Skye awoke with the sense that something was wrong. It was an ancient feeling, honed from a long life lived in a way unknown to most white men. It was not yet dawn, but a band of light cracked the eastern horizon. He peered quietly at the slumbering cow camp. The cook was already up and building his morning fire near a wagon with bowed canvas over it. The cattle were grazing quietly. He saw a night herder sitting his horse, unmoving.
There had been a light shower in the night, pattering down on Skye’s canvas-covered bedroll and annoying his face and hair. The air this June dawn was moist and fresh and sweet. He peered into the darkness, unable to banish his malaise, but he saw nothing amiss.
The evening had been enjoyable, though not for Victoria, who had sat bitterly among those who were occupying her homeland, a valley the Absaroka People had considered their refuge. But the trail crew had sawed off some thick beefsteaks for Skye and Victoria, and after beef and beans they had peppered them with questions about this country. Victoria had
subsided into silence, staring flintily at these bearded Texans, but Skye had relaxed some. These were working hands, without large ambition, unlike their employer and the men two days’ travel downriver, the ones who had nearly killed him. Skye didn’t hold that against this trail crew, but he knew Victoria did.
They had mostly wanted to know about the valley they would be settling; what tribes visited, what creeks ran through. This was home to the Snakes and the Crows, he had told them, employing white men’s names. It was arid, caught in the rain-shadow of the great chain of mountains lying to the west. It wasn’t prime buffalo country, but the river bottoms would support plenty of longhorns. He never did tell any yarns from the old days. These drovers wanted only to know about the present.
Now he peered about the slumbering camp, taking inventory, but he saw nothing amiss. Victoria still slept. He threw his bedroll off and lumbered to his feet, wrestling with his stiff and pained leg. The river brush wasn’t far, and he headed there in the deep silence. Dew caught at his moccasins. Even as he relieved himself, his gaze roved because his sense of malaise wouldn’t leave.
When he returned, limping painfully, he saw Victoria sitting up in her blankets.
“Something’s wrong,” he said.
She nodded curtly. She hadn’t liked being here last night, and still didn’t. She rose easily, her age affecting her less, and studied the camp. The cook busied himself, and ignored them. Their ponies were picketed on good grass.
“Go?” he asked her.
She nodded.
She would fetch the ponies. He couldn’t get around much
anymore. So he shook out his bedroll and tied it tight. Then he shook hers and tied it. Then he took his over to his saddle to tie it behind the cantle, and that’s when he discovered what was wrong.
His Sharps rifle was not in its sheath. Had he pulled it out, as he often did, to keep it beside him as he slept? He didn’t remember that, but checked the ground where he had slumbered. No rifle lay there. He limped in widening circles. Had he left it at the campfire? He hadn’t. Was it lying with Victoria’s stuff? It wasn’t. Her quiver and bow rested beside her Crow-made saddle. Was the light tricking him? No, the widening dawn skies were concealing nothing.
He had owned the Sharps for decades. It used an old technology now, but that didn’t matter. It had been a great lifesaving weapon, a weapon that had kept him fed and safe, for as long as he could remember. Its throaty boom had aided his wife’s people in their battles with the Sioux and Blackfeet. Its big bullet had dropped buffalo for her people and kept her Kicked-in-the-Bellies band fed and sheltered. With the Sharps, he had earned enough in buffalo hides and tongues to support his wives and son. The robes and hides he had brought to the traders had kept him in powder and caps and paper or cloth cartridges, had purchased pots and knives and thread and awls and calico. Long after the guiding business had faded, his Sharps had brought precious Yank dollars to keep his wives and himself alive.
Now it was missing, and he felt deprived and, in a way, naked. The Sharps was still his meal ticket and his safety. He stared at the empty sheath, willing his rifle to be there, willing it to be on the ground under his saddle, or close by. But it was gone, and without miracles, he could not replace it.
“We’ll look,” he said, not yet ready to make accusations.
She nodded. They separated, each drifting toward a group of slumbering drovers. She in particular had a way of gliding through unseen. No one paid attention to an old Indian woman. He watched her pause at each bedroll, pause at a pile of gear near the horses, and even stoop at one point to examine something closely. He drifted toward the cook and his fire and wagon. The cook was a cranky old gent, as disapproving of the Skyes as he disapproved of everyone else in his company.
“Looking for something of mine got misplaced,” Skye said.
“Nothing gets misplaced in my kitchen,” the gent said.
“I lean on it a lot,” Skye said.
“No sticks around here I haven’t burnt up to make coffee,” the cook said, dismissing him. Skye peered in the covered wagon.
“Ain’t nothing in there for you. Iffen you’re hungry, you can wait like the others.”
Skye had seen nothing resembling a rifle anyway.
Some of the hands were stirring now, rolling up their blankets, stretching, washing down at the river. Two night herders were riding in slowly, and Skye waited to see what was hanging from their saddles. But, in fact, neither had a saddle scabbard or a rifle on board. If they had lifted Skye’s rifle, they had hidden it somewhere in this brushy river-bottom country.
Someone had it. He hadn’t lost it. He didn’t know how to deal with it.
Victoria slid close.
“Some sonofabitch stole it,” she said. “Good at it too.”
Her grudging admiration was drawn from her own culture. The Crows were some of the best camp robbers on the plains, and were masters at lifting valuables from any white
party wandering through their country. Only this time the game was reversed.
Skye debated the proper course. There was no good way to deal with it. Accuse them? Threaten them? Systematically tear into their gear while they bellowed at him? No. The Sharps would not be in this camp, and would not be picked up by its new owner until the Skyes were long gone, and then it would be a source of great good humor among these drovers. But at least he’d put them on notice, one way or another. Some trail bosses ruled with an iron hand and wouldn’t let a guest at their campfire be harmed.
Victoria brought the ponies in and saddled them. Skye watched her lift his saddle over the blanketed pony and draw up the cinch. The scabbard hung uselessly from the right side.
Higgins approached. “You ain’t staying for a little coffee and cakes?”
Skye seized the moment. “Mister Higgins, I’m missing my Sharps rifle. It wasn’t in the sheath this morning.”
The foreman absorbed that for a moment. “Must be lying around here somewheres, then.”
“We’ve looked.”
Higgins studied the Skyes’ campsite, as if expecting the rifle to materialize.
“You used it some as a crutch. You reckon it got left in the bushes?”
“We’ve looked.”
“I don’t recollect seeing it when you-all rode in yestiddy.”
“I had it.”
Higgins paused a long time, and came to some sort of conclusion. “I imagine it’s around heah somewheres. I’ll ask. Let me do the asking, friend.”
Skye watched the foreman approach knots of men and converse with them, and watched them shake their heads. Higgins headed out to the horse herd, where other of the drovers were saddling up for the day, and once again the same questions wrought the same shake of the head in them all. Higgins must have directed them to start a search, because half a dozen yawning drovers began a broad sweep of the camp, the herd, the brush along the river, the riverbank, and the surrounding meadow.
They turned up nothing, which was what Skye expected.
Higgins ducked his head into the cook wagon and poked in there, and finally withdrew with nothing in hand. He returned to Skye and Victoria.
“It sure ain’t showing up nowheres. Maybe some thieving redskin come in the night and took her off.”
“In other words, it wasn’t your outfit.”
Higgins absorbed that a moment, and then agreed. “It sure as hell wasn’t any of my boys, and if I see one toting a Sharps, I’ll fix to get it to you. You going to the Shoshones on the Wind River, right?”
“Yes. They have an agent.”
“Well, Mister Skye, I’m plumb sorry. It makes the Republic of Texas look bad, and that makes me feel bad.”
“You tell Yardley Dogwood he owes me a new hat and a Sharps.”
“I don’t suppose I’ll tell him that. What happened to your hat?”
“Those bullets holes are what happened to my hat.”
Higgins had nothing to say after that.
“I suppose if a Sharps turns up in your outfit, Texas will be disgraced,” Skye said.
“I’m afraid that would be true.”
“And so would Texas and Yardley Dogwood, and each of you.”
The foreman stared.
There was no point in dragging it out. Skye painfully clambered onto the buckskin pony, and Victoria lithely settled in her squaw saddle, and they rode away, feeling the stares of a dozen men on their backs.
He and Victoria rode silently for an hour, wanting to escape that place and those men, and finally a certain tension lifted and they relaxed a little.
“I am watching the death of my people,” Victoria said.
“I’ll get a new one somehow,” he said. “Muzzleloaders are cheap.”
But the thing he had shoved to the back of his mind, the bottom of his heart, and the farthest reaches of conversation welled up in him, and he could not banish it. His vision was going bad. More and more, distant things were blurred, and words on pages were blurred, and he had been hunting now for two or three years in dread of not seeing clearly what he was going to kill, and that dread had so suffused him that more often than not he had let blurred moving objects pass by, for fear that he was shooting at a friend’s horse, and not the wild animal he wanted for meat. And he was more and more afflicted in his near vision too, often asking some white man to read something to him because he couldn’t make out the letters and words and sentences. Nor was that all. He had acquired a slight tremor, one he hoped was not visible to Victoria and Mary, but one that weakened his aim and required him to use a bench rest as much as he could.
The terrible reality was that he was not far from having to set aside his fine old Sharps because age had caught up with him. He had intended to give it to Dirk when Dirk returned,
or rather if Dirk ever returned. There was one more year of school with the Jesuits, and then Dirk would be sixteen and free to choose his life: Indian like his parents, or white. It was odd. He had driven Dirk from his mind, refused to think about the boy, loathed his decision to send his son east for schooling. But now he found himself aching for his son.