The Owl Hunt

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Owl knew he was not the youth he had been hours before. His walking was different, his way of standing was different, his way of addressing others was different. He was no longer Waiting Wolf. When Owl spread his wings and glided through the darkness, the world quaked.

  Owl found Dirk Skye in the schoolhouse, where he was obliged to be by those who paid him. Owl saw that he was reading at his desk, and approached boldly. The teacher swiftly sensed this was not an ordinary meeting, and set his book down.

  “I am pleased to see you, Waiting Wolf,” Dirk said.

  Owl smiled. “You do not look closely. Why do you think I am still what I was?”

  Dirk smiled. “I see a confident young man ready to resume his lessons.”

  “Why do you think I need your white-man lessons?”

  Dirk paused, weighing that. “You have come to tell me something, and I am ready to listen,” he said.

  “I have come to tell you that I am a Dreamer, and I have a new name.”

  “Good. It is fine for you to take the name given you.”

  “My name is Owl.”

  The teacher visibly startled.

  “Owl, Owl, Owl,” the Dreamer said. “Owl was the name I dreamed, and Owl is now my name.”

  Dirk paused, obviously weighing his words. “And what do your family and clan and the People think of this?”

  “They have made me the chief of them all,” Owl said. “I carry the Shoshone nation on my wings.”

  four

  No doubt of it, the young man had changed. Owl was no longer Waiting Wolf, the bright youth who would tackle the three Rs one week and drift the next. Now he was Owl, the most dreaded spirit animal known to the Snake People, as the Shoshones were also called.

  Dirk digested all that. Owl was only a few years younger than himself, but somehow seemed a man now. Owl slowly smiled, but it wasn’t a friendly smile, it was the gloat of triumph, and then Owl swept out of the schoolroom.

  Dirk wasn’t puzzled. These people dreamed. These youths went off on vision quests. This one had found a dream waiting in the middle of an eclipse. Their universe was not governed by impersonal forces, but by powerful spirits. By an owl. An oppressed and dispirited people had suddenly found a messiah. Owl could be Owl only when his beak faced white men; if his beak faced the Shoshones, they would somehow drive him away.

  The boy would stir them, and there might be painful confrontations with soldiers and the agent, but those would pass. Owl would remind them of their misery, maybe even win some concessions from the government, and then he would fade from memory.

  Dirk empathized with the youth. There were times when the Shoshones needed an Owl to deal with obtuse Indian Bureau officials or boneheaded military officers. Dirk felt his two bloods warring with each other, for Owl had stirred up in him the bitter mingling of white and red.

  He had never harmonized his two bloods, and finally had stopped trying. His mother’s blood stirred at the sight of Owl; his father’s blood had congealed in his veins. His two bloods hung over him as a curse; he wished he might be one or the other. Either! It didn’t matter which. He would have been a proud Shoshone, his mother’s son. He would have been a proud Englishman, his father’s lad. His father’s blood ached to see the Shoshones settle into farming and ranching, educate themselves in the manner of his people, and enjoy the settled world. His mother’s blood resisted; it rose in the middle of lessons, when sometimes he wished some student or other wouldn’t learn English, but become a medicine man of his people.

  It was unending, this strife in his bosom, and maybe that was why after years on the reservation he was no further along than when he started. Where was he? His teaching was a failure; he had no wife, and had managed to drive away the one girl he cared about, Washakie’s daughter Mona. He had drifted, doing his duty in the schoolhouse, sliding into apathy because nothing was better than before.

  Heat hung over the agency. Nothing stirred. A cloudless sky was merciless. The schoolhouse offered shade, but even with windows open it was miserable.

  Dirk stared at the empty desks, the unused slates, the pegs where no coat hung, the dried-up inkwells.

  “You’re excused,” he said, and watched the ghosts drift away.

  He left the one-room building, drifted past the two-hole outhouse, and walked toward the somnolent cemetery, a rough and ill-kempt patch of bone-dry soil. He saw the old woman there, as she often was these days. Victoria’s heart was yearning to be with Skye. Dirk sometimes thought his own heart yearned to be with his father and mother, who lay beneath clay mounds in the somber sunlight.

  The headboards were gray wood, the names burned into them with a branding iron. BARNABY SKYE, B. 1805, LONDON. D. 1876. MARY SKYE, B. ? D. 1876, BLUE DAWN.

  Victoria sat on the clay between the graves.

  “The boy gave you trouble,” she said.

  “Were you there?”

  “No. But he walks a new way. Like trouble in his footsteps. I saw him walk. I know that goddamn walk. Plenty sonsofbitches walk like that.”

  “He has changed his name to Owl.”

  She stared sharply at him.

  “And the People have gathered to him. At least that’s what he says.”

  “More tears. Is there no end to tears? Is that all of life on the earth?”

  Dirk smiled. “You visit with my father and mother?”

  “He was never so big as his last years, North Star, sitting there where Sirius Van Horne sleeps in his swivel chair. His heart was never bigger. One day he would be roaring at ranchers for stealing cows from the People. The next day he would be roaring at the army for letting stockmen graze on reservation land. Oh, his heart was so big.”

  There was more, Dirk knew. Once he was appointed as Indian agent for the Shoshones, his father had been a whirlwind. He had tapped some source of energy that was astonishing in an old man. Half of his task had been to educate the boneheads at the Indian agency itself, a task harder than bringing new ways of life to the Shoshones. The bureau had expected the Shoshones to settle down and farm. But it didn’t happen. Planting and hoeing and weeding and harvesting were women’s work, and the men wouldn’t do it. They were hunters and warriors. The officials in Washington City couldn’t grasp it, and faulted Skye for the lack of progress. But Skye knew the change would take generations. He struggled to create an agency cattle herd, knowing the reservation men were far more open to caring for cattle than for plowing and planting. But the agency herd he fought so hard to build was stolen by white cowboys, eaten by hungry Shoshones, or starved by a lack of winter feed. Still, Barnaby Skye had never faltered, never abandoned his wife’s people, and when age finally overtook him, his Shoshones were better off than before his tenure.

  Now, though, the Shoshone starved, drank, gossiped, gambled, and panhandled.

  “You have a decision to make,” Victoria said.

  “I’ve made it.”

  She eyed him closely. “Goddamn, you’re Skye’s boy.”

  How she knew his choices, he couldn’t say, but she did.

  “Let him sleep,” he said, glancing at the agency building. “That’s all he does anyway.”

  Victoria’s eyes lit. A little rebellion, a little mischief, lit her as much as ever.

  He didn’t really know what he would do. The Dreamers could inflict disaster on their own people. But the Shoshones were already immersed in disaster, hungry, rootless, dispirited, and feeling more and more as if they had been sentenced to a lifetime in prison.

  * * *

  “Grandmother, come,” he said.

  She rose stiffly, but once she stretched, she was as lithe as ever.

  He led her toward Chief Washakie’s house, and sensed she approved.

  He helped her up the veranda stairs, and then knocked. This time the chief himself answered, eyed them, and suggested that the shade of the porch would be a good place to visit.

  They waited for him on comfortable wicker chairs, and when he returned Dirk saw at once that he w
as wearing a white-man’s suit coat.

  “I am pleased to see you, Mister Skye, and madam. If this is a social call, you will surprise me.”

  “There’s trouble, Grandfather.”

  “Ah, yes, Owl. He came here after visiting you. The Dreamer is collecting a storm cloud around him, and soon will rain lightning upon us.”

  “Then you know.”

  “As much as he’s told me. He’s an honorable young man who does not skulk around behind my back. He told me of his dream, and the meetings of Dreamers in the dark, and how the world will change. He turned my blood cold. I told him that dreaming would make things worse.”

  Dirk expected as much. “Grandfather, I will tell you that I have not spoken to the agent about the Dreamers, or to the soldiers. This is something for the People to deal with.”

  Washakie eyed Dirk sharply, a faint smile building in his seamed face. “Then it will stay that way unless Owl himself announces his intentions to Major Van Horne. But I doubt that he will.”

  “Grandfather, what do you make of it?”

  Washakie turned somber. “Nothing yet. Young Mister Skye, suppose you were to obtain the agency trap and drive me to our people. And of course with you, madam, if you are inclined.”

  “I have the use of it. I’ll be back directly,” Dirk said.

  He trotted to the agency, told a yawning clerk he was taking the chief for a ride, and swiftly harnessed the dray in the pen. A half-hour later he settled Washakie on a quilted seat, his Crow mother beside the chief, and they were off. It was midmorning. They could talk with many people this long summer’s day.

  They rolled down a golden road that angled toward Crowheart Butte, a favorite summering place of the People. On Sage Creek was the ruin of a model farm. It had been Barnaby Skye’s prized project, intended to teach these people how to grow their own food and care for themselves. Now it was deserted, some graying clapboard buildings, weed-choked fields that had once been virgin prairie, and an aura of desolation over it all.

  “Stop here,” Washakie said, as the buildings rose before them.

  He stepped nimbly to the dusty clay, toured the sorry place, and then clambered aboard.

  Dirk ached to know what the chief was thinking, but Washakie didn’t offer a clue.

  Farther along Sage Creek were the ruins of a few log cabins, simple structures with dirt floors, shake roofs, and gaping glassless windows. Some of the fields around them had been scraped into furrows and planted once, but only weeds grew there now. This had been the Indian Bureau’s dream: families on farms, raising crops. But simple realities had demolished the good intentions, not least of which was the lack of firewood for heat and cooking. So the People returned to their lodges which they raised wherever there was wood and water and game.

  Another hour of riding, with the dust sifting over the carriage wheels and eddying behind them, brought them to the first of the encampments, seven lodges in a spring-fed gulch with jack pine and brush to meet the needs of those people. There was no shade to speak of. But the creek was cool and clear. It wasn’t the best of places to summer, but it was close to the agency, and thus close to the dole of flour and salt and sugar.

  Chief Washakie waited quietly in the trap, eyeing the camp. His gaze caught the shabby lodges, patched over many times, some of them a mixture of canvas and hide. His gaze caught the children, dressed in rags, the boys sometimes naked. He surveyed the horses, three in the village, the rest probably eaten. He sniffed, not missing the rank smell of a camp that had been in a place too long.

  The Shoshones were quick to discover their chief in the carriage, quick to note his black coat, white collarless shirt, and black hat. Only his two braids of jet hair were familiar to them. The women shied away, but slowly the men collected around the buggy, their expressions ranging from pride to suspicion to defeat.

  The chief was in no hurry, and let these miserable people congregate as they would.

  Dirk felt their gaze upon him, and his old Crow mother, both of them strangers, in a way; sojourners among the People.

  Washakie seemed to know the moment to begin, and he greeted them warmly, calling them his own people.

  But then he addressed the younger men, who seemed to collect in a knot, a little apart from the rest.

  “I will speak now to the Dreamers,” Washakie said. “Come gather around, you who dream.”

  No one moved. Some of the younger ones eyed one another furtively.

  “Ah, my young friend Wolverine, are you a Dreamer?” the chief asked.

  The young man, with brooding eyes and heavy bones, considered the request.

  “Yes, Grandfather,” he said.

  “And what did you dream? Tell me what you saw. We shall all listen to your story.”

  “I saw … Grandfather, I am waiting for my dream.”

  “But you are a Dreamer.”

  “We follow the Dreamer.”

  “Owl?” the chief asked softly.

  The young man remained silent, a deepening defiance in his face.

  The chief waited patiently. “Do others among us dream?”

  The knot of young men gradually hardened into stony silence.

  “I see,” said Washakie. “The Owl is the most dreaded of all creatures. The Owl can visit death upon the People. The Owl can trick the People.”

  “The Owl can do that to others, Grandfather,” said Wolverine. “The Owl came when the moon was eating the sun.”

  “Wolverine, wait for a true dream, your own dream,” Washakie said. “And I will say the same to the rest of you. Look for your own dream.”

  The stony gaze had returned to their faces.

  five

  Dirk Skye drove patiently toward Crowheart country, where most of the People had congregated because there was wood and shade and a little game drifting out of the mountains. Chief Washakie sat quietly, undisturbed by the turmoil on the reservation. His clothing contrasted sharply with what he, or any other plains chief, might have worn a few years earlier. He meant it to be so.

  If Dirk had seen rebellion in the faces of those Dreamers, so had Chief Washakie. But he paid it little heed. Dirk steered the trap over two-rut trails that sufficed for roads on the reservation. The iron wheels coiled the dust up and around, so it was always tumbling back to earth behind the carriage. They would not return to the agency this evening. Washakie plainly intended to confer with most of his people.

  The next stop was where a few lodges had collected in the Wind River bottoms. The river formed a silver streak through the sun-browned plains there, with bands of green on either side. A life of sorts might be gotten from the area if there were roots and berries and rodents enough. Dirk steered the wagon into the center of the encampment, where the lodges stood in a semicircle. Stately cottonwoods and willows sheltered the place from the burning heat of midsummer. The camp seemed deserted as they drove in, but it was an illusion. The women were quietly working in the shade, and the men were dozing in the dried grasses. There was nothing of a manly nature for them to do; no war to be fought, and nothing much to hunt, though a few were usually prowling for anything they could kill and eat.

  The white man’s regime had rendered Shoshone males all but useless. They could not be warriors; the army protected the People from their enemies. They could not be providers; the agency dole of flour and sugar and coffee and occasional blankets sufficed to sustain life. And that was what burned in the bosoms of the Dreamers, who wanted nothing but to restore the Ways of the People.

  Dirk drove the trap to the edge of the encampment and waited. It was a courtesy to wait to be invited in, and even the chief of the People needed an invitation. It was granted by an old headman Dirk knew as Last Dog. Slowly, he steered the trap toward a shady place where these people would congregate. Washakie studied the camp with knowing eyes, and the tableau was not heartening. Still, the males bestirred themselves and gathered around the carriage. They wore rags, their hair was not groomed—the usual insignias of honor, a feather
in the hair, a painted emblem on their brown flesh, were absent. They were a sorry lot, and their demoralization hurt Dirk.

  Washakie waited leisurely. Haste simply was not part of Shoshone life, except in dire circumstances. But in good time, the encampment drew around the trap, making the dray horse restless.

  Washakie stood, eyed them calmly.

  “I greet you, my People,” the chief said. “I see my friend Walks at Night here. I see Rabbit, a man of great courage. I see Nighthawk, and Mare. All good People. I see my beloved ones. I see my brave women. I see my beloved children. I see the People, and I have come to listen.”

  “What brings you and the old Crow woman and the half-blood to us?” asked Walks at Night.

  Dirk knew that was not a friendly greeting, and it placed the chief among those who were not full-bloods.

  “You know our son Dirk Skye, and his honored Absaroka mother, Many Quill Woman, who live in peace among us. They were kind enough to hitch the wagon and come with me, and I honor them now with the best wishes of all the People.”

  Dirk saw no change in the faces gathered around him. Always before, Chief Washakie had warmed his people, won smiles and assent and loyalty. But now he was facing a crowd whose thoughts were hidden deep.

  “We are not receiving from the white man what was promised to us,” Washakie said, suddenly shifting ground. “We have been protected from our enemies, and that is good. But we have not received what was promised. Our young friend here, Dirk Skye, was hired to teach us the new ways, so that we might possess the skills of the Americans, but the promised school is unfinished. And we have not been taught what we need to learn about planting crops and keeping cattle and learning to read and write and do numbers. This is a great sorrow to me. I am saddened to see you here, digging roots to live, catching snakes for meat, when we were promised so much more. So I have come to listen; tell me what troubles you and what you are doing. I will take these things to the agent and make life better for us.”