Eye of the Wolf by Theodore V. Olsen

Author:Theodore V. Olsen [Olsen, Theodore V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: western
Publisher: Doubleday and Company, Inc.
Published: 1971-06-25T22:34:53+00:00

For a moment, coming awake, he didn't know where he was. The bent-pole bark-thatched ceiling arched darkly above; roseate dawn stained its smokehole. Morning flooded through the open doorway, touching the simple furnishings of Adakhai's hogan with a muted pearling.

The casual bark of a dog had wakened him. Other sounds washed into his awareness: a guttural music of voices, people going about their daily lives. It was strange, after so long away, to wake up to the familiar village noises. Through the doorway he saw a woman weaving at a frame-mounted blanket; he smelled the strong rendering of the sumac and piñon gum from which dyes were made. And he felt what he'd never expected to feel: the odd, quickening sense of homecoming.

He moved his head slowly, looking about. Rainbow Girl was gone, her pallet empty. A blackened iron pot simmered on coals in the fire trench. Adakhai was wrapped to the neck in his blankets, snoring in thick boozy grunts. Looking at his withered claw clutching the blankets, Will-Joe thought of long ago, a rushing stream and a strong-faced man with patient eyes holding a fish-pole for a small boy, the brown hands finely formed and muscular and sensitive. He thought of those hands pointing out the secrets of sky and trail, stringing gut on a flexed bow, chipping minute flakes from a flint that would make an arrowhead, quick to a thousand tasks of strength or skill. Then the pictures faded: there was only a boozy dried husk of a man snoring in his blankets.

Moving his head, arms, legs brought protesting cramps from all of Will-Joe's muscles. He raised his arm and looked at it. Hot and sore, livid and purplish around the troughed wound, but it didn't seem any worse.

He heard the voices of two people approaching the hogan. Rainbow Girl and Billy Hosteen. They stopped near the doorway out of his line of sight and continued to talk, low-voiced. He couldn't make out the words, but Billy's voice was edged with anger. The talk broke off; Billy Hosteen walked into his sight and strode away through the village, stiff-backed. Rainbow Girl ducked through the doorway carrying a basket. Her face was warm-colored; she hardly looked at Will-Joe as she knelt and emptied her basket of the plants, herbs and roots it contained.

After a moment he said: "What is it with Narbona?"

"It's nothing."

"Has he tied his pony by your hogan, skinny one?"

She gave him a quick look and did not smile. "You talk too much."

He watched her quick hands shred roots and leaves and drop them in a copper kettle. She laid paddles of prickly pear with the spines cut away on a flat rock and began mashing them with another rock.

He felt a strange awareness of her. Rainbow Girl was Adakhai's granddaughter, the last living person of his line. She was two years younger than Will-Joe. As a boy, he remembered being embarrassed and proud and annoyed that the skinny brown toddler had chosen to idolize him, tagging everywhere in his steps.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.