“The stinking taipo couldn’t let Red Arrow’s young wife live. She would tell. And he didn’t know that Mountain Lamb had seen him kill her husband. So he cut the young wife’s throat and carried both of the bodies to the river the taipo call Platte. He just let them float away.
“Mountain Lamb was headed home, alone, on foot, horrified. That’s when the Crow found her. Took her to their village.
“The Two Footed Shit knew she must have seen, so he started back to the Wind River, thinking he would find her on the way and kill her. But he didn’t. He came back to our band and my sister’s lodge. But he was always out hunting alone, searching to see if Mountain Lamb was coming. And for more than a year, she did not.”
Antelope Fire almost trembled, his hands knotted. “When she did come, late the next summer, the Two Footed Shit had decided that she was dead. Mountain Lamb was no one’s fool. She came to my lodge at night, told me what had happened. She had had time to think during her stay with the Crow. She knew that if she just showed up, it would be a fight in the camp, that other people might be hurt. So we waited. Then one night after a father dance, when several naatea had gathered, she appeared at the fire as a surprise.
“The Two Footed Shit could do nothing but call her a liar, and when he came at her, I was there with a knife.” He pointed to his cheek. “He gave me this before others intervened. We tied him up, but before morning, he had vanished, taking four of the horses. We were never able to catch him.”
Butler turned to his father. “Is this true?”
“I couldn’t understand that singsongy clucking he was making.”
“About Red Arrow, and his wives … did you kill them?”
“That’s all a bald-faced lie. All of it.” Paw’s face had stiffened into his arrogant and appalled expression. “If I could, I’d face him down over a pistol!”
Dear God, he’d seen it so many times. Butler sagged, his heart like lead in his chest. With an aching sorrow that leached the starch from his bones, he turned to Antelope Fire. “I am so sorry. I never knew. None of us did.”
“What?” Paw cried, struggling to rise. “You taking his side?”
Butler stalked up to his father, who balanced on his crutch. “You raped a man’s wife! Gutted him! Hid the bodies, and denied it!”
“You had to be there! I don’t know what happened! I’d been through most of a jug!” He gestured feebly with his mutilated hand, eyes half rabid with worry. “They was just Indians, boy!”
“Just Indians? Like my wife? My friends? My naatea? Just Papists? Just Mexicans? Just a whore? Is there nothing in your life that you can be proud of? Is it all ruination and lies?” He pointed at his father’s lodge. “Get out of my sight, Paw.”
Paw blinked as if confused. Glanced sidelong to where the others were watching, Mountain Flicker whispering a translation in Dukurika.
“You don’t know shit, boy.” Then Paw turned. Awkwardly he propped himself. Reached down for his parfleche, and clinging to it and his crutch, stumped awkwardly to his lodge.
Butler glanced around, seeing his men. In a ring at the edge of camp, they watched him through stunned eyes. Then he lowered his head, tears of shame and sorrow mixing as they trickled down his cheeks.
He sank to his knees, bereft. He didn’t hear Hard Hand or Antelope Fire leave. Didn’t know how long he knelt there, but Mountain Flicker placed a hand on his shoulder, saying “I hurt with you.”
“What should I do with him? He can’t stay here. Not among the newe. It will be all over camp that my father is a rapist and murderer, and we’re keeping him here.”
“Puhagan will be back tonight. We can ask him.”
Butler pursed his lips. “When I was little, I worshiped my father. Thought he was the most powerful and grand man alive. He made me read, encouraged me to be a scholar. And it was all built on lies.”
“We cannot help who our parents are. They have different souls, nadainape.”
“Is there anything else he can do to disgrace me?”
The bang of a pistol shot made him jump.
Scrambling to Paw’s lodge, he pulled back the cover. The smoking revolver lay on the hides. Paw sagged against the poles, eyes oddly bulged and bloodshot, crimson leaking from his mouth, nose, and ears.
115
June 2, 1868
Butler looked back at the packhorse that followed along on its lead. The travois poles extended in an X above the horse’s withers. The blanket-wrapped body was riding perfectly where it had been lashed to the travois frame.
Beneath the blanket, Paw’s head had been tightly wrapped; his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears covered with rawhide bindings. At Flicker’s instructions, that had been done to keep his breath soul and dream soul trapped inside his corpse along with the mugwa, or body soul. The precautions were necessary. Not just because Paw had been a violent suicide, but that he’d been a rapist, murderer, and liar.
It wasn’t that suicide was prohibited among the Dukurika, just that there were acceptable methods: most generally walking away into a snowstorm; refusing food in the middle of a famine; leaping into raging rivers; or flinging oneself from a high point.
Blowing one’s brains out with a gun in the midst of a social gathering wasn’t among them.
It had been Butler’s decision to drag the corpse not only out of Owl Creek Valley but clear out of Shoshoni territory before he finally disposed of the body.
Had he not done so, a half-terrified Mountain Flicker had promised that every lodge in the valley would have been packed and gone by morning. And not only that, but the local bands wouldn’t have returned to the vicinity, fearing Paw’s malignant and evil spirits.
Why inflict
