The trail followed a small canyon cut into the limestone slopes. Ancient, it was said by the Dukurika to have been used since the beginning of time. Clear back to when the first humans escaped from First Woman’s basket. Butler could believe it. The ground was scored by the passing of numerous old travois poles, and winter-bleached piles of horse apples could be seen here and there.
Earlier Puhagan had told him, “We wouldn’t take the Red Canyon Pass if the snows were not so deep in the high peaks. Too many enemies use this trail. But this early in the season we should be able to get through and down to the safety of Anikahonobita Ogwaide.”
“Red something.” Butler had struggled with the words. He was learning, but Shoshoni was a difficult language.
“Red Canyon’s Creek,” Cracked Bone Thrower had told him. “That is where the injured taipo is. The one they have asked the puhagan to heal. The one that perhaps you, too, can help heal.”
Maybe it was Water Ghost Woman’s gift. Maybe it was the time he’d spent with Philip, but he did have a gift. In addition to delivering Red Rain’s baby, he’d helped Puhagan set broken bones, stitch wounds, and treat fevers. To his, and the men’s, amazement, his patients had all gotten better.
And then, three days ago, a runner had arrived from Ducha Goobai’s camp by Red Canyon’s Creek informing Puhagan that a white man had been badly mauled by a spring grizzly. Ducha Goobai, Dirty Face, was a longtime friend of Puhagan’s. Would the Spirit healer bring the Man Who Talks to No One—the one who had been given healing Power by Water Ghost Woman—and come immediately?
Butler wondered how Dukurika from all over the mountains seemed to know about him. As far as he’d seen, throughout the winter, most everyone had spent their time in the lodges.
The climb continued up through the shallow valley, and over the divide. As they passed through the summit, a panorama unfolded to the north bounded by the tall Absaroka Mountains on the west—the crags dominated by the peak called Iszupa Wean, the Coyote’s Penis. The lower peaks and cliffs were gleaming and snow covered. In the east, the Big Horn Mountains—capped in pristine white—towered over the basin. And in the far north, Cracked Bone Thrower pointed out a mountain. “The whites call those the Pryor Mountains. Named for one of Lewis and Clark’s men. That’s Crow country. Mostly they are horse people, we avoid them by staying in the high mountains.”
Before them the trail descended in a long slope toward a magnificent line of bloodred sandstone buttes and upthrust ridges. As the sun sank toward the northwest, Puhagan followed the trail—marked as it was with elk and bison tracks. While snow still filled the narrow drainages that incised the slope, green grass, sagebrush buttercup, shooting star, and the first shoots of balsam were coming up.
Flicker had slowed to walk beside Butler’s horse. Maybe he should have walked like the rest of them, but he’d dedicated himself to leading the packhorse, loaded as it was with the folded covers of three small elkhide lodges and baskets full of provisions. Among the Sheep Eaters it was considered rude to just show up without bringing some contribution to the stew pot.
And besides, he didn’t trust leaving the horses with the other Wind River Dukurika. It would have been shirking his responsibility to the animals. Even the biggest antihorse skeptic had admitted that the animals had been most helpful packing meat for the camp, but Sheep Eaters were dog people. And with good reason. When they retreated to the high peaks for summer, most of the trails were impassible to horses. Dogs, however, could scamper up and down rocks and over fallen timber, and leap from boulder to boulder with the same agility as people.
“How far is Red Canyon’s Creek?” Butler asked Mountain Flicker, at the same time keeping an eye on the two boys. Off and on Butler had taken turns walking, and letting them ride on the saddle. From the looks of their stumbling fatigue, it was almost time again.
Flicker pointed. “There. Just around that red cliff. It is a place of springs. We will be there by dusk.”
“Does Dirty Face have a bigger band than Puhagan?”
“All Dukurika camps are small at this time of year,” she told him, mixing Shoshoni with English words and hand signs. “Mostly just families, no more than ten or twenty people. As the snow goes away we will move up into the mountains. In summer these lowlands are too dangerous. There is too much war and raiding with Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, and Blackfeet passing through.”
Butler glanced over at the men, calling, “See. There’s trouble everywhere that men are men. War and raiding. Even here in paradise.”
“Maybe we’re all mad,” Corporal Pettigrew called back.
“Maybe we are,” Butler agreed.
Mountain Flicker glanced at the emptiness where Butler directed his remarks, and a knowing smile followed.
The shadows were long by the time Puhagan led them down a drainage and into a small valley marked by red cliffs on the west and steeply sloped beds of sandstone that gave way to soaring limestone on the east.
Two young runners came trotting up the trail, long hair bobbing behind them, dogs leading the way. It created a small melee as dogs and people sorted themselves out amid wagging tails, growls, and called greetings.
After that it was another mile or so before the youths led the way into a gap in the upthrust sandstone. Behind it lay a sheltered cove beneath high stony slopes. Here water bubbled up out of the ground in a small stream. Above it, amid juniper and pines, a winter camp of brush structures had been built against a sandstone incline.
Mountain Flicker pointed out the people. “That’s Dirty Face. And he’s the elder here.
