Flight of the Hawk: The Plains

by W. Michael Gear

  “Can’t do too much brains,” Singing Lark had told him.

  Drying the hides presented its own problems. She’d shown him how to use curved chokecherry sticks to squeegee the moisture out of the stretched skin.

  “Slow dry is best,” she’d insisted.

  Hadn’t been that tough, just a little tedious. Right up to the moment she’d retrieved the lash ropes from the packhorses. She’d tied them between two of the cottonwoods and the graining and stretching had started. She’d taken one side, Tylor the other, and for hour after hour, they’d pulled the hides back and forth over the tight rope. Pulled for ten, maybe fifteen minutes, turned the hide, and began the process over again. From dawn to midday for one hide, midday to nightfall for the next. Five hides in all.

  He thought his hands would become crippled claws.

  To clench his fists sent an agony through his fingers, forearms, and shoulders. But they’d finished the last of the hides. And, to his amazement, they had come out remarkably soft. Every square inch was pliable. Because she’d insisted.

  And, well, yes, he hurt, but he’d enjoyed it. Because they’d done it together. When he reached that point where he’d wanted to stop, he needed but look over. She’d shoot him that secret smile of hers, her white teeth flashing. Something devilish, almost challenging would flicker behind her dark eyes. A hint that they were sharing some great secret. Something special and forbidden to most of the world. Tylor had never known the like.

  As Singing Lark packed the last hide back to the safety of their shelter, Tylor worked his fingers and glanced up at the sun in time to catch the last rays of it as it dipped behind the high slope. The cold was coming now. Time to call it a night. His stomach was growling, empty, and squirming for something to fill it.

  “I take hides. You catch horses,” she told him with a smile hinting at curiosity and promise.

  By the time Tylor had laid the poles that served as a gate on the narrow mouth of the box canyon, Singing Lark had the fire stoked up. Once the brains had been used up, the hide-lined hole had been turned into an ad-hoc cooking pot. Filled with water, it had been the container for an ever-evolving stew. She employed her charred sticks to fish hot stones from the fire, then dropped the hot rocks into the liquid. Hissing and steaming, they brought the contents to a low boil.

  Tylor called it a stew, a mixture of the last chokecherries and the few squaw currants, rosehips, and plums they could find. Juniper berries and pine nuts had been collected from the slope above. Some roots that Singing Lark had identified from the remains of their dried stems, along with bits of sheep liver, heart, and meat, made up the rest.

  Not much in the way of diversity, but filling, nutritious, and surprisingly tasty.

  “Tomorrow we smoke the hides,” she told him as he stepped under the shelter and settled himself to one side of the fire. She used a quarter-curl horn from one of the young rams they’d killed and scooped some of the stew from the hide-lined pit. This she handed to him, then used the second horn to scoop her own supper.

  She slipped over, seating herself beside him, sharing the view as shadow filled the valley. “Once they are well smoked, it’s time to cut and sew.”

  “Just like that,” Tylor noted. He glanced around at the fittings for their camp. But for the rifles, powder, and lead, his horse tack, their skinning knife, his clothes, and the ax, nothing was American. Their bedding, cooking utensils, the drying rack, everything else was made from the land. Even the “water bottle,” which was crafted from a section of mountain sheep intestine.

  She drank lustily from her horn, eyes on the canyon before them. The last of the light had faded from the brilliant red wall, the gloom deepening. Tylor could feel the chill as if it were dropping like a blanket.

  The first hooting of a great horned owl could be heard up the canyon.

  “Have to take the horses and pack in more wood tomorrow if we’re smoking hides,” he noted.

  “We do. Need the right wood. Got to smoke good.” She turned her speculative eyes on him. Studied him thoughtfully as he finished sucking down the hornful of stew.

  “What?” he asked, turning to look at her.

  “I want you.”

  “You have me.”

  She took his hand, removed the empty horn, and stared at his raw knuckles, then raised them to her lips. “You know, no Newe man would dare help a woman with hides.”

  “Then they’re idiots.”

  “No Newe man would lay next to a woman, night after night with his wean hard and aching.”

  “I’ll never—”

  “After all this, do you still think of me as a girl?”

  “I think you’re all woman.”

  She placed her fingers to his lips, pulled him to his feet, and led him back to the bed in the rear. The old buffalo hides, gone stiff now, had been placed on the ground hair-side up for a mattress. The new sheep hides had been laid atop them, just like a real blanket.

  She met his questioning stare, and with a flourish, slipped her dress up and over her head, laid it to the side. She kicked off her moccasins, then told him, “Take it off.”

  “Singing Lark, I . . .”

  She stepped forward, her quick fingers working to loosen the ties on his fly before jerking his pants down over his hips. Then she attacked his shirt.

  “For too long now, my ta’i has been aching for you. Such a longing can cause soul sickness. You are my husband,” she told him in English. “It is time that I am your wife.”

  And with that, she pulled him down and held up the hides as he slithered in beside her.

  Neither of them slept much that night. The next morning they were late getting the fires started to smoke the hides.

  CHAPTER 29

  The weather was foul when Corporal Toby Johnson’s small command reached the mouth of the Platte where it flowed into the turbulent Missouri River. Call it plain miserable.

  Toby squinted out at the falling rain, his breath fogging before him. He hadn’t grown used to cold feet. Seemed like with his coat, oilcloth slicker, and hat, he could stay mostly dry. Dry was warm. But his feet down in the stirrups were always cold. Maybe because his boots were always wet.

  He led the way down from the riverside trail, hearing Eli Danford’s big gray horse slopping through the mud behind him. Each hoof lifted with a sucking sound. Didn’t need to look back. Private Simms would be there, steady as the North Star; and behind him the two packhorses that Captain Clemson had provided would be following on their leads, heads down, ears flat in the drizzle.

  The pack animals should have been doing better. Their loads had been diminished as Toby and his small command had eaten their way west. About half the flour and most of the cornmeal were gone. The salt pork hadn’t lasted even as far as the mouth of the Kaw.

  Toby stared out at the Platte. Didn’t look like much of a river with the thin ripples of shallow-running currents braided across its wide mouth. Still, several trails split off from the main one, each running down to the bank.

  “What do you think, Toby?” Danford asked from behind. “Cross or make camp?”

  “Cross.” He tilted his hat enough to stare up at the dismal clouds. “No telling how it’s raining upstream. Water could be up in the morning. Besides, you’ve heard tell. It’s supposed to be big doings, crossing the Platte. A special high jinks.”

  “Yep,” Danford said woodenly. “I’d be up for a high jinks, all right. ’Cept my jug’s been empty for nigh on two weeks now.”

  “The privations of army life, Private,” Toby told him with a grin.

  “Could be quicksand,” Silas called from the rear. “You gonna cross, you don’t take no time, Toby. It’s supposed to have good bottom, but looking at that water, I wouldn’t trust it.”

  “Hiya!” Toby cried, slapping his cold boots to Buck’s sides.

  The big horse bolted forward, slipping and sliding down the trail, then out into the river. Toby kept him going, muddy water splashing with each pounding of the
horse’s feet. Then Buck was climbing the far bank, digging hooves into the black mud. Toby reined the horse up through a narrow opening in the trees and bushes to find a trail ahead of him through the brush.

  He stopped, resettling his oilskin cloak so that it protected the lock on his musket from the rain.

  Eli and Silas were following, their mounts splashing and thundering through the water, both of them whooping like wild Indians. The packhorses seemed a little more subdued.

  But the whole outfit made it. Across the Platte. Beyond the last portal of anything anyone considered civilized.

  Taking stock, horses blowing, water streaming from their flanks, they were all grinning.

  Around them, the last of fall’s leaves were still twirling down, the branches on the cottonwoods, oak, and ash, mostly bare.

  “How much farther, ye reckon?” Simms asked, hunching slightly over the saddle as his sorrel mare shook.

  “Beat’s me,” Toby told him. “Why, for all I know, we could run into Manuel Lisa any day now.”

  “No,” a voice called from the other side of the thick stand of brush that lay between them and the banks of the Missouri. “You have a hell of a way to go. Who’n tarnation are you? And what in hell was that damn racket about? Thought we’s under attack.”

  Toby shifted in his saddle, heart hammering at the surprise. “Who’re you?”

  “Louie Lajoie. With me is Joseph Joyal. There is a break in the brush up ahead. Come to our camp.”

  Toby glanced at the others—who both shrugged, water dripping from their sodden hats.

  Toby lined Buck out, found the hole where the thick brush parted, and rode out onto the banks of the Missouri. Sure enough, a stone’s throw back downstream a low fire smoked. A large trade canoe—what they called a pirogue—was pulled up and piled with tarped packs. A sort of shelter had been strung up with ropes to keep two bedrolls dry.

  The two men watching him held weathered rifles crossways under their coats to protect the priming. Both were grinning.

  Toby led the way forward, calling, “I’m Corporal Toby Johnson, on special detachment for Andrew Jackson. With me are Privates Eli Danford and Silas Simms. First Tennessee Volunteers.”

  He glanced at the packs in the canoe. “I take it you’re traders?”

  “Oui, I am Lajoie,” the big one said, a wool cap at a slant on his head. “We work for Manuel Lisa, the man you were talking about on the other side of the brush. We are headed to St. Louis. From upriver, yes?”

  Toby pulled his horse up. Wasn’t much room here for the animals. “How far to Mr. Lisa’s camp?”

  “Many days’ ride.” The smaller man, who had to be Joyal, cocked his head. “What is your business with the bourgeois?”

  Toby tapped his breast where the orders where hidden in their waterproof pouch. “Got a warrant for a man.”

  Both of the engages laughed at that. “As long as it is for neither of us, we are relieved.”

  “It’s for a man called John Tylor. You know where he is?”

  “Oui,” Joyal told him. “He is now a free trapper. The bourgeois outfits him and Will Cunningham. They are headed to hunt and trap the lands of the Snake, yes? Far to the west.” He pointed west over the trees. “At the headwater of the Platte. In the mountains. But God help them. The Arapahos have killed Champlain and his hunters. Word is that the Indians are killing any small party of hunters and trappers. Tylor may already be dead. The Rees tell that a party of Arapaho are hunting him.”

  “I don’t understand. I’m ordered to go and find him.”

  “Then it is good you run into us, no?” Lajoie told him. “Maybe you find him before the Indians can kill him.”

  Joyal nodded his agreement, and meeting Toby’s eyes, added, “Fastest way to Tylor? You follow the Platte west. Go wide through the Pawnee lands. Stay back from the river. When you get as far west as the short grass, you can return to the river. You cannot miss the forks of the Platte. The two rivers run side by side for many miles. Take the north fork. It will lead you to Snake country. Word is that the North Platte runs at the foot of a huge black mountain. From there you head west. To the Big Horn River. There you will find Tylor and Cunningham.”

  Toby’s heart skipped a beat and felt curiously heavy. “Why did Mr. Lisa let him go west?”

  “Something mysterious, yes?” Lajoie said, a smirking kind of smile on his lips. “Per’aps the bourgeois learns of your warrant. Per’aps that is the reason Will Cunningham rides so far. Per’aps he has beaten you to Tylor.”

  Toby growled, “ ’Tarnal hell,” under his breath. Figured that Pap would have whaled him within an inch of his life if he’d ever heard such profanity pass his lips. Not only was soldiering a constant temptation to sin, but the chase after Tylor was putting its own strain on Toby’s upright and righteous ways.

  “What did Tylor do?” Joyal asked. “Murder most foul?”

  “I say he stole something from a rich man,” Lajoie countered. “Maybe from some governor or such.”

  “Treason,” Toby muttered.

  The two engages stopped short. They seemed to digest that, then broke out into laughter. “Tylor? Treason? From who?”

  “He conspired against the United States. But you know the man, did he ever talk about Britain? Maybe that he was a spy? Did he ever speak against the United States? Try and subvert the Indians?”

  “Tylor?” Lajoie asked incredulously. “The bourgeois watched him. Had Latoulipe watch him, and the bourgeois is no one’s fool. Manuel Lisa trusts John Tylor, or he would not have outfitted him and turned him loose from his contract. I tell you what, my young friend. Save yourself a long hard ride that is likely to get you killed, scalped, and chopped up for the prairie wolves. Go back and tell whoever sent you that Tylor is dead.”

  “What do you think, Toby?” Danford asked.

  Toby scowled, pursed his lips. Damn. To the engages he said, “Many thanks. I’m obliged. Good thing we ran into you. Hope you have a safe trip back to St. Louis.”

  Toby carefully reined Buck around, watched as Silas got the packhorses sorted out, and headed back to the trail. Just before he kneed Buck forward through the gap in the brush, he looked back. The two engages were still standing there. Both men waved.

  Toby touched a finger to the wet brim of his hat.

  Leading the way back, he stopped short on the north bank of the Platte, turned Buck so he could see Danford and Simms. “I believed them right up to the point about treason.”

  “Meaning?” Danford asked.

  “If Tylor’s up the Platte, that’s where we’re going.”

  “But you heard. Tylor might be long dead a’fore we get there.”

  “Eli, I gave Jackson my promise. Now, I ain’t much. Folks say I’m dumb as a rock ’cause I never give up. But I can’t hold the two of you to this. Not headed out into the wilderness. Either of you wants to turn back? I’ll relieve you. Let you get back to Jackson and the army.”

  Simms and Danford locked eyes, both men shrugging at once.

  “Hell, Toby,” Danford said, “we’re having the time of our lives. My family’s long hunters like yers. Same with Silas, here. Back with the army, we’d be taking orders, marching, eating that swill they fix up. Prob’ly get shot at by lobsterbacks. I’ll head upriver w’ ye.”

  Simms chimed in, “I’m game for the Platte, Toby. They’s a heap worse duty than this. Let’s go see the mountains and find Tylor.”

  “Might be some more miserable days than this,” he pointed out. “Winter’s coming.”

  “Bet there ain’t nothing ol’ man winter can throw at us what we can’t take,” Simms answered. “Might mean making duds as we go.”

  “Reckon we’re in, Corporal.” Danford was grinning.

  Toby turned Buck’s head west, hoping that the trail he took through the brush would lead him out of the trees, give him a view of the country so he could figure out the best route.

  It was one thing following upriver to find Manuel Lisa�
�s expedition. But heading out into the emptiness?

  Toby sucked at his teeth, water dripping from the brim of his hat. “So be it. I give Jackson my word. And it’s up to a man’s honor to do his duty.”

  With that he spurred Buck forward.

  CHAPTER 30

  If Dawson McTavish didn’t think too hard, allowed himself to forget Fenway McKeever, it was possible to marvel about his current situation. He was west of the Black Hills. Having heard tell of them for years, they’d been almost mythical. Now he’d seen them with his own eyes, passed to the north of their wooded slopes.

  The trail he and the others now followed paralleled a narrow cottonwood-and-willow-studded stream. Its course led them southwest into a wide basin, its eastern side bounded by the Black Hills, the west by a stunning, even higher range of mountains that rose in snow-capped splendor against the distant horizon.

  The land was drier, the grasses shorter, ridge tops rocky. This was a different land from the plains of grass they’d crossed since leaving the Missouri. The feel of the country differed so much from the forests of his youth that it might have been another world. Back in the Minisota River lands, the earth had been wet, forested, and pulsing with life. A land of green where spirit-power seemed to emanate from the earth beneath his feet. Even the occasional boulders—found inexplicably in the flats between the gravel ridges and potholes—grew thick moss. Here any exposed stone was lucky to sport a couple of lichens.

  High ground in the basin produced a short and curly combination of grasses, the soil pale, hard, and thin. Even the sagebrush looked stunted, ugly, and stressed. The ridges with their exposed bones of sandstone couldn’t even grow the scrubby sage. The lower slopes and bottoms along the drainages sported a thick growth of short grasses in a variety new to Dawson’s eyes.

  But scrawny and wilted as the grass looked in comparison to what he was used to in the country of his youth, it nevertheless must have been nutritious, for it supported great herds of bison. It seemed like they’d see a herd or two a day—a mass of dark animals that seemed to flow along the rumpled and drainage-cut uplands.