North Star

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Victoria had done the same, and now they stood behind their ponies. The shot had come from some vast distance far ahead and to the left, probably in the bottoms of the Big Horn River. She strung her bow and nocked an arrow. The ponies sidestepped nervously. Skye peered over the neck of his, wondering what lay ahead. He saw nothing. But someone had just tried to kill him. He wished his eyes were as good as they once were but now age blurred the horizons. He checked his Sharps. It was ready.

  He retrieved the top hat, which had fallen ten feet away, and found a fresh hole through it, just above his hairline. He had been an inch from death. This was his fifth hat. The first two had been beaver felt; the last three silk.

  A rage built in him.

  There was only silence. No crows flew, no wind whispered. They were proceeding south along the arid Big Horn River valley, on a trail laid out by Jim Bridger, the old mountain man. They had thought they were alone.

  “Goddamn white men,” Victoria said.

  Indians wouldn’t snipe at them from several hundred yards.

  His leg hurt. He had landed squarely on it, and while his knee didn’t capsize or break again, everything ached anew. He squinted at the silent bottoms of the distant river, ready to shoot back.

  After a while they moved slowly southward, walking between their horses, and thus walking within a living fortress as they had often done in the past. Occasionally Skye studied the river bottoms, ready for anything. But they proceeded peaceably south without hindrance.

  That lasted only a minute or two. A gaggle of horsemen boiled out of the brushy bottoms, heading straight for Skye and Victoria. Skye continued quietly, his bum leg paining his every step. There were six in all, skinny horsemen in slouch hats, all except one. A fat man, bulging at the belly and thighs, mounted on a thicker horse, followed along just behind. They were spread in a half circle, ready for whatever trouble they faced.

  They swiftly surrounded Skye and Victoria.

  “Hold up there,” the fat one bawled.

  Skye waited quietly. This was a tough outfit, with mean thin men sporting an unusual amount of facial hair along with revolvers and saddle carbines.

  “Gents?” Skye asked.

  “This here’s claimed land, and we don’t allow no goddamn redskins on it,” the fat one said.

  “I’m Barnaby Skye. And who am I addressing?”

  “It don’t matter none. This is my range, and you’re on it, and you’re going to get yoah ass off it.”

  “That’s interesting. I didn’t know there was a government land office anywhere around here,” Skye said.

  “It don’t mattah whether they is or ain’t. Yoah getting yoah red ass off. Ah’m claiming this heah Big Horn Valley, top to bottom, mountain to mountain, and that’s that.”

  “I didn’t catch your name, sir.”

  “It’s Yardley Dogwood, but never no mind; I could be God and it won’t make a bit of difference to you.”

  Skye had lived among the Yanks long enough to detect region in a man’s voice. These were Texans, he thought. Bitter men, defeated in war, swarming out of a ruined South, reckless of life and law.

  “Texans?”

  “We sure as hell ain’t Indians. Now you turn around and git. We don’t allow any trespassing here. You git or face what you get.”

  “Just passing through. Visiting my wife’s people.”

  “Did you heah me? Git out!”

  “Did you bring a shovel?” Skye asked. “Dig a grave for two people passing through?”

  Dogwood glared. “We don’t give a damn who you are, what you are, or whether you git buried or just rot until the coyotes eat what’s left of you.”

  “Got a few longhorns? I don’t see them.”

  “There a-comin’ and you’re a-going.”

  “Who are you going to shoot first? My wife or me?”

  “You’re both going to buy the ticket, mister.”

  “Mister Skye, yes. That’s how I prefer to be addressed. Do you prefer to be called Mister Dogwood?”

  “Enough talk.” He motioned to his men, who withdrew revolvers. Skye found himself staring into half a dozen muzzles. “That’s how I talk, redskin.”

  “Born in London, sir. This is my wife Victoria, born among the Absaroka People. And who are these gentlemen?”

  For an answer, Dogwood lifted his hog leg and drilled another hole through Skye’s silk hat. It flew off again. Skye winced.

  “You fat sonofabitch,” Victoria yelled. “You miserable bastard. I own this land. You get your ass off. This land’s mine. I’ve owned it since before you were born, fatso. My people owned it before Texas was. This is my home, and you can damned well take your fat ass out of here.”

  The whole lot stared at Victoria, whose drawn bow was aimed square at fatso’s chest.

  “Kill me, go ahead, you pile of grease. Only you get an arrow before you do.”

  Skye marveled. Dogwood sat, breaking the back of his nag, utterly paralyzed. One of the cowboys began easing sideways, out of Victoria’s vision.

  “One more step by that bastard and you croak,” she said.

  The cowboy stopped.

  “Looks like there’s a standoff, Mister Dogwood,” Skye said. “Now, are you going to let us through, or do we die? We’re old; we don’t mind dying. You’re what? Thirty?”

  “Tell that squaw to put the bow down.”

  “Tell your cowboys to holster their guns.”

  Dogwood plainly didn’t wish to do it.

  “Did you bring a shovel, Mister Dogwood? Three graves, one for you, two for us.”

  “I’ll tell you what you’re going to do, you fat bastard, you’re going to turn around and ride away, and when you’re out of range, we’re going to go ahead and cross my people’s land. And then you’re going to take your cowboys and your cows and get out of here.”

  Dogwood was hefting his revolver, twitchy, daring himself to shoot her.

  Skye deliberately reached to the grass and plucked up his hat, which lay between his and Victoria’s horses. When he was down, he swung his Sharps around. He put his hat back on, and his Sharps was at his waist, pointing at fatso.

  “Looks like you put another hole in my topper, Mister Dogwood,” he said.

  But Yardley Dogwood was staring at the huge bore of the Sharps, which now pointed blackly at his chest.

  “I don’t mind dying, but I guess you do,” Skye said. “You back off now. Turn your men around and get out of here.”

  Dogwood slowly, carefully, holstered his own Navy revolver and wheeled his stout gray horse. He nodded to his men, who followed suit, and soon the horsemen were retreating toward the bottoms. No tricks. Skye didn’t trust them, and rested his Sharps across his saddle, ready for a long-distance shot.

  The horsemen were soon beyond the effective range of their own carbines, but Skye didn’t move. Not yet. He waited until they were deep into the river bottoms, where they probably were camped in the middle of the mosquitoes awaiting Dogwood’s trail herd.

  Skye was in no hurry, and stood on an aching leg for a while more.

  Victoria eased her bowstring, returned the arrow to her quiver, but did not free the bowstring. Not yet.

  “Can they do that? Take land?” she asked.

  “No Yank government’s here yet,” Skye said. “They just claim it, and drive others off it, and call it their own.”

  “The goddamn government’s worse than the cowboys,” she said. “One of these days they’ll tell my people to go to some damned place with four invisible lines around it and stay in there.”

  All that day they rode hard, wanting distance between themselves and fatso. The Big Horn Valley was flanked by the Big Horn Mountains on the east, and rolling arid hills on the west, and was easy to travel. Skye’s leg hurt from the new insult, but he concluded nothing was damaged. They scared up some mule deer, but Skye was slow to draw his Sharps, and the deer vanished. Old age wasn’t helping him keep meat in the cook pot, which was still another reason why h
e was feeling the need to settle somewhere and raise his own beef.

  Midday heat suffocated them but Skye felt compelled to keep going, and as the day waned he knew they had traversed a long stretch of the arid valley. This arid land was going to fool fatso. Only the green bottoms along the river offered much feed for the longhorns, and most of that was brush-choked.

  Along toward dusk, Victoria grew restless.

  “Something ahead,” she said.

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “You’re deaf as a stone, Skye.”

  It turned out she was right. Just about when Skye was about to call it quits for a day, they rounded a river bend and discovered a sea of cattle ahead, longhorns of all shapes and colors, brown, brindle, bluish, spotted, black, gray, bawling and milling, many of them along the riverbank. And herding them were a dozen or so men on horseback, some barely visible in the distance.

  “More goddamn cowboys,” Victoria said.

  “Fatso’s herd coming up the river.”

  This time they rode straight toward the camp, where a fire was blooming. They were noticed, but no one was pulling weapons or showing any signs of trouble.

  But the foreman did pause and await company.

  “Evening,” he said, looking Skye and Victoria over.

  “Evening. I’m Mister Skye, and my wife Victoria Skye. We’re angling through here and thought to say hello.”

  “I reckon you’re welcome,” the lean man said. “Light and set.”

  Skye and Victoria gratefully slid from their ponies, picketed them, and joined the busy trail crew. The lowing of the cattle wrought a constant sound, almost a wail, as the animals watered and spread out on thin grass. Here were a dozen more of these wire-thin men, trail-worn and tired.

  “Name’s Higgins,” the man said. “Seems to me I’ve heard tell of you.”

  “I used to guide once, and before that I led a fur brigade.”

  “You a friend of Bridger’s?”

  “Sure am, Mister Higgins. You’re on his road. Old Gabe worked this out, mostly for wagons, but you’ve taken a herd over.”

  “You pass my outfit north of here?”

  Skye nodded. “Maybe twenty-five miles. That’s Yardley Dogwood, right?”

  “They let you through?”

  “It took some persuading, Mister Higgins. That fellow, he’s a big target.”

  Skye laughed. Higgins laughed.

  The foreman turned to several of his men. “Gents, this heah is a fine old man of the mountains, Mistah Skye, and his woman, Victoria. They been here before we were born. He’s rassled grizzly, put bullets into Blackfeet, taken people where white men never been, and he’s too tough to eat so we ain’t going to roast him for dinner. They’s passing through, and we’re going to welcome them. We got us a quarter of a beeve to eat this heah evening, before it turns rank on us, and pretty soon now we’ll be roasting the meat, soon as that fire gets hot. And you, Mistah Skye, you’re going to tell us some stories.”

  “Some good beef for a few yarns? I imagine that’s a bargain, Mister Higgins.”

  “Goddammit, Skye, you call me Mister one more time and you can just starve.”

  “Higgins, you call me Skye one more time, and I won’t tell stories.”

  “You got any booze?” asked Victoria. “He don’t tell stories good until he gets himself sauced up.”

  Higgins sighed. “I’d give a dozen steers for a bottle,” he said. “But we’re out of luck.”

  twenty-two

  Blue Dawn of the Shoshone People made her way east along the Big Road. She was no longer Mary, the name Skye had given her. She was no longer the woman of a white man. She was what she had been born to be. She sat perfectly erect in her saddle, and did not slouch like white men. She sat with her head high and her back straight, and thus she told anyone who saw her that she owned the world and was a woman of the People.

  But she met very few westering parties, and they paid her little heed. There was something about her that discouraged contact, and that was how she wanted it. Skye would count miles, but she never fathomed those invisible marks, and instead counted horizons. On a good day she rode past several horizons. She was now some unimaginable distance from her people and from Skye and Victoria. It was so far she had no word or concept for it; and yet the land never ended, and the only thing she observed was that the grass was thicker and taller, and there was more standing water and evidence of generous rain. But each day she was a little closer to her son.

  When North Star had been old enough, Skye had taught the child the mysterious signs Skye called writing, and taught the boy to read these signs. Sometimes Skye would draw them in charcoal on the back of a piece of bark, or an old paper, and then have the solemn child learn the letters. Then Skye taught his son words. Often this was early in the morning, before the world stirred much. Sometimes Skye found a book and taught his son the meaning of each word, even as Mary listened. She often thought that she, too, could read with a little help, but he never offered to teach her. He only told her he wanted their son to have a chance at life, a chance that was taken away from him when he was young.

  Skye had been a patient, cheerful teacher, who never reprimanded the boy when he could not fathom a letter or word or idea. Skye often illustrated the words, making up little stories, or telling the boy all about the place called London, with its streets and half-timbered houses and fog and thousands of people and frequent rain. So the boy had soon connected words and letters to these magic things, so different from the buffalo-hide lodge that was his real home, far from any sort of building.

  She had watched this mysterious ritual proudly, watching the boy discover a word and point a finger at it, watching Skye rejoice whenever his son had made a bit of progress. North Star was a patient boy, but sometimes he got restless when Skye detained him too long in their lodge on a winter day, or outside when the weather was good. Her son wanted to run and walk, like other sons.

  She only vaguely knew what this schooling was all about. Her boy would learn the magical powers of white men and be able to do the things white men did, and know what they knew. She knew this would take her son away from her, bit by bit. He would not be a Shoshone boy when he had mastered all this, but a white boy. That was a great sorrow to her, and yet she also was proud that he was learning Skye’s ways.

  “He needs to know these things,” he told her. “If he learns these things, he can choose the sort of life he wants to live.”

  That seemed strange to her. Why would one choose a life? What was wrong with the life they were sharing? Did Skye have some sort of plans for the boy that she knew nothing of?

  Sometimes North Star would pull out a scrap of paper and read words to her, pointing at each one. The child scarcely imagined that only one parent had these mysterious secrets hidden inside, and that she knew nothing of writing and reading. But she could at least teach him the ways of her people, and she showed him how to draw language-pictures, how to make the signs that were understood by most plains tribes, and she taught him all the words of her own tongue that she knew, and Victoria taught him the words of her Crow tongue as well, so the boy grew up trilingual, switching easily to her tongue, or Skye’s, or Victoria’s whenever he was addressing one of his three parents. This was a beautiful thing, for the boy had drawn close to each. He was quiet and sunny, and she had watched him proudly as he grew into a person, and left his infancy and childhood behind him. But what did Skye intend for him?

  Skye had seemed driven to teach the boy his words and his writing, and it troubled Mary because it was as if Skye were investing something in the boy that she couldn’t understand. All he would say was that he didn’t want Dirk to be trapped in the life that Skye had lived after being put on a ship and sent into the Big Waters. It amazed her that Skye’s people would snatch him away from his father and mother as a boy and put him on a boat and keep him from ever seeing them again. Surely that was a terrible violation of Skye and his parents, and it made her wond
er about the English. No Shoshone boy would ever be captured and forcibly taken from his parents. It was unthinkable. These English, they had no respect for the liberty and rights of the family they had torn asunder. They must be a very hard people, she thought, to permit such a thing. Hard and cruel. She liked her people more, because each boy could choose his own path, and was not stolen from his family.

  Skye was a hard man, she thought. He could have taught her to decipher the letters and words, and shape them into language. He could have taught her, the same as he taught their son. He could have taught Victoria too. But they were women, and he never thought to teach them how to put words on paper with marks. That was for white men. She didn’t mind much. She liked being his woman, and gathering nuts and berries, and firewood, and mending the lodge cover, and nursing the boy, and making quilled shirts and moccasins for him. But he was hard, and more often she could not fathom what went through his head. White men’s thoughts were so different from hers, and sometimes he seemed to be an utter stranger to her.

  Still, it had been a happy lodge, the four of them, his late-in-life boy, she and Victoria sharing the work and Skye’s arms. North Star had prospered. The Absaroka boys taunted him because he was different, but he gave back as much as he got. He was Skye’s son, and that gave him an aura of mystery, for Skye was a legend among them, the strong white man who had come to live with the Crows and fight beside them.

  Then one day, her happiness fell apart. North Star had lived eight winters. They were at Fort Laramie, and Skye was talking with his friend Colonel Bullock, who was the sutler. They talked for a long time, and Skye brought North Star to the colonel, and presented him, and the men all talked a long time, while she and Victoria wandered outside. She knew it had been a bad year for Skye; he could not pay the colonel what was owed. Fewer Yankees wanted guides to take them into the lands unknown to them, because now the country was known, and there were trails. And Skye went ever deeper in debt.

  Then at last Skye appeared on the veranda of the post store, looking solemn. He was searching for words, trying to bring himself to say something to his wives and son, and the more Skye struggled, the deeper was the dread in Mary. He was having such trouble that even the boy caught the malaise, and stared.