Cry of the Hawk

Shad rose as she trudged back toward the lodge. She plunged right past him as if he were not there. He reached for her. Toote yanked away from him angrily and dived back into the darkness of the lodge.

After a moment he shrugged his shoulders and returned to Jonah Hook.

“Seems sometimes I don’t do nothing right. Got a mark against me from the first whack, just because I’m a white man. She thinks I made Pipe Woman’s problem. Maybeso, I should send ’em north.”

“Let ’em simmer down. Both of ’em. Time was—” Jonah paused a minute, stared off across the prairie. “Gritta and me’d go for days not talking. Better for it—getting over being mad, rather’n saying something cruel or hateful, and being sorry for it later. A woman needs her time to get shet of it, and heal what made her mad at you to begin with.”

Sweete watched Jonah’s eyes focus on something a long, long way off. If not in distance, then something far away in time.

“Sometimes you love a woman more for the arguing,” Shad said quietly.

“I want to find her, Shad,” he said almost in a whisper. “Like a hole’s opened up in me and it won’t close up without her. I got to find them.”

Sweete reached out with one of his huge hands and squeezed Jonah’s shoulder.

“Your time’s coming soon.”

A tall dark-skinned young man bolted from the lodge door as Jonah Hook strode toward Shad Sweete’s lodge days later.

Jonah stopped, watching in surprise as the young man leapt atop his pony, bareback, and reined off, hooves spewing clods of dry soil and long, unbound hair flying.

Toote Sweete emerged into the sunlight, followed by her husband. She called in Cheyenne to the young man as Shad stood watching the rider disappear over the nearby hills. He dropped the hand shading his eyes to find Hook staring, motionless, at the scene.

“You come just in time, Jonah.”

“What’s that all about?” he asked, striding up to the lodge. Toote turned, fuming once more, her eyes filled more with sadness than anger as she dived back into the lodge. “Some young suitor come to pay court to your daughter?”

Sweete put an arm around Jonah’s shoulder and led him a few yards from the lodge. “No one courting Pipe Woman.” He stopped, standing right in front of Hook. “That’s my son.”

Jonah found it hard to believe. “Your son? Didn’t know he—”

“Just didn’t tell you.” Shad turned and trudged over to a tree.

When the old trapper had settled against the trunk, Hook came over and plopped down as well.

“Pretty important thing—not to go tell a friend, don’t you think?”

“He ain’t lived with us for some time. Never quite did get used to the idea he’s a half blood. Damn his hide anyway. Always has a way of showing up at the worst of times. Here I thought Toote might be getting over the boy—and he comes a’waltzing in on her again, making life miserable for his mama.”

“What about you, Shad? He’s your blood kin. Your boy.”

“Don’t I know. But there’s something in him that ain’t in either his mother or me, Jonah.”

“Where’s he go off to, if he ain’t living with you?”

“Ah, hell—he’s been old enough for some time now, twenty-one winters. He can live on his own.”

“Where?”

Shad shook his head, his lips curled up in clear disappointment. “Don’t have any idea most times.”

“He come back to stir up trouble?”

“Just to stir his mother up,” Sweete answered. “Always does him a dandy job of that too.”

“Better that he’s gone then,” Hook replied, hoping his friend would see sense in his appraisal of the situation.

Sweete sighed. “No, this time he’s really tore his mother up. Always before it was something little, but this time he’s gone and made a real ruckus between us.”

“Between you and him.”

“No. Between Toote and me. Bull’s doing a good job driving a wedge between that woman and me. Back there minutes ago, he just spit on his white blood. Then he spit on his mother for laying with a white man and giving birth to him—cursing him with his white blood.”

“She’ll get over it, won’t she?”

“I damn well hope she does, Jonah.”

“Give her time—like we was talking the other day. Better that High-Backed Bull’s gone, ain’t it? So’s he can’t go causing her no more trouble.”

“But he can cause us a whole lot of trouble.”

“If he just stays away, things simmer down—”

“He’s run back to a band of Cheyenne he’s been with for a little over a year, to hear him talk about it.”

“They trouble?”

“Tall Bull’s band of every outlaw and renegade and outcast from every village on these plains. That bunch ain’t just warriors who will fight to protect their women and children. The bunch Bull been running with loves the stalking, the raiding, the killing just for the sake of fun. They’re bad from the word go.”

Jonah fell silent, not knowing what to say to the man, except that he understood. “Family is trouble when you have ’em. Trouble when you don’t.”

“Man comes to realize that, Jonah. But it don’t stop you loving ’em as much as you do.” His face brightened a moment. “Tell me about Grass Singing. You find out anything? Run across word of her?”