Wind River

by Charles G. West

  Another groan from the Indian boy caused him to wonder if he wasn’t just toting a body a hell of a long way to bury it. Probably should have just cut his throat back there and be done with it, he thought. It was a useless thought because Squint couldn’t bring himself to kill a defenseless boy, and that was what irritated him most. “Too damn softhearted for my own good,” he mumbled.

  A low snort from one of the horses, probably Joe, told him that they smelled the mule approaching. He carefully guided Sadie over the rock and onto the thick floor of pine needles so as not to leave a track leading up to the entrance of his camp. As a matter of habit, he stopped at the opening in the rock and waited, listening. Joe snorted again and the mule answered. Joe seemed to feel a fondness for the mule, even favored her over Squint’s other horse, a little mare he called Britches. He named her that because of her markings. She was dappled all over except for her legs. They were black and it made her look like she was wearing britches on her front and hind legs. All seemed in order in his camp. Even so, he entered the clearing cautiously, looking first to the ledges over the opening and then toward the clump of laurel, behind which the horses were tethered. Long ago he inspected his little hideout from the perspective of someone who might have a notion to ambush him. He decided these two positions would be the most likely places to hide, so he always checked them first. Content that his camp was safe, he entered the clearing.

  * * *

  Squint didn’t know a hell of a lot about doctoring, but he knew enough to recognize an infected bullet wound when he saw one. And he had seen more than a few of them when he had been a sheriff, what with all the drunken cowboys and half crazy mountain men that had stumbled through his town, fighting over just about everything from cards to women. For most of the years he was the law there, there wasn’t any doctor as such. Most of the bullet wounds that were treated at all were tended to by one old woman, who was really a midwife. Usually, if the victim didn’t die right away, and the wound bled freely, it healed well enough if left alone. More gunshot cases were walking around with the lead still in them than those that had the bullet removed. Sometimes, however, the bullet would be close to the surface and the wound would fester if it hadn’t bled clean, like this Indian boy’s, and it would be necessary to dig the lead out and cauterize the wound. It wasn’t much fun for the person with the wound but Squint didn’t know any other way to stop the festering. He had seen it go untreated before and the result was usually the loss of a limb, or worse.

  After he had checked on the horses and unsaddled the mule, he went about building a fire and readying himself to take care of the boy. His patient didn’t appear to be faring any too well and Squint wondered anew if he was just wasting his time. Maybe it would be more humane to simply leave the poor kid in peace and not complicate his dying. Still, he thought, the boy was obviously unconscious. The only sign of life was an occasional babble of some kind that Squint was unable to make out. It sounded like Cheyenne, but he couldn’t say for sure. At any rate, the boy was out of his head so it didn’t figure to make much difference whether Squint dug the bullet out or not. The boy wouldn’t feel it anyway, so he might just as well operate on him.

  He took his skinning knife and cut the boy’s shirt away, leaving the wound exposed for him to work on. It looked bad, swollen to the point that it looked like it was ready to bust open on its own accord, like a huge boil. He could see a dark blue spot in the center that had to be the bullet. It appeared to be just beneath the surface. Squint’s experience with bullet wounds told him that it would be a lot deeper than it looked. He watched the boy’s face as he stoned a keen edge on the already sharp skinning knife. There was still no sign of consciousness.

  “Let’s get it done,” he sighed and wiped the blade of the knife on his leggings. “You’re damned lucky you ain’t awake for this.”

  Once resigned to the task, Squint didn’t waste any time on gentleness. Human hide was tough and he sank the knife deep into the boy’s shoulder at the top of the wound and then cut straight down across the entire swollen area. The boy stiffened perceptibly but made no sound. Almost at once, thick, yellow pus oozed from the incision and Squint recoiled when the acrid smell of rotting flesh assaulted his nostrils.

  “Damn!” he exclaimed and backed away for a moment before continuing. He cleaned the wound as best he could with a square of cloth, the remains of a shirt he had brought with him when he first came to the mountains. Squeezing the cloth out in a pan of water he had placed near the fire to warm, he wiped away the rest of the pus. The wound was still weeping, but now it was mostly blood. He probed in the wound for the bullet but found that he had to cut deeper to expose it. The problem now was the wound was becoming a bloody, pulpy mess and it was difficult to see the piece of lead he was groping for. Still, he was determined to dig it out. After inflicting this amount of damage on the boy’s shoulder, he couldn’t quit without retrieving the bullet. Finally he felt the blade tick the piece of metal and, with the knifepoint, he worked at it until he had gotten it free of the surrounding flesh. After rinsing it with water, he held it up to examine it.

  “That shore ain’t no musket ball,” he announced. It was a slug from a breech-loading rifle. “Army Spencer, more likely.” Squint’s interest was one of idle speculation. He wasn’t really concerned with how the boy had come to get himself shot. Now that he had extracted the bullet, he concerned himself with the wound.

  From the look of it, and certainly from the smell of it, there was a great deal of rotten flesh around the edges of the wound. Little wonder the boy’s so sick, he thought. It can’t do him much good to have all that rot around that open wound. He pondered his next move for a moment or two before deciding to proceed with the cauterization. He remembered seeing a medicine man in Wounded Elk’s camp treat a lance wound that had festered about as bad as this one. He had stuck a handful of maggots right on the wound and let them eat away the rotten flesh. Squint didn’t have any maggots. Even if he did, he figured that burning it away with a hot knife was better than maggots anyway.

  Again, there was little response from the wounded boy when Squint applied the red-hot skinning knife, just a mild, convulsive tremor before falling limp again. Since the response was so slight, Squint took his time and thoroughly seared the flesh over the entire wound, the smell of the infection now masked by the odor of burning flesh. The surgery complete, he sat back on his haunches to examine his work. The boy was breathing steadily. The thought crossed Squint’s mind that the boy might fool him and pull through. It was, after all, a shoulder wound. If he had been gut shot, his chances wouldn’t be worth much. It would probably depend on the boy’s constitution, on how bad he wanted to live. Time would tell—Squint had done all he knew to do for him.

  He decided it best to leave the wound open to the air that night. He could put some grease on it and bandage it in the morning. The night air would probably do it some good and, this time of year, there wasn’t any problem with flies getting into it. He rigged up a bed for the boy and covered him with a deer hide. Night was settling in over the mountains by then. If his patient woke up in the morning, he would see about feeding him. If he didn’t, he would bury him.

  * * *

  The boy was strong. He was still among the living when the sun rose high enough for the first rays to filter over the mountain and illuminate the delicate crystals of frost that had formed on the grass floor of Squint’s camp. Squint yawned and shivered involuntarily as he stood at the edge of the clearing and emptied his bladder, absentmindedly watching the steam formed by his warm urine on the frost.

  Cold, I hate being cold, he thought.

  He glanced back over his shoulder at the still form of the Indian boy. He had checked on him as soon as he was awake and, although the boy still seemed to be asleep, he appeared to be breathing easily. His fever might even be broken. Squint couldn’t tell for sure. “I reckon I better put some wood on the fire and see about getting us something to eat.”

  As
he picked a few sticks of wood from his pile, he pondered his options now that he had taken on an invalid. He was still not sure the boy was going to make it. If he did, then Squint would have some decisions to make as to what he should do with him. He wasn’t even sure the boy wouldn’t attack him again when he got strong enough. “Hell,” he muttered as he balanced a stick of firewood across the load already on his arm, “I might have to nurse him back to health just so I can cut his throat.”

  He stirred up the coals, all that was left of the fire, until he worked up a flame. Then he laid some small sticks on it until they caught well enough to start up the larger pieces. He had a pretty good-size woodpile and, if the winter was not too severe, it should probably last him through. He didn’t like to go out looking for firewood in the deep snow. As he stared into the growing flame, feeling its warmth on his face, he couldn’t help but remember how he had sweated when he had cut the wood last summer. It had been quite a chore, and Squint was not one to appreciate chores. “But when you got yourself a year-round camp,” he muttered, “you have to do things like cutting firewood and drying jerky.” It was almost like homesteading. And the wood had to be hauled in by mule from the other side of the mountain because Squint was afraid he might give away the location of his camp by cutting wood close by.

  A groan from the boy pulled his attention from the fire and he turned to look at his patient. The boy, still asleep apparently, muttered several words that Squint couldn’t make out. They were words though, not just grunts, Squint was sure of that. He still thought it sounded like Cheyenne. He bent low over the boy in an effort to hear what he was mumbling about. As he did, the boy opened his eyes and he and Squint stared at each other for a long second. There was a strangeness in the boy’s gaze that confounded Squint. Finally he sat back and announced, “Dang if you ain’t the first blue-eyed Cheyenne I ever saw.”

  The boy answered, his voice weak but clear, “I ain’t Cheyenne. I’m Arapaho.”

  This served to startle Squint more than a little, not because of the boy’s apparent lucidness, but because he had answered in English.

  “Well, I’ll be . . .” Squint gazed at the wounded boy in disbelief, never finishing the statement. He simply stared at the boy for a long while. Finally he blurted, “Well, what the hell did you try to bushwhack me for?”

  There followed a long pause, during which the boy gazed intently at the grizzled mountain man hovering over him like some great bear about to devour him. There had been a moment of alarm when he first opened his eyes to find the huge man staring down at him, a moment when he wasn’t sure what was in store for him. But he quickly decided this bear intended no harm and he answered, “I thought you was a soldier.”

  Squint considered this for a moment before replying. “Well, any fool can see I ain’t.” He was trying to make up his mind about the boy. Based on his remark, he wasn’t sure whether he was a good Indian or a bad one. He didn’t know many Indians who did like soldiers and he couldn’t blame him for that. He had to admit that, since living in the mountains for most of the last twenty years, he wasn’t sure he liked soldiers himself, and that went for settlers and prospectors and railroads and everybody else who was so damn hell-bent on civilizing the territory. He couldn’t help but get riled up whenever he thought about it. If the damn government would just live up to their own treaties and leave the Indians alone, he thought, then there wouldn’t be all this trouble that’s been heating up over the last two summers. Now it’s gotten so the Sioux are out to get any white man they see, no matter whether he’s done them harm or not. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the Cheyenne, the Arapaho . . . in fact, all the tribes on the plains were pushed about as far as they were going to be pushed. There was going to be all-out war and he was likely to be caught in the middle of it. Realizing his mind was wandering from the situation at hand, he brought his attention back to his patient.

  “Can you eat somethin’ now?”

  The boy nodded. His eyes betrayed the fact that the offer was met with some enthusiasm. It was not lost on Squint.

  “I bet you ain’t et for a spell,” he said, “from the look of you.”

  Squint sat back and watched as the boy devoured half of a cold, snow hare that he had cooked the day before. The other half had been Squint’s supper. He had planned to eat it for breakfast himself but it was disappearing fast. Since one half of a rabbit wasn’t much nourishment for a healthy young buck, much less one that was half dead, Squint dipped into his precious supply of baking soda and mixed up a little batter for pan bread. His pan bread wasn’t the best in the territory but, by Squint’s standards, it was passable. He poured the batter into a frying pan and set it on some coals at the edge of the fire to let it raise. When he thought it was ready, he pushed it closer to the fire to let it bake. The boy’s eyes followed his every move. When the bread was done, he flipped it out and tore it in half. The boy didn’t hesitate to accept the half extended toward him.

  “You don’t waste a lot of time chewing, do you? Just sort of choke it down like a dog.”

  The boy did not answer but continued to stare at his benefactor. When he was finished, he indicated that he needed to relieve himself and Squint helped him to his feet. He almost fell when the sudden movement sent a stab of pain through his shoulder and Squint had to grab him to keep him upright. He seemed none too steady and Squint offered to help him over to the edge of the clearing but the boy refused. He made it clear that he needed no help when taking care of nature’s demands.

  “You a mite modest, ain’t you?” Squint teased. He stood back and watched the boy stagger toward the woodpile. “Hold on to the woodpile for support. If you fall in your business, holler and I’ll come pick you up.” The boy made no response. Squint’s attempt at humor was lost on him.

  While the boy went about his toilet, Squint busied himself getting some jerky from a knapsack. Since the boy had done away with the rabbit, he would have to satisfy his hunger with cold jerky. Busying himself with the knapsack, he pretended to take no notice of the boy but, in fact, he was studying him intently out of the corner of his eye. The kid looked Arapaho right enough but, when he dropped his leggings, he sure had a pale behind. And a pale behind and blue eyes sure as hell didn’t add up to any Arapaho he’d ever seen. Squint returned to the fire and made himself comfortable. He watched the boy as he slowly made his way back to the fire and gingerly lowered himself to a sitting position. Once settled, he pulled his shirt away to examine his wound.

  “It don’t look too pretty but it ought to heal up right proper,” Squint offered in the way of explanation. The boy continued to stare at the fair-sized hole in his shoulder, already beginning to form a thin film of scab.

  “Did you have to use an axe?”

  He blurted it out so suddenly that it startled Squint and he couldn’t help but laugh at the boy’s tone. He fished around in the pocket of his shirt and came up with a small lead slug. “Well, first I had to dig this out of you.” He threw the bullet to the boy. “Then I had to burn the wound to keep it from going rotten. Like I said, it ain’t pretty but it’ll be all right.”

  “You damn sure made a mess of it.”

  “If I had’na, you’da been a one-armed Arapaho and that’s a fact.”

  The boy stared at Squint for a long minute while he evaluated the huge man’s statement. Deciding that Squint did what was best for him, he said, “I reckon I ought to thank you.”

  “You don’t have to if it causes you pain,” Squint replied sarcastically. The boy didn’t reply but shrugged his shoulders, wincing with the pain the movement caused.

  They sat in silence for a long while, the boy obviously uncomfortable with the situation he found himself in, until Squint decided it was long past time for some introductions as well as a general understanding as to what their relationship was going to be. He broke the silence.

  “My name’s Squint Peterson. What’s yours?”

  “Little Wolf.”

  Squint c
onsidered this momentarily. “Little Wolf,” he repeated and paused again. “I mean, what’s your real name? Your Christian name? Do you remember it?”

  The boy hesitated, obviously reluctant to admit owning one. The intense expression on Squint’s face told him that Squint knew he wasn’t a blood Arapaho. A frown creased his face as he replied. “I remember,” he said softly. “It was Robert . . . Robert Allred.”

  “Well, Robert, or Little Wolf, whatever you want to call yourself, where are your folks?” He didn’t wait for an answer before adding, “How long you been Arapaho?”

  The boy thought for a moment before answering. “I don’t know. I lost track. I think this is the fourth winter, maybe the fifth, I ain’t sure.”

  “You been living with the Arapaho for four or five years?”

  “I been living with the Cheyenne. My father is Arapaho.”

  That would explain why Squint was certain the boy had been mumbling in Cheyenne when he was delirious the night before. The Cheyenne and Arapaho were longtime allies and quite often lived together. Squint continued to prod him for information. “Tell me how you come to get shot.”

  “Soldiers.” The boy replied in Cheyenne, his eyes narrowed as he spat the word out.

  “Soldiers?” Squint echoed. He knew that Cheyenne word well enough. He waited for further explanation but the boy offered no more.

  It was apparent that his guest had no use for the military, but Squint still had no way of knowing what he might have done to get himself shot. In his years in the mountains. Squint had occasionally run into white men who had taken up with a tribe of Indians. Most of them were a pretty sorry lot, as far as he was concerned. Some were hiding out from the law back East. Some were just living with an Indian woman temporarily. A few simply preferred the Indian way of life. Squint himself had considered wintering with the Shoshones but decided he’d rather go it alone. He looked long and hard at the boy, trying to see inside his heart. He could see no meanness in the blue eyes that now gazed absently into the fire. For the second time, he asked, “Where are your folks? I don’t mean your Injun folks. I mean your white folks.”