Flight of the Hawk: The Plains

by W. Michael Gear

  When Dawson asked Wasichu about the distant mountains, the young Santee shrugged. Only when Dawson insisted, did Wasichu ask this, through signs, to Stone Otter.

  “Those mountains the Crow call Big Horns. The Shoshoni call them Powder River’s Mountains,” Stone Otter explained through signs and limited Lakhota. “Powder River is still west. We follow Pretty River to its source. It takes us to Pine Ridge, then we cross to Powder River. It takes us to the Shoshoni lands. There we find the Ni’otho you hunt. There I get my trade.”

  “How d’ ye know that?” McKeever had spared the man a sidelong look.

  Stone Otter had given him a humorless stare in return. “Your Ni’otho rides with Snakes. They are a simple and weak people. Always go back to find other Snakes.” He made the sign for “safety in numbers.”

  “What do you make of all this?” Aird had asked when he and Dawson rode just out of McKeever’s hearing.

  “Joseph, I figure we’re the same as hostages. McKeever’s happy to let us live as long as we’re of use to him. He’s playing his own game, one where we’re an asset to his ultimate goals. He could have killed us back at the river. Taken our trade, the horses, all of it.”

  “What makes us worth anything to him?”

  “We’re two more rifles.”

  “You think he really works for John Jacob Astor?”

  “That’s what he says.”

  “Maybe he’s a madman,” Aird suggested. “I keep coming back to that.”

  “There’s a war on,” Dawson told his friend. “Back east, they had to know it was coming. Astor would be a fool if he didn’t have agents on the river looking after his interests. That said, we know that he hopes to use South West Company against Manuel Lisa and the Chouteaus. And there’s the Spanish to consider, too. No telling what that governor, Salcedo, might do.”

  “What the hell do the Spanish matter? They’s way down south.”

  “Joseph, you heard tell. The Spanish been mad ever since Napoleon sold the Americans all of Louisiana territory. This country we’re riding over, all of it, used to be Spanish. They only ceded it to the French ’cause they thought they had the French between them and the Americans. Now there’s a story that an American trading company is on its way to Santa Fe. No way that Spain can protect Texas, New Mexico, or, God forbid, California from way off in Madrid. And if rumors are true, the Mexicans are already half in revolt.”

  “Well, if McKeever’s out here to keep an eye on Astor’s interests, why’s he got us clear off west of the river? Dickson’s gone to fight the Americans in the Great Lakes, we’re supposed to make allies of the River Sioux and get them to attack Lisa. If Governor Salcedo was to take this moment to send a military expedition against the Americans, he’d be coming from the southwest, not out here in the mountains.”

  “Reckon he would,” Dawson agreed, letting his eyes take in the low hills to the west. These were topped by a curious burned red stone that flaked away as if it were a kind of shattered ceramic. Funny country, this.

  “So, instead, we’re headed for Snake country.” Joseph made a face. “To chase down a single spy. Guess that makes me wonder what threat the Snakes is to the river trade? They might have been the terror of the plains once, but since the smallpox, they’re broken. Weren’t enough of them to keep even a part of the plains east of the Black Hills. All that country was left empty. So empty that the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and now the Sioux is moving in without so much as a fight. They took it. All the way to the Black Hills.”

  “Uh-huh. So?”

  “So let’s say this John Tylor is holy hell when it comes to converting the Snakes. That somehow he’s got enough trade to win them all to Lisa and the American cause.”

  Joseph pointed at the distant Big Horns. “Their home country is clear over there. Other side of them big mountains. We’re what? Two months travel from the Missouri? With winter coming on? And let’s say they got a couple thousand warriors. We’re supposed to believe that John Tylor can convince those couple thousand Snake warriors to ride across the plains in the dead of winter to attack the river? That they’ll whip the combined Santee and Teton Sioux, the Arikara, the Mandan and Hidatsa, and the Atsina thrown in?”

  Dawson chewed on his mustache where it hung down from his upper lip. “Doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  “Not for any agent in John Jacob Astor’s employ. I tell you, this is something else.”

  Dawson considered their situation. “I had a couple of chances to shoot him back before we got tied up with these Arapaho. You know, moments when my rifle was pointed his way. When he wasn’t paying attention. I just couldn’t do it. Killing a white man? Who might be working for the company? Just shooting him out of the saddle? That was stone-cold murder.”

  The thing he couldn’t tell Joseph was that Fenway McKeever scared him. Scared him in a way no man ever had. Ever since that morning when McKeever had killed Matato. Done it so quickly, quietly, and fast that the man didn’t even have to breathe hard.

  And McKeever watched him with a knowing look in his evil green eyes. That slight smile on his lips. It was as if the man could read Dawson’s mind. Knew him clear down to the soul.

  In that deadly green stare had been the promise: Try it, laddie, and ye’ll die just like Matato.

  Joseph depends on me. Dickson, even the Crown, depends on me.

  And Dawson McTavish was too scared to act.

  God, he felt miserable. His failure. All his.

  “You’re no murderer.” Joseph had narrowed his eyes. “Didn’t know how bad this would get.”

  “Here’s the thing, even if I could see my way to shooting him now, we’re all tangled up with these Arapaho. With McKeever alive, it’s three against three. No telling what Wasichu’d do. We kill McKeever, we better kill them Arapaho at the same time.”

  “Dawson, we’ve never killed anyone before.”

  “No. But Joseph, if it comes down to it, can you do that? Shoot one of the Arapaho? Maybe McKeever?”

  “He scares me. Looks at me like I’m some kind of bug.”

  “He scares me, too. Scares Stone Otter and the rest. You can see it.”

  “And don’t think the Arapaho haven’t figured this out,” Joseph said warily. “The fact they haven’t tried anything? It’s because we’re three white men with rifles. That means if they start anything, one or more of them is likely to die. But you can bet they’re planning for what’s coming down the line. Somehow betting they’re going to get all our trade, horses, and guns, as well as this Tylor’s and some Snake plunder as well.”

  Dawson’s stomach curdled. “Sort of puts us at the bottom of the heap, don’t it?”

  “Couldn’t have called it better myself,” Joseph agreed. “What about Wasichu? Which way will he break?”

  “I think, like us, he’s got more than he bargained for. When McKeever killed Matato, it sent a shiver down his soul. Back at the river, he thought: ‘Don’t cross the Scot. Do what he says, and wait for the moment to either get away, or for the Scot to reward you for good service.’ And if the whites kill each other, and he’s last man alive, he gets the trade.

  “Then, like us, he’s suddenly stuck with the Arapaho. Now, if we kill each other, there’s nothing to keep the Arapaho from killing him. Arapaho and Tetons may be allies for the moment, but he’s Santee. And with two packhorses of trade in the balance, what smart Arapaho is going to leave a Santee witness to tell the tale?”

  “So, if it comes to it, Wasichu will side with us.”

  “For the time being.” Dawson glanced sidelong at where the Arapaho rode some fifty yards to their right. That was the thing about the Arapaho. They never really let their guard down. Never rode with their backs turned, or where the whites could, on a moment’s notice, shoot them down.

  “I feel like a fool,” Dawson said miserably. “We’ve been on the trail now for weeks, and you and me have just figured this out?”

  Joseph glanced around, as if gazing at the lay of the land, then
shot a nonchalant glance over his shoulder. “McKeever’s known from the beginning. He’s always where he can watch everyone. Whatever way this is going to end, we really need to figure out how we’re going to get out of it alive. We’ve got to be smarter, Dawson. Otherwise it will be just pure dumb luck if we make it.”

  CHAPTER 31

  In comparison to what Tylor had known in his marriage to Hallie, what he shared with Singing Lark might have been from a different lifetime, something magical, like a fairy tale.

  In his old life, Tylor would have said his relationship with Hallie was more intimate than that lived by most married aristocracy. They had genuinely loved each other, had had a healthy sexual relationship, conversed about a variety of subjects in a manner most men would never have engaged in with a woman. They would never have considered each other as best friends, though they respected each other’s intellect. Rare as that was between a man and a woman.

  In the Carolinas a man’s wife was legally the same as chattel. For most men in Tylor’s circle, wives were essential breeding stock for the production and nurturing of offspring. A woman’s job was to oversee the everyday operation of the household, ensure the servants were in line, that meals were prepared on time, that the floors were polished, and the windows closed in the event of a storm. She was to be a showpiece, immaculately dressed on social occasions and retiring in a way that reflected well of her lord and master’s wealth and status.

  As liberated as Tylor’s relationship with Hallie might have seemed when set against the strictures of Carolina aristocracy, bounds remained that they would never have crossed. Their social roles had been as confining as if cast in iron.

  What Tylor shared with Singing Lark would have been incomprehensible in North Carolina. From the beginning, their roles were reversed. This was her world, and she was the dominant partner, skilled in the intricacies of survival. Once she showed him how to do something, she expected him to do it.

  Unlike in the east where lordly men and servile women’s worlds were inviolately separate, Tylor and Singing Lark did everything together: cooking, hunting, gutting and butchering, defecating, packing firewood, teasing, arguing, caring for the horses.

  Somewhere along the line he and she had become two halves of a whole. The kind who enjoyed each other’s company and had complete trust in the other. Somehow possessed of the knowledge that no matter what, each would be there.

  That single realization stunned Tylor. He’d never known that kind of friendship with anyone—let alone a woman. Sure, as with Baptiste Latoulipe, he’d had friends, shared companionship—but a deep-seated reservation had always tempered the relationship. In the days following his capture in the wake of the Burr conspiracy, he’d been well aware of the limits and transitory nature of friendship.

  That he and Singing Lark could share everything made him question all he’d known and been in the east. The world that had bred and raised him considered women frail and delicate, incapable of significant—let alone profound—thought, limited in ability beyond the simplest domestic responsibilities. After all, it was so plainly stated in the Bible: women were inferior in creation.

  Given young Singing Lark’s proficiencies, her ability to learn, and her remarkable acumen, he had to wonder if white women were naturally incompetent, if white men had bred the sense out of them through ages of selection, or if Shoshoni women just happened to be the pinnacle of brilliant accomplishment when it came to the female of the species.

  Tylor’s conjugal relations with Singing Lark were just as revelatory. He and Hallie had been active under the covers. Some in their world would have considered the extent of their enjoyment of the act sinful, but it had been structured, confined to both propriety and their bedroom. Almost ritualized. In contrast, Singing Lark had no inhibitions when it came to either his or her body, and considered copulation as natural and inevitable as she did any other aspect of daily life. She was happy to oblige at any time, and initiated the action whenever the mood struck, at times and places Tylor would never have imagined. Such as in the middle of fleshing a hide, right there on the sunlit grass.

  So, who is right? My people, who are born in guilt and live in repression because Adam and Eve ate an apple and were kicked out of the Garden of Eden? Or is it Singing Lark’s, whose people remind each other that in the Beginning Times the trickster, Coyote, carried a spare penis in a basket on his back in case his original equipment was inoperative?

  “You are smiling,” Singing Lark noted from her spot beside him at the fire. Outside, night had fallen, crisp, the night dark with clouds and a gentle snow.

  “Wondering if I am James Sutherland.”

  “Who?”

  “An older man who married a twelve-year-old girl. People made fun of him.”

  “Twelve? She had passed her first hunni?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “That is wrong.”

  “Back where I come from, some would lift an eyebrow about you and me.”

  “Did you know that back among the people, they pitied you? Made fun of you behind your back?”

  “Why?”

  “They thought that I was playing with you. Making a fool out of you so that I could be selfish. That I married you so I could remain irresponsible. That I got everything, and you didn’t even get the relief of yokog from the woman you married. Poor, pitiful Tylor.”

  He laughed. “I promised to be the responsible one, the adult taking care of you.” He paused. “You are half my age. Do you really think you know what you want for the rest of your life?”

  She shrugged. “My parents died from the rotting-face sickness. Gray Bear raised my sister and me. As a girl I dreamed of marrying a man who could hunt, who could fight, and who would keep me fed. We would have children, and they would grow strong and tall. That man didn’t have hair on his face and coyote-like eyes.” She gave him a teasing wink. “What I didn’t dream was that such a man would let me be who I want to be. You are a puzzle to my people, Tylor, but I can’t think of what life would be like without you.”

  As he considered that, she added, “As a rich and prominent man, the people are going to expect you to marry my sister when she has her first moon.”

  “Wait a minute! What?”

  “A man does not marry sisters among your people?”

  “No. One man marries only one woman at a time.”

  She turned, fixing him with her serious eyes. “We are not Taipo. We are the Newe. You had better start thinking about this. Or are you going to be as crazy marrying Yellow Breeze as you were about marrying me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If you do not like her, you can say no. But it must be done with respect, and you might suggest another man who would be better suited to marry her.”

  Tylor made a face, then rubbed his temples. On top of everything else, they expected him to be a bigamist? With Lark’s sister?

  She laughed, prodding the fire. “I see that confused look, husband.”

  “Thinking about the world I come from. Considering where we are. Right now. Beside our fire, with snow falling just beyond the shelter. Thinking about you and me. How different this world is from the one I left behind. I’m just coming to terms with the realization that I love you more than anything, in a way I never thought I’d love a woman, and you tell me I have to marry your little sister?”

  “You must at least make the offer. She might want to marry someone else by the time she is a woman.”

  “How do you feel about it? Is that something you would want?” The implications were unsettling. Another . . . child?

  “It would make our lives easier. She’s a good worker, and I think she will turn out to be better at being a woman than I am. She’s always been happier about gossiping, making clothing, tending to lodge fires, and doing woman’s work. I would much rather that you brought her to our lodge than some other woman.”

  “Some other woman?” Tylor wondered. “Lark, what about us?”

  “What about u
s?”

  “You make it sound like a business arrangement. Marry my sister. She can go to work for us. But what about you and me? It will change things between us. I love you. I don’t want someone else in our lives.”

  “Then don’t marry her.” Her brow lined. “You have told me about this thing you call love. We don’t have a word like that, but talk about a longing in the mugwa for another, and warm caring, and dedicating one’s life to another. But, this special feeling you have for me? Is your heart so small you can only share it with one person and not two?”

  He blinked. “I . . . I don’t know. Who do you think I am? Coyote? Like in your stories?”

  She gave him her level and sober look. “Depends on how you think about Coyote. Lots of sides to him. But the world wouldn’t have been the way the world is if Coyote hadn’t been Coyote and Wolf hadn’t been Wolf.”

  “Chaos forever in conflict with order,” he murmured, stopping long enough to cut a short length of tobacco from the last of the twist he carried. “Too much of either is bad. It’s the Newe goal to strike a balance.”

  “What are the stories among your people?”

  “God and his son, Jesus, are good. The Devil is evil. The choice is clear. Absolute. No balance to be struck between the two. Evil only exists because it’s a force acting on its own behalf. The assumption is that the Devil will forever tempt people to do bad things, lead them away from God, and exploit them through their ‘human’ failings. That we’re all flawed in our creation. What they call ‘original sin’ because we’re born of copulation. We all start life on the wrong side. Have to fight to overcome the stain of being born bad.”

  “Born bad? Poor Taipos. Among the Newe, some are born to be trouble. Others born to be helpful. I was six when Little Wolf was born. Something was wrong with him from the start. Perhaps he had some of Water Baby’s Spirit in him. When he was three, his parents had a little girl. He hated that she got all the attention he used to get. When he was six, he took her out into the willows and used an obsidian flake to cut her into bloody strips.”