The Poacher's Daughter

by Michael Zimmer

  Later that same day they abandoned the Whoop-Up Trail for a more westerly direction. Far ahead lay a mountain range, its peaks capped with snow, its flanks black with forests. As they drew closer, they entered a land of gently rolling hills timbered with tracts of conifers, like patches on a pinto. The air was high-country crisp, the creeks icy cold and running bank to bank. In the week since they’d left Fort Benton, they hadn’t seen another human being, or even much sign of one, so it was a shock to Rose when late one afternoon they topped a low saddle flanked by towering pines and Jacques pointed out a fort in the distance.

  “There it is,” he said tersely.

  Narrowing her eyes against the bright mountain sunshine, Rose said: “There what is?”

  “Harker’s Fort. It used to be a straight-up trading post, but that went under when the robe trade petered out. Old Jake Harker moved to Oregon and retired. Now his place is run by whiskey peddlers who deal mostly in furs and stolen horses, although I hear the Mounties plan to shut it down soon.”

  Harker’s Fort sat in the middle of a broad, green valley, surrounded by piney hills. A stream ran in front of the palisades, its banks grown over with groves of elm and ash and white-barked aspen. Beyond the fort grazed a herd of horses that probably numbered three thousand head—by far the largest cavvy Rose had ever seen. It was being watched over by at least a dozen men, and even from here she could see the rifles lying across their saddles.

  Closer, running along both sides of the stream for half a mile or more, was a good-size Indian village. The sight of so many lodges was startling to Rose. It was something she hadn’t seen in a long time, or ever expected to see again. Many of the lodges were made of soft-tanned leather—ten- and twelve-skin teepees, brown as mud—but it was sobering to realize that over half of them were constructed of canvas, the cream-colored material standing in sharp contrast to the older, smaller, more earthen-toned lodges of an earlier generation.

  Just as significant, to Rose’s thinking, was the number of buckboards and small wagons parked behind lodges, where once only travois had leaned. It brought home with painful clarity the changes being wrought to this land, to a way of life that was mostly gone now.

  The post itself was constructed in a style her pap would have called Kentucky, meaning it was surrounded by log walls set upright in the dark loam, sharpened on top to form notches behind which riflemen could stand in the event of an attack. Although the stockade had appeared impressive from the low rise, closer inspection revealed a post badly in need of repair. Timbers were rotting at the base, many of them leaning dangerously outward, and the wide, double gates sagged on broken hinges, locked permanently open by mats of weeds and grass.

  Inside, Rose discovered more of a rough-shod community than a single trading post. At least two dozen rooms, located in several long, log dwellings backed up against the palisade walls, housed an equal number of independent traders. Wagons and two-wheeled carts were parked haphazardly around the hard-packed quadrangle, and horses and mules wandered loose with only a catch rope around their necks. Rotting hides and gnawed bones littered the ground in front of several establishments, attracting clouds of blowflies.

  The men were a mixture of Indian and white, but the women were all marked by the dusky complexion and raven-black hair of their native ancestry. The place was ripe with the sights, sounds, and smells of a thriving industry, and over it all hung the pungent aroma of the element that held it together like glue—trade whiskey.

  Jacques drew up in front of the largest building, what had once been the main trade room, and stepped down. Wrapping Albert’s reins around the hitch rail next to Jacques’s gray, Rose followed the Métis inside. They went to the counter and leaned into it, while a bartender ambled down the opposite side.

  “Hau, Jacques,” the bartender said.

  “Brock,” Jacques returned politely.

  “Whiskey?”

  Jacques looked at Rose, who nodded. “Two,” he said.

  Brock poured, then corked the jug. Jacques slid a half dollar across the bar and Brock pocketed it without making change.

  “We’re looking for some old friends,” Jacques said, gently spinning the glass between his fingers.

  “Who might that be?”

  “Billy Garcia and Larson Web.”

  Brock furrowed his brows in thought, then shook his head. “I must be gettin’ old. My thinker ain’t what it used to be.”

  Jacques placed another four bits on the counter.

  “They rode in yesterday,” Brock said, “but I ain’t seen ’em since last night. They were awful drunk when they left here. They might not be up yet.”

  “Where’d they bunk?”

  “Why, I don’t rightly know, hoss. They have lots of friends hereabouts. They might be passed out anywhere.”

  Rose slapped another 50¢ piece on the counter, and Brock scooped the pile of change into his pocket.

  “Newcomers generally throw their blankets on the floor in one of the bastions until something better opens up. Not that I figure Web and Garcia will hang around that long. They never do.”

  “Merci,” Jacques said, pushing away from the counter. Rose shadowed him outside, her drink untouched. They paused on the verandah, but, before they could speak, Rose spotted a pair of men approaching from her left.

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” she said huskily, reaching for the Smith & Wesson.

  Less than twenty feet away, Billy Garcia was already pulling his pistol. “¡Puta!” he shouted, snapping off a shot that raked the air past her shoulder.

  “Bastard,” Rose returned, firing from the hip.

  All hell broke loose then. Garcia dived for the shelter of a nearby water trough, while Web, caught flat-footed, seemed even more stunned to see Jacques yank free his Remington revolver and pop a cap at his brother’s killer. Jacques’s ball dug a long furrow in the wall at Web’s side, but Rose didn’t hang around to see what effect the flying bark would have on the older man. She jumped to the ground and scrambled under the porch, lead from Garcia’s Colt singing around her ears.

  Crabbing into the deeper shadows close to the building, Rose kept up a steady return fire, her bullets splintering the wooden trough. Through the thickening powder smoke she caught glimpses of Garcia’s brown hand snaking past the edge of the trough to throw another round into the shallow crawl space.

  Rose emptied the Smith & Wesson, then rolled onto her side to trip the pistol’s top latch while pulling down on the barrel. As the cylinder and barrel pivoted away from the butt and hammer, she turned the pistol upside down, the empty brass tumbling free. Her fingers trembled as she dropped fresh rounds into the wheel. She kept glancing at the water trough, less than twenty feet away, but Garcia remained hidden and Rose knew, without really knowing how, that his revolver was also empty, and that he was frantically reloading.

  It was there Rose held the advantage. The Smith & Wesson was quicker to reload than Garcia’s Colt, which required that each empty case be punched out individually before a live round could be chambered. It wasn’t much of an edge, and her own rattled nerves were working against her, but she finally closed the Smith & Wesson with a sharp, upward slap of her hand. Scurrying out from under the porch, she darted into the quadrangle, where she had a clear view of Garcia kneeling in the mud behind the trough, his fingers poised with a cartridge at the Colt’s open gate.

  Rose fired instinctively, then fired twice more. At least two of her bullets struck Garcia, one in the leg just above his knee, the other in his side. Howling, he lifted his Colt, but he hadn’t finished reloading, and his first hammer-fall was on an empty chamber. It was his second that found a live round. Rose jerked back with a startled yelp as Garcia’s bullet zinged past her jaw, tugging at her hair. Heart pounding, she scuttled back under the porch.

  Things seemed to slow down after that. Curled up as far back as she could get, she cocked the Smit
h & Wesson and waited, but Garcia didn’t show himself. Above her, the roar of gunfire between Jacques and Web had ceased. Only the gentle splashing of water from the perforated trough competed with the ringing in her ears for attention.

  Rose didn’t know what to make of the silence. Was Garcia still crouched behind the trough, waiting in ambush. Or had he made his escape while she crawled back under the porch. Not knowing what else to do, she finally crept out from under the boardwalk. She’d lost her hat in the fray and her long blonde hair was plastered across her face; several strands were caught in her mouth, others menaced her eyes. She brushed the hair back with an impatient swipe, then warily approached the trough. She found Garcia still behind it, lying on his side in the mud, his chest slick with blood.

  Turning, Rose saw Web lying, motionless, on the verandah. She glanced at the opposite end, where Jacques had been standing, but the porch was empty. Limping over, she discovered him sprawled head down and on his back across the wooden steps, a bullet hole above his right eye.

  “Jesus Christ!” a voice exclaimed in quiet disbelief.

  Looking up, Rose saw a white man in buckskins crouched at the entrance to the trade room, his eyes as wide as double eagles. Two pieces of a briarwood pipe lay on the planking beneath him, where he’d bitten the stem in half.

  Others began to appear, many of them staring at Rose with the flat intensity of a predator. It was an unnerving experience, and even with the Smith & Wesson firmly in hand, she started to fear for her safety—here, where she was the stranger and Web and Garcia and Jacques had been familiar faces. She retrieved her Stetson, then limped to Albert’s side. Keeping the pistol unholstered, she mounted, then reined toward the open gate. No one spoke as she gave the roan its head, but there were volumes uttered in the charged silence that followed her retreat.

  Chapter

  35

  Rose hauled up on the back side of the same low saddle from which she’d first viewed Harker’s Fort. Although surrounded by several hundred yards of open meadow, thick pine forests walled her in on either side—well within range of the long-shooting buffalo guns so many of the ex-hunters at Harker’s seemed to favor. With that in mind, she decided to abandon the route she and Jacques had used coming north and veer east, into the trees.

  She began to breathe easier as soon as the forest closed in behind her. Still, she didn’t slow down. The afternoon was ebbing, and she knew she’d have to stop before dark. With only the stars and a quartering moon to guide her, she couldn’t risk traveling over the uncertain terrain she was encountering among the pines. In the meantime, she wanted to put as much distance as possible between her and the fort.

  Oddly it was the thought of having to make camp that brought the pain in her foot to the forefront of her mind. Glancing down, her vision started to blur when she spied the blood-soaked leather of her right boot.

  “Oh, Lordy,” she whispered, drawing rein. “I been shot.

  Carefully she slid her foot from the Mother Hubbard’s stirrup to study the torn leather as best she could without dismounting. As near as she could tell, the bullet had sheared away the outer edge of her boot, paring off a small section of the upper and a larger chunk of the sole. Although the leather was stained with blood for an inch of so around the tear, she saw no evidence that the wound was still bleeding, or that it required immediate attention.

  Reinserting her foot in the stirrup, she straightened with a huge sense of relief. “I don’t reckon it’s anything to fret over,” she told Albert. “It’s only a little bit bloody, and too far from my heart to kill me.” But when she glanced along her back trail, her expression darkened. “Come on,” she said, lifting the gelding’s reins. “Let’s put a few more hills between us and them yahoos back to Harker’s. I ain’t keen on gettin’ myself Custered by a bunch of dang’ whiskey peddlers.”

  It was almost dark when she came to a little aspen glade locked in on three sides by a deep pine forest, then sundered down the middle by a fast-flowing brook. Limping awkwardly, she pulled the saddle from Albert’s back and dumped it close to the stream, then picketed the gelding on some grass below the quakies. She collected firewood in the deepening twilight, then struck a blaze with a lucifer. With the fire burning to her satisfaction, she unfurled her bedroll and sat down on top of it, then gently pried the boot off her right foot.

  The pain intensified as the stiff leather slid over the injury, but eased again soon afterward. Setting the boot aside, Rose carefully peeled off her sock, then sat back in disbelief. The little toe on her right foot was gone, apparently shot off.

  “I’ll be damned,” she murmured, unable to look away. Even though she could see a piece of bone sticking out of the mangled flesh, the wound didn’t appear all that serious. She remembered her brother Luke accidentally lopping off half an inch or so from the tip of his index finger with a razor-sharp skinning knife, back in their buffalo days. Luke had cursed a blue streak for a while, but then he’d succumbed to her pap’s ridicule and wrapped the stubby finger in a dirty bandanna and gone back to work. Her pap had dressed the wound that evening with a cleaner rag, but pronounced it too trifling to waste good whiskey on by sterilizing it.

  Rose was forced to accept a certain degree of apathy toward her wound simply because she lacked any medical supplies to treat it properly. She didn’t even have a pocket flask of whiskey with which to bathe the torn flesh.

  To make matters worse, the pain was increasing with the injury’s exposure to the cool night air, causing her to feel suddenly queasy. Sliding the foot as close to the fire as she dared, she lay back to collect her thoughts. Even though the injury wasn’t life-threatening, she doubted if she’d be able to function very well for the next few days. Being alone intensified her anxiety, as did the fear that someone from Harker’s Fort might trail her and cut her throat in the middle of the night.

  Knowing she’d have to make do, Rose tugged the long tails of her shirt out of her britches and cut several inches off the bottom for a bandage. Although she didn’t have any alcohol or salve, she did have a small bottle of sperm whale’s oil she used to lubricate her firearms. She poured a little of that over the tail of her shirt, then wrapped it around her foot. The thick, amber-hued liquid quickly soothed the worst of the pain. Heeling off her other boot, she wiggled inside her bedroll, then pulled the blankets to her chin. Although her concern about being followed hadn’t lessened, weariness soon triumphed over worry, and she slid into the dreamless sleep of the exhausted.

  The sun was well up when Rose Edwards awoke the next morning. In the pines across the creek, a camp robber jay was scolding a squirrel, and a soft breeze whirred the delicate aspen leaves.

  Still groggy, Rose was content to just lie there for a while, wrapped in a cocoon of warmth that was only marginally disturbed by the remote discomfort of her foot. Gradually she became aware of the incongruous sounds of a crackling fire, the low rumble of boiling water where neither fire nor roiling water had any business being. She let her head loll to the side, peering through bleary eyes at a man she at first mistook for Jacques, drinking coffee by the fire. Then, abruptly, she realized that although this man had the same dark features as her Métis friend, and was dressed similarly, he was a stranger, and Jacques was dead.

  With a little gasp, Rose threw her blankets back and sat up. The sudden movement caused the pain of her missing toe to surge powerfully.

  At the fire, the Indian watched calmly, coffee cup in hand. Rose’s revolver lay by her side, but she didn’t reach for it. Looking around, she saw a small cavvy of horses at the lower end of the glade. With them was a man in his late forties or early fifties, with a paunchy stomach and hair the color of steel shavings; he wore buckskins and moccasins, as did two of the three women with him. The third woman and two young children were dressed in the more diverse style of the coffee drinker, a coalescing of white and Indian influences.

  “Don’t be afraid,” the cof
fee drinker said in fluent English, when Rose got around to returning his gaze. “My woman has some medicine for your foot.” He glanced at the youngest of the three women, the one wearing a buckskin skirt and moccasins, but a white man’s double-breasted shirt. “María,” he called.

  María was standing patiently beside a pack horse. At the coffee drinker’s hail, she started up the incline to Rose’s side, a rawhide parfleche clutched in one arm. One of the older women dismounted to join her.

  “My name’s Johnny Long,” the coffee drinker said. Indicating the younger woman with a slight jut of the chin, he added: “That’s my wife, María. I used to be called Jonathan Long Bow, but I shortened it to Johnny Long. I get along better with the whites if I don’t sound too Indian. That older gent down there is María’s father, Fights His Enemies. The other”—he made a motion toward the woman following María—“is Cow Elk Running. She’s my mother-in-law, so I won’t be speaking directly to her, as the old-timers consider that ill-mannered. The other woman, still on her horse, is Cow Elk Running’s sister, Never Talks, which isn’t altogether true, but close enough when Cow Elk Running is around. Cow Elk Woman was born with an active tongue, and age hasn’t slowed it down any.”

  Half a hundred questions were jumping around inside Rose’s head, but the one she finally blurted sprang more from impatience than any desire for an explanation. “I thought all Indians didn’t talk much. You ain’t hardly shut up since I opened my eyes.”

  Johnny chuckled. “Now, that’s a fact, but you looked so startled when you saw me sitting here, I was afraid you’d start shooting.” His smile slipped a notch. “These people have been shot at enough for one lifetime.”

  “I ain’t inclined to shoot without cause, but things is moving along a mite brisk for my taste. What’s she doing?” She meant María, who was lifting the blankets away from Rose’s foot.