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

will lift it a few feet, and blow it into the reeds. And the Americans will still be here. I have made them my friends. They call me a friend and are naming that army post for me in a little while. In a way, they are what they say. But their focus is not upon us, not upon their Shoshone friends. Their hearts are upon their lands and settlers and ranchers and farmers and the towns and mines they will start, and they will forget their Shoshone friends. And they will forget the Dreamers, and an owl’s feather will not change them in the slightest.”
    â€œAnd the People?”
    Washakie stared into the mysterious night. “The bodies of the People will live on, make babies, survive. But the People, the Snake People, they may be lost. The Dreamers believe it will not happen that way. Everything will return to what it was. But white men come with guns made of iron, with wagons and horses and steam engines, with plows and looms that make cloth, with steamboats, and the time of the owls and the buffalo fades into the past and will not be seen again. Only the bodies will live on, and those will be poor, small, sickly, and ill-made.”
    There was something prophetic in Washakie’s vision.
    â€œI have made my choices, for myself and for the People,” he added. “The Dreamers might put me on the spirit road, but the fate of the People would be no different. Go now. There will be an owl feather at the teacher house.”
    That chilled Dirk. He hurried across the empty fields to the shadowy schoolhouse and to his teacherage, only to find old Victoria waiting for him, sitting on the front stoop, wrapped in a striped blanket. She handed him the same furry feather that had been given to Chief Washakie, and maybe others this fateful night.
    He took it wordlessly.
    â€œStuck in the door. Big goddamn medicine,” she said.
    â€œNo, no medicine in it. It has no magic. A Gray Owl did not fly here and drop this feather for me to heed. It’s a warning, though. A Dreamer brought it. Maybe Waiting Wolf himself. The Dreamers are telling me something.”
    â€œI don’t know what. In the old days, when I had the inner eye, I could tell you.”
    â€œYou still have medicine, Grandmother.”
    â€œI don’t see the magpie no more,” she said.
    He puzzled it, and remembered that the magpie had been her spirit helper all her long life, and in some strange way, she and magpies had bonded. For her, Magpie was one bird, even if she had seen thousands in her life. It was as if all magpies had become her spirit counselor. But what did her magpie have to do with this?
    â€œGrandmother, when did Magpie become your spirit guide?”
    â€œI was still a girl, and I asked for a spirit blessing, and went by myself into the mountains above our village, and there I waited, and then Magpie came. She walked right up to me, where I lay on a robe, and she looked at me with one eye, and turned her head and looked at me with the other, and then I saw her above me, big as the whole sky, and I came down from the mountain and told our chief, Rotten Belly, that I had received the gift, and he told me I had received great powers. This was before I ever met your father, Mister Skye. Such powers didn’t come often to a girl, but they came to me. But now I don’t see Magpie, and I tell myself that we will meet on the star trail soon.”
    Dirk settled on the stoop beside her. The moonlight seemed eerie, and sometimes Dirk swore he saw shapes gliding across the meadows. But these were nothing, figments of his imagination, ghost warriors, ghost dancers, ghost spirits playing hob with the peace. Odd how jittery he was, even though the Dreamers had vanished.
    The feather seemed cold to his touch, not just lifeless but radiating the coldness of death. It sent chills through him. He ascribed this to his imagination, but no matter how much of a white man he tried to be in that moment, his other blood froze in his