The Fire Arrow

by Richard S. Wheeler

  “Victoria, we have given no offense to any living thing that I know of,” he said. “We have given food to the magpies, fed the mare, and honored all things.”

  That was important: she lived in a world in which one must respect all creatures great and small.

  “I am just damned tired,” she said, but he knew her spirits had slipped into darkness. He rose, fed more sticks into the small fire that threw a little light and warmth into their shelter, and peered into the blackness. No stars lit the heavens, and he dreaded what might come, especially in so rude a hut as this.

  He drifted into a light sleep. It was hard to sleep when you had to suck icy air, breath after breath, when your nose and cheeks ached with cold, when your feet remained blocks of ice.

  A nervous shuffle outside of the hut awakened him instantly, and he felt around for the Hawken. The barrel was icy to the touch, and the stock had frost on it. He chose his belaying pin instead, and hastened out into the bitter night. Something scurried away. Intuitively he knew the visitors were wolves, and his stirring had probably scared them off. He could not see the mare or colt but knew that if they had been attacked he would have heard about it. The loss of the mare would devastate their chances of ever reaching Victoria’s village. But he did not tie her up. She didn’t like it, and he finally had learned just to let her be his ally and not his slave. As long as he didn’t tie her, he had a partner.

  By the time he shook the cobwebs from his mind the next dawn, he was surprised to see a fire burning. Victoria had lit it. She was better and more patient than he with the flint and steel, and sometimes had gotten a blaze going when he had given up and was suppressing a rage at his own ineptitude. She handed him a broth made of boiled pemmican and water, and he drank the hot greasy liquid gratefully.

  He pulled on his buffalo-hide moccasins and went after the mare, wondering where she was. He was on the brink of alarm when he found her deep in brush, stripping bark off of saplings. In a place like this she could make her own living. He let her eat a while. Jawbone was butting her bag, getting his own breakfast.

  Victoria had dourly dismantled the willow-branch hut and collected the heavy robes.

  “Dammit, Skye, there are no magpies here.”

  He did not try to calm her. If there were no magpies, it could only mean trouble for Victoria. Still, he collected her cold hands in his big ones and held them. “We will do the best we can, and if we always have heart, we will go where we were meant to go.”

  At first light they loaded the robes onto the mare, slid the travois poles into the stirrups, and set out, following a southerly course. Skye’s burdens seemed heavier this day: pemmican in a parfleche, rifle, axe, hatchet, knife, powder horn, capote, and something intangible: an added worry because Victoria was less well than the day before.

  Still, they proceeded up the Ross Fork for a while before they abandoned it to head toward the visible gap between the two ranges. But now the drifts were building, and sometimes the crusts didn’t hold them and they floundered waist-deep in snow. Ahead was open country, not a patch of trees, not a creek, not a sheltered hollow, not a stand of cottonwoods to feed the mare, no limbs to weave a hut, only a windy snow-covered land in which the wind had rippled the snow into ribs and ridges.

  At one final patch of cottonwoods, Skye laboriously felled a few saplings, split and debarked them, feeling as worn out as the mare. He tucked the pliable green bark into the robes. It wasn’t but a fraction of a meal. The mare would get no other food, maybe for days. And all that day, no magpie followed them.

  eleven

  All that bitter day they struggled south, blinded by sun-dazzle but helped by the north wind at their backs. Their course rose imperceptibly toward the gap, and the higher they climbed the heavier the snow. Sometimes Skye whacked a hole in a drift with his axe, and the rest followed single file.

  The wind picked up, funneled into a ten-mile-wide flat between mountain ranges. But as long as it pushed them ever south, it was bearable. He rested the gaunt mare often, knowing that Victoria’s life depended on that worn old creature. The colt seemed almost oblivious of the hardship, having milked his mother of whatever resources she still possessed.

  Often the little fellow dashed ahead, as if to lead this slow procession toward a safe harbor, only to swing around and return again when no one matched his pace.

  There wasn’t a tree close by, though the distant mountains were black with them. Skye knew a little about this gap. It was bloody ground because it was the only passage for travelers going north or south in the whole area. That meant ambush, war, death right there, most often between Crows and Blackfeet, but other tribes had spilled blood there. It was a stark, treeless place without beauty; there was little to solace the spirit, and the spirits of the dead haunted it.

  Victoria mostly traveled in the travois, enduring its lurches and bounces, but occasionally she rose and walked a little, giving the old mare some respite. No one spoke; every word was energy wasted.

  They came, late in that day, to a ridge of snow as high as a house, a white wall that forbade a crossing. And yet they had to cross it, fast, before they lost the light for there was no refuge behind them. Jawbone pranced ahead, tentatively sampling the crust. And finding a crust, he began climbing that monstrous drift, ever higher. Then with a pitiful squeal the colt vanished. He had broken through the crust and was trapped in the soft snow below, thrashing about in its prison.

  For a moment Skye rejoiced. Little devil! But the piteous wail of the mare filled Skye with shame and regret. He halted the procession at the foot of that drift and studied that slope. The colt was about fifty feet ahead, braying and flailing in his trap. He would soon exhaust himself, freeze, and die.

  “Skye, dammit, do something,” Victoria said.

  “And what?” he snapped.

  Skye didn’t have the faintest idea what to do, so he did the first thing that came to mind. He shed his gear and prepared to go after the colt. He pulled his axe from his pack and began chopping through the crust, cutting a way to the trapped colt. It was slow, hard work, and after ten feet he was worn. He found that he had some footing well down from the crust, and if he kept knocking the crust with the back of his axe he could work along a narrow trench toward the little fellow, who was sporadically screeching his alarm, but the time between each of its struggles grew and grew.

  Behind him, Victoria and the mare stood watching. Skye made slow progress and kept chopping even while his body protested, finding a slow rhythm of axe-swinging and forward movement that sustained him through another ten, then twenty, then thirty feet. But the foal was silent now, resigned to its doom the way animals are when they sense hopelessness.

  Skye, too, was in a precarious place, climbing through the soft underbelly of the snow ridge until the crust came up to his chest. But at last he reached the colt, which had worked his way deeper into the snowbank.

  He cleared away as much of this soft snow as he could. Jawbone could not even look back at his rescuer.

  “Whoa, boy,” Skye said, not knowing how on earth to free the colt.

  Jawbone did not respond except to rotate his ears.

  Skye tried sliding his hands around the colt, intending to lift him, drag him backward, but he couldn’t get a grip, and the snow swiftly numbed his fingers.

  He burrowed down and cleared soft snow from its hind feet, fearing a sharp kick, but Jawbone didn’t move. Slowly he cleared the feet and lifted them, getting a good purchase on the pasterns, and tugged.

  Jawbone didn’t like that a bit, but it didn’t matter: Skye eased him a foot out of his trap. He was so worn he could pull no more, and paused for breath. The sun was just above the southwestern horizon, and they would soon be caught in a black night with no shelter.

  He took a firm grip on Jawbone’s hocks and pulled steadily. The colt slid along, almost as if he were slipping out of a womb, and in a few minutes Skye, his heart hammering, had pulled the colt out of his trap, down the snow slope, to
hard snowpack.

  The colt righted himself, shook off the snow, overcame the indignity of it, and butted his rescuer.

  “Avast!” yelled Skye, who didn’t quite topple.

  But the colt had already headed for his worn mother, jammed his bonehead into her bag, and was refueling.

  The sun dropped behind a distant ridge.

  “I think there is a crossing over there,” Victoria said, pointing to a place two hundred yards distant where some juniper seemed to grow right out of the top of the ridge. They headed that way at once, found firm footing that took them around the drift, and out upon a cold flat land.

  Ahead was a dark streak, and Skye headed for it in the tumbling twilight. Soon enough he led his weary band into a sharply eroded coulee out of the wind. They could perhaps shelter under a cutbank, and there was enough juniper and other brush to sustain a fire if they could light one in the restless air.

  He pushed down the dry watercourse, looking for a good place, and found one in a bend, where occasional spring floods had undercut a bank and piled up some driftwood.

  “Here,” he said.

  They stopped. He had taken them too far this day. The old mare hung her head, her ribby sides heaving. Victoria crawled off the travois, began undoing the bundle of robes on the mare’s back, and started to make a nest, gather kindling while the last light held.

  The foal, wobbly from its ordeal, stood stiff-legged watching Skye unsaddle the mare and turn her free to make whatever living she could in that little ditch in the prairie. Then the little animal wobbled toward Skye and pressed his bony, misshapen head into Skye’s side, and stood there, his head low and tight against Skye’s hip.

  “You’re welcome,” Skye said, and found a moment to run a numb hand under that heavy jaw, scratch it, and run his hand under the colt’s ratty mane. There was something about that colt, something that set him apart.

  He surveyed the cutbank. It wasn’t much, but Victoria had summoned the last of her strength to spread robes, gather the heaps of dead juniper brush, and scrape a bed ground clean of stones and debris. Skye found the mare tearing savagely at bits of dried grass poking out of the snow around the juniper. He added his meager supply of green bark to her fodder.

  The last glimmer of twilight faded into deep cold night by the time they had the camp readied. But they had no fire. Skye sat down and pulled his flint and steel from a small pouch he carried at his belt. Air eddying up the coulee would make a fire difficult. He settled with his back to the wind, built a little hollow out of Victoria’s brush, and began driving sparks into it, with no luck. Once one caught and held, an orange glow, but a moment later it died.

  He pulled the robe right over his head, making a shelter. Then he scraped steel over flint, generating a fine shower of sparks, again and again until he saw a dozen of them glowing and curling in the thumb-sized bit of shredded bark tinder he always carried. He blew softly. The little glow worms glowed the more. He blew again, and again, and then the tiniest flame embraced a straw-sized twig. He had fire if only he could keep it. Half the battle was to feed it, keep it going, helping it gain heat. A trickle of smoke stung his eyes but he did not lift the robe. Instead, he edged tiny sticks, smaller than pencils, into the guttering little flame, patiently.

  It took a long time, and he coughed a lot of smoke, but at last he pulled the robe away and began feeding larger sticks into the fire, while Victoria lay on her robes, exhausted. The fire would give them hot broth made from the pemmican, a priceless bounty for numb, worn, and cold people. The cutbank at the bend of the coulee was a good place, out of the wind, blocking it from most directions. With enough robes, and enough hope, and enough courage, they would live to the morning.

  He tried to heat water but it wouldn’t boil. There just wasn’t enough heat in that juniper debris. Still, it warmed enough so he could steep some pemmican in it, and then let Victoria drink. It would warm her. He ate his pemmican cold. Then the kindling ran out, and there would be no more light or heat that night. He listened to the night sounds, heard the mare working industriously along the coulee, wherever a sheltered corner offered some dry grass. She would do well this evening, which was not at all what he expected. The colt followed his mother, but now and then trotted through the inky black to check on Skye.

  Victoria huddled in her robes. He set his beaver top hat beside him, checked his Hawken and laid it beside him, made sure his belaying pin was close at hand, and then pulled the robes up, not finding any warmth at all in them. It would be a long time, if ever, before they felt comfortable this night.

  “It is bad,” she said. “My helper has gone away.”

  “Your helper will return.”

  “Dammit, Skye, when we get to the village, you go to Fort Sarpy and trade these robes for a jug. I am very thirsty. Firewater! That’s what’s keeping me going.”

  “I’ll get some from Chambers,” said Skye. “You and I are going to celebrate.”

  twelve

  They stumbled south, blown by the north wind, until at last they walked down a long draw and into the valley of the Musselshell.

  Skye rejoiced. This night there would be shelter from the wind, abundant firewood, feed for the mare, and maybe even game, a welcome prospect because the pemmican was nearly gone.

  The starved mare was failing again; Victoria had walked this day, but she herself was weakening. Never had a river bottom seemed so welcome to Skye. They could regroup and then head down the Musselshell. The Crow winter camp nestled another day’s walk downriver, under some protective sandstone bluffs that caught the winter sun and radiated it into the village.

  As the short day faded, they hurried over a snowy waste with the wind whipping them until he thought the wind would drive him mad. But when they entered the bottoms they found a great quietness there. Animal tracks laced the old and hardened snow. A lacework of bare branches stabbed the purple twilight. There were jack pines and juniper greening every hollow.

  The mare paused to snatch at every dried stem and stalk that poked through the snow. Skye pitied her. She had somehow dragged that travois all those miles and all the while making milk for that boneheaded little colt who ought to be shot.

  He found a fine thicket close to the narrow river, deep in a bend curtained by forest and sheltered from the cruel north wind. He unhooked the travois, unsaddled the old mare, and turned her loose. She would make her own living this night. She headed for the river, stuck her nose in the purling water, and drank. The colt followed her, poking his nose into the river and butting her bag. Skye had forgotten how dehydrated animals got in the winter and reminded himself to give Victoria plenty of broth this evening.

  She was already picking up loose sticks, breaking them off of trees, for they wanted a fire at once. They hadn’t been warm in days, and he was dreaming of a hot blaze that would soak heat through his buckskins. Victoria looked about ready to collapse, but sheer will kept her going. She chopped willow limbs and stripped them and soon had the framework of an emergency shelter, a small domelike affair that would support a couple of robes and give them a sanctuary.

  Skye took over the firewood collecting; this grand night he would heap up a mountain of it, and they would enjoy every stick of it. There was dead stuff at every hand, and he needed only to collect it, rap the snow off of it, and drag it to the shelter.

  In deep blue dusk they finished their task, scraped snow out of the bed ground, lined it with rushes from the riverbanks, and began to nurse a tiny flame that soon grew into a hot, bright, happy campfire. But no amount of heat was enough. It burned and snapped, but it did not take the cold out of his body. It scarcely even warmed his numb hands. He wished for a rocky overhang, a place that would absorb and reflect the heat through the night, but there was no rocky cliff here. The river cut through prairie and they were camping on a floodplain.

  He wasn’t getting warm, but at least he could heat some pemmican and make a broth. He set up his cook pot and began a meal while Victoria lay under tw
o robes, utterly drained.

  Then he noticed that the mare had stopped gnawing and was staring upriver, her ears cupped forward. He had been around the wilds long enough to respond. He found his Hawken, checked to see if there was a cap under the hammer, and slipped into shadow away from the open-sided hut and the bright fire before it. His old mountain rifle with its percussion lock had never betrayed him. It shot true and faithfully, and now he held it at the ready.

  He listened closely and heard the faint clop of hooves and something else, a hiss that sounded like iron tires rolling over icy ground.

  “Hello the camp,” came a voice out of the darkness.

  Usually a good sign. No surprises.

  “Come ahead,” Skye replied.

  Nothing happened for some while. Victoria had slipped out of her buffalo robes, grabbed the belaying pin, and joined him in the spidery darkness of the woods.

  Not one but two wagons emerged out of the blackness, following along a river road Skye hadn’t discerned in the twilight.

  “Thought you might be a white man. Injuns don’t make big fires like that.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Sam Fitzgerald, trading man, and my son, George.”

  Somehow Skye didn’t like the tone of all that. He rose, rifle in hand, and walked toward the horses and wagons, which stood dimly at the edge of the orange light. Bearded men stood beside the dray horses, each carrying a shotgun.

  “I’m Mister Skye.”

  “Saw that top hat and figured it was so,” said Fitzgerald.

  “Only man west of the Missouri that wears one of them things.”

  Skye thought it would be all right. “Fixing some broth; all we’ve got.”

  “Well, we’ve some meat. You have a fire. Sure is cold.”