Cry of the Hawk

Sweete himself had followed the elephant to the Northwest, where many former employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company, as well as American Fur and Rocky Mountain Fur, all attempted to put down what roots they could, now that there wasn’t all that much for a rootless man to make a decent living at.

“Coffee,” he said in Lakota, handing the Brule woman his battered tin cup with the rawhide-wrapped handle. He broke off a chunk of the tobacco twist and dropped it into the cup before she took the huge tin from him.

She flicked her tired, red-rimmed eyes at him, then dug the tobacco wad from the cup with two fingers. The others were stubby, chopped off in some past mourning. The woman plopped the tobacco quid in her mouth and began chewing noisily.

After she had poured him coffee from the small kettle on the smoky fire and disappeared into her lodge, Shad settled to the ground beside the tiny flames, and grunted his own prayer to the Everywhere Spirit for this blessing of coffee on cold spring mornings such as this one.

The woman was back, carrying a small burlap sack at the end of her arm. She stood over him, opening it for the white man’s inspection. From it he scooped a fistful of sugar and poured it into the steamy coffee with a smile for her. She disappeared again. He pulled one of the two knives from his belt and stirred while he drank in the heady aroma that did so much to arouse his senses of a morning. Quickly he dragged both sides of the blade across his leather britches long ago turned a rich brown patina with seasons of grease and smoke, then stuffed the skinner home in its colorful porcupine-quilled scabbard.

After the first few sips, Sweete pulled free a tiny clay pipe from the pouch ever present beneath the left arm and crumbled some tobacco leaf into the bowl. With a twig from the Brule woman’s fire, he sat back and drank deep of the heady smoke, drawing it far into his lungs as an elixir stirring the cobwebs from his mind.

Coffee and tobacco and the cool, clean air of these plains of a spring morning … If he could not have his wife with him, at least a man like Shad Sweete had everything else worthwhile in life.

First one winter, then a second, he and his wife had survived in Oregon—then the trapper had no choice left but to admit that Oregon was not for him. He hungered for the far places, the wide stretches of the mountain west where the purple peaks hugged the far horizon in one direction, and in turning in almost any direction, a man found more peaks raking the undersides of the fluffy clouds. Such was the land more to the liking of Shad Sweete.

While some of his kind, former trappers all, were content to drag a plow behind a mule through the rich soil of Oregon, others were content to do nothing at all—hunting a little, loafing a lot. Staying as long as they wanted in one valley before moving on.

He was not cut out to do either, neither a homesteader nor a layabout could he be.

In remembering that morning he had announced they were returning to the high lonesome of the Shining Mountains, going home to the great stretch of endless, rolling plains her people knew so well, Shad recalled the joy welling in the eyes of his Cheyenne wife.

“I no more belong here in this Oregon country than Gabe Bridger belongs eating at the same table with Brigham Young himself!” he had cried out as wife and young children scurried about their camp, packing what they owned in parfleche and rawhide pouch, loading everything on a groaning travois inside of twenty minutes, the time it took for the sun to travel from one lodgepole to the next.

They moved east and south, until the ground beneath their moccasins felt more akin to home. But in the traveling itself, Shad Sweete once more felt the peace that came from the tonic of wandering. While most men wandered in search of a place to set down roots, Sweete was himself a born nomad.

In joy they had returned to the central plains, where years before he had found, fallen for, and purchased his Southern Cheyenne wife, Shell Woman, whom he promptly named “Toote” Sweete, commemorating a fragment of the French language he had learned from bandy-legged Canadian voyageurs in the north country. He thought the name fit her nicely, what with the way she could whistle him in for supper or their handful of ponies out of the village herd. Toote loved him every bit as fiercely as he loved her, and gave Shad a son back in the summer of forty-five, then a daughter one terrible winter night in forty-six when something tore inside her belly with the birthing.