Cry of the Hawk

He glanced over the great, empty campsites strung up and down the banks of the little creek, grass trampled and pocked with lodge circles and fire pits, pony droppings and bones and the remains of willow bowers used by the young warriors too old to live any longer with their families but too young yet to have a wife and lodge and children too.

His eyes misted for a moment as he swallowed the pain of loss. To be hated, despised, cursed by a son was a deeper wound than he had ever suffered—across all those years of trapping and freezing, of fighting Indians and grizzly and loneliness and time itself. To stand in this place and realize what with so much time gone from his life, all he had to show for it was a son who had spit on his father’s name, his father’s race—his father’s blood.

“Winter’s coming, Shad,” Jonah said, slowly easing forward after he rose to the saddle. He crossed his wrists atop the wide saddlehorn. “Maybe we can go find us some work down south.”

He remembered. “The Territories?”

Hook nodded. “Down with the Creek and Choctaw. Sniff around for some word.”

Shad rose to the saddle and settled his rear gently against the cantle for the coming ride. How he wanted now to be plopped down in the sun, leaning back against the fragrant homeyness of her lodge, listening to the kettles bubble and smelling the pungent tang of autumn on the same winds that drove the long-necked honkers across the endless blue in great, dark vees. Going south.

Where Jonah yearned to go as well for the winter.

“Let’s settle up at Larned, Jonah,” he said, easing the horse away, pointing their noses east out of the meadow, toward the sun now fully off the horizon. A new day of opportunity and possibilities. Another chance to deal with fears and disappointments and pain that no man ought to know.

He glanced at the silent man riding beside him, seeing the gentle curve of a slight smile on Hook’s bony face. Something tugged at Shad now—seeing the comfort it gave the Confederate to be heading down south at last. To be going where there might be some answers.

And in that moment, he felt a little peace within himself to balance out that pain. For some time it had been there, and he had chosen not to realize it—this peace versus the pain.

Now he felt it, assured by it, comforted by it. Because so jumbled up were those thoughts of father and son with thoughts of him and Jonah Hook … that it caused him confusion and comfort, guilt and a sense of completeness never before experienced—that left him wondering where to go for help.

Knowing the only help for Shad Sweete rested within.

40

November, 1867

“THEY WAS TRICKED—and we helped the army do it, Jonah.”

Hook gazed through his own red-rimmed eyes at the moist, bleary eyes of the old mountain man across the table from him, at Shad Sweete’s mouth as he stumbled over some of the words.

“For better than a day now you’ve been sitting here in this stinking hole, washing your tonsils with this whiskey, old man,” Jonah said. “And all that time I been telling you your crying ain’t gonna change a thing.”

“Was hoping you cared.”

“I do care, dammit.” He slapped a flat hand on his chest. “But what’m I to do by my lonesome? What you wanna do, huh?”

The whiskey had long ago passed the point of warming Jonah’s belly. It felt like there was a hole burned right through him, hollering for something more than the cheap grain alcohol turned amber with a plug of tobacco and potent with some red pepper. Some called it prairie dew, others stumble-foot. Jonah just called it whiskey.

“Don’t know,” Shad Sweete grumped.

“Damn right, you don’t. Wanna go riding off and tell ’em?” he asked, feeling his belly burn for want of food. “Go tell them chiefs how they got swindled for putting their marks on that piece of paper you asked ’em to come and sign?”

“Maybe we should. Somebody’s gotta tell ’em.”

“What then, old man? We gonna help ’em take on the whole army? Seems they been doing just that since before we come out here. And from the look of things—these Injuns’ll be fighting the white man long after our bones are buried and there’s grass growing over the spot they buried us.”

Sweete sighed, working the whiskey around in his mouth the way he worked the thoughts around in his numbed brain.

They had arrived back at Fort Larned and were four days all told getting mustered out. Shad Sweete released from duty with the army, and Jonah Hook bidding farewell to Major Frank North’s Pawnee Battalion. Come spring, they were told at the last, there would be work for a man who was willing to guide and track, interpret and fight. Come spring, that is, after a man made it on his own through the prairie winter.