Free Coyote Wind by Peter Bowen

meat.
    When Gabriel Dumont led the buffalo hunt, he wore his red sash. I’ll wear my red sash.
    Benetsee. The prophets must have been a lot like him. No damn wonder folks killed them. Irritating sonsofbitches.
    Where had Benetsee gone? Some city, sleeping in doorways in his old clothes, begging quarters?
    I could find the old bastard, lock him in a room or something. Say, Benetsee, I got this wine out here, you tell me stories that I like, you get some. But not till I really like them damn stories.
    I got no talent for being a bastard, torture a harmless old man. Leave that to Bucky Dassault, other helpful bastards. The Sheriff’s such a fool, he think Benetsee’s one too.
    I got to find that old man, ask him, please, here, take this wine but tell me what you know. I won’t tell anyone else, I tell you before God (who is deaf, or was when my wife died) but I need to know.
    Coyotes sing now, they make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, there. Real straight.
    Du Pré looked down on some fine big country. He thought about the skreeking Red River carts, the people, the buffalo driven into stout log pens to be killed at leisure, the meat sliced off their bones in sheets a quarter-inch thick, hung on willow racks over fires, baled up and tied with sinew, bundles stacked in the carts arid then everybody turned around and went back north.
     At night the fiddles came out, the people danced, the men smoked and played cards on a blanket.
    They smoked that meat right down there, went round the mountains to the east, played the fiddle right down there, made babies, longed for home, the priest.
    The Black Robes, they come, have incense, golden kingdoms up above. But what good are priests, anyway, won’t make medicine help you to steal more horses? Send smallpox to them damn Blackfeet and Sioux. Protestants even sorrier, not even incense, they get called Short Robes.
    So I find that old man, see if maybe he tell me something.
    ’Sides I miss him, he comes from another time, like them buffalo hunters, like my grandfathers.
    Red River.

CHAPTER 21
    O LD B ENETSEE WAS AT his shack, carving pipes from the red, close-grained stone quarried for five thousand years over near Pipestone Pass. He would fit them with a willow stem, hang a few chicken feathers on them, spread them on a blanket and wait for shoals of tourists.
    Benetsee’s hands shook quite a bit, but when he bent to dig another bit of red stone out of the deepening bowl they didn’t.
    “Ho Benetsee,” said Du Pré. He had a jug of cheap white wine in a paper sack. He felt like a turd.
    The old man looked up and nodded.
    “I been expecting you,” he said. “How are all your beautiful women: Jacqueline, Maria, that nice Madelaine?”
    “Fine,” said Gabriel. “They ask about you some. Wonder if you all right, hope things go well for you.”
    “I got no pretty women,” said Benetsee. He seemed relieved about it. “If I had one now I’d be doing too well. Better this way, I don’t have to wash so much.”
    Scritch scritch on the pipe.
    Fifty centuries of that sound. Make that a couple million years. Some old fart going scritch scritch on the whatever, punctuate his teasings of a younger fool. Lot of men, stand where I am now. This dust is full of them.
    “You hear about I find these three skulls where there should be only two?”
    Scritch scritch nod.
    “Well,” said Du Pré, “what about that, you know?”
    Benetsee looked up, head cocked, eye bright as a bird’s.
    “Coyote tell me much,” said Benetsee, “but it very hard pick out just what he is saying, how much he is playing with me.”
    Tell me about it, thought Du Pré.
    Benetsee dug at the pipe bowl. He seemed to have forgotten that Du Pré was standing there.
    “You want some wine?” said Du Pré. Now maybe you remember me.
    “Good morning to drink wine,” said Benetsee, putting down his pipe, the little black awl with the deerskin wrapping the end held in the palm.
    Du Pré handed Benetsee