Return of the Coyote (The Coyote Saga Book 2)

by Ron Schwab

  Return of the Coyote

  Ron Schwab

  Poor Coyote Press

  Contents

  Also by Ron Schwab

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Afterword

  Also by Ron Schwab

  Sioux Sunrise

  Paint the Hills Red

  Ghosts Around the Campfire

  The Lockes

  Last Will

  Medicine Wheel

  The Law Wranglers

  Deal with the Devil

  Mouth of Hell

  Dismal Trail (forthcoming)

  The Coyote Saga

  Night of the Coyote

  Return of the Coyote

  RETURN OF THE COYOTE

  by Ron Schwab

  Poor Coyote Press

  PO Box 6105

  Omaha, NE 68106

  www.PoorCoyotePress.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Ron Schwab

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews—without written permission from its publisher.

  ISBN: 1-943421-19-6

  ISBN-13: 978-1-943421-19-0

  In memory of Bennie, my best buddy

  and purr-fect writing partner.

  1

  Ethan Ramsey could not believe Skye dePaul was dead. The news had stunned him and rendered him speechless, and he had excused himself from the wounded Lame Buffalo's side on the pretense he would make a search to determine if there were others he might assist. Now he wandered numbly through the smoldering remains of the village, as the acrid smoke bit his nostrils and burned his eyes. At least the autumn sun had broken through the haze and warmed his back this September morning in the Sioux mountain summer village.

  Bodies of women and children, including babies, were strewn like rag dolls among the rubble. The dead men were mostly old, but the female corpses spanned the generations. Lame Buffalo had told him that mostly the older girls and young women had been singled out for the rapes. Some had been spared a grisly death, mostly some of the elderly, with a smattering of children and a few younger women who had probably led them into hiding when the raiders struck at dawn. They sat in clusters, staring seemingly into emptiness with their vacant eyes. Menacing black vultures were already circling in the azure skies above, and a few of the more daring scavengers had started to feast on the tiny corpse of a bloodied infant, whose head had been smashed by a rifle butt or some other blunt weapon. The hulking birds retreated and fluttered off to another prospective meal at Ethan's approach. Ethan, a lawyer by profession these days, had earlier served as Army Chief of Scouts out of Fort Laramie and had viewed the carnage of such atrocities before--rendered by both Indian and military combatants. Both seemed to be equally adept at war on the defenseless, he thought. This time, the murderers were, Lame Buffalo had told him, a rag-tag mix of whites, several Pawnee, and a few colored men. The latter, the chief had called "buffalo hairs," referring to the kinky hair that had earned the Negro buffalo soldiers their designation by the plains Indians.

  Virtually all the braves and warriors had been absent from the village when the raiders struck. Many were out on a pre-winter buffalo hunt, which with the rapid depletion of the Sioux's multipurpose prey, took the hunters many miles from the village. Others had travelled northward along the Powder River to meet up with Cheyenne allies for a council that might bring war with the whites come spring. This, Ethan knew, Lame Buffalo would have opposed vociferously, supporting his Brule Sioux cousin, Spotted Tail, in efforts to keep the peace. Of course, after today's slaughter, the band's chief may be thinking differently.

  As Ethan surveyed the village, he wondered what was going to become of the survivors of the raid. There could be no more than thirty. Their food supplies had been obliterated, deliberately it seemed. The hunters might return with meat that would feed the remnants of the band for a time, but the hunting party might not come back for days, and there were bodies to be disposed of in some fashion with few able-bodied souls to help. There was neither time nor workers to build the traditional platforms and few tools with which to dig graves. He must speak with Lame Buffalo about this. And what if the marauders swung back this way?

  His presence here was filled with irony, he thought, as his fingers touched the crisp piece of paper in his shirt pocket. Skye dePaul, known to her Brule relatives as Sky-in-the-Morning, had employed him as a lawyer some months back, after the lynching of two innocent Indian boys in Lockwood, Wyoming, where Ethan practiced law when he was not managing his shoe-string ranch operation. Skye, a half-blood Sioux whose father had pioneered Wyoming and Montana as a French trader and merchant in Cheyenne, had been a teacher at the Quaker school near Lockwood. She had come to his office to ask him to represent her cousin, Bear Killer, who had escaped the lynching and, to further complicate matters, was Lame Buffalo's son.

  As it turned out, Ethan's scouting skills had been more important than his lawyering. In the end, Bear Killer's innocence—and that of his dead comrade—had been established but not before Skye lost her lower left arm and Ethan fell in love with her. He had nearly proposed marriage before she brusquely cut him short. She had left him a bank draft for three hundred dollars for his fees, however, which she failed to sign before returning to Lame Buffalo's village to recuperate. This he took as an invitation to visit the village to collect her signature and, hopefully, to explore their possibilities for the future. The pressures of the ranch and his law practice, coupled with his uncertainty about his standing with Skye, had caused him to delay the trip into the mountains for several months. And now he had waited a day too long.

  Ethan walked deliberately back to Lame Buffalo's tattered tipi, his grief over the report of Skye's death deferred for a few moments by the need for decisions and action. The front of the chief's lodge was ripped away, and only a few skins remained draped on the lodge poles to provide an illusion of privacy. The chief, who had been a vital man, not yet fifty, lay stretched out on a buffalo robe. Blood pumped out of a gaping hole in his chest, sending rivulets of blood down his rib cage, where it pooled along his side. His body had paled noticeably in the half hour Ethan had been absent.

  A wizened medicine man, who looked barely strong enough to lift the buffalo horn rat
tle he held in this trembling hand, chanted some song with a squeaky voice. A young woman, perhaps seventeen or eighteen years of age, knelt beside Lame Buffalo, grasping his hand. Her doeskin dress was half torn away and hung on her shoulders like a Mexican serape, its seams split and revealing the taut bronzed skin the garment once covered. There was no one else to comfort the chief as he approached his final journey, for both of his wives had been killed during the raid, the youngest being raped and mutilated while several marauders held her husband back as he struggled to charge to her defense. After the leader of the renegades had finished his turn at the young woman, he approached the chief and laughed contemptuously before plunging the military sabre into his chest. All this Lame Buffalo had related after Ethan's arrival.

  The maiden turned her head when Ethan entered the circle formed by the lodge poles. "You are the Puma," she said softly. "My father told me you were here. I am Otter. I was looking for Hooting Owl when you first came here." She nodded toward the shaman.

  Ethan noted her perfect English, but he was more taken aback by her resemblance to Skye. It was mostly the eyes, he decided, dark and constantly alert and searching. Notwithstanding the soot and raw scratches that covered her face, she was more than pretty and appeared undefeated by whatever had happened to her, reminding him again of another woman. "I am no longer the Puma," Ethan said. "I am not an Army Scout."

  "My father wishes to speak with you," she said.

  Ethan knelt beside the dying chief and saw that the man's eyes had opened and seemed surprisingly clear. "I am here, Chief."

  "My spirit is preparing to depart on the journey to my ancestors. Help my people, Puma. The prophecy revealed by the coyote is not dead. You have a destiny with our people waiting to be fulfilled. Listen to the coyote. And trust my daughter and her brother, Bear Killer, when he returns from the hunt. They will never betray you. Sky-in-the-Morning brought us the white man's words and prepared them for the trials of the road to peace."

  Lame Buffalo's eyes closed. A few minutes later he sucked in his last feeble breath. The medicine man started chanting some new song with a voice so weak and lifeless, the sound would not have carried beyond the lodge. Otter touched her father's forehead gently and rose from his side. Ethan half expected her to start wailing and cutting her body as some mourning squaws did, but, on the contrary, she appeared stoic and serene. Ethan got up and walked out of the battered tipi with her, leaving the medicine man to his task of launching the chief's spirit on its proper voyage.

  He stood by the young woman, wondering what she was thinking and trying to sort out in his own mind where he fit into this disaster. He did not have to wait long.

  "We must do something with the bodies," Otter said matter-of-factly.

  "Yes. And soon. What do your customs allow?"

  "We have no time for customs. Nothing in Lakota heritage requires leaving the bodies as carrion for the vultures and other creatures. There is a dry creek bed that runs past the south side of the village. We can take them there and wrap the bodies in buffalo and deer hides and group them by families and stack them tightly. Then we will roll stones upon them, so they cannot be reached by the scavengers."

  It was eerie. This might have been Skye speaking. Decisive. Pragmatic. Analytical. "What you suggest makes sense. I'll check out the creek bed. Are some of your people able to help?"

  "Anyone who can walk will help."

  "I have one question."

  "Yes."

  "Where is Skye's body?"

  "Sky-in-the-Morning? It is not in the village."

  "Then where is it?"

  "It was she they came here for. The men found her and were taking her away. Her mother, Singing Lark, tried to stop them and one of the Pawnee cowards struck her with a war axe. Skye broke free and ran to her mother's side, and she was clubbed and then bound and slung over a horse. They took her with them along with at least three other girls my age or a bit younger."

  "But your father said Skye was dead."

  "He assumed so. Look around you. Is there any reason to think otherwise?"

  He suddenly grasped a sliver of hope. Without proof beyond any doubt of Skye's death, he would not accept it as fact. Never. His first instinct was to mount Patch, his Appaloosa gelding, and start tracking her abductors. The trail would not be cold yet. But they would be moving fast, not knowing when the band's warriors might return and follow them.

  "Are you going to leave us?" Otter asked.

  "How many raiders were there?" She was silent for a few moments. He could almost see her mind taking a count of the men she had seen.

  Finally, she spoke. "Fifteen, probably. No more than seventeen."

  They would be easy enough to track. But with that many, what would he do if he caught up with them? He guessed he'd figure that out when he found them—if Skye was not already dead. But how could he leave these people in this condition? He felt something tugging at his shirt, and he looked down and his gaze met the dark, sad eyes of a Sioux boy, no more than eight or nine years old. The side of his forehead was swollen and smeared with blood, and he was clad only in a breechclout and filthy deerskin shirt.

  "You Puma, yes?" the boy asked.

  "Some of your people call me that. But my name is Ethan."

  "Puma better." He pointed to his chest. "Me Running Fox. You help us, Puma?"

  The boy's eyes won out.

  2

  The mass burials drug on through the afternoon. True to her promise, Otter rallied the entire village to the task. Old men who could barely walk carried small stones to the banks of the dry creek bed, while the women wrapped bodies in the remnants of tipis and buffalo and deer skin robes. Some boys and younger girls emerged from hiding in the surrounding forest as the afternoon wore on and were quickly put to work by Otter, who by default had assumed leadership of the village.

  Ethan carried most of the bodies to the bank of the creek, with Running Fox solemnly hoisting a corpse's leg or arm to help. Otter identified Singing Lark, whose body Ethan placed near those of Lame Buffalo and his wives. The boy stuck with Ethan like a bootmaker's glue, but his emaciated appearance belied the boy's actual strength, and he was quick and agile and seemed able to lift twice his weight. As the hours went by, the somber silence of the encampment gave way to a soft murmur of voices as the survivors seemed to emerge from their shock.

  As Ethan walked through the village ferreting out the remaining victims, he felt the familiar tugging at his shirt. He turned to find Running Fox pointing to the body of a young woman who was half hidden by a fallen tipi. He veered toward her and saw she clutched a child of no more than two years, whose head had been nearly decapitated, in her arms. Her buckskin skirt had been torn away, and she had obviously been raped before a bullet mercifully burrowed into her temple.

  "My mother," Running Fox said. He pointed to the baby. "My brother." He looked up with his dark eyes, which were tearless, but conveyed an emptiness which Ethan knew would haunt him to the end of his days.

  "I will take care of them," Ethan said. "Why don't you go help Otter now?"

  "No, me take Little Hedgehog. You take mother. She called 'Good Heart.' All love her."

  Ethan found himself speechless, a rare problem for a law wrangler, he thought. He tugged a deerskin from the lodge poles and lifted the toddler from his mother's arms, carefully holding the flopping head in place, and then he lay him on the deerskin and wrapped it tightly around the little body, realizing only then that tears were rolling down his cheeks. Making no effort to wipe them away, he lifted the tiny package and placed it in Running Fox's hands. "I will carry your mother. Hold your brother carefully. Do you understand?"

  "Me know what to do. Bring mother."

  Ethan lifted the woman into his arms effortlessly. No one was pretty in death, but as they walked slowly toward the dry creek bed, he concluded she must have been beautiful in life. Good Heart. Most Sioux names said something about the person, and his anger grew another notch.

  Otter
met them at the creek. Wrapped corpses already lined the creek bed and another layer had been started. No sooner did Ethan place Good Heart's body on the earth than two younger women began their somber work. Another older woman took the child from Running Fox's arms.

  "Running Fox is an orphan now," Otter said. "Like many others. But we will care for him."

  "His father?"

  "He died a warrior's death when the soldiers attacked a hunting party last spring. The bluecoats thought that the warriors were renegade Cheyenne who had attacked and burned the home of a family of white settlers. To most white eyes there is no distinction between the tribes or bands."

  He noted she said this with some contempt. "It's all so senseless, but I was a part of it once. Many warriors are dead because I led the soldiers to them."

  "Yes, I know the stories of the Puma who moved silently in the night seeking and finding his prey."

  Ethan felt a small hand slip into his own. "I was doing a job. I was good at it but came to hate the work."

  "The Great Spirit has other plans for you now."

  "A nice thought, but I think we make our own plans."

  "My father had the vision about you and Sky-In-The-Morning on the night of the coyote."

  "I've heard the story. I would think that all that has happened would convince you that Lame Buffalo got something wrong."

  A small voice said, "Me want to know story, Otter. Tell me."

  Otter looked at Ethan. "Running Fox wants to hear of the vision. Surely you would not deny him this?"

  This girl-woman had too much of her cousin in her. She was too adept at outmaneuvering him. He shrugged. "If you want to, go ahead and tell him."

  "My father climbed up the mountain side to seek the Great Spirit's guidance on whether he should trust the Puma with the life of his son. He waited until the stars started to fade from the sky. He feared that the Great Spirit was unable to help him that night and almost gave up his quest for an answer. And then a coyote he-dog called to his mate from the far end of the valley, and after a time of silence, the she-dog answered from somewhere above the entrance of the cave where my father sat. My father said he closed his eyes and the vision came.