The Spirit Path

by Madeline Baker

  When she woke up she was lying in bed in a hospital room painted a sickly green. It was there, surrounded by doctors, that she’d learned Susie was dead. Susie, who had loved ice skating and dancing and playing tennis, who had found joy in everything, dead at nineteen because her older sister was a careless fool.

  Six months after the accident, Frank broke their engagement. He hadn’t made any flowery excuses, he hadn’t lied to her. He’d simply told her the truth, as kindly as he could. He was sorry, so sorry, but he had to be honest and he just didn’t think he could handle living with a woman who was going to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair.

  Maggie had cried for days and then she’d thrown herself into her writing, running away from the present by writing about the past, hiding from her own misery by penning fanciful romances where true love could overcome any obstacle and everyone lived happily ever after.

  She’d moved to South Dakota four months later, buying a small ranch located in a grassy meadow between Sturgis and the Black Hills. It was beautiful country. The Hills were breathtaking and she could understand why the Sioux wanted them back.

  The Hills seemed to have a life of their own, a presence that she’d felt the first time she saw them. There were eighteen peaks that exceeded seven thousand feet, an island of mountains in a sea of prairie grass and rangeland that covered roughly six thousand miles. She loved the pines and the aspen and the clear blue sky, the rolling miles of prairie grass, the sense of history that she felt each time she looked out her window and saw the majesty of the Black Hills rising in the distance.

  The Lakota called them Paha Sapa, meaning hills that appear black in color. They also called them O’onakezin, which meant a place of shelter, or Wamakaognaka E’cante, which meant “the heart of everything that is”.

  Soon after she moved to the ranch, Maggie put an ad in the local paper, advertising for help. Nineteen-year-old Bobby had arrived at her door the next day and she’d hired him on the spot. He needed the money, he’d said, to help support his brother, and he hoped to go to college and study medicine. She’d hired Veronica the same day, liking her no-nonsense attitude.

  With Bobby to look after the ranch and Veronica to take care of the cooking and cleaning, Maggie turned her attention to writing romantic stories of beautiful white women and handsome Indian men. She never saw anyone else, never went into Sturgis, the small town about ten miles south of Bear Butte. Veronica did all the shopping and picked up the mail.

  Maggie’s love for the land grew steadily. In days past, the Sioux and Cheyenne had come here, to the Paha Sapa, to celebrate the sacred ritual of the Sun Dance. She liked to think that Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, Hump and Gall had once walked the land where her house now stood. The Hills were a piece of American history made famous by people like Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickok, Jim Bridger and the ill-fated General George Armstrong Custer.

  She’d always been fascinated by the Old West, especially the Indians. She was enchanted by their beliefs, saddened at their ultimate fate. When she’d started writing it had seemed the most natural thing in the world to write about the Sioux and Cheyenne.

  Perhaps feeling that she was a kindred soul, Veronica had offered to teach Maggie to speak Lakota, and Maggie considered it a rare gift to be able to speak the ancient Sioux language. Veronica had charmed her with old tales and legends, stories of Iktomi, the trickster; of the Unktehi, who captured men and turned them into beasts; of lya, a monster who ate animals and men. She wished lya would go to LA and devour Frank Williams!

  Maggie wiped her face with a corner of the sheet, determined never to think of the past again. It was too painful to think of Frank and what might have been.

  With a sigh, she closed her eyes and willed herself to relax, to think of quiet blue oceans and the whisper of the wind sighing across the prairie, singing to the tall grass.

  Instead, she fell asleep thinking of the Indian sleeping in her guest room.

  In her dreams, he came riding toward her as he had once before, a darkly handsome stranger with eyes as black as a midnight sky and skin like burnished copper, but this time she wasn’t afraid, and she didn’t run away.

  Chapter Eight

  Sunlight warmed his face. He heard someone singing softly, smelled meat cooking, and he knew it was time to get up, to go to the river to bathe before he offered his Dawn Song to Wakán Tanka.

  Sighing, Shadow Hawk started to get up, only to be seized by a sharp pain in his right side.

  Hand pressed over the bandage swathed around his middle, he sat up, unmindful of the thin blue blanket that slid down his chest and pooled in his lap as he stared at his surroundings. He’d had little experience with the wasichu, but he knew immediately that he was inside one of their square houses. Was he a prisoner?

  Frowning, he recalled seeing one of the white man’s lodges when he’d emerged from the Sacred Cave, but before he could wonder at its presence he’d been shot. By an Indian wearing the clothes of a wasichu.

  He stared at the white material wrapped around his torso. It was unlike anything he had ever seen, lightweight with tiny holes, like a net.

  He touched his hand to the mat beneath him. It was firm yet soft, covered with pale blue cloth. A bed, he thought it was called. His cousin Bright Flower slept in such a bed. She had married a white trapper when Shadow Hawk was sixteen and he had gone to visit her several times just to make sure the wasichu was treating her honorably.

  He had thought the white man’s lodge very strange, its furnishings stranger still. Bright Flower and her husband had taken their meals at something called a table, eating off colorful dishes made of hard-baked clay. She had cooked on a huge black metal object, a stove, she had called it, instead of over an open fire. He had refused to sleep in the narrow bed they offered him. He had sat on the floor instead of the wooden seat called a chair…

  Chair, he thought. That was what the Spirit Woman had been sitting in, a chair with wheels. He shook his head, bewildered by the strangeness of the whites.

  With his hand pressed against his side, he slipped out from under the blanket and made his way to the door, ignoring the sharp pain that pierced his side with each step. It was time to leave this place, time to go back to the village, to find out if his mother still lived.

  The sound of distant voices made him pause and he turned back into the room, moving toward the window, a sudden need to be outside the confines of the white man’s lodge making him forget the ache in his side.

  He put his hand to the window, marveling at the smooth coolness beneath his fingers. His cousin’s windows had been covered with oiled paper. You could not see through them. They did not feel hard and cool like clear ice. He pushed against the window, but it refused to open.

  He tapped it once, twice, and then, hearing voices behind him, he whirled around, his gaze darting around the room in search of a weapon. He was reaching for the three-legged stool at the foot of the bed, deciding it was better than nothing, when he heard a gasp. Looking up, his eyes widened in disbelief as the Spirit Woman entered the room. She was seated in the chair with wheels and it glided silently across the wooden floor.

  Shadow Hawk stared at her, and at the strange-looking chair, not believing his eyes, wondering if he was still inside the Sacred Cave. Perhaps there hadn’t been a battle. Perhaps Heart-of-the-Wolf still lived. Perhaps this was just another vision. “Winyan Wanagi,” he murmured reverently. “Spirit Woman.” She was even more beautiful than she had been in his visions. Her skin was smooth and clear, her lashes long and thick. Her hair, as black as his own, was worn in braids, the ends tied with bright blue ribbons that matched the color of her eyes.

  Maggie stared at the Indian. Awake his resemblance to the warrior in her painting was even more startling. The man in her dream had been a shadow figure without substance. The man in her painting was merely a flat image depicting what she recalled from memory. But this man was very much alive and he radiated masculinity and strength and a lat
ent sense of danger.

  Behind her, she heard Veronica gasp and Maggie knew that the breakfast tray in Veronica’s hands had come perilously close to crashing to the floor.

  “Good morning,” Maggie said, hoping her voice didn’t betray her alarm at finding her patient standing in the middle of the room, naked as the day he’d been born. “How are you feeling?”

  Shadow Hawk stared at her, wishing he had learned more of the white man’s language from his cousin so he could understand the Spirit Woman’s words.

  Maggie frowned, wondering if he was deaf. “How are you?” she said again, speaking slowly and distinctly so he could read her lips.

  “Maybe he doesn’t understand,” Veronica suggested.

  Maggie shook her head. “Why wouldn’t he understand? You told me all the Indians from the reservation speak English.”

  “Maybe he’s not from the reservation.”

  “Where else would he be from?”

  Veronica shrugged. “I don’t know, but he looks…different.”

  “Different?” Maggie looked at the Indian more closely. His hair wasn’t any longer than that of some of the Indian men she’d seen, his skin wasn’t much darker than most, and yet he did look different somehow. He held himself with a kind of pride she’d never seen in any of the reservation Indians. There was a wildness about him, a feral look in the depths of his dark eyes that reminded her of a cornered lion, or a bird of prey. She frowned at the scars on his broad chest. But surely they couldn’t be Sun Dance scars, not in this day and age.

  “Nituwe he?” Maggie asked, speaking in Lakota. “Who are you?”

  “Mieyebo Cetán Nagin,” he replied, startled that she should know his language. “I am Shadow Hawk.”

  “Tokiyatanhan yahi he?” Maggie asked, pleased that he could understand her. “Where have you come from?”

  “Wicoti mitawa.”

  Maggie glanced at Veronica. “His village,” she remarked. “What village do you think he means?”

  Veronica shrugged. “I don’t know. There are no villages near here.”

  With a shake of her head, the housekeeper walked past Maggie and placed the breakfast tray on the bed. “Wóyute,” she said, looking at the Indian. “Food.”

  Shadow Hawk stared at the Indian woman for a moment. She was tall, with deep-set black eyes and black hair that showed a few streaks of gray. She wore a loose white top, a colorful skirt similar to the ones Apache women wore, and beaded moccasins. She returned his gaze as though she were also studying him, and then she gestured at the tray.

  “Yúta,” she said in a motherly tone. “Eat.” Shadow Hawk glanced from the Indian woman to the tray on the bed, his dark eyes wary.

  “Well, maybe you can find out where he came from,” Veronica said. “I have a pie in the oven that’s going to be ashes if it doesn’t come out soon.”

  “Veronica…”

  Veronica glanced at the Indian, who was staring at Maggie, and then glanced at Maggie, who appeared to be staring back at the Indian with equal admiration.

  Matchmaking had never been her strong suit, but Veronica thought she’d have to be deaf and blind not to feel the attraction humming between Maggie and the handsome young man.

  “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me,” she said, thinking perhaps the mysterious Indian was just what the doctor ordered.

  Maggie stared at the Indian for a moment, then gestured at the bandage swathed around his middle. “How are you feeling?” she asked, still speaking in Lakota.

  “I am all right,” he answered.

  His voice was like black velvet, deep and soft. Her gaze was drawn toward the broad expanse of his chest and shoulders, then moved to linger on his arms, which were long and ridged with muscle. She felt her cheeks grow hot and quickly returned her gaze to his face, marveling anew at the masculine beauty of his countenance.

  Annoyed by her reaction to his looks, Maggie glanced down at her hands and then, feeling more composed, she looked up at him again. What was the matter with her? She wasn’t a dewy-eyed teenager for heaven’s sake, she was thirty-two years old, and this stranger, no matter how handsome he might be, looked to be in his early twenties, making him much too young for her, even if she was interested in knowing him better, which she definitely wasn’t.

  But she did wish he wasn’t quite so breathtakingly male, or quite so bare.

  “Bobby didn’t mean to shoot you,” she said, staring at a point past the Indian’s left shoulder. “He was after a deer.”

  “Where am I? How did I get here?”

  “This is my house. Bobby brought you here.”

  Her house. Was he in the land of spirits then? Shadow Hawk looked at the woman more closely. He did not feel dead—surely the dead did not feel pain or hunger. So, he was still alive and the Spirit Woman had called him to her side. He had heard ancient tales of men mating with spirits. The thought of holding her, touching her, sent a rush of heat surging through him.

  “How long have I been here?”

  “Two days. Please sit down and eat,” Maggie said, feeling her cheeks grow pink under his prolonged stare. “You must be hungry.”

  “No. I must go back to my people.”

  She saw the wariness in his eyes, the tension that held his muscles taut, as if he were on the brink of flight.

  “Kola,” she said, tapping herself on the chest. “Friend. Please sit down and eat.”

  Shadow Hawk hesitated a moment and then, with a curt nod, he took the tray and sat cross-legged on the floor, the tray across his lap. For a moment he stared at the odd-looking food, something white with a yellow middle, several narrow strips of fragrant meat that made his stomach growl loudly.

  “Enjoy your breakfast,” Maggie said. “I’ll see if Bobby has some clothes that will fit you.”

  Shadow Hawk nodded. He waited until she had left the room, then began to eat ravenously, his mind spinning in circles. He should go back to the Sacred Cave. If any of his people had survived the battle they would need him. His mother needed him. He could not stay here.

  Putting the tray aside, he started for the door, then paused, his need to know why the Spirit Woman had summoned him stronger than his need to get away.

  He was still wondering whether to stay or return to the cave when the Spirit Woman returned, gliding into the room in her chair on wheels.

  “Here,” she said, handing him a bundle of clothing. “See if any of those will fit.”

  He took the garments she offered him, studied them intently after she left the room. The pants were of heavy dark blue cloth, the shirt of some softer material. There was a white shirt similar to the one he’d seen on the boy, and an odd-looking item of soft white cloth that looked like pants without legs.

  Shadow Hawk grunted as he tossed the clothes on the bed. Just looking at them, he could see they were too small, even if he’d been of a mind to wear them, which he wasn’t.

  It was a mystery to the Indians why the whites covered themselves with so many layers of clothing. In the Lakota village, a man wore only a clout and moccasins during the summer, perhaps a beaded vest. Only in the winter did they wear leggings and heavy shirts against the cold. But the whites covered themselves from head to foot all year long.

  It was most peculiar, but then, the wasichu were a peculiar people, with their hairy faces and pale skin. They lived in square houses, when every human being knew there was harmony only within a circle. Life was a circle. Skan had caused the world to be made in rounds. The sun, the moon, the earth, and the sky were round. The stems of plants and the bodies of animals were round. Everything in nature, save the rock, was round. Thus the Lakota lived within the sacred circle, in harmony with the forces of nature.

  Yes, he thought as he fastened his clout, the whites were a peculiar race. Sitting on the small chair beside the window, he pulled on his moccasins, grimacing as he pressed his hand over his wounded side. It hurt to move, and he glanced at the bed. It was softer than the ground yet firm and strangely c
omfortable, and he thought briefly of resting for an hour, but he was anxious to return home, anxious to return to the village and find out if his mother still lived.

  “Didn’t the clothes fit?”

  “Your Lakota is very good,” Shadow Hawk remarked, turning to face her.

  “Veronica taught me. She taught Bobby, too.”

  “He is Lakota. Why did he not speak our language?”

  “I guess he never learned.”

  “Bob-by and Ver-on-ica.” He stumbled over the peculiar names.

  Maggie grinned. “Bobby’s Lakota name is Running Horse and Veronica’s is Little Moon.”

  Shadow Hawk grunted softly. “I must go now.”

  “Are you sure? Perhaps you should rest another day.”

  “I must go back to my village. My people need me.”

  “Where is your village?”

  “On the other side of the Hills.”

  “There’s no village in the Hills,” Maggie said, frowning. “Sometimes the Lakota have ceremonies on top of Bear Butte, but no one lives there.” She paused a moment. You’re not from Pine Ridge, are you?”

  “Pine Ridge?”

  “You know, the reservation. It’s about an hour away from here.”

  “My people do not live on the reservation.”

  “Oh. Is there someone I can call to come after you?”

  “Call?”

  “On the phone.” She pointed at the blue princess telephone on the bedside table. “Phone.” She said it in English because she didn’t know the word in Lakota, didn’t even know if there was such a word.

  He looked at her with such confusion that she felt a sudden surge of sympathy. Was he a little slow? Intellectually challenged? Had he wandered away from the reservation and gotten lost? Was someone searching for him even now?

  “Who are your people?” she asked. “Who’s the man in charge of your village?”

  “Mahpiya Luta.”

  “Mahpiya Luta,” Maggie repeated. “Red Cloud!”