Crows & Cards (26 page)

"The crow in my father's pouch looked inside you." She sounded awful put out, as if there didn't seem to be any end to the places that crow spirit could see.

"He's sure it was me?" I asked, shocked that not even my innermost feelings were safe from that bird.

"Yes," she complained. "And he saw us lead you home too."

"He can look into the future?"

"And the past. He doesn't give us any rest at all. He says we take you every step of the way home. To get the picture of the two-humped horse from your mother."

"Why's that thing so goldurn important?"

"My father wants to take it with him when he dies, as a gift for his father, whose name was Two Humps."

"Two what?"

But I'd heard her right. It turned out that Two Humps had got his name on account of a vision he had of a horse with two humps that led his youngest son—meaning the chief—home. Except that it had never happened, leastways not when the chief was a boy, which made him ashamed as a blue goose, what with all the other children rawhiding him day and night and claiming his pa's real name should have been No Humps. The chief and his pa had words about it too, the strongest kind of words, but Two Humps stuck with his vision to his dying day.

The princess said that a bunch of years passed. The chief grew into a man and held on to his father's sacred medicine bundle, partly 'cause nobody else wanted it and partly to prove that he believed his father's vision, even though some doubts had begun to sprout here and there. He had himself a vision too—of a crow who helped him find things. Just like his father's, his vision failed to come true. Oh, he went and bagged himself a crow and put its leg in a pouch, just the way the village elders told him to, so that the crow spirit would have a place to stay if it came to visit. But nothing come of it. The chief couldn't find dark on a moonless night, or so his neighbors claimed. He tried to be philosophical 'stead of bitter about all this, but he never gave up either. Anytime he saw a crow, he tried to strike up a conversation, and if a stranger passed through the village, he was sure to ask for news of a horse with two humps.

More time spun by. A white-man's sickness hit their village, wiping out neighbor after neighbor till Standing Tenbears got named chief for just surviving. Somewhere in there he grew old and his eyesight began to fail, making him take a young wife to help him see. According to the princess, they had a beautiful daughter who made them happier than sunrise on the prairie. When the princess was eight or nine, a bearded man came looking for people willing to travel with him to meet the kings and queens of Europe. The chief asked if there were any two-humped horses over there.
Why, only all over the place,
the bearded man said. When the chief asked about talking crows, he learned they were common as boots.

That settled it. He was headed to Europe with his wife and daughter, to prove that his vision, and his father's, had been true. But there wasn't anything to recommend the trip from the start. The princess's mother got sick and died on the crossing, and then the gent who'd brought them over disappeared somewhere in France, taking everything but the chief's spirit pouch and the sacred medicine bundle of his father's. He'd have probably grabbed them too if the chief hadn't always slept with them at his side.

So there the chief and princess were, stranded in a strange land and penniless. And they hadn't even hit rock bottom yet, nowhere near it, 'cause right about then it started snowing heavier and heavier behind the chief's eyes. In a matter of days he went totally blind.

But just before his vision was completely gone, a ray of sunshine struck. Buffalo Hilly happened upon them with a camel, which was the last thing the chief ever saw. And then came another miracle. The instant his eyesight was completely whited out, the crow spirit in his pouch started telling him what it saw. When Buffalo Hilly said he'd been invited to visit the king of Prussia, the chief and princess tagged along, knowing the camel would sooner or later lead them home, exactly the way Two Humps had foreseen.

Just hearing of such tribulations brought a lump to my throat, and not some little speck of a one either. I didn't even bother asking how the chief planned on getting a page from Ma's dictionary to his dead father. No doubt he'd find a way. All I knew was that they really were going to help me get home. The relief I felt could have filled an ocean.

When the princess and the chief waded out into the damp meadow, I followed along without any back talk, except to say, "The river's the other way."

"So's Chilly," the princess answered.

Seeing her point, I shut myself right up, figuring that every road headed home if you took the right turns. And besides, how lost could I get traveling with Indians? They'd been back and forth over this land a lot longer than me and mine.

***

We crossed the meadow with the princess up front leading the pony and travois, which the chief was stretched out atop with all his worldly possessions. I brought up the rear, feeling so lightheaded that I halfway convinced myself that if I ever did get home, I'd just tell Ma and Pa it'd been a busy few weeks and leave it at that.

But I was only lightheaded, not completely headless, so we hadn't gone too awful far before it dawned on me that such talk wasn't going to wash. My folks would have a whole lot more questions than I had answers.

Not long after I struck that notion, I started lagging farther and farther in back of the pony. Oh, the chief and princess might walk me home across that hundred and sixty miles of wilderness, all right, but what could they do to change my ma's and pa's minds about apprenticing me out? The chief, with the help of that crow, might be able to see through mountains, but could he move 'em?

Maybe a letter home was the thing to do after all. That way I could let them know the earth hadn't opened up and swallowed me whole, and that even though I hadn't exactly hooked up with Great-Uncle Seth, I was doing just fine and ... Slower and slower I dragged across that wet meadow, fretting every bit of the way about what I could pack into such a letter, until finally I was creeping along worse than Methuselah toward the end of his years. The chief and princess even had to pull up to wait for me.

"Is that the fastest you can walk?" the princess wanted to know.

"Some days."

"My father says you'll be an old man before you get home."

"You know," I said, coming to a stop, "I've been thinking about that. Maybe home isn't where I ought to be heading." Something desperate swooped over me then, and I think that I heard a trumpet blowing off in the far-gone distance as I spied the shadow of a possible answer to my woes. Even from the first I knew it was a slim chance, but when it comes to fools, I guess one size fits all. "There any way I could hook up with you?" I blurted. "Maybe learn about visions and such?"

"What makes you think you could handle visions?" the princess scoffed.

"Got my middle name from an uncle who's a wilderness preacher," I told her, hopeful-like. "Maybe such doings run in the family?"

She wrinkled her nose some at that but passed it on to the chief, who gave back an answer I wasn't anywhere near expecting.

"Let's make camp," the princess translated for him.

And that's what we did. In the middle of that soaked meadow the princess somehow or other got a fire started and put a stew on to cook. When the princess and chief finally got around to putting their heads together, the princess got her back up and her cheeks went all starchy, for she and her father were disagreeing up a storm. In the end, the chief won out and the princess lifted her chin formal-like to remark, "My father wants to know if his pouch talked to you."

She made it sound as though I was far too lowly for such a thing to ever happen.

"Some," I answered back, taking exception to being lumped together with grubs and worms. "But it would have been helpful if I could have understood it."

The princess acted as if what I'd said only proved her right and passed it on to her father with a flourish. Her high tone put the chief on the warpath. After a flurry of words that sounded all stones and sparks, he had her ask what was wrong with how the pouch had talked to me.

"For one thing," I said, "I don't know Indian, and it wasn't bothering with any English."

The princess had no more than passed all that on than the chief seized up as if he had a fish bone stuck in his craw. When the princess tried patting him on the back, he waved her off. He wasn't choking, just laughing. When he explained the joke to his daughter, her face went crab-apple sour and her voice fell flat. Seems that it had been the crow who ordered the chief to hand the pouch over to me. That had gone against the chief's better judgment, but the spirit had declared that I was the one in danger and if they ever hoped to get that picture of the two-humped horse, they had to get me some help. Except that the crow hadn't foreseen that I couldn't understand a word of Indian. This from the same spirit who'd helped guide them home all the way from Europe? That struck the chief as about the rip-roaringest thing he'd ever heard.

The crow must not have been so amused though, for all of a sudden the chief sobered up as if he'd gotten new marching orders. Right away he spewed some words at the princess, who asked me, "Are you willing to learn our language?"

The resentful way she laid that out, I could tell this wasn't any time for funning. So I squeezed on it some and come to see that maybe here's where I'd been heading all along without even knowing. It appeared I had something of a gift for talking with crows. How else could I explain being able to hear the one in the chief's pouch? And if that was the case, where else was I going to get a chance to put such a talent to use, other than with the chief? What's more, Ma and Pa couldn't argue with it if I ever got around to writing them a letter, not if I worked in how I was planning to hook up with Uncle Clayton somewhere out West and learn what he had to teach me about preachering. So it looked as though the die was cast, and I was dreadful glad of it, what with all the bridges I'd left smoldering behind me.

"I don't see why not," I told 'em.

When the princess passed on my answer, the chief puffed on his pipe real strong. For two or three hours he went at it, conferring with the pouch now and again, but otherwise taking time off only to hack and cough. I asked the princess what her father was up to, but she shhhed me, saying the crow was having a look around. Finally the chief cupped a hand around his ear to hear the pouch, then spoke to the princess, who looked crushed but managed to say, "You're hired. On one condition."

"What's that?"

"You'll have to ask your parents for permission."

"Now hold on just a gosh-darn minute.... "

"The crow's seen you talking to them in a vision."

"He has?" My toes ran cold.

"You tell them the truth and everything is fine."

"It is?"

"He saw it," the princess insisted, though in an almost gentle kind of way.

"Were they mad?"

"Of course they were," she said, flaring up a bit only to simmer down and add, "but they get over it."

Maybe that was what I'd been needing to hear all along, 'cause it settled me down considerably. I was even calmed enough to make a long speech to the chief and the pouch, telling them how thankful I was that they were willing to take a chance on me, though deep down I think what I was most grateful for was having someone willing to stand beside me when I had to face Pa and Ma. But the main thing was, I was headed home to set the record straight and that just felt right all over, no matter what the consequences.

And then something no heavier than a shadow landed on my shoulder. Turning my head sideways, I found myself eye to eye with a glossy black crow who appeared to have something to say. Now all I had to do was learn how to listen.

THE END

AFTERWORD

I
N
1849, if you were a twelve-year-old boy of European descent and if your parents believed in the importance of knowing how to make or fix quality things, then you might have ended up apprenticed to a master craftsman (most girls did not serve as apprentices). However, the practice of individual craftsmen training young boys was dying out. In another ten or fifteen years, by the end of the Civil War, apprenticeships would be almost entirely gone. Why? The biggest single reason was the Industrial Revolution and the changes that it brought about. Material goods were more and more likely to be turned out by a factory and less and less likely to be handcrafted. The spread of factories made it harder for craftsmen to make a living, and as a result, the number of craftsmen and apprentices dwindled.