Cry of the Hawk

“Till spring, Doctor!” Hook cried out as he reined about and set his horse in motion, pulling along the packhorse. Behind him came Moser, and the Pawnee woman riding bareback on the animal that of a time had been Moser’s pack animal stolen from the Creeks down in Indian Territory.

“Till spring!”

She came to him again as she had those times before, most every day when he sent the other man away to hunt or search for firewood or peel cottonwood bark for the horses to eat.

She called him Hook. And her heart had grown big and warm for him. The way she grew moist for him whenever those yellow eyes told her he must have her.

He called her by her name now, ever since leaving the soldier fort she knew as Hays. Called her Grass Singing in his tongue, unable to pronounce it in her Pawnee language. It was enough that he called her Grass Singing and held her close beneath the blankets in this dugout the three of them had made against the side of a hill where erosion had started to form this small cavern they had called their home these past two moons since leaving the soldier fort.

The three had lived as her own people had lived, she told herself whenever she began to miss the village and her friends. But then she remembered her mother and aunt, and how they had been thrown away by the tribe once their husbands had been killed by Lakota. No longer could the women live within the Pawnee circle, not without a man to care for them.

Grass Singing had a man to care for her. Hook, she called him. It made a ringing sound on the back of her tongue.

Many white men had lain atop her, but he was the first she had grown to care for before she ever received him. Looking back, she had come to care for him that terrible day the white men shot their guns at one another in the drinking place, the day she ran from that awful place, following the two white men who had helped her. Not knowing anything else to do—afraid to stay there more than she was afraid to ride into the unknown with the pair.

He had not clawed at her the way others had. Still, she sensed his overpowering intensity as he rode atop her and finished quickly, sooner than she had wanted. He had slept against her that first day, still asleep when the other white man returned to the dugout with fresh meat. She was not embarrassed, for the blankets were over them, and it seemed the other white man knew anyway what would eventually come to be between her and the man Hook.

With little of the white tongue that she could remember, the three of them mostly spoke in sign that Hook taught the other man through those long weeks of waiting for the prairie to green and the winds to come about out of the south, once more blessing this land with warmth.

She did not expect him to care for her the way she had come to feel for him in her heart. It was enough that he was here with her now, touching her body the way she had always wanted it to be touched, making her breasts and nipples alive with tension and desire, his fingers stroking the inside of her thighs before he drove himself into her moistness as she sang out in maddening fury for him.

And she came to love the way he cradled her after they were finished while his flesh grew small once more. Never before had any man done more than finish with her and pull up his britches and be gone.

Until Hook had come along, she had expected no more than what she had watched the ponies do back at her village that moved with the seasons—hunting buffalo and fighting Lakota and Shahiyena.

She did not want this winter to end, knowing when it did that he would be gone from her, perhaps never to return. But Grass Singing kept her sorrow to herself and cherished each day with the man she had secretly given her heart to … she would not trouble him with her love or make demands on him.

Outside the snow was melting and the prairie had begun to green. The entrance to their dugout dripped with the rhythm of the changing seasons as the buds on the willow and alder began to make their appearance. More sign each day of this prairie coming back to life after a winter’s sleep.

Inside, there in the private place that was her heart, Grass Singing wept with the changing seasons.

23

Late March, 1867

“WHAT YOU MEAN you can’t use him?” Jonah Hook asked the two soldiers and long-bearded, unkempt civilian seated behind the table in the shade of this fort porch.

“Your friend there—”

“He’s my goddamned cousin!” Hook snapped.

The officer sighed, smoothing his waxed mustaches this early spring day and continued, “Your cousin doesn’t have enough experience out in this country to warrant the army hiring him as a scout.”

“What am I going to do?” Artus Moser asked in a husky whisper, his eyes telling of his fear. “You got hired on, Jonah.”

Hook stared at the toes of his boots, bewildered.