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Short Stories & Tall Tales
Jackson Dorny on the High Trail
Tom Sheehan
He’d been up in the Tetons for almost a year looking for his daughter Mercy. The near 11-year-old was grabbed right out of the south pasture by an Indian seen by a drummer who’d been on the town road. As Jackson Dorny searched an odd section of the range, tried to sleep, lit a fire for coffee as soon as the sun absorbed the firelight, he could hear the parting words to his wife, “Pearl, I won’t come home until I find Mercy and bring her back. If I don’t come home you know I’m still looking for her or I’m dead.” His arms were around her when he said those last words before mounting his black stallion, “I‘ve loved you, girl, since I first set my eyes on you at Carter’s spread these 15 years ago.” He squeezed her tightly;
He’d wanted to say, “Pearl, if you believe in your heart I’m not coming back, make sure you get took care of, get what you need, what makes you perk better and earlier than any woman on this bared earth.” He did not say it because it would be too negative and he’d not leave her with that. “Hell,” he assented under breath, “she knows it anyway,”
Good old girl she was, making goodbyes as special as she could, including a startling wake-up in the darkness of the pre-dawn after which she said, “There,” picked up her guitar and Jackson Dorny knew it was her turn, singing in a voice soft as a feather pouch a favorite love song, “What is said of the heart is true, it’s fond of the fare adieu, without a kiss or breath anew, a broken heart bleeds all blue.” All the way down the near trail from the back side of the barn, and almost out of sight in the first wadi dip in the north section, he swore he could still hear her singing, not sure where she was in the lyrics, though he caught the rhythm and the chords.
She was a special lady.
So was their daughter, now, two days hence, coming on 11 years of age, “and prettier than a spring bud in the early sun.” And she sang like her mother with silver tones in her voice, and sweet as a rose.
Several times he sent word back to Pearl, never knowing if any message got through, which simply said, “Still hunting, Jack.”
On this day he encountered a few renegade Sioux who sounded out an alert, obviously to others about the range where he saw smoke. He’d fought first, hid a bit in a series of caves and niches, then in a final maneuver raced down the stone trail of the narrow canyon, his horse dead behind him (there’d hopefully be another like him later on), his rifle busted useless, war whoops following him as if the whole tribe of Sioux were on the chase, their cries bouncing off the walls of the grayed-out canyon like a horn playing in an empty great hall. In the tones he caught the chords of a mysterious music, as though a lance had become a baton, the beats endless but musical, the threats real as arrows in flight. He ducked and ran. He ran and ducked. He slid behind monstrous slabs of rock and sought more breakaways. He wondered where animals might have gone ahead of him or Indians on the run, or another man like him looking for a lost child and the whole damned world chasing him.
It pushed him. And pushed, his eyes seeking breaks, indentations, black holes in granite or limestone walls. A way that might not have been used in a 1000 years.
Once more a niche in the rock wall was provided from times past and he slipped into it, found secrecy in a series of turns, squirms and daring leaps near darkness so full he lost all of the day; and so he hoped the Sioux would find the same calamity, but who might not come this far into the depths of another God’s Mountain, too holy for the common trod, and after a common man only looking for his lost daughter. It all made him recall the stories he’d been told of the lost daughter of a great Mandan chief and the atrocious treatment she went through at the hands of her captors. Years old, the story kept coming back to him on this search every time his will-power seemed to stray an inch from his fervor, or the circulating story would be re-invented, twisted, given a new name and a new tribe of responsibility, but it was one other daughter he thought of, taken from her family, taken from the promise of her life.
There came times it all made him shudder because he saw old scenes, the happy images that left track and trail inside his head.
Pearl’s words came as a hum, soft as a new a vase of buds she would set up on the kitchen table, mixing the aromas, cutting one off, allowing the new scent to flourish, like a celebration was in order. Mercy, across the table from him, or at the other end of the room at her own task, used to raise her eyes and smile at him when she saw a vase of buds or flowers propped early like a flag on the morning table, so much older than she really was. He remembered saying to Pearl, “One day there’ll be a real lucky fellow who finds her like I found you.” Pearl had answered him in her own way … and he remembered.
In the arms of darkness, and almost a total silence, the words of Pearl’s song made an entrance as he neared sleep on a hastily prepared surface in the deepest part of the mountain. He loved her at the guitar, her playing it a total surprise to him on their honeymoon, which was “over the fence and off a small ways,” and where she produced not only the guitar, but a beautiful singing voice. But he never told her how once he had heard a tenor sing in St. Louis and that tenor’s voice remained forever with him and the mystery of the lyrics he sang in Italian, altogether outstanding and memorable to an acute ear.
And now, in the heart of the mountain, no idea at the moment where his daughter was, if he’d ever find her in the vast mountain peaks, steep valleys, obscure canyons that form the Tetons, the voice of that tenor comes back at him as he rolled in near sleep. He remembered a pre-performance discussion at the foot of a hastily arranged stage in which the singer explained how the story came from a Persian poet about a prince who falls in love with a princess, Turandot, who is lost or kidnapped. Only Mercy comes to mind when he hears the power of the tenor calling out for his lost princess. He does not know what the tenor is saying but understands it, like Pearl’s song that comes again and again in nothing more than a hum.
As he gets closer to sleep, old curiosities finding him, he gets a glimpse of the Mandan chief; was that great one, head of a tribe, ever lost in a mountain like this one? Caught up in the innards of Good Old Mother Earth? Did he find his daughter? What was her name? How many times did he call out after her? Over a whole mountain? A whole mountain range? Did she tell him what her captors had done to her? Eventually he shuddered to sleep.
It was the call of a morning bird that woke Dorny, from down a long, narrow passage, a lilt in its call, and minutes later, from another place in the range, an answer, trebled into the dark and rocky place. He immediately thought of those Indians who had told him stories of captured girls. The talkers were those ostracized from their own tribes for one reason or another, or left as battle-wounded and brought through recovery by the graces of a white family or lone white men who lived in the mountains, who lived in peace, who loved “all their brothers in this harsh world hurled outright into the pit of war, drought and devastation.”
The latest piece of information coming to Dorny was from a half-breed, Diego Dan, part Sioux, born to a woman of the trail. He was left for dead after an attack on a wagon train. Dorny had come down from the mountain to try to get supplies from the train, saw the wagon train under attack, waited out the departure of the Indians, and began a discussion with the wounded half breed, thought dead by his cohorts, but retrieved from an outer perimeter by members of the wagon train.
“Yes,” Diego Dan said, “I have not seen them, but two daughters of your world, young yet, were taken from their people last year, south of here, and live with Two Birds. Two Birds is Oglala chief of mountain village that if seen by an outsider, the outsider is marked as an enemy and can never leave the village and is slain if he tries.” His pause signaled significant warning, “All men should take care when they are near Two Birds. He never guesses a man’s intentions, and believes none of them are good for his people, his village.”
“Where is his village?” The more information he could get, the shorter would be his search.
“I have not seen it, would not dare it, but it is in a valley, a tight one I heard, in the Deep Calitrees where the sun enters late and hot before it swiftly departs, its daily errand done.”
Such information revealed much to Dorny; beginning at an unknown point in the Deep Calitrees all he had to find was a steeply-protected valley where the sun enters late and departs early, where the arrows and lances might pour down like a thick rain on an intruder, where his escape would be doubtful, his death or imprisonment sure. And if there was one normal and usual way into the Sioux village, there might not be another way out. With his father one time, Dorny had been in the Deep Calitrees and vaguely remembered the landscape too high for climbing, too dense for living, too dark for a day-long sun struggling to penetrate … the way it would be for him in this pursuit, this daughter search.
He figured on many occasions that he had lasted too long a time in the mountains, and surely the Indians, all of them, knew about him and his search.
He wondered if Diego Dan had given up all he knew about Two Birds, his village, the kidnapped girls now in his band. “Have you told me everything you know, Diego Dan? I know your mind must be loaded with all the information you’ve stored there from your visits into parts of the Deep Calitrees. Even the slightest clue, the smallest hint that might be hidden away under the funny hat you wear. Why do you wear a derby with a tail attached to it? What does that mean? I could guess all day and not come close. Am I right?”
Diego Dan uttered a small laugh and exposed a broad grin. “Jackson Dorny is like the elder fisherman in my old village who saw the great fish when he was a young boy and fished the same pool for 50 years or more, as far as he could count, and never got a nibble. But he knew it was there, he had seen it, nobody else had caught it. He always had a chance. You are like him who fishes.”
“I just want you to dig into your mind to find leads. You are my best chance so far with any information to help me find my Mercy. Any peculiar habits with Two Birds? Does he carry any strange baggage?” Dorny stood up over Diego Dan by almost a foot and his shadow out in front of them was a lot longer, showing so much difference, which Dorny was pushing all the way. He had to. Where would he be tonight without another good lead?
Diego Dan saw the difference in the cast shadows. Dorny so much taller, wider, darker, and hungrier for information. Diego Dan felt the love in the air that possessed this man. His mind went searching, back through all he had ever heard, seen, knew about Two Birds.
Came at last a glimmer of a thought that found a reddening smile on his face and a quizzical look on Dorny’s.
“What is it, Dan? Don’t tease me with a look like that. What just passed through your mind like a silent thunderbolt?”
Diego Dan brightened further. “Once I heard, and only once, that Two Birds likes to sit alone in a high place often for a whole day, and think about who-can-guess-what. But he must puzzle his way through problems himself. Hell, he’s had enough of them on his own.”
“He meditates?”
“I don’t think he calls it that. I think he talks to the Gods of the Mountains.”
“There’s more than one?”
“It’s all according to how you ride your horse, how you paddle the canoe on the hard river. What kind of feathers you put on your arrows.”
“What’s that mean?”
“That might be what Two Birds thinks about on the edge of the mountain. I don’t know what else he can think about, except the white man is coming for good with more rifles than he’ll ever have, or how to get more, like stealing them or attacking a group every once in a while and taking the weapons from all the dead, and their ammunition. It’s how they must work for new rifles, or buy them from white men that don’t give a damned for anything, even their own wife or sister getting grabbed as long as they get gold from the Nations. Gold fever is the worst of all the fevers. It’s worse than the cough and the wheezing of the dead man hanging around to get picked up for a new house to live in, for another body to slip into no matter how old it is already. ”
Then Diego Dan slipped a new point into the discussion. “How old’s your daughter now, Jackson?” It was as if he gave up another inside morsel of information. “If I was you, I’d hurry my search. She’s getting close to the age when they’ll make her a woman of the tribe.”
Dorny jumped up. “This early? It can’t be! She ain’t 12 years old yet.”
“You have to face it. Jackson, she won’t be 12 for long and then before anybody knows it she’ll be 45, bent over and all the way worn down to nothing. Your only chance is through Two Birds. There’s no way you can get in that valley on your own. Two Birds is like your bridle and bit for the job.” He snapped his fingers, “Just like your bridle and bit or the paddle on your canoe.”
Hit eyes were lit up an unknown possibility, a miracle coming out of the heart of the mountains, where everything lay in wait for the lucky or the persistent or the dreamer or one father of a lost child.
It all flashed through Dorny like a hundred pictures or paintings on the loose but coming one after the other in a rapid run, full of colors and all shades of a rainbow and speeds never dreamed of and a sudden burst of energy and then a whole new series of images in his mind as if he had seen all of them the day before and yet waited for this moment, waited for things to happen that never happened before. He swung his arm out and hugged Diego Dan like he was his own son or a doctor who had just saved his wife or child, or like he was a whole lot of downright magician right off the peaks of the mountains.
“Damn it all, Dan,” he pronounced, “you just about took care of it all. Plumb impossible you are, my friend for life, plumb near impossible.”
They parted ways shortly thereafter, Diego Dan shaking his head, wondering what he might have loosed in his friend’s imagination, what he might have done for his daughter. If he was mystified by his friend’s response, he remained mystified, because he tried to hear again everything he’d said to Dorny, brought it all back, and still could not figure out what had sparked a new tact for his friend, a new way to get into old trouble.
“But it’s got to be special, real special,” he admitted to himself as he rode off on his own, Dorny disappearing around a turn of the mountain, probably on his way to a sure death. “The man has his wife; isn’t that enough?” He was not married. He had no child of his own held captive by others. He slept well at night. He had no illusions.
Two days later, the weather gently warm in a soft breath, silence sitting all around him except when he heard a hawk happily or hungrily on a thermal drift or a noisy peccary in a snit with another predator who kept to silence, Dorny breakfasted at an open fire in sunlight. Then he bundled up a heft of supplies and, backpacking, started up into the peaks of The Deep Calitrees, his mind going over the contents of the backpack, making sure he carried what he’d need. He sorted and counted the contents a number of times, seeing them come into their future use, cutting at the heart of his problem, his loneliness, his inevitable loss or gain of a daughter. Their return home.
The smile on his face made its crease before he even saw the dreamed image come back again, as it had come incessantly during the two nights since Diego Dan had set up a solution, cut right to the heart of his problem without realizing it.
He scaled or climbed or ascended, a term he’d select for each effort according to the character of a section of the rise, after he reached a target point. It would be a point of ledge, the top of a high escarpment, a peak blunted by age and serious storms across the thousands of years. The lodges of Two Birds, his secret valley, did not appear from any of the high places, until he slipped out of a torturous cave and came onto a ledge and down below, drawn tightly inside a stockade of sorts, he spied a vicariously planned and small Indian village, the very young ambling about, all the rest at various labors and training, The place was very organized, very busy, and he hoped it would be the place selected by Two Birds to look over his people, see that their safety was secure, and his own aims at fair treatment.
Jackson Dorny watched for two days, leaning hard on his patience; saw little other than what was already revealed to him. Out from his hideaway he’d go in pre-dawn hours or with the evening closing down, stars flung into their same old positions in the sky, the God at rest, the promise of endurance visible. And that second evening, the stars crowding him again, one shooting across the blue-blackness like a fiery arrow, the moon beginning a new phase off in the east, he encountered, both by keen eye and touch a very natural rocky chair, a lord’s seat for a better description. His hand running along a smooth, worn surface told him what it was, a place for an observer, an elder, a chief, who might study his own self and his people from on high.
“This must be it, Dan” he said, as if he could at that moment share his fortune to this point with the half breed who had mysteriously directed him to this very place. It appeared regal in natural makings, for a tree grew out of the side of the mountain, from a crevice, and provided a sort of throne coverage of the natural seat. Oh, he thought, Lord High of the Mountain, the mountain god’s place of watch. The leaves threw a high noon shadow on the chair, surely a place for midday meditation.
He went to work, planning his proposed routine that had been sparked by Diego Dan, the images clear and valid in his head, all the parts having come together. There was space enough to work in the niche where the tree grew. Selecting the implements he’d use, the position for their use, the other apparatus he might need if he was to succeed in his quest to bring his daughter home to her mother, he cut away from the tree a single limb, stout enough for his task, a limb with several off-shooting branches he trimmed to fit his plan. Measuring certain lengths on the limb and the off-shoots and using the same approach with rope, he felt his satisfaction grow
All was arranged to fit the pictures he saw in his mind, the future coming to him in the images as they galloped through his mind; scenes from westbound plains, river crossings, mountain challenges, all the possible scenarios.
He was ready. He heard from the past Pearl’s voice, heard her laughter, saw her knowing eyes when they’d sit on a morning vase full of meadow flowers freshly cut, probably in the dawn flash of that same morning, felt the slim arms hold him.
The next day, from under the tree in the morning, from within the crevice that supported the tree, he heard the approach of a climber on the rocky ridge line, dared a look, saw an Indian in full dress except for a bonnet, climbing to his obvious examination point where he could study himself and his village.
“Two Birds,” Dorny said with an affirmed delivery that sank a whisper in the crevice, “coming to do his meditation, taking care of his village and himself, and I’ll take care of my daughter if it’s the last thing I do.”
Pearl’s humming came to him, then Mercy’s laughter, the knowledgeable lift of her eyes at a morning sign sent thrills and chills through him, wisdom and age awareness and excitement in a kind of carnival action shot up in his whole body and he was afraid they’d reveal his hideaway in the crevice. His right shoulder pushed against one side of the crevice, his left hand on the other side, the surfaces of the rocks enough roughness on them providing a secure grip, keeping him rigid, even as he heard Two Birds obviously greet in his own language the God of the Mountain.
He knew enough of the Siouan language to hear Two Birds say, as he seated himself under the tree and in that special rocky chair, “Good morning, God of the Mountain, I have come to spend the day with you. Hear my words, know my heart, what must I do this day to honor you?”
Dorny knew that the great chief would meld into a state of connection with the God of the Mountain, and that attraction, or distraction, would help him take advantage of Two Birds, take him captive, use him as fuel in his bargaining. From parts of the language, in newer twists, Dorny picked up words he had not heard in a long time, among them could single out Dowanhowee, macha, ojinjintka, angpatu and winona.
It was several minutes before he understood them and settled on an order that said to him “a radiant rose’s singing voice of a first born daughter.” Dorny did not have to sift or shift the words too much to realize they were about his daughter Mercy. And to him they brought a startling concern about what Two Birds was contemplating; Mercy’s twelfth birthday upon her and womanhood in the mind of the chief.
Waiting for long minutes, feeling Two Birds moving deeper into his contemplation and ultimate confirmation with the God of the Mountain, he readied himself to make his move.
The rope was noosed already, a fine loop in place, his pistol loaded in his holster, and a special branch cut and hewn to enact the hanging of a man as he stood upright on solid ground. All the images he had created, brought to light, saw through completion, were again passed through his mind, Pearl’s face always with him, the sound of her voice, the touch of her hand, Mercy’s eyes smiling at him filled with the deep love that he saw whenever he thought of her being delivered to her mother; this errand for mercy, this mercy of an errand.
Did he dare do this? Don’t think of danger, he thought, think of them hugging each other. There never would be such as sight as that.
Silently he dropped the loop of the rope, as smooth as the image he had created, over the proud figure of Two Birds buried in contemplation as he sat in the natural chair under the single tree growing out of the side of the mountain.
The rope fell true right about the head of Two Birds and he yanked back on it as the Indian struggled to free himself and set the hewn limb down upon the back of the Indian’s neck. He pulled the rope tight, the noose snug under the chin and hard against his throat. Two rugged off-shoots, shortened for the purpose, slammed against Two Bird’s shoulders and a third rammed into his back, the rifle attached to that third limb of the hewn branch jabbing into the Indian’s back.
He spoke in halted Siouan, “I have come for my daughter that was stolen from me one full year ago. I will kill you if I do not get her back. We are going down to your village and you will promise to me in front of your whole village that my daughter and I will be allowed to go free with no more threats when we take you out on the prairie where it’ll be safe for us and from where you can get back to your people.”
Dorny went over his words in English and Siouan several times until, on demand, Two Birds nodded his understanding.
Not once did the noose release any pressure. Not once did the three limb ends move out of position upon Two Birds’ back. Not once did the bore of the rifle move from its appointed place of death at the middle of his back.
And it was in this manner, and this deployment of weapons, of tree limbs, a rifle at his back, and a tight neck noose that Jackson Dorny, positive his year of searching closing fast, led the Sioux chief Two Birds down the mountain in the constant threat of a calamitous fall, to the village where he swore his kidnapped daughter was a captive.
This is the way Dorny thought it would happen when they neared the village, his mind telling him so after the first image leaped at him from Diego Dan, and his mind locking down on the image and perfecting it, giving it the twists and turns, its ayes and nays to each and every mental inflection, invention, infection: Alarms would be cried out by Indians almost immediately once the pair reached a lower part of the mountain, but any and all retaliatory actions of any sort would be quelled by Two Birds whose hands were unbelievably free and unfettered, but were kept useless by the pressures at four points being exerted upon the back of his body by what Dorny would call in time, in the future, “his new articles of war,” the trimmings from one tree grown in a mountainside pod of earth by the wind-blown seed of a tree or one carried there by a bird (where it might have nested, mated, gave life to more tree planters). He’d give appropriate directions to his people so that “this man searching for his daughter, this man who has searched for a year, this man still alive in Sioux country, will not indeed kill me” ... if it is the last thing he’ll ever do.
This is what really happened in spite of all Dorny’s thinking and planning and dreaming, his hands not on his captive: There was a silence over the village, over the entire valley, a rich and thickening silence, a silence never before understood, a silence born on the plains of anxiety, foundered in the mountains, found in a secret valley known he thought but to the Gods.
An utter silence.
A drum that had been sounding a repetitive and rare rhythm, its cadence so musical it bore mystic sounds not ever heard by the intruder, suddenly went still, and the drummer stood beside a small lodge as if at attention, not daring to release another note. An arrow maker, chipping away at sharp stones whose edges caught or brought streaking shafts of sunlight onto those edges, dropped his stony tools soundlessly into a pile of ashes and also stood away from his work, at attention to the plight of his chief. At a fire in a thick and broad ring of stones pieced tightly together, an older woman stood transfixed with a stone jar moving between her two hands, as if its contents were too hot to handle with one hand.
This new situation for the villagers, this predicament, was visible to all who looked on, muscles and nerves tensing for an attack to free their chief of his bonds.
Then the people of the village noticed the noose, the tree limb with multiple flush ends against Two Bird’s neck and shoulders and the middle of his back where also the Springfield rifle, lashed to the limb with a leather string fit to the trigger on one end and the other in the hands of the white man, was firmly pointed.
To a man they understood the compromise in front of them, the position their chief was in. They knew the sudden silence bearing down upon them too as though it was swept down from the mountain, a weighty and universal silence that took with it the normal animal sounds of a normal day - the outstanding but singular cries of coyotes, the wolf pack’s domination howls as they began a feast after a long hunt, a hawk’s on-high celebration of flight and sight, the evangelical moan of the high gods of all earth and sky as it sought the full congregation’s attention, conversion and belief ... until, from the other end of the village came a most beautiful voice singing a chant of mysterious and mythical import, none of the lyrics understood by Dorny, but the lilt in the voice plainly and unmistakably that of his lost daughter, his found daughter.
The feelings plummeted to the depths of his soul, rose again, as if to be tasted again in his mouth where he was trying to form and pronounce, “Mercy.”
Two Birds, not in comfort, but able to speak freely though the rope was at his throat, said to his people, which Dorny knew again to be the truth of words he had heard this very day up on the “praying ledge,” as he would later call it, singled them out once more. The dominant Sioux words of Dowanhowee, macha, ojinjintka, angpatu and winona but this time from a chief in front of a village full of Sioux, said fully aloud, as if summoning the one that was identified as a radiant rose’s singing voice of a first born daughter, Mercy Dorny herself, a year lost, a year stolen, 12 years alive.
She came running to her father from a lodge of the village, the largest lodge of all, not her melodic voice calling him, but in a tone that he never heard and knew forever after this moment, as her excitement, her relief, her hoped for joy, who might be thinking could her mother be so far away? Could she be as close to where he had come? Could that gentle woman imagine this sight? Or had her day already turned on itself, the sun and her flowers at their mix on the kitchen table, the sun and a sense of exhilaration glancing off the top of the table?
The way opened as Jackson Dorny, his daughter Mercy, Sioux chief Two Birds, each one mounted on Indian ponies, rode out of the village. The chief was still under rifle point, and his hands kept waving off his braves, ordering them not to follow, that he was guaranteed to be let loose within two days travel on the prairie.
For two days, once out of the valley by the only way in or out, the trio rode across the prairie, Dorny slipping back now and then to check if they were being followed.
Each time Two Birds said, “You think my people will not obey me. You have my word. I have your word. None of my braves will disobey me. They know you are a man of great courage, and you have gained their respect. We knew of your search but never thought you would find us. It was my fault that I chose to talk to my god while I was nearer him, on the high mountain.”
Dorny replied, “My word is as good as your word. My daughter said she has not been harmed. I am thankful for that, but why did you steal her from me, from her mother? Not only was she lost, we were lost too.”
The chief looked at Mercy and said, “One day, as I rested, I watched cattle in a great pasture, thinking I could come with my braves and take many of them, then, from nearby, beyond a copse of small trees, a cluster of them, I heard the voice of a girl singing and I snuck close to her, heard her clear words, loved her voice and knew she could do all that magic with my own people’s songs for the gods. So I stole her from you for the God of the Mountains. She has learned all our songs. She will never forget them, I promise her and you of that. Listen to her at night, think of your time in the mountains on your search, think what she has learned. Listen closely when she explains. She will take the God the Mountains with her wherever she goes in this life, whether she wants to or means to, or not.” He paused then, looked at Mercy, and said, “I hope it will be a long life, a happy life, and that you always bring our songs to others who have not heard them.”
Jackson Dorny believed he was hearing predicted truth in the words, a universal acceptance of a change in the land, a change in his people.
That night, Mercy Dorny sang around the campfire, a mesmerizing voice singing mesmerizing songs long after the flames died down. Her father did not know any of the words, but he thought the whole earth and all its mountains and the clouds and the sky had been singing to him, until the stars took over the world again all the way past any horizon he had ever experienced.
In the morning, with no words, Two Birds rode off as agreed, back toward his people, proud and regal, not an ounce of shame in evidence about him. And the next morning, after a long ride, a husband and father rode up out of a wadi on his north pasture, his daughter riding beside him.
Where the grass leveled before a dip in a wadi and a clutch of trees swallowed deep breaths of a breeze, Mercy Dorny, on an Indian pony, began singing one of the Indian songs in a spectacular voice that puffed her father’s joy, and across the grass, from her morning porch, Pearl Dorny heard that voice, walked into her kitchen, and returned with a vase of flowers from her morning table.
She held the vase on high as she waved to her husband and her lost daughter, home once again, with a strange and beautiful song coming along with her.
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