Now I realize I’m in real trouble. Everything I’ve tried for since I made up my mind I was going back to Bozeman has blown up in my face. I feel like I’m falling deeper and deeper down a dark mine shaft and I don’t know where the bottom is. While Ink is gone, it occurs to me that I should just get on Cricket, say my good-byes, and get the hell out of there. I have been obliged for so long—most of the rest of March, all of April—trying to make up for a stupid mistake. It’s going to cost me the life I thought I might have. I ain’t going to get back to Eveline and now I’m in the middle of this giant, wide-open country with a little slip of a woman and a child crazy with grief. I ain’t never been too comfortable around children. That realization works on me like a growing alarm. I felt it before in the battles I got caught in during the war. It’s like death. Death whispers to me, I think. I can’t get my mind to leave me be.
But then I remember how close to Fort Buford we are. “There ain’t no need to panic,” I say out loud to myself. I can still be shed of Ink and the boy. He stares at me with them dark Indian eyes when he hears me speak.
“Nope,” I say. “I ain’t gonna panic.” I almost say to him that I won’t be much use to him, but this little guy, when he finally gets quiet, I feel sorry for him. I can’t imagine what he’s been through. What horror he would always remember of it. Watching his mother die and swell up and turn black with death. The poor kid must of fought to keep the big birds from pecking her eyes out.
You got to admire that kind of natural, unwilling courage. Maybe it comes from anger, or even fear. But he would not leave his mother to the buzzards. His belly is swollen, and when Ink comes back with some of the salted otter meat, he gnaws on it furiously. Ink tries to keep him from eating it too fast. He drinks the water I give him, letting it run down his jaw. He’s got some beads around his neck and he touches them with pride when he sees me looking at him. His little fingers make me sad. I don’t know. I ain’t used to seeing nothing so small and helpless and human all at once. After he’s chewed on some meat, he lets Ink put her arms around him finally. He wraps his arms around her neck and puts his face deep into the crook of her neck and shoulder. She looks at me, then at the corpse.
“I know,” I say. “I’ll take care of it.”
“I will set camp over close to the river.”
“Stay in this grass,” I say. “We shouldn’t be out in the open like this.” She still holds the little fellow against her, and when she tries to give him to me so she can mount her horse, he won’t have it. Once she’s mounted, he does let me help him up onto her horse. “We’re getting to be quite a party,” I say. I look beyond her and see a small rise that is thickly covered in pine trees, but it’s on the other side of the river. “If you can find a place to cross, why don’t you try to make it to them pines over yonder.”
She sees it and turns back to me. “What will you dig with?”
I take out my sheath knife. “This is all I got.”
“I will cross,” she says. “You follow?”
“It’s gonna take me some time,” I say. “What about Hump?”
“He will not kill me.”
“No, I expect not. He’ll come after me.”
“I do not fear for you.”
“I got enough for both of us.”
“You will follow when you are done here?”
“I’ll be along,” I say. She gallops off and the other horses start to stir and stomp and nicker. I know Cricket won’t run off, so I tie the lariat that holds all the other horses to the horn of my saddle. Then I kneel down and start to dig in the dirt. Here, this close to the riverbed, the dirt is soft and gives easily. It don’t take long and I got a shallow grave, maybe a foot and a half deep, but long enough for the body. I hate touching it. The smell of a human body is worse than any other dead thing; it’s got a sweetness to it that makes me puke. The flies are thick and busy. Maggots already wriggle in her eyes and mouth. Without no consideration at all, I empty my tobacco pouch into my shirt pocket, then I take a handful of the maggots and put them in the pouch. There’s no telling if the boy has wounds. I tie the tobacco pouch back on my belt. As I do, I know I ain’t running from all this. I’m stuck like a bear in a steel trap.
The half-born baby is black and swollen. I get the body situated in the hole, then I pile grass on as thick as I can before I cover it with dirt. The grass will keep the odor deep and help the earth take it back to the ground. I pile the dirt; it makes a pretty high mound over the body. When I’m done, I stand up and puke again.
Cricket looks at me with what feels like a kind of disgust.
“There ain’t nothing else to do about this,” I say. Then I climb on her and, with the lariat still tied to the horn of the saddle, start after Ink. The sun is high now, above the far hills. The river glistens in the sunlight. I ride slow and keep watch all around. I feel like I got nothing inside me. Not even a soul. I think I know what it feels like to be a animal, breathing air and stalking under the sinking sun, with no idea of the past or future.
I don’t hear the boy crying again until I’ve found where Ink went across the river. I know she is not far. Cricket has to begin to swim through as we cross. The other horses don’t like it, and the tug on the lariat is considerable; I wrap it around my waist and hold on, and it squeezes my empty gut until I think I might just split in two. Even so, I get them all across. I’m soaked right up to my chest, but in the sunlight it feels kind of pleasant. I stand there for a while with the horses, letting them breathe a bit and eat some of the saw grass that grows on the riverbank. Then I start up the rise to the trees.
In a day or two—three at most—we will reach Fort Buford, and then I can say good-bye to Ink and the boy and be back on my way. It’s the last day of April. I got time. I got time.
I can still hear the boy crying.
Chapter 23
We sit around a fire Ink made and the boy stares at me without blinking. I was still feeling the sting of burying his mother when I come back from crossing the river. I may of had the stink of his mother’s body on me still. I figured I should stay away from him for the rest of the trip, but now Ink don’t want to go nowhere.
“He is not ready for the fort,” she says.
“I think he don’t like me,” I say.
“More than likely his mother was killed by white men. You are white.”
I don’t say nothing at first. Then I whisper to her, “Plenty of Indians at Buford. We’ll leave him with them.”
“You don’t have to whisper. He doesn’t speak English.”
“Can you speak to him?”
“I can understand him and speak a little of his tongue. He is Cheyenne.”
“Well, what do you mean, he ain’t ready for it?”
“He’s in a state,” she says. “A trance from grief. He needs to be away from white people, soldiers especially.”
“Well, we can’t stay here long,” I say. “I got to be heading back to Bozeman before we get too far into May.”
We stay in the trees for a few days. I hunt in the early morning. The boy sniffles and stays silent most of every day. The weather warms, and deep in the trees where we are there ain’t much we have to fear except maybe a bear or a cougar. I don’t worry none about Hump. As far as he knows, we already got to Fort Buford, and he won’t follow us there. I rode a long way east along the river one evening just to see the terrain. When I told Ink about it, she didn’t say nothing. I don’t know why Ink wants to stay here, but when I make any motion toward packing things up, she stops me. She looks at me with them dark eyes, now serious and kind of menacing, and I know I don’t have nothing to do but wait. I try not to think of Eveline, but I keep seeing her looking out the back of that covered wagon as she moves westward, wondering what happened to me. I know I am a disappointment and I don’t like knowing it.
I don’t want to be in the position of trying to force Ink to do nothing. But I worry about the horses. There ain’t much for them to eat here. I wonder how mu
ch longer I can give Ink what she wants. I ain’t completely stupid. I know she ain’t got nothing but that little boy on her mind now, and she needs me if she’s going to save him. So I am useful to her. I don’t feel like she knows me no more, but I can’t get through a damn day without wondering what’s going on in her mind. I’m always watching her, waiting for some sign. Anything.
On our fourth day in camp the boy goes with me to hunt. I let him have the bow and arrow. This pleases Ink no end, but I keep him in front of me just in case he decides to point the thing back my way. I ain’t yet ready to fully trust him. We hunt most of the morning, and just when I’m ready to call it quits, the little fellow shoots a arrow into a scurrying doe. It’s a good shot, and I almost reach out and pat him on the back, but I think better of it. He can see I’m happy for him. “They teach you to shoot with one of them things right early,” I say. I guess if his papa seen it, he’d be proud.
Later in the day, after we’ve eaten the deer, Ink gives the little fellow a name. He has a flat, round face; he’s as dark as Ink, and only about four and a three quarters of a foot tall. We sit by a faltering camp fire in the afternoon and suddenly she says, “I will call him Little Fox.”
“Little Fox?” I say. “Why Little Fox?”
“We found him running in the tall grass like a fox.”
“Why give him a Indian name?”
“He is an Indian.”
“But your daddy was white. If you’re fixing to raise him, shouldn’t he have a white man’s name?”
She just looks at me. We set there staring at each other while she makes up her mind if she should pay attention to me at all. Then she says as she turns away. “Little Fox.”
She don’t say no more. I throw another small branch on the fire and wait for the moon to rise.
The boy’s come to trust her enough that he let her clean his hair and put a new piece of leather on him. By now she’s tanned the deerskin and made a shirt for herself and for him. His shirt is long enough, it hangs down to his knees. She made a head covering for him with the skin of a prairie dog I killed and he puts it on his head with pride. He almost smiles when I tell him how good it looks. He still ain’t said nothing to me or her. But when she speaks bits of Cheyenne to him, he listens.
At night, when we should be traveling, we hunker down with no fire and try to sleep. I listen to the night sounds, the tree frogs and cicadas, and sometimes I hear a kind of rhythm that sounds like language, like voices chanting in the forest. One night all I hear is This will be so, this will be so, this will be so, and I try to get my mind to change it into something else, but I just can’t. Every day that goes by is proof that I ain’t going back to Bozeman and I ain’t never gonna see Eveline again. This will be so, this will be so. The whole thing makes me right irritable. But I can’t say nothing in the face of what Ink and that boy been through and what I got to do for them if I can.
In the daylight the boy looks at me sometimes and I know from the way his eyes go to my hands and then my face and then my hands again he still worries I might do him harm. It must of been white men that killed his momma, or at least chased her into that tall grass. One day near the end of that first week, around noon, sitting next to a small campfire, I say this to Ink and she says, “It is probably so. But that woman may have died trying to give birth to the other child.” I know that ain’t true. Or at least it ain’t the whole truth. But I don’t challenge her on the idea. I say, “I expect that’s true.” I try to meet her eyes, but she stares at the fire. She holds Little Fox’s head in her lap. She don’t say no more, and I sit there with a stick in the fire, wishing it would get dark enough so maybe I can sleep again.
I know what probably happened. Soldiers attacked the dead woman’s village and took everybody with them, men and women all. No soldier would let a brave go off to find his wife and child. Ain’t no tribe I know of would let a woman go off to give birth and then leave her there to die. And she wouldn’t take her other child with her to give birth, neither. So they was probably hiding, and maybe the boy seen the white men taking his family away.
Now Little Fox curls up next to Ink and closes his eyes. I think he might sleep a bit. For a few days now he’s slept without crying out and he don’t weep no more. I think he is getting used to us. He still clings to Ink for all he’s worth.
When his breathing gets to be regular, I whisper, “He’s fallen asleep.”
Ink says nothing.
“You been through one hell of a lot,” I say.
She thinks I am talking to Little Fox. She puts her finger in front of her mouth to shush me.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“You say those words more than any others,” she says.
This catches me by surprise. But then I remember what she’s been through, and how useless them words are in the face of it. I say, “When you think we should go on to Buford?”
She does not answer me. I sit there awhile longer, then I get up and go a-hunting again, this time by myself. When I’m out in the forest, looking for game or moving up to the high ridges near the river, I feel sometimes like I’m on my own again. I remember what that feels like, and it don’t seem possible I ever lived it. And if I think about it for even a little bit, a kind of sick feeling takes over my gut and I can’t decide if that’s because I want that solitary life again or if I don’t; maybe I’m getting nervous about what I’m gonna do with Ink and the boy. Maybe I’m sick about having them with me, or worried about leaving them behind. The only thing I know for sure is that thinking about my future ruins the alone time something awful. It’s only when I find a deer or a elk or even a rabbit or a groundhog to shoot that I feel pure again. But when I’ve done hunting and I’m getting ready to find my way back to them, Ink and the boy seem like a bad memory. I wish I could figure what’s in her head.
It don’t take long to lose track of time when you ain’t moving. Sometime in the third or fourth week of May, we get hit with a storm of ice balls and then a driving rain. We huddle under the trees and the animals stomp and whinny. Ink looks at me. It’s like we’re both in some sort of white dream, dark against the whiteness. It’s suddenly very cold.
“This ain’t a regular thing,” I say.
“It’s a storm,” she says. “It will pass.”
I stand there watching the white balls on the ground rattled by the rain. I can hear the river roaring down below us.
When the rain stops and everything settles again, Ink says, “We should move.”
“On to Buford?”
“The rain has stopped.”
“You want to move now.”
She looks at me.
“It ain’t like I can make it back to Bozeman now. So what’s the point?”
She says nothing while we pack up the horses. She tries to let Little Fox know what we’re doing.
I climb up on Cricket, lead them back down to the riverbed, and we start heading east, following the river. I see a dead horse in the water, frozen stiff as a statue. Then I see a woman in a dress, a child gripping her arm as they go by in the current. I realize it is suddenly very cold and the water is like a wall of moving ice. Up ahead the darkening sky looks bruised.
“Big Ice,” Ink says. “Great chunks of it. I have seen it before.”
“My Lord,” I say. “If we’d of been out in the open, it’s likely them balls of ice would of killed us and the animals too.” I don’t want her to know how nervous this event has made me. I hope Little Fox and Ink didn’t see the child and the woman. My voice shakes when I talk, but maybe she thinks I’m cold. It’s easy thirty degrees colder than it was a hour ago. And I’m heading east with her. Getting farther away from Eveline. This makes my heart feel fat and heavy. But I don’t know what I can do about it. We’re riding along the Missouri, and soon we’ll be to Fort Buford.
“We are getting to the weather of spring,” she says.
“Maybe that big ice ain’t done,” I say.
Ink just rides on, looking back
over her shoulder now and then. She’s thinking again. Her eyes shine in the weak light like a snake’s eyes, black and sparkling.
We ride along up the embankment a little and out of the mud, but next to the river for a while. The mist is still low to the ground, but now there’s a general fog all around. We can barely see in front of us. When it’s completely dark, I can’t even tell if there’s a moon. The air is drippy with the fog, so I start climbing to higher ground, trying to rise up out of the damp, swampy air. We get to more solid ground, but still no light nor clear air. I hear the breathing and chuffing of the horses, the sound of their hooves, and nothing else. Ink rides next to me, and Little Fox is behind her, holding her around the waist. When I look over at them I don’t see nothing but a dark shadow a little lower than me and off to my left. I know she’s there with him, but she ain’t got nothing to say. We’re just going steadily now, trying to get to morning.
When the sun begins to rise, it burns the fog until it turns into great columns of gray light that rise up to the top of the sky. There’s a breeze now, and it sweeps the fog past us and the world is shadows again and dark places in front of us. Sometime in the middle of that night, one of the horses riding behind us got cut loose. I don’t notice it until we’re getting ready to stop.
When I tell Ink about it, she sets Little Fox on the ground gently and then rides back, jumps from her horse, and picks up the rope. She studies it in the weak light, then gets back on her horse and rides back to me.
“You shouldn’t jump off your horse like that,” I say. “You could open one of them wounds again.”
“The rope was cut,” she says. She looks so sad, it’s almost a kind of purity—like she is innocent of everything in the world and don’t know death and decay yet, like a damn child. She’s been kidnapped and lived with the Indians for five years or more, she’s afraid of her husband’s fury, and she looks to me like a small, dark virgin child.
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