Cry of the Hawk

Epilogue

Late Summer, 1908

THE YOUNG NEWSPAPERMAN lay stretched on the freshly filled straw tick below the front window, where the night was beginning to cool at last.

In the back room, he heard the soft murmur of the old man’s voice. A cooing really, to Nate Deidecker’s ear anyway. That’s how Jonah Hook half sang, half whispered his wife to sleep as night had eased down on this high land in the shadow of Cloud Peak.

Whereas of a time long ago gone the couple had lain together in the shadow of Big Cobbler Mountain in the Shenandoah—seasons before a long, long trail had brought Jonah and his wife here to the edge of the high plains, their backs against the Big Horns.

Deidecker’s eyes burned beneath the poor light of the smoky oil lamp. Nate set his pencil upon the pad that lay beside the tick, reached over, and rolled the wick down, snuffing the lamp and plunging the room into momentary darkness—dark only for the time it took his eyes to grow adjusted to the moonlight rising over the vaulting land, starshine as bright as any ballroom back east in Chicago, Philadelphia, or New York.

He stuffed his hands behind his head as he rolled onto his back and drank deeply of the scents in the room. The freshly dusted tick, emptied of sour straw and refilled that afternoon by the old man.

He remembered Hook taking down the sickle from the porch wall and going to work only yards from the cabin as if he’d done the same every day of his life for a hundred years, slashing back and forth in a neat row across that small meadow where Nate’s picketed buggy horse grazed contentedly. Fresh grass, growing summer cured beneath the high-country sun now late in the season, was what the old scout stuffed into the tick until it could hold no more. Then Hook buttoned it closed and dragged the mattress into the cabin’s front room.

Here beneath the open window where the curtain was nudged into a gentle dance above him, casting teasing shadows over his outstretched body, the night was cooling.

Strange how quickly the night sounds came to him once the lamp was out and all was darkness once more in this world of consuming wilderness. Just outside that door, beyond this window only inches from his elbow—those crickets and locusts and tree frogs and the little toads down by the Big Piney. And from the distance, on that gentle, warm breeze came the first of the distant calls he was not sure at first he had actually heard.

A wolf.

Deidecker was sure that’s what it was. Hook had explained the difference earlier that day. How the coyote yammered and yipped—a smaller cousin to the big, yelloweyed, lanky-legged prowler of the high plains and mountains.

Out there now, that was a wolf.

Only then did he realize Hook was no longer singing to his wife. He too must be listening to that wolf, Nate thought.

Then the quiet, soothing rumble of the old man’s voice drifted back to him once more. Renewed, as he cooed his wife to sleep. Like a man would rock his children.

And something struck him, a thought that his mind hung on the way a man might catch his coat on the head of a nail as he carelessly brushed past an old, weathered wall. In this way his thoughts brushing past in the summer night as he heard a different voice coming from the old man this night, in the black of that back room. A voice unlike the one the old scout had used to tell his story to the newspaperman—soft enough to put Nate Deidecker to sleep as well.

He savored that sound, like water running gently over its high-country streambed. Hook cooing to the silent, far-seeing woman who never spoke, never so much as looked at Deidecker but once all that day and into the long evening of listening to the old scout’s stories. Rocking, forever rocking in her chair set down in the grooves worn into that old porch out front.

This wild, forbidden silence was their most private possession here in the darkness, with another summer night come stealing up the slope of these foothills. The light of a long day had hurriedly climbed over the Rockies.

As surely as Jonah Hook must have hurried west from Fort Laramie, over the Continental Divide, and marched to a rendezvous in that valley of the Great Salt Lake.

That part of the story would come tomorrow, Nate figured.

Enough for the newsman to digest in one day. Listening more than scribbling notes as Hook talked in that easy way of his so flavored by the things seen and heard, the things that had touched a heart gone old among these high and far places.

Nate had done enough of the writing though. But a lot of listening—to get the flavor of the old scout’s speech. Deidecker had to capture it just so, if he was ever going to make something of it.

He had come here for a story. And beneath this window with the wilderness slowly creeping in on him from the darkness realized he had a book. Good Lord—did Nate Deidecker have a book!

He closed his eyes, thinking on the leather binding … the expensive deckle-edged paper … signing copies of this breathtaking biography for the likes of folks back east who would buy out of wonder and amazement and …

… hours later, as the newspaperman came slowly awake, sensing there was a reason he had, Nate listened to the night. Listened to the great, shrinking wilderness that would soon be no more. Then he realized that the moon had risen, journeyed, and was coming down in the western half of the night black sky. Its first gentle, silvery rays slipped through the window only inches over his bed on the cabin floor.

Deidecker turned on his side, away from the window, propping an elbow beneath his cheek, ready to close his eyes again and give himself back to sleep when that moonlight caught something and shined from it, like a gentle ribbon of quicksilver off a mirror.

Pushing the single blanket from his legs, Nate rose, padding barefoot across the roughened plank floor. Never taking his eyes off the object beckoning from the stone mantle above the small fireplace.

He took it down and carried it quietly back to the window, where he turned the dull biass frame in the light to rid it of reflection.

Staring down into the old, faded chromo, recognizing a background of crude Indian tepees … only then focusing on the foreground, where stood a stranger staring back at Deidecker.

A young man with the nose and eyes and mouth of Jonah Hook. Beside him, a beautiful Indian woman, held close beneath his arm, protectively: and standing before their parents, a pair of half-breed children. The little boy wore only breechclout and moccasins, the girl, a dress with fringe spilling down the little arms, nothing on her tiny bare feet.

Nate Deidecker had not been aware of this brass-framed chromo sitting so openly on the mantle for all to see, like a family portrait.

Then the hair on the back of his neck prickled as he lay back down on his straw tick, with both hands gently pressing the old, faded photograph to his breast there in the silver moonlight come down on him from the high places.

They were days now gone the way of the winds.

Nate remembered the words spoken by the old man earlier that day when reflecting on the man he once was, knowing he would never be again.

Days gone the way of the winds.