Cry of the Hawk

39

October, 1867

“YOUR NAME’S HOOK, isn’t it?”

Jonah looked up from his coffee-making chores. The tall, handsome soldier came to a stop on the far side of the small fire where supper was beginning to roast. Jonah spotted the clusters on the collar.

“Have we met, Major?”

The soldier held out his hand as Jonah rose, dusting off his own.

“Not official, mind you. Joel Elliott. U.S. Seventh Cavalry.”

They shook, Hook suspicious. “I see. To what do I owe the honor of your come to call, Major? This go back to that time I was ready to shoot Tom Custer, don’t it? Go ’head and have you a set, where you can,” he said, waving at a nearby spot.

Elliott settled on a hardtack box, one by one slowly undoing the buttons on his tunic. As if he were searching for an answer.

“Suppose I only wanted to meet you—especially after that incident with your cousin—”

“He’s dead,” Jonah interrupted sharply, his suspicions confirmed.

The major appeared brought up by that, something short. “I see.” Then he cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Hook.”

“Jonah.”

“As much as you created a stir that day on the South Fork of the Republican … as much as Tom Custer has hated you ever since for holding him at gunpoint, I’ve got to say, and will admit this to any man who asks—I admire your sense of family. Your loyalty to family in the face of overwhelming odds.”

“Not overwhelming, Major,” Jonah said, dusting coffee grounds from his hands after he had dumped them into the boiling water. “It was just Tom Custer and me.”

Elliott smiled. “There were at least a dozen soldiers there, ready to put holes in you.”

Hook smiled in return. “Important thing was that Tom Custer understood that there was only one important hole—and that was the one I was fixing to put in him if he didn’t let my cousin go.”

“Like I said, as much as Tom hates you, and as much as the general himself doesn’t quite know how to deal with your brand of courage—I figured it was time for me to shake your hand.”

“Still doesn’t figure that I done something so special that a cavalry major come look me up.”

“You pour me some coffee, Jonah?” Elliott asked, watching Hook pull up two tin cups. “Sounds to me like you’re selling yourself short.”

As Jonah poured the steaming coffee from the blackened pot, he listened to the nearby cherk-cherk-creee of the meadowlarks feeding among the tall dry grasses caressed by autumn’s cool nights. “Man who makes something big of himself is a man I wonder about, Major.”

Elliott accepted his cup. “How old are you—you mind me asking?”

“Thirty, this last spring.”

“You been out here long?”

He hoisted his cup in the fashion of a toast. “Just since the Yankees brought me west to keep telegraph wire up and follow General Connor to the Powder River.”

“Back a little more than two years then.” Elliott sipped at his coffee. “You figure we got a chance making peace with these bands?”

“Major—you’re asking the wrong fella. That’s for certain. I’ve fought the Injuns, bedded down one winter with a Pawnee gal who taught me a bit of her tongue … and I’ve tracked around a good chunk of this territory with North’s Pawnee Battalion.” He speared a thick slice of buffalo hump and turned it over in the cast-iron skillet. “None of that makes me no great shakes when it comes to knowing if the army can make peace with these bands.”

“I’ve been trying to find out if there is really much cause to hope.”

“Hell—it’s hard enough for most men to make peace with themselves, much less have to worry about making peace with each other.”

“Let’s pray the chiefs of the warrior bands aren’t as cynical as you are, Jonah.”

Hook smiled, liking the open, ready good humor of the soldier. “Glory be—but we might have a chance to make peace between the Cheyenne and the army yet. If all the Injuns was like Turkey Leg—and all the soldiers like you, Major.”

In that second week of October, the bands had begun gathering for the great peace council along Medicine Lodge Creek, not far from Fort Larned in Kansas.

Miles to the south down on the Cimarron River were camped the bulk of the Cheyenne bands, more than 250 lodges. They waited, skeptical of the white man’s good intentions and promises of presents. On Medicine Lodge Creek itself Black Kettle’s 25 lodges of Southern Cheyenne camped. Below them were more than 100 lodges of Comanches. And below them stood the camp circles of some 150 lodges of Kiowa, along with 85 lodges of Kiowa-Apache. Closest to Fort Larned were 170 lodges of Southern Arapaho.

A great and impressive gathering of more than 800 lodges, all in a joyous mood, for recent hunting had been good, and word had it the soldiers at the nearby post had just received shipments of the goods soon to be brought out to the great encampment in wagons: coffee, sugar, flour, and dried fruits; in addition to blankets and bolts of colorful cloth, and surplus uniforms from the white man’s recent war among himself, uniforms the War Department had in the last few months turned over to the Interior Department. And on its way was a sizable herd of the white man’s cattle to feed the gathering bands.

When the white commissioners arrived at the scene on the fifteenth, they and their military escort of the Seventh Cavalry camped across the creek, on the north side of the Medicine Lodge. Row upon row of tents housing the troopers spread in grand fashion across the prairie. Next to those tents stood a long line of the freight wagons bulging with the presents for those making peace with the Great Father back east, and closest to the creek were the tents erected for the commissioners themselves. In that flat meadow between their tents and the streambank, the great council had begun its informal sessions on 17 October. Yet it had not been until the nineteenth when the chiefs began making their formal speeches.

Behind the commissioners, both military and civilian, hung a large canopy beneath which the many clerks and stenographers sat, recording the proceedings, word for word. There too sat the many newsmen here to record for their readers back east this momentous gathering with the warrior bands of the Great Plains.

On each morning the council assembled, the Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs seated themselves on the right hand of the white men, or on the west. On the left-hand side sat the Kiowa and Comanche leaders. And in a broad crescent behind these chiefs sat the old men, councillors and leaders all. Beyond them along the stream itself the young warriors moved about in all their finery—feathers and bells, paint and totems, not shy in the least of showing off their weapons. Eager young boys at times attempted to mingle with the warriors, but only with caution, for youths were never allowed to attend councils as important as this.

That first day Senator John B. Henderson had proposed to the assembled chiefs that the Cheyenne and Arapaho bands be moved south to the Arkansas River while the Kiowas could settle on land farther south along the Red River. As soon as the head men would agree to this proposal and formally touch the pen, the army would distribute the promised goods. First the Kiowa, then the Comanche, followed by the Arapaho, and finally—after many days of debate—the Cheyenne agreed to the white man’s terms.

Two days it took them to decide, two days as well after Jonah spoke with Major Elliott at that little fire beside the gurgling music of Medicine Lodge Creek, beneath the wide autumn black canopy with an egg-yolk moon rising off the horizon to the east.

Their job done after much debate and political posturing, the commissioners informed the chiefs they were leaving now, heading east to inform the Great Father of their success. In leaving, they were ordering the issuance of the promised presents. Tall side-walled army freight wagons rumbled into the meadow, emptied of everything in three huge piles: on the west, a pile for the Apache and Arapaho; on the east, a pile for the Kiowa and Comanche; and in the middle, a pile for the great Cheyenne of the plains.

There was so much there, and the celebrating was much greater than anything Shad Sweete would have ever expected, more than he had ever seen among the Cheyenne.

Little Robe, Black Kettle, Medicine Arrow, and Turkey Leg each sent their warrior societies forward to be in charge of a fair distribution of the presents among their bands. One by one the women were given kettles and axes, blankets and clothing, flour and sugar and coffee and more. Never before had any of them seen anything like this.

Perhaps the white man does number like the stars in the sky, Shad heard them whisper among themselves during that day and a half it took to distribute all the gifts placed on the prairie for the Cheyenne bands.

No man, no woman nor child rode from that meadow back to their villages. Every pony and pack animal they put to use to haul their new riches, stacked high and cumbersome and wobbly on animal backs or on swaybacked, groaning travois. Many times the poorly tied packs fell off ponies and burst open across the grass trampled with the pounding of many moccasins and hooves. Just as many travois poles snapped under the great weight required of them.

Women muttered, complaining of their plight, having to pack and repack and struggle along with their newfound wealth. But they smiled all the same. And no woman among them complained all that much.

With the days growing shorter and the nights colder, Shad watched with the other scouts as the bands moved out onto the mapless prairie, slowly marching into the four winds. Along the bank of Medicine Lodge Creek that last morning, the old mountain man found the water slicked with a thin, fragile layer of ice scum. Winter was due on the high plains. Winter would not be denied.

With the presents distributed, the women happy, and the chiefs satisfied that their hunting grounds had been somehow preserved by touching the pen to the white man’s talking paper, the civilian scouts found themselves out of a job for the coming cold that would one day soon squeeze down on the land.

Sweete thought of Shell Woman. Funny to think of her not as Toote, but as Shell Woman. But then, he had found himself among her own people for the better part of the last two weeks now. And in that time had not really thought of her as being among and surrounded by his own people—where she often camped at Fort Laramie, waiting for his return to her lodge. Perhaps by now she and Pipe Woman were in a winter camp far up in the Powder River or Rosebud country.

But it hurt, thinking on them now as he watched the great cloud of dust rise into the clear, autumn-cold sky above the rear marchers—these Southern Cheyenne going off to find their own winter camps. It hurt, that thought of mother and daughter, Cheyenne both. So only natural now that he think on father and son. One a white man, happy only when he was among an adopted people. And the other a half-breed, a young man denying his white blood and swearing vengeance on all white men.

What overwhelming hate must fill the heart of his son. One day there would be no other white men standing between them. One day, Shad realized, there would be no gulf of time nor distance between him and the son he had long hoped for.

“You coming, Shad?”

Startled, Sweete looked up from staring at the march of the disappearing Cheyenne, yanked of a sudden out of his reverie. Jonah Hook had come up with the horses and that one pack animal they had shared between them this last few weeks. “S’pose there’s no reason to be hanging on here.”

He glanced over the great, empty campsites strung up and down the banks of the little creek, grass trampled and pocked with lodge circles and fire pits, pony droppings and bones and the remains of willow bowers used by the young warriors too old to live any longer with their families but too young yet to have a wife and lodge and children too.

His eyes misted for a moment as he swallowed the pain of loss. To be hated, despised, cursed by a son was a deeper wound than he had ever suffered—across all those years of trapping and freezing, of fighting Indians and grizzly and loneliness and time itself. To stand in this place and realize what with so much time gone from his life, all he had to show for it was a son who had spit on his father’s name, his father’s race—his father’s blood.

“Winter’s coming, Shad,” Jonah said, slowly easing forward after he rose to the saddle. He crossed his wrists atop the wide saddlehorn. “Maybe we can go find us some work down south.”

He remembered. “The Territories?”

Hook nodded. “Down with the Creek and Choctaw. Sniff around for some word.”

Shad rose to the saddle and settled his rear gently against the cantle for the coming ride. How he wanted now to be plopped down in the sun, leaning back against the fragrant homeyness of her lodge, listening to the kettles bubble and smelling the pungent tang of autumn on the same winds that drove the long-necked honkers across the endless blue in great, dark vees. Going south.

Where Jonah yearned to go as well for the winter.

“Let’s settle up at Larned, Jonah,” he said, easing the horse away, pointing their noses east out of the meadow, toward the sun now fully off the horizon. A new day of opportunity and possibilities. Another chance to deal with fears and disappointments and pain that no man ought to know.

He glanced at the silent man riding beside him, seeing the gentle curve of a slight smile on Hook’s bony face. Something tugged at Shad now—seeing the comfort it gave the Confederate to be heading down south at last. To be going where there might be some answers.

And in that moment, he felt a little peace within himself to balance out that pain. For some time it had been there, and he had chosen not to realize it—this peace versus the pain.

Now he felt it, assured by it, comforted by it. Because so jumbled up were those thoughts of father and son with thoughts of him and Jonah Hook … that it caused him confusion and comfort, guilt and a sense of completeness never before experienced—that left him wondering where to go for help.

Knowing the only help for Shad Sweete rested within.