Where the Lost Wander(80)

“Yes! Where did you come from? And where is your woman?” Hanabi asks, looking beyond me. “Your family? Have you come alone?”

For a moment I can’t speak. My words are stuck in my tangled thoughts, and I lack the emotional endurance to unravel them. I have not grieved or broken down. I have not let myself feel much at all. Telling the story, saying the words out loud, might break my control.

“John Lowry?” Hanabi asks, her brow creasing in concern. Washakie shares the same expression.

“My wife . . . is . . .” I don’t remember the Shoshoni word for taken. I try again. “Naomi is . . . lost.”



I tell Hanabi and Washakie all that I know, from the moment Wyatt saw the smoke to the moment I set off in pursuit of the men who took Naomi. I have to stop many times. Hanabi brings me food. Water. Washakie hands me a bottle of whiskey. I don’t care for it. Never have, but I slosh a little into my cup and drink it down.

It doesn’t steady me or ease the vise in my chest, but the burning distracts me, and I am able to choke out what Webb and Will told me about the Indian with Will’s arrow in his belly. Washakie asks me how many there were and what they looked like, and I cannot tell him. Only that there were enough to make quick work of three men and two women. From the number of hoofprints, difficult though they were for me to distinguish, I would guess nine or ten.

“Why didn’t they kill your woman too?” Washakie asks.

I have asked myself that question, and I don’t know.

Hanabi has grown still, but there is grief in her eyes and the turn of her mouth.

“I am sorry, John Lowry,” she whispers. “This is a great sadness.”

“There were no others in the train?” Washakie asks. “They were alone?”

I describe why they were there and why they were alone and how far they’d traveled from the Bear River and Sheep Rock. He knows the places by different names but nods as I explain, describing the spring and the jutting black rocks and the distance to the river where we now sit.

When I have finished, he sits still, his hands on his thighs, his back straight. He doesn’t speak for several minutes, and I don’t press him. I sit in numb exhaustion. Hanabi’s daughter is awake, and Hanabi rises from the robes to go retrieve her and returns with the baby in her arms.

“Pocatello,” Hanabi says, looking at her husband, and her mouth is flat and hard. Pocatello. The chief of the Shoshoni thought responsible for the trouble with the soldiers. I remain silent, as does Washakie.

“Pocatello,” Hanabi insists when he doesn’t respond.

Washakie grunts, but he seems to be wrestling with a decision. Finally he raises his eyes back to mine.

“We go to the Gathering Place every three winters.”

Like the Pawnee, most tribes measure time in seasons, not years, when it is measured at all.

“All Shoshoni. North, east, and west,” he adds.

I remember Hanabi telling me this when we camped at the Green.

“You are going there now?”

“Yes.” He sighs heavily. “Pocatello will be there.”

“I do not know if it was Pocatello’s band,” I say.

“It was,” Washakie says simply. “These are his lands. He will take the animals he stole to the Great Gathering. He will trade them. He will trade your woman too . . . or kill her. And the white men will never know who is to blame.” He shrugs. “But word of the attack will spread among the whites, and it will cause trouble for all tribes. For all Shoshoni. For all the people.”

He is so certain, and he speaks of Naomi’s fate so emotionlessly.

“Will you take me there?” I choke, trying to control my rage.

“He will not give her back to you. You will be alone in a sea of Shoshoni.”

“He will not be alone,” Hanabi says, folding her arms and gazing at her husband fiercely. “He will have you,” she snaps. “He will have our people.”

Washakie doesn’t argue with her. He simply studies me.

“You want to kill Pocatello? You want to kill his men?” he asks.

William’s bubbling scalp and Warren’s face rise in my mind. Elsie Bingham with her cheerful smile and her adoration for her homely husband. Winifred. Winifred, who I loved. Wyatt and Webb and poor Will, who carries the weight of it all on his twelve-year-old shoulders.

“Yes. I want to kill him. I want to kill his men. And if my wife is dead when I find her, I will kill him, and I will take his scalp back to her brothers so they know I have not looked away from what was done,” I vow.

“And if she is not dead?” he asks. “If I can get her back for you?”

I do not know what he wants from me, and I wait, my jaw clenched over my fury and fear.

“I will take you to him,” Washakie says. “I will take you to the Gathering. But you must promise me that if your woman is alive, you will take her and the tua, the child, and go. No killing. No revenge.”

“And if she is not alive?” I have to whisper the words.

“If she is not alive, I will help you kill Pocatello.”

Hanabi bows her head, and I sit in stunned silence.

“But only him. Then you will go, and you will leave the white man out of it. You will not go to the white army and send them here. You will not show them the graves and point your finger.”