Wilderness Double Edition 14

by David Robbins

  “My kind?” Frazier said, puzzled.

  “You’re a trapper, ain’t you?”

  “I was. So?”

  “So it’s all the old farts like you who’ve killed off all the beaver,” Kendrick said testily. “You see, my partners and me came all the way west to become trappers. All those weeks crossing the prairie, all those days of terrible heat and thirst and going without food. And what did we find when we got here? That pretty near all the damn beaver have been trapped out. Ain’t hardly enough left to make a decent coat.”

  The accusation shocked Frazier. “Now, hold on. It’s not my fault the bottom fell out of the beaver market.”

  “True,” Kendrick agreed. “Between the time we left our homes over a year ago, and the last rendezvous, it surely did. But by then we’d gotten here. By then we’d learned the hard way that most of the beaver were already gone. Thanks to you and those like you.”

  Billy Batson fidgeted in his saddle. “It doesn’t hardly seem fair to blame this one fellow, Mr. Kendrick. I mean, he’s only one man, and there have been hundreds working the streams and rivers hereabouts for years.”

  Kendrick sniffed. “I suppose you have a point. Climb on down, stranger. Make yourself comfortable. No hard feelings, I hope.”

  Frazier had half a mind to tell the big man to go to hell, and leave. But the aroma of freshly brewed coffee reminded him that he had run out months before and would dearly love a cup. “None at all. Livin’ in the wild tends to make folks a big tetchy.”

  All seven were young, none over twenty-five. Kendrick appeared to be the oldest, although the man under the blankets, was approximately the same age. His pasty face beaded with perspiration, the man shivered and shook as if he were instead covered by snow and ice.

  “What’s ailin’ him?” Frazier inquired.

  “Fever,” Kendrick said. “He came down with it two days ago, and we’ve been waiting for it to break so we can go on.”

  Billy dismounted and knelt next to their stricken companion. “This here is Frank, my older brother. Him and me were brought up on a farm in Ohio, but we got tired of walking behind a plow all day. When we saw a notice that Mr. Kendrick was starting up his own trapping brigade, we joined right away. Thought it would make us rich.” He laughed bitterly.

  Frazier knew the booshways—the leaders of trapping parties—by sight. At one time or another he had met every one. At no time had he ever set eyes on Kendrick. Which told him the man was a fool. Kendrick had taken it into his head to lead a brigade without having any idea what it entailed—without ever having trapped. Based solely on tales and rumor, the idiot had led gullible greeners on a trek that might well have gotten them killed. His opinion of the big man dropped several more notches.

  A short, pudgy gent stepped forward. “The handle is Cyrus Walton, from Titusfield, the corncob capital of the world. Maybe you’ve heard of it?” '

  Frazier had to admit he never had. He was introduced to the last two, an ungainly scarecrow called Ira Sanders and a bristle-bearded walking barrel who went by the name of Elden Johnson. Bobbing his chin at each, Frazier turned and squatted beside Frank Batson. The former farmer’s brow was as hot as a red ember. “This jasper needs doctorin’,” he commented.

  “Think we don’t know that?” Ed Stark snapped. “But none of us know much about medicine.”

  Frazier doubted they knew much about anything, but he held his tongue and climbed back on Bessy. “There are some roots that might help. The Arapaho use them all the time.”

  Kendrick was skeptical. “An Indian remedy? You’ve been up in these mountains too long, old man. All that red mumbo jumbo doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.”

  “Shows how bright you are,” Frazier couldn’t resist responding. “Indians have forgotten more about treatin’ ailments than the white man will ever learn. I’ve seen them cure everything from a toothache to a crippled leg.”

  Ed Stark’s ferret features curled in a scowl. “Sounds to me as if we’ve got us one of them Injun-lovers on our hands, boys. I’ll bet this old coon has even lived with the heathens.”

  “What if I have?” Frazier said. He’d had enough of their attitude. He would forget the coffee and light a shuck as soon as he tended Frank Batson. “I’ll be back directly with what you need,” he told Billy, then departed.

  The roots were not difficult to find. They came from a flowery plant known to some tribes as poku sinop. Within an hour he was approaching the camp again, enough roots in his parfleche to do the job.

  Billy anxiously awaited him. “I sure hope you can help Frank. His fever is getting worse.”

  That it was. The old trapper filled his coffeepot with water from a water skin belonging to the scarecrow, Sanders. He crushed the poku sinop, added two handfuls, and stirred until the concoction boiled. Some of the younger men watched with interest, but not Kendrick and Stark. They stood aloof, resentment mirrored in their eyes.

  Frazier had met sour sorts like those two before. The kind who blamed everyone else for their own shortcomings. That they held him to blame for the decline in the beaver trade was outrageous, but typical. Sure, he had collected more peltries than most, but he had hardly single-handedly driven the beaver to near extinction.

  If anyone or anything was close to extinct, it was the trappers themselves. Only the Hudson’s Bay Company had any men in the field, and most were well to the north and west. The few free trappers still around were turning to varied pursuits to make ends meet. A few were guiding pilgrims along the Oregon Trail. Some had become scouts for the Army. Still others had gone east to end out their days in rocking chairs.

  Hot drops suddenly seared Frazier’s wrist. Jerking his hand back, he blew on it, then carefully filled a tin cup with tea. Everyone gathered around as he stepped to Frank Batson, who was tossing and turning. “Hold him down,” Ben directed Billy.

  The younger sibling hastened to comply. “Be still, Frank. This gentleman is trying to help.”

  Frank didn’t reply. Eyelids fluttering, his whole body quaking, he groaned loudly.

  Frazier placed the cup down, then gently lifted the sick man’s head onto his leg. It would take five or six cups, but by morning the fever should show signs of breaking and in twenty-four hours the Ohioan would be weak but well. “Open your mouth,” he said, pulling at Frank’s lower jaw, which grew slack. Frazier quickly picked up the cup and tilted it so some of the medicine trickled down Batson’s throat.

  Abruptly, Frank sputtered and coughed and lurched upward. Dazed, gaping in confusion, he clutched at the old trapper. “What’s going on? Who are you?” Billy put a hand on his brother’s arm “You’re sickly, Franklyn. Don’t you remember?”

  “I’m trying to help,” Frazier said, and went to push Batson back down. But the former farmer resisted, delirium lending him exceptional strength. “Please calm yourself. I only want to get some medicine into you.”

  Frank muttered incoherently and struggled to rise.

  “I could use some help here,” Frazier declared. He made the request too late. Batson tore at him, attempting to heave him aside, and in so doing wrenched Frazier’s buckskin shirt above his belt. One of the pouches fell, thudding at Kendrick’s feet, and some of the nuggets spilled out.

  Except for Frank Batson, everyone froze. Every gaze locked on the nuggets. Kendrick slowly bent and selected the largest. “Is this what I think it is?” he asked no one in particular.

  Ed Stark snatched up the pouch. “Gold! The whole damn thing is filled with gold!” He waved it at the others as if it were the Holy Grail. “There must be hundreds of dollars’ worth!”

  “All mine,” Frazier growled. Giving the tin cup to Billy, he extended an arm. “I’ll thank you to hand it over.”

  “Not so fast,” Kendrick said. He glanced at Ira Sanders and Elden Johnson and barked, “Hold him, boys!”

  Frazier stabbed for a pistol, but they were on him before he could straighten and unlimber either flintlock. Iron fingers held him fast. Billy B
atson protested, to no avail. Kendrick, smirking, patted Frazier’s sides. His smirk widening, the big man reached under Frazier’s shirt and pulled out the second pouch.

  “I thought so. And something tells me you know where there’s a lot more.”

  “Maybe I do,” Frazier blundered, and realized it the moment he spoke. “But I’ll never tell you.”

  A butcher knife blossomed in Kendrick’s other hand as if out of the rarefied air. “Reckon so, do you, old man?” He leaned forward. “I think you will.”

  Two

  They were young and they were in love. And when two people are in heaven, the whole world seems heavenly.

  Louisa May Clark certainly thought so. To her, the sky was bluer than it had ever been, the grass was greener, the trees were loftier. The Rockies had a fresh-scrubbed look about them, as if an invisible giant had spruced them up just for her. Every mighty peak pulsed with renewed vitality, the same renewed vitality that pumped through her own veins.

  Who could blame her for being so happy? Not long before she had lost her father, when he was brutally slain by hostiles. Before that, her mother. Louisa had been left alone in the middle of the vast wilderness, an orphan adrift in the dangerous sea of life. Her prospects for survival, let alone happiness, had been nil.

  Then Louisa met Zachary King. His dislike of whites and her dislike of Indians had resulted in mutual spite at first. But the longer they were together, the more they learned about each other, the better they understood each other, the closer they grew. Never in her wildest imaginings would Louisa have thought she could fall for someone like him. Yet she had. And now, thanks to their chance meeting, she had discovered bliss of an order she never suspected existed.

  Louisa was in love! Heart and soul, she adored Zach King. Or Stalking Coyote, as he was known to the Shoshones. Long before, the tribe had adopted the King family, in large part because Nate King, Zach’s father, had taken a Shoshone woman as his wife. In fact, Zach had spent so much time among them, he could pass for a full-blooded Shoshone warrior.

  Who would have thought, Louisa mused, that she would ever love someone who was part Indian?

  Life was so strange. After her pa died, Louisa had been in the darkest depths of despair. Now she was giddy with rapture, and thrilled to be alive.

  Where before the Rockies had seemed rife with menace and every shadow hid a potential threat, now the mountains were paradise on Earth. Her love had magically transformed them, just as it had magically transformed her, softening her hardened heart and letting her see everything in a whole new light.

  Louisa finally understood why poets and the like were forever spouting on about love, love, love. She understood why they claimed it was the answer to all the world’s woes. For if everyone could only learn to love one another, the evils of the world would melt away like wax under a hot sun.

  From the fountain of love gushed well-being and joy. At least, this was true in Louisa’s case, and she figured it was the same for everybody. Now, glancing at the handsome object of her monumental affection, she said softly for the umpteenth time that day, “I love you.”

  Zach King responded automatically. “I love you, too.” But he meant it, meant every syllable. The young woman beside him—let no one dare call her a girl even if she was not quite seventeen yet—meant everything to him. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for her. No challenge he wouldn’t meet. Her every wish was his command.

  At times Zach felt silly feeling as he did. He was acting the same as love struck Shoshone friends of his, young men his age who had undergone the same remarkable change. One day, they were interested in horses and tales of battle and counting coup; the next, they were interested only in the maidens of their dreams, and would dote on them to the exclusion of all else.

  Yes, it was silly. Yet it could not be helped. Zach’s father had been right, as he usually was. Years ago, on a blustery winter’s night when the wind howled outside their warm cabin and snow lashed the roof, they had talked about matters of love and intimacy. Nate answered a hundred questions Zach posed. And during the course of their talk, his father said something Zach never forgot: “Don’t fret, son. When the time comes, you’ll know it. You have no interest in girls right now except as playmates, and that’s as it should be. But there will come a day when you’ll change. When something inside of you will flare up like the wick on a lantern when it’s lit. And nothing you can do can stop it from happening.”

  Zach was glad his pa’s prediction had turned out to be true.

  Now, lightly clasping the reins to his dun, Zachary admired Lou without being obvious. She had on new beaded buckskins, courtesy of Winona, his mother, who had taught Lou how to make them. They clung to Lou’s lithe form like a second skin. Her eyes sparkled, her chin was held proudly high.

  It pleased Zach that she had started to let her brown hair grow. Previously, it had been cropped short so her father could pass her off as a boy and avoid unwanted attention in a land where white women were as scarce as hawk’s teeth. All in all, where Zach was concerned, Louisa May Clark was the perfect vision of feminine loveliness.

  Unknown to him, Louisa was doing the same thing he was. She admired his high cheekbones and the width of his shoulders. With his long black hair and bronzed features, Zach was as fine a figure of a man as any who ever lived, in Lou’s estimation.

  His buckskins, his moccasins, had been fashioned Shoshone-style. Around his waist, as around hers, were two pistols and a knife. Both were armed with Hawkens, both had ammo pouches and powder horns crisscrossing their chests, and Zach also had a possibles bag, typical of most mountain men.

  Lordy, but he is good-looking! Lou marveled. In her whimsy she compared him to the great heroes she had heard about when she was little, to the likes of Jason and Hercules, to famed King Arthur and fearless Sir Lancelot, and found them all wanting, Zach was handsomer, stronger, more manly. And he was hers.

  The shriek of an eagle drew Louisa’s gaze to a soaring silhouette far overhead. They were well to the west of the King cabin and had been on the go for two days. Another two and they would stop at a place Zach knew of, a high basin—or park, as the trappers called them—which they would have all to themselves for as long as they desired to stay. She couldn’t wait.

  The jaunt had not been their idea. Amazingly, Winona King had come up with it at supper a week ago. “I think the two of you should get away for a little while,” she had said out of the blue. “Go off and enjoy yourselves.”

  But had it been out of the blue? Lou now wondered.

  Zach and she had been flitting about like hummingbirds ever since Zach proposed. Naturally, she had said yes, and the two of them had been all set to start living together then and there. But Zach’s parents had laid down a condition: They must wait a year. By then Zach would be almost nineteen and she would be seventeen. They could have a formal Shoshone celebration, with all of Winona’s kin involved, and begin their new life “proper,” as Nate King put it.

  Initially, Louisa had been upset. She’d much rather become Zach’s wife right away. But the more she thought about it, the more she realized it made sense. It would give them time to get to know one another better, and to plan to meet the demands their new life would impose. So many questions had to be settled. Where would they live? In the same valley as Nate and Winona? In a valley of their own? Or with the Shoshones? What would Zach do once they were man and wife? How would he help support them? What should she do to contribute her fair share?

  They had been trying to work it out. Oh, how they’d been trying. Day after day they had debated what was best, and it had stunned Lou to find that often Zach’s ideas were completely the opposite of her own. So they hashed them out, and hashed them out some more, to the point where they started to get on each other’s nerves and were sniping at each other as if they were already married.

  Louisa suddenly laughed aloud. So that was the reason Winona King had advised them to spend some time alone!

  “What�
�s so funny?” Zach asked while threading his dun through aspens toward a jagged ridge above.

  “I was just thinking,” Lou answered. Bending, she reached over and brushed his hand with her own, careful not to swerve her mare too close to his mount. “You know, I’ve never been happier in all my born days.”

  “Makes two of us.”

  “Honestly and truly?”

  “Truly and honestly.”

  It was a private ritual of theirs, the honest and true part. Begun by Zach when Lou asked him outright if he sincerely loved her with his whole heart.

  “Won’t it be terrific, just the two of us alone?”

  “Yes, it will.”

  Louisa wasn’t worried about what her mother would have described as her “womanly virtue.” They had already decided not to go that far until after they were wed, and she trusted Zach to keep his word. Trusted him as much as she trusted herself. Which was ironic, considering that at the time of her father’s death the only person she trusted was her pa.

  After another few yards Zach reined up, rising in the saddle to cock his head. “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” The only sound Louisa heard was the gentle rustling of aspen leaves.

  “It sounded like a scream.”

  “No.”

  Zach listened for a minute, positive his ears hadn’t deceived him. He took pride in the keenness of his hearing and his other senses. From childhood he had honed them to be the best they could be, so that one day he would be worthy of being the great warrior he’d always longed to become. But after a minute, when the sound wasn’t repeated, he shrugged and sat. “Maybe it was that eagle.”