Victoria watched Skye ride a little ahead, unbalanced in the saddle, his stiff bad leg twisting him. He was riding with his spine straight and rigid, his shoulders thrown back, not with his usual slouch. He was riding as someone new to horses would ride, ill at ease in the saddle. She stayed a little behind him, aware that she was seeing something fraught with pain. Skye didn’t ride like that.
She elected to stay back, knowing his silence meant something also. Sometimes in the past they had walked their ponies side by side, communing with each other out of ancient love.
His rifle sheath bobbed uselessly on his saddle. He ignored it. An empty flaccid sheath, a lost rifle, an old man. Wearily, for she no longer rode easily for long, she followed, letting his silence command the hours. They were two days from the Wind River Reservation of Mary’s people, two days from Mary herself. Mary would pitch Skye’s lodge near her brother, and her brother would be looking after her, and they would all welcome Skye and Victoria.
Ahead the treacherous Wind River canyon blocked any direct route to the land given to the Shoshones by the white fathers. Skye steered west, up a red rock canyon that would lead to a divide and down an ancient route much favored by the Shoshones themselves. And in a while they would all be together again in Skye’s lodge, and Mary would look after them. More and more, Victoria was glad that Skye’s small family encompassed the younger Shoshone woman. Victoria wearied easily now.
They nooned in an enchanted park encased in tumbled red rock. A clear creek ran through. The red walls were decorated with ancient stick figures, the language of people long gone. But the stories told by the figures were sometimes clear enough for anyone to read. This small avenue over the arid mountains was a sacred route, filled with mystery and holiness.
Skye eased off his pony but landed badly, gasping when his bad leg shot fire through him. Victoria watched helplessly. She led their ponies to the creek, where they nosed and swirled the water before lapping it.
Skye, afraid to settle into the verdant meadow without a crutch, chose to sit on an old cottonwood log.
Victoria washed her face in the icy water, enjoying the shock of cold that stung her skin. Then she settled in the grass near him, planning on a brief nap in the breezy shade.
“I was going to give it to Dirk,” he said.
It had come out of the blue, and she puzzled a moment to connect these words to anything. But he was talking of the Sharps.
“I can’t see much anymore.” He stared at her. “Next year. He’s supposed to come back here next year. The rifle, that’s what a father gives to a son.”
She marveled. She had known for a long time that his vision
wasn’t good, knew that when he hunted he wanted her along. Knew when he asked about things ahead, or moving animals, he was making sure. He couldn’t see things close at hand, either, and had stopped studying those mysterious signs in books, stopped reading. But never until now had he confessed to it, and somehow he had even been able to hunt well enough. He knew from the way animals moved what they were, knew the stolid walk of the buffalo, the bounce of a running deer, the race of antelopes.
Now, for the first time, he was acknowledging it. And for the first time in many winters, he had spoken of his son, as if the boy were back from the dead.
“Will he come here?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Eight years of schooling. Who knows?”
“Next year, he is free?”
Skye lifted his hat and stared into the red-rock high country. “I don’t know that he’ll want to see us. He’s been away a long time, and he’s got a good schooling now. He’s used to the city. He wouldn’t like it here. Stuck with an old man who hasn’t seen the inside of a school for half a century.”
She marveled. He had not talked about Dirk for years on end, and sometimes she thought the boy was dead, and Skye wouldn’t mention his name, the way the Native people didn’t name the dead. But now, suddenly, sitting on this cottonwood log beside a clear creek, he was talking about a boy who was ripped away and scarcely heard from again, except for a perfunctory letter waiting each spring at Fort Laramie saying he was well and learning his lessons.
“This school. Is it like a white man’s prison?” she asked.
“I haven’t ever seen it,” he said. “But there’s a dormitory for younger boys, another for older boys, a dining hall, some classrooms, and a church and rectory.”
She hardly knew what all that was about. “The blackrobes?” she asked.
“Jesuits. Society of Jesus. You’ve met Father de Smet on his travels.”
She had liked Father de Smet, the blackrobe who liked Indians and defended them against sickness and the Yankee soldiers and government.
“What will he be like?” she asked, dreading the answer. Would there be a terrible gulf between his Indian mothers and the educated boy?
“If he comes. Who’s to say?” he asked. He peered into her eyes. “I didn’t do it for me. If it was for me, I’d have kept him here, showed him everything I learned here. He could be looking after us now.”
“Will he hate you?” she asked, the thing that had been smoldering in her breast for many winters.
“He was too young to rip away from us,” he said. “But Bullock was leaving. It was then or never.”
She didn’t like the brittle tone in his voice; this was something he had been rehearsing and reliving and regretting for all those winters past. And the lack of any more children only deepened Skye’s desolation. Skye had sent his only boy away and torn his own small family apart.
He rose abruptly, and Victoria knew she must not ask any more or mention Dirk again. He limped to his horse, his back stiff against her, almost in rebuke for opening this subject. He pushed himself heavily into his saddle, and she slid into hers, and they turned their ponies up the red-rock valley and the distant pass they must surmount.
She rode behind, aware that something valuable had happened there, while they rested themselves and their horses. She never did understand goddamn white men, and she had
understood Skye not at all when he had sent North Star away and broken the heart of his two mothers. But it had broken Skye’s heart too, and that was what she marveled at now. She had never realized that. He had sent Dirk away for the boy’s sake, so the boy could find a good life. And he had suffered for it, every day of his life since then. She didn’t know the meaning of all this, but she knew, at last, what had gone through the heart of the man she loved.
They rode uneventfully over the high saddle that would take them toward Mary’s people, and descended Muddy Creek, through a quiet afternoon. Skye rested often, mostly to relieve his tormented leg. Victoria was grateful for the rests as well. Once she saw a doe and fawn, and resisted drawing her bow. The Texas foreman had given the Skyes enough meat and biscuit to reach the Wind River Reservation. She watched the doe lead the speckled fawn toward safety, and thought about the drovers and their vast herd of beef, which would all be killed and eaten someday.
She wondered whether white men apologized to the spirit of the animal they had just killed, the way many of her people did. She had a ritual prayer. I am sorry to have taken your life, she would say to the downed animal. And she would wish the spirit a good voyage to the place of spirits. She meant to ask Skye whether white men ever felt sorrow for taking the life of one of their cows or sheep. But somehow she could not bring herself to ask him that.
They reached the banks of the Wind River the middle of the next day, and made their way upstream, toward the towering peaks in the distance, following a well-worn trail along the cold river. This was Mary’s home. She would be there with the lodge, and there would soon be a joyous reunion of Skye’s family.
Within the hour they reached Fort Washakie, and discovered log buildings, and also a cluster of log homes, along with some traditional lodges. There were even some white clapboard structures that she thought were government buildings. These had fieldstone chimneys, some of which were leaking gray smoke. Plainly, the Eastern Shoshones were acquiring the ways of white men. Their great chief, Washakie, had befriended white men and wanted to teach his own people the ways of these Europeans who were filtering through their country. He was as old as Skye but more vigorous, and had an almost mystical power over his people. He knew English and French, having learned it from the trappers, and this had enabled him to deal with the Yankees and win for his people a great and beautiful homeland along the Wind River.
Now, as she and Skye wandered into this sprawling but tidy settlement, she looked for Mary and the familiar lodge, but she saw neither. Skye reined in his pony, unsure where to go or what to do, and then started a systematic search for his lodge, even as Shoshone children and women, and a few elders, congregated around them. They all knew the Skyes, and they greeted the Skye family joyously—except for one thing.
“Where is our Blue Dawn?” a woman asked.
Skye knew enough of the tongue to understand. “Isn’t she here?” he replied.
They stared at one another. Mary, it seemed, had not come to Fort Washakie at all, and no one had seen her for many moons.
An unease built in Victoria. Surely Mary would have sent word. But it was plain that Skye’s younger wife had never arrived, no Skye lodge had been raised here, and the Shoshones had no knowledge of her whereabouts.
Victoria was well aware of all the troubles that could befall
a lone Indian woman traversing a vast land. Bears, storms, hail, sickness, injury, a broken leg, a lamed pony, death at the hands of hostile tribes, and something more. White men. Had that ugly bunch with Yardley Dogwood caught her, saw how vulnerable and beautiful she was, used her, and then killed her as they would kill some camp dog?
The thought must have crossed Skye’s mind too, because she found herself staring into his worried eyes. Those savages from Texas knew no boundaries.
About then Mary’s brother, The Runner, gray at the temples now, pushed through the throng.
“It is thee,” he said. “Art thou here for a visit?”
Skye had always loved The Runner’s Elizabethan English, gotten from studying the Bible and Shakespeare given to him by a white teacher long before.
“We are. It’s good to see you, my brother. And where is Blue Dawn?”
“Thou hast asked a question I cannot answer.”
“She came ahead of us. Victoria left her on the Yellowstone. She was coming here.”
But The Runner could only stare, sadly. “Brother and sister, come to my house. We will await Blue Dawn there. See my house? It is built the way of white men.”
Skye nodded reluctantly. “Has there been any word of trouble? Are there hunting bands from other tribes in the area?”
“No, only the sweetness of spring doth fill the air … But yes, word hath come that some white men with many cattle are upon the Big Horn River.”
Skye’s dread was palpable to Victoria. She thought that she and Skye might soon retrace their steps, this time looking for a hasty grave.