Read Online The Owl Hunt by Richard S. Wheeler - Free Book Online

Dreamers had collected here after the soldiers had marched. The Dreamers would disturb, maybe even terrify, this small collection of houses and buildings. The Dreamers would sing their dark message until they awakened this whole scattered community known as the Wind River Agency.
    A part of Dirk responded to this night-song, which followed the rhythms of his heart and set his own Shoshone blood to singing. He felt an odd empathy toward Waiting Wolf, whose prophesies and visions had inspired this. This was a song of defiance, a song that cried out to all listeners. You are not welcome here. Leave our homeland. Give us our lives and ways and visions. Go away, white man, go away, with all your armies and churches and condescension.
    He reached the mission and found the Partridges in their nightclothes on the porch, staring into the moonlit night. He didn’t see the sexton. The drumming was clearer here but lay somewhere beyond this place, perhaps in a copse of cottonwoods down the slopes. The Partridges stared at Dirk but said nothing, and Dirk acknowledged them with a wave. He saw that Thaddeus had a fowling piece in hand. Dirk had nothing, wanted nothing, for he would not need to defend himself.
    He pushed toward the cottonwoods, passed the first trees, which rose like sentries, and then into a small park where the brown grasses had been trampled. There was no one, no swift shadows. And the owl cloud had passed away.

eight
    The moon cast a sickly light over the slumbering slopes, a lantern for Dirk Skye. He made his way back to the vicarage, where the Partridges huddled on the porch, she wrapped in a vast angora shawl, he in a greatcoat over his nightshirt, and Bobolink barefoot in a nightshirt.
    â€œThey’re gone,” Dirk said.
    â€œHow do you know they won’t come back?” Partridge asked.
    â€œI don’t. But they made their point.”
    â€œIt was awful, just awful,” Amy said.
    â€œIt rose up from the bottom layers of hell. It was savagery, the howling of demons. This was the devil’s own work,” Partridge said.
    Dirk scarcely knew how to respond. “The Shoshone people have their own traditions, sir.”
    â€œI tell you, Skye, this was something out of the bowels of the earth. That fiendish drumming, rising to some sort of crest and then fading away, only to rise again, sulphurous and sinister, unloosing all the demons of the netherworld.”
    â€œThey would not see it that way, sir.”
    â€œWell, you’re one of them, Skye. It was an assault, that’s what. They’ll come closer next time, and closer, until they do this under our windows. Deliberately terrorizing us. If we become martyrs, like the Whitmans in Oregon, then that’s our fate. We’re Americans, sir. We’re bringing truth and goodness to these savages. We’re offering them the hand of reason, and the keys to everlasting life. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll talk to Van Horne in the morning. These ghouls must be punished.”
    â€œI’ll want the army here every night,” Amy Partridge said. “I’ll insist on it.”
    These people were plainly distraught.
    â€œThey’re probably the Dreamers,” Dirk said. “They’ve received a vision of life as it was for them, life without the presence of white men. Life following the buffalo herds. Life honoring their traditions and mysteries.”
    â€œExactly, and it must be stamped out! Exterminated!”
    Dirk tried another tack. “Have you heard of the Jesuit Father De Smet? For years, he wandered the West, befriending the tribes most hostile to white men, teaching them his faith, inviting them to masses. He helped them deal with settlers. He was their friend and they trusted him, and he was never harmed, and was much loved. He walked freely among the Blackfeet and the Sioux.”
    â€œYes, and all he did was delay the inevitable. We all saw the result at the Little Big