Flight of the Hawk: The Plains

by W. Michael Gear

  “Wee bit of a disputed border?” McKeever let his horse sidestep enough that the muzzle of his rifle could be shifted in a hurry. He never pointed it directly at Stone Otter. Just let it hint in the man’s general direction.

  Fox that he was, the Arapaho pretended not to notice. Stone Otter missed nothing in the dangerous game they played. He fully understood that he was the key to locating Tylor in the vastness of the Powder River Basin, the Big Horns, and the Wind River Country beyond.

  Over the month they’d been traveling together, McKeever had pieced the story together. How Stone Otter’s party had tracked Tylor and another Ni’otho to their camp. Had approached in friendship and been shot down by the perfidious whites and their hidden Snake allies.

  Not that McKeever believed it. Wasichu had overheard Red Bear Man and Wide Crane discussing how the Arapaho had killed Lisa’s party under Champlain. For whatever reason, the Hinono’ei had come to the conclusion that whites were rather offensive. Some sort of ill-mannered and smelly rascals that deserved whatever exploitation the Arapaho deemed appropriate at the moment. That they came bearing an incredible wealth in exotic trade, that they could be played off each other—Spanish against British, British against American—was just the fat in the stew. Nor was there a thing the whites could do in retaliation. They were too few, too weak, and too disorganized.

  One day that will change.

  McKeever kept thinking back to that long-ago discussion he’d had with Tylor while they were on the river. About the Americans—a growing horde who raised corn, pigs, and kids in profusion. Tylor might be right, that they’d be coming in a flood that would wash across the plains in a few generations. Or Mc-Keever might be right that it would take a couple of hundred years, but they would come.

  “And what will ye do then?” McKeever pondered under his breath, a sidelong glance fixed on Stone Otter.

  Not that it mattered. This was now. McKeever—through Wasichu—had learned that Tylor had shot Stone Otter’s little brother. One of the Shoshoni had driven an arrow through a cousin. The other dead and wounded had been some sort of society brothers that Wasichu couldn’t quite explain.

  “We’d best be getting on aboot finding Tylor,” McKeever told him. He pointed to the west, to where a valley marked a stream’s course. “Ye said that way was the fastest to the Wind River, aye?”

  “Snake that way,” Stone Otter agreed, augmenting his words with signs.

  “Let’s be on then. Sooner Tylor’s dead, the sooner what’s a’tween us will come to a head. And then, laddie, she’s Katy bar the door.”

  With that, he gave Stone Otter a disarming grin, gesturing that the Arapaho precede him back down the ridge to where the others were waiting.

  Find me Tylor, ye heathen scum. After that, it’ll be me pleasure to send ye to the Happy Hunting Ground so’s ye and yer little brother can be together again.

  CHAPTER 34

  According to Singing Lark, the name of the stream was “Wherethe-Buffalo-Drink.” From their camp in the red sandstone wall, they had backtracked to the Middle Fork of the Powder River and traveled downstream. At the confluence with Where-the-Buffalo-Drink Creek, Singing Lark had turned them on to an established trail that followed the tributary. The valley led them south in a gentle curve around the flank of the mountains. By the end of the first day, the trail had curled around to the west, leading them into the setting sun.

  Bounded by a steep ridge to the east and south, the valley was long, fed by drainages running down from the high slopes to the north that led up into the Powder River Mountains. The slopes and floodplain had grown thick with sagebrush, which, in the bottoms, rose as tall as a horse’s head.

  Along the stream itself, willows, chokecherry, sarvisberry, currants, and stands of both broad and narrow-leafed cottonwood grew, as did occasional box elders. Junipers dotted the higher slopes—sometimes thick enough to resemble forest. Occasional narrow-walled drainages cut through the mountain bedrock, and in their depths patches of aspen could be seen.

  Tylor let Singing Lark lead the way. His wife rode as if one with her horse, her rifle squarely across her saddle. She followed a well-defined trail that paralleled the stream’s left bank. Travel was easier there, given that so many of the drainages ran in from the west and north. At times, however, she would splash through a crossing to the opposite bank to avoid steep slopes, rock outcrops, or difficult passages where brush or terrain intervened.

  Between them, the packhorses followed on their leads, lined out and delighted to be moving again, especially since their loads were lighter, consisting only of dried meat, hides, and camp gear.

  Tylor had his newly tailored coat open, a testament to the day’s warmth. Must have been in the mid-fifties if he was any judge. The low slant of the winter sun had them riding in shadow anytime they were close to the steep ridge where snow clung in and around the sage.

  What a figure he cut, dressed in a fine antelope-hide shirt of soft leather that was topped by his sheep-hide coat. He’d been amazed at the fit Singing Lark had achieved—as fine as could be had by the tailors in Charleston or Philadelphia. His legs were clad in soft antelope; his sheep-hide leggings, tanned hair-on, were tied onto the cantle of his saddle. Shoshoni boots, also made from mountain sheep with hair-side in, now clad his feet. The only characteristic he hadn’t grown used to was the seam that ran down the center of the sole. Though cushioned by hair and grass padding, the seam might become debilitating on a long walk.

  While he rode with his head bare out of respect for the day, a fox-skin cap with a bill was rolled in his leggings. The jack handle rested sideways across his saddlebow.

  He chuckled. If I came to the west in an attempt to lay John Tylor to rest, my success is complete.

  Compared to the sartorial perfection of the man who had been received in London, Paris, and Amsterdam, he now might have been mistaken for a Mongol, Hun, or Vandal.

  He reached up to finger Hallie’s letter where it rested in a pocket over his breast. At the sound of the paper crackling, he had to wonder what Hallie would say if she could see him now, dressed as he was. He suspected that she’d arch a skeptical eyebrow. Say something like, “Surely this is only for the moment. You will attire yourself as a gentleman as soon as you possibly can.”

  Her reaction to his marriage to Singing Lark, on the other hand, would be baffled incomprehension. He had been a Carolina gentleman. To marry an Indian was the act of a lunatic or someone mentally deficient. Proof of a previously unsuspected madness—the manifestation of which was only first glimpsed by his activities in the Burr conspiracy and the subsequent charges of treason.

  Once upon a time, Tylor would have shared her reaction, considered the notion of taking an unlettered Native girl into his marriage bed an act of absolute scandal. A sort of perversity.

  A sad smile bent his lips as he swayed in time with the black mare’s steady walk, enjoyed the sunshine, and wondered just who in hell his people back in the Carolinas had ever thought they were. All that assumed superiority, the benefits of breeding, education, and station. And all the while, half the men were siring mixed-blood children off their negro slaves, while the women—overdressed and arrogant in their ignorance—couldn’t have tanned a sheep hide if their lives depended upon it. What was the ability to keep a ledger of estate expenses compared to the talent and skill necessary to elude an Arapaho war party?

  But then, were she to be dropped on the streets of Paris, Singing Lark would have been just as lost, terrified, and incapable of survival.

  “It’s a matter of where we are and what we know,” Tylor mused a moment before his mare started; four mule deer burst from the willows and went bounding up the slope.

  Reining her in, he turned his attention back to the trail and noticed that the chestnut packhorse in front of him wasn’t walking as smoothly as it had been. Probably time to pull that last shoe. The miracle was that it had lasted this long.

  He couldn’t get over the feeling of revelation
as he watched his Shoshoni wife riding ahead of him, her shoulder-length hair gleaming in the sunlight.

  If he was to survive, let alone thrive in this new world, it would be because of her. That she had accepted him, shared herself with him, laughed with and cherished him, might have been the greatest wonder in his world.

  “So, John, my boy, don’t you ever take that young woman for granted. You’ll never find her equal in this, or any other world.”

  Saying that, he threw his head back and laughed, satiated with the sheer joy of being alive.

  CHAPTER 35

  The camp that Gray Bear established sat in the cottonwood trees back from the Pia’ogwe. His small band had raised their lodges on the west bank, downstream from Dark Horse’s village, which lay not more than a couple of fingers of time away by foot. A high bluff, capped with round cobbles, provided protection from the west wind, and the grassy bottoms had plenty of graze for the horses.

  Their arrival had been accompanied by a flurry of activity and excitement in Dark Horse’s camp. As Gray Bear’s people set up their village, they’d been flocked by the entirety of Dark Horse’s band, forty some people in all.

  The first attraction, of course, was Cunningham. A Taipo who had come with trade. Everyone wanted to get a good look at him. Not that Taipo were as much a novelty these days. Dark Horse’s band had met with the Astorians under Wilson Price Hunt the year before as the Taipo expedition traveled through the Valley of the Warm Winds on their way to the Pacific.

  The hawk had taken poorly to the arrival, upset at the number of unknown people who’d come to stare at him. The bird’s fear ameliorated in proportion to the offerings of meat the new people brought.

  Additional comment was stirred by the news that young Singing Lark had left as a wild girl, had become a woman in secret and without the usual rituals that marked passage to womanhood. Then, to top it all off, she’d married some other Taipo, and was last seen on the Pretty River. Speculation about her fate ran rampant.

  And, of course, there were the guns. Most of the Kuchendukani Shoshoni were of mixed opinion about guns and their utility. Over the years occasional specimens had been traded up from the south. From the very beginning, the Spanish had forbidden the possession of guns by Indians—let alone any kind of trade in them. The few firearms that had been carried up the trails—most notably by Comanche cousins—and traded up to the Kuchendukani had been curiosities, most of them broken, rusted, and abused. Nor would anyone have traded it in the first place if it wasn’t worn out and essentially useless.

  Not to mention that to work, a gun needed both bullets and powder. While anything that fit down the barrel might have served for a bullet, gunpowder in any kind of sufficiency rarely made it as far as the Kuchendukani.

  Then, a generation ago, had come the British up in the north. The problem was that they traded guns to the Blackfeet, Sioux, and Atsina—enemies all—and now the Arapaho were encroaching, and more and more often, they, too, had guns in number. Deadly ones that worked.

  When the Shoshoni captured enemy guns, they came with only a limited amount of powder and a few balls. Whatever was carried by the enemy warrior at the time of his capture or death. The next problem was trying to learn how to shoot the piece. By the time any proficiency was reached, the powder and bullets were used up.

  The arrival of Gray Bear’s band, bearing brand-new rifles with powder, lead, and molds—not to mention a promised source for resupply at the mouth of the Big Horn—was a major cause for excitement.

  And then there was Gray Bear himself: A man who had left as a hunter and returned from the distant Great River being respectfully called taikwahni. Everyone wanted to hear the story. That meant several feasts, a public recounting, and celebrity status for everyone in Gray Bear’s little band after the story was told.

  As an unseasonably warm day waned, Gray Bear sat before Dark Horse’s lodge—a roomy four-pole tipi decorated with stylistic black horses on the run. Dark Horse’s shield and bow rested on a tripod to one side, and an elk hide had been laid out for the guests.

  At the hearth out front, Dark Horse’s two wives cooked buffalo tongue and boiled a yampa-root stew crammed with rosehips. Their names were Sage Cup and Snow Flower, sisters, and they had born Dark Horse six children, of whom four had survived so far.

  Dark Horse was in his mid-thirties, a broad-faced man with prominent cheekbones and a jutting chin. He wore his hair with the bangs curled back over the top of his head, the rest of his mane spilling down his back in waves. He leaned against a willow backrest, the sunlight emphasizing the golden hues of his elk hide jacket with its quillwork and faceted red beads in rose patterns.

  Cunningham sat to the side, his long-stemmed pipe in his hand. He had traded for a newly tailored buckskin shirt and pants, but still kept his white man’s boots. Now he watched Silver Curl, Dark Horse’s auburn-haired, pale-skinned slave. The woman worked to one side, using a fleshing tool to hack the tissue from a buffalo hide. As she chopped the bits loose, she’d toss them to a big brown wolfish-looking dog. Gray Bear had seen her shoot Cunningham more than one curious long glance. The tall Taipo had reciprocated with a smile each time.

  “What does this thing you have done mean?” Dark Horse asked as he packed kinnikinnick into the new ceramic pipe for which he’d traded a collection of otter skins. “You have nine guns and five men old enough to shoot them. Six if you count Eagle’s Whistle, but he’s still a boy. You say your people will trade the last three. For what? Who decides?”

  “We all do,” Gray Bear told him. “We all worked together. Everyone did his or her part. The guns belong to all of us.”

  “I would really like to have one.”

  “I will mention that. What would you trade?”

  “How many horses do your people want? I can offer three. Good animals. Solid. And I think one of the mares is pregnant.”

  “I will take your offer to my people.”

  Dark Horse shot him a measuring look. “Or maybe my people and I should travel to the mouth of the Pia’ogwe where it meets the Ge’te’ogwe. See how many horses the Taipo there want for aitta.”

  At that, Cunningham set his pipe aside so he could sign to fill in for Shoshoni words he didn’t know. “You’ll need packs of beaver. Furs. That or those white buffalo calf hides like Gray Bear traded. As to how many? That depends on the size and quality.”

  “It is not the first time the Taipo have tried to put a lodge at the mouth of the Pia’ogwe in the Crow lands.”

  Cunningham signed and said, “It’s all going to depend on the river tribes and which side they choose in the war back east. If they side with Manuel Lisa and the Americans, that post at the mouth of the Big Horn will be open for trade. If Dickson and the British close the river to the Americans, all the guns will go to the Sioux, Arapaho, and Blackfeet.”

  “What can we do about this war?” Dark Horse asked.

  “Nothing,” Gray Bear told him. “It will be fought in the east.”

  Cunningham was back to watching Silver Curl.

  Black Horse noticed, took a draw from his tubular pipe, and exhaled. “I would sell her.”

  “Why?” Gray Bear asked. “She’s known as a hard worker.”

  This time Dark Horse didn’t sign for Cunningham’s benefit, but spoke too quickly for the Taipo to understand. “I have these children to do a lot of the work. She’s an extra mouth to feed. The men are constantly pestering her. She got a little too friendly with Belongs to Bow a couple of moons back. You’ll notice his lodge is no longer here. His wife made sure they moved off for the Sage Grouse River after she caught Silver Curl and Belongs to Bow together. Beat Silver Curl half bloody and stripped her dress off in front of everyone.”

  Gray Bear grunted. That was the common behavior when a spouse discovered a cheating mate. Silver Curl was lucky to get off with just a beating and a little humiliation.

  “That doesn’t mean I’d let her go for cheap,” Dark Horse continued. “I’d want a
couple of horses for her.”

  “The Taipo only has that one horse. He won’t part with it.” Gray Bear said. “His other horses are either with John Tylor and Singing Lark, or enjoying life in some Pa’kiani or Sa’idika’s horse herd these days.”

  Cunningham asked in his broken Shoshoni, “What’s this? I catch half the words. What about me and the girl?”

  “Dark Horse wants to know if you’d like to buy her?” Gray Bear said.

  “She a slave?” Cunningham asked. “Where from? Hair like that, those light brown eyes, light skin. Where’d she come from?”

  “South,” Gray Bear told him. “What you call Spanish. She was a little girl. The Yamparika took her. Yamparika used to be here, on what you call the Platte. Now they are in the land called Texas.”

  “Comanche?” Cunningham guessed.

  “Sometimes they travel here, bring horses, metal, captives, things to trade for mountain furs and medicinal and Spirit plants, sometimes to visit kin,” Gray Bear told him. “Silver Curl was maybe ten when Dark Horse traded for her. Sage Cup and Dark Horse’s first child, Root, was little, and Sage Cup was full with the second, Lily. Snow Flower wasn’t old enough to marry into the family. They needed the help.”

  “After ten years? Dark Horse really wants to sell her?”

  “She’s been a woman for five years now. She wants a woman’s life,” Dark Horse told him. “My family is getting too large; my lodge is too full. Silver Curl and Sage Cup would be just as happy to be away from each other.”

  In English, Gray Bear told Cunningham, “And you have a couple of packs of trade. Makes you as rich as anyone my friend here has seen in years.”

  “What if she doesn’t like me after I buy her?” Cunningham asked in Shoshoni.

  “Tie her to a post and beat her,” Dark Horse told him. “She would be yours to do with as you want. Slave, yes? Not like a real wife.”

  Gray Bear tried to decipher the expression on Cunningham’s face. Looked like he was trying to swallow his beard. Figured it was some kind of disgust.