Winter Rain

“Jeremiah told her he’d come for her and the children soon as he finished some unfinished business. Told her he intended to marry her when he got back. She told him she figured they was already married—him being Antelope’s older brother. The gal waited for him, all right—raising them young’uns while Jeremiah was gone.” Jonah looked up from the kettle again, his eyes brimming once more. “I figure Jeremiah was tore apart between his two families: called to go find and put back together the one he was raised with … called to return to the bosom of the family he was raising of his own.”

“He went back among the Comanche?”

“Yes, Nate. I s’pose it was for the sake of them children that he raised ’em among the Kwahadi. Jeremiah been a close friend of Quanah Parker’s all these years. Time or two the chief’s even said Tall One is the one friend he can count on. Proud that my boy’s doing what he can to help his old friend bring the bones of his mother home to the Comanche reservation.”

“Cynthia Ann Parker’s remains?”

“Jeremiah does what he can, speaks to those’ll listen—writes letters for Quanah, asking the Parker clan down in Texas to let the woman’s boy take his mother’s bones home to the prairie she’d come to love.” He raised his eyes to the treetops. They glistened in the dancing fire glow. “Jeremiah’s made his pa so damned p-proud.”

The old man’s voice cracked as he said it, so Hook turned and rose slowly, unsteady at first, then moved off to fetch up one of the packs that he brought back to the fireside. He untied the thongs from the cowhide case and from it began pulling some utensils they would need for their dinner.

An object tumbled to the ground as Hook pulled free a green bottle of pepper. Curious, Nate leaned over and retrieved it, intending to straighten up the spill. “Here, let me help.”

Then he stopped, turning that object over slowly: a small cloth-wrapped bundle he moved into the flickering light of their fire. At one time the cotton fabric had been brightly colored, a fine calico fabric. Now it lay in the newsman’s hands a dull, grimy scrap of once-vibrant cloth. It smelled deeply of many camp fires. Bringing it under his nose, Nate felt something hard wrapped within the folded bundle of old cloth.

“Something special, Jonah?” he asked, wanting to open it, but afraid he would never get permission. Thinking maybe it contained the ear of an enemy, perhaps one of those shriveled fingertip necklaces he had seen on display in the Smithsonian Institute.

Hook put his hand out to take it, then shook his head, dropping his hand, empty. “No.” His eyes leveled on Deidecker. “I figure it’s time you looked at what’s inside there.”

“This cloth, whatever is the story—”

“Zeke’s shirt. The one I come on down there in Texas.”

“The shirt the whore’s child wore?”

“Same.”

Through the folds of cloth Nate of a sudden sensed something strange, wild, and unnamed communicated to his fingers. As if the years were reaching out to touch him.

“Go ’head, Nate. It’s time you saw the … saw what’s there.”

Reverently he slowly peeled back the layers of faded, worn calico folded over and around the object. Fold by fold he exposed the object he finally pulled out of his lap and into the firelight that sundown in the Big Horns. A rawhide-wrapped wheel about as wide as his hand. Dividing the wheel into four equal quadrants were two twisted rawhide strands, each quadrant a maze of rawhide netting. At their center was lashed a hard, textured object, almost resembling a blackened peach pit.

“Go ahead, Nate. Take a close look.”

“Is this what you call a medicine wheel?”

“I suppose folks back east call ’em that. Out here the Injuns call that a dream catcher.”

Over Deidecker’s hands spilled the long, black tendrils, some of which were flecked with gray. He figured it had belonged to an old warrior.

Just inside the circumference of the stiff rawhide wheel had been lashed a crude circle of stiffened skin from which dangled that thick patch of long, gleaming hair. No more than four inches across. Just the topknot no doubt, Nate thought as he began to stroke, that fine black hair flecked with snow. He felt a sudden, evil chill and figured it was nothing more than the thrill of holding such an artifact against his own skin.

“A scalp? A real honest-to-goodness human scalp?” Nate asked.

“Ain’t ever seen one before?”

“In museums. Never held one in my own living hands. And I never did see one of these wheels … a dream catcher, with a scalp sewn on it.”

“That travels with me, wherever I go, Nate,” Hook said as the old man bent over the fire, sliding the skillet with the two loin steaks atop the flames.

The fire’s glow in the deepening mountain twilight gave the shining hair reflections like a candle in a mirror. Glittering, gleaming beads of light, like black diamonds dancing up and down the full length of the silky strands. “Never knew many Indians, Jonah. And from what I’ve seen, I can’t say as I ever realized an Injun’s hair could be so fine to the touch.”