Wilderness Double Edition #7

by David Robbins

  “What the dickens is the matter with me?” Zach asked. He glanced at Mary, whose sides were heaving, then at the fire, at the flames that had been reduced to the size of his little finger. “What’s happening?” he wondered aloud.

  Suddenly Zach remembered! His pa had once given him a lesson on the basics of getting a fire going. “Flames are just like you and me,” his father had said. “They need air or they’ll smother and die.”

  Comprehension sent a chill down Zach’s spine. There was little air left in the cleft, and unless he dug them out quickly they would all perish. Swiftly he sprang to the mound and clawed his way upward. More dizziness gnawed at his mind, but he steeled his will against it. If he collapsed, he was dead.

  Fingers and hands a blur, Zach dug and dug and dug, heedless of where he threw the snow. The wolf tried to stand close to the incline, but was driven back by the rain of clumps. Mary, leaning against the wall, watched the boy.

  At length Zach had a small tunnel excavated, yet still there was no glimmer of bright light beyond the snow in front of him. Frustrated, he sank his right hand in to the wrist and tried to pull more snow back. But there was even less air in the tunnel, and the next moment he found himself on his face, gasping loudly, his mind totally awhirl.

  “No!” Zach cried. He must not give in when so much was at stake! There was more than his own life to think of; there was Blaze, Mary, and most of all his pa. “Get up, you weakling!” he chided himself, and used a word his parents frowned on. “Damn you, you good-for-nothing! ”

  Somewhere Zach found a slender shred of strength. Rising on his hands and knees, he thrust both hands into the snow, bunched his shoulders, and wrenched. He expected the snow in front to give way. Instead, without warning, the whole roof caved down on top of him, knocking him flat.

  In a panic, Zach screamed and clawed at the clammy coffin embracing him. He kicked wildly. His arms pumped. His heart beat like a drum in his ears. In a frenzied fit he got to his knees and tried to back up, to get out of the tunnel before more snow crashed down on him. A brilliant shaft of light struck him in the eyes and he instinctively raised a hand to block the glare as he scrambled rearward.

  The significance of the light brought Zach up short. Slowly, he lowered his arm and sat up, amazed to see blue sky above, a white slope below, and bent aspens laden heavy with snow further down. “I did it!” he blurted out. Ecstatic, he took deep breaths and stumbled to his feet. “I did it!”

  Then Zach remembered his father. He anxiously surveyed the slope but saw nothing moving. “Pa!” he shouted. “Where are you?”

  There was no answering cry.

  Fearing the worst, Zach moved away from the hole. His left leg bumped something and he bent his head to discover Blaze at his feet. “So you followed me out, did you?” he said, glancing back. The cave-in had created a tunnel over three feet high and two feet wide. Plenty of air would reach Mary.

  Zach hiked lower. He spotted a large, dark object protruding from the snow lower down and off to the north. “Please, no,” he prayed, and broke into a run, the snow able to bear his weight where it would have crumpled under the heavy tread of an adult.

  The wolf trotted alongside him.

  They were yet fifteen yards away when Zach recognized the body as being that of a horse, and from the pied markings on the hindquarters he knew which horse. “Pegasus!” he called forlornly, and ran faster, so fast he collapsed out of breath next to the dead steed and clasped his arms to his stomach. “Pa liked you,” he said softly.

  A scan of the slope showed only a sea of snow. After a while Zach rose and swept his gaze over the lower portions of the mountain, but there was only more of the same. Moving in a circle, he looked and looked and grew more despondent with each passing minute. His pa, he figured, must have been buried alive. Then he glanced at the snow at his feet.

  It took a few seconds for the tracks to register as such; they were so deep the impressions left by the hoofs at the bottom of the holes were difficult to discern. Startled, Zach turned and saw many more fresh horse prints and marks where the animals had slid now and then. He saw where a group of riders had emerged from the aspens, some going directly to Pegasus, the others to a point about forty yards away.

  “What’s over yonder?” Zach mused aloud, and ran to see. There he found a hole, a lot more tracks, and a trail leading to the north. Hope flared as he reconstructed what had happened. “There’s seven or eight of them, Blaze. Indians too, ’cause their horses aren’t shod. They must have dug my pa out and taken him with them, and they wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble unless he was still alive.” Thrilled to his core, he jumped into the air and laughed merrily. “My pa is alive!”

  A moment later Zach had sobered. “But what do I do now?” he wondered. “Since they’re heading north, they can’t be Shoshones. There ain’t no friendly tribes up that way.” He paced back and forth, a hand on his chin. “The first thing I have to do is get me a branch and dig Mary out. Then we’re going after Pa, Blaze, and if those Indians have hurt him, I aim to make them pay.”

  He tramped toward the nearest aspens, the wolf padding as always at his side. Halfway there, struck by a devastating thought, he stopped and stared timidly in the direction the abductors of his father had taken. Here he was, a mere sprout of a boy, about to pit himself against a half-dozen skilled enemy warriors. He must be touched in the head to believe he had a realistic chance of saving his pa.

  “I’m only a boy,” Zach whispered into the wind. “I can’t do the impossible.” Dejected, he stared up at the cleft, and remembered he had left his rifle inside by the fire. “See?” he addressed the wolf. “I don’t even have brains enough to keep my rifle with me at all times like Pa said.”

  Mechanically Zach moved on, the weight of the world bearing down on his shoulders. There were certain limits to what he could do, he realized. Rescuing his pa was a job for a grown man. He considered trying to find the Shoshone village and alerting Touch the Clouds and the others so they could chase the hostile band, but he knew that by the time he reached the village—if he did—the band would be long gone, the trail long cold.

  “No,” Zach said, “if Pa’s to be saved, then someone has to go after him now. And I’m the only one who can do it. Me. Zach King.”

  Then Zach thought of his other name, the Indian name bestowed on him by his folks shortly after his birth. “Me. Stalking Coyote,” he said dolefully to the pup. Although he had never admitted as much to his parents, he’d never been especially fond of that name since he’d always rated coyotes as rather low in the animal kingdom. Grizzlies and panthers were far more formidable, wolves far more regal, foxes far more intelligent. The only traits coyotes possessed worth admiring were a certain dogged persistence in the pursuit of prey and crafty dispositions. The tricksters, some called them, for the way they often outsmarted badgers and other predators; if a coyote came on a badger in the act of trying to dig a rodent out of its burrow, the coyote would then find the rodent’s escape hole and wait patiently there for the noisy digging of the badger to drive the rodent right out into its mouth.

  Zach grinned at the recollection. “Now if only I was that tricky,” he declared, and lines furrowed his brow as he recalled how once, after he’d won a game he and some of the Shoshone children had been playing, one of the boys had come up to him and complimented him by saying he was the trickiest boy in the whole tribe. “Maybe I am,” he now commented.

  But trickiness wasn’t everything. Only someone with a vast store of wilderness skills could hope to save his pa. The notion made him stop. Hadn’t he learned all about survival from warriors who were masters at doing so? He’d made it a point to learn all he could, prompted by advice his Uncle Shakespeare had given him years ago during a talk about Zach’s wish to become a great warrior: “You will be one day, Zachary. You’ve got a sharp mind, as sharp as your pa’s, and you can see what he’s made of himself. The secret to getting on in life is to always listen and learn from your
betters, then go out and apply what they’ve taught you. And the more you practice at it, the better you’ll get, until one day you’ll wake up a growed man, a respected warrior of the tribe, and a credit to your family.”

  So maybe, Zach reflected, he already had the knowledge he needed; he just had to go out and apply it.

  With renewed confidence he hurried lower. Among the aspens—where in spots the snow had drifted deep, and in other spots only inches of snow covered the ground— he found a suitable branch. This he toted to the cleft, and once there he had to sit and rest.

  “I’m going to make my pa proud,” Zach announced to Blaze. “I’m going after him, and I’ll fetch him back if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

  Once Zach was refreshed from his climb, he turned to the tunnel and set to work enlarging it, using the branch as a lever to pry large chunks of snow loose. Gravity would then take over, tumbling the snow down the slope. In this fashion he cleared an opening large enough for a man to walk through in not quite half an hour.

  Fatigued from his labors, Zach went inside, fed the last of the grass to Mary, and rekindled the fire. Warmth filled the cleft and brought renewed life to his chilled body. Relishing the comfort, he sat with his arms draped around his bent knees and his chin on his wrists. His eyelids became leaden. Twice he started and sat up, only to slump wearily down again.

  The next thing Zach knew, he opened his eyes and realized to his horror that he’d fallen asleep. Upset that he could be so careless when his father’s life was at stake, when every precious moment counted, he leaped to his feet and applied himself to the snow blocking the opening.

  When, eventually, Zach stopped, his shoulders were throbbing and his arms ached, but he had excavated a gaping cavity of which he could be rightfully proud. There was no time to savor his feat, however. Tossing the branch down, he saddled the mare and led her out into the bright sunlight.

  Blaze tagged along, sitting when Zach stopped. The boy thoughtfully regarded the wolf, then remarked, “If I leave you here, you might not live out the week. You’re too little to get by on your own. But you’re also too little to keep up with Mary, so I reckon there’s only one thing I can do.”

  Turning, Zach opened the pair of parfleches hanging on the mare behind the saddle. He removed extra leggins and a spare buckskin shirt from the one on the near side and crammed them into the one on the far side. A few other items were also transferred into the second pouch; then it was closed.

  “How are you going to take to this?” Zach wondered as he gently lifted the wolf and nestled it in the first parfleche. He had left just enough room for the pup’s head to stick out, and it showed no display of fear as he climbed up and took the reins in his left hand. The Kentucky rifle was in his right.

  “Well, here we go,” Zach said, clucking the mare into motion. He repeatedly checked the wolf to see if it would thrash around or try to jump out. Thankfully, Blaze did neither, so Zach concentrated on his riding, avoiding steeper sections of the slope where Mary might fall. Presently he was moving northward as rapidly as the mare dared safely go.

  Zach was immensely pleased with what he had done so far. He figured he was five to six hours behind the band of hostiles, which made overtaking them before nightfall unlikely. The next day should be different. Since they had no idea they were being chased and would consequently take their time, he should come on them before the second night fell.

  The golden sun arced higher in the tranquil blue vault of sky. Zach was hungry, but refused to stop to eat. He was thirsty, but when he came on a thin ribbon of water meandering from west to east, he let the mare and the wolf drink heartily, and only took a few sips of the freezing cold water himself. “Never drink too much when you’re out in the wild,” his father had counseled.

  “Doing so can give you a bellyache or make you outright sick, and a sick man alone is easy pickings for unfriendly Indians and beasts alike.”

  Zach remembered other lessons as well. He avoided looking directly at the sun to measure the passage of time, which could harm his eyes, and instead gauged how long he had been in the saddle by the lengths of the shadows. He also squinted constantly in order to reduce the glare and spare him from being struck by snow blindness. When he began to sweat, he didn’t open his shirt or remove his hat, which would have brought on an attack of the chills after the cold mountain air turned his sweat to ice. Quite a few greenhorn trappers had been found frozen solid, victims of their ignorance of the deadly combination of cold wind and perspiration. A man grew so cold so fast, there was no time to even build a fire.

  Zach also scanned for hawks and eagles to the north. Often, when birds of prey spotted something below them that aroused their curiosity, they would glide in tight circles above it until their interest was satisfied. If he should see one doing that now, it might be studying the Indians who had taken his father. None of those he saw, though, circled.

  By late afternoon Zach was on the lookout for a spot to stop. He didn’t much like the prospect of having to dig down through the snow to find grass for the mare, yet he recognized that if she died, he would too. Whatever was required to keep her alive, he must do.

  Fickle fate smiled on the boy. He crested a low hill, wound down into a narrow valley which had been sheltered from the brunt of the blizzard, and turned from the trail into a quiet corner where he found a spring and a tract of ground that had received just a light dusting. With the sun perched above the jagged peaks to the west, he opted to halt.

  Everything was done exactly as his pa had taught him. First he attended to Mary, removing his saddle and watering her. He was tempted to let her roam free so she could eat where she chose, but so many times had he heard his father or one of the other mountain men remark that “it’s better to count ribs than tracks,” that he tied her securely so she would be right there when he wanted her in the morning.

  Zach built his fire Indian-style, and warmed himself a short while before taking his rifle and going after game. The hostiles were so far ahead he need not fear the shot being heard. Blaze at his heels, he trudged toward a snow-shrouded meadow where he hoped to find wildlife. So hungry was he that he’d settle for a bird, if such should be all he found.

  Suddenly Zach heard a crackling in the brush off to the right and he swung around, leveling the Kentucky, hoping it was a deer or a rabbit. His mouth watered in anticipation that changed to utter terror when, an instant later, into the open lumbered a monster grizzly.

  Eleven

  Zachary King went pale and took a step backward, on the verge of fleeing. His pa had told him about the grizzly that visited their camp in the dead of night, and he suspected this was the same bear since grizzlies were known to range over a wide area in their ceaseless quest for food. The deep snow meant nothing to the great brute covered with thick hair and fat put on for the lean winter months ahead.

  As Zach started to turn, he paused, recalling yet another tidbit of information gleaned from his father. “Never run from a bear, son. That’s what its prey usually does, so when it sees something running away the bear naturally goes after it. Stand your ground, or back away slowly. And don’t take your eyes off it. There are some folks who claim bears are afraid of the face of man, that they won’t attack you if you stare them down. I don’t put much stock in such tales, but it’s plain good sense not to turn your back to something that wants to eat you.”

  So Zach now faced the mighty bruin, his thumb on the rifle hammer. He preferred to go down fighting rather than being taken from behind like an errant coward.

  About twenty yards off, the grizzly had halted and was regarding the boy intently. Raising its huge head, the bear sniffed the breeze, trying to detect his scent.

  Zach realized the wind was blowing from him to the grizzly, which should be to his advantage. Often bears fled at the smell of man, and since this one had left him unmolested the night of its visit, it might do so again. Yet to his dismay, the monster grunted and moved toward him, its enormous muscles ri
ppling under its fur.

  Quickly Zach sighted. He would have time for one shot, then flee to the closest tree and climb like a squirrel to the safety of the highest branches. Grizzlies were too heavy to climb, but they were exceptionally tall, this one looking to be about eight feet when fully erect, with a reach of another three feet, not counting the long claws. Meaning somehow he had to climb over eleven feet in the two or three seconds it would take the bear to reach the tree.

  Zach touched his forefinger to the trigger and tensed his finger to squeeze. Unexpectedly, an eerie howl erupted at his very feet, the wavering, ear-piercing wail of a wolf, so startlingly loud that Zach jumped. He glanced down, hissed, “Shush, Blaze!” then glanced at the grizzly.

  On hearing the howl the bear had abruptly stopped. Now it backed off to one side, venting an angry growl.

  Blaze howled louder, as if crying for his mother.

  With a disgusted toss of its head, the grizzly whirled and ran into the brush, vanishing in seconds.

  Just like that the encounter was over.

  A reaction set in, causing Zach to tremble as he lowered the hammer. Blaze still howled, and he didn’t object.

  The foolish wolf had inadvertently saved both of their hides. After an anxious minute spent scouring their vicinity to be certain the grizzly was gone, he knelt, grinned, and embraced Blaze with his right arm, holding the now silent animal so tight he swore he could feel the frantic beating of its little heart.

  “You did good, boy,” Zach said, and was licked on the cheek in return. “I’m right glad you’re with me. I don’t know how I’d hold up if you weren’t.”

  Rising, Zach pointed due west. “That’s the way the bear went.” He turned to the east. “So we’ll go this way. No need to invite trouble, as Pa always says.”