Free The Owl Hunt by Richard S. Wheeler

veins.
    â€œThe feather is telling you something,” she said. She had a way of seeing through with eyes that fathomed the unknown. “Magpie was always with me. I saw Magpie where she could not be. Magpie beckoned to me, or warned me, or chattered greetings, or let me know of a bear or a moose or a wolf. Magpie saved our lives, you know. Without Magpie, or your father’s grizzly bear medicine, you would not exist. Mister Skye didn’t know anything about living in this place and only his medicine and my medicine kept death away. He might have died a dozen times before he met your mother, but for Magpie, and the great bear claws that rested on his chest. They are medicine, even as that owl feather freezing your fingers is medicine.”
    Dirk didn’t want to believe it. Everything stormed inside of him.
    The arrow whacked into the porch post two feet from his head. He jerked back, and tumbled into the shadow of the veranda. Victoria didn’t move. His heart raced. He slipped to the floor of the porch to make himself smaller.
    But there was nothing to be seen. Only eerie white light from the impersonal moon, and those strange spectres that somehow shifted the light here and there. Someone had almost killed him. And still could. He debated what to do, how to hustle old Victoria into the safety of the house. He studied the deeps, the shadows stretching from the school building and the distant agency, and the slumbering fields.
    â€œYou get inside, Grandmother,” he whispered tautly.
    She ignored him, and stood in the light of the moon, a small wraith waiting there.
    He could barely discern the bushes from where the arrow had flown. He had nothing else to go on, so he sprang up and raced straight toward the brush, expecting more arrows to fly. He leapt into the brush, thrashing toward whatever was there, but found nothing. No one was fleeing, either. He roamed the area, but found nothing, and finally stood still, hearing only the hammering of his heart.
    He slowly made his way back to the porch, alert to any movement anywhere.
    She stood there, and sang softly. He knew it was not her death song, but an Absaroka song of courage. They stood while she sang her song, and then she turned toward the house.
    â€œYour father’s spirit is in you,” she said.
    He got his first close look at the arrow buried in the post. It had a steel head, was dyed totally black, and it was fletched with the soft feathers of the Great Owl.

nine
    Owl knew the fate of the People was intertwined with his vision. He found himself almost alone now, a mystic, a visionary who was sought out for counsel that rose not from his own youthful wisdom, but from a larger and more terrible source.
    Like the great Lakota visionary and warrior Crazy Horse, who had defeated the blue-bellies led by Colonel Custer two years earlier, Owl chose not to adorn himself. He was only a vessel, one whom the spirits had appointed in one galvanizing moment to carry their message to the People. He was scarcely into his manhood, and only days earlier he had been a youth named Waiting Wolf learning white-man things in the schoolhouse.
    Now he wore only a breechclout and moccasins, his body at home with nature. Whenever he spoke of his vision, the Great Gray Owl stamped on the face of the dead sun, and the return of the brightness that lit the world of the People, he was heard with respect. Who had ever imagined such a thing? Who could dispute this sign from the all-knowing spirits? Who could bear to receive a prophecy from the Owl, harbinger of death, terror of the night, the aerial stalker floating murderously on the currents of chill air?
    And so the Dreamers had sprung up. Other men were seeking a vision, and dreaming, and receiving the Owl courage. The Owl Dance had begun, sung in the depths of the night to the soft melancholy of flutes, punctuated by a single drum, flute and drum, a death knell drifting over the lonely reaches of the Wind River