IDING NE TONGO up to Zeb’s shack in the dark before dawn, I felt like I was returning back to the beginning of my story without going nowheres. Zeb’s was where me and Eeteh met up when I was running away from General Hard Ass three years before, like now I was still running away from him again. What was the same was the running. Started back on the Big River, running from Pap. Ain’t never stopped.
When the general catched me up in the Wyoming Territory, I didn’t know where to go. I’d told the general that the tribe was mad at me and throwed me out, so if I went back to where they was camped in the mountains, and Eeteh’s pesky brother snitched to him, he’d see I was lying. Of course that wouldn’t change nothing, I was already a low-down liar in the general’s books, heaving stretchers at him by the muck-cartload, and him knowing it. But what if I led his troopers there? Maybe, I thought, looking back over my shoulder, he was only letting me go so’s I could do that, reckoning on my stupidness. So I dasn’t go back, but if I didn’t, Eeteh wouldn’t understand why. He might even calculate I’d been captured and stumble into trouble trying to find me. It was like one a Tom Sawyer’s pair a duckses.
The first thing I had to do was get word to Eeteh somehow. Maybe he’d know what to do. When him and me wanted to call out to each other without nobody knowing, we always hooted back and forth like owls, so I was listening everywheres for his hoots and I was who-whooing myself, best I could, but I didn’t hear nothing back. Me and Tom mostly me-yowed and I was naturaller at cats. They was more like family. Eeteh says my hoots might be exact, but they warn’t made by any owl he ever heard in these parts. “Then it’s the hoot of an emigrant owl,” I says. “That way, you’ll know it’s me.”
It was resky, but when it got dark and I hain’t heard from Eeteh all day, I rode Tongo up onto a rocky slope in hooting distance from the camp, done my emigrant owl who-whoos, and this time Eeteh was pretty soon hooting back. I was toting the whisky and tobacco I’d bought in the tavern for the tribe, so when he clumb his pinto up and found me, we settled into some boulders high up on the hillside under the moon to drink and smoke a pipe or two, happy we was both still alive, but not for certain how to stay that way.
Eeteh had thought I was already completely dead. He says that pestiferous brother told everybody he was scouting for the tribe and he seen Long Hair and his soldiers grab me and drag me off to be shot. He was all alone, he couldn’t do nothing about it. He even said he heard the firing squad before he sneaked away. The brother drooped his head down and says he was terrible sorry about it. I says the general found me all right, but if that sorry brother was watching, he didn’t stay around long enough to see what happened next. Eeteh says that he didn’t see nothing, he just set the general on me, and cut. It’s what the low-down liar fetched the whole tribe there to do, he didn’t care about what trouble he was dragging them into. Eeteh was madder’n I never seen him, and says that brother don’t belong in the tribe.
I told Eeteh all the general said, how he declared me guilty of an awful sight of hanging crimes, and how he wanted me to repent my wickedness by leading the whole tribe into a death trap. Eeteh nodded and sipped his whisky and says the tribe and me should move separate to the Black Hills, which warn’t fur off, and where the army warn’t allowed. The tribe can send out a decoy to lead Long Hair and his troopers the wrong way, he says, and then, whilst his calvary is a-chasing ghosts, they can haul their lodges over there. He told me about the whisky-maker in the Gulch and drawed a map on birch bark how to find him and says he’d look for me there when the tribe finally reached the Hills.