Nightway Read Free Page B

required to contribute to the cost of the ceremony. While others agreed to furnish sheep to feed the hundreds—perhaps as many as a thousand—of guests who would come to witness the nine-night ceremony, Hawk agreed to provide the wood for the fires as his mother’s contribution, even though she was at his uncle’s hogan every day to help with the preparations.
    When school was dismissed early, his first thought was how much wood he would be able to chop before dark. A little snow would not stop him. But it was more than a little snow that fell from the flint-gray clouds that darkened the sky. Two inches were on the ground and more flakes were falling when the school bus let him out more than two miles from his home. Hawk mentally filed away the information that the white teachers had correctly predicted this storm.
    The flakes fell heavily and straight down. Before he reached the hogan, the wind caught up with the storm to blow the snow around. Visibility was reduced, but Hawk didn’t have to enter the hogan to know there was no fire warming the inside. No smoke curled from the chimney hole. Hawk trudged through the snow toward the door, assured that his mother and little sister had stayed at his uncle’s because of the storm.
    As he passed the corral, the horse whickered. Hawk stopped still, staring through the screen of white at the sound. Inside the corral stood the chestnut horse, wearing its harness and collar. He searched again, but the buckboard wasn’t in the yard.
    Turning to look in the direction that led to his uncle’s house, he was enveloped in a swirling storm of snow. He could see nothing, no movement except the falling snow. Turning again, Hawk ran to the corral. He didn’t bother to unharness the horse and put on the saddle. Hopping on bareback, he gathered the long reins and tied them short.
    The chestnut horse did not want to go out in the storm. It took repeated proddings and a slap of the reins to make it leave the corral. Hawk pointed the horse in the direction of his uncle’s hogan, a route that the horse knew well.
    Into the face of the howling wind, the horse plodded through the snow, which had begun to accumulate into drifts. Almost to his uncle’s hogan, Hawk found the buckboard in a dry wash with a broken axle. Taking the chance that he hadn’t passed his mother and sister, he rode on to his uncle’s hogan. Since she had been closer to it, it was logical to assume she had returned there.
    But she hadn’t. Hawk stayed long enough to warm the numbness from his bones. His relatives tried to convince him that he didn’t have a hope of finding his mother and sister in this storm, but Hawk wouldn’t bedissuaded from going out to search for them. In the absence of his father, he was responsible. And Hawk knew he was doing what his father would do in his place.
    With a warm Pendleton blanket of his cousin’s, Hawk set out again. The storm was worse, the temperatures dropping, and the wind whipping it still lower. Pain lay like a cold bar across his forehead. Snow was drifting over the buckboard. Hawk almost didn’t see it.
    The snow was deeper and the wind blew it into high drifts. The horse began to labor, plunging through belly-high snows. More than halfway home, the horse staggered to its knees. Hawk finally recognized the futility of going farther. Dismounting, he tied the reins to the harness with numbed fingers and turned the horse loose. Snow and ice were encrusted on its shaggy coat. On its own, the horse would turn its tail to the wind and gradually drift toward its home corral.
    Seeking the shelter of a windbreak, Hawk found a tumble of snow-covered boulders and crouched behind it. He wrapped the blanket around him like a tent. It accomplished nothing to rail against the conditions imposed upon him. Indian-like, Hawk practiced the blind acceptance of the circumstances. This was a time to renew his strength from within, to ignore the cold, the wind, and snow raging around him.