Cry of the Hawk

“GREAT GOD A’MIGHTY, Jonah—you blooded yourself in this scrap!”

Hook blinked his eyes, things watery at first, then slowly swimming clear. Up there blotting out a big chunk of sky hung Shad Sweete’s gray-bearded face.

“Take ’er easy. Looks of it, you had yourself a real tussle.”

Jonah sat upright with a jerk, wincing at the wounded arm. Near his feet lay a warrior, blood drying on the side of his head and face.

“He dead?”

Sweete smiled. “As dead as he can be. You whacked him hard enough to drive him on into the Other Side.”

“Other Side?”

Sweete poked his hands beneath Hook’s arms. “Where the Cheyenne go when they die. After taking a long walk in Seyan—that star road up overhead in the nightsky.”

His knees felt weak. “Sweet heaven.”

“You got the idea, Jonah.”

“I didn’t mean heaven like that.” He looked at the second warrior lying still, collapsed in the underbrush, a bloody, bluish hole in the middle of his chest.

“Don’t make no difference,” Shad replied.

All around them Hook heard that the shooting had stopped. Replaced now with yelps and laughter, hoots of joy and wild cheering from the Pawnee, who were scattered over every one of the Cheyenne bodies.

“How many we get, Shad?”

“Twenty-four,” he answered. “Every last one of ’em.”

“We … we killed ’em all?”

“And you got two for yourself. They yours—scalps and plunder both.”

“Plunder?”

“Guns, knives—whatever you want off’n the bodies. Along with the hair.”

He glared at Sweete, suddenly angry at something, perhaps the cold knot in his stomach. “Ain’t got no use for the hair.”

“You better let me take it for you then, Jonah,” Sweete said quietly as a half dozen of the Pawnee ambled up, shaking their black and bloody trophies, showing some interest in the white man’s victims. “This bunch will think you’re yellow if’n you don’t scalp them two bodies.”

“Told you,” Hook snarled, pushing away from the old scout. “I don’t want the goddamned scalps.”

“Then I’ll take ’em myself,” Sweete snapped, grimly pushing past the young Confederate.

Jonah watched as the Pawnee scouts closed in a tighter ring while Sweete stopped beside the first body. The old trapper yanked a short knife from his scabbard and kicked the Cheyenne over with the toe of his moccasin. As the young soldier’s eyes widened, the old plainsman pulled the black hair back, set the blade at the brow line, and dragged the knife around, over and behind the ear. Lifting the long, loose hair adorned with feathers, Sweete continued the knife’s path down to the nape of the neck, back up and around the ear to the brow line once more. Wiping the knife off on his buckskin britches, he stood and placed a hand on the back of the warrior’s neck. Tugging carefully at the bloody edges to start the scalp ripping from the skull, the dark skin finally gave way with a sucking pop.

“Here, Jonah—you best hold it for me.”

“I can’t. Told you I won’t.”

“Goddammit!” Sweete growled. “You’ll never hear the end of it from these Pawnee sonsabitches you don’t hold this scalp for me. Leastways, it’ll make ’em think I’m showing you how to scalp even though you don’t want the goddamned thing.” He held it out, shaking some of the gore and blood from it onto the yellow sand. “Now, do it.”

Glancing quickly at the gathering Pawnee, loaded down with their own scalps and plunder, Jonah found a few of them whispering to one another, grinning behind their hands. He burned with resentment.

“Won’t do you no good, son—though you likely feel like punching one of those faces to a bloody pulp.”

“Gimme that scalp!” Hook snapped, surprised that the old man knew how badly he wanted to pummel some of those arrogant faces. “And your knife!”

Sweete handed them over to the Confederate, who promptly turned on the closest tracker who was laughing at him. Stopping almost on the Indian’s toes, Jonah glared into the dark Pawnee eyes, reading the sneer on the tracker’s face. Hook held the scalp up right in the man’s face, then slowly inserted Sweete’s knife blade between the Pawnee’s neck and his long hair, slowly raising the braid with the knife.

The smile on the dark face faded like August snow. The dark eyes widened. Boiling inside, Hook rubbed the knife up and down the Indian’s neck.

“You laugh anymore at me, you bastard—I’ll gut you like a Christmas hog and hang you up to bleed to death,” he snarled.

“I figure he got the gist of your message, Private,” said Major Frank North as he appeared on the scene. “Better you take that knife from his neck now—before one of these others decide that you really do mean to kill Half Rope here.”

He turned to North, not removing the knife. “I would, you know. Half Rope, you call him?”

“He’s a good tracker,” North replied. “Just got him a sense of humor gets him in trouble a lot. But the rest of these are stirred up. Their blood’s hot from the fight—and we found the scalps of a few white men on some of these bodies. Likely from the soldiers killed by the Cheyenne at Platte Bridge a month ago.”

“I was there,” Hook said, not taking his eyes off the dark pools of the Pawnee’s.

“Major’s right about their blood being hot right now, Jonah. Best back off now. You made your point—these boys see the elephant for sure,” Sweete said.

“All right,” Hook eased the knife away, then turned quickly and parted the Pawnee as he strode to the second dead Cheyenne.

There he did as the old trapper had done on the first body, then popped the scalp free, holding them both aloft to the yelps and wild keening of the Pawnee—old enemies of the Cheyenne.

“You satisfied, old friend?” the young Confederate asked of Sweete.

“You’ll do, Jonah Hook. By bloody damn—you’ll do!”

Major North’s Pawnee scouts rode back into Connor’s camp brandishing the fresh, coal black scalps at the end of their coup sticks and from rifle muzzles. They howled like wolves and chanted their war songs. That night they began their ritual dancing around those twenty-four scalps, accompanied by the incessant beating of their small hand drums. The celebration went on for long past midnight and kept so many of the soldiers awake that General Connor had to order North to end the festivities.

For the next six nights, the trackers repeated their noisy dance, ending their celebration, however, by ten each night.

Only a week after that first skirmish with the Cheyenne, the Pawnee reported to Major North they had come across a large trail. North took word of the discovery to Connor.

The next morning, the general detached two companies of Ohio infantry, along with a troop of Seventh Iowa Cavalry, led by both the Pawnee and Omaha scouts. Bringing up the rear of the march was a pair of field pieces— six-pounders. This force would accompany Connor to the Tongue River in search of the migrating hostiles.

Into the rough badlands dividing the Powder River drainage from that of the Tongue, the general marched his trackers and troops. On past the Crazy Woman Fork, drawing ever closer to the bounty land of the Big Horn Mountains, where the men found not only an abundance of game, but fat trout as well in those clear-running streams far different from the alkali-tainted creeks in the Powder River country. The long column skirted the west side of a lake surrounded by ocher bluffs brilliant beneath a bright, summer blue sky.

“Water’s unfit to drink—thick with alkali. Years back, during the shining times of the beaver trade,” Sweete explained to Jonah as they rode past the long, narrow body of water, “this lake was named after the first Black Robe to come among the Indians of these northern plains.”

“What’s a Black Robe?”

“A priest. Name of Pierre-Jean De Smet.” Then Sweete laughed, as if enjoying a private joke. “I remember how Gabe used to tell pilgrims heading to Oregon about the thick oil spring you can find on the far side of the lake.