Sidewinder

by Jory Sherman

  “Well, wishes do come true sometimes, you know.”

  He looked at Wading Crow.

  “When do you want the cattle?”

  “Seven sleeps.”

  “That’s a week, darlin’.”

  “I make good map,” Wading Crow said. “You come. Do Snake Dance.”

  “Whoa,” Brad said. “I’m not . . .”

  “What’s he talking about, Brad? Dance with snakes?”

  “Never mind, honey. He’s just joking.”

  “No joke,” Gray Owl said. “Sidewinder make good Snake Dance. Bring good luck.”

  “Wading Crow, I’ll bring the cattle to you in a week, but I want no part of your Snake Dance. If that particular string is attached, I won’t bring the cattle.”

  “You bring. I pay.”

  “But no Snake Dance. Right?”

  Wading Crow smiled. He waved a hand in the air as if to dismiss the very idea of a Snake Dance.

  Brad wasn’t so sure.

  “Don’t you go anywhere near those snakes, Brad,” Felicity said.

  Julio looked sick. As if he had been kicked in the stomach.

  The snakes had stopped rattling.

  But Julio could still hear them, and the two Indians made him nervous. He told himself he would stay awake all night, just in case. With one hand on his pistol. The other on his rifle.

  “Good,” Gray Owl said, finishing up his small clay pipe. It was pink, made from pipestone, traded long years before from a Southern Cheyenne. It was a good pipe. “Make sleep now. Much rain all night.”

  Felicity wrapped her arms around Brad’s arms and yawned.

  “I am tired,” she said. “Let’s get some sleep.”

  “Yeah.” He was still thinking about the Snake Dance and the cattle and the gold. They could use the money. From what Wading Crow said, it would be a fairly long trip. Three or four days if they didn’t have to climb any big mountains.

  He would work all that out with Wading Crow in the morning, he thought. He helped Felicity make up their bed. They pulled the buffalo robe over them.

  Gray Owl added more wood to the fire and spoke to Julio.

  “You sleep,” he said. “No worry.”

  Julio’s eyes widened.

  Did the Indian read his thoughts? Gray Owl showed him a place to sleep on a deerskin he had unrolled.

  Julio could not refuse. He dared not refuse.

  He still didn’t trust either Gray Owl or Wading Crow, but he had much tiredness and his eyelids were as heavy as lead sash weights. He lay down on the skin, but he didn’t carry his rifle over to the bed. He took his pistol belt off and loosened the pistol in its holster. He kept one hand on the butt as he closed his eyes.

  Brad took one last look at the smoke hole. There were no stars, no moon. Only blackness and the silvery streaks of rain flashing past the opening.

  Almost as good as stars, he thought, as Felicity draped an arm over his chest and snuggled close to him. The smell of her hair and the silkiness of it was the last thing he remembered that night.

  TWELVE

  Two hours before dawn, the patter of rain diminished to whispers by the time the eastern horizon cracked open a rent in the sky. There was only a mist in the high trees, a thin blanket of fog in the low-lying valleys. The jays circled the encampment, squawking and chattering, while the squirrels and chipmunks ventured forth, sipping water from the leaves, gnawing on pine nuts.

  Brad cocked one eye open, focused on the smoke hole. He saw a paling sky, heard movement a few feet away. He opened the other eye and looked down at Felicity. She was still sound asleep, her lips parted invitingly, her face serene. He looked across the shelter and saw Gray Owl holding a mouse by the tail. He dropped it into a basket, and Brad heard the whirring sound of a rattlesnake. There was a swishing sound in the basket, a tiny squeak, and then the rattles were still.

  Wading Crow was nowhere in sight.

  Julio was still asleep, his pistol on his chest, both hands clutching it as if it were a child’s stuffed toy. Brad smiled. Julio might never get over his fear and mistrust of Indians. Brad wondered what Gray Owl and Wading Crow thought of the Mexican and his obvious fear that he would be scalped in his sleep or his throat would be cut open like a sliced melon.

  Brad slid from under the blanket, very carefully, so he would not disturb Felicity. He stepped over to Gray Owl and talked to him in sign, asking him where Wading Crow was. He had learned some of the sign from an old Lakota drover in Denver who helped him drive his first herd up to Oro City and into the mountains where he had bought his ranch.

  Gray Owl cupped a hand to his ear and pointed to a direction outside the shelter. Brad nodded that he understood, and walked outside and into the dripping pine trees. He heard the noises more distinctly now and walked toward them.

  Wading Crow was putting fresh lashes on a large travois he had resurrected from the forest floor, two long poles, stripped of bark, tied securely together at one end, leaving a large, wide V between their loose ends.

  “What are you doing?” Brad asked.

  “Seven suns, we go.”

  “Do you and Gray Owl pull that travvy by yourselves all through the mountains to your village?”

  “Make smoke. Friends come. Bring horses.”

  “Smoke signals?”

  Wading Crow pointed through the trees.

  “Big hill. Make fire. Green wood. Make smoke. Village see. Bring horses. Bring braves. Pull travois. Take snakes to village.”

  “I understand,” Brad said. “You were going to make me a map.”

  “Wading Crow make map,” he said, and leaned the tied end of the travois against the trunk of a tall pine tree.

  Brad wondered if he was going to use an animal skin to draw the map, the underside of a rabbit skin or a patch of deerskin, perhaps. Instead, Wading Crow walked over to a dry spot beneath a tree, scuffed away the pine needles until he had a patch of bare earth about two or three feet in circumference. He drew his knife from its scabbard. He cut a small branch from beneath a spruce tree, skinned it down to a bare stick. He sharpened one end to a point. Then he knelt down before the bare patch and, with the pointed end of the stick, drew a crude map. For their present position, he drew an inverted V. Then he drew a line and on either side he inscribed landmarks, ridges, passes. At the other end he drew a number of inverted Vs to represent the Arapaho village.

  “Three sleeps walk. Six sleeps drive cattle.”

  “Six days,” Brad murmured. “Just follow the valleys and low ridges.”

  Walking Crow nodded. “No big mountain on trail.”

  “You want me to remember all this? I thought you were going to give me a map I could hold in my hand.”

  “Secret village. No map in hand. Only here.” He tapped a finger to his temple, indicating that Brad should memorize the map.

  “You don’t want people, white men, to know where your village is?”

  “No. White man take red man to camp. Big camp. Make red man slave.”

  “A reservation?”

  “Big camp. No game. No fish. Bad place.”

  Brad knew that a number of Indian tribes had been moved to so-called reservations, given a house, a hoe, and maybe a mule. Trouble was most of the places were where no white man would or could live. The Indians could not grow crops. They could not hunt or fish, and were entirely dependent on the white man for subsistence. So Wading Crow and his people must have been hiding out from white men for some time. He wondered how they survived the brutal winters in the Rocky Mountains.

  Brad studied the crude map. Then Wading Crow took the stick and drew a large X on his dirt map and then a small scraggly line to another place where he put an even larger X. Then he drew a line from the big X to the path he had marked for Brad to follow when he drove the ten head of cattle to the Arapaho village.

  Wading Crow pointed at the little X. “Albert,” he said. Then he jabbed a finger into the center of the large X. “This Sidewinder.”

  Bra
d saw it all then, the Albert Seguin place where his cows had wandered, his own ranch, and a way to drive his cattle without coming back up the mountain to where the Arapaho and the Hopi had built their hunting camp.

  “Good,” Brad said. “How did you know where my ranch was?”

  “Me know. Me know heap.”

  “You’ve seen my property?”

  “Hunt long ago. Hunt deer. Kill many.”

  “What about Seguin? Albert? Did you know him well.”

  “Albert good friend.”

  “I hope I can be your friend, Wading Crow.”

  The Arapaho smiled.

  He dropped the stick and gave Brad a hug.

  “You good friend, Sidewinder.”

  Wading Crow obliterated his map with the sole of his moccasin, kicked pine needles and dirt over the spot.

  “Deer scrape,” he said.

  Brad laughed. Then Wading Crow opened his fly and urinated on the spot.

  “Deer scrape,” Brad said, and Wading Crow chuckled.

  They walked back to the shelter together. Julio was digging out the saddles and bridles.

  “I did not bring oats or corn for the horses,” he said. “Do we go home now?”

  “Yes,” Brad said. “I’ll help you saddle up, Julio, after I awaken Felicity.”

  “She is awake. She talks to Gray Owl.”

  “I see you and your pistol survived the night,” Brad said.

  Julio’s face twisted and collapsed in puzzlement. But Wading Crow got the joke, and he grunted what might be taken as a chuckle in his society.

  “Never mind,” Brad said, and walked off with Wading Crow.

  Gray Owl was teaching Felicity how to make sign. He showed her a man on horseback, and Felicity was delighted. Gray Owl made the sign for sun and water and mountains.

  “Brad, why haven’t you taught me to speak in sign language?”

  “I don’t know. Never thought of it I guess.”

  “I know you learned from Red Bonnet, that Oglala drover you hired.”

  “Some, yes.”

  “I guess I was too busy being a cook when we came up here.”

  “It’s not something you use all the time,” he said.

  “But, it’s a wonderful way to talk.”

  “Maybe more women should learn sign,” he said, and instantly regretted it.

  “You mean you want women to keep their mouths shut?”

  Brad held up both hands in surrender.

  “I didn’t say that,” he said.

  “That’s what you meant.”

  “I’m sorry. It was a slip of the tongue.”

  “At least now I know how you really feel about women,” she said.

  “Whoa, Felicity. That’s not how I feel about women. Have I ever clamped a hand over your mouth to shut you up?”

  “No, but you’ve told me to shut up often enough.”

  “Only when I was losing an argument with you,” he said.

  Felicity smiled.

  “You’re forgiven,” she said, and jumped to her feet, wrapped both arms around him, and peppered his neck with kisses on both sides.

  Brad’s face turned the color of a ripe peach as he pushed her away.

  “Enough of that,” he said. “I’m going to help Julio saddle up. We’re riding back home.”

  “I almost hate to leave,” she said.

  “I’m going to pick out some good cattle for Wading Crow when we get back. Then Julio and I will drive them to his village.”

  “So soon?”

  “Probably leave in a week. Take us better’n a week to drive them there and get back.”

  “I’ll miss you,” she said.

  He waved a hand at her and walked out to help Julio.

  They had the horses saddled within ten minutes, then led them back to the hut. Felicity was waiting outside. So, too, were Gray Owl and Wading Crow. Brad shook their hands and said good-bye.

  Felicity said good-bye.

  Julio just stood there, a blank expression his face.

  “Aren’t you going to say good-bye, Julio?” Felicity asked.

  “Adios,” he said, begrudgingly, Brad thought.

  “Adios, hermano,” Wading Crow said.

  Gray Owl said something in Hopi. Brad took it to mean either “good-bye” or “may the bad spirits take you to the Lower Place.”

  The three mounted up and turned their horses. Felicity and Brad turned and waved good-bye and got waves in return.

  “Julio, you were rude to those Indians. They saved Brad’s life.”

  “I did not mean to be rude,” he said.

  “So, you don’t like Indians.”

  “No, I do not like them much.”

  “Those were nice men. Weren’t they, Brad?”

  “Very nice,” he said, hoping Felicity would drop it. She knew better than to argue with one of his hands.

  And, to his surprise, Felicity said no more, and as they rode back to the place where the brindle cow had run off from the other cattle, the pain in Brad’s hand and the one on his head began to recede. There was sunshine, and the grass gave off a heady scent. The air smelled fresh-scrubbed and there were wildflowers all through the valley, giving off their aromas.

  Just before they reached the ranch later that afternoon, Felicity broke her silence.

  “Brad, Carlos and Julio found fresh horse tracks down by the creek and up in the timber before we left. Shod horses.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Somebody’s been watching the place.”

  “Or counting the cattle,” Julio said, eager to be part of the family again.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Brad said, too sharply, he knew.

  “What good would it have done? There was nothing you could do about it.”

  “So, why are you telling me now?”

  “I just wanted you to know. Oh, dear, I hope all our cattle are still there.”

  Brad snorted.

  “You could have waited all week to say that,” he said.

  But the worry was on his mind now. After learning about the Seguin family, he didn’t feel so secure. He had picked a place far from city life so that he would not have to worry about cattle rustlers and such.

  It seemed now that he had not settled far enough away from civilization and the greed of men who preyed on others for their livelihood.

  He said nothing, but a feeling of dread began to filter into his senses. And, with the dread, perhaps a small amount of fear.

  THIRTEEN

  A pair of buzzards circled overhead as Brad, Felicity, and Julio rode toward the Storm house. The buzzards rode the air currents as if they were on wires, wings extended, heads moving from side to side. They were low and flapped their wings only to gain more altitude. But they kept circling.

  “Something’s dead,” Brad said as he pulled on the reins, brought Ginger to a halt.

  “Conejo?” Julio ventured.

  “No, not a rabbit. Something bigger. They’d be on the ground picking a rabbit clean.”

  Felicity climbed down from Rose, handed the reins to Julio.

  “I’m going to let Curly out,” she said. “Take care of Rose for me, will you, Julio?”

  “And see if you can find Carlos,” Brad said, stepping down out of the saddle. He pulled his rifle out of its boot and handed Ginger’s reins to Julio.

  “I see him,” Julio said. “He is down by the creek. He is riding toward us. I will put the horses away.”

  “Give them each a hatful of grain and a good rubdown, will you?”

  “I will do this,” Julio said.

  Felicity trotted to the house, climbed the porch steps, and opened the front door. Curly romped out and stood on hind legs to lick her face. Felicity laughed and pushed him down. She ran down to greet Brad and jumped up on him, tail wagging furiously. Then the dog ran to the well and lifted a hind leg.

  Brad was relieved to see the cattle. They were grazing peacefully. He even saw the brindle cow,
alone, separated from the others. She was still the independent spirit among cattle. That would be one he would take to Wading Crow’s village, he decided. She had already cost him much. But he had to admit, she had also given him new friends and, perhaps, a different perspective on life. He had felt at home in the Indian camp, oddly serene, in the world but not a part of it. Maybe the brindle was that way herself. There was a good deal to say for the simple life, away from civilization, away from greed and rage, competition and war.

  He walked over to the porch and sat on the second step. He watched Carlos on his horse, picking his way across the field, passing through clumps of cattle that seemed indifferent to his presence, all contentedly grazing on good grass. Brad looked up and watched the buzzards dip and glide and swirl on their invisible carousels. The birds were graceful and silent as they sniffed and hunted for carrion.

  “Hola, patrón,” Carlos said as he rode up. “Qué pasa contigo?”

  “It is a long story,” Brad replied in Spanish. “What passes with you?”

  “The three dogs they are dead.”

  “All three? How?”

  Carlos described how the dogs had behaved and said that he had to shoot two of them.

  “Sounds like strychnine.”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  Felicity walked onto the porch and opened the door.

  “What’s this I hear about the dogs and strychnine?”

  “Pilar’s dogs are dead,” Brad said. “Poisoned, I reckon.”

  “Oh my god.” Then she began calling Curly in a frantic voice. “Curly, here, Curly.”

  Curly came loping around to the front of the house, ran up on the porch, tail wagging. “You get in this house right away.”

  She and the dog went into the house.

  “Did you find the poisoned meat, Carlos?” Brad asked, getting to his feet.

  “No, I do not see the meat anywhere.”

  “What’s this about horse tracks down at the creek and up in the timber?”

  Carlos told him what they had seen.

  “The tracks wash away in the rain,” he said.

  “So, no fresh tracks today?”

  Carlos shook his head.

  “Did it look like someone was scouting out our cattle?”

  “I think so,” Carlos said. “They sit in the timber for a long time. They do not ride by like travelers.”