Hawk Eyes

by David Althouse

  Beads of sweat rolled down Charlie’s forehead, and both his hands clutched his pistol, the business end of which he had directed towards the doorway. “Who’s out there?”

  “It’s Buck Wright. Open the door, Charlie.”

  Let me tell you somethin’ – I sure was glad to hear the voice of Buck Wright instead of the voice of some Yankee officer. I sure enough felt as if a ton of bricks had just been lifted off my back. The muscles in my body eased up and I felt nice and loose again.

  Charlie let Buck in. A couple of Buck’s men came in with him, whilst the others stayed outside atop their mounts to stand lookout. Buck and his men looked exhausted. It was clear to me that they’d been ridin’ long, hard, and fast.

  Buck looked at me with a big smile. “Hawk Eyes, you done real good. Watie and his men captured that supply wagon. By damned, they did it! They’d been travelin’ the Texas Road anyways. So when they heard ‘bout the supply wagon, they just continued on up near Cabin Creek, and that’s where they found the wagon. General Gano and his men were with him. They encircled the wagon and got the guards caught in a cross fire just as pretty as you please. Pretty soon, those wagon mules got jumpy and commenced to stampeding. The teamsters got the hell out of there and headed north. Well, when Watie’s men approached the wagon, they found some dead and injured mules. The injured mules were put out of their misery. Then they commenced to searchin’ the wagons.”

  Buck had to stop and catch his breath before tellin’ the rest of the story. “Let me tell you something. Watie figures the loot on this wagon to be worth far more than that found even on the J.R. Williams. There was food, clothing, ammunition and everything!”

  Charlie lets out a rebel whoop and says “Boys, this occasion calls for some drinks all around!” That was a night I’ll surely never forget. Charlie went over to the cupboard and pulls off a big-ass jug of whiskey. The whole bunch of us stayed up the rest of the night finishin’ off that jug and talkin’ ’bout that supply wagon as well as the old times.

  Charlie rolls himself a smoke, then looks over to Buck. “Buck, do you remember that one time we chased Hawk Eyes’ white ass down off those Winding Stair Mountains?”

  “How in the hell can I ever forget that?”

  Roselle demanded that her husband tell everyone the story, and so he did.

  “It was a spring day some years ago when Hawk Eyes, Big Buck Wright, myself and a couple of others were hunting over near the Winding Stair Mountains. The hunting wasn’t worth a damn that day. We all got to horsin’ ’round as usual and us Choctaw boys took to riling Hawk Eyes as much as we could on account of him being the only white boy in the group. Big Buck Wright points at him and he says to the rest of us, ‘Let’s chase his white ass down off this mountain.’ Without even thinking about it, Hawk Eyes took off down that dry, rocky creek bed in front of us.

  “It was obvious that he had not figured out beforehand where he would place his feet, what big or small rock he would land on next, but he took off down that dry creek bed with his feet doing their own thinking. He put a hundred yards betwixt him and us in seconds. He turned around to see if we were coming down the creek behind him, and we were still standing there where he left us. He ran as if he expected us to be right there behind him all the way, because he assumed that if he could do that kind of running, then so could we. He looked back up at us as if he were amazed that we weren’t breathing down his neck. I’m sure he was puzzled at our expressions. We were amazed that a man – and a white man to boot – could run down a steep, dry, rock-filled creek bed like a four-legged deer and not fall down and break a leg or bust his ass doing it.

  “I remember that for about a minute, we stood there in complete silence. Then we all commenced to laughin’ because the picture of a white man doing this thing seemed to be so very funny to us. We ambled on down to where he stood waiting on us. He waited on us, remember Buck? We finally got to him, and Buck says, ‘How in the hell did you learn how to do that? It’s like you mapped out this creek before and remembered every single rock and where it lays! Weren’t you afraid you might fall and break a leg?’ And he said he had never run down that creek before until then. He said he didn’t even think about it – he just did it! He said that, in his eye, each step, each planting of the foot, was something that happened very slowly.”

  Then Charlie turns and looks at me. “I’ll never forget that, Hawk Eyes, because you were moving pretty damn fast to us! And then Buck says, ‘Do it again, will you? Come on, show us how you do it!’ You nodded that you would, and off you went flying down that dry creek bed some more. You went about three hundred yards again before stopping to look back up the slope at us. Remember? When you looked back at us you saw a bunch of us rolling on the ground with laughter. Hawk Eyes, I can tell you we were laughing so hard our sides hurt! Someone said, ‘That white man is part deer!’ Then Buck said, ‘Deer, hell! He’s a hawk what is saddled with two big feet! He didn’t run down that creek bed. He flew down it!’ It was then that we knew your name of ‘Hawk Eyes’ was the right one for you, especially after what you told us about your eyes and how they seen things happening so very slowly.”

  Then, Big Buck Wright broke in. “Hawk Eyes, there’s something we’re gonna give you tonight. It’s something what we appropriated off that supply wagon, and something that General Watie insisted we give you after we told him it was you who supplied the information. It’s a Sharp’s rifle what was intended for those damn Federal Indians. You practice with this thing awhile and soon you’ll be hitting your targets at two hundred yards, just like those buffalo hunters. We told Watie all about you, about growing up with you, and about how you came to get the information about the supply wagon. After we told him this, he says to us to give you this rifle, and he also told us to tell you that you should trust in those eyes that the Great Spirit has given you, and that if you do that, then you needn’t worry about the blue-asses ever taking you.”

  Well, I’d heard a lot of talk from a lot of folks before, but nothin’ I’d ever heard in the way of words had ever meant as much to me as what my friends told me that night. I knew I didn’t have to get all fancy with thankin’ ’em for what they’d said ‘bout me and for this here rifle. I knew they could see my heartfelt thanks just by lookin’ at my face and my eyes wellin’ up. I was at a loss for words and they well knew it.

  I was just damn glad I had a friend like Charlie and Roselle, Buck and the rest of ’em. And I was just glad I was accepted among these here folks, that they counted me as one of their own. Hell, I didn’t feel like I was much of a fit around white folks no how.

  But my time with my friends was to be short-lived. I knew I had to make myself scarce in the immediate area and so, two days later, I was on the trail to the Cherokee Nation to see Jesse Youngbird. Charlie told me Youngbird lived up north of Tahlequah a ways, in a little cabin underneath them cliffs what line the Illinois River on the west side. I’d been up that way a time or two, so I knew the general direction of where to find him. My experiences drovin’ cattle along the Shawnee Trail with my Pappy had familiarized me with a good part of eastern Indian Territory, and that included the Cherokee Nation which sits perched on its northeastern corner. The old Shawnee Trail crossed the Red River north out of Texas and hit Colbert’s Ferry on the Territory side, then on to Boggy Depot, North Fork Town, and Fort Gibson. If you took the west fork of the trail as you headed north, you’d hit Flat Rock Ford, Union Mission, and Hatfield Mission. Pappy and me always stuck to the east fork of the trail, headin’ straight up to the Cherokee Nation, which was our destination on those trips.

  It weren’t no time that Red and I crossed the Arkansas north of Skullyville, and then lit out for them rollin’ hills what begin just a few miles north of there. This here is some of the prettiest country around – rollin’ hill country, full of ancient oaks, some pine, and a good bunch of sumac. One thing what stands out ‘bout these foothills of the Ozarks is that there doesn’t seem to be as many tall pine like there is
down in them Ouachitas where I used to run with them Choctaw boys. Or at least that’s how I recall it in my memory. We’d come up through here with Watie’s men a time or two, so I was really just gettin’ re-acquainted with it.

  Somethin’ woke me durin’ the middle of the night on my first night out. I couldn’t put a finger on just what it was. There weren’t no unusual sound or smell. Somethin’ just woke me, and I never knew exactly what it was.

  That’s the way with me. Nighttime has been known to speak to me in ways that it doesn’t speak to other folks. There are times at night when I can see and feels things that, durin’ the day, I can’t. Sometimes, of a night, I seem to get notions of those who have gone before. Maybe it’s their spirits that I recognize, or maybe it’s somethin’ else altogether, but somethin’ comes over me and I just know that I’m followin’ in the footsteps of other folks long since gone. This gut feelin’ sometimes comes to me on the wind as it whispers through the tops of the pines and sweeps down over the rocky creek beds. It comes to me from the quakin’ leaves of the forest trees, singin’ all to once as the soft wind sets them to flutterin’ in the night.

  Sometimes, the sounds of the night critters make me believe that the critters themselves also recognize this presence. Maybe it’s a certain pitch in the night cry of the whippoorwill, or a lonesome tone in the hoot of an owl. I don’t claim to know just exactly what it is, but the sense of it comes over me, and knowin’ that I’m in its company is a comfortin’ thing.

  It speaks to me most clearly when the sun has been down for just an hour or so and right before the night is drowned in darkness. Around that time, I have a sense of the unfamiliar and the unseen, of a world that is somehow within my reach, but not quite.

  Once, over north of Skullyville near the banks of the Arkansas River, I was camped out on hunt with Big Buck Wright. It was durin’ the fall time of the year when the leaves where bright orange and yellow and red. Dusk had been set in for a while and the night sky was growin’ a darker shade of gray with each passin’ moment. The fall wind blew in from the north and west as I stirred the coals in our fire. It whispered in amongst the trees that outlined our camp and the flutterin’ sound of a million brightly colored fall leaves filled the night. I took a look upward through the trees and beheld the ever-darkenin’ night sky with its bright stars painted throughout.

  Buck, he up and asks me what I’m thinkin’. I told him that we aren’t the first people to live in these parts, that other folks had lived near this area in times past, a people none of us at the time were familiar with. Buck replies that other Indian peoples had certainly lived in these parts before, folks such as the Osage who everyone knew had made it down to what is now eastern Oklahoma long before the Five Civilized Tribes of the southeast had been relocated to the area. I told Buck that there were people here long, long before the Osage. Buck asks me how I knew this, but I didn’t have anything to tell him in that regard. I told him that I just had a feelin’. Buck said I was a crazy white-ass, and we just kind of left it at that.

  Then, one day ‘bout a year later, Buck comes to me and asks me ‘bout that night around the campfire. He asked me again how I knew ’bout people livin’ around there so many years and perhaps centuries ago. Again, I told him that it was just a premonition I had as I stirred the coals of the campfire and took in the many sounds of that autumn night. I asked him why it was so all-fired important a year later, and he replied that just a few days hence, someone had dug up some bones, pottery, flints and suchlike over north of Skullyville in an area of some unusual earth mounds not far from the river. He said the stuff that’d been dug up weren’t anything resemblin’ the work of the Osage people. The stuff was from people who went before the Osages.

  I told Buck I always respected my hunches.

  It wasn’t long after I crossed the Arkansas that I found myself in the Cherokee Nation what bordered the Choctaw Nation on the north side. Every now and again, I would catch the smell of wood smoke comin’ out of the chimney of some far off Cherokee cabin.

  Goin’ easy-like, keepin’ my eyes alert for anything and everything, constantly watchin’ my back-trail, and makin’ dry camp of a night, I reached that area north of Tahlequah three days later. I was pretty sure I hadn’t been seen, and I was sure I hadn’t left an easily readable trail for any Yankees around and ’bout.

  I got to the area I knew had to be the whereabouts of Youngbird, and then I went to searchin’ for his cabin. Around noon on the third day, I happened upon the cabin that I knew had to be Youngbird’s. I was out amongst the oaks and sumac, surveyin’ the layout, when an old voice came from the cabin.

  “If you’re the white man they call Hawk Eyes, come in walkin’. If you’re a Yankee, then get ready to catch a bellyful of lead!”

  I asked myself two things: How in the hell did he know I was out there in the trees and brush? And, how did he know I was Hawk Eyes?

  I went in walkin’.

  4 Hiding Amongst the Cherokees

  The first thing I noticed ‘bout Youngbird was that he wasn’t so young. He looked to be ’bout sixty or more. He sported two long braids of white hair that went all the way down his back. He had the smallest and the darkest eyes I’d ever seen, but they were eyes that spoke of powerful medicine. His fingers were long, slender, and brown, and I remember tellin’ myself they were perfect fingers for playin’ the piano. He looked to be full-blood Cherokee.

  He spoke, and although his voice was soft like a whisper, it made me to know that the man behind it was a man of mysterious strength and powerful medicine.

  “I was informed some days hence that you would be among us, that you are in trouble with the Federals, and that you won’t be able to make it back to Fort Smith as long as these Northerners are holed up there, and that you need help. Well, you are in the right place for a man who needs cover. We Cherokees have perfected the hiding of wanted men into an art. You are not the first man we have hidden from the Federals during this war. I know you are the man they call Hawk Eyes. I have been expecting you. By the looks of you, we need to get you on the field to play stickball.”

  I’d heard ’bout the Cherokee game of stickball, and I’d heard it weren’t a game you went into lightly. Those Cherokee took it almighty serious, and if a body wasn’t careful, he could get his brains bashed playin’ it.

  Nevertheless, I promised the ol’ Cherokee that if I made it through this ordeal without gettin’ my ass strung up by blue-bellies that I’d sure give this game of stickball a try. Youngbird said he would hold me to that promise.

  Youngbird then commenced to ask me if I thought I was followed from Skullyville. I told him I felt I was bein’ followed once I got ’bout twenty miles north of Skullyville. He asked if I saw tracks, and I said no I hadn’t. He asked if I heard or smelled anything, and I said no to both. He then asked why I felt I was bein’ followed, and I replied that it was just a premonition I had, just a feelin’.

  Youngbird gave me a queer look. “It seems everything those Choctaws say about you rings true. You were followed for sure, and by Federals. But, the Federals were followed by Choctaws! They watched your backtrail for you, making sure you had a clean break from that part of the country. Them Choctaw friends of yours lured your pursuers away from your trail.”

  I then recollected that I’d a premonition back there on the trail, and just then I knew that my premonition had been right. I sensed somethin’ out there followin’ me.

  Youngbird told me I would be stayin’ with him for the night, and then I would head out the followin’ day to another stopover in the Cherokee Nation where I could hide out from any Federals what might eventually be on my backtrail. He said he would tell me where my next stay would be, come mornin’. He went on to say that his contact at the next stopover would give me instructions from there.

  Youngbird then reached into his pants pockets and pulled out a piece of buckskin what looked four inches wide and maybe as long as a big size horse pistol. On the leather, written
in tattoo ink, were all kinds of strange symbols. All to once, I figured the symbols to be some of that Cherokee alphabet, created for the Cherokee by the one called Sequoyah. Sequoyah was a Cherokee who came from Georgia and eventually settled in Arkansas. Sequoyah is big medicine among the Cherokee people, and the reason is he created an alphabet for the Cherokee people in a little over ten years. I reckon it took us white folks a helluva lot longer than that to build our alphabet.

  Youngbird held up the piece of buckskin. “This is a totem. This will help us keep you safe from any Yankees while you’re in the Cherokee Nation.”

  I didn’t know what he meant by that, but he explained everything the next mornin’.

  When I rose at dawn, Youngbird commenced to fillin’ me in on the plan that was gonna keep my white ass out of the hands of the Federals. He said that I could probably count on those Federals stayin’ hot on my ass for at least the next couple of weeks. I was to take my totem and head to Sugar Mountain, ’bout thirteen miles to the southeast. There I would find the Coulter family, a good bunch of Confederate Cherokees. I would show ’em my totem and they would know what to do. Youngbird explained just how to get to the Coulter cabin. He went on to explain that I must do everything that the Coulters told me to do. After I’d stayed with the Coulters for a time, they would send me on to my next destination with instructions. Youngbird looked me dead in the eyes and insisted that I must follow my instructions all along the way and to the hilt, regardless of how much I might not want to. Before Youngbird sent me off on my way, he made me pledge on my friendship to the Choctaws that I would follow the directions of my new Cherokee friends all the way. I didn’t know why he kept honin’ in on that part of the deal, but I gave my assurances nevertheless.