The Owl Hunt

by Richard S. Wheeler

  He felt the presence of someone there beside the shattered pine, but there was no one. He was alone. And yet he felt it, this ghostly presence, this spirit of Owl resting there before he began the Long Walk into the heavens.

  “Yes? Yes?”

  “You see, soon they will go,” Owl said.

  Dirk didn’t believe it. The white men were here to stay; it was their world now.

  “It is a good dream, Owl,” he said aloud, into the emptiness of the afternoon.

  “All things pass, North Star.”

  “You did not have to turn yourself in to the agent. You did not have to sacrifice yourself, Owl. There are many Shoshone Peoples, stretching far to the west. You could have joined them safely and lived out a good life among them.”

  Owl laughed softly. “The time of the white man will pass, and then the blessed mother will be as she was, and the People will remember,” he said.

  Then the spirit vanished. Dirk could only sense it, but somehow he knew it. Owl was gone.

  Dirk started down the slope and soon emerged on the flat that shouldered the agency and fort. Owl swung in the wind.

  Old Victoria had boiled up some gruel for their supper, and they spooned it down. Dirk wasn’t very hungry.

  He avoided the north window, which looked past the schoolhouse toward the commons, where the gallows stood in the twilight, its burden spinning in the arctic wind.

  “He is not there,” she said. “He is with the People.”

  “With the People?”

  “They will remember him forever,” she said.

  “I don’t think the People will survive,” he said.

  She grinned. “Goddamn, you don’t put much stock in redskins, do you?”

  “It’s the whites I don’t have faith in.”

  “Your father and I lived with joy for many winters, North Star.”

  Later, when he lay abed, unable to sleep, he heard a rhythmic drumming, slow and steady, the sound of a heartbeat. He sat up swiftly, knowing he was hearing the Dreamers. The Dreamers were dancing this night, dancing their Dream Dance, their dance of pleading for a new world, a world like the one that was lost, Dreamers dreaming the promise of Owl’s prophesy, that the white men would go away, and the People would live peacefully on their own land.

  Sometimes the drumming seemed close at land, as if the Dreamers were circling the commons. Sometimes Dirk swore the drumming rose from the post. Sometimes the Dreamers seemed to dance before the agency buildings. Sometimes the Dreamers drummed a circle around his schoolhouse. Sometimes the Dreamers faded into silence, only to return. Sometimes the drumming rose from Chief Washakie’s house out a ways.

  He heard shouts, and knew squads of soldiers were hurtling this way and that, hunting down the Dreamers as if they were elk to be shot. But he heard no shots, no scuffles, no sounds other than hurried hooves clattering by. But the dreaming had stopped, and the night fell still, and a quietness returned not long before dawn.

  Dirk didn’t fall into sleep again. He lay abed, listening for the Dreamers, but with the dawning in the east he knew the Dreamers were gone, far away, off to their miserable huts and lodges and cabins.

  When the light had quickened, he peered out upon the commons, and discovered that Owl was gone. And that the gallows had been dismantled and lay in pieces on the hard clay. The People had Owl.

  thirty-four

  Once again the schoolhouse was empty. That morning, Dirk opened the doors and admitted no child. What parent would send a child to the agency at such a time? From the school windows, a child could see the commons, see the dismantled gallows lying on the clay. No doubt the mothers and fathers of those little ones thought the children might see something else dangling in the wind.

  In fact, there wasn’t an Indian in sight at the Wind River Agency. The winds swept over the clay, scouring it of horror. But Dirk supposed it would take a lot more than snow and rain and wind to purge the commons of its memories, now scorched into the minds of the Shoshone People.

  The school seemed hollow, and exuded a sense of failure. For years, he had struggled to teach the few children who did show up the knowledge they would need to survive in a new world. But he hadn’t thought to teach them that the penalty for failing to learn white men’s ways and beliefs could be death.

  He built up the fire against the cold, and waited for some student, any student, to pull open the door and slide into the warmth. Often, Shoshone mothers had sent their children without a lunch, knowing that Dirk and old Victoria would somehow feed the child. And somehow the schoolmaster always did, finding room in his salary to supply some oat gruel or a few boiled beans to the hungry child. He thought maybe it could be considered a bribe: send your child to school and a hot lunch will be waiting.

  But on this cruel November day, not one student appeared.

  He fought off melancholia with dreams. If the students couldn’t come to his schoolhouse, maybe he could take school to the students. Take a wagon out and spend time in each settlement, gathering students around and teaching what he could. That was an old dream he had nurtured ever since he learned that the Indian Bureau lacked the funds to build a boardinghouse for students. There would not be much education on the Wind River Reservation until the Shoshone young people could be housed right there at the agency.

  But it was an idle dream. His contract required him to be present daily, to open the school every weekday morning, and to maintain the building. Many an idle day there was naught to do but read, but he was always in peril of running out of books, and had borrowed what few of them he could scrounge from the officers at the post.

  Live students were such a prize for him that he had taken delight in them, nurtured their curiosity, worked swiftly back and forth in the two tongues, encouraged them, fed them, listened to their joys and sorrows.

  But not this day.

  There were no books at hand this day. The seven-day clock ticked slowly. The woodstove consumed its fuel and started to cool, but he threw another log into it. He would write, then, as he sometimes did to blot up time.

  Letters. There were things that needed attention at this melancholic post so far from Washington City. Yes, write letters about the demoralization of the Shoshones, their near starvation, their lack of support from the bureau. He could write of Chief Washakie’s efforts to bring his people into a herding and farming way of life. He could write of the problems posed by deeply felt beliefs, vision quests, the glory of hunters and warriors, the role imposed on women, the need to help these people into different worlds.

  He wished Aphrodite would come to help out in the classroom, as she sometimes did. She didn’t know Shoshone, but she could show them numbers and lead them through arithmetic and give them English words, and help to feed them when Victoria showed up with some beans or soup. But this day she was nowhere to be seen, and who could blame her?

  Still, he yearned for her to arrive, with her usual smiles. They could while away the day, as they often did, and it would be good. He always felt himself melting into her sweetness when she was there, and now he wanted that all the more, especially after they had clung to one another up at the shattered pine tree, sharing a sorrow that deluged both of them.

  Letters, then. He unstopped his ink bottle and collected pens with good nibs on them. Letters, but to whom, and about what? Who was he, to send missives to distant bureaucrats? He gazed out the window toward that sorry commons and discovered a work detail from the fort gradually loading the murderous timbers into two wagons. They were simply bluecoats, doing the task assigned them. The two draft horses yawned and waited. The men, working under that executioner sergeant, whose skills had just snuffed a life, were nonchalantly lifting the uprights and settling them onto a wagon bed. Then came the crossbeam, with a severed rope still wrapped to it. Other men were knocking apart the platform planks and loading them. The trap was intact, and the soldiers lifted it onto the planks. Thus did they remove the engine of death from the agency. Soon a Shoshone could w
alk into Major Van Horne’s lair without being reminded of the powers that white men held over him.

  Dirk discovered Chief Washakie standing at the far edge, watching, watching, as the death machine was turned into timbers.

  He thought to write the Indian Bureau about all that but decided against it. Not just yet. The mails would be thick with messages to and fro, from the agent, from the captain, from the ones in Washington City who presided over flour and sugar and beans and death.

  Where had the Dreamers taken the body of Owl? Surely to some secret place well hidden from the eyes of white men. And what would they do with it? And what would they think about it? Every one of them had heard Owl’s prophesy: when Owl began his Long Walk, then would the white men be filled with doubt and they would leave.

  Would the body be placed in a sepulcher, like the body of Christ? Would it vanish, its whereabouts known only to a few beloved brethren? Dirk ransacked all that he knew of his mother’s People, and couldn’t say. But he felt sure the final resting place of the boy, forever known as Owl, would be kept utterly secret, and utterly sacred.

  He would write the men in Washington City about food—or the lack of it. And how the agent kept the People imprisoned; they could not leave the reservation to hunt without special permission, and that permission was rarely forthcoming. The People needed meat. And he would write about a tribal herd of cattle, one that could supply the People with meat each month once it was built up. And about the theft of pasture and cattle by surrounding ranchers, and about the bitter reality that little was done about it, and the People suffered.

  Yes, it was time to write about that. Owl’s death had stirred not only the Dreamers to dream again, but it stirred Dirk to do what he must to better things on the reservation, no matter what the risk. So he settled down at his desk, nib pen in hand, and addressed his first letter—there would be many, he thought—to the commissioner in distant Washington.

  Dear Sir—

  A clatter on the steps halted that. He discovered Agnes Throw Dog, one of the clerks over at the agency.

  “The major, he wants you quick,” she said.

  “I’ll be along.”

  She stared at him, as if she were privy to something bad.

  “He’s lit a cigar,” she said.

  That was bad. Whenever the agent fired up, things were bad.

  She fled, and he watched her hurry through a gloomy morning and vanish into the agency. He had never been sure of Agnes’s office over there, and suspected there wasn’t any.

  He stoppered his ink and set aside his letters. There would be time for all those, and he wanted to weigh carefully every word he set to paper.

  Somehow, he didn’t like this. He pulled a coat over his stocky frame, and plunged into the cold, reaching the agency moments later. The agent was waiting, his cigar chomped at one end and pointing upward at the other.

  “Sit, Skye,” he said. “There’s bad news for you. The bureau’s canceling your teaching contract. You’re done.”

  He hadn’t seen it coming. He thought he had done a good job. It hit him right in the heart.

  “Out? But why?”

  “Well, they think you’re not adequate.”

  “But why?”

  The agent smiled slightly. “You know as well as the rest of the world that you’ve hardly advanced a student. You haven’t put a single student though. The whole lot are as dumb as the day you opened your doors.”

  Heat built in him. The school had no boardinghouse. “That’s not the reason, Major.”

  “It’s one of the reasons. Young man, you’ve got a lot going against you, and the bureau thought to do something about it.”

  “Such as, sir?”

  Van Horne sucked hard on his cheroot, until its end glowed orange and crackled.

  “You weren’t following our goals, boy. You’re supposed to be giving ’em a white man’s education. You’re supposed to be turning them into farmers and ranchers—and believers in what we believe in: democracy, religion, the United States of America.” He eyed Dirk. “Some think you’re not even a citizen, not even a true-blue Yankee.”

  “Half-Indian?”

  “Well, no redskin’s a citizen, you know. And you’re no more than half of one, and your pa, the Londoner, he switched pretty near at the end of his life. So, no, boy, you weren’t in there promoting the best interests of the Indian Bureau.”

  “Then why was I hired?”

  “Favor to your old man, I imagine.”

  “Who—”

  “Wires have been heating up twixt Fort Laramie and Washington City for some while, boy.”

  That was as much an admission as he would get out of Van Horne.

  “Was this because I schooled Waiting Wolf—who turned himself into Owl?”

  “That came up, yessiree.”

  “Owl’s vision was peaceful, sir.”

  Van Horne’s cheroot wiggled violently.

  “He started a coup. That little brat was fixing to overthrow the government of the United States, and it was pure luck that we caught him in time.”

  “Caught him? He walked through your door.”

  Van Horne straightened. “I’m not here to quibble, Skye. Pack up. You’ve got forty-eight hours.”

  “To go where?”

  “You’re an enrolled Shoshone, but that don’t mean I’ll hand out chow to you. Next thing I know, there’d be another rebellion around here. You’d be the next lightning rod, Skye. You and that old crone, you fetch yourself out of here and don’t come back. I’ll take the schoolhouse key right now.”

  Dirk handed it to him.

  “And don’t go in there. Leave the records.”

  Dirk stood, shaken. His world had collapsed.

  “You have some cash of mine in the agency safe, sir.”

  Wordlessly, Van Horne opened the black enameled strongbox and handed Dirk his greenbacks, the paltry savings from years of teaching Shoshone children. It didn’t come to much, but any cash would help him now.

  Then, oddly, Van Horne relented a little. “You’ll need to take the old woman off. She can enroll up at Crow Agency. I imagine they’d put her on. She’s a card, Skye.”

  Dirk rose, nodded, and stepped into a different world. The only home he’d had since his schooling in St. Louis was no longer a home. His mother’s people were suddenly beyond his reach. His uncles and cousins were severed from him. His mother’s grave and his father’s grave would no longer be near.

  A fierce heat stole through him. This was not about teaching. This was about the other things, and especially about Owl, and that dream of a world restored to his People, the world they dreamed of. Dirk knew what it was. His dark skin, his mother’s cheekbones, his mother’s ways and beliefs. They had hanged Owl and cashiered the half-blood young man who had once schooled the youth who had started the People to dreaming.

  And now young Skye would merely be frontier riffraff, the same as a thousand other breeds, a man who would swiftly be forgotten.

  It was a chill November day. He stepped into a different world, and crossed to the house he shared with his Crow mother, wondering what she would think, and what they would do and where they would go, and whether she could survive a long cold trip. It would soon be December, and she was as ancient and frail as papyrus.

  thirty-five

  Never had Dirk spent so restless a night, one haunted by dreams, regrets, loss, and mysterious terrors that lay beyond any reason he could summon. Several times he rose, peered into a misty night, swore he heard whole ghostly choruses singing, and then tumbled into his bed no more comforted than before he rose.

  His old Crow mother had simply smiled at the news that Dirk was no longer the reservation’s schoolmaster. Sometimes he didn’t fathom her, and he thought she was getting a little daft. But her eyes were always keen, her comments often sharp, and he sometimes thought she was simply strange.

  “Now we are free, North Star,” she told him.

  “Free and penniless,” h
e replied.

  “Many lodges would welcome us.”

  But these night phantasms that were discomfiting him as he lay wrapped in his blanket were a wolf howl rising out of his Shoshone roots, and not his English ones. He could see nothing amiss outside. A cloud cover obscured even starlight, and there was nothing in the walls of black outside his windows to suggest unrest.

  He was annoyed with himself. He wanted to be a modern white man but his Shoshone blood spoke to him of other, older, things. The chasm went deep. Aphrodite had seen it, but he didn’t think anyone else had.

  With the quickening of light piercing the overcast, the restlessness outside quickened, too, and he resolved to dress and patrol the agency, because there was something, a force or spirit, alive there. He poured water into a bowl and splashed his face and wiped it with a towel, and that would suffice. He hurried into his cord britches and a green woolen shirt, and then into the soft moccasins he usually preferred to white men’s shoes, and opened the door.

  It was hard to see what was seething there, small movement all across the agency commons, things disordered, out of place, wrong. He peered into the murk and discovered that the agency swarmed with people. He saw entire families, grandparents, mothers, fathers, infants. He saw old couples sitting side by side on blankets. He saw young men congregated into silent cohorts. There were women collecting in knots, settling on cold clay. The air was so chill that their breaths were visible. Old ones wrapped themselves tightly in striped blankets. No fire warmed these people, and for a while Dirk could not fathom why they were present.

  These people were not chattering, not shouting, not engaged in activities such as cooking or fire building or raising lodges. They were waiting, waiting, waiting, their gazes shifting from the agency buildings to the distant Fort Washakie. They were calm and yet expectant. They studied Dirk as he stood in his doorway, but mostly they watched the fort, and Van Horne’s darkened house. As the light quickened, so did these people, and they moved about for warmth. Dirk thought there might be two hundred of them, a significant portion of the Eastern Shoshone people, and they were waiting for this momentous day.