The Arrow Keeper’s Song Read Online Free PDF

herself with a lie. Suddenly she was grateful for the amber warmth spilling from the window, for the familiar sights and sounds she would soon be leaving behind.
    â€œHow can I make you listen to reason?” Robert said. The diminutive man was not about to accept defeat without one more last-ditch effort.
    â€œDon’t try, Father. Please.” She climbed up the steps and slipped her arm in his.
    â€œBah. I might as well be talking to the wind,” he remarked.
    Joanna gave a start and glanced over her shoulder at the night. The icy kiss of that cold breeze seemed to clutch at her soul. But the drums … or had it been the beating of her own frightened heart? Spectral riders in the mist, their unearthly voices wailing …
    Joanna shivered and hurried toward the light.

PART ONE
    A P RAYER TO THE S UN

CHAPTER THREE
    Oklahoma Territory, 1897
    I N THE BEGINNING THERE WAS THE A LL -F ATHER , M AHEO . A ND Maheo was lonely as He walked the Great Circle, so He created a great sea and reaching down into the sea He found little mounds of mud and these He shaped in the palm of His hand and set them upon the water. And the little mounds grew and grew until the sea was covered with land. Then the All-Father took a rib from His right side and created a man and took a rib from His left side and created a woman. Maheo placed the man in the south and the woman in the north. Man and woman walked toward one another, searching, always searching, for they too were lonely. And as they journeyed, they saw all matter of animals and birds, and these they named. Eventually man and woman found one another and their lives became one. Maheo was pleased with them. To their children He gave the sacred songs to bind the world, songs of power so that the world would not end, songs of healing and renewal and magic.
    The Maiyun whispered these songs to Sweet Medicine when the Cheyenne prophet received the Sacred Arrows. And so the songs were passed from one generation to another, down the long dark trails of time, from one Arrow Keeper and his circle of elders to the next.
    Seth Sandcrane knew the songs, and he had taught them to his son, preparing Tom for the day he would one day receive the Mahuts from Seth’s own hands. Now it was all lost. Tom had abandoned the old ways. And though the songs still lived within Seth, he was no longer the Arrow Keeper and there was no point in singing them.
    Seth emerged from the cabin he had built at the foot of a wooded knoll south of the settlement and glared at the newly risen sun as if he resented its arrival. Perhaps he did. Mornings were a hard go for a man without a purpose. He wiped his mouth on the tail of his whiskey-stained shirt and then tucked the shirt into his Levi’s and pulled his faded brown suspenders over his shoulders. He scratched his back against the corner of the log cabin, working the blunt end of an out-thrust log between his shoulder blades. His gaze inadvertently drifted to the ceremonial lodge nestled between the oaks on the slope west of town. A ribbon of smoke unfurled like a banner above the treetops, and Seth could only imagine Luthor White Bear standing by the medicine fire atop the bluff overlooking the lodge. Seth began to sing softly to himself the creation song that the world might not end. But the words trailed off, his voice became a whisper, then grew still. Old responsibilities, like habits, died hard.
    Seth studied the scattered buildings that made up the settlement and allowed his thoughts to slip back twenty-nine years. It was in the time of the hard-faced moon, November, and Chief Black Kettle’s band of Southern Cheyenne were wintering on the banks of the Washita, about five miles up-river from Cross Timbers. Seth was sixteen years old. He had just gone down to the river when the bluecoats struck. Custer had chosen his time well, for many of the braves were on a hunt, and only a few remained to defend the old ones and the women and