by Sharon Ihle
Josie crept up behind him and said, "So what do you think of my new friend?"
"I see, but I don't believe."
She laughed. "I thought he'd be happy inside out of the cold, but now he seems awfully nervous. What can I do to calm him down?"
"Her," corrected Daniel. "It's a female."
"It is? How can you tell from so far away?"
"Has to do with the horns. I'll explain later."
"Who do you speak of?" asked Long Belly, heading out of the stall. Daniel raised a crutch, barring his way.
"Quiet," he said. "And I'd advise you not to rush out there for a look at our... guest. You know how skittish buffalo can be."
Daniel had assumed that Long Belly would go wild when he learned that the buffalo of his dreams had been found, not that he would lapse into a stupor. The big Cheyenne was beyond excited, unable to say or do more than clutch his chest and sag against the wall, as mute as the planks of wood that held him up. Guessing that he wouldn't remain silent or immobile for long, Daniel took those precious few seconds to come up with a plan.
Whispering to Josie, he said, "If any of our horses get loose with your new friend, they'll be ripped to shreds in minutes. Can you sneak back out there and check to make sure the stall doors are secure so the horses can't get loose? The cow will just have to fend for herself."
Josie shrugged. "I doubt you have to worry about her. I think the buffalo has been living with some cattle—yours, I guess."
"Buffalo?" said Long Belly, looking and sounding hollow. "Where is this buffalo you speak of?"
"Go now," Daniel urged Josie. "Toss a little more hay on the ground to keep it busy while you're securing the stalls. And hurry," he added with great meaning, "before our other friend here decides to help you."
As Josie quietly went about her tasks, Long Belly regained most of his senses.
"I must see this buffalo you speak of," he said to Daniel. "I must see it now."
"You will," Daniel assured him. "But not until the three of us are sneaking out the rear door on our way back to the cabin. You can take a quick look at it as we leave, but be sure to keep quiet and don't make any sudden movements. It's a little nervous and might charge us."
Long Belly nodded in agreement, but his eyes were so huge and glazed over, Daniel would have bet that he'd forget his vow once he saw the great beast. When Josie returned to the stall, he urged her through the back door first, and then tucked both of his crutches under one arm in order to keep a firm grip on the Cheyenne's jacket as he stepped out into the aisle. It seemed like a good idea, keeping control of Long Belly in that manner, but Daniel might as well have tried to control the buffalo.
When Long Belly actually caught sight of the great beast, he fell to his knees in prayer, dragging Daniel down with him. He landed face down in the straw, kicking his splinted leg out behind him. That foot then hit the edge of the open door, prompting an involuntary howl Daniel couldn't have contained under the threat of death.
His agonized cry got the buffalo moving. Trotting down the corridor toward the men, the beast grunted several more times, a strange sound that sent The Black rearing in his stall and turned the other horses into high-pitched, whinnying maniacs. About the time Daniel thought he would be trampled to death by the last living buffalo on earth, Josie stepped between him and the beast.
"Get out of the way," Daniel shouted.
She, of course, didn't listen.
Instead Josie held her ground and began making cooing noises which, surprisingly enough, slowed the animal's approach. Although still highly agitated, the beast stopped in its tracks mere inches from where she stood, its tail raised in challenge to the two men behind her. That was enough to get Daniel going, but Long Belly was still caught in the animal's spell.
"Broken Dishes has mastered this great beast," he said, awestruck. "She must be a goddess or a—"
"Shut up, you fool," Daniel said, cutting off the Cheyenne's benediction. "Get me out of here before your great beast runs through her to get to us."
This got Long Belly moving at last. He helped Daniel to his feet, and then dragged him through the narrow opening Josie had left in the door. A moment later, she followed them outside and secured the barn door. Then the group trudged through the field of snow carpeting the corral and made their way back to the cabin.
Once they were all inside again, Daniel insisted that Josie warm herself by the stove before he would allow any further discussion about the buffalo. Now that he could concentrate on her, he saw that her face was scratched, a couple of gouges almost matching those she'd left on him their first morning together. Her cheeks were blotched with angry patches of red—frostbitten, no doubt—and her hair had come loose of its braid, leaving it to fall every which way across her back and bosom in a mass of auburn tangles. She looked as if she'd picked a fight with a wolverine.
"Are you all right?" he asked, removing his jacket from her shoulders.
Josie paused, warming her hands over cook top, and considered the question carefully. She'd been so cold she hadn't really been able to feel her extremities until now. As she warmed up, her fingers and toes began to tingle and sting, yet she didn't think they suffered from frostbite. She also ached from one end to the other—and knew exactly what had caused her injuries.
"Thanks to that no-account crazy horse of yours," she said, shooting Daniel an accusing glance, "I'm tired, cold, and bruised from my toes to my head. Other than that, I guess I'm all right."
Long Belly pushed his way into the conversation. "Where did you find the great buffalo? Why did he come here with you?"
"She followed me," Josie corrected. "At least Daniel says he's a she."
"She is," he confirmed, before going back to her previous comment. "As for my crazy horse, I would never have allowed you to ride him—that fool did." He pointed at Long Belly. "So what happened? Did The Black throw you?"
Josie nodded and rubbed her backside. "We were almost back to the cabin when something in the trees spooked him. I went flying out of the saddle, then rolled down a hill and crashed into a tree."
"And then you found the buffalo?" asked Long Belly, focused on only one topic.
"No," she said. "The buffalo found me. Actually, I guess you might say that she also saved my life."
The men glanced at each other. The look they exchanged said they thought her quite mad.
"I passed out after I bit the tree," she explained. "When I came around again, the buffalo was trying to nudge me up out of the snow. I think I might have laid there forever if she hadn't been so persistent."
Again they exchanged a glance, this one of both doubt and wonder. Then Daniel said, "All right. Assuming the buffalo saved your life—and I'm not saying that she didn't—how did you get her to follow you back here?"
Until then, the enormity of the experience and the apparent rarity of a wild buffalo taking to a human being hadn't really crossed Josie's mind. She'd seen buffalo herds at a distance during the family's trek out West, but knew very little about the nature of the animals. She'd certainly never been close enough to one of the beasts to actually see its dark purple tongue or feel it rasp up the side of her face like the dull blade of a razor. Did that make her special somehow?
Turning to warm up her backside against the stove, Josie drank in the marvel of the men's expressions, unaware until then how thirsty she'd been for respect—theirs or anyone's. Never had she been an object of such admiration, much less the near reverence with which Long Belly was regarding her. While she could hardly call Daniel's expression worshipful, he also seemed to be holding her in much higher esteem than he had that morning. Knowing these things made Josie feel aglow inside, as if an ember of coal burned close to her heart.
Smug as she relayed the tale of her arduous trek, she said, "After I got over the shock of seeing a buffalo standing over me, I started back up the hill, figuring I could follow the tracks of that idiot horse of yours—assuming he was smart enough to head home. I heard somethin
g behind me, and when I looked back, I saw that my new friend was following me."
Long Belly sighed, or something close to it, and then his eyes rolled to a close.
Daniel was less convinced. "You expect me to believe that buffalo followed you like a pet dog all the way back to the cabin?"
"Well, she did stop here and there, but I just dug around in the snow until T found a handful of grass, and along she came, nibbling out of my hand until we got near the barn. She wouldn't move after she saw the building no matter how much grass I tempted her with, so I ran inside and got some hay. She couldn't resist it."
"Well, I'll be damned." Daniel shook his head with wonder.
Josie turned to Long Belly, assuming he had a few questions for her, too, but he stood there staring somewhere over her head, in a world of his own.
From a distant part of the room came a sudden groan.
Glancing between the two men, Josie saw that Sissy was lying in Daniel's bed. In all the excitement, she'd somehow forgotten about her.
"What happened to Sissy?" she asked, alarmed.
"She and her horse took a pretty bad fall."
Josie didn't care for Daniel's tone or his expression. He reminded her way too much of an undertaker.
"She's got some broken ribs," he went on to say. "And she probably has a concussion, too."
It all came back to Josie then—the fall, the screams of both Sissy and the mare, The Black nearly unseating her in his own panic. How could she have forgotten any of it—especially the accident that could have cost her the only friend she'd ever known?
Almost afraid to hear the answer, Josie asked, "Is... will Sissy be all right?"
He shrugged. "Might take a little while, but I think she'll be just fine."
Josie tried to squeeze past the men in order to go to Sissy and assess the damage herself, but Daniel blocked the way. "She needs her rest now. Leave her be until she comes around on her own."
It wasn't easy, but she bowed to his judgment. If those were Sissy's only injuries, there wasn't much else to be done for her anyway. Besides, Josie was too tired and achy to argue the point. Suddenly, she could hardly stand much less make it across the room. She swayed on her feet and willingly allowed Daniel to help her to a chair, which he did by using only one crutch to aid his own ailing body. Long Belly, who remained trancelike, went to the bed, looked down at Sissy, and then slowly made his way up the ladder to his loft, all without speaking a word.
Outside, the storm raged on, building rapidly toward blizzard proportions. Soon, Josie thought, feeling neither happy nor sad, but resigned, they would all be trapped in a cage of snow. Caught as surely as the great beast in the barn.
* * *
An hour or so later, after Daniel had warmed a kettle of water for Josie to use in washing up, he set his mind to fixing a hot meal—soup, he thought, given the fact that invalids suddenly outnumbered the healthy. Although he'd laid in extra rations for the livestock, he hadn't had much chance to consider his own needs, especially after he broke his leg. At the time, winter had seemed a long way off.
Now, with two extra mouths to feed, Daniel realized how truly meager the cabin's store was. The shelves above the stove contained a tin of coffee, a sack of sugar, a jar of salt, a bowl of acorns, and two bottles of whiskey. A bin of flour sat to one side of the stove, enough to see them all through for months. To the other side of the stove away from the heat sat a barrel loaded down with potatoes and onions. Larder enough for a while, he supposed, but soon he would have to make a trip to the St. Labre Mission for more supplies.
Settling on the few ingredients at hand, Daniel filled a kettle with water and added potatoes, onions, and a nice fat clod of beef from the calf Long Belly had 'accidentally' rounded up.
As he tossed in a measure of salt, Josie, who'd been dozing in her chair, suddenly said, "I think I'll call her Sweetpea. How does that sound?"
Daniel glanced over his shoulder. "What?"
"The buffalo. Don't you think the name Sweetpea suits her?"
With a roll of his eyes and a shrug, Daniel turned back to the kettle and began to stir the watery soup. Why, he wondered, did women always think they had to come up with names for their animals, especially the ones that sooner or later wound up as someone's meal? Men didn't indulge in such foolishness as a rule unless the subject was a horse. Even then, Daniel didn't see the need for fancy names.
The mule was the closest he ever got to naming an animal, referring to the cantankerous beast, depending on its mood as Lop-ears, Knothead, or Buzzard Bait. The Black was The Black because he was black. The mare was known as the mare, the cow a cow, and the chickens were, of course, chickens. Long Belly called his paint Spots That Fly with the Wind chiefly because his owner was a fool. Daniel occasionally referred to the horse as Spots That Break Wind simply because he enjoyed irritating his brother. Otherwise he called him The Paint, what else? Now it seemed the ranch was blessed with a grumpy buffalo named Sweetpea, a ridiculous moniker if ever there was one. What was next, he wondered, a grizzly called Baby?
"Well?" said Josie, drawing Daniel's attention again. "Can you think of a better name for her than Sweetpea?"
With a final stir of the soup, he propped the big wooden spoon against the edge of the kettle and turned to her. Josie was dragging her fingers through her hair in an effort to undo all the tangles and knots, grimacing as if it were an ordeal. It suddenly occurred to Daniel that the poor woman didn't have her usual grooming aids with her.
Heading to his possibles bag, Daniel suggested, "If you just have to name it something, why not call her Bison? That's what she is, you know."
"What kind of name is Bison? That would be like naming a child Kid or Ragamuffin, don't you think?"
"What I think," he said as he dug out his bristle brush, "is that naming animals is a foolish waste of time."
"In that case" I'm sticking with Sweetpea whether you like it or not."
There was something new in Josie's attitude, Daniel thought as he approached her chair, a heightened sense of superiority above anything he'd noticed in her before. It made him want to take the backside of the brush to her bottom, to destroy that obstinate streak once and for all. But then she turned to him and grinned, an adorable smile that wasn't so much crooked as slanted, angling to the right with a little catch that prompted an involuntary wink. The expression made Daniel forget all about her defiant nature. The next thing he knew, he was playing the handmaid.
"Let me help you with those tangles," he suggested, positioning himself at the back of her chair. "You'll never get them out yourself."
"What a nice surprise," she said, eyeing the brush. "Thank you. I'd appreciate that very much."
As he began to draw the bristles through her hair, Josie settled into the chair with a request. "Tell me about the horns. How did you know that Sweetpea was a female?"
"Easy," he muttered, distracted by her hair as it slid through his fingertips. "Cow horns are skinny and the tips point forward. A bull has much thicker horns with tips curving upward—all the better to rip a hunk out of another bull. Or a man."
She made an odd noise, a cross between a groan and a gag, then went silent, giving herself up to his ministrations.
Since he'd never groomed a woman's hair before, not even his wife's, Daniel was unprepared for the response it pulled from him or the deep sense of intimacy the act suggested. As he drew both the brush and his free hand through her hair, he marveled over the texture, the coarse full-bodied, but surprisingly soft feel of those locks slipping through his fingers. After he'd brushed out most of the tangles, Daniel continued to stoke Josie's mane of auburn tresses, making them shine until she relaxed enough to let her head fall back. Then she began to moan with undisguised pleasure.
"No one," she murmured softly, "has ever done this for me—at least, not since I was a very small child at my mother's knee. It feels so wonderful, I could almost fall asleep."
Sleep by then was the last thing on Daniel's min
d. He wanted to raise Josie up out of that chair, wrap himself in those shiny locks, and kiss her until they were both crazy from wanting each other. He'd almost convinced himself to do just that when Long Belly spoiled the whole mood by climbing down the ladder and making his way to the table.
Glancing at Daniel, the big Cheyenne eyed the brush in his hand with amusement, and then said to Josie, "lf this maiden has finished grooming you, I have gifts to offer in your honor."
Josie sat bolt upright, cutting off Daniel's indignant response.
"Gifts?" she said. "What kind of gifts?"
"Things to keep you safe." The warrior then hunkered down before her, playing the humble apostle. "These are charms meant only for a woman of your great powers,"
He reached out and took into his hands a small length of hair that ran from Josie's temple down to the tip of her breast. She flinched at first, frightened perhaps, then relaxed and allowed the fawning Indian to continue with his sudden display of devotion.
Daniel thought he might be sick as he watched the overly dramatic ceremony Long Belly made of plaiting the hair at each side of Josie's head. When he fastened the ends of the braids with an arrowhead attached to a leather thong, then set out to explain what he'd done, Daniel thought for a moment that he really might throw up.
"These are stone arrowheads," Long Belly said, carrying on as if he were truly besotted. "They will ensure you a long life. Wear them always."
While Josie studied the crude charms, the Indian reached inside his buckskin apron and withdrew a tiny leather bag attached to a long strip of rawhide.
"This," he explained, "is the greatest gift of all, an amulet to protect you against accidents or illness. Never let it leave your slender neck."
As Long Belly rose to tie the medicine bag around Josie's throat, Daniel's gut rolled and he clenched his fists against a sudden burst of rage. This had to be a false gesture, one calculated to ensure that her power over the buffalo could be transferred to him. To offer a white woman such a gift was unheard of in the Cheyenne tribe, a gesture that usually carried far more significance than Josie could ever understand. Daniel had never been given a medicine bag. Not only was he half-Cheyenne, he was also Long Belly's brother-in-law and the father of his nephews.