The Fire Arrow

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Skye turned on Skittles, only to see the man smiling, the revolver casually in hand.

  “There now, Mister Skye, you step back and let them destroy themselves. It is destined, you know. The inferior races will fade away. The superior races will triumph and possess the land and its wealth. That’s historical reality. There’s nothing we can do to change it.”

  Some few youngsters were still brawling, but now village headmen were pulling people away, clustering around the fallen, stanching blood. And the wailing had begun.

  Skye smelled death in the air. Along with vomit, fear, and maybe something like hysteria. He itched to land on Skittles and thrash him into the cold ground, but he knew better. It was a good thing he himself had not been drinking. He would be among the dead.

  In time, the Absaroka people, those who could still function, came for the sick and the dead and hauled them away. Chief Robber was not among them. One or two headmen, including his testy old friend Otter, had restored order. Now there was a lonely gulf between the village and the traders’ camp, a no-man’s-land where no one dared venture. An aching silence.

  Death and grief had come. Skye didn’t know who had perished. What boys lay wounded. What girls wept into their cold beds, for there were only a few blankets to warm these people this winter’s night. They would lie on cold ground where robes had once protected them from the earth. They would shiver, not only from cold, but from the evil unloosed in their camp. They would remember the prediction of Walks to the Top, that Skye’s medicine horse Jawbone would bring down the wrath of the spirits upon them.

  He thought that in the morning they might come to kill his horses, or even kill him, for had he not assisted in the trading?

  And even if he might escape with Victoria and his animals, would he ever be welcome in a Crow village again?

  But there was not time to ponder that. The traders were working by the flickering light of two fires as they closed up shop. They had filled one wagon; the other was nearly full. There were no doubt few buffalo robes left in The Robber’s village.

  “Time to be moving, gentlemen,” Skittles said. “We’ve done all the good we can.”

  thirty-eight

  By the light of the bonfires, green shirts dismantled the trading camp. Two canvas tents had already vanished into the bowels of the supply wagon. All that was left was blood and vomit on the grass.

  Skittles obviously planned to make time this night, putting distance between his outfit and the Crow village they had debauched.

  “Mister Skye, you’ll harness the teams,” he said easily.

  He had an air of total triumph about him. The outfit had raked in a small fortune, almost without cost.

  Skye nodded. If he was going to make a break, it had to be now. But where was Victoria? The tents were packed and the wagons were loaded almost to the bows and canvas tops.

  One green shirt stood at guard before the wagons, his rifle at the ready. The rest were packing up. Some lifted the empty booze kettle and stowed it. Others collected tin cups, gourd cups, wooden cups that littered that bloody ground, and piled them into a burlap sack. Others raised the tailgates of the wagons carrying the ill-gotten robes and hides, and levered them tight.

  Skye started toward the rope corral that contained the draft horses and the saddlers, as well as his captive colt and mare. The harness would probably be lying there, ready to drop over the big draft animals. He would have trouble in the dark.

  His mind seethed. Another guard stood at the horse pen, rifle at the ready, no doubt to prevent theft of the stock. Skittles was not one to let anyone or anything slip through his hands.

  Two green shirts were already harnessing. Putting eight draft horses into harness and hooking them to wagons was a tough task, especially at night. Add to that the loading of the packhorses, and you had a half hour of hard labor by several men.

  Skye looked toward the dipper, trying to tell the time as it rotated around the north star. The night had turned wintry and dead quiet. He was grateful that no wind stirred, so that his hands wouldn’t go numb as he dropped collars over those thick necks and tightened bands under their great hairy bellies.

  It was perhaps midnight. An eerie silence lowered over them all, all the louder for the drumming that had shattered the peace only an hour or so earlier. Now not even the wail of the mothers of the bloodied boys caught the tendrils of winter air.

  He clambered under the rope fence and found a heap of harness awaiting him.

  “Good evening, Mister Skye,” said one of the green shirts. “You can start on that big black over there.”

  Skye thought it was Oliver, or maybe Parsons. Men who were groomed alike were hard to pick out. Jawbone discovered him, trotted up, squealed, and butted him.

  “That miserable thing should have its throat cut,” said another of the green shirts. “Makes trouble.”

  Skye nodded. He found the mare now, faint firelight reflecting off her side. She whickered softly and drew close. But there was little Skye could do for the moment. The firelight revealed too much. He needed darkness, real darkness, a cloak of darkness, the kind of night where a man can’t see ten feet.

  Where was Victoria? How could he make a move without knowing? Had they knocked her in the head and left her in the woods?

  And where was his kit? His bedroll, his rifle, his packsaddles, his gear? He hadn’t the faintest idea. He found a collar, which felt icy in his hand, and found a halter. These teamsters rarely used bridles with these superb animals. They walked beside their teams, lead rope in hand. The big draft horse stood quietly, letting itself be haltered. Then Skye dropped the collar over its thick neck, and led it to the heap of harness. A belly band would be next.

  It was then that he heard the harsh whistle of a magpie. It was a thing unknown in the night, but apparently not a thing that troubled the green shirts anyway.

  He felt a surge of joy. She was there.

  He finished with the big black’s breeching and led it to one of the pelt wagons, backed it into place, and buckled the traces. Skittles was watching him. Skye walked slowly into the darkness again, entered the rope corral, and found another big draft horse. The two green shirts from the rope corral were each leading a harnessed draft horse toward the wagons.

  No one was watching him. It was the moment Skye needed.

  He collected another halter and belly band and headed for the next draft horse, only to bump into a small person in the moon-shadow side of the horse.

  “Dammit, Skye, don’t step on my toe,” she said.

  Skye’s heart raced.

  “Come.”

  She led him to the rear of the corral, closest to the naked cottonwoods that lay fifty yards away, and they simply walked through the darkness. Somehow she had discerned that the fire-blinded night guard could not see them. Skye followed silently, his heart banging, not knowing what to think but filled with joy.

  They raced into the naked trees, the distant firelight eerie on the web of limbs. And then they reached the sandstone cliffs, and she headed through brush toward the village, well screened from the river.

  She paused at a niche in the stone and pulled him down beside her.

  “I hide here,” she said. “See, a cave. I got that jug. They gave me a jug of the good stuff. They put me in the supply wagon, guard in front so I couldn’t get out. But they don’t know Absaroka. I got my knife from my moccasin and cut through the canvas at the other end and walk out as soon as it got dark. They never knew. Dammit, Skye, I got a whole jug here, big enough for us to have a good time. But not now.”

  “You rescued me.”

  “Hell, yes. Maybe I’m good for something, eh?”

  “Can we get my gear? Rifle, bedroll, packsaddles? Do you know where they are?”

  She didn’t respond. She didn’t know. One of the wagons.

  “We need to get the mare and the colt.”

  She pressed a hand over his. “Let them go, Skye. We can’t go back. They’re hunting for you now
.”

  Without a rifle once again. Without means to make meat. Without weapons. Without horses. All that time at Fort Sarpy lost. But he had escaped.

  “We’ll head for the village,” he said.

  “The hell we will, Skye. They’re looking for you there. Why do they want you, eh? You never told me.”

  “At first I thought it was because they wanted my labor. They’re shorthanded and don’t have a good translator. Now I think it’s because I’m a witness. What they’re doing is against the laws of the Fathers. Any white man who doesn’t go along, he’s dead.” He turned to her. “Maybe you saved my life.”

  “Witness?”

  “Someone who would talk in St. Louis. Someone who would tell the Indian agency about them. Name some names.”

  “You people crazy.”

  “I’m not a Yank, Victoria.”

  “You want a sip?”

  “Yes, soon as it′s safe.”

  “Who died, Skye? I heard the wailing.”

  “I don’t know. One of the young men drumming.”

  “Sonofabitch,” she said.

  “Let’s work back and see,” she said.

  He nodded. They left the sheltering sandstone and worked back at the base of the bluff until they were opposite the traders’ camp, and then slipped like wraiths through the naked forest until they could peer out onto the meadow.

  Nothing. Gone. All the wagons, all the livestock. But for the trampled brown grass that whispered of large events, it was as if the traders had never been there.

  “Don’t go out there,” he whispered. “It would be just like Skittles to leave a man behind, his horse hidden, waiting for us. They know I’ll come looking for my kit.”

  “I won’t.”

  They waited an eternity, it seemed. A cloud canceled the moonlight. The meadow of sorrows lay in deep darkness. A deep predawn cold settled over the meadow, frosting the broken grasses. And still they waited.

  Then, soft as the flapping of an owl through night air, the clop of horse hooves. The horse moved upriver, away from the village. Probably the direction the traders went.

  He didn’t know where they would go next. Skittles would have to send his two loaded wagons to a fur post. But he was expecting two wagons back, and there must have been some agreement about where. If he sent the two full wagons out, that reduced his company by four men.

  Skye sighed. His Hawken, powder horn, caps, lead and patches, and all the rest were moving away from him in the cold night. He and Victoria slid onto the meadow, searched it closely. Searched with dread for the bodies of his colt and mare, their throats slit. But they found nothing at all in that sad flat beside the river.

  They walked toward the village, knowing it was forlorn and defenseless, that its men slept with vomit on their shirts, that they would wake up sick and listless, that many a lodge was shivering this night, that in some lodges bloodied young men were lying in the vise of death. The village was naked to its enemies. A raiding party could sweep through it. The entire pony herd, pride of the Crow nation, could be swept away.

  The Robber’s village was a desolate place. Something foul hung in the air. Little smoke ebbed from the blackened cones of the lodges. One drunken man sprawled on the ground. Skye wished he had a blanket or a robe to cover the wretch.

  Victoria steered him toward her own small lodge, but when they entered they found nothing at all. No robes, no blanket, no parfleche with her things in it. Nothing but frozen earth.

  Victoria scratched on the door of Two Dogs’ lodge. No one answered. She tried again. The smell of vomit eddied from the door.

  Skye knew what he had to do. He was going to follow that trading outfit, he was going to do it, and he would do it even if he didn’t possess a weapon to his name.

  thirty-nine

  Something frightful had passed through The Robber’s village. Skye and Victoria crawled out of their small lodge in the gray light of a winter’s dawn and saw a deadness everywhere. No smoke was eddying from the lodges. A desolation hung over what had been, only hours before, a vibrant and happy place.

  Skye and Victoria had survived the cold by building a lodge fire and feeding it all night. She had gone to the sandstone bluffs to recover a robe she had hidden there but it was gone, and so were all the other robes the village women had hidden there. Each had been pawned for a drink of the rotgut. So Skye had dug into his fire pouch at his waist, struck steel to flint, and eventually they had a hot fire in their naked home.

  Now he braved the cold, wandering through the forlorn village, wondering who lived and who didn’t. Victoria muttered softly, wandering from lodge to lodge, looking for life. They rounded a lodge and saw a girl. Victoria knew her. She lay across the frozen ground, her skirts hiked high, her face staring at the dawn.

  Victoria plunged to her knees and shook the girl.

  “Get up! Get up!” she cried. “Broken Wing, wake up!”

  Victoria shook hard, but the girl did not move.

  Victoria and Skye lifted the girl, but the girl did not sit. She was stiff, frozen solid, and life had fled her. A rime of vomit clung to the girl’s lips.

  “Aiee! Broken Wing!” Victoria cried.

  Victoria pressed her hands upon the dead woman, and sobbed softly.

  When at last she had wept away her grief, she looked up at Skye, and at the other person who now stood over her. It was the old Tobacco Planter, Walks to the Top, wrapped in a bright thick Hudson’s Bay blanket.

  “I saw this in the smoke of the sweetgrass,” he said. “I warned the people. Now it has been as I saw it.”

  Skye nodded. Would the old man blame all this on the medicine horse?

  “The traders are gone. They left in the night. They have almost every robe and hide that was the wealth of this village,” he said.

  “This I saw in the smoke.”

  “And it’s not over. There are the sick, the dead, and the ones who fought each other with knives. And the girls who were violated. And the old men sleeping half frozen in their cold lodges.”

  “I went before The Robber and I told him. Do not let business be done with the traders. This I saw.”

  “Here is The Robber’s oldest daughter,” Victoria said. “The one he loved most.”

  The Robber’s lodge rose nearby, as cold and quiet as the rest in the village. Someone would have to tell him that his daughter had perished of spirits and cold.

  Tenderly, Skye lifted the frozen girl. She seemed so heavy, but probably didn’t weigh a hundred pounds. Then he lowered the girl to the trampled earth before the chief’s lodge, and Victoria straightened the girl’s soiled skirts. Walks to the Top, wrapped tightly in his red blanket, his face dark with pain and anger, came along.

  Skye scratched at the door, but this evoked no response.

  Victoria slapped the doorskin hard, repeatedly. They heard a stirring, and finally the chief’s old sits-beside-him wife, Stirs the Water, poked her head out.

  “Mother, we have bad news,” Victoria said.

  The woman squinted, caught sight of her daughter’s frozen body before the lodge, muttered a cry, and then retreated inside. The lodge’s door flap slapped shut.

  The village was stirring at last. Skye stood unhappily at The Robber’s lodge, noting that old people were heading for the bushes, women were building lodge fires, a few shivering children were solemnly wandering about, some of them in tears.

  Some wore spare clothing. A few had blankets. One wore a blanket capote. A few did have some worn or torn buffalo robes, somehow salvaged from the devastation that had whirled through this village.

  The Robber poked his head through the door, studied the frozen body of his daughter, and groaned.

  “She was over there when we found her,” Victoria said, pointing.

  The chief nodded and dismissed them with a wave.

  He looked ill. Skye thought the chief was barely functioning. Whatever it was, headache, nausea, the aftereffects of indulgence, he wasn’t ready to cope w
ith this.

  Now a crowd gathered, and Victoria told of finding the chief’s daughter frozen to death.

  Walks to the Top whirled away, exuding anger and sorrow. Skye followed. There was nothing more he could do for The Robber and his family.

  “This is the beginning of the end of my people,” the Tobacco Planter said. “I have seen it.”

  “I’m going to try to stop it.”

  “How will you stop it?”

  “I′m going to go after them.”

  “More traders will come with this poison water. Nothing in the stories of the People prepare us for this. It is a new evil that white men bring. Look at them! They are dazed. They are sick. They hurt. They lost their manhood. A man is a man when he commands himself. But they swallow this poison and they no longer command themselves. They fight like rutting elk. They stab each other, brothers fight, friends fight. And now the mothers and widows cry. Our chief himself drank the poison, and he is helpless now. They will wait for the next traders to give them more, and they will kill buffalo and tan robes so they can trade them for more and more and more!”

  The Tobacco Planter saw the thing Skye dreaded.

  “Look at them!” Walks to the Top shouted. “We are naked before our enemies. They still stagger. They cannot put one foot in front of the other. Who cooks the morning meals? Who cares for the horses? Who polices our village?”

  The elder stopped suddenly. “What are you going to do?”

  “Follow them, stalk them, find some way to destroy their spirits. It’s pure grain alcohol. It burns.”

  “You will take a war party?”

  “Many Quill Woman and I will go alone. It is better that way.”

  “With what?”

  “That is a good question.”

  “We will see,” the venerable man said, and walked away as suddenly as he had approached Skye.

  The village was stirring now, sullen, hungry, cold, and ashamed. Skye spotted Otter, the headman who had suffered ambush at the hands of the Blackfeet.

  “It is true, then. You are the cause of this,” Otter said. “That′s what is whispered.”