Cry of the Hawk

“Told you—you’re to call me Jonah.” The old man smiled, a few of his teeth missing. Not unexpected. “We’re friends, Nate.”

Nathan appreciated that, having made a friend like Jonah Hook so quickly. Yet there was something that bothered the newspaperman who had traveled to Wyoming from Omaha, on a hunch and a limited budget begrudged him from a tightfisted managing editor at the Omaha Bee. In 1908 there weren’t many newsmen actively following up the old warriors who still had stories to tell.

Having heard whisper of an unknown former scout living somewhere at the base of the Big Horn Mountains, Deidecker had finally convinced his editor and publisher to open their wallets and spring for a round-trip rail ticket, along with expenses for hiring the horse and carriage he had driven down from Sheridan.

   Stepping off the railroad platform, he had been met by the aging newsman who had founded and owned the Sheridan Press.

“How’d you end up picking me, Mr. Kemper?” Deidecker asked as the two sat down for coffee once a carriage and horse had been secured outside the bustling Sheridan cafe. The summer sunlight was startlingly bright on the high plains. Even here in the cafe, Deidecker found himself squinting.

“You been writing stories, haven’t you?”

Nate swallowed the hot coffee, its scorch something akin to the hot August weather that had accompanied him all the way west across Nebraska. “What stories?”

The old newsman chuckled. “Your stories about the old plainsmen. I don’t mean those goddamned bragging, strutting peacocks we’ve seen time and again.” He quickly leaned across the table, head close, grasping Deidecker’s wrist between his old hands. “We’re talking a different sort of man here, you understand.”

Nate Deidecker looked down at the waxy hands gripping him, the ink forever tattooed in dark crescents at the base of the man’s fingernails. “I understand, Mr. Kemper. Just as you said when you wrote me—not like Buffalo Bill over at Cody, or Pawnee Bill down in Oklahoma. You said Will Kemper would steer me to the real thing.”

Kemper leaned back and seemed to suck on a tooth a moment before speaking. “This man’s the real thing. Those others you’ve been writing about either been honest-to-goodness grandstanders or they simply aren’t the caliber of the man I want you to meet.”

“What’s his name?”

“Jonah Hook.”

“Why haven’t I ever heard of him?”

Kemper smiled, running a single finger around the rim of his white china cup. “As long as I’ve been writing stories out here, it seems the ones who got the best stories to tell are always the ones who keep most to themselves.”

Deidecker ruminated on that, sipping the hot coffee he really didn’t relish on this hot summer afternoon. Something else to drink was on his mind, like a beer in that shadowy, beckoning place across the street. Unconsciously he wiped a hand across his lips before he replied.

“One thing’s bothered me ever since that first letter you wrote me.”

“You write good stuff, young man,” Kemper said. “That’s why I came to you first. I’ve been reading everything you’ve written about the old scouts you’ve found on your own. You can be proud your copy’s been picked up by the Tribune and the Herald.”

“I am—but I want to know why you want me to talk with this particular fella. Why don’t you?”

“Don’t get me wrong—I’ve talked with the man many a time,” Kemper said, without the least bit of defensiveness.

“Surely you could write this story yourself. Why don’t you?”

Kemper once more leaned in close to the young reporter.

“Because you write as well as I did when I was your goddamned age, Deidecker.” Slowly he creaked back in the chair. “I don’t write that well now. Don’t do anything that well now.”

Deidecker pushed his cup and saucer aside, glad to be through with it. Itching to get on with the long ride south out of Sheridan. “He knows I’m coming?”

“Like I said, when you told me you’d be here—I went down there to tell Jonah.”

“No problems?”

Kemper shook his head. “No problems. Just take it slow. Don’t rush things.”

Deidecker had patted his coat pocket, knowing he would be shedding the wool suit coat as soon as he stepped outside to the carriage. From inside the pocket came the reassuring sound of the folded map Will Kemper had drawn him of the route to the cabin where the Omaha newsman would find this reclusive Jonah Hook.

“I best be going.”

Kemper looked out the window. “Yes. It’s a long ride.”

Deidecker held his hand down to the Sheridan newsman, who did not rise from his chair, as if he were comfortable right as he was and was not about to be disturbed from his perch by the formalities of another man’s leave-taking. Kemper took Nate’s hand. They shook, then the older man held Deidecker’s for a moment longer, looking directly into his eyes.

“Find out about the woman—his wife,” Kemper whispered. “No man’s ever found out about her.”

Nate remembered how at that very moment the cold splash of something had run down the length of his spinal cord. “Is she—was she killed somehow?”

Kemper removed his hand from Deidecker’s sweating palms. “Not exactly. No. You’ll see her … meet her.”

“She’s there? With the old man.”

“He loves her deeply. And she’s all he has now. Except the stories.”

“The stories.”

“Best you go now.”

“Yes, Mr. Kemper. I’ll come round when I get back to town.”

Kemper was gazing back out the window at the bright splash of liquid sunshine spraying the hot, dusty street.

“Like I said, Mr. Deidecker. Take your time asking—and you will be richly rewarded.”

Funny how things had turned out on that long ride south from Sheridan, Wyoming, crossing the Tongue River and heading toward the country where Colonel Henry B. Carrington had decided to raise the pine stockade for his Fort Phil Kearny in the middle of Red Cloud’s hunting ground some forty-two years gone. Not that long, Nate had thought at first. Many a man that old or older.

But as the horse hit its comfortable stride and the wheels of the jitney clattered and rumbled along the jarring ruts of the old wagon road that led him south toward the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains, Nathan Deidecker himself slowed down.

His heart found a new pace. What’s more, his own youthful and impetuous hurry to get on with things was seeping out of him with every drop of sweat pulled from him by this high, arid land. What was normally the aggravation of summer’s heat now became something to be savored as richly as the smell of green-backed and white sage, stunted cedar and juniper.

He turned again now to look at the woman in her old rocking chair, remembering Kemper’s cryptic admonition.

“Find out about the woman.”

Deidecker watched as the thin old man descended the five creaking steps from the porch into the grassy, dusty yard in front of the old cabin nestled here in the foothills, beneath the shadow of Cloud Peak.

Jonah Hook went about pulling firewood from the cords of it he had stacked against the north and west sides of the cabin. A few pieces he selected for kindling and split them agilely. One final thin sliver of kindling the old man furred into curls that he laid atop a generous pile of ashes filling an old fire pit. Dragging a wooden lucifer across one of the flat stones ringing the fire pit, Hook started his supper fire as the sun sank closer and closer to Cloud Peak.

Swallowing hard, just as he had when preparing to commit one of the deadly sins of a schoolboy in class with the teacher’s back turned, Deidecker glanced again at the old woman. For the first time all afternoon, finding himself amazed that she continued to rock in that dark, cherry-wood, ladder-back rocker with its old arms rubbed down to the color of yellow pine.

She hadn’t spoken to him all afternoon. Looking at him only once with those cloudy blue eyes of hers when