HAWKINS’S BISCUITS • ELK DOG • TRUST
AVERY JOHN HAWKINS crouched beside a small fire pounding dough in his large hands. He dropped the dough as biscuits into the bacon grease that popped and hissed in the blackened skillet.
“I tell ya. During these summer months I do prefer to stay out of doors as long as the weather permits,” Mr. Hawkins said, dropping another biscuit into the pan. “It helps during them long winter months, when that cold got you froze clear to the bone.”
Mr. Hawkins looked at the sprawl of stars that spread across the inky black night.
“You stop and think to yourself, It sure is cold now, but I do remember a warm summer evening not too long ago, and that does what it can to stove off the night,” Hawkins continued. “Even just for the moment, it surely does.”
There was something to Mr. Hawkins’s voice that Lionel had never heard before. Something foreign that didn’t sound like any of the Blackfeet or government people that occupied the outpost.
“Say, there, Corn Poe. You mind keepin’ an eye on them biscuits for a minute? I want to check on the corn.” Hawkins smiled. “I wanna check on the corn, Corn Poe.”
Mr. Hawkins reached barehanded into the fire and rotated the five ears of corn that lay in their blackened husks at the edge of the glowing ash. “I usually like to soak the corn for a day or so before roasting. Helps lock in some of that flavor.” Then Mr. Hawkins turned his attention to the brook trout that he’d instructed Junebug to pull from the stream earlier. There were five good-sized fish, stuffed with wild onions from the banks of the stream, skewered and hanging over the dancing flames. “That should be enough, well, with maybe some melon for dessert—that is, if you don’t mind gettin’ one from the garden there, Lionel.”
Lionel looked to Beatrice before leaving the circle of firelight. He wasn’t sure what to make of their new guests. Beatrice nodded, but did not take her eyes from the man and his son.
Lionel walked toward the garden. The cool grass was wet with the night and felt good on his bare feet. The smells from the Hawkinses’ cook fire urged him to move quickly.
“Joint guests is what we are.” Mr. Hawkins’s voice carried across the meadow. “We’re enjoying the fruits of your labor and what you done to the place, and y’all gettin’ ready to sample the culinary wiles of the Hawkinses, firsthand.”
Lionel paused to let his eyes adjust to the darkness before stepping from the grass into the turned earth of the garden. He looked up at the countless stars and listened to the crashing movement of the stream in the distance.
“How come this fellow over here, Junebug as you call him, never says nothin’?” Lionel heard Corn Poe ask. “I seem to notice that you’re the one doin’ all the talkin’.”
“Oh, Junebug will say plenty if you listen,” Hawkins said without turning from the flames, “but he don’t have the words that you or I have. He’s a mute.”
“Mute. well, I suppose that would explain it,” Corn Poe said, looking to Junebug and then suddenly raising his voice. “I just thought you was rude or somethin’!”
Mr. Hawkins let out a long, bellowing laugh that was soon accompanied by a strange but similar version of the same laugh from Junebug. It was the first sound that any of them had heard from the boy since they had met him at gunpoint late that afternoon.
“Why, he’s mute. He can’t talk. That don’t mean he’s deaf,” Mr. Hawkins said through his laughter. “I don’t mean to chuckle, but we’ve seen it done before. The few people we see, always raisin’ their voices when they hear that he don’t speak like we do, when there’s no need. He hears better than any of us do, but people always want to raise their voices when they talk to him. Ain’t that right, Junebug?”
Junebug nodded his head in agreement, his strange laugh bubbling into a slight giggle. As Lionel returned from the darkness with a large melon, he noticed that Beatrice’s face had slipped into a smile, and that even Corn Poe couldn’t help but laugh, despite the laughter being somewhat at his own expense. Lionel figured that Corn Poe may have become accustomed to this position.
“And Mr. Lionel with the melon. That sure looks like a good one. Here, boy, let’s set it over there.” Hawkins took the melon and laid it next to his saddle by the fire and then, raising his voice to thunderous proportions: “or should I say over there!”
They all settled around the fire to eat, but continued to giggle and take turns speaking in the loud manner in which Corn Poe had addressed Junebug. The tension that had occupied the afternoon and early evening seemed to erode, and even Beatrice took a turn, asking, rather loudly at one point, for Lionel to pass her another piece of freshly cut melon. This brought relieved laughter from Mr. Hawkins most of all, and after they had all finished, they settled back in the grass around the fire and looked up at the endless sea of stars.
“Oh, man, that was some good eatin’ there, Mr. Hawkins,” Corn Poe announced. “I was as hungry as a horse, but now I feel like a swolled-up tick a-fixin’ to pop.”
“Yes, it was, and I’d like to thank all of y’all for havin’ me and the boy,” Mr. Hawkins added. “I didn’t know what to think when I saw old Beatrice there sneaking up to my horse dressed the way y’all’s dressed. I ain’t seen no Indians in clothes like that in some time. You must be from the Blackfeet rez down below, huh?”
“Yes, sir, we are. But we’re renegades, on account of them trying to force the Blackfeet outta us,” Corn Poe declared.
“I do know that feelin’,” Mr. Hawkins answered, reaching for a small leather bag and pulling from it a pipe that he packed with tobacco.
“Hey, our grandpa smokes a pipe like that,” Lionel observed, then looked to Beatrice for approval.
“Is that right?” Mr. Hawkins asked, lighting the pipe. The big man sat smoking, his knees fixed to the insides of his elbows, staring off, lost in the fire.
It was quiet for some time, and Lionel thought that he might have dozed off for a minute. It had been a long day, and one that was not to be forgotten. Lionel was startled by a soft whinny that he recognized to be Ulysses, who was resting somewhere in the darkness of the meadow surrounding them. The Hawkinses’ horses answered, and then they all seemed to settle back down around the fire.
“That’s a helluva horse,” Mr. Hawkins said, breaking what passed for silence in the meadow with the distant sound of the stream, the wind in the Great wood, and the crickets that sang softly in the high grass.
“That there is Ulysses, the fastest horse in all of Montana,” Corn Poe said, drawing a heavy glare from Beatrice. “What? He is!”
“You don’t say,” Mr. Hawkins continued, noticing Beatrice’s scowl. “I suppose it ain’t none of my business how y’all came by a horse like that, but it sure is good lookin’.”
Mr. Hawkins leaned forward and took a drink of cool stream water from a tin cup and spat in the fire. “You said y’all was Blackfeet? Piegan, eh? Niitsítapi—the original people. The real people.”
“That’s right,” Corn Poe said, with perhaps more to prove on the subject than Beatrice or Lionel.
“You know I was down there for a while. Back when I was with the army, Tenth Cavalry.” Mr. Hawkins threw another piece of wood on the fire. “Why, I’ve been told that it was you Blackfeet that first domesticated the horse. Called ’em ‘po-no-kahmita.’ You know what that means?”
“No, can’t say that I do,” Corn Poe answered for the group, careful to avert his eyes from Beatrice’s close and cautious glare.
“Y’all don’t speak it, eh? well, po-no-kah-mita is Blackfeet for ‘elk-dog.’ Big as an elk, but you’re able to work ’em, carrying loads, like dogs.”
Mr. Hawkins leaned back against his saddle and took a long draw on his pipe, his dark face streaked with dancing firelight.
“Yep, the Blackfeet are known as some of the greatest horsemen the plains have ever seen—that much is true.”
“Some?” Corn Poe spat, once again looking to Beatrice for support.
Ulysses and the Hawkinses’ horses appeared out of the darkness as though they had been listening all along.
“Nioomítaa …A great horse,” Mr. Hawkins concluded, looking up at the horses.
Lionel rolled over onto his side and studied Beatrice. She was the best horseman he had ever seen, and today he had seen that even she could get thrown off by the “elk-dog.” A jumpy elk-dog named Ulysses.