by Win Blevins
“No,” said Hannibal.
“Hell, no,” said Flat Dog.
“Joe,” asked Sam, “you really all right with this?”
“I guess,” said Joe. “But my wife, Rain, she has her doubts.”
“A squaw’s opinion,” said Newell, “is of no value.”
Joe swigged and looked sidelong at Doc.
“How long to the next post?” asked Julia.
“Fort Boise,” said Hannibal. “About three weeks.”
“Safer together,” said Doc.
“We already told you no,” said Flat Dog.
Nineteen
THE THREE OF them climbed up a low ridge, leaving the horses and men out of sight below. From this distance, though, Lei could see nothing. Dark bushes clustered at the foot of the slope, and the plants might mean a spring. Whatever Kanaka Boy was studying through his field glass, she couldn’t make it out.
“I want to look,” said Nell. She was one of the loose Kanaka-Indian women Boy kept around camp. Lei knew he had sex with her when he wanted to. Lei dealt with it by ignoring her.
Now Boy ignored Nell by handing Lei the field glass. He was proud of that piece of equipment—to him it represented leadership. He’d traded for it at Fort Boise, near the place where the Owyhee River flowed into the Snake.
Lei adjusted the focus a little for her eyes. “I only see bushes,” she said.
Peering intently, she still saw nothing. Then a movement caught her eye. A child, yes, a toddler, darting out of a bush—no, a low, domed hut woven from branches.
A woman stood up abruptly into the circle of Lei’s vision, a Digger, naked to the waist.
Boy said, “This will be lovely.”
“Let me see,” said Nell.
Lei handed the glass to Boy and started back down the rise.
At the bottom Boy directed a half-dozen men to lead their horses off to the north and ascend the slope beyond the visible ridge and another half-dozen to do the same to the south. “Stay low,” he said. “No riding. Get above the hut so you can charge down. Don’t let them see you or they’ll scatter.”
“How we know when?” said Delly. He spoke a sort of Pidgin English that Lei didn’t like.
“At sundown, when they’re all back in camp. The signal will be my gunshot. When you hear that, ride.”
Lei wanted to ask what on earth Boy wanted with the Diggers. They didn’t possess anything of use to anyone. But Boy was being coy about this—he strode around like a man executing a fine plan—and she knew he wouldn’t tell. She could only dread.
She lay down and took a nap on her saddle blanket. As she drifted off, her last thought was, What has my life become?
Kanaka Boy woke her with a shake. “We’re heading in,” he said. His eyes were alive with excitement. “You want to go?”
“No,” said Lei.
“I do,” said Nell.
“Good,” Boy told her.
Nell flashed Lei a look of superiority.
Lei knew Nell, in fact all the women, scorned her because she refused to participate in dirty deeds. Or maybe they envied her because Boy treated her special. She didn’t care which.
Boy handed Lei the field glass. “Watch if you want.”
She climbed the rise again, and for a while she could see the action with the naked eye. Boy and his gang fanned out parallel to one another, their horses maybe ten yards apart. They rode openly and steadily toward the camp several hundred yards away. Lei suddenly thought that they were doing it in the style of a rabbit drive. They must not want to let anyone—
Shouts and screams came from the Digger camp. She could see figures stirring.
Boy spurred his horse to a gallop. He rode an enormous Appaloosa stallion he called Warrior, seventeen hands high, black with white spots like snowflakes—an easy horse to spot at a distance. From a long way out Boy fired, making the huge noise she would never get used to and sending up an eruption of white smoke.
Now Lei could see riders charging down the hill toward the camp from two sides.
As Boy rode into the camp, Lei raised the field glass and focused on him and Warrior. A Digger man ran straight at them, brandishing a club. Boy swung his tomahawk once, and the man crumpled.
Other riders charged across her field of vision. Some shot people with rifle or pistol, and some just trampled Diggers with their mounts.
Lei lowered the field glass. She shuddered. Why on earth did Boy want to kill these people?
Mesmerized, she couldn’t turn her face away. Horses darted back and forth among the huts. White smoke formed a cloud above the camp. Indians scurried around, looking for a way out.
She turned her back to the scene and crumpled to her knees.
FOR SOME REASON Boy and the men didn’t come back for a long time, maybe an hour. Lei sat wrapped in her saddle blanket, shivering, though not from the cold. When they came, they brought six women and ten children between the ages of about six and twelve. All had their heads down, their hands tied, and their feet hobbled.
Boy swung off Warrior and swaggered toward her. He was intoxicated with violence.
Lei knew the men’s fate. She stared for a long while at the captives and finally asked, “What happened to the small children?” Like the toddler. “The old people?”
He gave a twisted smile and said, “They couldn’t walk to California.”
Lei started to speak, stopped, and told herself, Don’t stutter, you idiot. Then she spoke one word: “Why?”
Kanaka Boy shrugged easily.
“Californios want slaves.”
Twenty
TRAVEL, AFTER A long while, is not a matter of going somewhere. It is a way of life.
The whole Sam–Hannibal–Flat Dog–Julia crew hated the lava plains of the Snake River. Even as summer wagon-spoked toward fall, the days were blazing hot, beaten by a relentless sun. The horses had to pick hoof placements through black lava rock where there should have been soft earth and grass.
The family’s days were simple. Get up at first light, make coffee, gnaw on pemmican, load the packhorses, and ride. Take a long nooner somewhere with water and shade. Ride again until the sun is mostly gone and you see a decent camping place. Unload. Eat. Drink coffee—Sam was glad he’d spend the rest of his life where he could get coffee beans. And sleep, because you’re too tired to do anything else.
That anything else, fortunately, included Esperanza acting pissy.
Tonight, after three weeks on the trail and just an hour or two from Fort Boise, Hannibal wished someone would bicker. Supper was done. Flat Dog and Sam were leading the horses, one by each hand, over to the river for the last drink of the day. Esperanza sat off by herself braiding and unbraiding her hair. Though she still thought about how Prairie Chicken did her wrong, she was too tired to muster any hatred. Julia was playing cat’s cradle with the boys, who were at least honest enough to grumble at each other. Baby Paloma hung from a cottonwood limb in her cradleboard, whimpering.
Sam and Flat Dog hobbled the last four horses and came back to the fire for one more cup of coffee. Sam glanced over at Esperanza unhappily, wishing for the hundredth time that she’d act like she was glad, finally, to be with her father. Flat Dog stared morosely into his cup, thinking how, halfway to his allotted three score and ten, he had abandoned an entire life.
Hannibal took his rifle and walked away from camp to the boulder he picked out for his watch. The last of the light was on the river now. The waters were dark where the trees cast shadows upon them, and silver-lavender where they rocked the last light in the sky. It was Hannibal’s favorite time of day.
What none of the others knew was, Hannibal was half-jealous of them. True, right now they were mostly unhappy. Still, they formed a net of connection. They mattered to each other, for hurt or for joy. Even annoyance was connection.
Hannibal had led a vagabond life, and here he was vagabonding again. He’d been born without a decent world to live in, half white and half Indian in a society that didn�
�t like breeds. He was vastly educated, in a country that was skeptical of book learning. He was alone—loneliness was the fate his parents gave him—in a culture where most people sought to bond to one another.
Because learning languages, getting along with different people, and making a buck by trading came naturally to him, he’d always survived, and he’d never been poor. He’d done a lot of thinking and had come to a personal motto that worked for him—rideo, ergo sum, I laugh, therefore I am. Somehow, though, wisdom didn’t have the power of bonding.
Now, wonder of wonders, he was playing with the faintest thought of getting married. He shook his head. Now that, he thought, is something to laugh about.
Maybe California would be different. That idea had teased him since he first rode there with Sam in 1827. The races were mixing in the Golden Clime. A man could be accepted for who he was and what he could do, not for his family or race. Maybe he was letting hope get in the way of his mind, but Hannibal had hopes for California.
I probably have another thirty years to live. Why not?
Twenty-one
LEI KNEW SHE had to time it exactly right.
Right now it was hell—she had to block out of her mind what was going on with the slaves. On the first night the six women got topped over and over, the rapists led by Boy himself. In camp the scene turned from ugly to a nightmare of evil. Drunk, the men flaunted their power over these human beings they claimed to own. Not only did they force sex on the women at will, day and night, they took pleasure in making it public. They reveled in humiliating the poor creatures. The women had no defenders—Boy’s ruffians had killed the men and the older boys.
The worst was when a boy of about twelve lost control and fought for his mother. Two of Boy’s men beat him senseless. Boy refused to let Lei take care of him, and sometime during the second night he died.
She fled into the bushes and threw up. Then she came back composed, pretending it didn’t really matter.
The men let the body lie where it fell, and ravens flocked to it. Lei couldn’t let herself look at the mother.
Lei waited about a week, until the moon was full. Her plan was simple and terrible.
The first trick was to get Boy so drunk that he passed out. She turned herself into a Delilah of seduction and inebriation and got it done.
When she couldn’t even shake Boy awake, she took what little she dared. She tucked his pistol under her dress and secured it with her belt. Though she didn’t know how to reload it, she knew how to cock and fire it—in desperate circumstances she could shoot once. She took her own belt knife and the small belt bag where she kept beauty items. Under her blanket she carried a sack of jerky. These few possessions would have to do.
She slipped out of the tipi, bridled her mount and Boy’s, pulled their stakes, and led them to the river. The guards would think she was watering the animals.
Her plan was to ride Warrior as much as she could and give him a break sometimes by riding her mare, Kauai. Her grandfather, who gave the mare to Lei when she became a woman, named her after his island of birth. She was a beauty, an Appaloosa with leopard spots and a rear end that promised speed.
Lei carried no saddles—that would raise alarms. Learning to ride as a child, she never used a saddle.
When she got into the cottonwoods that lined the river, she jumped on Warrior’s back in a flash and guided him softly through the trees. Once they got out of hearing of the camp, she eased him onto the sagebrush flat and kicked him with her moccasined heels. The stallion bolted to a gallop. He was a magnificent beast—Boy always bragged about Warrior’s speed and endurance. His strength plus Lei’s determination equaled freedom.
Fort Boise was two long days’ ride at a normal pace. She would make it in a lot less, depending on how much she had to sleep.
What would happen when she got there? She would throw herself on the mercy of the chief trader and . . . She couldn’t think about that now.
Eight hours’ head start. It would have to do.
She slapped Warrior’s hindquarters and rode like hell.
LEI STOPPED AT first light.
The night had been crazy. The moon turned the landscape into a strange, phantasmagoric place she didn’t recognize. She had to pick her way when she wanted the horses to run. While she was steering Kauai down an embankment to the river for a drink, the mare slipped and crashed down on her left side. Lei barely got her leg out from under the horse and ended up sitting on the poor animal’s flank.
The result of it all was that Lei was exhausted. The horses needed grass and rest, and she had to sleep. If she didn’t, she would pass out, fall off, and maybe lose the horses.
She didn’t bother with a hidden camp. If Boy was somehow close enough to see her, she had no chance anyway. She tied the horses to limbs and rolled up in her blanket. I’m going to sleep the sleep of the dead, she thought. She smiled to herself. She tried to remember the story the missionaries had made her listen to, about the man-god who was raised from the dead. She couldn’t bring the story back, but she told herself, I will go down and then be resurrected by the sun.
SHE WOKE WITH a start. The sun was maybe an hour above the horizon. The horses were grazing peacefully. No reason for alarm. Time to go.
She watered them, jumped back onto Warrior, and kicked him for speed.
She rode until midday and took a break in the shade of some cottonwoods. She felt like she could keep going, but she wanted to maintain the horses’ strength—they are bringing me back from the dead.
She was making good time, she knew, and might even reach the fort tonight. But she was edgy and kept the break short.
LATE IN THE afternoon she left the Owyhee and crossed some low hills to the Snake River. Now she was on the last lap, about ten miles from the fort.
At the river she rode into the shallows, jumped off to drink upstream of the horses, and filled her belly. Then she splashed water on her face and dunked her long black hair into the stream. She had learned that her hair was a sponge for liquid that would keep her cool. Dropping the hair down inside the back of her dress, purely by chance, she saw it.
At first she didn’t believe it. On the ridge behind her, about a half a mile back, the sun glinted off . . .
She knew damn well what it was—she’d seen it scores of times. Kanaka Boy’s field glass, reflecting sunlight.
How?
I don’t know and it doesn’t matter.
She led the horses back out of the river fast.
What was left now was a horse race to the fort.
SHE SLAPPED WARRIOR, she hollered, and she kicked him. She did everything she knew to make that horse run.
She dropped Kauai’s lead—Warrior would run easier and freer without Kauai. One big worry. Boy and his men loved to race their horses, and she knew from competing that she wasn’t as fast. But she also had one great comfort. Boy wouldn’t risk a long shot, for fear of injuring Warrior.
She ran, she ran, she ran.
She turned Warrior to shortcut a bend in the river. The best ford was downstream from the mouth of the Boise River. This was the time of low water, though, and beyond the bend was a place Warrior could get across and save some distance—one mile could mean survival or death.
At the bank she risked her first look back. Four riders, Boy the biggest, no more than two hundred paces behind her.
She blasted Warrior into the water at full speed. She wanted him to understand what they absolutely had to have—she wanted him to charge across this goddamn river.
Warrior’s hoofs slipped on the slippery rocks. He didn’t like the footing at all. He fought the reins, but she held his head down and kicked him straight. He staggered and went down on one hind leg.
“Up!” she shouted. “Go!”
He got up and went. The bottom turned to mud, slower but more secure. When she got to the other side, they faced a low-cut bank. Warrior stopped, looking at it wildly.
“Jump!” Lei shouted. At that moment her r
ight leg erupted into fire.
Warrior reared, staggered on his hind legs, and toppled backward into the river and on top of Lei.
Twenty-two
HER EYES FLUTTERED open. She looked into Kanaka Boy’s large brown eyes and sugary smile. He cooed sweetly, “I have saved your life, Magpie.” His lips smacked open wide and his white teeth gleamed. “Now I can kill you in a more intimate way.” His eyes laughed. “As a good wife deserves.”
Lei shook with cold. She was lying in several inches of water.
Delly said, “Boy, let’s get out of here. Someone might come.”
Nell and an Indian named Turno stood and stared down at her.
“Maybe I would in my great mercy spare your life, but you forced me to hurt Warrior. My shot, it went through your lovely thigh and into his flank.”
Yes, there was burn and cold just above her knee, from the bullet and from the river.
“He will live, but you caused him great pain, and this I cannot forgive.”
“Boy!” said Delly.
“Yes, my friend is right.” He scooped his arms under her and hoisted her out of the water.
Agony bolted from knee to toe to skull.
He threw her onto a saddle belly down. Pain thunderclapped her consciousness.
“Tie her on and take her back to where the cattails are. Keep her out of sight. Nell, stay with me.”
DELLY LIFTED LEI off the horse, held her waist high, and dropped her.
The earth knocked her consciousness topsy-turvy.
After a few moments or eternities she swam through flights of quicksilver birds back to the world.
She felt her sopping-wet hide dress being jerked off her arms and shoulders.
A thought crossed her mind—he’s going to dress my wound. Then she thought, No, I’m tit side up. Then she realized how stupid the whole idea was and started laughing. She couldn’t help herself.
Delly realized he’d almost forgotten the laudanum. He stopped his hand just short of Lei’s crotch. He’d thought about her privates for a long time, and now he meant to have some sport.