the old man first brought the newsman up onto the porch when Deidecker arrived. Here out of the sun at that moment, she had seemed to study something in his eyes only, and only for a moment—not really looking at the newspaperman, rather looking through him, somewhere—then went back to staring up at the green hills gone summer brown and gold, beyond them the blue and purple and lavender of the high places tucked beneath the clouds of this high land.
Never a word. Not a sound from her except for the incessant creaking of the rocker’s bows on the plank porch.
“I built this place for us, you know.”
Deidecker started at the old man’s voice. He found Hook standing in the yard, halfway between the porch and his fire. Hands stuffed in the pockets of his canvas britches.
Nate felt nervous again. “I—ah—”
“She don’t talk much, Mr. Deidecker.” Hook came up the steps. “I’m the only one.”
“She talks to you?”
He settled on the top step, next to the reporter. “And you’re the first I’ve talked to in a long while, son.”
“You’ve decided?”
“You can stay till you got all your questions answered. Gritta don’t mind.”
He looked at the woman, then caught himself and turned back to Hook. “You—you asked her?”
Hook tossed a stick toward the fire. “Don’t have to. Sometimes—a man and woman been together for a long time, they can just tell. It’s all right with Gritta if I talk to you. Just like, well—just like it’s all right with me if Gritta don’t talk to no one else no more.”
“How long you been married?”
The old man smiled, his bony face creasing all the more. Deidecker was amazed that many hard miles could show on a man’s face when he smiled or frowned. A face that nonetheless did not look to have seventy-one years of war and trails and tragedy indelibly scarred into it.
Hook gazed up at the peaks. To Deidecker, the old man might very well be looking at that same place the woman was staring. Far away. But somewhat nearer just by the mention of it aloud.
“Eighteen and fifty-four.” Hook tossed another twig at the nearby fire. “We’ll put meat on as soon as we get some good coals.”
“I can wait.”
Hook patted the newsman’s knee. “I wasn’t always as patient as you when I was younger. Didn’t get this way overnight neither.”
“I want to know everything.” And he couldn’t help it, but found himself flicking his eyes at the woman slowly rocking, rocking, forever rocking as if she were truly a part of the chair.
“I know you do, Nate. And if you’re patient—that’s just what you’ll find out.”
“You and … and Gritta were married in 1854?”
“I was seventeen. She just turned fifteen. Had eyes on her for some time, I had too. We were living in a valley between the Rappahannock and Shenandoah rivers.”
“Virginia?”
“You know it?”
“Only from schooling. The great war and all.”
Hook looked down at the palms of both his old hands. “Yes. The great war.”
“So I figure you fought for the Army of Virginia? Robert E. Lee, eh?”
“No. We left Virginia two years after we was married. Gritta and me decided we wanted to spread our wings. Find our own place in this big country. Hattie had come to us by that time.”
“Hattie?”
He sighed, rubbing his big hands across the shiny thighs of his threadbare canvas britches. “Daughter. Our firstborn. Come to us in the spring of fifty-five. Next year we was gone from that valley below Big Cobbler Mountain. Where Gritta’s folks had farmed for generations.”
“Gritta … is German?”
“Her folks was about as German as folks could get, that many generations out of the old country.”
“And you?” Deidecker asked.
“German too. There was some little Irish blood a ways back, my mother told me of a time. On her side. Scotch too, as I remember. But my father was firstborn to folks who came over from the north of Germany. Named Hecht.”
“Hecht? How—”
“Somehow got changed on some paper. Wrote down as Hook, so Hook it was from then on.” The old scout got up without explanation and stepped to the far edge of the porch. The old dog dozing alongside Gritta’s rocker raised its head and watched its master pee off the porch into the yard.
Self-conscious, Deidecker looked away to watch the sun settle on Cloud Peak, impaled with a rosy summer light that gave a rich, rose luster of alpenglow to these foothills. Leaves in the nearby trees rustled with the cool breeze that seemed to immediately sweep down out of those high places, down from those never-summer ice fields as soon as the sun began settling for the coming of twilight.
Hook came back to the steps and strode down off the porch, across the wide, dusty yard toward the smokehouse, a last, unshakable remnant of his southern heritage. The old dog raised its snout, then slowly rose with a shake of its rear quarters, a languorous stretch, and loped off the porch as well.
“Only damned thing that ranger will get up for.” Hook strode away, finding the dog at his leg. “If it ain’t a bitch in heat nearby … it’s meat.”
Hook disappeared into the darkness of the shed. A moment later a big bone came sailing out of that dark rectangle where in another moment Hook himself reappeared, two large steaks draped over his bare forearm.
“Best meat gets aged. Don’t ever let anyone else tell you different.”
“What is that, Jonah? Buffalo?”
He laughed a little. “Wish it were. No, buffalo good as gone now. We seen to that, Nate.”
“Elk?”
“You ever had yourself elk?”
“No.”
“Then you’re in for a treat, son.”
“This whole … this meeting you. It’s a totally different world out here. Something I’ve never experienced before.”
Hook trimmed the steaks and laid them in a huge cast-iron skillet. “Certainly is something different out here. I had no idea how different it was when first I come out.”
“You didn’t tell me where you went when you left Virginia.”
“Missouri. To homestead with an uncle.”
“You came on here to Wyoming from Missouri?”
Hook set the skillet atop the coals, where the steaks began to hiss as the cooking fire’s heat seeped across their bloody surfaces.
“We’ll talk more after dinner and Gritta’s fed.”
Nate cursed himself silently for pushing. “I’m sorry, Jonah.”
“No offense taken. Just … out here, you slow down a bit so that you can read the sign. A man in a hurry is going to miss most of what there is to read. The way a bird is calling out. The lay of a clump of bunchgrass. Maybe even the way the ants are acting on their hill. You slow down—you’ll get all your questions answered.
“Time was, I wasn’t one for it. This being slowed down. But—I learned from the best teachers there was back then how to slow down and read the sign. I learned from the best these plains ever could make out of white men.”
“The men who taught you to be a scout?”
“The best ever set a moccasin down out here.”
