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Summary
Summary
Barnaby Skye, the most durable and unforgettable character in modern Western fiction, returns in this harrowing tale of survival from his early years in the Rockies.In the midst of a brutal winter, Skye's beloved Crow Indian wife, Victoria, is critically wounded when a Blackfeet raiding party attacks a Crow hunting camp. Despite Skye's attempts at doctoring, Victoria's life hangs in the balance as the two, left alone in the frozen wilderness, struggle to survive cold and starvation.Miraculously, an old mare and her foal wander into their camp. Victoria believes they have been sent by her spirit guide, and finds the strength to ride. Skye and his wife make their way toward Victoria's home village on the Musselshell River. Breaking winter trail is a slow and laborious process, but at the end of the journey they will find peace. Or will they?Skye's love of whiskey puts his life, and Victoria's, in peril when they encounter a renegade band of Yankee traders taking a wagon-load of a cheap and poisonous raw alcohol to trade among the Indians. Their leader, a former West Point officer, forces Skye to guide them, but all the while the legendary mountain man plots to ruin their deadly enterprise.In The Fire Arrow , Richard S. Wheeler has fashioned an unforgettable tale of love and survival in the unforgiving wilderness of the American West.
Author Notes
Richard S. (Shaw) Wheeler was born in Milwaukee in 1935 and grew up in nearby Wauwatosa. Wheeler spent three years in Hollywood in the mid-50s, where he worked in a record store and took acting lessons while struggling as a screenwriter. He eventually returned home, and attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
He spent over a decade as a newspaperman, working as an editorial writer for the Phoenix Gazette, editorial page editor for the Oakland, California, Tribune, reporter on the Nevada Appeal in Carson City, and reporter and assistant city editor for the Billings, Montana, Gazette.
In 1972, he turned to book editing, working in all for four publishers through 1987. As an editor for Walker & Company he edited twelve Western novels a year. Sandwiched between editing stints, in the mid-70s he worked at the Rancho de la Osa dude ranch in Sasabe, Arizona, on the Mexican border. There, in the off season, he experimented with his own fiction and wrote his first novel, Bushwack, published by Doubleday in 1978.
Five more Western novels followed Bushwack before Wheeler was able to turn to writing full time: Beneath the Blue Mountain (1979), Winter Grass (1983), Sam Hook (1986), Richard Lamb (1987) and Dodging Red Cloud (1987).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Rough luck plagues mountain man Barnaby Skye in this fourteenth installment to Wheeler's colorful Skye's West series (The Deliverance, etc.). Once a British seaman, Skye is a hunter and trapper in 1850s Yellowstone country, where he lives with his wife Victoria, a Crow Indian, and her people, the Absaroka. When Victoria is horribly injured in a Blackfoot raid, Skye stays behind to nurse her after her people depart. The miraculous appearance of two horses provide transportation out of wintry Blackfoot territory, but traders rob Skye's rifle and kit, and he returns to the Absaroka a pauper?and with horses they consider a bad omen. Exiled, Skye is tricked into working for a ruthless gang of fur traders who bilk the Indians for their valuable buffalo hides, doling out rotgut whiskey as payment. During a disastrous drunken trading exchange at Victoria's village, Skye is forced to act as translator, leading the Indians to blame him for their misfortune. Skye is once again an outcast, but vows revenge on the traders. In what may be the best Skye's West novel to date, Wheeler deftly balances the violence and brutality of frontier life with the love and tenderness of a husband and wife caught between cultures. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Booklist Review
Montana mountain man (and former Royal Navy seaman) Barnaby Skye returns in this episodic new western. It's a novel, but it feels more like a series of stories: how the Blackfoot Indians raided the Crow camp and Barnaby's wife was struck by an arrow, how Barnaby nursed her back to health, how they made their way to safety, how Barnaby found work at Fort Sarpy, how he fell in with a bunch of nasty Yankees, and so on. Luckily, Wheeler's engaging writing style, which evokes the Old West with remarkable power, keeps the novel from feeling too disjointed, and, let's face it, it's always nice to spend time with Barnaby. Recommended most heartily to fans of the long-running Skye series (it's going on 20 years old) and to anyone who likes a good, old-fashioned western yarn. --David Pitt Copyright 2006 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Fourteenth in Wheeler's western saga featuring mountain man Barnaby Skye (The Deliverance, 2003). As the story opens in the 1850s, Skye's Crow Indian wife Victoria is wounded in an attack at their hunting camp by a Blackfoot raiding party. Ignoring her pleas that he return home with the rest of the hunters, Skye stays behind and nurses her back to health. Snowbound in Yellowstone country, Skye is found by a malnourished half-wild mare and her ugly colt, quickly named Jawbone. With the mare, Skye and Victoria can travel. They arrive at the Crow village after losing to robbers everything but the horses. One of the elders prophesies that Jawbone will bring trouble to the camp and orders Skye to kill the colt. Skye refuses and sets off alone with the horses. Working at a trading post, he manages to replace his rifle and other equipment, but now the horses are stolen. Skye tracks down the thieves, only to learn that they are young braves of Victoria's tribe, proving their manhood. Once more Skye goes off alone, this time meeting up with a group of ex-army men who trade illegal whiskey for buffalo hides. After drinking with them, he awakens to discover he has signed a contract with them, one making him a virtual slave. Their first stop is Victoria's village, where Skye tries to warn the elders, to no avail: The village is all but wiped out in a drunken riot. With Victoria's help, he escapes the traders, then sets out to take revenge on them for the havoc they have caused among the people. At the end, he must face the task of rebuilding the devastated tribe. Many of the characters are paper-thin, and the prose no better than serviceable, but Wheeler's sense of setting and of history is powerful, and he has a fine command of pace. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One Death rose out of the night. A rush of hooves on frosted ground. A chilling howl. Whickering horses. A faint rip, thud, gasp, and sigh. The earth trembled. Barnaby Skye struggled awake. Violence had struck the camp. There was only the thin leather of his lodge protecting him, and that was no protection at all. Victoria gasped. He sat up, threw the thick buffalo robe aside, jamming away the sleep. Dead ash, embers gone, only blackness inside his lodge. He peered through the smoke hole. Bright moonlit night. Stars scattering through the October skies. The Judith River country, aglow in the moon, full of buffalo, full of death. He knew then. A raid. Blackfeet, who else? The horses already gone but now a worse evil, the enemy in the midst of the Crow hunting camp, every man for himself, death stalking the camp. He felt about for his Hawken, didn't find it, but found his belaying pin, that weapon of choice for generations of British seamen. A polished hickory club, thick, heavy, and flared to protect the hand or stop its passage through a ship's fitting. He grasped it just in time. The flap burst open and a dark force smashed in, swinging savagely. A battle-axe slashed the lodge cover, bedded itself in the robes inches from Skye. A knife glinted. Skye jabbed first, felt the belaying pin connect, then smashed hard just as a knife whipped by. Caught the warrior at the base of the neck. Skye jammed the stick into his face, heard teeth snap. The warrior retreated, howling, staggering out into the moonlight. Skye sprang up, pushed outside. The last of the Blackfeet were retreating north. The moonlight caught shadowy forms retreating into the gloom. A few half-naked Crows, kin of Skye's wife Victoria, chased on foot, carrying lances, only to fall back as arrows fell among them. One gasped and tumbled to the frosted grass. Skye was barefoot but he scarcely noticed. He did not see a horse anywhere. His own two buffalo runners, picketed beside his lodge, had vanished. In the distance, the thrumming of two hundred hooves diminished and died. Nine lodges of Crows, and not a horse among them, unless a few escaped the herding of the Blackfeet. Crow warriors armed themselves, but it was too late. It had happened so fast. The Blackfeet had overwhelmed or tricked or killed the night herders, the village youths not yet old enough for battle, and made off with the prized horses. But their triumph would not be complete without visiting some death or injury on the hated Crows. So they had raided the camp on Louse Creek after driving off the ponies, entering lodges, counting coup, killing if they could, making a great victory out of it. Death in the night. The hush suddenly returned, and it was as if there had been no violence, no death, no injury. Several Crow warriors hunted for horses, trotting here and there. Women, along for the skinning and hide-scraping and preserving, peered fearfully from lodge doors. Silvery moonlight flooded the encampment, making the lodges almost as visible as in bright day. And now they wailed, for there were bodies sprawled grotesquely on the frosty hardpan. Skye studied the murk from whence a last hurrah of arrows might come, but he saw only the silvered limbs of autumn-bare trees and brush along the creek. It had been a poor place to camp. He trotted toward a knot of people gathered around one of the fallen. It was the boy, Knot-on-Top, and he was dead, pierced by a Blackfoot arrow. His lifeless eyes studied the moon. Hardly a dozen years had this man-child lived. Three women knelt beside him, including his mother, Wolf Dreams. She did not wail. She sat mutely, cradling her son's arm in her lap. Grim warriors guarded the perimeter, but it was too late. Grief had come to this buffalo-hunting camp. The fletching and the dyed rings on the arrow protruding from the chest of Knot-on-Top told the story to anyone who knew of these things: Piegan. The most numerous and sometimes most pacific of the Blackfeet bands, and all the more dangerous for that. "Aieaa," muttered Otter, the headman who had led this hunting party to this desolate end. Skye sorrowed, and trotted toward another downed Crow, fearing the worst. He was not mistaken. Sees Dawn, the other boy guarding the herd, lay facedown, his head cleaved by a war axe, perhaps the very one that nearly chopped Skye's head in two. He would never see another dawn. He was Victoria's nephew and clan-brother. She would weep and in her own way vow death and disgrace upon whatever Blackfoot had slaughtered one of her own. Where was she? Skye didn't see her, and wondered about it. Off in the murk, several Crow men returned leading a few horses. So some had escaped the Blackfeet net after all, slipped into brush in the night. Skye studied the small band, looking for his two dun buffalo runners and not seeing them. He owned only three horses including one for Victoria, and was poor by Crow standards, for a man's worth was measured in horses. Skye had neither the skills to capture any nor the means to buy any. He wondered where Victoria was. She must have been deep asleep. He would check on her. There was little he could do here in the frost, as the moon bathed the fallen. He had some small reputation among the Crows as a valued warrior and hunter, but he could not speak their tongue enough to make friends or take part in the village life. It was time to check on Victoria, whose silence worried him. He hastened to his small lodge, a place shared only by his woman, and crawled in. Instantly he knew something was wrong. He dropped to his knees beside her, shocked by her long silences, and her brief desperate gasps for air, and the strange twist of her body, her head cocked backward, mouth open to suck life into her lungs. Too dark! He could see nothing. "Victoria!" She gasped. "Victoria! What?" She spasmed, some sort of shudder rolling down her small, lithe body. He tugged the buffalo robe aside, and then he couldn't pull it free. The robe was pinned to her. Then he discovered the thin, cruel wand of wood rising out of the robes, the feathered end of an arrow, the same arrow that had awakened him with its soft rip through the lodge cover. "Victoria!" The sight of her, so dim in blackness, seared him. He needed fire! He scrambled for wood, found some just outside the lodge door that she had gathered in the evening, grabbed some handfuls, set them upon the cold firepit in the center of the lodge, found his powder horn lying next to his Hawken, dribbled some over the kindling, hunted blindly through his possibles until he found his flint and steel, fitted the steel through his ham-thick fingers, and struck sparks savagely. The loose powder flared, blinding him. She trembled and gasped. One small stick caught, and then another, small blue light, and then welcome yellow. He could see. She wasn't looking at him; she stared straight up, a death rictus twisting her lips, her eyes sightless. "Oh, no . . ." Fire at last, tender flickering light casting its gloomy rays upon the small household of Barnaby Skye. The arrow had pierced the robe, and pierced Victoria under the robe. He could not see where and was afraid to touch her or it. She gasped again. Her lungs weren't working. Swiftly he clasped his great trembling hands over her chest, pushed air out, and let her suck air in. Something was stopping her lungs from drawing air in and out. Her face was blue. The fire wavered and started to die. He thrust more brush over the dwindling flame until it flared again. She wasn't breathing. He squeezed her chest and she gasped. He pushed and pulled her ribs, making air move. He needed help, but where could he turn? He summoned words and yelled. "Come!" he cried into the moonlight. Someone did come, a woman whose face he couldn't see. Then he heard talk, and two women crawled into his lodge and took it all in with swift glances. He knew the women: old Makes Rain and her sister, Lifts the Doe. Makes Rain was a blessing; she was reputed to have great powers of healing. But she was also no friend of Victoria. For Makes Rain didn't believe that a woman of the Crow people should marry someone else. She glanced sharply at Skye, and then produced a small, worn paring knife that had seen much work at this buffalo camp. Slowly she inserted the knife into the robe at the place where the arrow had punctured it, and sawed through the robe, little by little, while Victoria gasped, until at last the robe was freed and she and Lifts the Doe could peel it away from Victoria, ever so carefully. Victoria was gasping again, and Skye slowly squeezed and released her ribs until she was breathing, if the slow suck of air into her lungs might be called breath. The Blackfeet arrow protruded from her abdomen, just under the ribs, lit by the dying flame. Blood had collected around the wide slit of a wound, staining her trade-cloth chemise. Gently, the old woman sliced away the cloth until the wound lay exposed. The arrow had pierced upward two or three inches from the abdomen, no doubt cutting into those muscles that operated her lungs. A broad steel point, probably a Hudson's Bay trade item, had buried itself in her, and there was no way to remove it without starting a rush of red, red blood. They stared, helpless, at that fatal shaft. An inch more would have killed her but the lodge wall and robe had slowed the thrust. Victoria lay gasping, doomed unless she could breathe, and breathe soon. Copyright (c) 2006 by Richard S. Wheeler Excerpted from The Fire Arrow by Richard S. Wheeler All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.