Flight of the Hawk: The Plains

by W. Michael Gear

  “Definitely evil, I’d say.”

  “He didn’t get all the blood washed off. When he went back, his parents were suspicious. They went out and found the body of his sister, of course.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “His father stepped up behind him. Smacked him in the back of the neck with a club. Before his mugwa and navushieip could slip out of the body, they tied a sack over his head to trap the souls inside. Then they dug a hole, covered his body up, and rolled a big rock over it to keep his evil trapped forever.”

  “His parents killed him?”

  “He was their child. Their responsibility. But, unlike in your world, most people are born good among the Newe.” She made a face. “I don’t think I want to live in your world where all people are born bad.”

  “In my world, women are kept separate, a wife is little better than a slave. Men give the orders, women do as they are told. You and I couldn’t live like we do.” He snorted derisively. “Just the fact that we’re married would be a scandal. I’m a white gentleman, you’re a squaw.”

  “A what?”

  “An Indian.”

  “I’m Newe.”

  “Doesn’t matter to them. Only the lowest classes of white men marry Indian women.” Let alone two of them.

  “Lowest classes? Explain.”

  “My people place different values on different kinds of people depending on who their parents are, what they own, where they live, what they do for a living, and what race they belong to. I came from the top, the chiefs. We are called the aristocracy, the landed planters.”

  She considered this. A crooked smile bent her lips. “You have gone from the top to the bottom?”

  “I have.”

  “Miss being on top?”

  He chuckled. “I think a person has to lose everything to really discover who they are.”

  She pressed her fingers together, that thoughtful look intensifying. “Among the Newe if a man orders a woman around like a slave, she’ll just ignore him. Unless she’s really a slave. Then she has to do what she’s told or be beaten. But everyone has expectations about what a woman should be. A woman behaves in a certain way. Does certain things. She is expected to spend her time with other women, have children, talk about children. Tan hides. Cook. Gather food. Help other women.”

  “What happens when we finally find Gray Bear’s camp again?”

  The crooked smile was back. “I married a Taipo. I’ve gone from the top to the bottom.”

  “I guess you have.”

  “In the beginning I married you to keep from being who they wanted me to be.”

  “How’s that?”

  “They could not have made me marry as long as Gray Bear and Aspen Branch took my side. I could have kept doing what I wanted, but it would have been hard. No one would have really trusted me. They’d have thought my puha was wrong. Maybe not tainted like Little Wolf’s was, but having different puha than everyone else makes people nervous. Quick to lay blame if there’s bad luck or illness.”

  “They won’t say that if you’re married to a Taipo?”

  “Of course not. Taipo have different ways, that’s all. And I was always different. It figures I’d do something crazy like marry a Taipo.”

  He joined her laughter, then, in a serious voice, asked, “How is it working out for you?”

  Her eyes were still sparkling. “As dumb as you are about so many things, I wasn’t sure in the beginning. I still have to tell myself, he’s a Taipo, and I would be as dumb in your world.” She took his hand, lacing her fingers into his. “I think marrying you was the best thing I have ever done.”

  “What happens if we just stay here? Who would miss us?”

  Her chiding look was back. “Not enough food. The sheep, deer, and elk have smelled too much of us and the horses and left. By the end of the next full moon, our bellies would be more empty than full. By now the raiding parties should be headed home. When the weather breaks, we’ll slip south along the foothills, then over to Big River to look for Gray Bear’s village.”

  “And then what?”

  “We spend the winter in a nice lodge, tell stories, you trade. We hunt some. Enjoy each other under the robes.”

  “I need to trap beaver. I have to take trade back to Manuel Lisa. He’s supposed to have a post at the mouth of what the Crow call the Big Horn River on the Yellowstone. You know where that is?”

  She nodded. “I can find it. Follow our Pia’ogwe to where it joins the Ge’te’ogwe. The Fast River that some others call the Yellow Rock River.”

  “You will help me trap beaver?”

  “It is hunting, yes. We’ll have to be away from the winter village. Away from people telling me how to behave.”

  For a time they watched the fire burn.

  “What comes after you take the beaver to the Taipo post?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have said you are not going back to the Taipo world, but what if they ask you to?”

  “I can’t go back. Ever. There are men back there who want to kill me. Men who hate me.”

  “Why?”

  “I have an enemy back there. A man named Joshua Gregg. We were boyhood friends. We got into a fight as boys, and our fathers took it up. My father killed Joshua’s father in a duel. Then we wanted to marry the same woman. She married me. I went west, to Santa Fe, in an effort to become . . . Well, a kind of great Taipo Taikwahni. The great chiefs among the Americans didn’t like it, called me a bad man. Especially Joshua Gregg and a war chief called Jackson.”

  “Doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “Hard to explain until you understand laws and governments. I escaped, but they want me dead. As long as Joshua Gregg knows I am alive, he will send men after me.” He thought back to Fenway McKeever, how close the big Scot had come to killing him.

  Her gaze remained fixed on the flickering fire. “You think they will come looking for you?”

  “I think Lisa will keep my secret.” He gestured around. “This is about as far from the Taipo world as a man can get.”

  “I can take you even farther than this,” she told him. “I can take you into the Dukurika Mountains, to the Pa’do’ikint, the place where the steaming water comes out. It is a place of the Spirits, filled with puha. The Dukurika live there. The Sheep Eaters. I have some cousins among them. It’s a high land, cold in winter, with deep snows. No one but Sheep Eaters could find you there.”

  She giggled in that little girl way, eyes sparkling. “We could go to the Pa’do’ikint and never come back. Just live there. You and me, forever.”

  “There’s worse things, I suspect.”

  Her gaze turned serious again. “What if the Taipo come hunting you?”

  “Way out here?” He took a moment to consider the question. Jackson and Gregg would be able to trace him as far as St. Louis. McKeever would have reported to Joshua Gregg that he was onto his man clear back when Tylor had signed onto the Lisa expedition. William Clark knew that John Tylor had traveled upriver. Clark had sent Cunningham as a courier, carrying Hallie’s letter and a warning to Lisa. After McKeever died that night in the Missouri, no word would be going back to Gregg.

  Whether, in the midst of a war, Andrew Jackson would send anyone in pursuit was another matter. The rational assumption was that Jackson had a great many more pressing matters to attend to than an escaped traitor. But who would ever assume Jackson was rational?

  “I think we have a couple of years,” Tylor said at last. “No one will know what happened to me until Lisa returns to St. Louis next summer. Not that he’d surrender my secrets lightly, but anyone with enough pennies to get his returning engages drunk will hear plenty of stories about John Tylor. A persistent intelligencer will figure out that Will and I headed west into the plains. After that it’s a gamble as to whether or not I’m still alive.”

  “How far is this St. Louis?”

  “Very, very far.”

  “If anyone comes, we will hear.” She se
emed so resolutely sure of herself.

  “Let’s hope.” But he kept thinking of that two-thousanddollar reward Gregg had put on his head. And word was that Jackson had added another thousand. Money enough to goad any number of men off into the wilderness in Tylor’s pursuit.

  “Besides,” Singing Lark told him. “If anyone comes, I have a rifle. I will shoot them.”

  “So, now you want to be a warrior as well as a scout and a hunter?”

  “Why not?”

  He had at least a year before anyone could travel from St. Louis to the Upper Missouri. Until that time, he could relax. Just be himself.

  And know that in another couple of years, the people would expect him to marry Yellow Breeze when she became a woman.

  Another couple of years?

  Whatever made him think he’d live that long?

  CHAPTER 32

  The way led into the wind. The relentless and everlasting wind. At night Toby and his small command would make camp down in the cottonwoods, along the banks of the Platte. Just after the evening fire started to burn down, the wind would usually die. In the morning, after they’d cooked their scanty breakfast and mounted up, the wind would begin as a slight breeze, gathering strength until midday, when it was a blow.

  They had reached the long-sought fork of the Platte, the channels running side-by-side for miles, as the traders had said they would.

  “Where in hell are we going?” Silas Simms asked as he huddled in his blanket and stared up at the night.

  They had camped in a hollow beneath a steep embankment where a stream had cut a loop into the side of a hill. Freshly shot antelope sizzled where it was propped on sticks over the coals. To the south, the broad plain of the Platte River was thick with cottonwoods. Above, the night was unusually clear, hoary with a million stars, and a faint sliver of moon in the east.

  “Tired of adventure?” Toby asked, his own blanket around his shoulders. The night was cold enough their breath frosted.

  “Funny thing.” Danforth rubbed his bearded chin, staring thoughtfully into the flames. “Half the time I’m scared stiff. When we crossed them horse tracks today? There had to be what? Fifteen, twenty of them? That’s a lot of Indians. And there’s just the three of us? Way out here? If’n we’s to be kilt, ain’t nobody going to know what happened to us.

  “And then I look around. See all this country. That’s when the feeling sets in. I’m the first white man out here. Well, along with you fellers. I get this quiver down in my guts. Sort of says, by hell and tarnation, boy, yer the first! Ain’t been nobody here ahead of you. And there ain’t, right? Toby, you ever heard of any white man ever rode up the Platte to its start?”

  Toby shook his head. Wished he had tobacco. “For all I know, we’re the first. Might have been somebody ahead of us.”

  Silas smiled. “Kind of nice to believe we’re the first. Think, boys, we’re seeing things even Lewis and Clark didn’t. And, well, even if some fur hunters was to have gone this way, they might have been on the south bank, or down on the river. They ain’t seen it the way we are.”

  “Sure was a lot of horse tracks we seen today,” Danford reminded.

  “Villages is down on the river,” Toby said, thinking back to the last of the Pawnee towns they’d seen. From the high ridge they’d had a glimpse of the rounded earth lodges, tiny in the distance. The town had stood out only because a faint haze of smoke had hung over the lodges where the cold air lay. Toby had chosen a two-day detour to the north, staying to the low ground.

  “Country’s starting to change.” Silas leaned forward to pull his skewered antelope from the fire. He blew on it, watching the steam rise. “Grass is getting shorter. Like that feller said back on the Missouri.”

  “We’re making good time.” Toby reached for his own meat. He figured that between them, if they recovered their bullets, they had powder enough for close to seventy shots. With the weather getting cold, meat wouldn’t sour. They should be able to hunt for a couple of years at that rate.

  Assuming they didn’t get into an Indian fight. But then, if they shot up all their powder and lead, it wasn’t a fight they were going to walk away from. He remembered Pap’s stories about Fort Loudoun back in Tennessee. So much of winning and losing was about numbers, as the people fleeing the abandoned fort had discovered to their peril.

  Toby considered his companions, and once again he admired Andrew Jackson’s smarts when it came to assigning them to him. Tennessee hunters, all. Descended from families of long hunters who had braved the dangers west of the Appalachians and built homes beyond the white frontier. They had a spirit for adventure that had taken them to the army, and now lived unleashed in their breasts as they journeyed into the unknown.

  Toby might not have known who John Tylor was, nor really cared, but it had surely sent him on the doings of a lifetime.

  Simms’s sky-blue eyes fixed on his cooling meat. “The bay packhorse is gonna throw that last shoe tomorrow. Might want to pull it in the morning.”

  “We’ll save it along with the rest. No telling what we might need the iron for. Maybe trade, maybe repair something that’s broke.”

  “I did a bit of blacksmithing,” Danford said. “Hard part will be not having an anvil and the right hammer.”

  “Reckon we need to shoot a buffalo or two.” Simms took a bite of his antelope. “My hide tanning on this prairie goat ain’t fer shit. Never seen hair like this on a critter. Stiff, bristly, all hollow. The stuff just busts.”

  “Think we’ll need buffalo robes?” Danford asked, his eyes on the starry night.

  “It’s nigh onto November.” Toby bit off a morsel of his own antelope, having cooked it perfectly. The shooting of their first antelope had been one of those magical moments in a hunter’s life. They’d heard about the prairie goats, stories having been carried all the way into the Tennessee forests. The first pronghorns they’d seen had dazzled them, left them in awe as the creatures raced away across the grass at a speed no horse could hope to match.

  Danford had made the first successful stalk, shot one from ambush. Then the three of them had studied the beast from hooves to horns, and now found the meat the equal of elk and bison.

  “These high plains is supposed to get damn cold,” Toby said. “That’s what that quartermaster back at the fort said. And I figger if they was a hard snow, blown by this miserable wind, it’d freeze a feller right down to his bones.”

  Danford frowned into the fire and retrieved his own skewered meat. “Way I figure it, we’re making about twenty miles a day. That’s about all the horses can take without wearing down. The important thing is their feet.”

  Somehow it had skipped Toby’s mind to lay in a supply of horseshoe nails back at Fort Osage. At least Simms had been smart enough to pack a rasp so they could dress the hooves, though as the land had dried, they’d needed it less and less.

  “Seems like the hooves have toughened on their own. Shouldn’t be trouble unless we hit some rocky ground and the horses are loaded heavy.”

  “Couple of straps is wearing on the bay’s packsaddle,” Simms announced around a mouthful of antelope. “Buckle tongue is pulling through the leather.”

  “Can you fix it?” Toby asked.

  “Reckon I can make a repair,” Simms agreed. “Need to see to it in the next couple of days, though.”

  The eerie serenade of the coyotes carried in the night. The yipping, high-pitched squealings had sent the shivers down their backs the first time they’d heard them. Now, like the endless skies, that naked feeling of being small on the landscape, and the wheeling of the eagles and hawks overhead, the sound had become commonplace.

  “Wish them French boys back on the Missouri had said how far we had to go west from the fork of the Platte,” Simms muttered. “And how the hell do we know when we get there? Where the river runs north of the black mountain? How, out in the middle of all this, do we find Tylor?”

  Danford asked dryly, “Ask the first buffalo we see?”
>
  Toby scratched under his bearded chin. That was a hell of a good question. It was one thing to be standing in a room in Nashville when he made his promise to Jackson that he’d bring his man back. Another entirely when the traitor was thought to be in Lisa’s company on the Upper Missouri. But now?

  Toby Johnson was just beginning to get a glimmer of how fantastically large the land was, and the immensity of territory he was going to have to search to find a solitary man in this wilderness.

  CHAPTER 33

  From a high ridge, its top capped with a resistant dirty-yellow sandstone, the view was outstanding. The west wind gave off a harsh whisper as it bent and teased the ponderosa branches. The pines grew in sporadic patches just under the rimrock and along the broken slopes below. Sagebrush spikes shivered and tossed with each gust. In the wake of the snow, the sky was a remarkably clear blue, the sun glaringly bright in the southern sky. It cast a beautiful pattern of shadows in the northern slopes, in the drainages, and cuts.

  Fenway McKeever pulled Matato’s coat tightly around him in an effort to cut the wind’s chilling bite. Didn’t matter that the day was warm enough to melt the snow, the way the wind chill slipped through every gap sapped a man’s heat.

  “River you call Platte.” Stone Otter sat on his horse and pointed off to the southeast toward a tall and forested mountain that ran east-west like a black wall. “River there. Under mountain. Black Lightning said he would winter there with his people.”

  McKeever squinted across the distance; lines of ridges and buttes—pale-looking basins and drainages interspersed among them—lay between their vantage and the mountain. His horse shifted under him, worked the bit, and tried to turn away from the wind.

  “Close to the Snakes, aye? Ye said they’d be o’er yonder.” McKeever pointed west toward the rugged bluffs and buttes that rose progressively into the southern flanks of the Big Horn Mountains.

  “Black Lightning will have scouts. Watch for Snakes. Snakes have scouts, watch for Hinono’ei.” He used the people’s word for Arapaho.