Wilderness Double Edition 14

by David Robbins

  “No!” Nate placed both hands flat on the other’s stomach and pushed in deep, a trick he had seen used by a Shoshone on a child that nearly drowned in the Green River. But nothing happened. He pushed again, and a third time. Had he been too late? Was all this in vain? He pumped madly, not knowing what else to do.

  Scott Kendall was pale, his face covered with grime, his reddish beard caked with dirt. A wide gash above the left ear bled profusely. He was a big man in his own right, heavy with muscle. On a few occasions, at the annual rendezvous, they had wrestled, and Nate had been impressed by his friend’s bulk and weight. Now both worked against them, preventing him from saving Scott’s life.

  Unwilling to be denied, Nate put his hands on Kendall’s chest, one on top of the other, and in desperation resumed pumping. He had no idea whether it would do any good. He just wanted to get Kendall’s lungs working again. Push-stop-push-stop-push-stop. Repeatedly, Nate performed the same driving thrust. His arms were tiring and sweat was dripping from his chin when, unexpectedly, Scott Kendall lurched convulsively and coughed.

  Nate pumped again, but there was no need. His friend was heaving and sputtering and wheezing like a blacksmith’s bellows. Nate sat back, weary but elated, as the other mountaineer sucked in air. In a while Kendall’s breathing became normal. But to Nate’s dismay, he didn’t open his eyes or sit up.

  “Scott?”

  Rousing himself, Nate rose onto his knees and shook Kendall’s shoulder. Scott’s eyelids fluttered, but otherwise there was no reaction. Nate shook him again, harder. Now what? he thought, and examined the head wound. It was worse than he had guessed, deeper and jagged, caused by the most severe of blows. No wonder Kendall was still out to the world.

  Rising, Nate claimed the Hawken, then bent and lifted his friend. He figured that he could make it down without too much difficulty, but he figured wrong. His first stride nearly resulted in disaster. Talus slid out from under him so fast, he pitched forward and would have fallen except for a large boulder that resisted the pull of the earthen mercury and enabled him to check his plunge by propping a foot against it.

  How else can we get down? Nate wondered, and received his answer in the form of crackling brush and the sudden appearance of his son and the young woman his son was engaged to. “Zach! Louisa! I need your help!”

  Zachary King was all of seventeen years old. He had his father’s black hair and green eyes, and like his father he favored buckskins. But his were fashioned more in true Shoshone style, and his hair was worn as a Shoshone would wear it. His knife sheath, his moccasins, were Shoshone. Unless given a close scrutiny, he could easily pass for a full-blooded warrior. Springing from his dun, he hastened to the talus.

  Beside the young man ran the girl Zach loved. Louisa May Clark was only sixteen, but by frontier standards that made her a woman. She was old enough to marry, old enough to bear children. Indeed, girls who had not wed by her age were branded peculiar. By twenty, unwed females were considered old maids.

  But Louisa Clark hadn’t accepted Zach’s proposal out of fear of becoming a spinster. She loved him, loved him dearly, loved him as she had loved only two other people in her whole life: her mother and father. She’d lost the former on their arduous trek across the vast prairie. Her father had later been slain by hostiles. Now she was on her own—or had been until she met the one who had claimed her heart.

  “What do you want us to do, Pa?” Zach asked. They were a good fifty feet below where his father stood.

  “Do you have your tomahawk?” Nate responded.

  Zach pointed at a parfleche draped over the dun, behind the saddle. “In there.”

  “Chop down three straight limbs about seven feet long. Trim off the shoots and leaves and bring them here. As fast as you can.”

  Zachary turned, but Lou beat him to the dun and unfastened the flap with a deft twirl of her fingers. The tomahawk was on top. Zach accepted it and led her into the trees, scanning high and low for suitable branches. He found one on the ground, another low on a wide pine. The last was beside a log. “These should do us.”

  “What does your pa have in mind?”

  “I don’t rightly know. But he wants them, so he gets them.”

  Louisa couldn’t get over how close-knit the Kings were, how deeply they trusted and relied on one another. Back in the States, many families had honed bickering to a fine art and spent more time squabbling than sharing. Not so the Kings. They treated each other with a degree of respect rare to behold. And they were always ready to lend one another a helping hand, unlike her own relatives, who could only be persuaded to help out when it was in their best interests.

  Drawing her knife, Lou helped trim. As she worked, she studied her sweetheart on the sly, admiring how his lean body flowed with each swing of the tomahawk. She never tired of gazing at him. He was the single most handsome male in all Creation. Or so she believed, and woe to anyone who sought to convince her differently.

  Zach King was thinking about the man his father was helping. He’d glimpsed Kendall’s face, and was curious why the man had shown up so early. The two families weren’t slated to get together for another moon.

  Up on the talus, Nate hollered for them to hurry. He wanted to get his friend to his wife without delay. Winona was a highly skilled healer, her knowledge of herbal cures remarkable. She could gauge better than he how serious the wound was, and what was needed to mend it.

  “Bring the last one,” Zach said to Lou while dragging two of the limbs off. He had a fair notion what his pa had in mind. When he came to the talus he ascended without being told.

  Nate had set Scott down so he could palm his butcher knife and cut a strip from the bottom of his shirt to use as a makeshift bandage, which did little to staunch the flow of blood. Now he began to cut whangs from under his arms and give them to his son. “Tie them together in pairs,” he directed.

  The fringe on their outfits served a variety of purposes. It helped drain rainwater off so the seams wouldn’t swell. It reduced the wear and tear on their elbows and forearms. And best of all, the long strips could be cut off and used as binding.

  In this case, Nate planned to use them to keep Kendall from slipping off the poles. He laid the long limbs side by side, about a foot apart. Then, with Zach’s help, he placed their friend on top and lashed Scott’s wrists and ankles to the outer ones.

  “You sure this will work, Pa?”

  “No,” Nate admitted. If anything went wrong, Kendall could wind up worse off than he already was. “The two of you take the top. I’ll take the bottom.” So saying, Nate slid lower, slinging the Hawken over a shoulder. He lashed the three lower ends as closely together as he could, then gripped the outer limbs. “Ready?” Working together was essential, otherwise the crude travois would fall apart.

  Zach nodded.

  “Whenever you are,” Lou said, praying she wouldn’t mess up. Ever since she arrived at their cabin, she had been doing her utmost to show Zach’s folks she was worthy of being a King. She did all she could to help out his ma; she treated little Evelyn as the sister she’d never had; and when given a chore, she did it to the absolute best of her ability.

  The Kings didn’t demand such perfection. They were relaxed and easygoing. No, Lou imposed it on herself. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was an outsider, that she must prove herself to them in order to be fully accepted. Silly, she knew, but that was how she felt, and she could no more discard her feelings than she could stop breathing.

  “On the count of three,” Nate said, and counted. On “three,” he lifted the ends and backed slowly down the slope. The poles slid loosely on the talus, carrying Kendall with them. Zach and Lou insured that the top ends didn’t drift wide, Lou placing her hands on either side of the trapper’s head so it wouldn’t drag.

  “Easy does it,” Nate instructed.

  The fifty feet seemed like five hundred. They had to stop often so Nate could set down his end and push large rocks out of the way or roll small bo
ulders aside. More times than Nate cared to count the talus started to give way, the dirt caving in on itself and stopping only when they stood stock-still.

  “Where do you reckon his wife and daughter are?” Lou asked Zach. She’d enjoyed their company when the two families got together. Lisa, the mother, was a naturally friendly soul, always in fine spirits. Vail Marie, the little daughter, was a bundle of energy who kept her parents hopping to keep up with her. “I hope they’re safe. I like them.”

  “I hope so too,” Zach replied. He liked the Kendalls also—liked them a lot—in large part because they treated him no differently than they treated everyone else. Not all whites did. Too many of his father’s kind looked down their noses at him because he was of mixed blood, half white, half Shoshone—a half-breed. And as he had learned through bitter experience, ’breeds were generally despised by whites and Indians alike, a state of affairs that angered him whenever such rank bigotry reared its ugly head.

  “Don’t let your end slip,” Nate cautioned. He was thinking ahead, to how they could get Kendall to their cabin without jostling him. A sturdier travois would suffice but would take most of an hour to rig—and they didn’t have an hour to spare.

  Lou stared at the blood on Scott Kendall’s head. It had stained the bandage and continued to dampen his hair and beard. She recollected her pa telling her that if a person lost too much blood, they died. It was plain they must do something soon to stop the bleeding or the poor man wouldn’t live out the day.

  If there was any one aspect to life in the mountains that Lou disliked most, it was the violence. Violent accidents. Violent enemies. The raw violence of Nature itself. She never felt completely safe, as she did back in the States, because she never knew from one moment to the next when a new threat would arise.

  As if on cue, Nate King stopped and gazed past them, above the talus. “Hold up. Don’t make any sudden moves.”

  Lou hated to look, but she had to. Slowly turning her head, she spied the one creature that was more than a match for her prospective father-in-law. How could she miss it when it rivaled a bull buffalo in size? “Dear Lord, no,” she breathed.

  The grizzly on top of the ridge growled.

  Two

  Louisa May Clark had known the King family a relatively short time. Yet in that brief span she had come to regard them as rather remarkable. Besides being so close-knit and considerate of one another, they were some of the bravest people she’d ever met. She was given another example of their courage as the grizzly started down the slope toward them. Did either Nate or Zach show the slightest fear? They did not. They faced the monster as calmly as she would a stray dog, acting as if it were nothing to get excited about, as if having a grizzly interested in devouring them was the most normal occurrence on the face of the earth. Her future father-in-law seemed more annoyed than anything else. Unslinging his Hawken, he sidled to the right for a clear shot, careful not to dislodge the talus.

  Zach had put himself between her and the bear, an act that endeared him to her all the more. He was so protective. When they first met it had bothered her some. She was a grown girl. She could take care of herself. But then she realized he was doing it out of love, not out of any urge to run roughshod over her, and she had come to accept his protectiveness. She imagined that-when they were married he would do the same, but she wouldn’t mind as long as he didn’t turn into one of those men who treated their wives like helpless babies, as some friends of her pa had done.

  At that moment, unknown to her, Zach King was regretting that Lou had tagged along. He’d wanted to leave her at the cabin with his mother and sister, but she insisted on coming and he couldn’t bring himself to refuse. Things would change once they were man and wife. Then he could speak more freely, and he would be damned if he would let any wife of his put herself in harm’s way. For their mutual peace of mind, once they had their own place it would be best if she stayed close to home.

  Nate King pressed his Hawken to his shoulder but didn’t fire. At that range he’d only wound the beast, and a wounded grizzly was a ferocious demon, unstoppable unless struck in a vital organ. Which was hard to do, thanks to their thick skulls and hides. As Lewis and Clark had learned on their famous expedition, dropping a griz took grit, perseverance, and plenty of ammunition.

  The bear halted short of the upper edge of the talus field. It sniffed suspiciously, perhaps disturbed by lingering dust. Its enormous head swung from side to side as if the bear were seeking a safe way down. Apparently it had dealings with talus before.

  Nate wasn’t worried—yet. He’d slain more than his share of the great bears. When he initially came to the Rockies, the mountains literally crawled with them, and every other month or so he’d been pitted in combat with one. It had earned him a name unique among whites. To the Shoshones and the Crows, the Flatheads and the Utes, the Cheyennes and Arapahos, he was known as Grizzly Killer.

  As the years went by, as more and more trappers flocked to the mountains, the number of silvertips along the foothills and the lower slopes dwindled. But those in the high alpine regions of the Rockies were as numerous and formidable as ever.

  Nate sighted along the Hawken. The grizzly was prowling to the left, nose low to the soil. Nate speculated it was trying to pick up their scent in the mistaken belief it could descend the same way they had. Little did it know. He saw the brute start onto the talus, then draw up short when its paws dislodged a torrent. Backpedaling, it regained solid footing and snorted in irritation.

  “Want me to fire a shot to try and scare it off?” Zach asked. He was well aware that grizzlies were fearless, but he didn’t want the bear getting any closer, not with Lou present.

  “No, Stalking Coyote,” Nate said, using Zach’s Shoshone name.

  “Maybe it will just go away,” Louisa said.

  Zach almost laughed out loud. Grizzlies never gave up. The idea was ridiculous, but he didn’t say so to Lou for fear of offending her. Quite a bit of late he found himself choking down words he might otherwise say, just to spare her feelings, and he took it for granted that was normal when two people were in love.

  Rumbling deep in its huge barrel chest, the grizzly had climbed to the crest and was gazing at them. Silhouetted against the sky, it appeared almost regal—yet incredibly sinister. Turning, it shambled off down the other side.

  “See?” Lou said happily. “What did I tell you? We’re safe now.”

  Are we? Nate asked himself, and reslung the Hawken over his right shoulder. “Work fast,” he commanded, bending to the poles. Acutely conscious of every passing second, he resumed their descent, moving with less care than before, anxious to reach the bottom. So anxious that when dirt slid from under him he didn’t stop.

  Louisa sensed the mountain man’s urgency and divined the reason. She checked behind them several times, but the grizzly hadn’t reappeared. Nate was unduly concerned, she reflected. They weren’t in any danger. Why would the bear go to all the trouble to travel completely around the ridge?

  It was the blood, Nate was thinking. Kendall’s freshly spilled blood. The grizzly had caught a whiff of it, and the monster’s bestial instincts had been inflamed. Their only hope to avoid a possibly fatal clash was to mount up and get out of there before the silvertip returned.

  One of the horses whinnied. All four had their ears erect and were fidgeting nervously, Lou’s mare worst of all. The bay was staring at the west end of the ridge, two hundred yards away.

  “What’s got them so skittish?” Louisa asked, the answer occurring to her the moment the words were out of her mouth. “Oh,” she said, and felt foolish. “It’s going to come after us, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Zach said. He knew they would be lucky to escape unharmed. A grizzly’s ferocity and cunning were matched only by its single-minded determination in pursuit of prey. Once a bear began a stalk, it didn’t like to quit until its fangs were buried in its quarry.

  A low roar from the west end of the ridge was added incentive for the
m to hurry. Nate reckoned it was a young bruin; an older grizzly would know better than to let them know where it was. He kicked a large rock from his path, avoided an eddy of swirling dirt, and drew within a dozen yards of the bottom.

  “It’ll be awful close, Pa,” Zach said.

  “What will?” Louisa asked.

  Zach didn’t answer. He was surprised she didn’t realize their plight. Granted, she had little wilderness savvy, but he would hope his wife-to-be was sharp enough to think things through for herself. Not that he would adore her any less. Still—

  Nate went a little too fast and paid for his mistake by having his moccasins wrenched out from under him. He fell onto his knees, pain searing up his thighs to his lower back. Undaunted, he shoved erect, firmed his grip, and partially walked, partially slid, the final few feet. The whole while, Scott Kendall never stirred. His breathing was regular but shallow, half his face caked with drying blood.

  Nate saw that his son and Lou were winded. He could use a short breather himself, but an overriding sense of urgency spurred him into moving toward the horses without setting the travois down. “We'll throw Scott over the sorrel,” he announced.

  “Oh, God!” Lou exclaimed.

  The bear was at the far end of the ridge. It stared for only a moment, then broke into a shuffling trot, moving with amazing swiftness for so large an animal. Its bulk was deceptive. At top speed, a grizzly could overtake a horse.

  Pure fright gushed through Lou. She had to will her arms and legs to work, to help Stalking Coyote and his father lift Kendall and ease him onto the saddle, belly down. It took valuable seconds, seconds in which the bear drew rapidly nearer. When next she looked, the grizzly had slashed the distance by half. Another hundred yards and it would be on top of them. Lou’s fright grew worse, nearly paralyzing her.

  “Light a shuck!” Nate declared, pushing both of them toward their respective mounts. “Zach, you lead the sorrel.” Without waiting to see if they obeyed, Nate sprang onto the bay, hauled on the reins, and did the last thing any sane person would do. He rode toward the grizzly instead of away from it.