Fortunately, Keokotah came back with a young bear. It was not enough for so many, but it took the edge from our hunger. The Ponca woman caught fish in the stream, now free of ice, and then Unstwita came back with meat from a big buck.
It was a clear, cloudless day, and we had eaten well. It was a good time to lie in the sun and soak up some of the heat we had missed in the winter.
Itchakomi had walked out from the lodge, going toward the river that went from us down to the lower valley where our first home had been. She was still not far and I was watching her. Suddenly she turned and started back, and then she started to run.
“Keokotah!“I was on my feet, reaching for an arrow.
A warrior ran at Itchakomi. Then another sprang from the brush near her. My arrow took the first one, but then they were coming from everywhere. Dropping my bow, I drew my Italian pistols. Lifting the first gun, I took careful aim and fired.
The Indian at whom I shot was nearest to me. Another had already grabbed Itchakomi, but at the thundering report of my gun, all heads turned, our own people as well as theirs. In that instant when he was off guard, Itchakomi jerked free and stabbed the man who had seized her.
The man at whom I shot dropped in his tracks. Lowering the pistol for the load to drop in place, I lifted it and fired again.
My targets were standing, stricken with astonishment. Some of them had no doubt heard the Spanish guns but had not expected anything of the kind here. One by one I fired the guns, and three men were down before they took cover, the echoes of the first shot still racketing against the hills.
Itchakomi came to me, running.
In just that first moment of attack the effect had been catastrophic for them. Four men were down, two wounded, two dead. Itchakomi’s attacker, badly hurt, was crawling away. Then struggling to his feet he disappeared into the brush.
My guns had been a total surprise, but this attack was not over. They had retreated merely to take stock of the situation. I said as much to Itchakomi. “It is only the beginning. They will not be surprised next time.”
Back inside the lodge I reloaded my pistols. My powder horn was still more than half full, but I’d have to find a place to make powder.
How many were out there? I glanced around at Itchakomi. “How many?”
“Many! Too many!”
An Indian that I had wounded was starting to crawl away, but I let him go. I could not make out where my bullet had struck him. I had aimed simply for his body but thought I had shot low and right. That last had been a hurried shot, and I should not permit myself such waste. Each shot must score a kill.
All was still. The sun was warm, the snow melting. Soon it would be gone. I replaced my pistols in their scabbards and took up the bow.
Keokotah came to me as I emerged from the lodge. “They wait.” He paused, his black eyes sweeping the terrain before him. “I think they come soon.”
We waited, our men formed around in a circle, well into the woods near the lodge, waiting for an attack that was long in coming.
“I think they come closer,” Keokotah said. “This time no time. They come quick.”
I agreed, and waited, and waited.
My stomach felt hollow and my mouth dry. If they were many and they attacked from close in we might all be killed. I felt for my knife, for it would come to that. They would not attack from a distance this time, but would be upon us at once. My guns, if I used them, would get off no more than one hasty shot each. I dared not take a chance on having one wrested from me.
With night it would be cold again. They would draw off then, and build fires—
They came with a rush, and from close in. But our defenses were out, and their approach could not be completely hidden. One arrow left my bow. Then I dropped it and took to the knife. A big warrior leapt at me, and my knife ripped him up. Keokotah swung a club he had been carving. One of our men went down from a thrown spear, and the Ponca woman withdrew the spear and thrust it at the Indian who bent to take his scalp. She held it low with both hands and drove hard and the Indian tried to leap away, too late. I glimpsed her pin him down, saw his eyes staring up at her as his hands grasped at the spear.
It was hand to hand. Men fell. There was a scream. I was struck from behind and driven to my knees. I came up, fell, and rolling over, kicked a man away with my feet and came up. I was face to face with a short, powerfully built Indian who was amazingly agile. He slipped away from a knife thrust and swung his knife at me. Our blades clashed and when we came close I kicked him suddenly, catching him on the knee.
His knife ripped my tunic. My upward thrust cut a thin line along his chest and nicked his chin. We circled. Then somebody leapt on me from behind and my adversary lunged to finish me off. In that moment Itchakomi thrust a spear into his back. I fell, the man atop my back was gripping my hair in one hand, his other coming up with a knife to take my scalp. His hand gripping my hair gave my neck a fearful wrench, and I struck upward with my knife, stabbing him in the side. He wrenched hard on my neck again, wanting only that scalp, and I stabbed again. I felt the cutting edge of the knife on my hair and with a frantic lunge managed to throw him half off me. I came to my knees, driving a fist into his belly.
That broke his hold and he fell back and I leapt on him. He rolled to one side but not fast enough, and I sank the knife deep.
He wrenched free of me, bleeding badly, his face contorted with fury. He leapt at me, but this time I kicked him as he came in and he staggered back. His knees buckled under him then and he fell.
All around me there had been fighting, but suddenly it was over and they were gone. Bloody, gasping, I looked around. Itchakomi was standing in a corner near the lodge, a spear in her hand, its tip bloody.
The man I had fought was crawling away and Keokotah, bloody and bleeding, thrust a spear into him.
They were gone. Why they had broken off the attack, I did not know.
Two of our men were dead, and one had been scalped. A woman had been killed. Only Itchakomi and Unstwita were unwounded.
They had carried off their dead and wounded. How many we had killed, I did not know. Keokotah’s woman, a terrible bruise on her shoulder and a cut on her arm, was bathing the blood from his wound.
“They will come again,” Keokotah said, looking at me.
“Aye, and we must be gone.”
Amazingly, I was almost unhurt. There was a thin knife cut at the roots of my hair only an inch or two long and not deep and a few minor scratches. Keokotah had taken a blow on the shoulder that had left his right arm almost useless for the time.
“We will go now,” I said, “in the night.”
Limping and bloody, we gathered our few belongings and the little meat we had left. By the time we were ready to move it was dark. I knew only one place to go.
My valley.
Chapter Twenty-Eight.
We walked upon the mountains in the night. Limping, I led the way. Constantly we paused to listen for pursuit, but heard nothing. Often we had to pause because our lowland lungs were unaccustomed to the heights. Several times we stopped to rest.
At the first halt I went from one to the other, doing what I could to treat their wounds. It was little enough that I knew, but more than anyone there with the exception of Itchakomi. Surprisingly, she knew a good bit.
When morning came there was a dense fog, a mist lying low in the hollows of the hills. We followed a dim path, probably a game trail, and at first, for at least five miles, it was all uphill. Then the climb eased except for scrambles through boulders and the remains of avalanches that had swept down the mountain during the winter. Stiff, tired, and sore, we climbed, gasped for breath, and then pushed on.
The mist lifted away from us, revealing a world of broken granite and snow, with here and there a dwarf spruce struggling for existence against the wind and the ice. We sat down then and shared bits of jerked meat among us. There was little enough, but it was needed. A Natchee went back a few hundred yards to watch our tra
il while we ate.
Their faces were gaunt and tired, their wide eyes staring emptily upon nothing. A cold wind blew off the peaks, and I shivered. This was not the way I had hoped to come to my valley.
Rising, I walked down the path, and then waited for them to rise and follow. The Natchee watching our back trail came in. “There is nothing,” he said, “or nothing that can be seen. There is mist covering our valley, mist in the passes.”
Halting a half mile further along, I looked back at my straggling band. How did I, Jubal Sackett, a loner, come to be in this place with these people?
A cold wind stirred the limbs of a spruce near me and whined softly through a crack in the rocks. I shrugged my shoulders against the cold of the wind and beat my hands together. Slowly, the others were catching up.
There was a creek cut across our path not far ahead, and there we would build a fire, rest, and eat what we had.
We had been coming downhill for some time now, very slightly at first, but then the descent had grown steeper. The creek was free of ice, the water chuckling along over rocks and gravel, clear and cold. We gathered broken branches and bark for a fire. Building it, we gathered close. The Ponca woman, the best fisherman among us, went to the creek away from us.
I had not eaten when the others had. There was too little food as it was, and I was strong enough to survive. When I looked up at the mountains there was black rock, perhaps wet from melting snow, and a lone golden eagle swinging on wide wings against the sky and the snow.
A thin waterfall, thin from here at least, perhaps forty feet wide where it was, fell from rocky shelf to rocky shelf, mostly melting snow. By late spring it would be only a trickle. Now the mountain was stark and beautiful, a place for no man or animal, just for the clouds and eagles.
I brought sticks for the fire and added fuel. I watched the affectionate flames reach out and clasp the sticks in a fiery embrace, destroying what they loved.
My legs were tired. My back ached. I sat on a fallen tree and looked back the way we had come, rough, broken, and almost treeless.
The Ponca woman came to me in her black moccasins. She was a wide woman who smiled rarely but never complained. She pointed across the way at the mountains. The ones the Spanish call the Sangre de Cristos. “Caves,” she said. “Big!”
“You have been here before?”
“With Ponca,” she said. “My people hunt.”
“Thank you,” I said. “We will go to the caves.”
She did not linger, but returned to her fishing, and by the time the sun was high had caught a half dozen fish. It was a help.
Keokotah killed a ptarmigan. I saw nothing, but I thought of Itchakomi. She would wish to go home now, back to her own people and the warm weather beside the Great River. Well, I was a loner, anyway. And there were always the mountains. The thought brought me no comfort.
Keokotah came to me where I sat beside the stream. “Caves no good,” he said, “too much climb. Big hole inside. No good place for sleep.”
The thought of climbing high among the rocky peaks did not appeal and I said so. “We’ll go up the valley,” I said, “find a place there.”
“I see many tracks. Deer, elk, buffalo, turkey.” After a moment, “Your buffalo here. He look for you.”
Tired as I was I walked out on the grass beyond the creek. The buffalo was there and I went to it, standing beside it and scratching its ear. “If you’re going to stay with us,” I said, “I’ll put you to work.”
The thought had come suddenly, but the more I thought of it the better I liked it.
A few minutes before dark one of the Natchee killed an elk. We ate well that night, and for once I sat long beside the fire.
Itchakomi came and sat across from me. “My people say they go home,” she said suddenly. “Grass come soon. Much water in river. They go home quick.”
If they went, she would go. She would return to their home on the Great River.
For a moment my heart seemed to stop beating. I waited a moment and then said, “It will not be easy to get past the Conejeros, and Kapata will be waiting.”
She merely looked at me, saying nothing.
My mind struggled with the problem of how they could reach the Great River by way of the Arkansas without being seen. It would need a roundabout route unless … unless they could reach the river before it emerged from the mountains and ride it all the way down.
“I shall find a way to get you back,” I said.
She arose abruptly and left the fire. I started to speak, but all I saw was her back as she retreated. I sat for a few minutes, puzzled over her abrupt departure.
Women! I’d never understand them.
When I had been sitting there for several minutes Keokotah came to me. “Look,” I said, “they wish to go back. They will ride the river down.”
On the clay at the river’s edge I made a mark. “Here is where the river comes from the big canyon. South of there and back in here … that was our first camp. Now we have crossed to the west and we are in a long valley that’s roughly north and south. It seems to me that if we went up the valley we could get to that river in the canyon before it reaches open country. They might slip by during the night.”
He looked at the rough plan I’d drawn and put his finger at the head of the valley we were in. “What is there? We do not know.”
Of course he was right. And the water through that canyon would be rough. Yet rough water was to be preferred to the Conejeros and Kapata. The more I considered the idea the more logical it seemed.
What was the matter with Itchakomi? She was their leader, and if they were going to return—
I spoke of this to Keokotah. He glanced at me out of those cool black eyes and said, “Maybe she no wish to go. Maybe she think you try to be rid of her. Maybe she think you think she too much trouble.”
That was ridiculous. She was no trouble at all! Of course, if I had not become involved with them I might now be much further west, and might have had no trouble with the Conejeros, and certainly none with Kapata. But the possibility that she might not wish to return was nonsense.
She was a Sun, a person of importance among her people. She had come west to find a place for her people, and aside from the Conejeros this was a good place. The snow had almost gone from what I thought of as my valley. It was, I guessed, more than twenty miles long and four to five miles wide. There were several streams and the runoff from the mountains, and the valley was sheltered from the worst of the winds.
When morning came we moved north, but when we camped that night on a creek near the edge of the mountains, Keokotah came to me. “Maybe no good,” he said.
“It’s a beautiful valley,” I objected. “It is higher, and they would have to learn to plant different crops than they are used to, but I think it is a good place.”
“Much trail,” he said, gesturing back the way we had come. “I find Indian path, very old. Much Indian walk that path. Maybe he no like people here.”
“Conejeros?”
“No Conejeros. I think maybe Ute. Very strong people. Live in mountain valleys. Very strong.”
The place we had found was a good place, and the valley was fertile. As the grass began to turn it green, I could see from the variety of plant life that the soil was rich.
“We will go no further,” I said. “This is where we will stop.”
The location was one that was easily defended, tucked into a corner of the mountains on the east side of the valley. It was a place well supplied with water.
As soon as we went into camp several of the Natchee left to hunt.
“We must find how far it is to the river,” I said. “Tomorrow, I think—”
“You stay,” Keokotah said. “I go.”
There was a yearning in me to see what lay to the north, but it was also necessary that a fort be built, a place we could defend in case of another attack.
A stream emerged from a canyon to flow down into the valley, and at one place the stre
am fell over some rocks in a small waterfall of about three feet. Nearby were some tumbled boulders at the crest of a small knoll, a flat place atop the knoll surrounded by trees at one side of the canyon but overlooking the valley.
It offered a site for a group of lodges, water from the waterfall, and protection from the boulders and trees. With two of the Natchee men I set to work to build a rough shelter to take care of us while we built a stronger cabin.
The Natchee who had gone hunting returned with two deer and several sage hens. By the time they came into camp a crude shelter for the night had been built and we had dragged several dead trees across gaps among the boulders to make a stronger wall.
Itchakomi was busy and she avoided me. Several times I started to speak, but each time she turned away and went off to some other area, avoiding me, or seeming to. Irritated, I decided if that was the way she wanted it, she mighty well could have it. So I avoided her.
Keokotah would not be back for a day or two, so that other question need not arise.
Yet I slept ill. The night through I turned and tossed, getting no decent sleep at all, and when morning came I took my weapons and went up the canyon behind our fort. It was a fairly deep canyon and led back into the mountains. There was still much snow in the shaded places, and here and there boulders in the stream were icy. When I returned it was dusk and meat was cooking. I went to the fire and chose a piece for myself and sat down near the fire.
Itchakomi was across the fire from me. After a moment, she spoke. “Keokotah has gone to find a way?”
“He will find a way to the river. The water will be rough and fast, but I believe your people might slip by your enemies, passing them at night.”
“You will go with them?”
“No.” I looked up at her. “My place is in the mountains, so I will stay. The river is called the Arkansas and some other names as well, but it flows into the Great River. Your people can get home without trouble. Unstwita can lead them. He is a good man.”
She looked at me then, for I had not mentioned her leading them. I avoided her eyes, feeling uncomfortable. Until I had spoken I had not thought of it myself, but why had I not mentioned her? Was it not her place to lead? Would she not lead if she was going back.
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