It was Victoria’s home, or at least her brother’s home. Her own Kicked-in-the-Bellies band was down on the Big Horn River. He wondered whether she would agree with the old Tobacco Planter that the colt must be destroyed or exiled. That its presence would invite disaster upon her People. That he must do as the old man directed or be driven out of this place.
He was a pauper now. The Hawken rifle that had won meat for the whole village had been stolen and he had no weapon save for a knife and his ancient belaying pin. Those were good enough for close-quarters war, but of little value here in this vast plain. He had no grasp of archery and could not hunt with bow and arrow, the way any Crow boy could. Bows and arrows were not weapons known to a British seaman. Just now he was dependent on these people for everything. For every scrap of food. For the lodge the village women were sewing together for him and Victoria,. For clothing, moccasins, safety. He had gone from being an asset to a serious liability, someone who needed to be cared for. His rifle had meant meat and hides and a trump against the more numerous Blackfeet and Sioux. Without it, and without skill with a bow and arrow, he was … nothing.
He stood in the warm sunlight, absorbing his new status of beggar. The colt edged in and rubbed against him. Well, he would destroy the colt. Slit its throat. Worthless ugly thing. Kill the mare too, because the old creature would be frantic about the colt. Mercy killing. She was starved anyway and her teeth were no good. She couldn’t gain weight even if he fed her buckets of oats. He would collect his courage, his ability to do hard things, and do them. They were just strays who happened upon his desperate little camp up in the Judith country. So do what must be done.
But first there were obligations. He walked slowly toward the great lodge of the chief, The Robber, a famed and revered leader of the Absarokas. The Robber and his wives had already given him four lodge skins, and these were even then being sewn into the new lodge that the village would give him and Victoria.
Skye found the fat graying chief warming in the sun before his lodge, enjoying an idle afternoon along with three headmen, every one of them a noted warrior. He paused, waiting for the invitation that would permit him to approach. It came at once, for Skye was still a respected man among them.
He approached, and found the chief and headmen waiting. They had been playing a stick game to while away the sunlight hours. In the evenings they often told stories. The headmen glanced at Skye, but their attention was focused on the audacious colt, which dogged every step and presented himself to the chiefs just as Skye was presenting himself.
Skye studied them, aware that his broken Absaroka tongue was not adequate to the task. But he knew the sign-talk, and decided to employ it.
“I have visited the Tobacco Planter,” he began. “The elder has pronounced what he believes. It is this: he says that this colt beside me is a curse upon the people and must be destroyed. He will bring evil upon the village. He will unloose trouble.”
“And?” asked The Robber.
“And so I am first to tell you every word of what Walks to the Top has said.”
“And?”
“Then I must decide what to do.”
“Is there any decision to be made?”
“Yes, sir, there is.”
“And what might that be, Mister Skye?”
“To spare the lives of this colt and its mother, who brought Many Quill Woman to safety.”
That met with dead silence. It would be an act of defiance. It would signal trouble and sorrow.
“We each must follow our own path, and we each must bear the consequences,” said The Robber. It was not unkindly said.
But Otter, the headman, had other ideas. “If that is what the elder believes, then the colt must die.”
“Or leave, or be given to other people,” Skye said.
“I personally will destroy the colt for the sake of the People,” Otter said.
“It is …” Skye caught himself. He was going to tell Otter that it was not his to destroy. It was something Skye alone had to do.
Skye glimpsed the black and white flash of a magpie, and remembered suddenly that it was Victoria’s spirit helper, the magpie, who had somehow driven and pecked the mare and the ugly colt to Skye’s lodge on Louse Creek, clearly a gift of Victoria’s helper.
“The horses were the gift of magpie,” he said. Every headman knew whose spirit helper the magpie was.
The colt stood quietly and then walked boldly to the headmen and studied them. Skye had never seen such a fearless colt.
Otter didn’t like it and growled at the colt. Jawbone didn’t budge, and slowly lowered his head and pushed straight at the headman, who was surprised and then enraged. Otter lashed wildly at the colt, who danced away unharmed and bleated cheerfully.
Chief Robber raised a weathered hand. “It is so,” he said. “The elder has shown it. Take him from the People. I do not wish to see this colt again, and if I see it, I will have it killed at once.”
seventeen
Skye walked away from The Robber’s commodious lodge with the strange colt prancing beside him, butting him, and otherwise making a nuisance of itself. Behind him, the chief and village headmen stared, and their gazes were not friendly. Something sour had happened, and Skye couldn’t fathom it.
One moment Skye was a hero, renamed The Walker for delivering Many Quill Woman to safety even though she was weak and had been at death’s door. Now the village glowered at him and his colt, the foal of the very mare that had borne his wife all that distance.
Was it the colt? The elder had condemned it out of hand, employing his authority as a shaman, to sentence Jawbone to death. And for what? Because Jawbone was unlike other colts? Because Jawbone was fearless? Fear is what governs horses. They sense danger and they run, for their safety lies in escape. But this little fellow marched right into Two Dogs’ lodge, butted people, pushed the shaman backward, and didn’t behave like a horse. Was that it?
Skye knew it wasn’t. An obnoxious horse might be welcomed in a village, but there was something more, something having to do with medicine powers known only to the grandfathers, that had set this village on edge. Jawbone was a dark force, a looming danger, and The Robber had condemned the colt to die, for not even a chief would overrule the verdict of a Tobacco Planter and elder such as Walks to the Top.
Skye didn’t know what to do. He could slice that colt’s throat, but he knew he wouldn’t. He knew somehow that Jawbone was a magical colt who would bring great good fortune to him. The ugly little thing was a gift to a pauper, and it had come to him in a moment of crisis. He would not kill it, nor would he kill the old mare that had rescued them.
Magpies burst away from him, and he thought to tell Victoria who lay abed in the lodge, weakened by the long and desperate trip from the buffalo hunt. But as he walked through the village he felt the hard stares; men who yesterday had honored him and hunted with him and welcomed him now stood silently, their gaze on him and on the condemned colt.
It was a rare and warm late autumn day, with the village nestled comfortably under the yellow rimrock, soaking up the low sun. It was a good day to be alive. Most of the men were out hunting. The disaster up in the Judith country had depleted the supply of meat and hides and robes, as well as horses. The buffalo were nowhere near here, but deer were abundant, and there were elk too. The women were gathering firewood in the thick woods along the river or tending to their cook fires or lacing new moccasins together, or collecting in knots to dress skins and scrape hides and enjoy the mild air. Some of them were out in the woods, cutting willow saplings that could be employed as lodgepoles. Old men and old women, dark and wrinkled, wrapped themselves in grimy blankets and watched the world go by. Blue smoke drifted up from the lodges, which were blackened on top around the smoke holes.
But it was no idyll for Skye, for people paused and stared at him, the executioner’s glare in their faces. And some turned their backs, not on Skye but on the condemned animal, who it was believed carried a bad spirit that
menaced the village.
Not far from Two Dogs’ lodge a dozen women were lacing hides together, making a lodge for Skye and Victoria. It was a tedious process but with so many hands patiently lacing one hide to another the work was progressing rapidly. By nightfall he and Victoria would have a home of their own.
If he slit Jawbone’s throat.
He paused at the lodge door, scratched, for he was a guest, and received a word from within. He entered. Jawbone followed.
“Get him out!” said Victoria, who was sitting up in a reed backrest.
Skye grabbed Jawbone by the mane and evicted him. Jawbone contented himself by poking his head inside and observing. Skye thought it was funny but kept silent.
“I have heard it,” she said. “You will do it?”
“No. This is my own spirit horse. I won’t do it.”
Victoria stared, bleakly registering that. It meant trouble, or worse, it meant Skye might be banished from this place.
“I am going away for a while,” he said.
“You will not return.”
He saw a sorrow in her face and knew what she was thinking. So many women of the People had married a white man only to have that man abandon them and their children and go back to the place where white men lived. She had seen the East; she knew its comforts.
“I will be back, Victoria. I’m going to the American Fur post on the Yellowstone and see about a job. I’ve traded pelts for years and I think I can get a wage there.”
“You will buy a rifle,” she said.
“Yes. I’m not much good without it. Without my rifle I am nothing here. I can’t make meat. I can’t feed us. I can’t get hides and trade them for a rifle and powder and ball. I can’t help your people in war.”
She nodded sadly. “Dammit, Skye, take me with you!”
“I will come for you.”
He saw tears collecting in her obsidian eyes, and reached across to her, slipping her cold hand into his big rough ones.
“Every hour that we are parted, I will be thinking of you and dreaming of the time I will send for you. It will be a while. I must earn enough to buy a new rifle and all the rest. But someday I will have what is needed.”
“And you will take the mare and the colt?”
“Yes. We are all exiled.”
“Exile, what does that mean?”
“Banished. We must leave.”
“I am glad. Magpie brought them to us.”
“Today, a magpie was flying and flitting around the colt and me.”
She nodded. “But you cannot bring them back to this village.”
“First I’ll get some work if I can at the trading post on the Yellowstone. Fort Sarpy, out on the plains. Get a rifle and an outfit. Then we’ll go to Long Hair’s village on the Big Horn River, the Kicked-in-the-Bellies, and we will be with your kin. Then I will come for you. We’ll end up with your people.”
She sighed. “It is so far away.”
“It will take one or two moons for you to gain your strength. It will take me that long to buy a rifle.”
“Dammit, Skye, you think I am an old woman?”
He laughed, his big voice booming in that small, enclosed cone of leather.
She grinned. “Maybe I will show up at the trading post Maybe I will surprise you. Maybe I will catch you between the robes with some girl. Maybe I will crawl between the blankets with you. Then you’ll see I am well and strong.”
He touched her face with his thick fingers, gently rubbing the tears away.
“Will I ever see you again? I am feeling so bad.”
“I will be coming for you soon. I must have a rifle. Tell Two Dogs I will come for my ponies some other time. And thank him for caring for them.”
It was a painful moment. He kissed her. She smiled at him. He stood, gazed down at her lithe but gaunt beauty, and knew he would never leave her.
He collected his few things: a robe, hatchet, blanket capote, saddle, halters, belaying pin, and some pemmican, enough to keep him going for two days. There were two dangers: cold and Blackfeet, and he would not be well armed against either.
He shooed the colt away from the door flap and crawled into the beautiful afternoon. People had halted their labors and were staring at him. He nodded curtly, not explaining himself though the things he carried told the tale. The colt trotted along beside him, inseparable, and drew cold glances. He continued beyond the village, walking through open bottomland, past young herders riding slowly around the horse herd. The colt squealed and barreled straight toward his mother, who turned her head and watched. She remained gaunt, but somehow looked better.
Skye saddled her, not to ride her but to carry his few possessions, and when he was ready, he walked her to the river, looking for a ford. When he found it he mounted her and she carried him across a flat gravelly shallows. Then he dismounted; from now on, he would walk.
He didn’t know this country well, but knew there was a low divide between this river and the Yellowstone, and once he had topped it he could follow any watercourse south and he would end up at that majestic river, one of his most cherished streams and one where he had spent his happiest times.
In all his years with Victoria he had scarcely been apart from her, and only for brief periods. But now he would be gone awhile. He made his lonely way south, a solitary man, half trapper, half native, wearing buckskins, moccasins, capote, but also wearing his battered beaver top hat.
He hoped to earn his way back. He needed a whole outfit, but especially a rifle. With that, he could be a valued guest among the Crows. Without it … he was a parasite. He didn’t know whether the fur post, Fort Sarpy, would hire him; and if he could not find employment there, he would head for another, either Fort Union at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri, or Fort Laramie, far south. And every step would carry him farther away from his woman.
eighteen
He raised Fort Sarpy just before dusk, when the cold was setting in along with a knifeedged wind. The fur-trading post stood on the north bank of the Yellowstone, below Rosebud Creek, like a grim and solitary prison. It was nothing but four picketed walls of wood, and its bleakness matched the surrounding country.
Skye led his mare and colt along the brushy river bottom, alert for trouble. The Blackfeet had made winter sport of killing any man who dealt with the Crows, and there were often two or three Blackfeet lurking around Sarpy, looking for a chance to bury an axe in the skull of a trader. The little graveyard behind the post had seven mounds of clay in it.
Skye knew that a belaying pin was no match for one of these assassins so he trod gingerly, keeping out of sight in brush, avoiding open trails as much as he could. The forbidding fort rose starkly ahead, on a hill above the floodplain. There was abundant forest in the bottoms to feed its fireplaces and stoves, and river transportation to Fort Union, down a way, where robes and hides could be shipped to the States. It was the most solitary and desolate post in the Northwest.
He saw no Absaroka lodges at the post, but the old, glazed snow was dimpled with hoofprints and other signs of life and passage. The purple twilight settled gently over this land of long rises, tinting the gray smoke rising from the post’s chimneys. He walked in utter silence, the sort of quietness imposed by late November on an empty land, hearing not even a crunch of snow under his moccasins.
He had been here several times, usually in fall or summer, when Crow lodges filled the whole plain below the post, like a fleet at full sail. But now he saw not even a raven perched in a branch. He knew the post’s bearded and long-haired factor, John Chambers, who scorned and ridiculed the Crow people but was perfectly at ease driving hard bargains with them, a few pennies worth of trade goods for a good robe or hide.
No one greeted him as he walked across the flat in a lavender dusk.
”Hello the post,“he bawled.
He saw no one manning the walls.
”Hello the post!“he yelled.
”Someone is talking a strange tongue. We haven
’t heard it in a long time,“a voice returned.”Would you be talking some fool language called English?“
“I am Mister Skye.”
“Oh! The damned limey! Living in sin with a Crow slut.”
Skye kept the peace. He had heard it all before. It was a way of testing and provoking him. When he was younger, an insult like that always got a fight from him, and he usually gave more than he received. His broken and pulpy nose was mute testimony to his brawling. But now he lifted his old top hat from his head, let them stare through the deepening murk.
“Guess it’s himself, all right.”
“It’s Mister Skye, you bloody damned yellow-bellied Yank.”
He heard only a maniacal laughter, but moments later one of the ten-foot-high double doors creaked open and a pair of traders motioned him in.
“We don’t let Brits in here,” one said. “Now if you were a good honest upright Crow chief with a dozen daughters, we’d let you in.”
The other laughed.
The post was typical, with an open yard surrounded by lean-to sheds around the walls.
“Welcome, Skye. I suppose ye want us to put you up.”
“You can feed me, water and hay my horses, and give me some floor to sleep on. I want to talk to Chambers.”
“That’s me, Skye.”
“So it is. The darkness fooled me. It’s Mister Skye, mate.”
“Lord Admiral Skye if you insist.”
Chambers opened the gate, let Skye through, then slammed it shut and dropped the bar to keep the redskins out.
“I keep forgetting, you put on them English airs,” he said. “We’re a little shorthanded here. Lost two men a few days ago. Pesky Blackfeet. You’ll have to put up your beasts yourself. The stew pot’s full of meat. Good to see you.”
That sounded good to Skye, who had subsisted on pemmican for two days.
“I’ll be with you directly,” Skye said. The horse pen was on the west side. Any animal left outside the walls would vanish and never be seen again. He put the mare and Jawbone in, watched them stir up the half a dozen other horses, and watched Jawbone horn in on some prairie hay that was lying in a manger. Skye found some more hay and fed the mare, hoping she would get it before the others crowded her out.
The Fire Arrow Page 9