Wilderness Double Edition 14

by David Robbins

  Pointing northward, Evelyn said, “Yonder. I felt some cold air blowing on me. And when I looked, I found this big hole in the ground. And saw the little man.”

  “The what?”

  “A little man sitting down in the cave. He was all brown and dried up, like a berry that’s been in the sun too long.”

  Lou was fascinated. “Really? Goodness gracious. Was it an Indian? Did he say anything to you?”

  “No, I think he was dead. He didn’t move or anything. He just sat there, smiling like he was happy to see me.”

  “Take us to him.”

  Zach had heard enough. “Lou, you can’t be serious. She’s pulling our legs. There’s no cave, and even if there is, there sure isn’t no little man. She’s making the whole thing up. Trying to convince us she saw a NunumBi, when anyone with half a brain knows there are no such people.”

  “A NunumBi?” Lou said.

  Evelyn squealed in delight and clapped her hands. “The NunumBi! Of course! Why didn’t I think of that? The little people who live in the mountains and shoot their little arrows into folks!”

  “They do what?” Lou was beginning to agree with Zach. His sister was fabricating a tall tale to make them look silly.

  “It’s an old Shoshone legend,” Zach explained. “Older than any Shoshone can remember. About the days when dwarfs and giants and wild creatures bigger than our cabin roamed the land. The giants were supposed to be ten feet tall, and carried clubs no ordinary man could lift. There were birds as big as buffalo, called Thunderbirds, because when they flapped their wings it sounded like thunder. No one takes the stories seriously.” He gave Evelyn a pointed stare. “At least, no one who is grown up.”

  “Touch the Clouds and Drags the Rope told me the NunumBi are still around,” Evelyn held her ground, “and they’d never lie.”

  “Could it really be?” Lou said, stirred by accounts her own grandparents had related of life in the old country, of the fair folk and pixies and leprechauns and the like. It astonished her the Indians had their own version of the Little People.

  “Now who’s acting addle pated?” Zach asked, wondering how she could take his sister’s nonsense seriously. “If the NunumBi exist, then elk can fly.” Chortling, he hiked toward the high trees. “Come on, you two goofs. Ma told us not to be gone too long.”

  Lou’s cheeks acquired a pink hue. “Men!”

  “Brothers!” Evelyn declared.

  The two girls stared to the north, then the older grasped the younger’s hand and they headed for home. The mysterious cave, with its mysterious occupant, would wait to be explored another day.

  Nate King was mad enough to spit glowing coals. Mad at himself. He should have seen it coming, should have realized his heartsick friend’s torment would lead Scott to do something rash. Now here he was, racing like a Chinook wind to catch up and stop Scott from doing something rash.

  Beside the bay trotted Swift Elk’s splendid white stallion. Four other warriors were with them. The rest had stayed behind to make sure the slain warriors were properly sent into the hereafter.

  Swift Elk wasn’t the same man he had been before finding the bodies. Gone was his smile, his outgoing nature, his willingness to gab. He was a dark and terrible shadow of his usual self, ominous lightning crackling in his eyes. He had signed only one statement to Nate in hours, and that was when they mounted up to go after Kendall. “My people will be avenged. This I vow.”

  All the Utes were equally somber, equally subdued.

  Their thirst for vengeance ruled them to the exclusion of all else.

  By Nate’s reckoning, Scott was an hour and a half ahead, or better. He hadn’t noticed his friend was gone for the longest while, and when he did, he’d assumed Scott had ventured into the trees to heed Nature’s call. The truth didn’t hit him until he saw that the buckskin was gone, too. By then Scott had a forty-five-minute head start. Getting the Utes to make up their minds about who would stay and who would go had taken another quarter of an hour.

  Now here they were, driving their weary horses anew, their urgency compounded by Nate’s need to save Scott from himself.

  As time went by and it became apparent they weren’t going to overtake Kendall anytime soon, Nate fell into a funk of his own. He would hate to lose Scott. He could count the number of truly good friends he had left on one hand. Life in the wilderness took a savage toll on those audacious enough to live there. Many of the trappers he had known were pushing up clover. Many close friends had met ghastly deaths at the hands of hostiles or under the slashing claws of ravening beasts.

  It had always been thus. In the early days of the beaver trade, hundreds of young men flocked to the Rockies in their bid to emulate John Jacob Astor. Most did well enough at first, earning up to a thousand dollars or better at the rendezvous. This in a day and time when the average laborer in the States was lucky if he made four hundred dollars a year.

  The money never lasted long, however. Supplies at the rendezvous cost three to five times as much as they would in St. Louis. And unless a trapper wanted to travel clear across the prairie, wasting weeks of valuable time, he had no choice but to make the best of a barely tolerable situation.

  What little profit the mountaineers made usually went for foofaraw for the maidens, and whiskey. Trappers were powerful fond of drink. Strong drink. The kind that curled the hairs on a man’s chest and curled his toes in rigor mortis if he wasn’t careful about how he conducted himself while under the influence.

  Then it was off into the mountains again, for two more seasons of trapping before the next rendezvous. Usually it was there, in the remote fastness of the peaks, in the solitary pursuit of their chosen trade, that so many lost their lives.

  Shakespeare McNair once estimated that of the two to three hundred men who were at* the rendezvous in 1830, less than a handful were still alive ten years later. Nate thought the number was more, but he had no means to verify who was right. Many mountaineers gave up within the first year and went back home without telling anyone, others had gone on to California and the Oregon Country, and some took to living with Indians, becoming adopted members of a tribe and forsaking all their white ways. But it was safe to say the death toll had to be high. Scores—if not hundreds—of bleached skeletons littered the vast expanse from the Mississippi to the Pacific.

  Nate King didn’t want Scott Kendall’s bones to be among them.

  The buckskin showed signs of flagging toward evening, but Scott didn’t slacken his pace. Either the horse held up, or it didn’t. And if it gave out he would find another somehow, someway.

  It felt good to know that from here on out he wouldn’t let anything hold him back. Scott raised his face into the wind and smiled. I’m sorry, Nate, he thought. Hope you won’t hold it against me, partner.

  Another day was almost done. Scott wasn’t going to stop, though, until close to midnight. He wasn’t worried about losing the trail, as he’d done that first day. The tracks were plain enough for a greenhorn to follow, and he was no greenhorn. Besides, the war party was making no attempt to conceal their sign. They were in a hurry to put Ute territory behind them.

  Scott intended to catch them before they did. From what he’d heard, the land beyond was unexplored and inhospitable. A burning wasteland, rumor had it. A land where those the boiling sun didn’t bake alive, hostiles staked out on anthills. Even those bold adventurers, the Spaniards, hadn’t penetrated very far.

  Scott shuddered to think of Lisa and Vail Marie enduring such an ordeal. As capable and strong of spirit as his wife was, she had never been faced with so severe a challenge. She’d never been tested to her limit of endurance, and beyond.

  Then there was Vail Marie, so small, so young, so fragile.

  Gazing at the heavens, Scott asked the same question he had posed dozens of times in the past few days. Why us, Lord? Why did you let this happen to a God-fearing family like us? What have we done to deserve to be punished so?

  The answer, of course, was no
thing. Absolutely nothing. They were decent, peaceful folk who never harmed a soul unless set upon. Lisa and Vail Marie were innocents who’d never committed an evil deed in their whole lives. They didn’t deserve this.

  Why, then, indeed? Scot mused. The only answer was that “things happened.” Man had no more control over the events of his day-to-day life than he did over the weather. No one was the master of his own fate. Oh, many liked to pretend they were. They set themselves up in 'a good-paying job and bought a nice home and owned the latest carriage, and in their arrogance they thought they had the world by the tail. But they were oh-so-wrong.

  The simple truth was that man was a leaf in a gale, a twig in a stream, driftwood on the ocean. People were swept along by currents they couldn’t see, much less comprehend. And sometimes those currents churned through rapids, where if a person wasn’t careful they would crash onto the hard rocks of grim reality.

  It was a bitter lesson to learn.

  Especially at the cost of a wife and daughter.

  Lisa Kendall was exhausted. Not so much physically as emotionally. She felt drained, utterly drained, and she was gladder than ever when the tall warrior indicated a ridge they were approaching and said the same words he always did when it was time for them to stop for the day.

  The ridge would overlook their back trail. Extra vigilance on the part of her captors, who were more careful than ever since ambushing the Utes.

  Lisa had learned a few things about them since the bloodbath two days before. To begin with, the purpose of their raid was to get their hands on all the horses they could gather up by hook or by crook. That became evident when she saw the fuss they made over the Ute animals they had caught. Two almost came to blows over a fine sorrel each wanted.

  Some tribes, like the Blackfeet, ranked stealing horses high on the list of deeds that earned warriors coup and prominence. The Sioux, too, were accomplished horse thieves. They loved their warhorses so much that when enemies were sighted in the vicinity of a Sioux village, the warriors brought their best horses into their lodges at night to safeguard them.

  Lisa had also learned who her captors were, at long last. It happened during a short rest that very afternoon, when the tall warrior who led the war party came up to her and squatted. Pointing at his chest, he’d said, “Ammuchaba.” Thinking it was his name, she’d pointed at her own. “Lisa.”

  The leader then pointed at Vail Marie and arched his eyebrows.

  Lisa told him her daughter’s name and was surprised when the man motioned as if to say she had misunderstood. She arched her own brows.

  Again the man pointed at himself and said, “Ammuchaba.” Swiveling, he pointed at another warrior. “Ammuchaba.” At a third. “Ammuchaba.”

  “It’s the name of your tribe?” Lisa had responded, knowing full well he didn’t know English from Greek. Ammuchabas? A name she’d never heard.

  Smiling, the leader pointed at her once more and waited.

  Amazement set in as Lisa realized he wanted to know what her people were called, not what her name was. The Ammuchabas had never seen a white person before! Flabbergasted, she’d gawked at him as if he were from another planet. Gawked so long that he grew annoyed and pointed at her again, sharply this time, his brows pinching in anger. “I’m a white woman,” Lisa had blurted. “White.”

  “White?” He’d said the word tentatively, rolling it on his tongue as if he were tasting it. “White. White. White.” Content, he had gone off.

  The third lesson was that her captors had no mercy whatsoever. Or precious little.

  Yesterday morning, shortly after they started out, one of the wounded men fell from his mount and couldn’t get up. It was the man whose shoulder had been splintered by the gray-haired Ute’s war club. The wound was grievous. Bone had burst outward, shredding skin, and the Ammuchaba had lost more blood than Lisa deemed safe.

  Nothing his companions tried staunched the flow, so that first night two of them held him down while a third applied a burning brand to the shoulder. The stricken warrior had been given a stick to bite down on, but he still cried out.

  The blood stopped flowing, yet the man became weaker and weaker. He was listless, always running a fever, and refused to eat much. Finally the ravages took their toll and he’d fallen from his horse.

  Lisa expected the others to help him back up. They’d tie him on so he wouldn’t slip off again and be on their way. But they had other ideas. A short talk between the leader and several others ended with one of them drawing a knife and sinking the blade between the man’s ribs. They gave no warning. They didn’t consult with him. They just up and killed one of their own, and the warrior who performed the foul deed claimed the man’s horse as his own.

  Lisa could rationalize why they had done it. Their companion was too far gone and would only slow them down. But to kill him outright like that! It had been so cold, so calculated, giving her whole new insight into their character.

  It also reaffirmed Lisa’s decision not to do anything to antagonize them. To them she was a novelty, the first white woman they had ever seen. They were taking her to their village as a trophy of sorts, to show their people the strange person they had stumbled across. But that was all she was to them. A curiosity. It made her dispensable, and giving them sass might be all it took to provoke them into slaying her.

  “Ma, I’m awful tired,” Vail Marie piped up.

  Her daughter had been so quiet for so long that Lisa thought she must be dozing. Easing her forearm, which was curled around her daughter’s waist, she responded, “So am I. But in a short while we’ll be stopping and you can get all the rest you need.”

  “It looks like Pa isn’t coming today. Do you think tomorrow he will?”

  Vail Marie had asked the same question daily since they were taken, and Lisa always had the same answer. “We’ll have to wait and see. I’m sure he’s doing all he can.”

  “I hope nothing happens to him. What if Pa has an accident and can’t catch up to us?”

  The same secret dread kept Lisa awake nights. She didn’t fancy the notion of spending the rest of her days penned up in a lodge as the wife of an Ammuchaba. Or maybe one of several wives. Some tribes, she’d heard, practiced polygamy.

  “Will we stay in the mountains after this is over?”

  Lisa hadn’t given it any thought. But what would they do once—or, rather, if—they were rescued? Knowing Scott, he’d be all fired up to take them back to the States where it was safer. He’d blame himself for their abduction even though he had been miles away. For all they knew, if he had been home he’d be dead now. The war party might’ve killed him to get to her.

  “I hope we do,” Vail Marie was saying. “I like it here.”

  “In the States you could go to school. Have a lot of friends your own age. And you’d never need to worry about hostile Indians or grizzlies or painters.”

  Vail Marie twisted to bestow a loving gaze. “I just want to be with Pa and you. You pick where and I’ll be happy so long as I’m with you.”

  Statements like those were every parent’s treasure. Lisa kissed her on the head. “I hope you feel the same when you’re eighteen and married. I’d hate to end my days with no grandchildren to tickle and spoil.”

  A shout by the leader brought the war party to a halt. Soon the horses had been tethered, guards posted, and two men had tramped into the trees in search of game. Lisa and Vail Marie were left in the watchful custody of the man who had slapped her the other day.

  Holding her daughter, Lisa walked to a spot where she could see for miles to the north. In the fading sunlight the mountains were splashed with vivid colors, Nature in all her royal glory.

  “What’s that, Ma?” Vail Marie asked.

  “What’s what?”

  “See that mountain way, way off? The one with just the top showing? What’s that on it?”

  Lisa had to peer intently to make out the distant figure. “I wish I had your eyes.” Something, an elk or black tailed deer, ma
ybe a bear, was swiftly descending a high slope. It was so tiny, it appeared to be an ant. “Could be anything.”

  “Think it’s Pa?”

  The idea hadn’t occurred to Lisa. Suddenly her heart leaped and her intuition flooded her with the conviction that, yes, it really and truly was. But she hoped she was wrong. For it meant he was alone, and by himself he was no match for the Ammuchabas. In his haste to save them, Scott was rushing headlong to his death.

  Darkness fell while Scott was still high on a range. The buckskin was breathing raggedly and caked with sweat. By rights, he should stop before it keeled over. But he refused. Another day, two at the most, and he would be with his wife and daughter. Nothing was going to stand in his way.

  Then the buckskin lurched. Scott had to fling his hands against its neck to keep from being thrown. It tottered as if drunk, drool foaming the bit, and slowed on its own accord.

  “No!” Scott reined up. “Not now! Not when I’m so close!” Climbing down, he examined it and a rare oath escaped him. The buckskin was on the verge of collapse. Either he stopped for the night now, and let it rest until morning, or in another hour it would give out completely and he might as well put a lead ball into its brainpan.

  This can’t be happening! Scott railed, raising his face to the sky in mute appeal. At that instant, golden shafts of sunlight radiating from the setting sun shimmered above him like Heaven’s pearly gates. It had to be an omen, he thought. A sign that if he didn’t lose faith in his Maker, his Maker would guide his steps.

  Others wouldn’t agree with him. Other people might see only the sunlight and not think to look beyond the sunbeams to their source. But Scott knew. He just knew. Bolstered by newfound confidence, he walked the buckskin into a patch of firs and made a cold camp.

  “I’m coming, Lisa. I’m coming” were Scott’s last words to himself as he slipped into a fitful sleep, while lower down on the inky mountain wolves howled as if in feral lament.

  Eleven