The Fire Arrow

by Richard S. Wheeler

  She watched him as he dragged piece after piece back to the lodge and then warmed himself. She was keeping the fire now, sparing him one worry. In deep cold it was hard to start any fire, even with dry tinder and flint and steel.

  After three trips into that miserable wind, he returned to find that she had heated thick and meaty broth for him. She was well enough to stir about. He drank it gratefully and was renewed. But conditions outside were worsening by the minute. Now the wind whipped the snow into tiny bullets of ice, scouring one piece of land only to pile huge drifts elsewhere. He could no longer walk into it, and was forced to back slowly toward that dead cottonwood while the wind whipped snow like buckshot and plastered his capote with it.

  When he returned it was only midmorning, but he was as worn as if he had toiled hard a whole day. He had a little wood, enough for the night, but not much more except a few lodgepoles he was holding in reserve.

  She handed him tea this time, something she had decocted, he didn’t know from what.

  She had been sitting up most of the morning.

  “Skye, if you and me get out of here, you’re going to get another wife. I’m tired of doing it alone. You get two, three more wives, make me the sits-beside-him wife, so I get to boss the rest.”

  He stared at her, amazed.

  “Dammit, Skye, you get more wives. You’re doing women’s work, and it ain’t right. One wife gets sick, you got three more to help out.”

  He stared at her over his tin camp cup, feeling the steam brush his face. She was serious even if he spotted humor in those eyes that had been so dull and pain-soaked for days.

  “You’re all I want, Victoria,” he said.

  “Then you’re no chief. You want to do me a favor? You want to make my life happy? You get more wives. I want some wives myself.”

  A sharp blast of wind shuddered the lodge, and he wondered if the wind rose so high it might tip the shelter over. There were no rocks pinning it down. This was merely to be a hunting-camp shelter, easily dismantled. There wasn’t a rock in sight, and if the wind blew the lodge away, they would perish. As simple as that.

  “Some wives, Skye, we could make you comfortable.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Who ever heard of a chief having only one woman? I hold my head in shame in the village because I am the only woman of Mister Skye. It tells them you are no chief, in war or in the robes.”

  She laughed, wickedly. He had rarely seen her laugh like that, but it was a laugh known and practiced by the Crows, and especially old women of the People. He had heard it many times around many campfires, especially when it came time to tell stories and spin away a winter’s day. Her laugh was a bawdy one, and she was thinking of what it would be like in a lodge with several comely women in residence.

  Skye sat there, flustered. Where had this come from? How could she be thinking of more wives when their very lives hung in the balance?

  nine

  Days passed, the early winter weather moderated, but the peril did not diminish. Skye scoured the valley for firewood, stamping trails that took him farther out each day. Victoria took charge of the domestic labor, keeping fires going, sawing meat from the frozen forequarters, and resting in between.

  The early November sun crusted the snow so that the giant drifts no longer shifted in the wind. Some were taller than Skye. Each of them formed a wall imprisoning them, keeping them from the Crows’ winter camp. Skye feared passage through a gap between the Snowy Mountains and the Belt Mountains where snow always collected and reached formidable heights, all but sealing this country into northern and southern parts all winter long. Somehow, he would have to take his fragile woman through or over that barrier. There was no good way around.

  Victoria gained strength but pushed too hard to take pressure off of Skye, and then lost ground. She was right, he thought wryly: he could use a few wives, for it was the Indian women who did the hard work of sustaining life, the women who toiled from dawn to dusk.

  There were other things looming on the horizon, and the worst was scurvy. How long could they subsist on meat alone, without greens or fruits? How long before they weakened, their gums bled, they lost strength and even the will to live?

  One morning he remembered the cache left behind by the fleeing hunters. It was guarded by formidable drifts that stretched higher than his head but he was determined to find out what was in it and salvage anything useful. He hacked his way toward the creek, sometimes stepping into snow that engulfed him, but he finally reached the creek in the vicinity of the cutbank, and stumbled down a slope. He probed and finally located what he thought was the cache tucked under a river-washed hollow.

  He chopped and hacked, using the only tools he had, a camp hatchet and a stick, and finally broke into a hollow area. A great sour odor rose out of it, and he discovered dozens of small eyes peering out at him. He had found a pack-rat city, and the insolent little creatures had made a bonanza out of the cache. He cleared away more snow and peered in. The rats had ruined the robes, eaten leather, soiled everything. There was one treasure: an axe. That simple tool would make all the difference in the world when it came to gathering and reducing firewood. He collected it gladly.

  One parfleche caught his eye. It remained tightly bound, and apparently the pack rats had not burrowed into it. He dragged it out, opened it, and found it full of new pemmican. He was overjoyed. It was the great trail food of all the tribes, consisting of pounded dry meat—usually buffalo—fat, and berries. This pemmican had both chokecherry and service berries embedded in the fat and shredded meat. There could be no better food.

  Joyously, he collected his axe and the heavy parfleche and wrestled them back to his lodge.

  There, Victoria immediately dug into the parfleche and wolfed the pemmican, her body starved for any fruit or vegetable matter. He ate some too.

  “Nothing else in the cache,” he said. “The rats got it.”

  “Soon we will go home,” she said.

  He did not respond; the forbidding drifts that imprisoned them were on his mind.

  “I will be ready,” she said.

  But he saw her weakness. She worked fitfully but always sank back into the robes and lay inert for hours. She was not ready for travel and would not be anytime soon.

  He rested; fighting through crusted soggy drifts was the most exhausting labor any man could face, and he was constantly worn out, fighting for breath, needing time to recover.

  Then he heard a soft clop of hooves. He couldn’t believe it. Not now. He grabbed his Hawken, checked the load and the cap over the nipple, and with the rifle ready, tugged aside his door flap for a look. There, before the lodge, standing in the small area that had been trampled down, stood a gray mare and a colt. The mare had been gaunted by starvation. Her ribs showed. Her backbone formed a ridge. The flesh around her rump had wasted down to bone.

  Skye thought he saw a magpie fly away, a flash of black in the glaring winter sun, but put the odd thought aside. The magpie had nothing to do with this. He peered about sharply for Blackfeet, for any living person, and saw nothing. The snowbound ridges hemming this sheltered river bottom were as bright and silent and anonymous as they had been since the storm.

  A mare. And near death from starvation. Her head hung low. Brambles had lodged in her mane until it was an unkempt mess that no longer protected her long neck. Her hooves had worn down. She had an ugly roman nose and a look of sorrow in her eyes. She had once been around human beings; she was either unafraid or too starved and close to perishing to care.

  “I’ll be damned,” muttered Victoria.

  If the mare was worn, the colt was not. It was six or seven months old and still nursing, and it had robbed its mother of the last of her strength. It was truly the ugliest little beast Skye had ever seen, gray and wild, an oversized jawbone disfiguring its face. Its floppy ears sat in the wrong spot on its skull. It hung about its worn mother, butting her, dancing away.

  A mare. Passage to safety for Vic
toria if somehow Skye could nurse the animal to usefulness, and if she wasn’t a complete outlaw.

  “Whoa, lady,” he said, stepping toward her. He handed the Hawken to Victoria and approached gently, a tentative step at a time.

  Then the miserable colt kicked. The little thing whirled, unloosed his hind feet, and caught Skye in the right thigh, rocking him back. And before Skye could recover, the colt caught him again at the groin, staggering Skye backward until he teetered into a snowbank.

  Skye boiled up like a sore-toothed grizzly.

  “Avast!” he bawled, determined to wrestle the offending colt right down to the ground, tie him up, and show him who was the boss. But before he even recovered his balance, the colt lowered his head, turned himself into a battering ram, and charged straight into Skye, that bonehead ramming into Skye’s belly and knocking the breath clear out of him.

  Skye reeled backward, gasping for air, and the colt followed his retreat, butting again and again until Skye tumbled into the snow again. Then the colt minced backward, did a little jig of victory, and stood there, watching Skye unfold himself and stand up and catch his wind.

  “That’s the rottenest animal I’ve ever seen,” Skye roared. “I’ll fix him.”

  But Victoria was laughing, and it was an unkind laugh, a cackle Skye had heard only among Crow old ladies, a cackle that said they were enjoying someone’s misery. There was his wife cackling and wheezing, and there was that stupid-eyed colt with the underslung jawbone, ready to nail him again.

  There was nothing to do but laugh.

  Skye felt a volcano of laughter erupt from his belly; a vast earthquake of joy, which hurt his stomach where the rotten little colt had butted him. But laugh he did, laughed at the whole mad world this bright morning.

  But the time came when he and Victoria were looking again at the desperate mare, her head hung low, fighting to stay alive. There was not a blade of grass to be found and the snow was too deep to paw through to feed herself.

  “Have to feed her fast,” he said.

  “Damn lucky you got the axe,” she said.

  It was lucky. It was almost magical. With that axe he could offer that mare some emergency grub. Maybe the colt would nibble on it too. He circled warily around the horses and headed for the cottonwoods along the creek, where there was a stand of saplings, their bark smooth and green rather than scaled and thick and dry. The smooth bark of young cottonwoods was an emergency horse food, well known to mountain men and Indians. He struggled through deep snow, singled out a sapling, and hewed it down in swift strokes. He limbed it and dragged the green log back to the lodge, then cut a slit down the limb so he could roll the bark away.

  The mare tore into it even before he had finished, her big buck teeth scraping the green bark loose and her old lips capturing every green shred. She knew instinctively that she had food before her.

  Victoria stood before the lodge, a robe wrapped around her, and watched.

  Skye retreated to the cottonwood stand, felled two more saplings poking from deep snow, and dragged them to the lodge. The effort exhausted him. But she was eating. She expertly worked the green bark off that thin log, turning the log somehow, chewing the pliable bark into feed.

  Skye watched, gratified. This mare might be their salvation; a fair enough trade. He could feed her; she could carry Victoria away. As for that mean colt, maybe he would shoot it. No man in his right mind wanted a colt like that, full of some insane instinct to attack everything in sight.

  The colt wouldn’t even let its mother eat, but butted her, poked that thick underslung jaw and snout into her bag, and robbed her of what little milk and life she had left.

  Skye watched, disgusted at the little creature’s greed. At the rate he was bullying his mother, she would never gain strength or put on weight or be strong enough to carry Victoria out.

  He could slit its throat, or he could get the poor mare more feed. He watched dourly, and then headed into the snow once again, and spent the rest of that bright day cutting saplings, until he had managed to drag a pile of green-barked logs to her. The mare never stopped eating, stripping soft green bark off of those wands of wood, and by the end of that day he didn’t know whether the tears in his eyes were from snow blindness or something else.

  ten

  Time was running out. For days, Skye fed the old mare cottonwood bark, which he roamed wide and far to find. She prospered a little, or at least he thought she did, but it was poor food and all it did was keep her alive and allow her to make a little more milk for the ugly colt.

  But with each passing day, danger increased. The mare had left a trail in the snow, and what warrior or hunter could resist the trail of a lone mare and foal? There was the prospect of another fall storm, and a hundred times each day Skye’s gaze focused on the horizons, looking for an ominous bank of clouds. The forequarter of buffalo meat was dwindling; the pemmican he reserved as a travel food. He had long since consumed the available firewood. This campsite was exhausted and yet he lingered to give Victoria the best chance.

  But finally he dared wait no more.

  “We’ll leave in the morning,” he said.

  “I am strong.”

  “We’ll see when we hit the drifts. I’ve made a travois from the last of the lodgepoles. The mare’s gentle enough; she belonged to someone once. I’ll put the robes on her back, you in the travois, and I’ll carry the Hawken, the tools, and the pemmican on my back.”

  They would abandon the lodge with its comforts. Each night they would have to stay out in the open. He would try to find cottonwood groves, so he could feed the mare more green bark. The odds were bad; he thought they had one chance in ten. Most likely they would suffer snow blindness. The whole world was still white, and only a heavy overcast could save them from ruining their eyes.

  They left before dawn to gain time. The mare submitted docilely to the saddle, and then to the travois poles anchored to the stirrups. The colt butted him whenever he approached the mare, and now and then Skye roared at the miserable heavy-jawed thing that kept getting in his way. Then the colt butted him again, just to show who owned that mare.

  But the colt might come in handy, especially if it would break a trail. They sadly abandoned the lodge that had kept them alive just as a faint light lined the horizon to the southeast. The snow had crusted, making walking all the more difficult as they punched through, step after step. Skye wrapped the pasterns of the mare in patches torn from old robes to keep them from being sliced to pieces.

  Just as he suspected, Victoria lasted a few hundred yards walking and then settled gratefully into the travois and pulled a robe over herself. The travois was easy on the mare, mostly skidding over surface crust, but it didn’t take long for the mare to weary. He let her rest. He needed her. Victoria depended on her. They had a long, long way to go.

  When the sun rose his eyes watered at once. A squint didn’t stop the glare, and only when he pulled the hood of his blanket capote over his face did he find any relief. The mare’s eyes watered and so did the colt’s. Victoria sat with her eyes closed.

  At least he wasn’t cold. The temperature hovered above freezing. And Skye was working too hard to get chilled. Behind them a telltale trail unfolded, hooves, moccasin prints, travois tracks. Any passing war party or loner could track them down. And yet it could not be helped. One did what one had to do, and he had to move.

  They struck the Judith River, which flowed southwest, and once they reached its valley the going was easier. They were traversing game and buffalo trails, already packed. He kept a sharp eye for pony hoofprints, but saw none. The early snow was a blessing in one sense: the hunters and warriors had taken to their lodges and were probably gathered about lodge fires playing the hand games or bone games or telling stories of their people.

  For a while that afternoon they traversed well-stamped ground. The mare perked up, not having drifts to fight, and the travois skidded easily over the glazed surface. The wellworn trail gave Skye the gift of ext
ra miles, but he didn’t want to exhaust the mare or Victoria, and called a halt in a fine stand of cottonwoods and willows near the fork of the Judith and Ross Creek.

  There, he felled green cottonwood limbs while Victoria chopped willow saplings, wove them into a small dome, and threw spare robes over it. It was little more than a hut, but it would be far more comfortable than open ground, and a fire at its front would throw heat into it.

  The ugly colt nuzzled up to his mother’s bag and drained it, and then butted it for more supper, but she had given him all she had. Then it began mouthing bits of cottonwood bark, and Skye was glad to see it beginning to forage for itself. It was old enough to eat any horse feed.

  “With that jaw of yours, you could eat whole trees,” he said to it. For an answer, the colt whirled and kicked, barely missing Skye’s shin.

  “You little devil!” Skye roared.

  “His name is Jawbone,” Victoria said.

  “That’s a good name! He’s all jaw! He has no brains and no back and nothing else of value. Jawbone it is, you little punk!”

  They were camped in a trench cut into the plain, and Skye did not worry about a fire. They had come much closer to the Snowy Mountains and the Belts, which brooded whitely above them. In a day or two they would enter the gap between the ranges, and then there could be big trouble. But there was no sense in worrying it to death. For this night they had shelter and pemmican and plenty of green bark for the weary mare.

  At dusk, which came all too early, they settled into their hut. Victoria had gathered armloads of reeds from the creek bank and these formed an insulating bed between them and the snow. But this was not the same as the lodge, and they shivered as they slipped into their doubled robes.

  “I did not see the magpie,” she said. “It is a bad omen.”

  He lay quietly, gathering what little warmth he could from within the robes. It was important to her to know that her spirit helper was beside her. In her weakened condition it could even mean life or death, despair or the will to live. And he knew he could not cheer her up with bland assurances.