The Powder River (27 page)

“Adam,” she said belatedly.

“Why?” was the question he did not ask—why anything. He smiled a little at himself. He was in heavy surf of thought and feeling, and he chose to hide it behind the mask of his face. It was inexpressible anyway. Yet he felt a tiny calm in the violent waters, an inclination for Whistling Otter to think how terrible life truly is, and accept that.

“You look grand,” he admitted.

She inclined her head graciously and smiled a little. That small smile wilted him.

He doesn’t know, she thought, amazed, outraged, bitterly glad. He doesn’t know or he would speak his regrets. She clung to that notion, her axis in crazy turmoil.

God, I’m humiliated. She composed her face deliberately—he must never know. He thinks I look grand—how delicious.

Adam looked more … Indian. Perhaps it was the breechcloth and leggings. Or perhaps it was a new maturity in his face, a gravity. Her mind flicked over what had happened to Adam in the last four and a half months, and she thought, Adam has finished growing up. Life will do that to you. She nodded to herself. It will.

“I have a new name,” he said. “Whistling Otter.”

“Whistling Otter,” she repeated. She knew that would mean a good deal to him, a new name given by his people. Whistling Otter. She liked it. Otters were playful, and playfulness was part of what she loved in Adam. Whistling Otter. The new name felt good to her. It buried her husband, Adam Smith Maclean. Whistling Otter.

“I will take Rain as my wife,” he said.

She squeezed the saddle horn. Her mind turned over once and came back to equilibrium. She stared at Adam. If he’d seen that she nearly fell off, it didn’t show in his face.

“I wish you the greatest happiness,” she murmured, and by an utter miracle the words came quickly, without a break in her voice. She nodded affirmatively. She thought of telling him she would grant the divorce he wanted, but dared not speak again.

Elaine looked full-eyed at the man who once was Adam, her husband, her face composed. She touched her heel to her horse and moved onward. Reeled onward.

Adam Smith Maclean, newly Whistling Otter, stood on the headquarters steps, weeping.

Elaine Maclean, newly Elaine Cummings, sat her horse as it walked back toward the cabin of Crazy Horse’s death, weeping.

Chapter 5

The rest of that day and most of the night, Elaine buried herself in her report to Captain Wessells. She told herself that she had done it as gracefully and beautifully as possible. Amputated her marriage.

It seemed supremely important to let it go that way. She assumed—hoped—that the man now known as Whistling Otter saw it the same way, and was gone. Ruth had told her this morning the word around the fort was that he had checked each of the patients in the hospital, spoken in a kind way with each of them, and left the fort. She hoped he was gone back to his people. It couldn’t be truly over as long as she feared she might see him again here at the fort.

Beautiful and noble and tragic. Yes, that felt right, the true course of her life, profoundly … suitable.

At noon she had a horse brought round and carried her report a few buildings down to headquarters—she couldn’t be seen gimping around the fort until she was sure Adam had gone. Gone back to the Cheyennes who were hiding. Who had hidden for three months, the entire U.S. Army unable to find them. Gone into a distant world, his world.

An orderly tied her horse. After a look around, she permitted the man to help her quickly up the steps and into headquarters.

She put the report on Wessells’ desk and sat to rest. It was a dumb report. Too long, too fragmented, too full of detail that didn’t count, too barren of the impassioned language that might count. But nothing would count. This drama of the Cheyennes, she felt in her deepest self, must play itself out to the awful end, and no man could alter its course.

Perhaps the sacrifice that Morning Star’s people had made was the end. Perhaps their hot blood had cauterized the wound. She didn’t know. She only knew that neither she nor anyone else could change the destiny that was working itself out.

At that moment the scout Shangreau walked into headquarters. He would know. “Has Dr. Maclean, Whistling Otter, left the fort?”

Shangreau looked at her funny. “Yes,
madame
,” he said in his French way. Yes, certainly, everyone at the fort knew about the foolish white woman and Cheyenne man who had tried to make a marriage in an impossible time and been torn asunder.

“Do you know where he went?”

“Yes,
madame
. To Red Cloud.”

Where the living remnant of Morning Star’s people were.

She stood her full height. She was as tall as Shangreau. She felt calm, and had the wisdom not to think.

“Will you take me to him?”

Shangreau hesitated. Then, “Yes,
madame
.”

Shangreau got the wagon more than halfway. Elaine wondered later whether she would have survived the trip if she had had to ride all the way. But the snow was mostly blown off the road, and not until after dark that day did Shangreau come upon a drift he couldn’t drive through.

They slept there, Elaine in the wagon and Shangreau underneath it. He treated her curiously, with great delicacy, as a superstitious Frenchman would treat a virgin, or a saint. Elaine felt not a bit like either. In the morning the scout still couldn’t find a way to get the wagon around the drift, so they untied the saddle horses from the back and left the wagon where it sat.

She wasn’t worried, at first, about whether she could ride that last twenty-some-odd miles. She was terrified that Adam might go on today, that he might greet his people and minister to them briefly and go back to the hidden camp of Little Wolf. If all the army scouts couldn’t find that camp, she and Shangreau certainly had no chance. And not to see him now would be … beyond contemplation.

She didn’t think about whether he would take her back. She didn’t imagine what words, loving or cruel, he might say to her. She did not ask herself whether she might even have to share Adam with Rain as one of two wives. She did not ask herself whether she could bear to live as a Cheyenne, and endure whatever was theirs to endure. She simply went, bearing a gift unconditionally.

She sat her horse in the middle of the circle of Red Cloud’s lodges. “Go find Dr. Maclean, please,” she said to Shangreau. The little guide dismounted with a word, only a kind of pungent look, picketed his horse, and walked off.

They had ridden into the middle of the circle of lodges, open on the east, in the traditional manner. Lodges not of buffalo hides but tattered canvas, she noticed. The people here wouldn’t get their meat by hunting buffalo but by going to the agency on issue day. The children around her, trying not to look curious about a white woman, were gaunt.

Yes, she would have to walk soon. She couldn’t say the words to Adam from this height. But she didn’t have to let these children see her limp on her wooden leg yet. After most of a day in the saddle, her stump felt like a boil in need of lancing. She would walk terribly, gimping her worst.

Walk she meant to do, regardless. But she could rest a moment first.

Whistling Otter stepped out slowly, tentatively, among the lodges, which were circled as always, the sign of community. Shangreau followed, he of the unbelievable message, followed like a dog, friendly and curious.

Yes, it was Elaine, sitting a sidesaddle. Elaine. He walked toward her, hurrying but hesitating, half stumbling, uncertain. She held up a hand to stop him from coming closer. She stood up on her stirrup with her left leg and dismounted awkwardly but with a determined air onto a … peg? Immediately she strode toward him with a show of vigor, limping conspicuously on, by Christ, a wooden leg.

Dumbstruck, he let her come.

Several steps away his wife stopped and looked at him, in what state of feeling he could not say. She wobbled a tad on her peg. “Adam, I love you,” she said distinctly. “I was cowardly yesterday, and could not tell you. I was afraid for you to see me … as I am.”

She took a deep breath and plunged ahead. “Whistling Otter, I love you. I am yours. Wherever you go, I will go.”

Adam was stock still one moment and running full tilt at her the next. He swept her up in his arms and lifted her high, eye-high, and looked at her face. He looked at her peg, and back at her face, agony in his eyes and salt tears on his brown cheeks.

Elaine leaned forward and kissed his tears away.

Chapter 6

The Human Beings under the Sweet Medicine chief, Little Wolf, broke camp during the thaw in late January and headed for Powder River.

Among these people were Whistling Otter, his wife Elaine, his mother Lisette, his daughter Hindy, his cousin Rain, and her infant son Big Soldier.

They moved slowly, for they had not much strength. After some days they passed near the sacred mountain, Nowah’wus, which the whites called Bear Butte. Little Wolf asked them to wait three days while he fasted and meditated on the mountain. When he came back, he sang a song:

Great Powers, hear me,

The people are broken and scattered.

Let the winds bring the few seeds together,

To grow strong again, in a good new place.

One day, not quite yet the time Whistling Otter figured must be the vernal equinox, they saw geese arrowing north, and they came onto Powder River. The ice was breaking up on the river already. A few days, thought Whistling Otter, and home. These mornings the ache to see his mother Annmarie raged through him like a fever.

But the people were still in jeopardy, and sign of soldiers was everywhere.

One day the Human Beings captured some scouts from Lieutenant White Hat Clark from Keogh, the fort at the mouth of Powder River. They knew White Hat as a good man, and their friend. Little Wolf told the scouts to have White Hat bring the soldiers up. Then he found some naturally fortified high ground, where a fight would cost the soldiers dearly.

When White Hat arrived, Little Wolf went out to meet with him alone, wearing a blue blanket that was almost new, and his peace medal, and as always carrying the bundle of sweet medicine under his arm. He told the people that he did not know whether he would come back, or what they should do if he did not.

White Hat said he would recommend that the Cheyennes be sent to the Arapaho and Shoshone reservation in Wyoming Territory, but could promise nothing. For now he would feed the people well and guarantee that no one would be hurt. Probably he could hire some of the men as scouts. In return he asked the people to give up their guns and horses.

It seemed not enough. The people talked about it among themselves. They believed the words Little Wolf had spoken so often, “The only Indian never killed is the Indian never caught.” But they ate well.

Then they asked White Hat to recommend that the Cheyennes get a reservation of their own, here in their home country. He said he could promise nothing, but would work hard for such a reservation. The people talked some more. Little Wolf still felt reluctant, but surely he had to trust some white man, somewhere, sometime. The people left their high ground and rode downstream with White Hat.

The flight of the Cheyennes from Indian territory to the Powder River country had ended. Of nearly three hundred who started, here one hundred and fourteen still walked the earth. On the Pine Ridge Reservation of the Sioux, a few dozen more lived.

The man known to some as Whistling Otter, to others as Smith, and to his wife as Adam, walked out of Maclean’s trading post and went down to the river.

It was the first morning he had awakened at the post. He had hugged his mother and inspected the post where he would probably spend most of the rest of his life. It seemed good, a stout structure of logs, like his father would have wanted. It would have enough trade, now that the Cheyennes were back home.

Smith and his two mothers and his wife stayed up half the night trading news and reminiscing. Annemarie told everyone that their friend Peddler was alive and well, still walking all over Indian country peddling his sewing goods at nearly eighty years old—he would surely be here again this summer. They were obliged to tell her that her lifelong friend Jim Sykes, the Man Who Didn’t Stir Air When He Walked, had died of the shaking sickness in the south.

Smith sat down on the bank of Powder River, below the mouth of the Little Powder. He loved rivers. He had been raised beside a river, the Yellowstone, a little to the northwest of here. He had spent the summers and autumns of his youth near this river. He loved them both. He wanted to live in a country rich in great, throbbing rivers, this country. Soon he would make a pilgrimage up the Yellowstone and visit once more the enchanted kingdom of his youth, the Yellowstone country, which others had recently discovered and nominated the first national park. A country grand with flowing waters.

Powder River was now in its spring flood, cold, its banks full. He sat down on the bank and stripped off his clothes. Naked, he dived into the river.

The cold shocked him at first, but he was used to it from many years of this springtime ritual. He stroked out toward the current, and felt it gather him up and sweep him along, and being to roll him, turn him over …

Smith kicked like hell and got into the eddy. He’d nearly forgotten how powerful these spring-flood rivers were in the north country. He got out, spread his blanket, and lay down to feel the warm spring sun on his body.

Lying there, basking in the sun, a little sleepy, perhaps he began to dream, or perhaps merely to imagine. In his imagination he stroked along in the river, underwater, his eyes closed, and felt himself change. He wasn’t clear on how he changed. It was as though his body had melted into the river, the way the spring ice melts, and becomes part of the river. Part not only of the river, this time, but part of everything in the river, part of the fishes and crabs and snakes and turtles, and even the watercress and the algae, and even the microscopic particles of life that are in the water, and are the water. It was as though the cells of his body intermingled with the very cells of the river beings, and all became one huge creature, breathing as one, resoundingly alive, resoundingly fecund, infinitely virile and strong. He felt the water flowing through him, making him move, flow, undulate, the river bringing motion and rhythm to him, everything together, everything the same life, fathered by the sun, mothered by the river, all of the same, flesh of one flesh, soul of one soul.

He abided with these things, and was of them, and they of him, one single, grand dance.

Smith smiled at himself in his daydream. When he was done napping, he would go find Elaine and take her to their bedroom and make love with her heatedly, as they had done last night. Right now he was sleepy.

He dreamed once more. This time he was an otter. He felt so lucky, to dream of being an otter. He played in the water. He splashed. He whirled. He swam in loops. He danced. He jumped into the air and felt the sun on his skin. He whistled. He laughed. He played forever.