Beauty for Ashes

by Win Blevins

  “Now they know someone has been killed,” he said.

  He waved his blanket toward the Big Horn Mountains. “That tells them what direction we’re coming from,” he said.

  He flung one end of the blanket to the ground at his side, once. “Now they know we’ve lost one.”

  One? Six men rode out of this camp, and two were returning. Beckwourth was just gone somewhere else. Third Wing, Gideon, and Blue Medicine Horse were dead. Dead.

  Flat Dog walked over and sat down by Sam. “Since they’ve seen me,” he said sadly, “they know which one.”

  Sam pondered what that meant.

  In a few minutes Red Roan and two other young Kit Foxes showed up. Coy stood up, bristled, and growled. Sam calmed him down.

  The three sat and asked questions of Flat Dog, disregarding Sam. Flat Dog answered very factually and very fully. It seemed to Sam that he recounted every little thing they did after they left rendezvous to steal horses from the Head Cutters. The session seemed to last for hours.

  Sam noticed nothing in particular that reflected on him except one story. Flat Dog told how Blue Medicine Horse had worried that no one in the party had medicine to go to war. At that point Sam told about his daydreams. Blue Horse and Flat Dog thought maybe that was how white men got their medicine and decided to go against the Head Cutters the next morning.

  Not one of the interviewers looked directly at Sam, but he had never felt more thoroughly condemned.

  At last Red Roan and others rose and walked down the hill to camp.

  “We stay here,” Flat Dog.

  That evening the wives of Kit Foxes brought them food and water. For some reason they weren’t allowed to touch the cups that held the water. The women put water to their mouths like they were small children. No longer having a hat, Sam had to ask them to bring a small bowl for Coy to drink out of.

  One woman brought a buffalo robe. Without looking at Sam, she dropped it on the ground and said, “For Joins with Buffalo,” and walked away.

  When they were alone, Sam went to Paladin, then turned and looked at Flat Dog expectantly. Flat Dog shook his head no. “We stay here,” he said, “until the village finishes mourning.”

  He sat on a silvered cedar log and took an arrow from his quiver. He gazed off toward the Big Horns for a minute or two. Then, suddenly, Flat Dog stabbed himself in the left shoulder with the arrow point. Then he stabbed himself about a dozen times on the left arm, each cut making a trickle of blood.

  He began to weep. At first he cried softly, moaning a little. The moans grew in volume. They grew in intensity. They swooped up and down. They squeezed soft and bellowed loud.

  As he moaned, he changed hands and stabbed himself on the right arm. Over and over, seemingly without counting, he inflicted small wounds on himself.

  His moaning grew extravagant. It was as though he was trying to gauge the depth and breadth of his grief for his lost brother. He pitched on an ocean of sorrow, rode a swell of fierce pain upward and dropped down into a trough of anguish. Then the next pain lifted him high into the bleak vista of his heartache.

  With the arrow he wounded himself about half a dozen times on each cheek.

  At last he sat rigid, frozen by the prospect of a loss as wide and deep as any ocean.

  Sam heard the drums beating in the village, and the voices joined together in a great song of woe. Now what he had seen in two winters of living with the Crow people came home to him. He had seen men and women with wounds like those Flat Dog just scarified himself with. Men and women with joints missing from a finger, where they had expressed violently their sorrow, and their anger at their loss. Women who lost a close relative chopped their hair almost to the roots, and mourned until it grew to its original length. Families gave away most of their belongings, and grieved formally for two moons, or sometimes an entire year.

  When a relative was killed by an enemy, Sam remembered, the family mourned until a member of the offending tribe was killed in vengeance. It hit him hard—until a member of the offending tribe was killed in vengeance.

  Flat Dog emerged from his seeming trance and once more began to give voice to his sorrow. Long into the night rose the beat of the drums and the village songs of mourning. Long into the night rose Flat Dog’s wail.

  The next day Sam realized that they were in a kind of exile. All day they sat on top of that little hill, and then another day and another. Sam lost track after three. Every day they sat on the hilltop, all day. Flat Dog sat looking mournful, or far away. Sam waited. Or thought about his dead friends. Mostly waited.

  Coy looked at them peculiarly, and jumped onto his food and water gratefully when it came.

  It was the second night that Sam began to grieve. He started with a kind of madness. He began to moan along with Flat Dog—he didn’t know why, just had the impulse to make a kind of duet. Flat Dog sang high and loud, Sam soft and low.

  Tears came.

  True, hot tears.

  Thoughts of Blue Medicine Horse swam through his head. How hard he worked, so exactly, to learn English. How he opened his heart to Sam because of that rabid coyote. How he helped Sam train Paladin, and helped save Sam’s life during the buffalo hunt. How he counseled Sam wisely on how to behave in a way acceptable to the Crows. This man’s duty was to protect his family, but he brought the stranger into their circle of acquaintance, tragically.

  Most of all, Sam couldn’t help thinking of Blue Medicine Horse as the man who risked his life to help Sam get eight horses to win Meadowlark’s hand. And lost his life.

  Sam’s mourning lifted him high into anguish, low into despair.

  He thought of the brother who could not help to assure the safety of his younger brothers and sisters. Who could no longer help feed his family. Who would be unavailable to defend the tribe against enemies. Who would never delight a young woman with his love. Who would never add to the life of the tribe through his issue.

  A human being lost.

  A new wave lifted Sam, and he knew how far his sorrows reached beyond the death of Blue Horse. He had lost Gideon, his first real friend in the mountains. He’d failed to protect Third Wing, the Pawnee who saved his life out of pure generosity.

  He lifted his lament to the night sky.

  The memory of his father, Lew Morgan, washed over him, tumbled him head over heels in a flash flood of sadness. It had no words, only pictures of his father’s kind face, or his compact body doing work, lifting a deer onto his shoulder, carrying a ham in each hand, walking behind the mule and forcing the plow blade into the soft, spring earth.

  He wailed and wailed.

  Worse, Sam himself had become a killer. He had killed the Pawnee sentry Two Stones. He had slain Pock-Marked, his Lakota captor. Altogether he had walked the halls of the drama of life and death as one who sheds blood. He recognized, with the heaviest of hearts, that he walked the earth with bloody hands.

  In this fullness of recognition, he knew that the earth was, forever, the cradle of birth. It was equally, and also forever, the cold arms of death. He knew himself as the bearer of both life and death, and knew that he bore in his blood his own death.

  He wailed long into the night.

  Chapter Seventeen

  LOW ESTATE.

  That was Hannibal’s phrase. Hannibal was always using words no one else knew. When Sam asked him what it meant, Hannibal said, “Down and out.”

  When he and Flat Dog finally went into the village, Sam found out what it meant, really, to be in low estate.

  He had sewn the two pieces of breechcloth together, so his nether end was more or less covered. He had no shirt or hat, and, worse, no shoes. No shelter. The buffalo robe was his on loan. He had no food and no weapons to hunt with.

  It stung, also, that he had lost his gage d’amour and his medicine pouch. They were the only gifts he’d ever gotten from Meadowlark. And the medicine pouch held the matted hair that was his buffalo medicine.

  The Celt was gone. The Celt…. His bow was gone
.

  What did he have in place of all his possibles, everything he owned?

  Guilt.

  Flat Dog got them shelter. They moved into a brush hut with two other Kit Foxes, Naughty Ones like themselves, he said. These turned out to be Stripe and Straight Arm, who inflicted the name No Arrows on Sam.

  Bell Rock invited them to supper at his lodge that evening. He didn’t have to say it was to fend off starvation.

  Around the brush hut Stripe and Straight Arm hardly spoke to him at all. Sam was glad.

  The next day Flat Dog left to join his family in mourning. They would live out somewhere alone for some weeks, Sam knew. At least he didn’t have to face Gray Hawk and Needle, not yet. He also wouldn’t get to see Flat Dog. Or Meadowlark.

  He felt defeated.

  The first job, he made himself decide, was to get food. He used his single weapon, the hair ornament knife, to cut finger-thick willow shafts along the river. He peeled them and laid them out to dry. They would make arrows. He’d learned from Blue Medicine Horse—the memory twisted his heart—to use thick ones. The small ones would get too thin when they were scraped straight.

  Owning almost nothing, he dried extras to trade for arrowheads and sinew to lash the points on.

  While they dried, he rode out with Paladin and Coy to gather serviceberries. Since he had nothing to carry them in, he picked double handfuls, devoured them, and rode to the Stinking Water to drink. He liked the taste of the red and purple fruit, and the cool river water. Though the river got its name from hot springs upstream, the sulfurous taste was long gone here. Coy and Paladin liked it, too. Sam would have napped in the sun by the river, but he was afraid of what he might dream.

  Gathering berries was women’s work, but Sam refused to care. Tonight he would put serviceberries into the stew Stripe and Straight Arm would have. Though he was sure they wouldn’t let him starve, he wanted to make a contribution. Tomorrow he would find a good root-digging stick and dig up some Jerusalem artichokes.

  He was mostly worried about getting through the night.

  The next day, doing that, he made a discovery. Life was simple. Necessity: Find enough food for today. There were no other necessities.

  He made another discovery. He liked life this simple. It had clarity. Find food or starve. The finding wasn’t so hard. He liked life this way.

  He started to wonder why anyone ever made it harder.

  The answer came quickly. Winter.

  He knew he deserved to be poor.

  Winter would come.

  When Sam brought his contributions to the supper pot, Stripe and Straight Arm nodded their approval but still didn’t say much to him.

  Sam understood. The way the village saw things, he had taken a party on a raid, come away empty-handed, and gotten a man killed. In fact, that was exactly what did happen. He would have shunned himself.

  Stripe and Straight Arm, though, frowned at Sam when he fed Coy meat from the pot. Almost as if he understood, the little coyote started hunting chipmunks and squirrels. Sam’s sense of justice was offended.

  In the dark of the night, whether he slept or waked, his sense of justice also condemned him.

  After several days Sam borrowed a deer shoulder blade with a hole drilled in the middle. Slowly and carefully, he used the bone to scrape the willow shafts to a single diameter. When he returned the shoulder blade, he gave the owner several straightened shafts and borrowed a piece of basalt with a groove worn in it. With this tool he took the knots off and rubbed the remaining shafts smooth.

  The next part tested his patience. He heated the shafts over the fire and rubbed oil on them until they were supple. Then, borrowing a bone with a hole in it from Straight Arm, he used that as a lever to straighten the shafts slowly.

  Last came the most trying part. He held each shaft a long time while it cooled.

  He had no skill at lashing the points on. So he begged for help from Bell Rock. It was one of Bell Rock’s sons, Weasel, who showed Sam how to get tight lashing. Sam gave the young man two finished arrows for his help.

  Bell Rock chuckled at that and said, “Do you think you could accept a dinner for nothing?”

  Sam didn’t think he deserved it, but he accepted.

  He had three finished arrows. At the end of dinner he had to ask for the loan of one of Bell Rock’s bows.

  Bell Rock reached behind him and unwrapped an object Sam had paid no attention to. It was a bow fashioned from the thick, heavy horns of big horn sheep. He handed it to Sam.

  “It’s yours. A gift.”

  Sam turned it over and over. It was a stiff, powerful bow, and would take a strong draw.

  “Let it make you strong,” Bell Rock said.

  Sam pulled on the bowstring. He needed all his arm power to get the string back to shooting position.

  “I want you to have that,” Bell Rock said. “I believe in you. You’re a good young man.”

  Sam felt a gush of relief. Then he reminded himself, I got Blue Medicine Horse killed.

  He practiced all the next day, shooting his arrows at a circle drawn into the soft earth of a hillside. When he went to bed, his right arm ached. When he slept, his dream tormented him.

  The next morning the arm was screaming at him. At dawn and dusk he watched for deer, observing the paths they took to the water. Midday he spent gathering gooseberries and wild onions.

  The following day he got up before first light, excited. He left Coy tied to a tree near Paladin. A coyote might scare the deer off.

  In half an hour, big bow in one hand and three arrows in the other, he stood utterly still beside a boulder alongside the Stinking Water. He’d picked this spot out when he watched two does and their fawns drinking last evening. The abundance of heart-shaped tracks said they came here a lot, and others too.

  He hoped he looked like part of the boulder.

  He wished he could hunt bucks instead of does. It was his father who taught him to take the bucks. “The does will bear the young,” Lew Morgan said. But Sam would take whatever came.

  Now his days of hunting in Eden came back to him strongly. It hadn’t been a real Eden, just a spot he and his father liked. They named it that because Lew Morgan had once told his younger son, when Sam wasn’t old enough to hold a Pennsylvania rifle steady, that he could play Adam and give names to all the animals and plants. The names were original. Deer were mooshmen. Trees were starks. Wild roses were garbies. A bear was a woze.

  That was a good day. Sam remembered lots of good days with his father. He didn’t think about the lousy days after Lew Morgan died, and Sam’s brother Owen took over as head of the family.

  It was Lew Morgan who taught Sam how to become absolutely still in the woods, how to make yourself part of things, so that after a while even the birds would forget about your presence and return to their songs. Then all the animals would relax—and the deer would come.

  I had a rifle then.

  He hadn’t let himself think about the rifle his father willed him since it got stolen. What did it mean to him? He’d had the gunsmith Hawken engrave Celt on a brass plate on the stock and circle the name with Celtic love knots. That said it all.

  What would Sam do? Some Lakota—Sam was tempted by the hand-slap name the Crows used, Head Cutter—was walking around with his father’s rifle. That couldn’t be, simply couldn’t be, allowed.

  There’s nothing I can do about it now.

  He felt a tingle.

  Doe. One fawn. Picking their way through the cottonwood grove, noses up and alert.

  They would get no scent of Sam. The wind was upcanyon, and he’d picked his spot upwind of the tracks.

  Slowly they came. When they stepped out of the trees and onto the bank of the river, he might get a shot.

  The doe changed directions, heading a little left.

  Damn. That would make the shot longer.

  Frustrating. If he had The Celt, a hundred yards or so would not be an issue. But this big-horn bow was another story.
He couldn’t brace it against a tree trunk, and he couldn’t hold it steady for long. He wouldn’t be able to take his time on his aim.

  He considered trying to slip closer, and rejected that. Even when she had her head down to drink, the doe would be too alert for a significant move. He would wait and hope.

  The two deer came half out of the trees. The doe sniffed the air carefully. She looked upstream and down.

  They emerged and walked steadily to the river. Into the stream. Drinking.

  Sam couldn’t stand it. The bow had plenty of power for this distance. It was up to him to make a good hold.

  Check of wind, arrow nocked, now drawn. His forearms and biceps screeched. Steady….

  The arrow flew a couple of feet over the doe’s back.

  She bolted, and the fawn behind her. They ran in their upright, prancing way until Sam could barely catch an occasional glimpse of a white tail flicking through the cottonwoods.

  The arrow could be found later. He might get another shot. Carefully, he lined up the boulder he stood by and a tall cottonwood across the river. The arrow would be on that line, maybe in the water.

  When he did get another shot, it was even longer. This time a doe and two fawns. The arrow sailed behind the doe, and a little above. A gust of wind, maybe.

  She just stood.

  Quickly, Sam nocked his last arrow and drew. Steady! he shouted at himself inside his mind.

  A clean miss.

  The doe ignored anything she might have heard or felt, drank a little more, and then trotted daintily back into the cover of the trees.

  Sam wanted to stomp the bow.

  He didn’t.

  He spent an hour hunting the arrows. One was in the soft sand of the opposite bank. One was in front of a head-sized rock in a riffle, the shaft broken. The third he never found. Maybe it landed in a deep spot and floated away. But he didn’t find it washed up downstream either.

  One morning’s hunting, no meat, one arrow left.

  Dejected, he went and got Coy. They walked along the river to cut more willow shafts to dry.