Four days later they reached the summit of Sangre de Cristo pass, a grassy plateau, and there ran smack into Utes. A dozen warriors, brightly dressed with all their war honors on display, raced their fleet mounts straight toward the red cart, whooping ever closer.
Skye slipped his rifle from its beaded sheath, checked to see whether a cap was on the nipple, and waited for whatever came.
“It’s the Capotes,” Childress proclaimed as the advance guard hurried forth and surrounded Skye and his women. He lifted his broad-brimmed straw hat and waved them on, with a gallant and cavalier swoop.
All but two or three of these bronze, lean, bare-chested warriors were young and ready for anything. But Skye saw no nocked bows, and their war clubs hung from saddles. He slipped the rifle back into its nest. Shine fairly bounced and somersaulted on the back of the draft horse, chittering and yammering at the Utes, who pointed and laughed. They were all familiar with the monkey. Shine, not the trader, was the cynosure.
Skye saw Victoria ease back on her horse. Her skirts were hiked high, baring slim brown legs. Standing Alone rode in the same fashion, but she was not relaxed and her gaze was
somber and piercing as she looked over these rawboned warriors. Something malign rose from within the Cheyenne woman.
Childress immediately plunged into intense talk with a graying warrior, probably a subchief, and for once Skye regretted having a translator present because there was no finger talk he could read. The crafty Utes spoke a Shoshonean tongue, similar to that of the Comanches and Shoshones, and Skye wished he might understand.
The likelihood of trouble seemed remote, but with these Utes one could not know. He saw no easy escape. The open plateau offered no concealment, no help. He would have to wait and see how things went.
At last Childress turned to his fellow travelers.
“They’re heading out to the plains on a big spring buffalo hunt. They’re hungry. Whole band’s following, every last one. Back a way is Chief Tamuche and the rest of them.”
Skye nodded. “What have you told them?”
“I’m trading; you’re with me. That’s all.”
“Do they know what we’re about?”
“No.”
“Would they recognize Standing Alone?”
Childress shrugged. “This woman, Skye, looks two decades younger than the one huddled at the gate of Bent’s Fort. I saw her there last summer.”
“Please tell Standing Alone all this.”
Childress switched to the Cheyenne tongue, which he spoke hesitantly, and Standing Alone absorbed his news without a flicker of emotion. Several of the warriors listened intently, barely controlling their restless horses, and Skye suspected that some of them understood Cheyenne, and maybe English.
Skye didn’t like it. He lifted his hands to draw attention to them, and addressed the older one who bore the scars of war upon his torso, Skye’s fingers and palms and wrists and elbows spelled out messages.
Friend, peace, who are you?
The warrior pointed at himself. “Degadito,” he said aloud. Chief, friend, buffalo hunter. You trade? Hungry. Who are you?
Skye replied. Maybe, few things. Looking for lost people.
Ah, looking for people. The subchieftain nodded.
Skye made the sign for the heavens, and pointed at himself.
“Ah! Skye!” the headman said. The name was obviously known. Skye marveled that his name was so well known from tribe to tribe and band to band. The warrior studied him, examined Victoria, and then gazed at the beautiful Cheyenne woman, registering curiosity in his face.
The rest of the village rounded a copse of pine, and rode majestically forward. Now other warriors and headmen raced ahead, the red cart galvanizing them all. Soon Childress’s wagon was surrounded, ten deep, and Shine put on a show, swinging gayly from horse to cart to the ground, where he shook hands with squealing children. Soon the women were crowding close, wanting to see Shine. He obliged them by tugging at skirts and grinning broadly.
Skye saw the value of the monkey who entertained these Utes but was looking for other things: children who looked Cheyenne, or any other color or race or breed, and there were plenty of them to consider. The Utes seemed even more varied in racial composition than most tribes, and Skye thought he saw Hispanic and other European blood in the younger ones. The men were lean; the women stocky.
Standing Alone, too, was studying the Utes from the back of her horse. Here was an entire village on the road, the lodges loaded onto travois, households bundled onto the backs of burros and mules and horses, and even a few oxen. There was no place to hide a child.
The Ute women were smiling, poking fingers at the monkey, and obviously having a grand time, while Childress continued a conversation with the Utes. But Standing Alone was
sliding off her horse. She handed the rein to Victoria, who was muttering things, and then Standing Alone walked slowly through the throng, her piercing gaze resting on each young man and woman, missing not one young person. Her back was arched and she walked proudly, as if to say that she was a Cheyenne woman and not afraid. Once she cried out, only to turn away after staring at a girl.
All this suited Skye fine; Standing Alone could examine the entire band without making her purpose known. In a settled village, with lodges erected and life within them hidden, it would be much harder.
Victoria edged her shaggy horse closer to Skye. “We damn well got big luck this time,” she said. “They don’t know her. We don’t have to say.”
Skye nodded, lifted his top hat, and settled it.
Tamuche had dismounted and sent a boy to summon them; he wanted to be introduced. Childress did the honors, hastening across the flat with Shine riding his shoulder. Skye and his women followed. Tamuche stood on his tiptoes, erect; wiry, intense, dark as mahogany. Some black chin whiskers curled around his jaw, his eyes glowed like agates, and his demeanor was a studied indifference, a theatrical yawn. Tamuche plainly considered it beneath him to be impressed. The chief and headmen and shamans looked Skye over, nodded, and talked among themselves. Eventually, they turned to Childress.
“We’ll have a fiesta,” the Colonel said. “They want to trade with me and have a big Bear Dance in your honor. They got them a gander at that grizzly bear-claw necklace around your neck, Sah, and think that’s big medicine. There’s a spring around the bend, and that’s where they’ll break out the champagne and caviar.”
“I’m agreeable,” Skye said.
“They’re inclined toward anything bearish, Mister Skye. They have an affinity for bears, and think of themselves as bear people. Their Bear Dance is mighty medicine. So you’re
being highly honored. They look upon you as a good omen; a bear-claw man like you, can only mean a good hunt.”
“Sonofabitch,” said Victoria.
“Your wife expresses herself poignantly, Mister Skye. I am at a loss when it comes to matching her elocution.”
Victoria laughed. Skye could read her mind. If she was lucky, she might even get some hooch this dance night under the stars.
Childress continued: “I’ll tell them about our new store and hand out a few trinkets; I’ll remind them they’ll be passing it en route to the buffalo grounds. And I’ll probably sell some iron arrow points, and some powder, perhaps, but not a dozen of them have muskets. This outfit’s low on food, too.”
That all seemed just fine to Skye. He wanted to observe the Utes; watch them trade, study their physiognomy, and maybe learn how to approach them about the children—and stay out of trouble.
The Utes retreated to the small spring that dribbled icy water into a green pool with no outlet, while Childress drove his red rig there. Soon the squaws had some fires lit and the warriors were watering the ponies at the small spring. When Shine led the big draft horse to the spring, the warriors parted at once to observe this amazing thing, twenty pounds of monkey leading fifteen hundred pounds of horse.
No meat. The Utes didn’t have any, which was why they were en route to buffalo country. The squaws stood about, waiting for some provisions from the traders, but Skye had none to spare and Childress wasn’t carrying much. It was going to be a hungry night.
The Utes had a small herd, heavily guarded by the boys, and Skye looked them over carefully, unsure of what a Cheyenne boy would look like. But Standing Alone had already done that, walking imperiously among the laughing and joking Utes, her face a mask but her will and determination springing from every step.
The fat trader opened his store with a majestic flourish
and gymnastic entertainment from Shine, who plucked up awls and blue beads and arrowheads and flasks of powder and held them up, clacking and dancing before the studious Utes. Soon the cart contained some heavy buffalo robes and a few glistening beaver pelts, and the Indians were busy ogling their ribbons and beads.
Some cooking smells drifted on the breeze, along with piñon pine smoke, the sweetest aroma Skye had ever smelled, and in time he realized they were boiling a few dogs. He would gladly have rolled up in his blankets by then, but the night’s festivities were just beginning. Chief Tamuche invited the Colonel’s party to sit beside him, smoke the pipe as twilight thickened, and then see the great Dance of the Bears.
The dogs vanished down Ute gullets, and Skye saw Childress watching. But the Colonel asked for nothing, and contented himself with some tea, which he brewed in a small kettle all by himself. That in itself seemed to be a mystery: a fat man who didn’t need food. Shine had no trouble at all stealing a meal. In time, Tamuche’s wives presented Skye and his women with a half a dozen fat roasted lizards, glistening and yellow, with black collars, on a slab of bark. Some piñon nuts, Ute emergency food, completed the repast. Skye ate. He had learned to eat when he could and what he could, because the natural world provided nothing else. The whole meal consisted of a few smoky, stringy bites, and some starchy nuts.
Victoria laughed. She preferred the cuisine of the plains tribes.
The Bear Dance began in the velvet quiet of the evening, softly at first, each portion of it varying from the next. Skye listened to the metronomic drumming, the low gutterals, the honoring of all bears, the pantomimic capture and killing of a bear, the portioning of its spirit to the bear dancers, and then he nodded.
He awakened with a start as silence enveloped the encampment. A chill spring wind cut through the uplands, scattering orange sparks. Skye worried about his horses, which
were being herded with all the rest. He worried about the Utes’ famous propensity to lift whatever they could lift. The women were slipping into their blankets. Childress was snoring under his cart. Skye had never found raw ground comfortable to sleep on, and knew that few mountaineers did either, though they bragged about their toughness. This ground was hard as stone and he could not shape it. The night would be long and wakeful. But all things considered, maybe that was good, not bad.
But it was Standing Alone who filled his mind that night. Among these Utes, she was a different and forbidding woman.