Gray Bear tossed the hawk the rest of the meat. The bird snapped it out of the air.
Walks Too Fast, his rifle over his horse’s sweaty withers, slid his gelding to a stop at the edge of camp. “Taikwahni! Riders coming. Pa’kiani. They are just to the north, maybe twenty of them. They don’t act like they know we’re here, but they’re going to. They’re going to stumble right into our butcher site. Maybe in the next hand of time or so. After that, they’ll be here in another couple of hands’ time.”
“Find everyone. Let them know. I want us packed and moving. Now.”
“What about Red Moon Man and Kestrel Wing?” Twin Sun Woman asked.
“They will see us ride out,” Gray Bear told her. “We’ve planned for this. They know the route I want to take and where to meet us. They will bring Cunningham with them.”
“That leaves only Tylor and Singing Lark,” she noted.
“I haven’t a guess where they’ve gone.” Gray Bear looked around, seeing Whistling Wren where she was starting to pack the piles of jerked meat.
“Leave most of it,” he ordered. “The same with the buffalo hides. Take only enough for a week or so. We’ll hunt along the way.”
“Just leave it?” Whistling Wren cried. “Are you mad?”
“That hasn’t been determined to anyone’s satisfaction yet. Maybe I am, but I’m hoping the Pa’kiani are hungry. Would you chase after us and just leave a camp full of meat? All those perfectly good hides?”
She frowned, clearly reluctant to abandon the product of so much hard labor.
“It’s all right, old friend. Leaving all that work may very well buy us our lives. Come, let’s get packed.”
They’d have to be careful, do their best to hide the trail. He doubted that he’d do as good a job as Singing Lark would, but . . . well, she’d have to figure it out herself.
He hoped she really did have her own special puha, and that it would keep her and John Tylor alive.
CHAPTER 23
Weta Kahni. The Bear Lodge. Tylor glanced over his shoulder to see the giant pillar of gray stone where it thrust up into the translucent blue of the afternoon sky. He’d never seen anything like it: a massive towering column of rock rising up into the heights like the trunk of some impossibly huge tree. Parallel lines of squared and angular fractures, like gouged flutes in a Doric column, gave the sides a textured and grooved look.
He could almost believe the story Singing Lark told him, that a giant grizzly bear in the Beginning Times had scratched those furrows down the pillar’s sides while trying to get a woman who’d climbed to the top to escape being eaten.
He couldn’t help but marvel at the wonders he’d seen to date. Magical things like the Bear Lodge.
Beside him, Singing Lark shifted. He returned his attention to the bison grazing no more than forty yards from where he and the girl lay belly-down against the side of a gully, their heads and guns screened by the scrubby sage. Dry yellow grass waved, teased by the wind. It carried the warm scent of soil and sage, almost felt like a tonic in comparison to the sun beating down on their backs.
Tylor laid his cheek against the jack handle’s stock, and squirmed slightly to the right, his leg and hip touching Singing Lark’s. Where the rifle was laid across the sage, the sight’s silver blade was resting on the hollow just behind the buffalo cow’s front leg.
“Ready?” Singing Lark asked through a whisper. Her head was snugged to her trade gun, her breathing easy. Nevertheless, he could feel the tension in her body.
“I’m left.”
“I’m right,” she told him. “Three, two, one.”
Tylor triggered Jack Handle. Fire leapt before his right eye. Both guns banged, rocking their shoulders back.
“Reload,” Tylor told her, keeping his watch as the sulfuric smoke blew back over them.
The two cows—the closest of the fifty or so that grazed their way down the slope just north of the Pretty River—had both hunched at the impact of the balls. Tylor’s cow took a step. Then another. The rest of the herd had raised their heads, now alert, but with no idea of the threat.
Singing Lark’s cow trotted forward, then slowed, staggered, and sank onto her belly. A pained rattling, almost a lowing, issued from her throat.
Tylor’s cow stood, legs braced, head dropping lower. Then she tried to take a step, sank, and thrashed. The lungs worked, the tail flicked. Her head slowly settled onto the grass.
“Loaded,” Singing Lark told him as she slipped back up the slope and re-laid her rifle over the sagebrush.
Tylor shinnied down out of sight, pulled his horn around, and poured his charge. He patched a ball with a bit of old cloth from the wreckage of his shirt, used the rod to ram it home, reprimed his pan, and flicked the frisson closed.
Wiggling up next to Singing Lark, he laid his rifle across the sagebrush. Both cows were down, unmoving. The rest of the herd, unconcerned, had gone back to grazing, moving ever so slowly south toward the river.
“That’s two,” Tylor told her.
“Work starts.” She reached down for his belt, flipping out his knife and handing it to him. “I hunt. I shoot. I get horses. You skin.”
“Imp.”
“What is ‘imp’?”
“Taipo word for small person who is trouble.”
“Imp,” she told him happily. “I like.”
He chuckled, climbed to his feet, and walked out toward the closest cow. He approached carefully, and crouching down to the side, reached out. The brown iris was wide, and it seemed like he looked into a bottomless eternity where the buffalo’s soul had fled.
He got no reaction as he laid his finger on the cow’s eyeball. If she’d had any life in her, she would have blinked, flinched.
“I’m sorry, beautiful girl. Hope your soul dances among the stars. Your death gives us life.”
Straddling the animal’s thick neck, he made his first cut in the thin skin behind the jaw, working his blade up and around the neck. From there he sliced back along the top of the neck to the hump, then down the backbone to the top of the tail.
White men gutted from the belly up. When it came to bison, Singing Lark had taught him that Indians started at the spine, split down the back, and worked their way down. Given that the animals generally died upright instead of on their sides, it made a lot more sense. The hide was then skinned down the shoulders, ribs, and hips and laid out like a mat on either side. The hump roasts, back straps, hips, and shoulders were cut off and laid on the clean hide.
The ribs were chopped out whole. The backbone removed in one piece. The guts they took—organ by organ—and the last thing to go was the brisket. The hide was then split down the belly into right and left halves. Given the weight of a green bison hide, a half was a lot easier to lift, pack, flesh, and tan. When finished, if a full robe was needed, the women would whipstitch it back together along the back.
He had the hump roasts and backstrap cut free by the time Singing Lark arrived on her buff-colored mare. She was leading his horse and the two packhorses. Hobbling the animals, she came to help. Working together—with the help of his ax—he figured it took them four hours to render the cows down to bloody piles of meat.
He recovered both bullets from where they’d lodged on the far side under the hide. To his delight, Singing Lark’s shot had been straight through her buffalo cow’s heart.
Just out of throwing range, a couple of wolves had shown up, and now paced back and forth, noses working.
These were big animals, rangy. They watched him with wary yellow eyes. Singing Lark called them “Grandfather.”
“Why?” Tylor asked, taking a moment to pick the clotted blood from under his nails. His hands ached from the effort of pulling down thick hide as he sliced away the connective tissue.
“From Beginning Time,” she told him. “Wolf and Coyote. They make world, yes?”
“That’s a story I want to hear.”
She made a face as she straightened, her back apparently as kink
ed as his. She brushed her hair aside with blood-blackened fingers. He thought she’d never looked so beautiful.
“Tell come, um, egi do’mmo.” She mimicked shivering, her arms clasped to her.
“Cold. Winter,” Tylor guessed. “Winter story.”
She grinned, taking only long enough to slice another piece off the liver and plop it in her mouth. A deep-seated joy lay behind her enchanting eyes.
My God, I’m really coming to love her. The notion hit him like a thrown rock.
In the weeks since their “marriage” he and Singing Lark had done everything together. Part of it was their mutual need to get away from the prying Shoshoni. It should not have come as a surprise, but they had become the absolute center of everyone’s attention. A sort of freak show.
For the Shoshoni, the notion that Tylor had given Singing Lark a rifle was almost scandalous. That she had married a Taipo added to the titillation, and the whole band—including Cunningham—was obsessed with a curiosity about what was happening in Tylor and Singing Lark’s bed every night.
Then had come Singing Lark’s insistence: “We go hunt.” That she’d packed the bedding, taken the two packhorses and their saddles, indicated that it was to be for an extended time.
They had no sooner ridden out of camp than Singing Lark had taken to the bushes, warning him away. “Hunni!” she had cried.
What?
No, the word for “what” was hinni. Hunni was an entirely different word. Something new.
Took him a bit to realize it was her woman’s moon. Took her a bit longer to accept that he wasn’t nearly as terrified of it as a Shoshoni man would have been: something about bad puha if a man came in contact with menstrual blood. Once that mutual amazement had sunk in, they both relaxed and enjoyed a four-day hunt that brought the horses back to camp loaded with deer and antelope. Tylor didn’t even mind that he’d had to do all the butchering and packing after Lark explained to him that it was “forbidden” for a woman in her hunni to touch the meat.
Didn’t take much for Singing Lark to talk him into leaving again for the buffalo hunt.
Tylor tilted his head back, letting the westering sun warm his face. Was this really him?
The sensation was as if a terrible weight had been lifted from his shoulders. That his body had turned partially to air; a giddy sensation of floating permeated his breast.
“Hi’i?” Her equivalent of “What are you thinking?”
“I never thought I’d ever feel this way. Absolutely delighted to be alive. After all the terrible things I’ve done, survived. For the longest time, I wanted to die. Would have killed myself more than once, but the chains made it impossible. After so much suffering, is this much happiness possible?”
She was squinting at him, the look filled with skepticism as the wind tossed her collar-length hair. She might not have understood the words, but she caught the sentiment. Lark stepped across the piled meat, reached out, and ran gentle and bloody fingers down his cheek. “I have good husband, John Tylor.”
He took her hand in his, that feeling of love beaming through him. “I have a good kwee.”
An image of Hallie rose in his mind, and he was cognizant of the letter that lay folded in the pocket over his left breast. She’d divorced him. An action so heinous in American society it took his being charged with treason to goad her to it.
What would she say? Tall, blond, elegant Hallie? She had always been a regal lady, dressed in the finest of fashions, the perfect hostess, her manners impeccable.
And as different from Singing Lark as ice was from fire.
Tylor cocked his head, aware that Singing Lark was still watching him, almost reading his mind. Not that she could. But she was so observant that she could pick up his mood from the slightest inflection of expression.
In so many ways she was a contradiction. One minute she was a teasing girl, giggling, almost awkward in her innocence. When he angered her, she reacted with a child’s pique. In the next moment, some circumstance would send that veil of maturity behind her eyes, as if an old soul—one battered and weary—looked out at a world that held no more secrets or magic. She could be soft, coquettish, only to walk up behind a dying antelope, kneel down, and slash its throat, washing her hands in the hot and spurting blood.
Hard to believe that she and Hallie were even the same species.
And yet I love them both.
Now there was a conundrum for priests, scholars, and philosophers: Was he civilized or savage? Fire or ice? Up or down? In or out?
“Savage,” he declared. “I tried civilized. It hurts too much.”
“Talk too much. Eat,” Singing Lark told him, playfully pressing a bloody slice of liver past his lips.
“Talk too much,” he agreed as he chewed, bending down to the task of rendering more of the meat.
Singing Lark showed him how to use half hides to pack the meat. How to lay the various cuts onto the hide, and then bind it up into a container. In that moment, he understood why she had insisted that certain muscles be cut from the bone either whole or just so. It made packing the slippery meat so much easier.
When they had packed as much as the horses could carry, the sun was slanting in the western sky. By the time they were winding down the long ridge toward camp, it lay like a bright orange orb just over the irregular horizon.
Singing Lark led the way. Gray Bear’s camp was situated in an old oxbow of the Pretty River. Terraces sheltered the location from the prevailing winds; the bottoms were rich in willows, cottonwoods, and downed wood for fires. There the band was engaged in drying meat, tanning winter hides. The horses had plenty of forage, and lookouts could keep track of the entire valley and surrounding land from a pine-thick peak a short distance south of camp.
Tylor would have ridden right into camp—and into disaster.
Singing Lark pulled her mare up, then raised a hand. She stared. Then said, “Kaikaittsaa.” Wrong.
“Wrong? I don’t see anything wrong.”
She indicated the horses grazing up above the terrace. “Not our horses, gwee.”
He squinted over the distance, picking out the animals where the dying sunlight illuminated them. No. Not right. That splotched white wasn’t one of theirs. Neither was the gray with what looked to be a black mane.
He could just see two distant figures. Guards for the horse herd?
“Pa’kiani,” Singing Lark told him.
“Across this distance? How can you be sure?”
She turned on her mount. “Pa’kiani. See horse? Stolen last summer. I know these Pa’kiani. Killed our people.”
“So, what do we do? You think they attacked the camp? Took some of our people prisoner?”
She shook her head, eyes squinted as she studied the distant camp. “Taikwahni got away.”
“How do you know?”
“Our horses gone. Just Pa’kiani.”
“Why wouldn’t they follow?”
“Camp full of drying meat and tanned hides.” She made the sign for “What more you want?” and gave him one of those sidelong glances that hinted that he was an idiot.
She took her time, carefully scanning the country to the east. “Aahku! Look. See them?”
“See what?”
“Horses and riders.”
“Ours?”
“Sa’idika. Dog Eaters.”
“How do you know from this distance?”
“Same horses as back east. Still hunting us.”
Tylor could just make out the dots of color. How could Singing Lark make out individual horses, let alone identify them? Damn, but that woman’s eyes were sharp. “I see. So, what do we do?”
“Run.”
CHAPTER 24
The way Fenway McKeever figured it, both of his companions were of stout Scots ancestry. And being such, they should have had a much tougher constitution. Not like those French dogs he was familiar with on the river. They were a lazy lot with their Gallic inclinations to wine and pork. Scots, by contrast, were
born and bred on whiskey and beef.
Dawson McTavish and Joseph Aird, however—and young as they might be—had McKeever’s ire up. He expected more bottom, less whining and complaining, even if he had shanghaied them from their mission for Dickson.
Now, the Indian boy, the one who called himself Wasichu— young as he also might be—was a different sort. He’d taken one look at the dying Matato, given McKeever a sober inspection, and done whatever he’d been asked to do. Hard to say what the savage’s true thoughts might be. He never let them show.
Why, then, were the two South West Fur Company agents so sullen? Given what McKeever had done to their big Sioux, the lads should have gritted their teeth, consigned themselves to the long haul, and determined to gut it out. Dawson McTavish had some notion that he needed to take care of the younger Joseph. That he was somehow responsible for the boy. It made Mc-Keever wonder what Robert Dickson had seen in Dawson that he’d have entrusted the lad to a task as important as swaying the Teton Sioux. Fact was, McKeever knew he scared the shite out o’ the lad. A fact he’d use until McTavish became a debility.
McKeever considered these things as his little party rode into the teeth of a cold west wind. To his relief, Matato’s beaded coat had fit. Bit tight through the shoulders, but the length was good, and the flannel-lined elk hide was plenty warm. So, too, was a pair of buckskin pants from the dead Indian’s pack. They’d proven to be a reasonable fit. The man’s moccasins, however, were way too large. The good news was that they could be stuffed with grass to make up the difference.
To that add a good quality Nor’west trade rifle, lead, mold, and powder, not to mention the Sioux’s knife and tomahawk, and Fenway McKeever was fully outfitted for the trail.
He rode in the rear, the trade gun across the horse’s withers. That damn Sioux hadn’t used a saddle, so McKeever had to make do bareback. He’d never been much of a horseman, but if it meant running down Tylor, chopping off his head, and earning that two thousand dollars, he’d become a goddamned centaur if he had to.
But what did he do with the two South West men? For the time being, McTavish was cowed. Not beaten. The moment would come when he would try something. Aird wasn’t that kind. His answer would be to slip away in the night, take his chances on a run for the river and the east.
Flight of the Hawk: The Plains Page 11