Dirk Skye fumed his way to the forlorn cabin. Nothing was right on this reservation. And Major Perkins liked it that way. An October chill was a harbinger of what would soon descend on them. The dirtfloored cabin was worse than a lodge, and he knew his father and Crow mother would suffer, and maybe his mother too.
His father wore his age with dignity, not complaining and doing what he could to grow food for them all. But Dirk knew he hurt. His Crow mother Victoria hurt in other ways, torn from her own people and way of life, even as her body lost strength.
He plunged into the cabin just as his mothers were boiling a vegetable stew, there being no meat again. It took the women most of each day just to find firewood, and they were forced to search ever farther away. In the days when the People lived in lodges, they simply moved to a new locale when fuel and grass and wood were exhausted. But now there was no place to go, and few lodges to shelter them.
His mother glanced at him and frowned, well aware of
the fury boiling through him. But she said nothing. They all had turned stoic, their goal to endure one bad thing after another. He wasn’t even sure that they had hope of anything better.
They ate the stew eagerly, but it did not fill or satisfy them, because there was no good meat. But they could expect none until the next distribution day, and then it was likely to be a few pounds that must last all four of them the whole month.
Skye, too, was watchful of his son, and when they had all finished their meager meal, he addressed the boy.
“What is it, Dirk?” he asked.
“I despise this place,” Dirk shot back.
The women were attentive now.
“Have you looked at the school? And the teacherage?”
“I have,” said Skye.
“And what did you see?”
“Empty school, all ready for use, and a house all ready, with furniture and a stove. I went to Major Perkins and asked why it wasn’t being used, and he said the Indian Bureau had no money for teachers or books or slates or anything. I said we’d teach, I can teach lots of things, and he asked what was in it for him.”
“That’s how the man does things here,” Skye said.
“We could be teaching. I know my arithmetic and letters and spelling and grammar and a lot of other things. You know a lot more than I do. These people need what we can give them. It’s not their world, and no one can help that, but we can help them into the new world.”
Dirk saw how attentive they were, and felt heartened. This was the first time in all his days and weeks and months on the Wind River Reservation that he had cried out, that he had been anything but polite and subdued.
“We could be living in that house. It has a floor and bed frames and chairs and a horsehair couch. It has a kitchen and a kitchen wood range and a woodstove in the parlor. We could be there. Every day I see you get up, drive the stiffness out of you that came from lying on cold ground. You never complain.” He appealed to them all. “You get up, begin a hard day, no matter that you hurt, no matter that dry firewood is two miles away and you must haul it here on your backs.”
Victoria sighed. “A lodge. That’s all I want is a lodge. All it needs is a tiny goddamn fire the size of a hand, and it is warm.”
“A lodge would be good,” Mary said. “This place …” She waved at the foul clay floor which soiled their robes, and the gloomy log walls, the one tiny window, scarcely a foot square because glass was precious, the flapping door hung on leather hinges. “It’s so hard to live in it.”
Skye rose stiffly. “Dirk, we’ll talk to the agent.”
“About what?”
“About the future.”
Dirk’s father dusted off his top hat and settled it on his gray hair and brushed his old leathers, making himself presentable.
“What future?” Victoria said.
Skye turned to her. “We don’t need to stay here. We can go live with your people.”
Victoria’s face told Dirk everything he needed to know. For weeks, this ragged family had lived in deep silence, the women bravely enduring a miserable life in a place that was neither a village nor a new home for his mother’s people.
Dirk followed his father toward the distant white buildings of the agency, the air sharp against his face.
Skye entered, lifted the top hat, and didn’t wait to be summoned by the agent, who it turned out was snoozing, his feet on his desk, his bulk filling a wooden swivel chair. Major Perkins awakened with a snort, eyed Skye and Dirk narrowly, and carefully lowered his grimy boots.
“It’s customary to knock,” the major said.
“Our apologies,” Skye said. “My son and I, we’ve been thinking about that empty school.”
“Think no more. Nothing’s going to happen.”
“The people here are slowly sinking,” Skye said. “We think we could help.”
“You were pressed into the Royal Navy at age thirteen, Skye.”
“It’s Mister Skye, sir. A preference of mine. In the New World, anyone has the right to be a mister, including these good Shoshone people, and my son Dirk. Now, as it happens, something can be done to help them. I was thinking my boy and I could teach a lot more than reading and doing numbers. These people have been pushed into giving up their lodges and building these miserable cabins, but this new life isn’t much good, sir. No one has enough firewood, and winter’s coming on. It’s not like the days when a village could take down their lodges and go to a fresh place with wood and grass. I’m proposing, Major, that we teach these people a little about business. I was a businessman in the fur trade, and as a guide, most of my life. I want to help these people. We need a firewood company, someone with a horse and wagon and a crew with saws and axes. We need a furniture company, someone who can join wood and make chairs and tables and bed frames.”
“And earn a lot of coin,” Perkins said, amused.
“Barter, sir. We have some potatoes. I’d trade some for
firewood and furniture. What I propose, sir, is that my son and I start up a school. My boy will teach arithmetic and reading and spelling and all that. He knows some mechanics too. I’ll teach these people how to organize services and businesses.”
“I’m sure you’d draw crowds, Skye.”
“I think, with Chief Washakie’s help, we would.”
“Well, the answer’s no. I have no funds for a school.”
“There’s another thing, Major. This tribe needs its own herd. It needs something to replace the buffalo in the diet, and I’d like to see a few cows and a bull each month set aside from the beef allotment and kept on the reservation.”
Major Perkins almost reared back. “I’ll not permit it. I’ve a contract with ranchers to bring in thirty beeves a month, and I won’t be undercutting these good folks who supply our beef.”
Dirk wanted to yell at the man. What beef? The culls and sick animals driven here each month hardly fed anyone. Just putting them on pasture for a month or two would add plenty to the food supply.
“I will discuss that with Chief Washakie, Major. We all want to see these people properly fed and healthy and on their way to living a better life.”
“No, Skye, you won’t be competing with my suppliers. This tribe will not grow its own beef.”
“Then release them to hunt buffalo,” Skye said.
“No, if they feed themselves on buffalo meat, they’ll take food out of the mouths of the local ranchers.”
“You’d prefer that the tribes remain as they are, Major?”
“Exactly as they are, Skye. It’s all orderly and peaceful.”
“What about the school?”
“It would just be a magnet of discontent and rebellion. It
would be best if it never opened its doors. In fact, I may have it torn down.”
“You don’t want them to live as white men do?”
“Well, Skye, that’s the policy of the Indian Bureau, but we know what the chances are. These are stone-age people, without the wheel, without metal tools. What good would a school do?”
“I’m sure Chief Washakie would be interested in that viewpoint, Major.”
Perkins stared. “You done, Skye? You want to register a complaint? Write my bureau? Stir up the Shoshones? Educate some boys?”
“We have one request: unlock the schoolhouse door.”
Perkins looked amused. “I might. What’s in it for me?”
“Commendation from the Indian Bureau. Anything you can report to Washington about schooling the Shoshones, making them self-supporting on farms and ranches, would win you advancement.”
Perkins yawned. “The position doesn’t pay, Skye. What’s a thousand dollars, eh? A year of toil and grief and isolation for a thousand dollars? And neither does any other in government service. So what if I rise, and become a supervisor for two thousand a year? What if I reach twenty-five hundred a year, and oversee a dozen Indian agents, eh? What if I dine with congressmen and senators, and bring in a chief now and then and present him to the White House? What then, eh? Why would I want to advance, when everything is fine right here?”
Dirk fumed. This was a world he didn’t know about, thanks to all the years he was confined in a quiet compound in St. Louis. But he was learning fast, and it was all he could do to let his father, so weary with age, conduct this exchange.
The agent was absolutely in charge, knew exactly what he did not want changed, while he enriched himself.
Dirk wished he knew just how Perkins was doing it. Each month thirty beeves were supposed to arrive, but only twenty-eight actually came, and those were so miserable that two of them hardly equaled one healthy one. Each month each household got a flour and rice allotment, but it was always short. How did the major rake off a cut? Who got the beef and flour? Who paid whom? And here was the major, resisting a tribal herd, resisting a school, resisting even the teaching of agriculture to Dirk’s mother’s people.
Dirk’s father seemed more accepting of this than he should, and Dirk wondered if age had simply weakened his will or dulled his once-powerful sense of moral outrage. He had swiftly come to understand what age had done to Barnaby Skye. The man never stopped hurting. Dirk, at fifteen, could hardly imagine it, a body that hurt all the time, but his own eyes told him that his father lived with some unimaginable pain, and it was softening and withering him.
The major slowly lifted himself to his feet, smiled benignly, as one does in total victory, or perhaps in total power, and nodded. Dirk saw his father nod stiffly, and slowly limp out the door. But the major’s gaze was not on the old man, it was on Dirk, educated by the blackrobes, and that gaze was not friendly.
But outside, where a chill wind whipped through their coats, Skye seemed to transform himself.
“Time to talk to the chief,” he said. “We’re going to go out on the biggest buffalo hunt ever to leave the reservation.”
“But we can’t!”
“But we will. And you and I are going to lead it. We’re headed clear out to the plains. Out near the old Bozeman
Road. Out in Sioux country, where the buffalo are still thick. And we’re going to make meat. And make robes. And make jerky and pemmican and lodge covers.”
“But we can’t without the major’s permission!”
“Exactly,” said his father.
Dirk stared at a man who suddenly looked twenty years younger.