Skye knew what he had to do. It was never easy, but he never asked anyone else to do these things for him. It was a part of being a citizen of the wilds. He feared the day might come when he would have to do this very thing to Jawbone. It was why he tried not to love an animal, but he did anyway. He remembered horses he treasured, a dog he once owned, and his deep respect for Jawbone, whose mysterious medicine made him an animal he would honor all of his days.
The yearling tried to limp away as Skye approached, but finally stopped, quivering and in obvious pain. The night’s uproars had destroyed him. A night spent racing around on treacherous ground, a night bumping into fleeing mares, tumbling under Jawbone’s onslaught, had finally snapped this fellow’s leg. And there was nothing anyone could do except end its suffering.
Skye slipped his Green River knife from its sheath at his waist.
“Whoa, boy,” he said.
The yearling was too far gone to resist, but it trembled as Skye approached.
The wounded leg was terrible to look at. Splintered bone stabbed through flesh. Black blood soaked the pastern and hoof.
That didn’t make it any easier.
Skye lifted a hand to the colt’s mane. It trembled. Then swiftly, hoping to give swift peace and not lingering agony, he jammed his knife under the ear, sliced downward under the cheek and across the throat, feeling his keen blade sever life from death. The horse shook a moment, and then tumbled down.
“Well done, Mister Skye,” said Winding, who was standing ten yards away.
Death is never well done, Skye thought. But he nodded, acknowledging the teamster’s expert opinion. The swift sharp knife had lessened the torment of the wounded animal, offering a merciful death, and that was what the teamster meant.
Skye wiped his blade on grass and restored it to its sheath. It was a rotten way to start a new day.
He would not ride Jawbone. The young stallion would be busy this day and many more herding his harem, and the task would draw on the horse’s last reserves of strength. It would be good to put one of those fine Gros Ventre ponies under saddle and see what sort of gift those people had given Mercer for the magical night he gave them.
Jawbone was young. He had whipped a proud old mustang and driven him away. Skye wondered how that old horse must feel this dawn. Yesterday, he was king of his little herd. Yesterday he was a lord of all horses, breeding mares, stamping foals with his own nature, disdainfully chasing away all the young stallions who meant to steal his band from him. Today he was a broken old stallion, an outcast who had surrendered to the law of life: the young replace the old; the young conquer from the old.
Was he quietly grazing somewhere, nursing the wounds Jawbone had inflicted on him? Did horses have feelings? Was he bereft? Or was he merely a bundle of instincts, without understanding of his new and humbler condition? Skye didn’t know, but he wished he might find the old stallion and wish peace and comfortable old age upon him. Maybe now, free of responsibility, the old fellow would graze peacefully, enjoy the warm sun, look upon his world as a good place, and think upon his own glory. It was a fanciful thought, so Skye set it aside. There was much to do this morning.
The light was quickening now. Mercer swung out of his robe and stretched. Skye’s women emerged from the lodge and headed toward the seep. Skye remembered there was little water here; not enough for a herd of horses. They would need to move on.
“Didn’t sleep. Not a bloody wink all night,” Mercer said. “Jawbone was breeding, I take it.”
“No, it was more than that,” Skye said. “He was making himself king.”
“A monarch! Well, whatever. It spoiled my night,” Mercer said. “The horse world is no democracy. God save the king.”
With that, he smiled, those even white teeth flashing again.
He caught up his robe and brought it to Skye, turning it over so the hair side was down. “Now, what’ll I record for yesterday, eh? The day Jawbone captured a harem? And how do I paint that, eh?”
Mercer had indeed kept a pictograph journal of sorts on the fleshed side of his buffalo robe, very like the winter count of many a tribal elder. Mary had shown him how to make paints of grease and colored clay, usually ochre, and how to turn various fibrous reeds or twigs into brushes. She had even sewn a tiny bag for Mercer, so tightly done that he could store his greasepaint within it and tie it shut.
“Not much to record, Mister Skye. Nothing that would cause a sensation in London. Just horse doings. Anyone in England is entirely familiar with horses.”
“Wild horses, sir? You could make something of it. I’d be interested in reading it.”
“Well, it’s not the stuff of a good story. I should have headed for Salt Lake. A piece or two on the Saints would’ve rocked London on its heels. This North America, sir, it’s a bust. There’s not a story in the whole continent.”
Skye had heard it all too many times.
Nonetheless, Mercer opened his little paint bag, softened the fibers of his stick brush, and began to draw some stick-figure mares and foals, and two stick-figure stallions rearing. It was not bad art. Mercer could be expressive with a few strokes of brown paint. There was, actually, an impressive collection of symbols and figures known only to the adventurer himself. But the saw-toothed fire symbols were plain enough.
“There now. I’ll take this moth-eaten thing to London. But I’ll write most of the stories on board ship across the Atlantic and pop them onto desks when I get back. Not that my scribbling will ever pay for this trip.”
Mercer rolled up his robe and put away his little paint bag.
“I say, Mister Skye, what do the bones look like?”
“They’re poking out of rock. There’s a skull several feet long, teeth six or eight inches high.”
“What do the Indians think of them?”
“Hard to say, sir. Each tribe has its own stories. But Victoria’s people think they are the bones of a huge bird, maybe the big black bird of their people, their namesake.”
“How big did you say?”
“Bigger than any animal known to modern man, sir. Maybe three times the height of a tall man.”
“These birds, did they fly?”
“I can’t say. Ask her.”
“Well, bones are bones. I hardly think there’s a sensation in them.”
“The tribes all have legends about them, Mister Mercer. The Crows do. I’ll wager you’d get a different story from the Sioux or Blackfeet or Assiniboine. It’s also a sacred place, sir. We won’t touch those bones. The spirits of those animals are there, ready to destroy anyone who tampers with them. That’s the story one gets from the people who live here. It’s taboo. It’s forbidden.”
“Forbidden! I have been to a hundred forbidden places in Asia and Africa. At last I might have a story, Mister Skye.”
thirty-two
Skye’s party continued to cross broken prairie in autumnal weather, as if it were all a picnic. Maybe Graves Mercer was simply a lucky man, Skye thought. Everything seemed to go right, just because he wanted it to go right.
The man lost an outfit in the fire and won another one. The gods were smiling. It was as if Mercer, the great explorer, could conjure up whatever he needed. And now he needed a sensation. A bigger sensation than anything that other explorers might uncover. The man had rivals. Who could find the most exotic thing lurking in the unexplored world?
Skye thought about that as they pushed northward toward the great ditch of the Missouri River. What the man really meant by a sensation was something that would shock his English countrymen. Shock was in the air. In modern times the queen’s men had radiated outward to the farthest reaches of the unknown world, penetrating into the Amazon jungles, pausing at South Sea islands, probing toward the poles, trekking up the Nile, climbing higher and higher toward the peaks of the Himalayas. But it was the customs of foreign peoples that shocked the English. Wicked things. Erotic things. Cruel things. Sacrifice a virgin to the morning star and the civilized world would be d
uly horrified.
Mercer was really engaged in shock. Whatever he could unearth that would rattle his countrymen, that’s what would ensure his own fame. How different this was from other times, when people sought the comforts of orthodoxy, or the healing of faith, or the blessings of a strong crown.
Even as Skye mused, a good buffalo runner gotten from the Atsina chief was carrying him northward ahead of the rest of the party, the horse lithe and young under him. Skye never stopped scanning the open country, for it was his duty to keep his people safe, to spot trouble, to give those behind him time to regroup or defend. His women were riding now, thanks to the plenitude of horses. They kept the travois ponies and packhorses moving steadily along. Winding and Jawbone brought up the rear, keeping an eye on the wild bunch.
Mercer, also riding now, never seemed content and was forever spurring forward, or pulling off to one side or the other, or dashing somewhere to examine something. But now he urged his pony forward and joined Skye as they crossed an empty land.
“When you say forbidden, Mister Skye, what do you mean?”
“I meant that the Indians revere these bones, respect them, and would not want anything to damage them. In the case of the Absarokas, these are the bones of creation, the bones from which they derive their visions of where they came from, and who they are.”
“Ah, mythology! I suppose most people have some of that to explain themselves. The Greeks and Romans did. All those stories were displaced by Christian religion but they linger on, half submerged, and one still sees villagers at the old pagan shrines. I’ve seen them myself. I suppose when Europeans settle this country, these old stories will linger in the hollows and hills.”
“They are more than stories, Mister Mercer. The tribes feel a kinship to these bones. The bones are their ancestors. And I should tell you, there’s never been warfare at the place of the bones. Blackfeet, Crows, Sioux, other tribes that fight each other, they gather here, enemies at all other times, but quiet and respectful and at peace. Parties come and go, camp there, sit for hours before these giants, and are perfectly safe. The next day, a mile away, they might kill each other but not there where the bones poke up from rock. That’s how powerful this place is.”
“Well, I’m ready for it. There’s nothing else around here. Of course I discount all the stories about the size of the bones. Those things get exaggerated, you know. The more sacred they are, the bigger they get. It’ll be a guffaw or two when I start some measuring and find they’re maybe as big as an ostrich. Now that’s a big bird, an ostrich. And I’ll probably end up writing about this very thing: the natives worship at a pile of fossilized ostrich bones and have turned them into the bones of giants.”
The man was saying he didn’t believe Victoria or Skye, but there was no point in protesting it. He would see for himself. But Skye supposed that was all part of being a sensationalist writer. If you debunk a local legend that’s quite as good as confirming it.
“I say, Skye, these bones. They’re caught in sandstone?”
“Fossils, yes.”
“How do you suppose that happened?”
“They are very old, Mister Mercer.”
“How old?”
Skye had no answer. “Older than anyone imagines; what else can one say?”
“Maybe a trick of God to fool the unfaithful? Wasn’t the world created in six days, about six thousand years ago?”
There were things Skye did not feel he could respond to, and that was one. He scarcely grasped theology. But he had a few notions.
“Some things are written as poetry, Mister Mercer, because they were too much for the prophets to explain. Genesis is poetry, I imagine. I read Genesis once, and saw that it was fanciful.”
“Ah, you’re a heretic, like me!”
“No, sir, not that. I am a faithful man in my own way. Let me put it this way. Most of the natural world has yet to be revealed to us. Someday maybe God will open our eyes.”
“That’s a gracious response, Mister Skye. How did you get here, in this corner of the unknown world?”
“I was a pressed seaman, ended up in the Royal Navy, snatched as a boy right off the streets of London. I made my escape when I could.”
“Ah, a deserter.”
“Think what you will. I consider myself a freedman. My liberty was taken away; I took it back.”
“But you cannot return to England.”
“Never.”
“I’ve met wanderers like you from one end of the world to the other, Mister Skye. England has its exiles. Convicts sent to Van Diemen’s Land, the refuse of the Napoleonic wars, criminals who fled the island, and republicans at war with monarchy, or Irish opposed to English rule. But mostly, Mister Skye, outcasts. Social transgressors. Women who became enamored of another man and paid for it by fleeing from disgrace. Men who professed atheism and found themselves ostracized. Bigamous men. Banished men. Odd quacks who declare themselves nobility. I met a chap in Spain who said he was pretender to the throne and he was collecting a fleet to topple the queen. Of course most Englishmen flee to France, but there are exiled Englishmen in every corner of the world. And you’re one.”
“By accident, sir. I would probably be an import-export merchant like my father if a press gang of laughing sailors had not pinned my arms behind my back and dragged me over the cobbles to the wharf. I have no very great quarrel with England. It’s still my land, my people. In fact, after meeting a few Yanks, I prefer Englishmen. I won’t make myself a Yank. I’m a man without a country.”
“That answers my next question, Mister Skye. What a good day this is. We’ve been weeks on the trail, and only now do I sense that I know you.”
“I guard my privacy, Mister Mercer.”
“Out here, beyond society, beyond law? But why?”
“I’ll respond with a question: Are you planning to write about your guide Skye in the North American wilds, the one with two Indian wives, one young and very beautiful?”
Mercer grinned. “You have me, Mister Skye.”
“And shock London with it?”
“Yes, but what difference does it make?”
“I have not seen my family for decades. I don’t know whether my parents or my sister live. I don’t know whether she married or has children. I haven’t heard about my cousins, either. Would you make sport of me?”
“Probably. If it’s true, and if it catches the eye, I would publish it.”
“Then say that I love my wives. Both of them. Say that it is the Indian custom. Say that when native women’s burden is shared they are happier. Tell them that I was and am an Anglican And tell them that a man yanked off the streets and stuffed into a royal sloop deserves his liberty.”
“As you wish, Mister Skye.” Mercer’s tone was earnest Somehow, he always managed to redeem himself.
They rode on in silence, though no antagonism remained between them. The land forms changed. Now great grassy gulches tumbled northward. Skye consulted with Victoria, who pointed westerly. Skye turned their caravan down a long trough where the grass was thicker in the bottom than on its sides.
The horses seemed eager, and pushed ahead almost without urging, so that sometimes the travois bounced. The walls of the great trench of the Missouri River rose higher and higher as they plunged into a giant ditch that seemed devoid of all life.
They came at last to narrow bottoms and beyond a slender flat the great cold river purled its way to its union with the Mississippi. Skye dismounted and let the buffalo runner poke his ugly nose in the icy, clear water. Skye studied the bluffs, looking for trouble, and found none.
The women dismounted and let their horses drink. And then, one by one, watered the packhorses and the draft horse and the spare mounts, while Winding ran a well-versed teamster’s hand over pasterns and fetlocks and shins.
A narrow trail ran west here.
Victoria spotted the broken arrow and summoned Skye.
Directly ahead, on the trail they soon would take, was an arrow plunge
d point-down in the ground, with its back broken and the feathered part lying beside it.
Mercer hastened to the spot
“What’s that about, Mister Skye?”
“It’s a warning. It says, do not go farther.”
“For us?”
“Yes.”
“But we will, of course. I haven’t come across an ocean and a continent just to be put off by this.”
“You would be risking your life, Mister Mercer,” Victoria said.
“Well, I’ll just risk it. Missus Skye,” he said. “What tribe’s arrow is this?”
She picked up the feathered end, and pulled the shaft out of the moist earth.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I have never seen an arrow marked like this.”
thirty-three
The arrow was unlike any Skye had ever seen. The entire shaft was enameled bloodred. Large feathers, maybe hawk or falcon, adorned it. It lacked an arrowhead or iron point. A ceremonial arrow, then, and all the more ominous for it.
“This is big medicine, Mister Mercer,” he said. “See how it’s made. No point. All red. This is a medicine arrow, a message arrow.”
“Who made it?”
“Damned if I know,” said Victoria. “Makes me unhappy, I don’t know. Maybe the spirits made it.”
“Spirits?”
“Stuff you and me don’t know about.”
“Surely you don’t …” Mercer stopped himself.
Skye smiled. Mercer was dismissing Indian legend but was being polite about it.
Victoria studied the arrow, cussing softly. “Owl feathers. Owl feathers! That’s what these are. This is very bad, owl feathers.”
“And what does it tell you, eh?”
Victoria squinted at him. “We better damn well stay away. That’s what.”
Mercer studied the red arrow, turned it over and over. “A taboo. A message. Oh, this is delightful. I love a taboo! I shall record it on the backside of my robe tonight. This makes the whole trip over here much more promising. Something to scribble about. There’s nothing like a good taboo to titillate a Londoner over his morning tea.”
The Canyon of Bones Page 17