‘Why do you wear a feather in your hair if you are not an Indian?’
‘The Cheyenne gave it to me.’
‘Why?’
‘For bringing down a grizzly.’
‘That’s a wonderful story,’ said the escorting teacher.
‘No it’s not,’ said the boy. ‘He’s an actor just like all the rest.’
As each new wagonload of visitors arrived Craig scanned them for the glimpse of a cascade of black hair, the turn of a face, a pair of large dark eyes. But she did not come. July slipped into August.
Craig asked for three days to go back to the wilderness. He rode out before dawn. In the mountains he found a stand of osage cherry, took his hand-axe, borrowed from the smithy, and went to work. When he had cut, shaved and scraped the bow-stave he strung it with twine from the fort, as he had no animal tendons.
The arrows he cut from rigid and cue-straight ash saplings. The tail feathers from an inattentive wild turkey formed the flights. By a creek he found flint rocks and from these he chipped and knapped the arrowheads. Both Cheyenne and Sioux had used mainly flint or iron arrowheads, lodged into a cleft at the tip of the arrows and lashed in place with ultra-fine cords of skin.
Of the two the plainsmen feared the flint the more. The iron arrowheads could be withdrawn against the barb along with the arrow, but the flint variety generally broke off, involving deep and usually terminal no-anaesthetic surgery. Craig made four of them. On the third morning he took the buck.
When he rode back in the beast was across his saddlebow, the arrow still in the heart. He took the kill to the kitchen, hung, gutted, skinned and dissected the animal, finally offering the cook sixty pounds of fresh venison in front of a stunned audience of townsfolk.
‘Something wrong with my cooking?’ asked the chef.
‘No, it’s fine. I liked the cheese pie with coloured bits.’
‘It’s called a pizza.’
‘Just figured we could do with some fresh meat.’
While the scout was washing off his hands and forearms in the horse trough the cook took the bloody arrow and walked quickly to the command post.
‘It’s a beautiful artefact,’ said Professor Ingles as he handled it. ‘I have seen them in museums, of course. Even the barred tail feathers from a turkey are clearly identifiable as Cheyenne work. Where did he get it?’
‘He says he made it,’ said the cook.
‘Impossible. Nobody can knap flint like this any more.’
‘Well, he has four,’ said the chef, ‘and this one was right in the animal’s heart. Tonight I’m serving fresh venison.’
The staff ate it at a barbecue outside the stockade walls and enjoyed it.
Across the fire the professor watched Craig slicing slivers of cooked meat from a haunch with his razor-sharp bowie knife and recalled Charlie’s assurance to him. Maybe, but he had his doubts. Could this strange young man ever turn dangerous? He noted that now four of his female students were trying to attract the untamed boy’s attention, but his thoughts always seemed to be far away.
By the middle of the month the black dog of despair was beginning to overtake Ben Craig. Part of him tried to remain convinced that the Everywhere Spirit had not lied to him, not betrayed him. Had the girl he loved also been given the curse of life? None of the high-spirited group around him knew that he had already made a decision. If by the end of the summer he had not found the love for which he had obeyed the vision-quester’s plea, he would ride back to the mountains and by his own hand go to join her in the spirit world.
A week later the two wagons rolled again through the gates and their drivers halted the sweating draught horses. From the first poured a gaggle of young and excited children. He sheathed his knife, which he had been honing on a stone, and walked forward. One of the grade-school teachers had her back to him. From her head to the middle of her back flowed a torrent of hair the colour of jet.
She turned. Japanese-American, round puppy face. The scout turned and strode away. His rage boiled up. He stopped, raised clenched fists to the sky and screamed.
‘You lied to me, Meh-y-yah. You lied to me, old man. You told me to wait but you have cast me into this wilderness, an outcast of man and God.’
Everyone in the parade ground between the buildings stopped and stared. Ahead of him was one of the ‘tame’ Indians, walking away. This man also halted.
The old face, wizened and brown like a burnt walnut, ancient as the rocks of the Beartooth Range, framed by strands of snow-white hair, stared at him from beneath the stovepipe hat. In the visionquester’s eyes was an expression of infinite sadness. Slowly he shook his head. Then he raised his gaze and nodded silently, looking at a point beyond the young scout.
Craig turned again, saw nothing and looked back. Underneath his hat his friend Brian Heavyshield, one of the two Native American actors, was staring at him as if he had gone crazy. He turned back to the gate.
The second wagon was unloaded. A crowd of children milled around their teacher. Jeans, check shirt, baseball cap. She stooped to separate two scuffling boys, then wiped her shirtsleeve across her brow. The peak of her cap got in the way. She pulled the baseball cap off. A torrent of released dark hair tumbled down to her waist. Disconcerted by the sensation of someone staring, she turned towards him. An oval face, two huge dark eyes. Whispering Wind.