Cry of the Hawk

Hook disappeared into the darkness of the shed. A moment later a big bone came sailing out of that dark rectangle where in another moment Hook himself reappeared, two large steaks draped over his bare forearm.

“Best meat gets aged. Don’t ever let anyone else tell you different.”

“What is that, Jonah? Buffalo?”

He laughed a little. “Wish it were. No, buffalo good as gone now. We seen to that, Nate.”

“Elk?”

“You ever had yourself elk?”

“No.”

“Then you’re in for a treat, son.”

“This whole … this meeting you. It’s a totally different world out here. Something I’ve never experienced before.”

Hook trimmed the steaks and laid them in a huge cast-iron skillet. “Certainly is something different out here. I had no idea how different it was when first I come out.”

“You didn’t tell me where you went when you left Virginia.”

“Missouri. To homestead with an uncle.”

“You came on here to Wyoming from Missouri?”

Hook set the skillet atop the coals, where the steaks began to hiss as the cooking fire’s heat seeped across their bloody surfaces.

“We’ll talk more after dinner and Gritta’s fed.”

Nate cursed himself silently for pushing. “I’m sorry, Jonah.”

“No offense taken. Just … out here, you slow down a bit so that you can read the sign. A man in a hurry is going to miss most of what there is to read. The way a bird is calling out. The lay of a clump of bunchgrass. Maybe even the way the ants are acting on their hill. You slow down—you’ll get all your questions answered.

“Time was, I wasn’t one for it. This being slowed down. But—I learned from the best teachers there was back then how to slow down and read the sign. I learned from the best these plains ever could make out of white men.”

“The men who taught you to be a scout?”

“The best ever set a moccasin down out here.”

1

February, 1865

HE HAD GROWN to hate the sound of that door sliding open against its three rusty hinges. But he suffered it this one last time.

Jonah Hook stepped from the tiny cell into the narrow hall running the length of the entire building, one of the hundreds of cells here at the Rock Island Federal Prison for Confederate prisoners of war. He was fourth in line coming out of the cell, two more behind him. The rest staying behind in the bull pen hooted and spat on those few who had decided they’d had enough of rotting away in this stinking place.

Eighteen hundred had signed an oath of allegiance to the Union they had of a time fought so hard to tear themselves away from in those long, bloody years of insurrection and rebellion and ragged defense of what mattered most to a man who had himself a small plot of land down in southern Missouri.

All those years of wondering on Gritta and their young ones.

“All right, boys! Let’s march out into that sunlight, you Johnnies!”

The bellowing voice erupted volcanically from somewhere behind him, echoing off the rafters of the dirty prison building, built on the order of a warehouse, now smelling of piss and decay and souls rotting away month after month until the time spilled together into years of captivity.

Jonah Hook had vowed allegiance to the Union. He would put on a Yankee’s blue uniform as long as he did not have to fight his former brethren dressed in butternut gray. He would go west with the others to hold back the Indians. He would keep the freight roads open and the telegraph wires strung across that expanse of open wilderness yawning out there in his imagination.

Hell, Jonah would do anything just about to get out of that stinking cell where one more man had died before the winter sun came up to make the whole damned building steamy again.

He wasn’t going to wait until it was him they dragged out by the ankles while everybody turned away. Jonah Hook was going west dressed in Yankee blue.

In the North for the past few months, President Lincoln had been engaged in a fierce campaign against his former chief of the army, George B. McClellan. Lincoln won a second term. But as the terrible human cost of the war mounted, the President’s Union found it harder to recruit soldiers for the effort. Draft laws and conscription edicts did nothing but incite the Northerners into riots.

Then there was Gettysburg, and the thousands of bodies piled up all in those three long days. Along with so many other less glorious battles with little-known and easily forgotten names, where thousands more lay waiting for a shallow grave, perhaps no grave at all, lying there for the animals and the seasons to reclaim their nameless mortal remains.

There were damned few substitutes left among those Yankee states by 1864—substitutes who would be paid a handsome bounty to serve in the stead of a man drafted to go fight the rebellious Confederates. So the Union continually drew manpower from its frontier army until it hurt, like an old-fashioned leech bleeding to cure a hopeless patient.