“Otter, I was a prisoner. My wife was held hostage, along with all my things. My horses were held hostage. I did not sell any of the spirits. I only translated.”
Otter eyed him malevolently “We will see,” he said. “I took none of the spirits. I alone am fit and able this morning. I have chosen my way.”
“Then you must put this village together, Otter. Put guards out. Start the village police. Watch over the horses. See about firewood. Start hunters. The village needs a thousand robes and hides.”
Otter stood, his arms crossed before him, looking truculent. “It is said you should leave here. You were with them. You are a white man. You brought this upon us.”
One could not argue with something like that. Skye knew it, knew he would be wasting his breath. This would soon snowball into an exile.
“I have some business to attend, and then I’ll leave the village,” he replied. “And if I return, I will have good news for you.”
Otter simply glared. A storm was gathering over Skye.
He trotted to his lodge and found Victoria there.
“I’m being blamed. We need to leave. The ponies that Two Dogs gave me; are they still in the herd? Do you know them? Can we borrow a few things?”
“I know them, Skye. I don’t want to leave my people. I don’t want you to be disgraced.”
“We have nothing. Food, robes, weapons. Whatever you can scrounge from your brother …”
She nodded.
They didn’t even have saddles. He could ride bareback, but only for a while, and when his back split in two he had to dismount. They could get hackamores easily enough, and with luck, a packsaddle. But they would be leaving The Robber’s camp with barely enough to survive on in wintertime. And Skye had a mission in mind, no matter that he even lacked a rifle.
Victoria begged all that morning, and somehow put together a small outfit. She and Skye caught the horses in the village herd. They were good sound animals, and that was a start. And on a venerable pack frame they loaded their few things: some parfleches of jerky and pemmican, a worn blanket apiece, a hatchet and spare knife, Victoria’s bow and quiver filled with arrows, and the small jug of spirits that Victoria had not sucked dry while she was imprisoned by the green shirts.
They rode out amid dour stares, silent curses, grim glances, and deep silence. For most of the village he had called his home, and the people he had called his own, somehow connected him with the darkness that had fallen over The Robber’s band.
Victoria sat bareback, her skirts hiked, tears forming in her eyes. These people were her own, but wherever her man went, so would she.
Skye rode straight upriver from the stricken village, reached the somber meadow where the traders had milked the people of all they had, and then picked up the trail of the wagons, fresh still in the frosted ground. He didn’t know how he was going to do it, but he intended to put Skittles out of business.
forty
Skye felt like singing, so he sang.
As I was a-walkin’ down Paradise Street,
To me way! Hey! Blow the man down!
A pretty young damsel I chanced for to meet,
Give me some time to blow the man down.
Oh, blow the man down, bullies, blow the man down,
To me way! Hey! Blow the man down,
Oh, blow the man down, bullies, blow him away,
Give me some time to blow the man down …
Victoria was cross. “Why are you singing?” she asked.
“What else is there to do?”
“You should be watching for the wagons.”
Indeed, the furrows of the wagons ran straight ahead, cutting deeper and deeper in the thawing mud. Skittles might end up mired if this winter day warmed much more. That would suit Skye fine.
“What is that song about?” she asked.
“It’s a sea chanty. Paradise Street is in Liverpool.”
“Where’s that?”
“In the country where I was born.”
“We should be crying instead. People dead. My family, everyone, sick.”
He lifted his battered top hat and settled it again. There were times so dark that all he could think of was singing, as if melody might kill a little hurt in him. Sometimes it did.
He sang because everything had gone bad and he was worse off than he’d ever been. A man likes to make some progress, but here he was, almost as poor as the moment he jumped ship at Fort Vancouver with little more than the clothing on his back to sustain him.
He thought over the past months: a devastating Blackfoot raid that almost killed Victoria. His good old Hawken stolen. Everything else stolen. His horses stolen. A new colt and mare with strange powers. Distrust in her village and exile. Work for a rotten fur company post to get himself a new outfit, and that got him fired for being fair to the Indians. Then some time spent in the Kicked-in-the-Bellies band of Crows, only to get himself kicked out because of a rabid wolf. Then Skittles’s imprisonment of him, loss of his kit again including the replacement rifle, loss of his medicine horses, and distrust once again in The Robber’s village. All his fault. It was time to sing!
She hailed me with her flipper, I took her in tow,
To me way! Hey! Blow the man down!
Yardarm to yardarm away we did go
Give me some time to blow the man down.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“It means the singer’s about to be shanghaied.”
She sniffed. “Talk about something I know about, dammit.”
“Did you bring that jug?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll drink our dinner tonight.”
She grinned.
He got tired of riding bareback. After a couple of hours the spine of the horse sawed his crotch in two. So he stopped, slid down, grabbed the line, and walked. She thought that was a good idea and joined him. They were trailing four horses, all good ponies.
They approached a grassy rise dotted with jack pine, and he handed her the lines and told her to wait. He hiked to the ridge and peered over, studying the country ahead. The prairie was surrendering to rougher country with sandstone outcrops and piney ridges. The ruts of the wagons continued straight, generally northerly. But the warming ground was starting to claw at those iron tires, and Skittles’s traders were no doubt slowed, and their big horses would be wearied. It was time to be careful.
Skittles was probably too contemptuous of the Crows he left behind to post a rear guard, but he also was an army man and one could be sure of nothing. So Skye settled into the dry grass, studied the country ahead for a while, spotted nothing but cloud shadows cutting across the aching open country, and finally decided it was safe to proceed.
He didn’t know what he would do when he found the traders. He lacked so much as an old rifle. They were well armed with short and long guns, some of them the new fastloading Sharps. And Skye knew they could use them all to good effect. If he had any success, it would be entirely by stealth.
He thought he heard a distant crack of a rifle, but the wind was tricky, and he heard nothing more. His imagination, then. He studied the empty land one last time, then slid down the rise and joined Victoria.
“Looks all right. They’re struggling with mud now. Frost’s out of the ground. Maybe they’ll hole up before dark to let their plugs rest.”
“What the hell is a plug?”
“Horse.”
“You white men have ten names for everything. I gotta learn the whole damn business over again.”
All that afternoon they pursued Skittles’s wagons. Skye was sure from the freshness of the ruts that they were gaining ground, and now he paused at every hill for a long look. But Skittles was driving hard.
They came to a low pass of sorts, with a saddle to the northeast. That’s where the ruts parted. Skye studied the place. Two wagons were cutting northeast for the Missouri River. The rest continued northward and would hit the big river somewhere west of the badlands, maybe Fort Benton.
The great river wound through impassable canyons for a couple hundred miles. There probably would be a flatboat waiting on the river somewhere to carry those hides and robes to Fort Union.
Skittles was down to two wagons and eight men. But he had two empties and four other men coming his way, and they would rendezvous somewhere and then hit another Indian village. It could be Blackfoot, Gros Ventre, or Assiniboine, but who could say?
Victoria studied the diverging ruts.
“There go the robes,” she said. “There go everything they could take from my people. Are you going to follow the robes?”
“No, I’m going to follow the booze.”
“Goddamn, Mister Skye, are you sure?”
Skye knew she was seeing those robes and hides as a Crow woman would; hundreds or thousands of hours of patient scraping, softening, tanning, the brutal work of generations of women. He wondered how many hours of miserable bent-over labor was expended for each cup of rotgut hooch the Absaroka people got in return.
It was something he didn’t want to think about. There was another reason to go after the kegs. He wanted his outfit back. His rifle, his horses, his packsaddle, his bedroll, his powder and shot. They had it all.
And they had all the odds on their side too. But they could get too cocky in a hurry.
He wondered how Skittles felt right then. The man had made a killing. Did he consider what he had done to the Crow village? That the youths especially might acquire a taste for that booze? That he left the village naked and demoralized? Was he so oblivious to the needs of native people that he didn’t know or care? Or was he just another avaricious Yank, making a buck and the hell with scruples?
Skye thought the man did have scruples of a sort, which he heeded when it was convenient to do so. That was the odd thing about Skittles. He was full of ethics.
They followed the wagon ruts into a broad valley hemmed on the north and west by a sandstone ridge. Skittles’s bunch were pressing straight down the valley toward what Skye believed were the Snowy Mountains, blue, white-crowned, and distant.
Skye called it quits well before dusk. He didn’t want to walk into an ambush. He wanted plenty of light around him for now. A need for the dark would come later, when it would shroud him, cloak them both, conceal their design.
He found a side canyon in the yellow sandstone and went up it, being careful to keep his horses on hard ground. He didn’t want hoofprints to tell tales. There were scores of shallow wind-carved caves in the whole region, many of them dandy shelters. He picked one deep in the side gulch, far below the rimrock capping the bluffs. There he could build a good fire that would not be seen, and its heat would radiate off the cave walls, warming them all night.
There would be plenty of grass for the ponies too. He and Victoria picketed them on buffalo grass and gathered wood for the camp. He found plenty of fallen deadwood and built a fire. He had no weapons at all and intended to whittle a belaying pin from a dead limb.
They settled down to a miserable meal of pemmican, but even so, the fat and ground meat and berries in it filled his belly.
“You have that jug?” he asked.
She laughed. This was the jug Skittles’s green shirts had handed to her to keep her quiet while she was a hostage. Now she dug it out of the gear on the pack frame.
“Sonofabitch!” she said, pulled off the cork, and sucked.
She gasped, wheezed, howled, growled, and handed the jug to Skye.
He let that awful, treacherous, vicious stuff slide down his gullet. He whooped, groaned, sucked again, and sighed.
But then she plucked up the ceramic jug and hurled it into the darkness. It shattered.
“The whole damn world is broken,” she said, and began to weep.
forty-one
Her tears fell into the hollow of his shoulder. Skye pulled her tight with his big hands until she was wrapped into his side. He could not comfort her. She wept softly, sometimes muttering in her Absaroka tongue, her English abandoned now.
But he could follow her every thought. It wasn’t just that her world had shattered when the green-shirt traders had debauched her village; it was much more. Her life had changed with the wound in her side. It had shattered when he had left her to put a new outfit together. In all that time they had struggled on alone and apart.
“You have not touched me,” she said. “You don’t want me.”
How could he tell her he had feared to touch her? That the terrible wound in her side might yet torment her? That he had been waiting, almost forever, for some hint that she wanted him? Some little flash of light in her eyes?
“I am ugly now,” she said.
He slid his hand to the place where he had pressed a red-hot knife into her almost fatal wound to cauterize it, a place of corduroyed and corded scar tissue under her ribs.
“You are beautiful,” he said. “This wound is where life is, not death. Without this wound you wouldn’t be here in my arms.”
“Oh, Skye.”
She wept, her hot tears soaking through his buckskin shirt. She was weeping not only for her village, which she saw in its shame and ruin, but also for herself. She had suffered a loneliness just as terrible as his own.
“I love you more than ever, Victoria.” It seemed a lame thing to say to her.
“But you haven’t had me.”
It had been a long time. Some eternity ago, when she was slowly mending, he had left her in her brother’s care, headed out to get a new rifle and outfit, and now, months later, he was with her and still had not touched her and it was tearing her to pieces.
He caressed her softly, and felt her torn spirit quiet within her. He had not let her know how he ached for her. He had been away too long. He kissed her. Her hands found his wellshaved cheek and jaw, and he felt the joy in them as she caressed him.
She nestled herself into him, and he held her until the fire dimmed and the cold began to creep into this perfect hideaway, wind-hollowed and peaceful. Then, softly, he rose, built up the flame so the warmth would again echo off the sandstone, and returned to the old robe and blanket they shared. Now his hand found her and slid over her and possessed her, and her arms found him, and her lips and her heart too.
They made love softly, awakening ancient memories. He kissed the scar on her torso. It was his way of saying something to her, that he loved her whole, all of her, and she was as beautiful to him as ever.
Her hands found his back and drew him tight and Skye and Victoria renewed the bond that had brought them together long ago. And so they passed the night. From time to time he rose, built up the fire, and then they came together again, scarcely noticing when the flames played out and only embers lit their night.
At last he pulled the old blanket over them, but they didn’t sleep. She wept again, her tears watering his bare shoulder. He knew she was thinking of other things now. Something had happened to her people. The proud Crows, able to hold their own against the more numerous and more dangerous Sioux and Blackfeet, had been ruined by a poison brought by the white men. And now she wept.
She had long experience of it. At the trappers’ rendezvous she and Skye had bought the spirits and sucked their jug dry. But after those rendezvous everything returned to the way it was and the party was over. It was a weakness in both of them. He knew how hard it was for him to resist a good howl with a bottle, and sometimes that’s what he wanted more than anything else.
But she was right. This thing done by Skittles was different. The booze was meaner and was used systematically to ruin her people. There was nothing in their entire history to help them deal with this; it was a new menace for which they had no defense, not even a legend, a story with a moral to it. In the world of white men there were hundreds of mocking stories about drunks, a thousand jokes, a folk wisdom about spirits, and these were an inheritance he had that she didn’t. None of her people had heard stories or jokes like that, or listened to the wisdom of their parents or their priests. The Crows were naked before this new thing, b
ut so were all the Indians. Would Blackfeet or Sioux fare any better?
They kept to themselves and hugged through the chill, but then she rose until she was sitting, looked at him in the ember light, and said, “Thank you.”
Oddly, he knew what she was thanking him for. It wasn’t the union they had shared. So close had they been for so long that he fathomed her thoughts, even as she fathomed his. Her thanks were not for the love they had renewed that soft night, but for his resolve. He would destroy the destroyers of her people. Somehow, powerless as he was without a weapon, he would stop these traders in their tracks.
“There will be a way,” he said.
And that was all they had to lift them; a sense that there would be a way. They fell asleep at last in the small hours, when the chill descended on them, and their thin old robes were not enough to keep the cold at bay. But the warmth of their bodies was enough, and so the night passed into faint dawn, and the embers had died away with the dimming of the stars.
They dressed quietly, aware that their lives had changed; that they were mates, that they had a great task before them, one that might kill them both. In a way, they grew aware of the danger they faced and resolved to face it.
There was nothing but more pemmican, cold and cruel on the tongue, and they gnawed at the fatty stuff, knowing it sufficed to sustain life.
The ponies had passed the night grazing. Skye collected them and eased the packsaddle over one. They would need watering soon. Then he lifted Victoria onto one of the ponies and he pulled himself over the other. Riding bareback was never easy. Getting aboard a horse without a saddle was hard and he had never mastered it. But soon they descended the side canyon and picked up the clear trail of Skittles’s outfit. The ground stayed frozen and Skittles would be making fine time this morning, but the ground would soften that afternoon and then things would be different. The trail had turned mostly west across rolling land, south of the Snowy Mountains.
The Fire Arrow Page 21