Chief Washakie met them, as was his custom, on his front porch. He listened closely and came to a swift decision.
“I’ve been a friend of the whites and will continue. I’ve guided my people in peace. That is my road. I will not send word to join the hunt.” But then he paused, a faint smile on his lips. “But I won’t resist it.”
That was all Skye needed. He thanked the chief and left.
“Saddle up, Dirk, and spread the word, up the valley first. We’ll leave early the day after tomorrow from here.”
“Where will we be going?”
“To the plains.”
Dirk hastened to collect one of his mother’s good horses and saddled it. He would be the messenger of a quiet rebellion, hunters leaving the ancestral home to pursue the buffalo, contrary to the express wish of the agent. It tore at him. He had learned much in St. Louis. He admired the Americans and he knew they held the future in their hands. Even their reservation system was at bottom an effort to give his people
and other tribes a safe and productive homeland. His mother’s people could only bend, and change, or wither away. But here he was, furtively spreading word of a hunt, in defiance of the Indian agent, a man who was backed by the bluebelly soldiers.
How strange and determined Barnaby Skye seemed in that moment. This was not an old man, but a younger one with a will of steel.
North Star rode up the great valley of the Wind River, his message terse and clear: join Skye in the morning of the second sun for a buffalo hunt. Nothing more needed to be said. There were no remaining buffalo on the Wind River Reservation. The Shoshone hunters would arrive with whatever weapons they could manage, saddle horses, and travois horses. If the weather was good, and the hunting was good, they would bring back frozen quarters of buffalo on those travois. If the weather was warm, they would bring back jerky or pemmican. It would fill bellies during the long winter descending on them.
He found The Runner’s lodge and stopped to give word to his uncle, who spoke an odd Elizabethan English derived from his self-study of a collection of Shakespeare’s tragedies.
“Prithee what news?” The Runner asked, upon discovering his nephew at his camp.
“My father is organizing a buffalo hunt, and he’ll leave the morning of the second sun. All are welcome.”
“And where doth he intend to go?”
“The plains.”
The Runner pondered that, looking grave. The Shoshones were ancient enemies of the plains tribes. He was not a young man, and his memory stretched back into the hazy past. There was white blood in him because he was a grandson of
Charbonneau, and that was one reason Dirk felt close to him, and to his mother. The mixed-bloods were a people apart.
“It is something to be considered,” The Runner said. “A trial fraught with peril.”
He was talking about the United States Army, which had a small detachment right there on the reservation, near the agency buildings. It had started up as Camp Brown. “The plains, you say? That which was ceded to the Sioux?”
Dirk nodded. Double the jeopardy, the army and the Sioux.
“Is thy father, the honored Mister Skye, in possession of his senses?”
“He is twenty years younger now than he was yesterday.”
“I will think on it,” The Runner said.
On a frosty morning a dozen or so Shoshone men of all ages, plus several women, gradually collected at the cabin. They brought riding and travois ponies, and whatever weapons were at hand. Dirk had never hunted before, and now he examined these skilled hunters and warriors with respect. He would help with the skinning, or any other way he could. His schooling had taught him much, but not such as this.
In air as sharp as needles they proceeded toward the Wind River, directly under the eyes of the two platoons of soldiers at the army camp, but they paid no heed. The soldiers were busy erecting a new post, which was the true occupation of most enlisted men on the frontier. The comings and goings of a few Shoshones didn’t interest them. Skye wanted it that way; everything out in the open. Dirk rode easily, but not comfortably because the icy wind whipped the heat from him. In time they made the river, far out of sight of the soldiers, and proceeded downstream through the majestic valley, flanked by some of the highest mountains in the Rockies. No one
stayed them. Dirk half expected a squad of bluecoats to ride them down and turn them back, but it never happened.
For two days they rode east toward the plains, mostly under cast-iron-gray heavens that threatened to spill snow or icy rain over them. His mother rode comfortably; old Victoria hunched on her pony as if she had lived there all her life, and his father seemed more alive than ever. The Runner and the other Shoshones began to enjoy themselves, and one of them shot a buck that would provide some good camp meat for this large group. These people, Dirk realized, were poor. They could not renew or repair their buffalo-skin clothing because they could not reach the buffalo. They lacked funds to buy wool or cloth, and their allotments scarcely kept them warm. A few had old fusils or smoothbore rifles; only two or three had a modern weapon. Others were well armed with bows and arrows, and a few had lances.
Somewhere or other they crossed the invisible line; Dirk had no idea where it was, and the Shoshones understood it only vaguely. But they were no longer on their reservation, no longer within the “homeland” that the United States government gave them, along with two platoons of soldiers to keep them at home. Just where those lines ran was something Chief Washakie probably knew, but few of these Shoshones knew, and couldn’t fathom invisible medicine lines anyway. It was a good home, but it also was a prison without walls, and white men were claiming every inch of land outside of those medicine lines.
The sparkling river took them east, and when it curved north toward the gloomy canyon that guarded the Big Horn River basin, the hunters abandoned the stream and continued toward the plains where the buffalo were thick. They slept out-of-doors, building brush wickiups against the icy nights,
and relying on their robes for warmth. Dirk watched Skye and Victoria, fearful that the hardships of the trail would weary them. It was painful to watch his father ride, with his stiff leg poking out, always unbalancing him. His eyes were so bad that Dirk wondered if the old man would hit anything he shot at with an old muzzleloader he had somehow gotten. His birth mother found ways to ease the toil of the elders, but Victoria kept shooing her away, not yet ready to surrender to great age.
The cold weather held, and that was a blessing. Ice skinned the puddles each morning, and rimmed creek banks. Frozen meat would keep. But then one afternoon the thing he dreaded most fell upon them. A patrol of blue-clad cavalry soldiers cantered up and stopped, examining Skye and his cohort. Some of the Shoshones were taut and ready for trouble. The patrol’s commander, surprisingly a major with oak leaves on his shoulders, looked dashing, with mustachios and sideburns, and merry blue eyes.
The officer addressed Skye. “Shoshones, I take it.”
“Chief Washakie’s people,” Skye said. “I’m Mister Skye, and these are my wives Victoria and Mary, and my son, Dirk.”
“Mister Skye, is it? That name’s known, sir, from ocean to ocean. I’m Dedham Graves, sir. Call me Ded.”
“Dead Graves?”
“Dedham Morpheus Graves. It runs in the family. My mother is Passionflower Nightshade Graves. My father was Oak Coffin Graves.” He eyed the Shoshones and their dozen travois ponies. “Out for a Sunday stroll, are you?”
“It’s a good day for a stroll, sir.”
“Ah, Mister Skye, I can’t let you stroll over to Sioux country. Ever since the Honorable Red Cloud licked the United
States Army, they’ve been testy about wandering Shoshones and other undesirables sampling their private larder.”
“That makes it hard on us, sir. We’re some short of meat.”
“Short of meat, are you? Don’t you get thirty beeves a month?”
“We’re supposed to, but it comes out to a regular twenty-eight, and culls at that. Not enough meat on them to feed half these people for one week.”
Major Graves eyed him. “How about the other rations?”
“Always short, sir. The agent blames his suppliers.”
“Perkins does that, does he? Who supplies the beef?”
“Big Horn Basin people, sir, as far as we know.”
“Yardley Dogwood. We’ve had a few spats with him. He doesn’t want any Yank blue-belly soldiers on his rangeland.”
“I thought he might be the one, sir.”
“He has the contract, all right. I don’t know who has the contract for the flour and sugar and all that.” Major Graves stared into the cold blue sky. “The army would like to see the Indians well fed and happy on their reserves, and learning to take care of themselves.”
“Then you’ll let us continue our Sunday stroll.”
“I hear tell there’s a few buffalo along the foothills of the Big Horn. You might take your Sunday stroll that way, steering well clear of Yardley Dogwood, of course.”
“We’ll do that, Major.”
“I know a place,” Mary said. “In our tongue it is meeteetse, the place of meeting.”
“Very good, madam.” Major Graves smiled cheerfully. “I must report this, Mister Skye. I’ll let my superiors know I had a pleasant visit with you and your family who were out on a picnic.”
He wheeled his horse to lead his parade, and then looked back.
“Mister Skye, don’t confuse Dogwood’s longhorns for wild game. It would cause no end of trouble.”
“My eyesight’s getting bad, Major. Never know what I’m shooting these days. I can’t even tell if it’s two-footed or four-footed.”
The major laughed and wheeled his patrol west.
Victoria looked irritated. “When white men talk, I don’t understand nothing,” she said.
“He said he won’t report us, and don’t get caught.”
“Then why didn’t the sonofabitch just say it?”
“Politeness, I imagine.”
“I’ll never understand you crazy people,” she muttered.
Skye turned his party north, where he would intercept the Bridger Road and could follow it into the great valley to the north.
“Dirk,” he said, “tell our people that all’s well. We can hunt, but not where the Sioux are buzzing.”
Dirk let the others catch up, and quietly explained that the army didn’t mind, and this hunting party would slip north, past the ranch there, and look for buffalo in the hidden draws near the Place of Meeting.
If the conversation with Major Graves had fascinated Victoria, it has fascinated Dirk even more. Here was something his schooling by the Jesuits had not touched upon, an entire visit in which the principal concerns of each party were scarcely addressed. Skye wanted to lead his hunters to the plains but didn’t say it. Graves wanted to know why the Shoshones were off the reservation but didn’t say it. Skye wanted the major to know that the food allotments were seriously short, but made
no accusations. Graves wanted them to know that this state of affairs justified a hunt, with the army’s blessing, but didn’t say it that way. And the major said he would consider all this a Sunday stroll, and a chance encounter with Skye and his family.
Why hadn’t the conversation been direct and open? Dirk grasped that there was a world among white men he knew nothing about, and his father was a master of it, using innuendo and guile, even as the major did.
Skye led them into the Big Horn Basin over the next days, where they cut west, keeping a sharp eye out for Yardley Dogwood’s drovers. But it was a vast basin, and they never sighted the Dogwood company, even as they skirted the western foothills until they arrived in the place his mother called meeteetse, or meeting place, and found buffalo hidden in the nearby ravines.