North Star

by Richard S. Wheeler

  The cabin could contain them. It had no furniture in it, but at least it had a straw-covered clay floor with robes scattered about. It was as close to the interior of a lodge as a small structure could get, and it awakened ancient memories in North Star. It was a lodge, but with log walls and a shake roof and a sheet-metal stove.

  There was only a small window, and it had no glass, but shutters against the cold. Now, as the last light faded, it grew dusky in the cabin. He could see that Victoria was bent and worn now, as thin as ever but her back had curved and her head rested forward. And Skye had lost weight, and had bent also, but there still was fire in his eyes. Fire in the eyes of both of them.

  Someday soon they would know the story. Mary would tell of her impulse to see her son; he would tell of his rushed decision to return with her. She would talk about the long trip on the Big Road, and tell them where her horses came from, and the troubles they had. He would tell them of his honors at school, and what he could do and what he had learned. But not this night, when they paid him and his mother the greater honor of not asking.

  “Father and Mother Victoria, I should take care of the horses,” he said.

  “That’s good, Dirk, and I will show you,” Skye said.

  Together they slipped into the twilight and undid the packs and the packsaddle and the riding saddle and brought them inside. Dirk knew that they would feel very light in Skye’s hands. They contained no food at all, and few other things. The trip had consumed whatever small things Mary and he possessed.

  Skye gathered the reins. “Good-looking horses. Are they yours?” he asked.

  “They are my mother’s.”

  Skye started slowly toward the fields, his limp slowing him. “The herd’s off that way. Not many left.”

  “Stolen?”

  “No, eaten. These people don’t get the rations they were promised by the government. Either that or the Indian agent skims much of it off. So they’re half-starved and living on horse meat until the next shipment of flour and beans comes in.”

  “I didn’t know. I shouldn’t have come.”

  “You can help, son.”

  They hiked a while more along a lane between planted fields, and then Skye quit.

  “My leg’s giving out. Here, take these over to that grove of cottonwoods and let them loose. They’ll find the herd.”

  Dirk took the reins, led the horses another quarter of a mile to the trees, slid the bridle and halter off, and let them go. He saw no other horses and wondered if he’d ever see these again.

  His father was waiting for him.

  “We’re living on charity, Dirk,” Skye said as they started back. “These people can hardly feed themselves, much less a Crow and a white man. Tomorrow, you get yourself enrolled with the agent. You and Mary. It’s worth some flour and beans. Erastus Perkins is his name. Major Perkins. They’re all called major, all the Yank Indian agents.”

  “Where are my uncles?”

  “In a lodge upriver, four, five miles. They turned over the cabin and said they’d live the old way for a time. But no one can leave the reservation without the major’s say-so, which means they can’t go after buffalo out on the plains, which means that they’re worse off than ever. Victoria and I, we’re thinking we’d best get back to our Crow people. Wild Indians have it better than tame ones, and we’re just robbing them of food, staying here like this.”

  “It’s an outrage, sir.”

  “It’s that. It’s slow starvation. They’re out hunting rabbits and snatching turtles and trying to kill a few ravens for the kettle.”

  They reached the little cabin, and Skye paused.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Dirk. I’d like to help these people but I can’t, not with my bloody busted leg, and I get worn-out fast. I hardly know what I’m going to do; everything I try, including hunting, hurts too much.”

  North Star felt a strange tenderness, and more. He felt that he was destined to return at this very hour. He was standing, man to man, beside his father. They needed him here. The moving finger had written his fate.

  thirty-three

  The youth wandered aimlessly, wondering what had inspired him to abandon St. Louis. Dirk, or North Star, or whoever he was, drifted day by day, not knowing what to do. His two bloods were at war, but mostly he wasn’t sure he cared. These were not the Shoshones he remembered from his childhood, when they were still a proud migrating happy people never far from buffalo or game.

  When his mother had suddenly appeared in St. Louis, that ancient memory was kindled in him, and the joy of unfettered freedom, of riding open prairies, of climbing to mountain lakes, of dancing to the drums, of shivering at the sound of an owl’s hoot, all trumped everything the Jesuit fathers had instilled in him, and suddenly he had to break free.

  But this gaggle of huts being called Fort Washakie was not that place, and it all seemed bleak and unfamiliar. The valley itself was beautiful, but where were the people? They lived now in little cabins far apart, disconnected from one another, their dreams reduced to hoeing and drifting. On his hikes, North Star saw the shanties and the barely scratched plots of land, growing a few scraggly worm-eaten crops that would yield little when harvest came. He saw women alone by the river, rinsing out old clothing, and he remembered how the Shoshone women used to gather together and make their work communal, with gossip and jokes to make the toil pass by easily.

  He saw men lounging, smoking, looking unkempt and bored, waiting for the next allotment day, when they would get their few pounds of flour or rice, or beans or sugar and maybe a slab of beef now and then. He wondered what had happened, why these men didn’t have fire in their eyes, why they sat passively waiting for whatever would happen to happen. Where had their souls gone?

  This wasn’t the world of his memories, filled with strong, bronzed men and women in clothing wrought from deer and elk skins or trade cloth, sleeping in buffalo robes, tackling each day with joy. Maybe that world never quite existed, but it seemed real to the seven- or eight-year-old boy who was eventually ripped from it and plunged into another world, in another land. Maybe, had he been older, he would have seen weary, half-starved, diseased people locked in an unending quest to survive. But he did remember laughter, and jokes, and pride, and those who decorated their lodges and clothing and ponies with their own emblems.

  North Star had thought there might be rejoicing when he and his mother showed up after her long absence, but there wasn’t much, apart from a little curiosity about her. Her brother, The Runner, had come to visit, along with his women, but no one said much. A few people stopped to talk with him, but the Shoshones were spread for miles up and down the Wind River now, and were grimly trying to eke a living from the verdant meadows, and there was little time to rejoice in the prodigal who had returned. Had the heart been torn out of his mother’s people?

  Chief Washakie had welcomed him warmly, rejoicing in his mother’s return. But even he was different. North Star remembered him as a traditional and proud chief living in a large lodge, wearing magnificent ceremonial robes, beaded moccasins, attended by his wives, his lodge a place of power and wisdom. But now Chief Washakie lived in a house with chairs and tables and a stove and a couch and a kitchen, and he wore collarless shirts, with black waistcoats and gray woolen trousers. Only his shining black braids remained as North Star had remembered them. Washakie seemed the only Shoshone on the reservation who still had spirit burning in him, and good cheer always radiated from his face.

  “We are glad you have come to us, North Star,” he said. “And we are glad that you bring with you the mysteries of the white man, which I hope you will share with the People, so we may be as wise as the Fathers who taught you all they knew.”

  Washakie blessed Blue Dawn too, and urged her to enroll herself and her son in the tribal ledgers kept by the agent, Major Perkins, in the white clapboard buildings. So Mary and Dirk duly entered the fearsome building, found the major with his boots resting on a cold stove, drinking some amber fluid D
irk thought might be whiskey. The man’s beard was unkempt, and his clothing stained.

  “Ah, yes, Skye’s woman and boy,” the major said. “Heard all about it. You should have stayed in St. Louis, boy.”

  But Gallipoli Sanders, his bespectacled white clerk, enrolled them, writing with a Spencerian hand, and henceforth on each distribution day he and his mother would receive some flour and beans or rice, and occasionally some beef butchered from a few stringy and stumbling cattle delivered by a ranch over in the Big Horn Valley. That meant that the Skye household had three allotments to feed four, because Victoria was an Absaroka woman and not eligible. But Skye himself, as a spouse of Mary, would qualify.

  Each day Dirk watched his father crawl from his robes, struggle to his feet, dress and overcome his morning stiffness, and then pick up his ancient hoe and head for the fields, where he would patiently chop weeds away from squash or maize or beans or potatoes until he wearied. Dirk’s father had welcomed his son, and yet there had been something unspoken lying between them. Plainly, his father had seen this new world coming, and at great cost to himself, to Mary, and to Victoria too, he had sent Dirk to his freedom and his future. But now Dirk was back, and this reservation was his future, and the youth found himself drifting from sadness to bewilderment, and occasionally to fits of action. He joined groups of boys who went hunting in the old way. He had no weapon and minimal skill with a bow and arrow, but he went anyway, hoping to add food to the larder.

  Occasionally he saw his uncle, The Runner, who lived with his family in the traditional way now, having given the cabin to Skye. Mary’s brother had been eager to embrace this new world, and had mastered some ancient English, but now he was too busy trying to feed his wives and some clan brothers and sisters. This was not The Runner of yore, either, and that disturbed Dirk. He felt he had walked into some vortex that was sucking him down into a pit. Sometimes the majestic mountains brightened him. Some early September snows had whitened the peaks, making them glow boldly with their promise of liberty. Flee to the mountains, for there is liberty!

  Dirk noticed the girls too, quiet Shoshone girls, most of them too thin, some pretty, though he had an odd aversion to the heavy cheekbones he saw in them, and in himself. He thought white women were more delicate, with faces and figures he liked more. And yet occasionally a girl stirred him, and he sometimes talked with one or another, but they took alarm. He had not yet recovered his own tongue, though it was swiftly returning, and the girls shied from him as an odd and maybe dangerous person, who sometimes glowered at them instead of smiling.

  Was this all there was to life? He wished he might have books to read now that the whole bright world of knowledge had been opened to him, but there was scarcely a book on the reservation. His uncle, The Runner, had once had a Shakespeare and a Bible, but the pages had been ripped out, one by one, to start fires, and now there were no books, not even in Major Perkins’s office and house, except for a Bible, which the agent obviously not only did not read, but rejected.

  September was harvesttime, and Dirk helped dig up potatoes, and pluck maize from stalks, and gather squash and stow these in a root cellar dug into a slope. Skye and Victoria and Mary worked steadily, not only harvesting the crops The Runner had planted in his patch of land, but also neighbors’ crops, which had suffered from inattention. Few traditional Shoshones cared to garden, and most all of them greatly preferred good meat, even if it was the softer white man’s beef, though they all yearned for the rich, textured firmness of buffalo meat.

  Dirk sensed that his family was not happy. His mother and Victoria toiled silently, saying little. His father had drawn deep into himself, and seemed to be forcing labor from a body mostly spent and hurting. Dirk heard no complaint; his mothers simply did what had to be done each day and fell into their blankets at night.

  The clay-floor cabin itself was not as comfortable as a lodge, and its stove ate firewood, requiring the women to roam farther and farther gathering deadwood. Both Victoria and Mary shouldered heavy packs on their backs, and walked a mile or so back to the cabin with enough wood to keep it warm two or three days. Dirk remembered the lodges, how the tiniest fire would heat the air inside the leather cone, how an insulating layer of robes on the ground would keep the chill off. And yet that was mostly unreliable childhood memory. Each day, as his father struggled just to get up, Dirk knew that a good bedstead would be a treasure for his father. And yet nothing happened. It was as if the whole tribe was waiting, waiting, for something.

  There was something else: the silence was terrible. Dirk craved the company of his father and mother and Victoria. There were years of absence, a thousand stories, and a universe of wisdom and anecdote and always the mysteries, the things that had animated his mother’s people. This was a cruel world, and was having a cruel effect on his parents.

  These people were slumbering through life. The past had vanished, and there seemed to be no future. The agent, Major Perkins, didn’t seem to care. He was a time-server, taking his pay from the government, maintaining some sort of minimal existence for his wards, and whiling away his empty hours drinking. And toying with the girls. The agent had two housekeepers, Shoshone girls in their teens, pretty and well fed, and Dirk wondered about them. The girls avoided his eye. One looked pregnant. On distribution days, there never was quite what had been promised, or the food was bad. Wormy flour, spoiled salt pork, bony cattle. Somehow, that never evoked any ire in the agent, though he was responsible for feeding these people and making sure the government was not being cheated by contractors. Dirk began to study the man, not sure what was happening. And the longer Dirk lingered on the reservation, the darker his spirits grew. What had he come west for?

  One day, he peered into an empty clapboard building near the agency and discovered an unused schoolhouse, and an unused teacherage next to it. Through the windows he saw a completed school, with desks and a woodstove and a chalkboard. Through the windows of the teacherage he saw empty bedsteads, horsehair furnishings, a table and chairs, a kitchen. All as new and silent as the day they had been completed.

  Impulsively he headed for the agency, and found the major more or less drunk.

  He stood, hat in hand, because one was required to wait and be invited to speak if one was not a white man. Eventually Major Perkins nodded.

  “You, is it? What’s the trouble? More bad flour?”

  “Sir, I wanted to ask you about that school.”

  “Oh, that.” The agent yawned. “Another bungle. They can’t get anything right. Build a school and then there’s no budget for teachers or books. Congress won’t spend a dime.”

  “Could we, my father and I, teach, sir?”

  “No money, I told you. Not a bloody cent from those skinflints.”

  “Could we move into the teacher house and teach, sir?”

  “What makes you think you can? What are you, fifteen?”

  “I was ahead of my class, sir. I can teach the alphabet, spelling, writing, reading, mathematics, some algebra, English literature.”

  “Oh, now, boy, half the students would be older than you.”

  “My father was schooled in London and was headed for the university.”

  “And was pressed at age thirteen, I gather.”

  “He knows a lot more than the boys here do.”

  “What’s in it for me, young Skye?”

  Dirk had no answer to that.

  thirty-four

  Dirk Skye fumed his way to the forlorn cabin. Nothing was right on this reservation. And Major Perkins liked it that way. An October chill was a harbinger of what would soon descend on them. The dirtfloored cabin was worse than a lodge, and he knew his father and Crow mother would suffer, and maybe his mother too.

  His father wore his age with dignity, not complaining and doing what he could to grow food for them all. But Dirk knew he hurt. His Crow mother Victoria hurt in other ways, torn from her own people and way of life, even as her body lost strength.

  He plunged into t
he cabin just as his mothers were boiling a vegetable stew, there being no meat again. It took the women most of each day just to find firewood, and they were forced to search ever farther away. In the days when the People lived in lodges, they simply moved to a new locale when fuel and grass and wood were exhausted. But now there was no place to go, and few lodges to shelter them.

  His mother glanced at him and frowned, well aware of the fury boiling through him. But she said nothing. They all had turned stoic, their goal to endure one bad thing after another. He wasn’t even sure that they had hope of anything better.

  They ate the stew eagerly, but it did not fill or satisfy them, because there was no good meat. But they could expect none until the next distribution day, and then it was likely to be a few pounds that must last all four of them the whole month.

  Skye, too, was watchful of his son, and when they had all finished their meager meal, he addressed the boy.

  “What is it, Dirk?” he asked.

  “I despise this place,” Dirk shot back.

  The women were attentive now.

  “Have you looked at the school? And the teacherage?”

  “I have,” said Skye.

  “And what did you see?”

  “Empty school, all ready for use, and a house all ready, with furniture and a stove. I went to Major Perkins and asked why it wasn’t being used, and he said the Indian Bureau had no money for teachers or books or slates or anything. I said we’d teach, I can teach lots of things, and he asked what was in it for him.”

  “That’s how the man does things here,” Skye said.

  “We could be teaching. I know my arithmetic and letters and spelling and grammar and a lot of other things. You know a lot more than I do. These people need what we can give them. It’s not their world, and no one can help that, but we can help them into the new world.”

  Dirk saw how attentive they were, and felt heartened. This was the first time in all his days and weeks and months on the Wind River Reservation that he had cried out, that he had been anything but polite and subdued.