DU PRÉ DROVE TOWARD BENETSEE’S shack. The moon washed things white or black. The landscape was ghostly and unmoving.
The old man wasn’t there. Du Pré went in, moving gently through the four old dogs, who wheezed in his way. They got his scent and went back to bed. Du Pré felt the stove. It was cold.
That damn old man, Du Pré thought, he always knows when I am coming and plays these games with me.
There is always a point to the games.
So. Where is the old bastard?
The moon is washing him.
The coyotes. Du Pré went to his old cruiser and dug his fiddle out of the trunk and tuned up. The sudden cold skew-jawed the strings. He tuned three times before the strings quit warping off.
Du Pré played his coyote song. He played howls on his fiddle and then he would stop-time and howl. It was a song from the Red River cart days, when the Métis came down from Canada to hunt the buffalo, driving the carts with their big wheels. Drive them buffalo into long, blind corrals and kill them with spears to save the gunpowder for them Sioux. Flesh out the buffalo, hang the sheets of meat on racks made of willow, dry them with fires made of red alder. Fold up the dried meat in rawhide parfleches, go north again, ready for winter…
Du Pré finished and waited.
The coyotes burst into chorus, crescendoed, stopped.
One howl kept going. It came from a cliff a mile or so away, a low one, perhaps fifty feet high. It wavered and sank.
The coyotes sang again, softer this time.
The lone coyote on the cliff howled.
Du Pré walked toward the cliff where Benetsee was. He stopped. Shit. He had forgotten to bring wine. Well, the old man would have to make do with water. Then Du Pré remembered he had a bottle of bourbon in the trunk. He went back and got it. Fiddle in one hand and whiskey in the other. Tobacco. Questions.
The land was stark, the trail a ribbon of pale gold across the white. Sagebrush stood gray, bark white and silver. The grass was dead and it waited for the winter.
Coyotes.
A jackrabbit, coat already going patchy white, dashed in front of Du Pré, a coyote twenty feet behind.
Another coyote be waiting ahead, spell the first one, and that damn rabbit run in a circle till he drop and get eaten, Du Pré thought. He remembered the first time he had seen that story in tracks in the snow.
The trail went to the right of the cliff, up through jumbled slabs of stone. The rattlesnakes would be chilled and sleeping, in huge balls of hundreds in the caves.
Du Pré’s head rose above the cliff top. He looked over and saw a bush near the edge of the cliff. The bush stood up.
Du Pré walked toward the old man.
“Ho,” said Benetsee. “Long way for a polite young man to come bring an old man some whiskey,” he said.
Du Pré shook his head.
“The bottle is too small to be wine,” said Benetsee. “So since you are a polite young man and not a cheap one, it must be whiskey, no?”
He took the bottle, cracked the seal, and drank deeply. Du Pré took out his tobacco pouch and rolled them cigarettes.
“This evil man, he don’t like the Cree,” said Benetsee.
“He only kill the one Cree,” said Du Pré.
“Three,” said Benetsee. “The woman from the Canada school was half-blood, a Métis. The last one was Métis, too. Red River Breed woman from North Dakota.”
No telephone out here in the sagebrush. Du Pré thought. No telephone in his house. I am the second person in Montana to know about this last killing.
Du Pré waited. Benetsee would tell him what he wished to when he wished to. Du Pré went over to the edge of the cliff and slid to the earth in the cross-legged set of the Indian.
They looked out at the sere landscape. A coyote trotted across the field, up to Du Pré’s parked car, pissed on a tire, ambled on.
A vee of geese crossed the moon, high up and headed for the Gulf of Mexico.
“I cannot see his face,” said Benetsee. “But these women, they pass by me on the way to the Star Trail, and they are weeping. Most of the dead are happy, but they are not.”
But the Star Trail isn’t Cree, Du Pré thought. I don’t know what the Cree think about that. Us Métis, the Jesuits got to us so long ago, we’ve lost some of our poetry forever.
“Babiche, bakihonnik, watunk,” said Benetsee. Choked, stabbed, and crushed.
“Could you maybe tell me how to find him?” asked Du Pré.
Benetsee sat silently. He lifted chaff between forefinger and thumb and let it dribble, to see what way the imperceptible wind was blowing.
“Used to be an ocean here,” said Benetsee, “long time ago.”
Du Pré nodded. Yes. Eighty million years ago.
“Métis used to camp over there,” he said, pointing to a big stand of willows around a spring that ran clear, sweet water. “You go there and stand sometimes, you can see where the corrals were for the horses. You go in the early spring, you can see where they drove the buffalo. Grass comes up greener where the posts were.”
“I can’t see him,” said Benetsee. “He is in the dark there, hole in the mountain. I can’t see him, just I maybe see him when he starts to move, see his eyes gleam. See him rising up, stirring, little bits of shadow. Then the women pass me when they are dead.”
Du Pré waited.
“He hates Indians,” said Benetsee.
Du Pré nodded. He took the bourbon from Benetsee and had a swig. The burn felt good. It was flat cold out.
“I try to scare him back,” Benetsee went on. “Maybe there’s another way out of the mountain.”
Du Pré waited.
“Maybe that’s just where he sleeps,” said Benetsee.
Okay.
“How big is the mountain?” said Du Pré.
“Can’t tell,” said Benetsee.
Okay.
They sat silently.
“You come over to Madelaine’s with me, huh?” said Du Pré.
Benetsee didn’t say anything. He didn’t move.
Du Pré got up, a little stiff.
“I am very tired,” he said. “I will go to sleep now, grandfather.”
“You going to go there?” said Benetsee.
“I don’t know,” said Du Pré.
“He just quit till you leave,” said Benetsee.
Shit shit shit, Du Pré thought. Now I got to worry I don’t go there the bastard be killing Indians because I stay here where I’d rather. Shit shit shit.
“Maybe he don’t quit,” said Benetsee. “I can’t see.”
Whew, Du Pré thought. Fucking Washington, D.C. Thank you, you old prick.
“When he’s ready again, I’ll know,” said Benetsee.
“You let me know?” asked Du Pré.
Benetsee shrugged.
Du Pré started to walk away.
“Gabriel!” Benetsee said loudly, his voice young and crisp. If it was his voice.
“Yes,” said Du Pré.
“He will come looking for you when he’s ready,” said Benetsee.
Okay, thought Du Pré.
Benetsee tossed something to Du Pré. A smooth round black stone the size of a small plum. Du Pré wrapped his hand around it. He opened his fingers and looked at it for a moment. He put the stone in his pocket.
Christ, I am tired, he thought.