North Star felt some mysterious tug as he and his mother worked their way up the Wind River. Something ancient and powerful was awakening in him. It seemed almost a physical force, though he knew he had scarcely been in this place, and only when he was too young to remember much about it. There was majestic beauty, with snowy peaks rising to the west, but along this trail was greenery and shelter from the winds.
The white man part of him told him it couldn’t be familiarity, because he had spent most of his childhood among the Crows of his mother Victoria’s people, and he had scarcely been here. But the Shoshone part of him whispered that he had come home, that this very land was the ancient and primal land of his people, and all that he saw was his to possess. His mind had worked like that for years now, a dual way of seeing the world, and he didn’t mind. If he was a man of two bloods, then he really wanted to see the world in each way. But just now, he was pure Shoshone, walking beside his
Shoshone mother Blue Dawn, just a little apart from a place he and she had not seen, Fort Washakie.
“I do not know this,” she said, the sweep of her hand encompassing planted fields, small log cabins situated well apart from one another, and up ahead, some white frame buildings with a flag flying above them. The new agency, he supposed, given by the Yankees to his people. The thought was a little cynical. The Yankees had forced his people onto a homeland, with borders around it that made it an invisible prison.
Still, this was a good place. He saw smoke curling up from the chimneys of the cabins, and knew life progressed within. He and his mother proceeded into this settled area unnoticed. There was no town crier anymore to herald the arrival of visitors, as there had been when his people lived in lodges and moved camp whenever it was necessary. They saw some women toiling in the fields, patiently using wooden or buffalo-bone hoes to hack down weeds. They saw squash and maize and beans and potatoes and grains, some of it well tended, the rest patchy and in need of hard work.
“This place …” Mary said. “We once raised our lodges here. We met with the other bands and had games and feasts. The families arranged marriages, and it was good. Now a plow has torn up the grass.”
But the closer they got to the white buildings, the more North Star sank into himself. What would his father be like? When at last, when they stood man to man, would he welcome his son and his wife? What would he think of Blue Dawn after her long absence? Would he and Victoria even be here? Neither he nor his mother were sure.
He could not answer these questions. But this was his home, and he was in a good place and his heart was good.
The sun had dropped to the top of the distant mountains in the west, and now the long light gilded the land, burnished it with gold, so that the cottonwoods were golden, and the grasses too, and the sunlit sides of the log cabins, and the sunlit sides of the agency buildings. And opposite every gilded object was a purple shadow, a shadow that was crawling along the earth as the sun sat for a while right on the distant ridges.
They both saw Skye at the same time. The gold light lit his ancient top hat and turned his white hair bright and caught his ruddy cheeks. He was in a field, hoeing, and there was no mistaking him. Mary cried out suddenly, her hand flying to her face. His own heart tripped, and for a moment he was anxious.
She steered her worn horse toward the distant man, her man, his sire, who hoed in the golden last light, and now they progressed between rows of some plant he thought might be potatoes, and at last Barnaby Skye noticed, and set down his hoe, and lifted his old hat from his head, so the gold light caught all his white hair, and the old man seemed to straighten up, grow taller, as he stood waiting. For it was plain the old man recognized his wife and his son, and now walked toward them, limping slightly, his hoe as his staff.
They reached him and stopped. Mary slid from her horse and went to him. North Star halted, afraid now, seeing the great puzzlement in the old man’s face.
“Mary! And you?” his father said, peering first at his wife and then at his son. “You?”
His mother stood stiff and proud, for she was making a presentation. “Yes, Mister Skye. We have come to you. Here is your son.”
He didn’t speak for a moment, but stood, the breeze riffling
his unkempt gray hair. Then, searching for words, he spoke. “I’m glad,” he said. “Gladder than I’ve ever been.”
He collected his wife and hugged her, and collected his boy and embraced him, and then stood back to gaze again at these two.
“Now my life is complete,” he said. “But don’t explain it. Let it be a miracle.”
“Mister Skye, we will call it a miracle,” North Star’s mother said.
Now the sun slid beneath the western peaks, leaving a rim of white fire as the gold faded away into indigo shadows.
North Star had no wish to talk. There was no need for words, and besides, all the feelings within him now were Shoshone, but he had lost his mother tongue and his English seemed poor and inadequate. His father was glad. So it was enough to stand still while his father took the measure of them both, his gaze, which seemed uncertain, absorbing his wife and then examining his son.
“What name shall I call you, son?” Skye asked.
“That name that draws you closest to me, Father.”
“Then you are Dirk, lad. And a proud name it is, owned by your grandfather in England.
“And you, my beautiful wife? What shall I call you?”
She grinned. “I’ll whisper it in your ear sometime.”
He laughed, a rumbling chuckle that wrought memories in North Star. “Let us make the circle complete,” Skye said. “Victoria hates cabins and stoves and is probably cussing her way through some cooking.” He turned to Mary. “Your brothers gave us a cabin. They are starting another.”
They walked through the fields, three people and two horses, in the gathering twilight, and no one noticed them. The first stars emerged, and Dirk looked as always for the
Star That Never Moves, his natal star and one that wrought odd feelings deep within him.
They reached the door, Skye set his old hoe against the logs and pushed the door open. Victoria turned and stared.
“I’ll be goddamned,” she said.
She set down an iron spoon and examined the youth and the mother, and then she studied Skye, looking for something within him. Whatever it was that Victoria saw in him, she seemed satisfied.
“I am pleased to see you, Mother Victoria,” North Star said.
“You are here. You are alive,” Victoria said. She turned to Mary. “We stopped saying your name.”
Dirk knew all about that. The names of the dead were never spoken.
“There isn’t much in the kettle. We don’t eat much anymore. You’re both thin.”
It was true; she had only a few cups of stew boiling on a sheet-metal woodstove. “Eat this,” she said. “I’ll start some other.”
“Let me cook,” Mary said.
There was meat boiling slowly in that stew, and the scent seemed heavenly to North Star. They had scarcely enjoyed a mouthful of meat for days on end.
Victoria headed first for the younger wife, and touched her cheek. “It is Mary of the Shoshones,” and then she touched North Star’s cheek. “What name have you taken, boy?”
“I wish to be Dirk to my father, and North Star to my mothers.”
“Aiee, this is good!” Victoria said.
North Star waited for the questions that didn’t come. He waited to justify himself. He waited to tell them why he had
left school. He waited for them to ask his mother where she had been. About the long trip. About how they connected. About what had inspired her. But Skye and Victoria asked nothing at all of him.
He was ready to tell them that he had done well with his lessons. He was good at arithmetic. He knew some geometry. He could spell. He could write. He could keep accounts. He had read many books written by Englishmen. He had learned the history of the Americans. He had learned theology, and knew the history of the Jesuits. He knew mechanics. He had done some carpentry. He could glaze a window or plane a door.
If he was weak, it was in composing sentences and writing paragraphs and papers. His thoughts were too unruly, and the nib pen too slow in his fingers. And yet, the good fathers had told him he was quick and bright, and they had little left to teach him because he was doing better than most of the other boys. They had told him he could do as well as any white boy. He wondered about that. Could he do as well as any full-blood too? What was it about being a mixed-blood?
But his father didn’t ask. His father kept staring at Dirk, staring as if he was trying to puzzle away the gap between the eight-year-old boy he last saw and this youth he was examining now.
So the questions didn’t come, and neither did they rain on Mary, and it gradually dawned on Dirk that this was acceptance; that he would not have to justify himself to his father and Victoria, and neither would Mary have to justify what obviously was a long and perilous trip. His father and Crow mother would learn about it in good time, and they were leaving it to him to choose the moment.
So Mary and Dirk spooned the savory stew while
another meal was boiling, the new one without meat because the antelope meat had been the gift of Mary’s family, and it was all the meat there was.
The cabin could contain them. It had no furniture in it, but at least it had a straw-covered clay floor with robes scattered about. It was as close to the interior of a lodge as a small structure could get, and it awakened ancient memories in North Star. It was a lodge, but with log walls and a shake roof and a sheet-metal stove.
There was only a small window, and it had no glass, but shutters against the cold. Now, as the last light faded, it grew dusky in the cabin. He could see that Victoria was bent and worn now, as thin as ever but her back had curved and her head rested forward. And Skye had lost weight, and had bent also, but there still was fire in his eyes. Fire in the eyes of both of them.
Someday soon they would know the story. Mary would tell of her impulse to see her son; he would tell of his rushed decision to return with her. She would talk about the long trip on the Big Road, and tell them where her horses came from, and the troubles they had. He would tell them of his honors at school, and what he could do and what he had learned. But not this night, when they paid him and his mother the greater honor of not asking.
“Father and Mother Victoria, I should take care of the horses,” he said.
“That’s good, Dirk, and I will show you,” Skye said.
Together they slipped into the twilight and undid the packs and the packsaddle and the riding saddle and brought them inside. Dirk knew that they would feel very light in Skye’s hands. They contained no food at all, and few other
things. The trip had consumed whatever small things Mary and he possessed.
Skye gathered the reins. “Good-looking horses. Are they yours?” he asked.
“They are my mother’s.”
Skye started slowly toward the fields, his limp slowing him. “The herd’s off that way. Not many left.”
“Stolen?”
“No, eaten. These people don’t get the rations they were promised by the government. Either that or the Indian agent skims much of it off. So they’re half-starved and living on horse meat until the next shipment of flour and beans comes in.”
“I didn’t know. I shouldn’t have come.”
“You can help, son.”
They hiked a while more along a lane between planted fields, and then Skye quit.
“My leg’s giving out. Here, take these over to that grove of cottonwoods and let them loose. They’ll find the herd.”
Dirk took the reins, led the horses another quarter of a mile to the trees, slid the bridle and halter off, and let them go. He saw no other horses and wondered if he’d ever see these again.
His father was waiting for him.
“We’re living on charity, Dirk,” Skye said as they started back. “These people can hardly feed themselves, much less a Crow and a white man. Tomorrow, you get yourself enrolled with the agent. You and Mary. It’s worth some flour and beans. Erastus Perkins is his name. Major Perkins. They’re all called major, all the Yank Indian agents.”
“Where are my uncles?”
“In a lodge upriver, four, five miles. They turned over the
cabin and said they’d live the old way for a time. But no one can leave the reservation without the major’s say-so, which means they can’t go after buffalo out on the plains, which means that they’re worse off than ever. Victoria and I, we’re thinking we’d best get back to our Crow people. Wild Indians have it better than tame ones, and we’re just robbing them of food, staying here like this.”
“It’s an outrage, sir.”
“It’s that. It’s slow starvation. They’re out hunting rabbits and snatching turtles and trying to kill a few ravens for the kettle.”
They reached the little cabin, and Skye paused.
“I’m glad you’re here, Dirk. I’d like to help these people but I can’t, not with my bloody busted leg, and I get worn-out fast. I hardly know what I’m going to do; everything I try, including hunting, hurts too much.”
North Star felt a strange tenderness, and more. He felt that he was destined to return at this very hour. He was standing, man to man, beside his father. They needed him here. The moving finger had written his fate.