Wild Side of the River

by Michael Zimmer

  Ira got to his feet. “I can see it’s gonna take you a while to chew your breakfast, so I’ll leave you to it. Let yourself out the back way when you’re done. I gotta run over to the bank before I open up for the noon trade.”

  Ethan nodded. “I appreciate you not dumping me in the trough alongside Andrews last night.”

  “Aw, hell, after the entertainment you provided, it would’ve been downright ungrateful of me.”

  Ethan forced a smile, waited until Ira had left the room, then tossed his piece of beef back into the skillet. He debated drinking the coffee, figuring it wouldn’t hurt his jaw, but was afraid of what it might do to his stomach, so he poured that back into the pot, as well.

  Tim Palmer wasn’t around when Ethan hobbled into the livery for his horse and mule. He decided that was just as well, considering the way Palmer had acted last night. He saddled the bay first, then the mule, throwing the grizzly bear hides over the top of the sawbucks and tying them down.

  The Bar-Five lay mostly south and a little east of Sundance, but Ethan wasn’t going home. He was heading for Gerard Turcotte’s place, about ten miles below the Wilder spread.

  Turcotte had been on the frontier even longer than Ethan’s pa, a company trapper early on, then an independent trader among the Assiniboines. He was French-Canadian, his father a post factor for the old Northwest Company, his mother a frail woman from Quebec who had died shortly after coming to the frontier.

  Gerard had settled on the Marias about the same time Jacob had bought his old post from American Fur, back in the 1860s when both men had intended to live out their days dealing in buffalo robes and beaver skins. Back then, no one had foreseen the rapid decline of the big herds, least of all those who had made their living off the hides and meat.

  Nowadays, Gerard mostly hunted and trapped, a subsistence living at best, but it kept him and his family fed and clothed. Gerard had an Indian wife named Corn Grower, and a daughter, Rachel.

  It was nearly sundown when Ethan hauled up on top of a low rise overlooking the Turcotte home. He stopped as he always did and leaned forward to rest both hands on his saddle horn. Turcotte Creek ran its winding course through the shallow valley below him, shaded on both sides by a sparse forest of cottonwoods and scrub willow. Turcotte’s cabin sat on the east bank of the creek, a squat, log structure with a sod roof overgrown with weeds. Smoke curled lazily from the chimney, and a small herd of horses grazed on the lush bottom grass between the cabin and the Marias, a half a mile to the south.

  Ethan noticed that the meat racks were full, a trio of hides pegged out, flesh side up, on the flat ground in front of the cabin, the fatty inner tissue glowing like patches of spring snow.

  The mule wandered up beside him, long ears flopping forward when it spotted the distant remuda. Ethan tapped the bay’s ribs with his heels. It was an easy drop from the ridge to the valley floor. He kept his animals to a walk as they passed through the cottonwoods. Down here the sun had already set, and the air felt cool against his bruised flesh. He crossed Turcotte Creek above the cabin. Splashing up the far side, he heard a shout from the yard, and saw Rachel jump to her feet from where she had been kneeling beside one of the hides. Tossing her bone-handled scraper to the ground, she raced toward him. Ethan grinned in spite of his split lip and dropped from the saddle, allowing his reins to trail.

  Rachel never slowed as she left the hard-packed sod of the cabin’s yard. She came through the tall grass like a bounding deer, holding her skirt high and to one side to keep it out of her way. Catching a glimpse of her bare brown legs caused Ethan’s pulse to quicken. Rachel was nineteen, with a thick, black mane flowing down her back and sparkling eyes the color of black cherries. He had just enough time to appreciate the way her thin wool dress seemed to mold itself to her body, then braced himself for her assault. But instead of throwing herself into his arms as she usually did, Rachel skidded to a stop, her naked heels nearly sliding out from under her. Her eyes grew wide as she took in the carnage under his hat, the battered knuckles of both hands.

  “Ethan!”

  His smile never faltered. God, he’d missed her. “I fell off my horse,” he said.

  She reached up to trace his swollen jaw with her fingers. Then a wildcat look came into her eyes, and she said: “No, not a horse. Maybe a mountain you fell off of, no?”

  Ethan laughed, and immediately regretted it. He touched his lip to feel if it was bleeding, but Rachel brushed his hand aside and launched herself against him. “Where have you been?” she demanded.

  He wrapped his arms around her even as her long legs encircled his waist, sliding the palm of his left hand, the one still hidden from the cabin, appreciatively under her buttock. She kicked her legs when he did, and pushed away.

  “You just got back, and already you wish to be chased off?”

  “Who’s going to chase me off? You?”

  “I should,” she charged, then grinned tauntingly. “But no, it would be Papa.”

  “I’d think your pa would be glad someone was showing some interest in his daughter. I bet he’d like to marry you off before winter so he wouldn’t have to feed you.”

  “Probably he would. But to you?” She turned away, flouncing through the grass a few steps ahead of him, out of reach. “He could do better for a son-in-law, no?”

  “He likely could,” Ethan agreed.

  Rachel’s eyes flashed reproachfully. “Bah! You know better. Ethan Wilder is the manliest man on the Marias. Even Papa admits it is so.”

  Ethan knew Rachel’s father liked him, but he doubted if the old hunter had ever made such a statement concerning anyone’s manliness.

  “Come,” she said, taking the bay’s reins. “Supper is soon ready. We will eat, then Papa will bring out some wine and his fiddle and we will drink and dance all night.”

  “That sounds mighty fine,” Ethan admitted, his gaze straying to the cabin where Gerard stood in the doorway, one bony shoulder propped against the frame, a white clay pipe canted from the corner of his mouth. Ethan didn’t see Corn Grower, but figured she was probably inside, putting the finishing touches on the evening meal. There were two other Turcotte children, both boys who were older and had long since left home; the last Ethan had heard of them, they were up on the Saskatchewan River, living in teepees.

  Gerard was smiling as Ethan and Rachel strode into the yard. Then he saw Ethan’s face, and cocked a brow in surprise. “You fall off your horse?”

  “He has been fighting like a little boy,” Rachel replied starchly, “but he has not said with who.”

  “You never gave me a chance,” Ethan reminded her.

  “Then tell me.”

  “I forget,” he said, laughing and quickly pulling the mule between them. “I have some hides to trade, Gerard, if you’re interested.”

  The old man’s eyes shifted to the bundle of skins on the mule’s back, widening when he spotted the long, cinnamon-colored hair. “Sacre, Ethan, are they what I think?”

  “Three of ’em,” Ethan confirmed. “A sow and two yearlings. I shot them up in the high country.”

  Gerard came over to brush the hair back from the sow’s forepaw, exposing long, amber-tipped claws. “Ah, she is a beauty, no?”

  She had been more beautiful alive than dead, Ethan recalled, and a lot more terrifying. He’d come across her just below timberline, rooting for grubs under a fallen pine. In working his way around her, he had unknowingly come between the sow and her two yearling cubs. The three grizzlies had no more meant to set a trap than Ethan had to step into one, but none of that mattered when the grizzly became aware of his presence. She’d stood up on her hind legs and roared challengingly, and the hair rose across the back of Ethan’s neck. On foot, surrounded by a tangled mass of stunted, wind-blasted trees and jutting gray rocks, flight had been out of the question. His odds wouldn’t have been any better mounted. A grizzly could outrun just about any horse in a sprint, and, in that scrub, there was nowhere to run.

  Throat
closing, he’d shouldered the big .50-95 Winchester and tried to retreat as unobtrusively as possible. He hadn’t realized how much trouble he was really in until he heard the inquisitive woof of another bear behind him. It was only then that he became aware of the sow’s two four-hundred-pound cubs.

  At the younger bear’s cry, the sow dropped to all fours and rushed him. Bracing himself against the mountain’s rocky slope, Ethan fired three times into the mother’s chest. The bear dropped as if its front legs had been yanked out from under it, and Ethan whirled as the more aggressive of the two yearlings charged. It took two more stubby, 300-grain slugs to the chest to drop the younger bear. When it was down, Ethan spun to face the third grizzly. That bear was watching him from the shelter of a clump of twisted juniper. Keeping his eyes on the yearling, Ethan reached blindly for the extra cartridges he carried on an ammunition belt around his waist. He reloaded hastily as the grizzly worked its way closer through the brush—stalking him.

  Ethan’s ribs were taking a pounding from within, but his hands remained steady as he fed the massive Express cartridges through the Winchester’s loading gate. He’d barely slid the last round home when the grizzly exploded from the scrub. Its jaws had been wide, hung with strands of saliva, lips pulled back like stage curtains from its mottled pink gums. It was less than thirty yards away when Ethan got off his first shot. Despite the puff of dust and hair thrown from the center of the bear’s chest, the grizzly barely slowed. Working with quiet desperation, Ethan levered more rounds into the Winchester’s chamber, firing methodically.

  It took all seven rounds straight to the chest before the charging grizzly skidded into the dirt practically at Ethan’s feet. Its flanks heaved for breath and its front claws pawed at the ground in an effort to pull itself closer. His throat dry, Ethan had pulled the old Remington from its holster and moved around the bear’s side, finishing it off with a single, well-placed shot to the head . . . .

  He blinked then and shivered, and suddenly found himself back at Gerard Turcotte’s cabin, the mule shifting tiredly under its load of pelts, the old trader still fondling the sow’s claws even as Rachel stared at Ethan with unabashed pride.

  Gerard looked up, his expression deadly serious. “You would trade this one, Ethan?”

  “I’ll trade all three to you, if you want them.”

  “Oui, I want them.”

  The grizzlies’ hides wouldn’t be worth much with the summer hair still slipping, but Gerard would take the claws—considered powerful medicine to the Plains tribes—to one of the nearby reservations to trade for horses. For each set of five, he would receive a good horse that he would take into Sundance or down to Fort Benton to sell for cash. It had cost Ethan less than 50¢ worth of ammunition—and maybe a few years off the tail-end of his life, he reflected—but the claws he’d brought to Turcotte would help feed the old hunter’s family through the winter.

  “Rachel,” Gerard said abruptly, dropping the hair back over the sow’s claws. “Care for Ethan’s stock, then peg these hides with the other skins. You and your mother can scrape them tomorrow.”

  “Yes, Papa.” She pulled the big Winchester from its scabbard and handed it to Ethan, then dutifully led the horse and mule away.

  Gerard and Ethan went inside, Ethan having to duck to enter through the low entrance.

  The cabin was a simple, four-room affair—a kitchen and front room, two bedrooms in back. The floor was dirt but swept clean and watered regularly, the low ceiling draped with various herbs and roots that Rachel and Corn Grower had gathered over the summer. There was a cabinet and chairs in the front room, a table and wood-burning stove in the kitchen. Pegs driven into the walls held an assortment of items, from root-digging tools to shotguns, heavy winter clothing to rawhide parfleches crammed with who knew what.

  Mama!” Gerard shouted with a grin. “We have company for supper. Come, welcome Ethan Wilder into our home.”

  Corn Grower came from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a cotton rag. “So much noise from one so skinny,” she chided her husband. “Do you think I did not know Ethan is here?”

  Corn Grower was an Assiniboine, a short, heavy-set woman with a face as round as a full moon, skin the color of dull copper. Her dark hair—shot through with slivers of gray—was parted in the middle, the part painted with vermilion. She wore a wool-strouding dress of dark blue, with white trim and removable sleeves. Heavy earrings dangled from her lobes, and tribal tattoos fanned out from the center of her lower lip to disappear under the first of her chins; a series of dots, like black tears, ran from the corner of her left eye down under her ear, then vanished into her hair.

  A normally shy woman, it was only recently, as Ethan’s visits became more frequent, that Corn Grower had started to open up toward him. He knew much of that had to do with Rachel’s feelings for him, and he wondered again, as he had so many times before, what she—what all of them—expected from him.

  “Ethan,” Corn Grower said warmly, “come, sit. There is coffee.”

  “Coffee sounds good,” he admitted.

  “Enough for two?” Gerard asked.

  “Yes, even for an old man such as yourself. Sit, and I will bring the coffee. Then maybe a little special tea.” She studied Ethan’s face critically. “It hurts, no?”

  “Some.”

  She smiled. “Yes, coffee, then tea to bring down the swelling. Then we will eat. You are hungry, yes?”

  “Hungry enough to eat the nose off of a moose,” he replied.

  Corn Grower laughed and returned to her kitchen. It was a joke between them, that she had grown up where the nose of a moose was considered a delicacy. At Corn Grower’s urging—and Rachel’s—Ethan had tried it once and nearly gagged on the rubbery texture. He’d eaten some rough fare over the years, including raw snake one bad week when he’d been thrown from his horse in the Small Horns and had to hoof it back to the Bar-Five with a sprained ankle and nothing to build a fire with, but he’d never eaten anything that wanted to stop halfway down his throat the way Corn Grower’s moose nose had.

  Supper that night was considerably better than either snake or snout. Corn Grower dished up a fine stew of peas, onions, corn, and beaver tail, with fry bread and huckleberry jam on the side. As Rachel had promised, there was wine afterward, and Gerard brought out an ancient fiddle upon which he played even the most rambunctious songs with a shyness that seemed out of character for the rough-hewed frontiersman. As Gerard played, Ethan and Rachel danced merrily, and Corn Grower sat with a blanket over her shoulders, smiling with an inner satisfaction Ethan could only guess at.

  It was late when Gerard announced that he’d had enough. Ethan had also grown weary of the demanding French and Métis numbers, but he had to admit that Corn Grower’s magical brew of roots and herbs had significantly lessened the aches and pains in his body. She’d promised him a second mug with breakfast, and Ethan intended to ask her for it if she didn’t have it waiting.

  Rachel had taken his bedroll and saddlebags into the trees across the creek where he normally slept when visiting. After saying good night, Ethan crossed the purling stream on stones protruding from the water and found his blankets already unfurled, the bay and mule grazing nearby on hobbles. He flopped onto his bedroll and pried off his boots, then quickly shucked his clothes. With a spare shirt for a towel, he walked back to the creek to bathe as best he could without soap or razor. Shivering, he scampered back to his blankets. He was exhausted, but knew he wouldn’t sleep.

  He kept listening to the sounds of the night, watching the stars spin slowly across the heavens, until, well past midnight, he heard the stealthy approach of footsteps in the tall grass. He whistled softly, and, moments later, Rachel glided out of the darkness, bare shoulders gleaming in the starlight.

  “Good Lord, woman,” Ethan whispered as she slipped into the blankets beside him. “Are you crazy?”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” He scooted to the side so that she would be fully covered. “You didn’
t leave the house naked, did you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Your pa’d skin me alive if he caught us out here like this, and he’d likely do worse to you.”

  “Oui,” she replied, “he would.” Then she laughed faintly and tipped her face close to his; her breath was warm, her flesh inflaming. “Kiss me,” she demanded. He happily obliged.

  Chapter Four

  There was no fresh, healing tea from Corn Grower the next morning, no friendly smile from Gerard as Ethan entered the somber cabin. Nor was Rachel anywhere to be seen. The looks on the faces of both parents worried him, but he dared not ask what bothered them.

  Picking up his rifle and hat, Gerard said: “Come with me, Ethan. There is a thing I wish to show you.” He went outside, and, after an awkward pause, Ethan followed.

  Rachel was just coming around the corner of the cabin when he ducked out the low door. She was leading a pair of horses, Ethan’s saddle cinched to the back of a long-legged roan, his Winchester booted under the right-side fender. He didn’t know if it was a good sign that his bedroll and saddlebags had been left behind.

  When Rachel came closer, Ethan winced at the faint scratches on her neck, but resisted the urge to rub the stiff scruff of his beard.

  Gerard was already mounted when Rachel handed the reins to Ethan. She kept her eyes down, as was proper for a young woman bringing a man his horse and weapons, but he took heart from the quick, air-breath caress of her fingers across the back of his hand. Whatever had happened that morning hadn’t changed her feelings for him.

  Ethan swung into the saddle, grateful for the loan of the tall horse under him.

  Gerard rode south to a gravelly ford on the Marias, about a hundred yards below where Turcotte Creek spilled into the larger river, and they crossed without even getting their feet wet. On the far bank, he guided his mount into the breaks, following a well-worn trail that led gradually upward toward the main ridge. They rode silently, Gerard in the lead, until they came to a tiny flat about halfway up. The first warming rays of the morning sun slanted over them. Gerard halted, waited for Ethan to come alongside.