Only one of the horses has a saddle on him, and it’s a Indian saddle, but it don’t matter. Ink’s been a Indian for a long time, so she knows what to do. I take my gear and the pack off Cricket and load it on one of the other horses. I put my saddle on the biggest one—I wouldn’t be surprised if this one isn’t the one that belonged to the Crow brave. Crows need big horses. This one has had a white man’s saddle on it before, which I might of guessed. The gullet don’t fit like it should and I know I’m going to rub this nag’s spine raw before long, but it’s the best I can do for him.
When we’re all set, the moon has commenced to sink to the horizon. “We’re gonna stay clear of them woods,” I say. So we turn a little to the left and head for a open meadow that rises steadily above the tree line. We’re still headed north, but we’re tilting to the east a little too. With both of us riding now, we make a little better time. Cricket brings up the rear, carrying nothing. She don’t limp now hardly at all, since she ain’t carrying no weight. A few times I pick it up a bit and get all of us galloping some, but then Ink points to the dust we’re raising. Even in the dark it looms in the falling moonlight, so I slow down to a walk again. We go like that until the moon is gone and it’s only starlight. We cross several streams, where the horses drink, and I fill the canteens; then we start out again, climbing and twisting through ravines and gullies, back up steep slopes to another meadow. It ain’t no valley we’re a-riding in, but I still think the river is near. Ink says nothing but she’s awake. Every now and then, I catch her looking behind us.
All night I’m watching the trail ahead and behind us. That Crow brave’s screams keep echoing in my head. I left all the bodies there for the birds and coyotes. I remember when I first come out here, and how it felt after I killed my first Indian. I remember the dreams, and then wonder at what I’ve got used to. There’s a good reason the Indians call their warriors “braves,” I can tell you. A couple of times during the night, I think I might get sick. It didn’t bother me none to kill them other three. It was my survival.
Some Indians believe that if you dream about a dead person, he ain’t dead. He’s out there, wandering wherever your dreams put him, and you got to do something to make him die. A dance, or a shaman ritual, or maybe another killing. I’ve seen some fellows fairly crazy with it and that’s how I’m getting. I realize once and finally for sure that I want to get out of this beautiful, dangerous, miserable killing ground. I want to find my way back to Eveline and go as far west as I can go. I want to get a hotel room and sleep with four walls and a ceiling around me. It might be damn nice to work in a print shop, or a candle factory, or a foundry. I don’t care. It’ll be civilization, and won’t nobody be lurking behind a tree thinking to kill me.
Chapter 22
We now have five horses, counting Cricket, and three rifles, a bow, and some arrows. Just when the sun starts to glow beyond the horizon, we stop near a great stone that hangs out a little over the trail. Across the way is a small stand of trees. I get down and help Ink off her horse and settle her in the darkest place under the rock. I take a long rope and tie it to one of the trees, then tether each horse to it at about ten-foot intervals.
When I get back to Ink, she is sitting up on one elbow, watching me. “We’ll camp here today,” I say.
“I am hungry.”
“I’ll scout around a bit.” I set the pistol down next to her. “See if you can sleep.”
“I am hungry. I won’t sleep.”
“I don’t like where I got the horses,” I say. “They’re too much in the open and ain’t a lot of grass under them trees.” I sit with Ink for a spell, but I don’t say nothing more. The horses are a problem now. We got so many of them.
In a little while Ink nods off. She don’t have much pain no more, but it still exhausts her. I get up as quietly as I can and start walking toward the rising sun.
Not far from where I left her sleeping in the shadow of the rock, I find a open meadow that runs down into a small valley and then bends back up again on the other side. In the morning light it’s a sweet, green bowl in the landscape and it’s behind the trees where I first tied the horses. So I go back to them, then walk them down into the meadow. They will have a wide range to eat and the meadow is far enough below the tree line a body would have to be in front of us and halfway up the mountain on the other side to see them. I walk back to the trees and then follow a small path down to my left where there is a blue and black stream scuttling over rocks and tree branches. I kneel down and drink the cold water. I don’t know if I should go back and check on Ink or go in search of game. Then I remember the bow and arrow. Whatever I shoot, maybe I should do it silently. So I creep back up to the stone and this time I try as hard as I can not to make a sound. But halfway up the hill it occurs to me that she might not expect me back so soon, so she’d shoot whatever she heard coming her way. “I’m coming back,” I say. “It’s me.” When she can see me she puts the pistol down.
“I was already awake,” she says.
“Really.”
“I heard you coming a long time before you said anything.”
“I tried to be real quiet.”
“Maybe next time you should try to make noise.”
“I don’t know how you could hear me coming when I couldn’t hear myself.”
“I can hear you breathing. It sounds like a buffalo.”
“I didn’t make a sound.”
“Except for the breathing. I do not believe you can’t hear it.”
I get the bow and the quiver of arrows. I put it across my back and shoulder my carbine. I hold the bow out so she can look at it. “I’m going to kill something we can eat with this.”
“You know how to use it?”
“It looks pretty simple.”
She don’t say nothing. She has been collecting buffalo chips for a smokeless fire. She nods slightly and goes back to what she was doing. She carries the pistol around her neck in a skunk-skin sling she made.
“Don’t shoot me when I come back,” I say.
A few hours later, about two miles up the stream, I shoot a otter with the bow and arrow. It’s a clean shot, and hardly makes a sound except for the twang of the string and the whoosh of the arrow. I carry the thing back to Ink, then make a fire with the chips and a few pieces of the driest wood I can find. I boil coffee and make a pot of beans as well. I clean the otter in front of the fire, and we eat until we can’t no more. It looks like Ink is getting her strength back.
“You heal fast,” I say.
She nods.
I sleep for a bit in the afternoon while Ink keeps watch. It was a damn good retreat into blankness, I can tell you. It feels good to know that I have gotten to where I trust Ink enough to sleep good and not worry about her.
Near the end of the day I break up the fire and we clean off the bones of the otter. I give Ink the last of my hardtack, and I eat the last of the dried venison. As the day begins to wear out, the air becomes a bit cooler. There ain’t much in the way of clouds overhead, and when the sun’s light softens and begins to sink, the small breezes feel almost like somebody caressing you kindly; like the earth has your interests at heart. It is bright green and rock white and dirt brown under the shadows of the trees, and damn fine to look at. At dusk Ink says, “Well? Shouldn’t we be going?”
“This is a great spot,” I say. “I wonder how much it will hurt to stay here another day.”
“Hump will catch up if we stay here,” she says.
“You still worried about him?”
“I don’t know how far ahead of him I was or how long it took him to find I was gone. He could be getting close.”
“You think he knows we turned north? We crossed in front of him and I covered our way pretty good. He gone right past and is still headed east, probably.”
“We should keep going,” she says.
“But it’s so warm and peaceful here.”
I wonder what on earth Ink might be thinking. Lately I notice he
r eyes more, find myself studying them. They’re bigger and darker than Eveline’s—got a glitter to them, they’re so dark. I wonder what she wants and what she thinks will happen when we get to where we’re going. Out of the blue, sometimes, I feel bad all over again for shooting her and I’ll say, “I really am sorry I shot you.” She don’t even answer me no more. Half the time she just smirks and sighs, like she’s impatient with a mule that won’t take a step.
She gets up and starts for the trees. “Where are the horses?”
“I got them in a meadow yonder. I’ll fetch them. Pack us up while we still got some light.”
Riding only at night, we cover a lot of ground. In six more days we finally begin to smell the Missouri River. We never was close as I thought, but ain’t no doubt about that smell. Ink starts to move better, and the wound on her belly really is beginning to heal. When she ain’t in pain, she rides that painted pony just like she ain’t nothing but a Indian. She moves with it when it climbs up the side of a ravine or starts to trot down a small hill. We make good time and don’t see nobody. Finally on the seventh day, near dusk, just about the time we’re getting ready to start out again, I say, “You ain’t looked over your shoulder lately. You think Hump is still after us?”
“I don’t know. I am listening for him,” she says. “But . . .”
“But what?”
She looks at me for a second. Then she says, “I am not so afraid of him as I was.”
“Really.”
“I have seen what you can do.” She points to the other horses. “You killed many.”
“I don’t like to think about that,” I say. I’m not going to think about it.
“And I have a gun now,” Ink says.
“You ain’t thinking of shooting me, are you?”
She don’t answer me. She’s putting that Indian saddle on her horse. It don’t have no buckles. It cinches all the way around the horse’s middle and loops over the top and ties to a ball of leather sewed into the top of the saddle. I don’t like it that she just keeps working and says nothing.
“I wouldn’t blame you,” I say.
“I will not shoot you,” she says. “I hope I never have to.”
Cricket no longer limps, so I’ve put the saddle back on her. I climb up on her back and start looking for the other stirrup. Ink takes me by the ankle and places the stirrup on the end of my foot.
“What do you mean, you hope you never have to?” I say. She don’t need my help no more to get up on her horse. She does it swiftly and easy.
“What do you mean, you hope you never have to?” I say again.
She looks at me with those dark, serious eyes. “I will defend myself,” she says. “That is all you need to know.”
“Yeah, well,” I say. “I don’t guess I’ll be attacking you any time at all.”
“That is just fine,” she says, and then she kicks the side of her horse and trots off in front of me. I got the other animals tethered to a long line behind me. The other horses are used to the way we move along, so they don’t take much hauling, but I still have to hold the rope in one hand or the other and it’s a strain. I wish I had a pair of gloves.
The country is beginning to slope downward into a evening mist. It looks like clouds lay on the ground in front of us and I watch as Ink’s horse’s legs disappear in it. Now she looks like she’s floating on the clouds. I trot a little to catch up.
And then, just like that, she’s gone.
I don’t holler at first. I slow down a bit, wondering if she fell off a edge or something. “Hey, where are you?” I say, not too loud. Then I shout, “Ink.”
Her voice comes to me from way up to my right. “Over here.” Then I see the hill that drops down to the bank of the river. Cricket manages to stay up but she almost keeps going into the river. The mud is thick here, and Ink has already turned her horse so that she can keep him up out of the soft ground. She heads east, more than a little bit in front of me. I notice a lot of horse prints in the mud by the river. I ride back up the embankment a little to find solid ground, and to keep the other horses from the mud, then gallop with them up to where Ink has stopped to wait for me. In the thick fog she is dark and ghostly. She looks like something painted on a white wall, dark with white eyes and teeth, her hair like jet-black smoke around her face.
“You see those tracks?” I say.
“It is a lot of horses. Unshod,” she says.
Her horse don’t want to stand still. She pulls on the reins, but he throws his head back and turns completely around, stomping his front hoofs.
“What’s he scared of?” I say.
“I do not know.”
“Well, ain’t nobody can see us in this mist.”
“I saw a lot of tracks,” she says.
“Ain’t none up this way. Maybe they crossed the river back there.”
“I followed some tracks in the mud right by the river.”
“Why would a body ride in the mud like that?”
“Maybe they want us to follow them.”
“Well, we ain’t. You know, if it ain’t a pack of wild horses, it’s likely Indians, and if it’s Piegan or Sioux and they seen us, we won’t have these horses long.”
She keeps her eyes on me as her horse backs away, his nostrils wide with fear. He snorts and keeps throwing his head up and down, left and right.
“Maybe a bear around here,” I say. “Or a cougar.”
“We have to keep moving,” she says. “It is getting to be light. If anyone is ahead of us, we won’t see their fire.”
“If they bother to make one.”
“If it is a hunting party or a war party, they will make a fire.”
“Maybe we should cross the river.” It ain’t really a suggestion. I turn Cricket and start east toward the rising sun. The ground this close to the river is just too uneven and thick with saw grass and swamp mud. I move on up further from the riverbank and start heading directly east. Ink comes up beside me and the other horses fall in behind us. We move along quickly now, feeling some of the anxiousness of Ink’s horse. We have to watch for whatever folks made them tracks by the river.
“Fort Buford can’t be more than a day or two ahead,” I say. “But it’s almost daylight. We should set up camp somewhere around here on high ground.”
It’s trouble coming, I can feel it. I’m pretty good at that too. Maybe it’s a sixth sense, but I can feel trouble like some folks notice humidity. We’re losing all the rest of the darkness. The ground is soft, so we don’t make much noise—just the creak of my saddle and the breathing of the horses.
Toward dawn I hear something caterwauling ahead of us in the tall grass. It’s a high-pitched sound, something like a trapped rodent or bird of some kind. It’s loud. We’re riding along another sloping hill, near the river. A hour ago we crossed a fairly swift stream that branched off and run south. I know Fort Buford sits at the place where the Yellowstone River runs south from the Missouri, but I still don’t know how much farther we have to go. When we come to the stream that run south, Ink stopped for only a second, then rode along it a ways until she seen where it could be crossed, and she led her horse right down in there and I went on behind her with the others. It was shallow enough that we didn’t have to get much more than our feet wet and the horses stepped through it fine. It was a hard surface of stones underneath.
Now, when we hear the high-pitched screaming ahead of us, Ink stops her horse and looks at me.
“I’ll go see,” I say.
“It is a child.”
“What?”
“That is a child’s cry.”
“I ain’t never heard no child make a noise like that.”
I ride on ahead a little, then stop and get off Cricket when I see something moving in the tall grass ahead of me. I hold my carbine at the ready and start moving toward it. The grass is wet, waist-high, and I’m getting soaked as I move through it. The sun ain’t appeared full yet, but it lights the distant low clouds in red and gold
. When I see what it is making the noise, I stop. I can’t believe my sight. Lying in the grass, where it is trampled down and flat, is a great, bloated corpse, black-faced, with long black hair, leather shirt stretched and tattered. And running back and forth from one end of it to the other is a young thing—a boy or girl, I can’t tell—crying and crying like it wants to wake its mother from this black sleep. There are flies everywhere, buzzing in the kid’s hair, crowding into the eyes of its dead mother. I look up and notice vultures circling. They ain’t ready to swoop down and begin to eat with all that movement and noise.
I think it might be a boy. He’s small, the thin legs churning, his screams breathless and frantic; I realize he’s been doing this long enough, his voice is ruined now. He sounds like a wild boar. His cries are strained and horrible. I move back to where Ink waits for me.
“It’s a child,” I say. “No more than eight or nine.”
Ink dismounts.
“I hope you know what to do,” I say. “The little thing’s crying for its dead mother. She’s right there in the grass. I don’t know what killed her.”
Ink moves through the path I made in the grass, and I follow her.
We both frighten the little guy. It is a boy, maybe Cheyenne. His mother is almost through delivering another one. Both she and the newborn are dead. It didn’t find its way to the world right, and got all twisted up inside her.
“Where’s their village?” I ask when we figure out what’s happened.
Ink shrugs, then stands high to look all around where we stand. The little boy is whimpering at her feet. He ain’t even five feet tall. He looks at me with eyes so wide with fear, it begins to make me feel like some sort of evil thing. “I won’t hurt you,” I say to him. “Neither will she.”
Ink turns and stares at me. The boy won’t let go of her legs. He’s not screaming now, and I think his throat must be pretty sore. His eyes are so red and swollen, he looks near dead himself. When she tries to lift him he pulls away from her. I don’t think he’s afraid of her, but he’s too old to be picked up. Ink says, “Look after him for a minute,” and goes past me back toward the horses. The little fellow watches her go and then starts to cry again, only not so loud no more. I don’t say nothing. I stand there looking at him, and he looks at me.
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