Cry of the Hawk

“Shell Woman!” Shad cried again in Cheyenne as the two white men trotted through the confusion. Man and woman, child and old one alike turned in amazement to watch the two white men zigzagging through their newly claimed camping ground heaped with the scattered lodge skins and parfleches and bundles of private riches.

A few yards ahead, he watched a woman lift her head, then turn fully around with a jerk. Surely it was Toote. She reached out to tap the person beside her, who bent over at the bundles atop the travois they had just dropped from a weary pony. The second woman stood almost a full head taller than Toote, who began running, full speed toward her husband.

“Rising Fire!” she called out in English, her arms opening as they collided in a swirl of snow.

Surely that must be the daughter, Jonah figured, watching the second, taller woman hurry forward now, pushing back her wolf-hide hat that caped her shoulders above the blanket capote. He could claim to have seen only her back of a time, and not much of that really, when she went stalking off in anger at her mother and white father months gone the way of spring and summer and autumn now.

The three embraced, the women bouncing on the toes of their buffalo-hide winter moccasins, snow swirling up their blanket-wrapped calves. Shad glanced over his shoulder, finding Hook standing there.

“C’mere, Jonah. You remember Toote,” Sweete said as the woman nodded. “And this is my daughter. You see’d her before—but never met proper. Her name’s Pipe Woman.”

Only then did she raise her eyes to him, capturing his attention with their almond luster. Then looked away, glancing up at her father. Asking something quietly in Cheyenne.

“Jonah Hook,” Sweete told her.

She looked at the tall, rail-thin white man again for but a moment. Only as long as it took her to smile and say, “Jo-naw. Jo-naw Hoo-oucks.”

This was the reason she did not like most white men.

They pawed at her with their eyes. Some of them lunged close enough that she smelled their stinking breath, the stench of their unwashed bodies. Young warriors bathed frequently. Young, arrogant white men did not.

By now Pipe Woman was old enough to know what the white men wanted with her. This would be her twenty-first winter. Long ago she had come to understand what men and women meant to one another beneath a buffalo robe, when their hands ran up and down one another’s bodies, tasting, licking, kissing, feeling, sweating in rhythm with each other.

She had grown up sneaking looks at her parents across the fire pit whenever her white father returned to the lodge of her full-blood Cheyenne mother. And their union had often filled her with confusion: as much as she hated her white blood, she loved her father and all he had meant to not only Shell Woman, but to his daughter as well. He was the only white man she had ever tolerated.

Many looked at her with undisguised lust in their eyes, licking their lips, lurking close with the smell of whiskey strong about them, their bloodstained, greasy wool-and-leather britches straining beneath the rigid hardness of their flesh as they tried rubbing against her. So it was that in young womanhood Pipe Woman had learned where first to strike a man whose hands she did not want mauling her breasts or pinching her bottom. One swift, sure blow to that swollen flesh that a man ofttimes let rule him.

More than once Pipe Woman had had to fight men off. She did not understand this power of her beauty yet. As much as her mother and father told her, still she did not fully realize the power it held over men, both her own, and the white man.

This stinking gathering place was filled with them. Soldiers in their dirty, mud-crusted uniforms soaked with melting snow. Unwashed civilians in their unwashed clothing, smelling of old fires and stale tobacco and meals spilled and smeared and forgotten. Both kinds seated at the small tables in this dingy, smoke-filled room where the walls themselves reeked of whiskey and worse.

Again Pipe Woman wondered why it was that a man who came equipped so well for peeing did not take the trouble to walk outside of such places as these and pee on the ground. Instead, she remained mystified, so many of these white men chose to pee where they stood, in the same room where they smoked and drank, and traded.

That’s why she was here. Her mother had sent her to the sutler’s for some hard candy. Sweete had brought coffee, but had been unable to find any hard candy for Toote along the trail the three men had ridden northwest from Fort Larned. It was a special craving Shell Woman suffered, from the time she was a child and experienced her first taste of hard candy given her by a trader on the upper Missouri River. From that moment, she was hooked something fierce.