Spirit Wolf (13 page)

Nash led the horses back up to the corral, stripped them of their saddles and blankets, and rubbed them down with hay while they ate their oats. Nothing like oats to make a horse feel fat and sassy, and they'd need that if the storm Flynn was talking about ever made its debut. After the horses settled down, Nash walked back to the lean-to. The campfire was shooting flames into the frigid air, and grease in the frying pan, perched on a rock near the fire, was already smoking.

Uriah looked up as Nash walked back into camp. The cold of the past few days had seeped into his bones, and he needed the blaze to drive the chill away. It helped, but only a little. The cold simply played hide-and-seek with the fire. If a man stood front on to the flames, the cold would slip wraithlike under his coattails and steal along his backbone and down his legs. Fires were more sacrifice than solution to the cold.

Uriah tossed the steaks into the frying pan and a little plume of smoke trailed off into the air. Nash was so hungry he thought he could eat the steaks just the way they were, just the way the old man had eaten the liver.

The old man. Nash didn't really want to deal with the old man now, not with Uriah frying steaks, not while Uriah was hanging on to the routine of cooking meals as a drowning man clutches a rope thrown to him. But before long, Flynn came over. Flynn had the Irish gift of healing pain. He bantered with Uriah, weighing the hurt hiding behind the forced smile and light talk. The Irishman examined the pain, as a doctor might examine a tumor, searching for its weakness. Then Flynn lanced that hurt with humor, gently at first, opening it a bit more with the whiskey he brought with him. Nash watched until he heard his father chuckle. Laughter wasn't a cure, but it sutured the wound Uriah had opened that afternoon.

When Nash heard his father laugh, he walked over to the burlap sack where the deer carcass was hanging. “Dad, I'm going to take the old man some liver.”

Flynn saw the tension between Uriah and Nash, and he put his words between them. “I don't know. Looks to me like Nash is more worried about passing the liver off on somebody else than he is about feeding that old man.”

And Uriah returned Flynn's grin. “Maybe so,” he said.

The old man was sitting beside the fire, still as death. Nash didn't know how anybody could sit like that without moving. But that was foolish. He had to be moving. He had to be going down to the creek for water and back into the trees to relieve himself. Sometimes a man could ignore a call from God but never a call of nature.

Nash held the liver toward the old man, and the knife appeared again from beneath the robe as he took the meat. He impaled a piece of the liver on the willow stick Nash had cut the night before and began roasting the meat.

“We've got some bread in camp. You could have some of that.”

“This is all I need.”

While the old man was eating, Nash walked over to the woodpile by the grove of trees, gathered an armful of firewood, and returned to the fire.

“Don't know how you can keep that fire going. Never seems to be any wood around here,” Nash said.

“Plenty of wood around here,” the old man replied.

Nash sat on a rock across the fire, watching the Indian finish off the liver, warmed barely past thawing. As the old man chewed, Bullsnake came huffing up.

“My, my. Ain't this cozy, though. A coyote killer and a stinking old buck. Must be you got a touch of injun in you, boy. Quality white folks can't stand the smell of injuns.”

Nash was tempted to point out that Bullsnake had precious little knowledge of “quality” folk, but he kept his peace.

“You're real lucky,” Bullsnake continued. “Weren't for this boy here, you'd be starving by now. Maybe he just don't know any better, but the rest of us do. You remember that, old man.”

Nash glanced at the old man. He sat there as though Bullsnake's words held no significance. But the old man's hands had disappeared under the buffalo robe again, and one of those hands held a wicked-looking knife. Bullsnake might be getting himself into something he couldn't handle.

“Yup, I thought by now you might be getting a little light on meat and be moving on, old man. That wouldn't bother anybody, except maybe our young injun-lover here. But then he goes out and shoots a killer coyote. You injuns love to eat coyote, don't you, old man? You want I should cut the liver out of that killer coyote and bring it up here and
feed
it to you? You want I should do that? Maybe you want some of the coyote, too, boy? Maybe injun-lovers eat coyotes and dogs, just like injuns?”

Nash was mad, but scared, too. Bullsnake was talking himself into something and Nash didn't know what. He did know that if Bullsnake laid a hand on Nash, Uriah would step in. Nash didn't want his father put to a test like that—not now, not today. So he sat like the old man, quiet and unmoving.

Then Bullsnake strutted off. The old man turned to watch him go. “He is wrong,” the old man said. “Only a coyote would think of eating another coyote.” The wheezing began again, and Nash wondered if the old man was laughing or having trouble breathing.

“What makes Bullsnake like that?” Nash asked.

“What makes the Northern Lights?” the old man answered. “They are both creations of the earth. I understand neither of them, but that is not important. On this earth, I must only understand myself and God.”

“That's what Dad said, too.”

“Your father is obviously very wise,” the old man said, the wheezing beginning again.

“Are you afraid of Bullsnake?”

“No. Only Bullsnake is afraid of Bullsnake. A rattlesnake that buzzes at shadows is no trouble for a man with a stick. We are Bullsnake's shadows.”

Nash threw another piece of wood on the fire, watching the sparks shower upward from the embers there. “Dad told me a story today,” Nash began while the old man was still chewing his dinner. “It was about some people he knew back in Minnesota. They thought the Indians, the Santee Sioux, were their friends, but the Indians killed them. Butchered them.”

Nash stopped talking, leaving the question he hadn't asked hanging in the air.

The old man had draped the robe over his head again, and his face was lost in the deep shadows of it. But Nash could see the glint of his eyes, almost hidden under heavy brows and darkness.

“It was war,” the old man said. “When I was a young man, we won horses and honor in war. But the white man taught us there is not glory in war, only death and hunger and pain and hate. Many of the white man's ways were mysteries to us, but we came to understand his war very well.”

“The white man never taught the Indians to torture and then butcher their victims,” Nash said, his voice rising. “We didn't do that.”

“No, you didn't teach us that. As children, we would catch prairie dogs or rabbits and cut or burn them a little at a time until they were dead. Those with skill—those who could make the animal or man suffer most before they died—were greatly honored.

“One time on the Greasy Grass, we caught five Crow. They fought bravely, but we soon killed all but one. He towered above the bodies, fighting even though he knew he would die. So we told him that we would honor him for his bravery, that we would not kill him if he came with us, and he did. He walked alongside our horses, joking with us.

“But we soon found an anthill, and we staked him to the ground and his head was on the anthill. Then we scalped him and cut off his eyelids, his nose, his lips and his ears, and then we left him there. The ants were crawling on his eyes and he couldn't even blink. But just as we promised, we didn't kill him.” The wheezing started again.

A shudder ran through Nash. “How can you laugh at something like that? It's—it's … evil.”

“You find that evil?”

“Yes,” Nash said.

The old man sat quietly, putting white man's words in order in his mind so Nash would understand what he was trying to say. “When we were put on the reservation, I thought about all that had happened, and I wondered at it. My people, the Cheyenne, were dead, sick, or imprisoned. The buffalo, the seeds of our life, were gone. From herds as many as the leaves on the cotton-wood trees, they were gone to some place we did not know. Some people said they walked into a hole in the ground, never to return while the white men walked on the earth. Mother Earth is thick with white men. They are as ticks on a cottontail in spring, and like the ticks, they suck the juices from Mother Earth, killing her, killing us.

“And I wondered at that. I wondered what had happened that made it so, what had happened to the medicine of my people. So I went to see the blackrobes, and I said, ‘Teach me of the white man's God, the one they call Our-Lord-Jesus-Christ.' I listened to them and asked questions, as you are asking questions now, and I learned from the Holy Book. So when you speak of evil, I know what you are talking about. I didn't know before. There was no evil before the white man came.

“We killed our enemies very slowly and very painfully, but we didn't know that was evil in the eyes of the white man's God. But the white man killed us very slowly and very painfully, and he knew what he was doing was evil. Are we, then, more evil than the white man?”

“Lies!” Nash cried. “You are lying to me, old man. We didn't torture you. We didn't cut you up while you were still alive. We didn't kill you the way you killed my great-grandmother and great-grandfather!”

Nash had half risen in his anger, but then he sank down again to his seat by the fire.

The old man took his eyes from the fire and focused on Nash.

“The white man does not torture? The white man gave us blankets filled with pox. Have you ever seen a village stricken with the pox? First, it kills the young and old. Mothers and fathers watch their children die. Wives watch husbands die, and husbands wives. The pox is a bad way to die. It sets the body on fire and consumes the spirit as the fire consumes these logs. In the end, there is nothing but ashes. The pain of dying is a terrible thing to watch, but the real pain comes later, for the living.

“Then the white man gave the Indian alcohol, trade alcohol mixed with tobacco and pepper and death, but we wanted it more than we wanted our honor. It has been years since the white man first gave the Indian alcohol, and still we suffer long, slow, painful deaths.

“We have no food and no way to get it. The buffalo are gone. We are beggars now. We didn't even know what begging was before the white man. We cared for each other. There was great honor in giving to those in need. But now there is nothing to give. Our lives, our honor, our people, our lands, and our beliefs have been taken from us. We die slowly, in great pain, and the white man laughs. He laughs at the drunken Indians and the light-fingered old bucks. The white man is much better at torture than we ever were.”

“It isn't the same,” Nash retorted. “It isn't the same as what the Indians did to my great-grandparents.”

The old man continued as though he hadn't heard Nash. “My wife was called Antelope Dancing. She was graceful, like the antelope, moving over the earth without effort. There are hard edges to the way most of us walk, but not Antelope Dancing. I would find her sometimes, staring at the horizon as though she were thinking about how long it would take her to run to it, beyond it, to see what she had not seen.

“Magpie was my son. We called him that because he chattered all the time. He was always underfoot. Wherever I went, he was there, watching me. Antelope Dancing said he would sometimes cry at night when I was gone. That was his mother in him. I … loved her very much.

“Spring Flower was like the sego lily in spring, shy, face down, bobbing with the winds, delicate yet full of life and beauty. I always marveled that I was part of the creation of such beauty. She was our first.

“One day I left them in the early morning to go to the edge of the camp to relieve myself. As I was walking, I saw a flash on the hillside above the camp, and then the sound of long guns. The soldiers had come in the night. We didn't expect trouble because we had a paper saying we were good Indians, but they didn't ask to see the paper.

“I turned and was running toward my lodge when the cannon shell hit. Those white men did not torture my wife. That first shell turned her into a fine pink mist, like part of a rainbow, but they tortured Magpie. He was still alive when I reached him. He was trying to crawl away, but he had no arms and only one leg. He was crawling like a caterpillar, arching his back and pushing himself with his leg. He didn't go very far before he died. I was very glad to see my son Magpie die.…

“I found Spring Flower leaning against a rock, looking down at what was left of her body. She asked, ‘Why?' and then she died.

“The Cheyenne were good at torture, but the white man is much better.”

Tears came to Nash's eyes. “I'm sorry.”

“I'm sorry, too.”

“It was the war.”

“Yes, it was the war.”

Nash stared down at the snow, hiding his face from the old man, but he looked up when the old man spoke. “Tell me about your great-grandfather and grandmother.”

“I better get back to camp.”

“Tell me.”

And Nash did, hesitating at first, and then the words came in a torrent. And when Nash was finished, the old man said, “And now your father dreams of his father as I dream of Antelope Dancing and Magpie and Spring Flower. We have both been strong under torture. Tell your father I am sorry. We are of two people. And there was a time when our people came together like two streams in the mountains, raging against each other, but in time we will be one people, and nobody will be able to tell one stream from the other.”

“Nash, time to eat.” Uriah's voice floated into the old man's camp, breaking the spell there.

“I've got to go,” Nash said, rising from the rock where he had been sitting.

“Tell your father what I said,” the old man called before returning his attention to the ghosts flickering in his fire.