Cry of the Hawk (40 page)

Long ago she had ceased to protest each time he circled her, flung back her hair, and bit her shoulder. It was the same each time. No more did she fight him with her fists and knees and teeth. Now she just fought him by going outside herself until he was done with her. She wasn’t really that body, after all, was she?

She clucked again. Shameless, how that body just laid there letting the brute abuse her with his privates, doing his business on her, in her, up to her womb where she knew she must never again have another child only to have it taken from her to suffer.

They would never get her mind. Not Usher. Not any of them. She would keep coming here, out of herself. That shrinking shell of what she had been, something that seemed to dry up and fall in of itself when she left her body, each time Usher wanted it for himself.

She left her body behind and feared going far away, forcing herself to remember, and look, and still feel something. But felt something less and less each time. Afraid now the last few weeks … or was it months? She had no way of knowing and grew afraid of that as well. Afraid mostly that she was losing her soul.

More and more now it was like stepping first with one foot, then the other, into that wide, yawning pit of quicksand—with nowhere else to go but into the pit. Then turning, reaching out for a limb, something hanging over the pit to help pull her out.

For the longest time there, she remembered the faceless man standing at the edge of the pit. And felt, more than knew, it had been Jonah. Him—reaching out for her … first with his hand. Then with a stout limb … then there was nothing left for him to do but stand on the edge of that pit helplessly watching her sink deeper and deeper into the quicksand of insanity.

After all, if she couldn’t help herself …

Hancock’s campaign along
the Republican River and Custer’s campaign along the Platte had accomplished nothing but to stir the tribes to a boil.

“Like jabbing a stick into a hornets’ nest,” Shad Sweete had told Jonah that late August afternoon as the entire command finally marched back to Fort Hays. A hot, steamy summer evening coming down slowly on the central plains.

“There’s talk everything west of here’s shut down,” Jonah said.

“Construction on the K-P ain’t no more. Workers skedaddled back east to safety. Wagon road from track’s end west to Denver City is closed down. No man willing to take the ride into Injun country now. What I was a’feared of most is just what happened.”

“What didn’t you want to happen?”

“I came along with Hancock and Custer to try my level best to see that the army talked with the tribes this time out—’stead of charging in shooting and slashing.”

Jonah had snorted quietly, without needing to say a word.

“I know,” Sweete agreed. “A foolish thing for me to think, weren’t it, son? Figuring I could help these bands by going along with the army.”

“Don’t grumble so much, Shad Sweete. After all, you was the one talked me into going along with you.”

“Should’ve listened to Toote all along.” Sweete looked up from the lodge peg he was carving on to watch his wife hauling water up from Big Creek.

“She figure it wasn’t such a good idea riding with the army?”

“Not so much that as much as she just wants us long gone from this country.” He jabbed the pointed end of the lodge peg into the dry, flaky soil. “We ain’t got no business staying around here where so much trouble’s bound to boil over. She wants to wander on west, over the mountains again. Says we’ll be safer … she’ll be happier there.”

“Maybe you should listen to her.”

Shad watched Toote carry the sloshing kettle of water in through the lodge door. “It ain’t like I never thought of it myself, Jonah.”

The voices from inside the lodge grew louder, more strident. Sweete glanced up at Jonah’s face as the angry words penetrated the buffalo hides.

“It’s hard on them both,” Shad explained, seeing Jonah become self-conscious when the ex-Confederate was discovered overhearing the argument. “They been doing the best they can, what with being Injun and Cheyenne and come up here to this soldier fort looking for a white man to boot.”

“Ain’t that many women around, Shad. And them two happen to be some of the best looking a man could set his eyes on.”

“I oughtta send the two of ’em north—live up there with the Northern Cheyenne on the Powder and Tongue.” He scratched at the ground with the peg. “It isn’t that the soldiers give ’em a hard time here—we all come to figure on that. It’s something else—something Toote or me can’t put our finger on. Unless …”

“Unless what?”

Shad gazed at the Confederate’s face a moment before answering. “Toote says it’s the girl’s white blood making her crazy the way she is.”

He chuckled. “That’d explain a whole lot, wouldn’t it? We white men seem just about as crazy as folks can get to the Injun, don’t we?”

He sighed, feeling better for having talked about it. “Perhaps you’re right. We don’t do anything what makes sense to an Injun. Especially an Injun woman. And when you mix in my white blood with that girl’s growing up a Cheyenne half-breed—it just makes things all the harder—”

The young woman burst out the lodge door, shoving aside the antelope hide roughly, storming off as Toote burst out on her tail, squawking her disapproval in a sing song Cheyenne. Pipe Woman kept right on going, headlong for the creek and the timber, where she could disappear, while mother ground to a dusty halt a few yards from the lodge, balled her fists on her hips, and stomped a foot angrily into the dried grass.

Shad rose as she trudged back toward the lodge. She plunged right past him as if he were not there. He reached for her. Toote yanked away from him angrily and dived back into the darkness of the lodge.

After a moment he shrugged his shoulders and returned to Jonah Hook.

“Seems sometimes I don’t do nothing right. Got a mark against me from the first whack, just because I’m a white man. She thinks I made Pipe Woman’s problem. Maybeso, I should send ’em north.”

“Let ’em simmer down. Both of ’em. Time was—” Jonah paused a minute, stared off across the prairie. “Gritta and me’d go for days not talking. Better for it—getting over being mad, rather’n saying something cruel or hateful, and being sorry for it later. A woman needs her time to get shet of it, and heal what made her mad at you to begin with.”

Sweete watched Jonah’s eyes focus on something a long, long way off. If not in distance, then something far away in time.

“Sometimes you love a woman more for the arguing,” Shad said quietly.

“I want to find her, Shad,” he said almost in a whisper. “Like a hole’s opened up in me and it won’t close up without her. I got to find them.”

Sweete reached out with one of his huge hands and squeezed Jonah’s shoulder.

“Your time’s coming soon.”

A tall dark-skinned
young man bolted from the lodge door as Jonah Hook strode toward Shad Sweete’s lodge days later.

Jonah stopped, watching in surprise as the young man leapt atop his pony, bareback, and reined off, hooves spewing clods of dry soil and long, unbound hair flying.

Toote Sweete emerged into the sunlight, followed by her husband. She called in Cheyenne to the young man as Shad stood watching the rider disappear over the nearby hills. He dropped the hand shading his eyes to find Hook staring, motionless, at the scene.

“You come just in time, Jonah.”

“What’s that all about?” he asked, striding up to the lodge. Toote turned, fuming once more, her eyes filled more with sadness than anger as she dived back into the lodge. “Some young suitor come to pay court to your daughter?”

Sweete put an arm around Jonah’s shoulder and led him a few yards from the lodge. “No one courting Pipe Woman.” He stopped, standing right in front of Hook. “That’s my son.”

Jonah found it hard to believe. “Your son? Didn’t know he—”

“Just didn’t tell you.” Shad turned and trudged over to a tree.

When the old trapper had settled against the trunk, Hook came over and plopped down as well.

“Pretty important thing—not to go tell a friend, don’t you think?”

“He ain’t lived with us for some time. Never quite did get used to the idea he’s a half blood. Damn his hide anyway. Always has a way of showing up at the worst of times. Here I thought Toote might be getting over the boy—and he comes a’waltzing in on her again, making life miserable for his mama.”

“What about you, Shad? He’s your blood kin. Your boy.”

“Don’t I know. But there’s something in him that ain’t in either his mother or me, Jonah.”

“Where’s he go off to, if he ain’t living with you?”

“Ah, hell—he’s been old enough for some time now, twenty-one winters. He can live on his own.”

“Where?”

Shad shook his head, his lips curled up in clear disappointment. “Don’t have any idea most times.”

“He come back to stir up trouble?”

“Just to stir his mother up,” Sweete answered. “Always does him a dandy job of that too.”

“Better that he’s gone then,” Hook replied, hoping his friend would see sense in his appraisal of the situation.

Sweete sighed. “No, this time he’s really tore his mother up. Always before it was something little, but this time he’s gone and made a real ruckus between us.”

“Between you and him.”

“No. Between Toote and me. Bull’s doing a good job driving a wedge between that woman and me. Back there minutes ago, he just spit on his white blood. Then he spit on his mother for laying with a white man and giving birth to him—cursing him with his white blood.”

“She’ll get over it, won’t she?”

“I damn well hope she does, Jonah.”

“Give her time—like we was talking the other day. Better that High-Backed Bull’s gone, ain’t it? So’s he can’t go causing her no more trouble.”

“But he can cause us a whole lot of trouble.”

“If he just stays away, things simmer down—”

“He’s run back to a band of Cheyenne he’s been with for a little over a year, to hear him talk about it.”

“They trouble?”

“Tall Bull’s band of every outlaw and renegade and outcast from every village on these plains. That bunch ain’t just warriors who will fight to protect their women and children. The bunch Bull been running with loves the stalking, the raiding, the killing just for the sake of fun. They’re bad from the word go.”

Jonah fell silent, not knowing what to say to the man, except that he understood. “Family is trouble when you have ’em. Trouble when you don’t.”

“Man comes to realize that, Jonah. But it don’t stop you loving ’em as much as you do.” His face brightened a moment. “Tell me about Grass Singing. You find out anything? Run across word of her?”

“Heard in Hays City she’s gone back to the blanket.”

“My, but you are picking up the tongue out in these parts. So she went back to her people?”

“What I’m told, asking about her in town. Gone back to her mother, and they both headed north to someplace in Nebraska to find their old village.”

“Lotta Pawnee up there. You figure on looking for her?”

“Enough folks for me to look for, Shad. She’s with her mama now—and I need to be finding some work while I keep my nose to the ground for that bunch out of Missouri.”

“You got any idea what we’re to be doing come freeze-up?”

He smiled at the old trapper. “We, eh? Well, now—for this boy, I’ve gone and found me a job with a new bunch of scouts being formed.”

“That the bunch under the North brothers?”

“Yeah. The major remembered me from Connor’s expedition to the Powder two years back. North needs help getting his Pawnee Battalion back together.”

“I hear the Norths both fought on the Union side.”

“Don’t matter, I suppose. Long as they can use me, I figure I can learn what I can from them Pawnee. Maybeso some tracking.”

“You learn what you can while there’s time. Come freeze-up this fall, the army will cut you loose.”

“That’s when I’ll be ready to ride south again—pick up that trail that went blind on me down in the Territories.”

Shad nodded. “I’ll be ready to ride with you. Your cousin—he going to go with us come winter?”

“Artus? I s’pose he is. Come winter, he figured he wouldn’t have no more work on that crew laying track up north on the U-P.”

“Nebraska?”

“Yeah.”

“I wish he’d hire on somewhere else, Jonah. Injuns still making things a might hot for track crews up there on the U-P.”

Jonah shrugged. “Artus, now, he’s come out of that damned war back east and got through just about everything else that’s been throwed at him. He’ll do all right, laying track. I don’t worry none ’bout Artus.”

34

Moon of Geese Shedding Feathers

O
NLY THE NIGHTS
were cool this season of the year. The days hot, sticky, steamy. But when the sun went down, a man could feel halfway alive once more.

Turkey Leg sat with the others. Their council held outside, at the center of the great circle of Cheyenne lodges. Too warm for any of them to huddle as normal inside a lodge to debate, argue, make plans. The breeze was better out here. Besides, the stars were out and bright this night.

“If the young men want to go to investigate this smoking, noisy monster,” said Burns, one of the older warriors, “I say let them.”

“Yes,” Spotted Wolf agreed. “We know the soldiers are back in their forts already. And they show no desire to again march after us.”

“It is true, the soldiers are no longer sniffing on the trails taken by our villages,” Turkey Leg said when all had grown quiet. Though he was chief, every man had his say in this warrior band. “Perhaps they do not have the heart to make war on us.”

“These soldiers,” spat Spotted Wolf, “they only want to make war on women and children … burn empty lodges.”

“Then go marching off aimlessly to wear both men and animals down without food or water,” Burns said.

“The white man is back where he is safe,” Spotted Wolf continued. “The young men want to ride with me to see what we can of this great smoking monster making noise in the north.”

“We have all heard tales of the monster, Spotted Wolf,” said Turkey Leg, an aging chief. “I would go with you to see it myself.”