Cry of the Hawk

42

Late December, 1867

“THAT THEM?” JONAH asked the old mountain man standing beside him. The light snow swirled from time to time, but mostly it drifted down flat and fluffy. Hook and Sweete watched shadows of movement in the distance. Coming out of the north. Down from the heart of Red Cloud’s country.

“Chances be, Jonah,” the tall trapper replied, his eyes never straying from that distance, hopeful.

“Gotta be,” Hook said. “Down from the land of the Tongue and the Powder and the Crazy Woman. As wild a country as you were a young stallion in your early days, I’d wager.”

Sweete nodded. “Man thinks of nothing more’n getting his stinger dipped in a woman’s honey pot when he’s a young colt. Ain’t till he gets older that a man learns the real value of a woman.”

“He don’t have to get old to learn that. Not if he’s a lucky man, Shad.”

Jonah felt the keen, sharp-edged anticipation of the big man beside him. Not angry at Sweete for it, when he could have been. For there was plenty of need in Hook to experience just that same anticipation of seeing one’s woman again after a long separation. And while Hook realized his was a far greater separation in both time and distance, he begrudged Sweete not.

It had been Spotted Tail, chief of a large band of Brule Sioux camped near Fort Laramie these days, who had told the two white men that he had reason to believe Two Moons’ band of Cheyenne were coming south to the fort. Not so surprising as it might seem, the old chief had said. There were many bands coming in to Laramie to see what the peace-talkers had to say. After all, listening meant receiving presents. Fine presents the likes of which other bands had received at the talks down on Medicine Lodge Creek. Word of such splendor traveled fast along the moccasin telegraph, all the way up the Bozeman Road to Montana Territory.

Travel on the road was all but impossible this time of year, what with the Indian troubles coupled with the way winter had clamped down hard on the northern plains. Just a year ago many of these same bands had waited in ambush while a dozen young horsemen lured Captain William Judd Fetterman and eighty soldiers over the snowy Lodge Trail Ridge up by Fort Phil Kearny. And when the white men were all in the trap, killed every last one of those soldiers.

And only this past summer the warrior bands of Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho had agreed to wipe out the two northernmost forts on the Montana Road in one furious day of bloodletting. As it turned out, the warriors failed in destroying Fort C. F. Smith up on the Bighorn River. It was there they failed in a day-long attempt to wipe out the few civilians and a handful of soldiers hunkered down inside a corral beside a hay field a few miles from the post.

The following August day saw a repeat of the same failure—this time Red Cloud’s own, in another hot fight that saw the Oglalla chief’s horsemen hurl themselves against a tiny ring of wagon boxes where some thirty soldiers held out against the hundreds, a matter of miles from Fort Phil Kearny while the sun hung high in that summer sky.

Nothing moved on the Montana Road now. Winter had come, and only the army escorted its occasional supply trains north. From time to time a solitary mail carrier slipped through, riding by night, making himself scarce by day. Men like Portugee Phillips, who were made of sinewy stuff that could take what the land and the sky and the warrior bands handed out—and still not break.

Riley Fordham had decided he would wait for spring and the first civilian train to gather on the outskirts of Fort Laramie, bound for the goldfields along Alder Gulch and Bannack and Virginia City.

“A man gets older and learns a little humility, doesn’t he, Mr. Sweete,” Fordham had commented one recent evening, “when he finds out he isn’t so immortal.”

“Gives a man a whole new outlook on life, Mr. Fordham, it does.”

But the prospect of waiting out the winter at Laramie did not improve the deserter’s disposition. Most of the time Fordham was looking over his shoulder, watching every new group of horsemen come riding in from the east along the Platte River Road, or south from the Colorado Territory. Always on the lookout for a familiar face, someone who might be looking for his.

The uncertainty in that waiting must surely take its toll on a man, Jonah decided. Perhaps, just perhaps, as much as the not knowing took its toll on him.

He gave Riley Fordham a grudging respect for riding away from Jubilee Usher. Better had it been that he rode away with Hattie, rather than just saving his own skin. But then again, Jonah figured, Fordham would have to deal with that ghost of failure in his own way, in his own time.

“You know that band. I can tell you do,” Jonah said, the cold breeze whipping the breathsmoke from his face. The wind here came cruelly off the Medicine Bows to the west.

Sweete smiled a bit bigger now. “Ain’t that I know the band so particular, Jonah. But I do recognize three of them ponies.”

“You see her?”

“Yes,” he said finally, pushing the wolf-fur hat back farther on his brow. “I believe I do.”

It might have been difficult for some men to pick an individual out of that crowd of several hundred warriors, women, and children, along with the old ones too lame or frail to walk or ride atop the ponies. Those wrinkled ones cackled and complained from the travois slung behind many of the horses where they sat among the folded lodge skins and camp equipment, parfleches and rawhide boxes filled with dried buffalo. Man and woman looked so much alike at this distance, every one so wrapped in blanket and robe, hoods pulled up around faces, coyote and wolf and bear hides pulled down to eyebrows to keep out the blowing, stinging snow. A colorful parade this was, coming down to Laramie in a gray December snowstorm.

In the van rode the young warriors, each brandishing his favored weapon, bow or rifle. They gave the gathering soldiers and the great number of civilians employed at the fort a brief exhibition of their horsemanship; their animals kicked up great clods of the frozen snow as they tore past, hanging from rumps by one heel, hiding behind the great, heaving necks of the grass-fed war ponies recent of the buffalo hunts in the north country. Then came the old men, each one riding more stately than the prancing bucks, no longer having to prove anything to any man, white or red. On the scarred ones came, their fans and pipes and other symbols of office now on display as they arrived at this great gathering place to be counted in those discussions to come with the white peace-talkers.

At the last came the women, guiding, riding, or walking beside the ponies who packed on their backs or dragged behind them on a wide vee of lodgepoles the wealth of the band. Like the great arms of an arrow point behind their men, the women slowed their march as the young men slowed theirs, waiting now for the Medicine Pipe Bearer to show the site he had selected for their camp.

And once the word was passed that their long march south had ended, a great shout went up from the old men, echoed by the young warriors—answered and eventually drowned out by the trilling, keening cries of joy from the women and children. Dogs barked their agreement. It had been a long, long journey of many, many days. And this would be a good camp, with many presents yet to come just for listening to the words of the white peace-talkers.

“Shell Woman!” Sweete called out, flinging his voice into the cacophony of camp making as the women shouted to one another as they raised the swirl of their lodgepoles, forming the great horned crescent facing the east.

The old mountain man turned for a moment, reaching out to snag Hook’s coat and pull him along. “C’mon, dammit.”

“Shell Woman!” Shad cried again in Cheyenne as the two white men trotted through the confusion. Man and woman, child and old one alike turned in amazement to watch the two white men zigzagging through their newly claimed camping ground heaped with the scattered lodge skins and parfleches and bundles of private riches.

A few yards ahead, he watched a woman lift her head, then turn fully around with a jerk. Surely it was Toote. She reached out to tap the person beside her, who bent over at the bundles atop the travois they had just dropped from a weary pony. The second woman stood almost a full head taller than Toote, who began running, full speed toward her husband.

“Rising Fire!” she called out in English, her arms opening as they collided in a swirl of snow.

Surely that must be the daughter, Jonah figured, watching the second, taller woman hurry forward now, pushing back her wolf-hide hat that caped her shoulders above the blanket capote. He could claim to have seen only her back of a time, and not much of that really, when she went stalking off in anger at her mother and white father months gone the way of spring and summer and autumn now.

The three embraced, the women bouncing on the toes of their buffalo-hide winter moccasins, snow swirling up their blanket-wrapped calves. Shad glanced over his shoulder, finding Hook standing there.

“C’mere, Jonah. You remember Toote,” Sweete said as the woman nodded. “And this is my daughter. You see’d her before—but never met proper. Her name’s Pipe Woman.”

Only then did she raise her eyes to him, capturing his attention with their almond luster. Then looked away, glancing up at her father. Asking something quietly in Cheyenne.

“Jonah Hook,” Sweete told her.

She looked at the tall, rail-thin white man again for but a moment. Only as long as it took her to smile and say, “Jo-naw. Jo-naw Hoo-oucks.”

This was the reason she did not like most white men.

They pawed at her with their eyes. Some of them lunged close enough that she smelled their stinking breath, the stench of their unwashed bodies. Young warriors bathed frequently. Young, arrogant white men did not.

By now Pipe Woman was old enough to know what the white men wanted with her. This would be her twenty-first winter. Long ago she had come to understand what men and women meant to one another beneath a buffalo robe, when their hands ran up and down one another’s bodies, tasting, licking, kissing, feeling, sweating in rhythm with each other.

She had grown up sneaking looks at her parents across the fire pit whenever her white father returned to the lodge of her full-blood Cheyenne mother. And their union had often filled her with confusion: as much as she hated her white blood, she loved her father and all he had meant to not only Shell Woman, but to his daughter as well. He was the only white man she had ever tolerated.

Many looked at her with undisguised lust in their eyes, licking their lips, lurking close with the smell of whiskey strong about them, their bloodstained, greasy wool-and-leather britches straining beneath the rigid hardness of their flesh as they tried rubbing against her. So it was that in young womanhood Pipe Woman had learned where first to strike a man whose hands she did not want mauling her breasts or pinching her bottom. One swift, sure blow to that swollen flesh that a man ofttimes let rule him.

More than once Pipe Woman had had to fight men off. She did not understand this power of her beauty yet. As much as her mother and father told her, still she did not fully realize the power it held over men, both her own, and the white man.

This stinking gathering place was filled with them. Soldiers in their dirty, mud-crusted uniforms soaked with melting snow. Unwashed civilians in their unwashed clothing, smelling of old fires and stale tobacco and meals spilled and smeared and forgotten. Both kinds seated at the small tables in this dingy, smoke-filled room where the walls themselves reeked of whiskey and worse.

Again Pipe Woman wondered why it was that a man who came equipped so well for peeing did not take the trouble to walk outside of such places as these and pee on the ground. Instead, she remained mystified, so many of these white men chose to pee where they stood, in the same room where they smoked and drank, and traded.

That’s why she was here. Her mother had sent her to the sutler’s for some hard candy. Sweete had brought coffee, but had been unable to find any hard candy for Toote along the trail the three men had ridden northwest from Fort Larned. It was a special craving Shell Woman suffered, from the time she was a child and experienced her first taste of hard candy given her by a trader on the upper Missouri River. From that moment, she was hooked something fierce.

So it was this third afternoon since the arrival of the women at Laramie that Shad had come down to the post with Pipe Woman and Jonah Hook. The men turned off to see the peace-talkers, and Pipe Woman was sent on to the post sutler’s place, to buy Shell Woman’s hard candy before the three of them returned to the Cheyenne camp where Toote was involved with a special supper: elk loin and marrow bones and fry-bread.

“Ain’t you a pretty little thing.”

Pipe Woman turned away from the man as he loomed toward her out of the dingy, smoky haze. The smell of him turned her stomach. And staring at the stinking hole in his face made her all the sicker.

She stood her place at the counter, waiting for the clerk to finish with a soldier.

The foul one came slowly around to her other side, his eyes moving down, then up her body.

“I’ll bet you know how to make a man mighty happy, don’t you, squaw?”

She did not understand all the words he said. There was some English she knew, learned from her father. Yet the meaning of the words spoken by this smelly man got across to her all the same. Pipe Woman refused to look at him.

“Bet that body of yours under that coat is all soft and warm and willing to let a good man show you just how he can make you happy too, little squaw.”

She glanced over at the side of the room where the tables and chairs sat—that part of this place given over to the white men who drank whiskey and became mad from it. They were, by and large, quiet and attentive at this moment. Watching her. Watching him too.

She looked in the other direction. The clerk nervously continued helping the young soldier. He wanted no trouble, and was doing everything he could to ignore her problem.

Then his dirty hand was on her arm, at her elbow. She stared down at the dark crescents beneath the long, cracked fingernails. Pipe Woman turned to face him as her right hand shot up, slapping him full force. The noise of that flesh against flesh weighed heavy in the smelly room where the white man drank himself crazy.

But as quickly her left arm was hurting—at both the elbow and the shoulder.

The man with the stinking breath had twisted and spun her about, pinning her arm behind her, raising it as she bent over, yelping as the stabbing pain took her breath away. His left hand now grabbed her hair at the crown of her head, yanking back slowly. He showed pleasure at the hurt he was causing her.

“Shit, fellas,” he said near her ear, “I’m new in your country here. But it sure looks like these squaws out in these parts like to play with a man just the way the squaws do back down to the Territories.”

“These are Sioux, and Cheyenne Injuns out here, mister,” one of the others said, all but his voice obscured by the murky, smoky haze. She did not know what face spoke. The pain was so great in her shoulder now that she saw stars blink before her eyes.

“What the hell that mean?” asked her tormentor.

“Just figured you’d wanna know these Injuns don’t just lay down for a white man out here the way they maybe done for you down in the Territories.”

“What you trying to say, mister?”

“Nothing,” replied the voice quietly.

“Just so you know,” her attacker said, dragging Pipe Woman away from the counter toward the smoky part of the room, “them squaws back down there don’t always lay down and spread their legs just ’cause a white man wants to rut on ’em.” He smiled wickedly. “You just gotta convince ’em how bad they want what you got to give ’em!”

He took his hand from her hair and reached around to tear open the flaps of her capote, the colorful woven sash falling to the floor at her feet. His long-nailed fingers dug at her firm breasts. With her heels, Pipe Woman tried kicking backward at his shins. He yanked upward on her arm, making her cry out, and dug his fingers into her breast brutally. So hard the first tears came to her eyes. Pipe Woman cursed those tears for betraying her.

“I’m used to taking a squaw where I want her,” the man said.

“Take her outside,” someone suggested. “Least do that.”

“All right,” he hissed at her ear, breathing heavily behind it. “Yeah, that’s the least I can do for you fellas. Since I am new out here. I’ll call you when I’m done—and any the rest of you can have what’s left when I am.”

She could feel him now, that rigid hardness pressing in behind her, near the tops of her buttocks. He was a tall man, and younger than her father.

He lifted her off her feet, starting her backward for the door when a sudden blast of cold air told Pipe Woman that someone else had come in.

“Say you! Hold that door open, mister!” her tormentor called out.

He shuffled her toward the cold draft that said he was drawing her closer to the door.

“Pipe Woman?”

Thinking she recognized the voice, the young woman was only sure when her attacker turned slowly.

“You know this squaw, mister?”

“Yeah,” answered Jonah Hook, taking his eyes off her face and looking into the man’s.

“She any good?” he rasped, then laughed humorlessly.

“Doubt she’s been with a man at all.”

She could feel his entire body tense at that. “How you so sure?”

“Cheyenne women like that. Go ’head. Put your hand down there between her legs. Yeah, down ’round her waist. Feel that rope. That’s a belt she’ll cut off for the man she’ll marry.”

Pipe Woman could feel the man’s breathing go shallow, hard and shallow. He was growing more than excited.

“She’s a goddamned virgin!” he said greedily. “Let’s go, sweetheart.”

Hook put out his empty hand. “I guess I didn’t get it across to you. She ain’t for you to use.”

The stranger stopped shoving her toward the door, his attention on Hook. “Where you from, Reb? You one of them poor white trash we whipped in the war?”

“You didn’t whip me, mister. I’m still standing here—waiting for your yellow-bellied kind to show me how you fight a man. You’re pretty tough with a woman. But your kind gets all yellow and runs when you gotta fight a man.”

“I figure I’ll take care of you—then have my fun with the squaw here.”

“Your kind never learned any manners around a woman, did you, Yankee trash?”

“This red slut ain’t no woman. She’s a goddamned Injun whore—and I’m just lucky enough to be her first man. Now—if you know what’s better for you, why don’t you just wait in line when I’m done, you ugly Gentile.”

“Gentile,” Hook repeated. “Seems I remember some folks calling me that before.”

“Chances are—you rubbed up against Mormons. And come out losing against the power of God. Like I said, Reb—I’ll whip you good tonight and leave you for the dogs to chew on come morning.”

“You’re a lot of talk with a Injun girl between us, Mormon,” Hook said.

Pipe Woman watched Hook pull open his coat, the big handle of his pistol sticking out now, looking huge like a deer hoof.

Her attacker was silent for a few moments, breathing hard, probably considering. Then he shoved her forward a step, closer to Hook.

“Something about you bothers me, mister.”

“Maybe because I come to hate Mormons.”

The man shook his head. “Naw—it’s them eyes of yours. Swear I seen eyes like that before. Yeah—almost like you could be kin to some other poor Secesh trash we burned out down in Missouri.”

She watched Hook swallow hard, his eyes narrowing as he asked, “Missouri?”

“You know the place, do you? Well, let me tell you about this hardscrabble farm we come on,” he hissed. “Folks there without no man to take care of ’em. Years back. Kids all got the same yellow eyes like yours, mister. Especially the girl. What’s she now? Maybe ten—eleven years old. Just about prime for rutting, don’t you think?”

“Maybe you ought’n hold your tongue, before you get it cut out of your throat.”

“Oh, you is it? It’s you gonna do the cutting? I don’t think so. So let me tell you we took that girl and her mama and two young boys and—”

“Let the Injun girl go now.” Hook breathed out slowly.

“You want her for yourself, mister?”

“I want to know where you got my daughter and wife. Then … I’m going to kill you.”

He laughed, like the quick, high bleet of a sheep. “You better be real good with that hog-leg you got stuck in your belt—because I’m quick.”

“Let the girl go now.”

“Yeah,” he breathed heavily, almost in a curse of a whisper. “I’ll let her go.”

His hand came away from her breast, with a sudden rush of blood to her flesh after so long beneath his clawing grip. Then he released her wrist and her arm fell, limp, tingling with the rush of circulation returned to its entire length.

“G’won now, Pipe Woman.”

“Nice name,” the Mormon said, pulling apart the flaps of his coat.

“Take it outside!” yelled someone from behind Hook.

“Go now, Pipe Woman!” Hook repeated, urgently, motioning toward the open door where the snow swirled.

She saw that Hook never took his eyes off the one who had grabbed her, so she was not sure he would know she had left. Only when she stepped through the doorway into the darkness filled with cold, icy, dancing snow … and slammed the door behind her.

She was running, running through the deep snow, sprinting through the patches of darkness and lamplit brightness—heading back to her mother’s lodge, breathless, hurting, scared—

—when she heard the gunshots throb profanely into that winter night, behind her.