Wilderness Double Edition #7

by David Robbins

  Rolling Thunder would let nothing tarnish his name. He took great pride in his accomplishments. At the age of fifteen he had counted his first coup on a Nez Percé, and ever since he had steadily added to his prestige, until he was now widely respected and admired. The old chief came to him regularly for advice. Seats of honor were his at the council sessions. He owned more horses than anyone else, and the beauty of his wives made him the envy of every man. After working so hard to get where he was, he would do whatever was needed to maintain his standing.

  Of equal importance in his decision to press on was the fact he always kept his word. He had promised his wives he would bring them elk meat, and he would not let them down. To his way of thinking a man was no man at all if he could not provide for his loved ones, and he had a reputation for being an excellent provider.

  In order to guarantee success, Rolling Thunder had brought his friends to this region where the elk were known to be more numerous than practically anywhere else. It mattered little to him that the Shoshones also hunted here. His wits and his strength had seen him through more dangers than he cared to remember, and he was completely confident he would prevail if he encountered them.

  Once in the valley, Rolling Thunder stopped. “We must separate and search for sign. Little Dog and I will take the west side.”

  “Stay alert,” Walking Bear advised, hefting his lance. He angled to the east, Bobcat and Loud Talker tagging along. “We will call out if we find anything.”

  The only sounds were the dull thud of hoofs and the noisy gurgling of a swift stream meandering along the valley floor. Rolling Thunder’s keen dark eyes roved constantly over the ground. A skilled tracker, he sought evidence of a game trail. Where there was water, there was always wildlife. From past experience he knew that any elk in the vicinity would bed down in the dense timber above during the day and come down to drink toward sunset. Being creatures of habit, the elk would use the same route again and again, so if he could find the trail he could backtrack to where they were hiding.

  The morning sun climbed higher and higher. They were halfway along the valley when Little Dog addressed him.

  “Do you think any of the others suspect the true reason you insisted we come so far south?”

  Rolling Thunder’s iron will served him in good stead.

  He continued riding, his face impassive, and remarked absently, “I do not know what you mean.”

  “You can fool them, my friend, but not me. We have been like brothers since childhood. I know your ways better than I know my own.”

  “You speak in riddles.”

  “Do I?” Little Dog said. “If so, it is a riddle you understand. And I am surprised you have not told them the truth. They are almost as close to you as I am.”

  “Speak with a straight tongue.”

  “Very well. Does White Buffalo know what you are up to?”

  “Why should I tell him?” Rolling Thunder rejoined, the indignation in his tone obvious. “What is he to me? We are not even related.” He was about to go on, to justify himself, when he saw where the grass ahead had been flattened and torn up by the passage of many heavy forms. And there in the bare earth were scores of large elk tracks. “Look!” he exclaimed, then trotted to them.

  Rolling Thunder slid down off his war pony and sank to one knee to examine the prints. As his gaze roved along the game trail he suddenly stiffened, then lowered his face within inches of the earth.

  “What have you found?” Little Dog asked.

  “Fresh horse tracks,” Rolling Thunder answered, touching his fingers to one of the depressions. There were two sets of hoof prints, those of a larger than normal animal that must be a big stallion and a much smaller set that might be those of a mare. Both had crossed the valley and gone up into the trees. “Someone else is hunting elk,” he deduced, and rose.

  “Shoshones, you think?”

  “Perhaps,” Rolling Thunder said, hiding his disappointment that neither of the animals were shod. Rising, he led his horse toward the stream, studying the tracks carefully as he went along, memorizing the individual characteristics of each animal.

  “We will have to stay clear of them,” Little Dog said.

  “There are only two.”

  “But there may be many more.”

  “It will do no harm to follow them and see.”

  “But what—”

  Rolling Thunder spun, anger clouding his expression. “Earlier I stood up for you, but now you give me cause to doubt my judgment. There is a fine line, old friend, between caution and cowardice. See that you do not cross that line or I will denounce you in front of the entire village.”

  Eyes flinty as steel, Little Dog closed his mouth. Rolling Thunder spun, and walked on until he came to a spot by the water’s edge where the two riders had dismounted and let their animals drink. The moccasin prints told him a large man was riding the stallion, but the rider of the mare was a mere child. If they were alone they would be easy to slay. Rolling Thunder tilted back his head and vented a series of piercing yips in a perfect imitation of a howling coyote.

  From the other side of the valley came Walking Bear’s prompt reply.

  “Maybe we will count coup on this trip after all,” Rolling Thunder declared.

  One

  “DID YOU HEAR SOMETHING, PA?”

  Nathaniel King turned his amused gazed from an irate, chattering gray squirrel in a nearby pine and shifted in the saddle to stare at his young son. “No, Zach. What was it?”

  “I don’t rightly know, Pa. Something real faint.” The boy had his head cocked and was listening intently. “It came from behind us, I figure.”

  Nate listened for several seconds, but heard only the temperamental squirrel and the northwesterly wind sighing through the tall trees. He was about to suggest that his inexperienced son had imagined hearing a sound when he saw the earnest look Zachary wore and realized the boy was doing exactly as Nate had often instructed him to do. “Always stay alert in the wilderness,” he had repeatedly advised. “The man who stays alive is the man who is never taken by surprise. Use your senses, your eyes and ears and even your nose, like you have never used them before. Use them like the wild beasts do. Learn from the animals, Zach. That’s what the Indians have done since the beginning of time.”

  Nate smiled, pleased that Zach was trying so hard, and said, “If you hear it again, let me know.”

  “I sure will.”

  Cradling his heavy Hawken in the crook of his left elbow, Nate lifted the rope reins and clucked his pied gelding into motion. By nightfall or early tomorrow, he reflected, they would have their elk and he would teach Zach the proper way to remove the hide, butcher the carcass, and make jerky. In a week they would be back at the Shoshone village, where he would proudly boast of his son’s prowess to all the other fathers.

  He had to hand it to his wife. Winona had come up with the idea to take Zach off alone into the high country to hunt. The time had come, she’d asserted, for Zach to learn the all-important skills he would need to survive in the raw, untamed land her tribe called home. Already the boy was a skilled rider and could shoot a bow as well as his Shoshone playmates. But there was so much more Zach needed to know, and no one better qualified to teach him than his own father.

  Which tickled Nate no end. He loved being a parent, loved being able to spend the precious time with Zach that his own father had been too busy to spend with him. He delighted in seeing the world through Zach’s naive eyes, and in watching Zach slowly grow and mature. In a sense he was reliving his own childhood, and sometimes things that Zach said or did brought back forgotten memories of incidents from his own early years. As Zach discovered more and more of the world, it seemed that Nate rediscovered more and more of himself.

  “Say, Pa?”

  “Yes?” Nate idly responded as he surveyed the expanse of mountain above. The elk trail they had been following was winding ever higher, and unless he was mistaken he’d find them holed up in a belt of aspens less
than a quarter of a mile away. Some of the leaves had begun to change, dotting the green background with patches of bright yellow.

  “Why do some of the other boys keep calling me a breed?”

  Involuntarily, Nate’s grip tightened on the reins and his lips compressed into a thin line. He didn’t turn because he was afraid his feelings would show. “Your mother is a Shoshone. I’m a white man. That makes you half-white, half-Indian,” he explained. “A half-breed, some would say. Or a breed.”

  “The way they say it makes me want to punch them,” Zach commented.

  “It’s not something a true friend would call you,” Nate confirmed.

  “Then I will punch them.”

  “Who has been calling you this?”

  “Runs Fast, mostly, and a few that hang around with him.”

  “Runs Fast? Jumping Bull’s boy?”

  “Yep.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “Oh, about ten sleeps, I reckon. Runs Fast has been picking on me every chance he gets lately. I don’t know why. I’ve never done nothing to him.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

  There was a pause. “A man should always take care of his own problems. Isn’t that what I heard you tell Uncle Shakespeare?”

  Nate probed his memory for over half a minute before he recalled making such a statement, and he marveled that his son remembered the incident. It had been almost a year ago, during one of Shakespeare McNair’s periodic visits to their cabin. McNair, his best friend and mentor, had been talking about a mutual acquaintance, a free trapper embroiled in a dispute with another man. Instead of confronting the offending party directly, the trapper had been trying to enlist the help of everyone he knew to side with him against his enemy. During the course of that conversation Nate had casually mentioned that any man worth his salt handled his own squabbles and didn’t go around imposing on his friends.

  “Isn’t it?” Zach prompted.

  “Yes, I do recollect saying something along those lines,” Nate admitted. “But I was talking about grown men. It’s perfectly all right for a boy your age to come to his folks when something like this happens.”

  “I’m not no whiner. I want to do what a man would do.”

  Nate looked over his shoulder and bestowed a kindly, knowing smile on his pride and joy. “You have a heap of growing to do, son, before you’ll wear a man’s britches. Don’t rush things. These years are some of the best years of your life and you should enjoy them while they last.”

  “Why are these the best years?” the boy inquired.

  “Because you don’t have any responsibilities yet.”

  “I have my chores, don’t I?” Zach said, sounding slightly offended. “I take care of the horses and chop wood and such.”

  “I’m not saying you don’t do your fair share of the work,” Nate assured him. “But it’s a far cry from doing daily chores to having a wife and kids to keep fed and clothed and having a homestead to look after. Some responsibilities are bigger than others, and a wife and children are the biggest a man can have. He has to work real hard to give them the things he thinks they should have, and sometimes it can be almighty trying.”

  “Don’t you like looking after Ma and me?”

  Nate stopped until Zach came alongside him, and tenderly placed his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “What a silly notion. Nothing in this whole wide world gives me greater pleasure than having to do for your ma and you. I never knew what genuine happiness was until I met Winona, and when you came along we were as happy as could be.”

  Zach pondered a bit. “If you like young’uns so much, how come I don’t have any brothers or sisters?”

  “The Lord knows we’ve tried, son,” Nate said, inwardly amazed at the convoluted twists the boy’s reasoning sometimes took. Nate was also a little bothered by the question. Had he somehow given Zach cause to doubt his love, or was the query merely prompted by idle curiosity?

  “Running Wolf has three brothers and two sisters. He says that’s too many, that they pick on each other all the time.” Zach’s brow creased. “If Ma does have babies, I hope she doesn’t have five at once.”

  “I doubt she will,” Nate said with a straight face. “You never know, Pa. Beaver Tail’s dog had a litter of six pups, and Tall Horse’s dog had eight.”

  Nate made a mental note to have a long talk with his son about affairs between the sexes at the first opportunity. They’d already had a few discussions, but clearly he hadn’t covered all he should.

  The aspens were much nearer. Nate rested his Hawken across his thighs and scoured the wall of vegetation for sign of the elk. He saw nothing, and his mind began to drift. Instead of concentrating exclusively on the matter at hand, he found himself wondering why Jumping Bull’s son had taken to giving Zach a hard time. He knew Jumping Bull, but not well. They were on speaking terms and would greet one another if they passed in the village, but Jumping Bull had never been overly friendly toward him. In fact, now that he thought about it, Jumping Bull had always been strangely aloof, even cold. Why?

  Suddenly Nate spied a moving patch of brown among the slender trunks of the aspens. A moment later he made out the outline of a bull elk walking slowly westward. Quickly he snapped the rifle to his shoulder and touched his thumb to the hammer. He had to elevate the barrel to compensate for the slope. Fixing a bead on a spot behind the elk’s powerful front shoulders, he began to cock the Hawken.

  “Pa! Look!”

  At the strident shout the elk whirled and vanished in the undergrowth so swiftly there was no chance for Nate to fire. One instant it was there, the next it was gone. Exasperated at his son’s mistake, he swung around. “Zach, haven’t I taught you better than to yell when you’re closing in on game?”

  The boy was pointing at the valley below.

  Immediately Nate spotted them, three mounted Indians traversing the valley floor from east to west. They had just crossed the stream and were in plain sight in the tall grass. Sunlight glittered off a long lance one held. From so high up he couldn’t tell to which tribe they belonged.

  “Are they Shoshones, you think?” Zach asked.

  “There are no hunting parties in the area I know of,” Nate said.

  “Maybe they’re hostiles, Pa. Maybe they’re Blackfeet.”

  “They only travel this far south to raid, and when they raid they like to go on foot,” Nate pointed out. “I doubt they’re Blackfeet.” But they could, he thought to himself, be from one of a half-dozen tribes who were bitter enemies of the Shoshones. Warriors who would try to kill Zach and him on sight.

  Zach was excited. “Should we hide and wait to see if they’re after us?”

  “No,” Nate said calmly, hiding his blossoming worry. Where there were three, there might be more, many more, and here he was alone with his young son.

  “They’re awful close to the elk trail. Maybe they’re just hunting elk like we are.”

  “They could be,” Nate allowed, although he didn’t believe that was the case. He scanned the expanse of craggy mountain beyond the fluttering tops of the trees while gnawing on his lower lip, his every instinct telling him to get the hell out of there, to get his son to safety. “Stick close,” he cautioned, and angled higher.

  Constantly winding right and left to avoid thickly clustered trunks, Nate slowly made his way through the aspen belt and into sparse pines above. The ground became rockier. Every now and then a stone would be dislodged by one of their horses and clatter downward. The air felt cooler, growing even more so as they approached a blanket of snow crowning the ragged summit.

  A solitary hawk soared over the crest and swooped down above them, then banked and glided to a lower elevation.

  “Was that a red hawk?” Zach asked.

  “I didn’t pay attention,” Nate said, his eyes on a promising notch several hundred yards to their right toward which he was gingerly picking his way. He had to skirt several talus slopes where their horses might slip and
fall. Always he tried to stay in cover in case the Indians below were scouring the mountain for them.

  The notch was above the snow line, situated at the apex of a steep slope. Nate thought it prudent to climb down, and had Zach do likewise. The gelding and Zach’s mare were as surefooted as mountain goats, but he dared not risk an accident. If one of their animals went lame they would be hard pressed to elude pursuers. Taking the reins in his left hand, he worked his way upward, his knee-high moccasins finding scant purchase on the packed, slippery snow.

  “This is the first time I’ve ever been up this high,” Zach remarked breathlessly. “Everything looks so small down below. That stream looks like a string. And those Indians look like ants.”

  Indians? Nate twisted and held a palm over his eyes to shield them from the glare. Crossing an open tract between the valley floor and the trees on the lower slope were five warriors riding in single file, most with upturned faces. He could guess what they were doing: searching the mountain for Zach and him. “We’d better hurry,” he suggested, increasing his pace.

  Soon they were at the notch, which proved to be, as Nate has hoped, a narrow pass to the opposite side of the mountain. There were plenty of elk, deer, and bighorn sheep tracks, none made recently.

  Nate passed through the gap quickly, anxious to learn if there would be a way down the far slope. He feared the pass would open out on a towering cliff or an impassable gorge, which would force them to either retrace their steps down to the valley or to try and swing in a wide loop around the climbing Indians and pray they weren’t discovered.

  The first sight Nate beheld when he emerged from the shadowy pass was a cliff, thankfully off to the left and not barring their way. To his right grew dense forest. Directly below, the alpine fastness inclined gradually for hundreds of feet into more aspens. Nate and Zach mounted, and made their way toward them.