He thought to start a fire, even though Victoria would scold him. It was not men’s work, she would snap, but she would be secretly pleased that he was thinking of her comfort. He made himself collect some of the kindling outside of their lodge, and with his skinning knife shaved bits of it, and added a pinch of gunpowder from his horned flask. He would not wrestle with flint and steel this morning, not with some trading post lucifers at hand. He struck one, watched the powder flare, and watched the tiny flame lick the kindling and catch. By the time the women returned from the brush, there would be a thin warmth in Mister Skye’s lodge, and the nine-foot circle of his home would begin to welcome life.
two
There wasn’t much to eat. For two moons the village hunters had been stymied by cold so terrible that no one could leave the lodges. It was bad enough to look after the frostbitten, starving horses. No, this was a time to huddle around fires, sing songs, play the stick game, and endure.
Mary set a kettle of snow to heating, and added pemmican and some prairie turnips, to make a breakfast stew. The lodge warmed a bit. The frost coating the lodge liner melted and dripped onto Skye and his women. The fire gathered muscle and drove heat outward and smoke upward.
No one spoke. But they all knew this was a portentous moment, and that this day Mister Skye would say a thing that would affect their lives. He was always Mister Skye. Friends and family addressed him that way because he required it. When he had arrived in the New World, fleeing the crown’s minions, he chose to give himself that title. He would be Mister Skye, and not just Skye, and so it had been for decades. Others laughed at him, thought it was pretentious, but he was always Mister, and if you wanted any sort of commerce with him, you would address him as he required.
With a good stout fire going, the lodge warmed, except underfoot, where the cold rose straight through the robes lying on the clay. The thin warmth helped, but both Skye and Victoria clothed themselves in red Hudson’s Bay blankets even so. Mary ladled out the stew; it might not be a king’s feast, but it would fill them. When they were done with the morning food, she silently gathered the bowls and horn spoons and wiped them clean.
They were waiting, he knew.
But he was stumble-tongued, as usual, and hardly knew where to begin.
“I want a home,” he said. “For all of us.”
“Is this not a home?” Victoria asked.
“A comfortable home,” Skye said.
“Is this not a good lodge?” she persisted.
“I’m getting old,” he said.
“Well, so am I, dammit. And so is she.”
Skye ran bony fingers through his matted gray hair. He wore a trimmed beard now. His hands were stained to the color of walnuts by a life out-of-doors. He gazed at Victoria, who was dark and suspicious and already angry. Mary, with little gray in her glossy jet hair, waited patiently, her obsidian eyes masking her thoughts.
This was already brewing into a domestic fight.
“I don’t mean away from your people,” he said to Victoria. “Somewhere close by.”
This resulted in a terrible silence.
“I have a great need—I’ll call it a hunger—for a house. A refuge against wind and rain and snow and cold and a hot sun.”
He knew that these women considered their lodge to be just such a refuge, and often it was. Some periods of the year, a lodge was a marvel of comfort. But in the blistering heat of summer, and the howl of winter, it could be miserable.
“It is harder and harder for me to live like this,” he said. “I need chairs to sit in, a warm bed to sleep in. I need to stand up. I want walls that keep out the wind. Walls and a roof to keep out the cold and the heat and the rain and keep me warm. I would like a hearth, and a cast-iron stove, and maybe an oven. I would like to sleep off of the ground, so my legs and arms don’t ache.”
He saw not the slightest response in either of his wives.
“I am not as patient as your people,” he said. “My own people, the English and the Americans, live in houses when they can. Log ones, or wooden frame ones such as we’ve seen in the mining towns. Glass in the windows. Roofs of shakes that carry the rain away. I’m hurting a bit and this would help me. I’m not planning on leaving this earth anytime soon. I want to be with you. I’d like to grow old in a little comfort. Maybe with our pastures and a garden and a woods where we can get fuel. A few cattle, a few sheep, some chickens to feed us. I’d like to build a shelter for Jawbone, now that he’s hurting, and give him his own meadow, and lots to eat.”
The silence returned and clung there.
“Where would this be?” Victoria asked.
“Near your people,” he said. “Here we are, near the Birdsong Mountains. I would like to build my home over in the next valley, the Shields River, where everything is at hand, and everywhere the eye gazes, there is glory.”
White men were calling the jagged and isolated mountains just to the west of this winter camp the Crazy Mountains, but Skye much preferred the Crow name, the Birdsong Mountains. What could be a more beautiful name for an isolated range of sharp peaks?
“But we would live there alone,” she said.
“We would have many Absaroka visitors, and maybe we could care for your clan brothers and sisters and children, and they could care for us. Maybe they could help us build this place, and we could have them stay with us and take care of things.”
Something dissolved in Victoria’s spirit. Skye knew that if she could have some of her people around her, she would be pleased. Home for her was not a lodge, it was a village.
“Sonofabitch,” she said. “I’m going to have a big house. Biggest goddamn house anywhere. Big enough for my whole clan.”
It dawned on Skye that if he built a house, it would have to hold thirty or forty of Victoria’s relatives. But that was fine with him. There was a way to do this. He would ask his Crow friends for help, and together they could erect a house and the outbuildings, and then farm or ranch with him.
“I have always wanted to live in a house,” said Mary. “A white man’s house is a place of great medicine.”
“And it would be a place for some of your Shoshone people too,” he said.
She smiled so sadly that he felt stricken. Anything that reminded her of her Shoshone people also reminded her that she had seen very little of them as the winters and summers rolled by. Skye and his wives had lived among the Crows.
“This is women’s work,” Victoria said. “We will build the wooden lodge.”
“It’s men’s work, and hard. We have to fell the trees, bark the logs, notch them, use a drawknife to flatten the top and bottom sides, split shakes, make a puncheon floor …”
“What is this floor?”
“Logs carefully split down the middle which will make a floor, curved sides down, flat sides up.”
“Dirt ain’t good enough for you?”
Skye was tired of clay; tired of walking on it, tired of the bugs crawling out of it, tired of mud and grass. “We can do better,” he said. “If the right kind of rock is around, we can use flagstones for a floor. Wood is more comfortable.”
A house. Nothing but a dream now, in the middle of deep cold and near starvation.
The more Skye talked to his wives, the less he hurt. It was as if the promise of comfort was sweeping away all the rheumatism in his body. He was aware that his women were studying him, receiving unspoken knowledge from his conduct. Let them study him. The more this great vision filled his imagination, the younger he felt. By the time he began building his house, he would be a young man again.
“I am thinking about the Shields River valley, just north of the Yellowstone,” he said. That was a lush broad valley west of them, near the great bend of the Yellowstone. There would be running water, meadows for grazing stock, ample pine and cottonwood and willow and aspen.
“That is a good place,” Victoria said. “The People visit there every summer. Magpie always makes great noises when we are there.”
&nbs
p; The magpie was Victoria’s spirit helper, and she received occult wisdom from her communing with the insolent and raucous black and white bird.
The Shields stretched northward from where it debouched into the Yellowstone, through open country with the Birdsong Mountains rising to the east, and a great range white men were calling the Bridgers rising to the west. Skye had passed through that country many times. Some places might offer grander vistas, but no place offered so much of what the earth could provide.
And there was something else:
“The Americans are talking about giving the Crows a homeland south of the Yellowstone,” he said.
“We got a homeland!” Victoria said. “What the hell is this?”
Skye dreaded what he had to say. “They say they want to settle your people on the land south of the river.”
“How do you know this?”
Skye wasn’t sure where he had heard it. Long ago he had concluded he could do little about the Americans flooding through Crow country en route to mining camps. For a few years they came up the Bozeman Trail, until the great Sioux chief Red Cloud stopped them, defeated the United States Army, and forced the Yanks to abandon the trail. Skye had made some money guiding wagon trains over that trail, through some of the most dangerous country in the West, but then the traffic stopped, and so had his income. So once again he lived as the Crows did, migrating from place to place, following the buffalo, defending their land against the Siksika and the Lakota. But someone, somewhere, told him the United States government had plans for the Crows, and they would be confined to a reserve. It was, he thought, the finest piece of land on the continent, and teeming with game, so there was solace in it. But it all heralded great change for Victoria’s people, and for himself.
The Shields River country he would call home would be just north of the proposed reservation. That ought to suit Victoria, and it ought to suit the Yanks. They surely wouldn’t boot him off the land he settled. Or would they?
“I don’t know it,” he said. “But the place I have in mind wouldn’t be on that land.”
“They make invisible lines, and say this is mine and that is yours,” Mary said.
The world was changing so fast that Skye barely understood it himself; his Indian wives would have even more trouble with the future.
“First warm weather, we’ll go and start,” he said.
“Leave the People?”
“Find a place. I may need to ride into Bozeman City for tools.”
“You gonna build this big damn house yourself?”
Skye considered the ache in his limbs and the way he got out of breath these days. “I’ll need help,” he said. “I can’t do it alone. And Dirk’s gone away.”
Mary’s wan smile appeared again, concealing her sadness.
“You’re too damn old to chop down trees,” Victoria said. “I’ll maybe get the whole Kicked-in-the-Bellies to come do this.”
“Maybe I should talk—”
“You leave this to me,” she said.
Skye felt warm enough now to begin his day. He pulled a fur cap over his head, wrapped himself in a greatcoat made of buffalo hide, and pushed through the flap into the bitter air.
Jawbone stared at him. The old gray stallion was frosted from front to rear. Icicles dangled from his frozen lips, and from his belly and mane and tail.
Skye walked to his great medicine horse, fed it some cottonwood bark Victoria had cut, and leaned into Jawbone’s withers.
“You and I are going to live out our days in comfort,” he said.
The old horse stood mutely, alarming Skye. He noticed yesterday’s meal lying untouched on the trampled snow.
Jawbone hadn’t greeting him this morning, as he usually did.
Skye stared at the ugly gray, and Jawbone stared back, and everything was wrong.
three
It was what did not happen this cold morning that worried Skye the most. Every dawn, for as long as Skye could remember, Jawbone had greeted him by butting his head into Skye’s chest. It was a ritual. Jawbone would butt him, and Skye would yell at the horse, and Jawbone would butt him again just to let him know who was boss. That was their communion. But not this gray dawn.
Skye ran his gloved hand under the old stallion’s mane. Something was terribly wrong. He studied Jawbone, realizing that the horse’s long winter coat concealed the great hollows along his spine. The horse was starving and cold and listless.
He remembered how Jawbone had come to him seventeen years earlier, an ugly little colt that didn’t behave the way horses behave, finding ways to be obnoxious. But in some mysterious way, Skye knew even then that this mustang that had appeared out of a wintry nowhere and he were mysteriously connected, and that they would share a life. For years, Jawbone had been a feared and admired sentinel, one-horse army, and protector of Skye and his family. He had also become a legend among all the plains tribes; even the enemies of the Crows hallowed and dreaded Jawbone. The horse annoyed white men so much that several had tried to kill him, but Skye had growled them off. Other white men had simply laughed: never had they seen a horse so misshapen and degenerate, with such a stupid look in his eyes.
Now the horse stood quietly, its head lowered, its back to the wind. As usual, it had posted itself near Skye’s lodge. But the green cottonwood bark that Skye used to sustain Jawbone lay untouched in a scatter on the glazed snow.
Jawbone’s teeth were no good anymore. Seventeen years of ripping up sandy prairie grass and masticating rough bark and chewing on dirt had worn them down so that the incisors didn’t cut and the molars didn’t grind. The tools in his jaws were worthless. It was a common malady in old horses, and why they slowly starved to death. Skye pulled his gloves off and grasped Jawbone’s head. Usually the old horse would have snarled, but this time he just stood and let Skye run his finger between the horse’s lips. He probed the incisors and found them blunt and rounded. The molars were flat and worn. What teeth were left were almost useless. Jawbone was dying, not from disease but from hunger.
In settled places there were some remedies. In Skye’s own England an old horse could be fed warm sweet mash that could sustain an animal with bad teeth. But a good mash required rolled grains and molasses. There was nothing like that in this winter camp of the Crow people. There wasn’t even any prairie grass. Only the bark, painfully harvested each day.
Skye felt the clawing of anguish.
Jawbone was not very old, and had more good years in him. He was a little lame, but eager and ornery as ever. Skye didn’t ride him much anymore. It was enough to have Jawbone with him, guarding the family, enjoying the life they had fashioned. Jawbone was as much a part of his family as his wives.
Skye ran his gnarled hands over the animal, discovering shocking hollows under the coat, feeling the corduroy of ribs. Jawbone stood stolidly, and that in itself alarmed him. Jawbone was not usually stolid about anything.
“You and I are old, mate,” Skye said.
He ducked into his lodge and found the women staring at him. They had heard him.
“I need a blanket for Jawbone,” he said.
Wordlessly the women set to work. But there wasn’t much to work with. Victoria found a large piece of buffalo hide that had been in the lodge cover until it grew too soft, and had saved it for moccasins. This would make some belly bands. There ought to be a breast band too. A blanket could be sewn to them. It would take a day.
Skye watched them cut the leather, cut thong, and fashion a blanket there in the confines of that small lodge. He kept the fire going, and tried to be helpful, but they ignored him.
“I’ll build a barn. I’ll build a stall for Jawbone. I’ll get some grain and molasses from Bozeman City,” he said. “He’ll be warm and he’ll have some sweet feed. I’ll keep him going just as long as I can.”
He caught Victoria staring coldly at him. The Crows would let a horse die, because death was a part of life and because it was good for old creatures to die. This was his white man’
s instinct, keeping the old medicine horse alive.
All that wintry day the women made the horse blanket, using their awls on the leather and lacing the straps to the blanket. Late in the afternoon when the cold was thickening and the twilight was vanishing, they finished. They nodded to Skye. Quietly he collected the blanket and carried it into the bitter twilight, and found the horse standing nearby, its head low, its legs locked. Victoria braved the cold, and between them, they threw the white and blue blanket over the old horse and tied the belly bands. It worked well enough. The blanket hung over Jawbone’s back, covered his withers, and tumbled over Jawbone’s hollowed croup. The chest band would keep it from sliding backward.
Jawbone lifted his head. Surely the horse would begin to feel some warmth now, a thin life-preserving warmth. Surely this great-hearted horse would survive the winter now, and never face a brutal winter like this one again.
It was growing dark. The winter night stole over them and drove them into their small lodge, and then Jawbone was outside alone. Skye glanced about the village, and saw not a soul out-of-doors. Smoke rose reluctantly from the lodges, and then lowered under the weight of heavy air. He felt almost as cold as Jawbone, and hurried in. There was not much firewood, but it was too dark to get some.
No one spoke. The women drew their robes tight and lay quietly in the dusk, and when the fire threatened to go out, Skye added a few grudging sticks of cottonwood limb. Tomorrow, no matter what the weather, he would need to cut a generous supply.
Skye could not sleep that night. None of them had eaten, and none wanted to eat. Skye and Mary and Victoria lay wrapped in blankets wrapped in robes, and still the cold pierced to them, through the lodge cover, through the layered robes that protected them from Father Winter this subzero night. He knew as he lay in the darkness that the women were awake too. If he had said something, they would have responded.
He heartened himself. He thought of that blanket warming Jawbone, good wool holding the heat in, protecting the vital areas, lungs and heart. Jawbone would be all right. Tomorrow he would try to grind up the cottonwood bark into tiny bits, the sort that Jawbone could swallow without grinding the bark with his useless old teeth. Tomorrow would be better. They had given Jawbone a lease on life.
North Star Page 2