Half-Breed

by Anna L. Walls

  Kolar reported the attacks and their results to the local police who went out to investigate. Actually, they weren’t too concerned with an investigation. The bandits had been causing trouble for everyone in the area for months. If someone had cut their numbers down, they couldn’t be happier, but they did want to clear the bodies away from the road and bury them. They might even be able to identify some of them, which might give them clues to further attachments.

  Becoming a Plainsman

  Canis continued to ride on the wagon for the three days it took to reach the tiny farming community of Chappell, allowing Cepheid to patrol using her new mount, but he started and ended each day with exercises with his new sword. He liked the reach, but the weight felt awkward.

  He also spent time with the new horses. Kolar agreed that he could keep them. Normally, he wouldn’t even have bothered with the stock, but if Canis could use them, he could have them.

  Canis could use them. He had a lot of distance to cover and doing it on foot would draw too much attention. Only the poorest traveled on foot here and few that were so poor had anywhere to go. It could also enhance his ability to take on other jobs. Judging by the attitudes of the drivers when they first started, he almost didn’t get this one for lack of horses. And if he was going to have horses, it was important that they and the Wulfen became better than uneasy traveling companions.

  Canis and Cepheid learned everything the drivers could teach them about the horses and their gear, and by the time they reached Chappell, the horses seemed to be quite happy with them despite the Wulfen.

  The horses were shaggy and rough looking, but then much of that was their winter coat. One of them was black with a wide white slash on his nose that tapered to a point long before it reached his eyes. The only other white mark on him was his left back hoof. When it wasn’t muddy, it looked like he accidentally stepped in white paint. The hair was still midnight black, but the hoof was pinkish white.

  Cepheid chose an ugly beast with big feet and long legs. She had good form, but the coloring was disconcerting. She had a plain white boney face with blue eyes and dark brown cheeks. It made one think of a skull to look at it. She also had a large speckled patch of white covering her rump from the middle of her back, down her flanks almost to her hocks. The rest of her, including her tail, was a dark mahogany brown that shaded to black at her feet as if she had just walked through ash. Cepheid liked her because her eyes were almost the same color as Canis’s, but he was the only one she admitted that to.

  The third horse would be their packhorse or a spare if they needed one. She was a smart bay with a black mane and tail and black legs and feet, and she sported a clear seven-pointed star in the center of her forehead. She was only a few inches shorter than the other two, but she looked almost delicate by comparison. She had a much finer bone structure than the other horses. She also had a fascination with the puppies. If the three were left to their own devices in the same location, it wasn’t uncommon to see the horse pushing the puppies around with her nose while being careful not to step on them.

  By the time they reached Chappell, Cepheid had names for all of them. The black stallion she named Midnight, of course, and her mare she named Thumper; she had an odd single footed gait when moving faster than a walk. The bay she named Star for the mark on her face.

  Kolar insisted on picking up the tab for their stable fare. He argued that it was counted as part of his wages and Canis was the best guard he had ridden with since he started driving these wagons. “Besides, you haven’t cost us the price of a room yet,” said Kolar. “Since you won’t sleep in the inn, the least we can do is house your horses when we’re in town.”

  Cepheid insisted that he let the man have his way.

  They left early the next morning and reached the biggest town yet late the next evening. Julesburg saw traffic to and from both Cheyenne and Denver, which accounted for much of its prosperity, and it took its name from the oldest family in the area. Baron Jules ran the small city and a respectable section of the surrounding land efficiently and firmly. Lawbreakers were hunted down and dealt with severely.

  Despite the hour, Canis found an armorer and showed him the sword. “It is balanced wrong, can it be fixed?” he asked.

  The armorer turned the sword over in his massive hands and scrutinized it closely. “You’re right. It’s a good blade, but the hilt is too poor and not heavy enough. They weren’t made by the same man. Give me a few days and I’ll fix it right up for you.”

  “We’re leaving at first light. Can you have it done by then?” asked Canis.

  “Ah, now,” the man looked at Canis with his white eyes and his wide shoulders, then he noticed the stone between Canis’s eyebrows. “For you, I’ll have it done by then, but I’ll charge you silver for the work and the lack of sleep. I don’t do halfs.”

  “How much silver?” asked Canis, he would have to find a moneylender to break down one of his gold coins; he didn’t have any silver left.

  The armorer assessed the sword again. “Oh, I don’t know; two aught to cover it. I’ll decide in the morning.”

  Canis sighed. “I will be back for it before dawn.”

  He went back to the innkeeper and asked after a moneylender, but Kolar overheard him. “What do you need a moneylender for?”

  “All I have is a couple gold coins and I need some silver. I need to exchange one.”

  “Ah, how much silver do you need. I’ll consider it an advance on your wages, you’ve earned it already.”

  “Two…three just in case,” replied Canis.

  Kolar took Canis out to the wagons and dug down into one of the lock boxes. He rummaged around in a pouch for a few seconds, then handed Canis a handful of silver. “There, that aught to cover anything you need.”

  “This is too much,” protested Canis.

  “You’ve earned it and you need it. We’ll be heading out of these hills soon enough. You and your little lady will need new clothes. We’ll be spending a day or two in North Platte. You can get what you need there and not have to bother about a moneylender.”

  Canis counted the coins in his hand and called after him. “There are eleven silvers here, you did not count them.”

  Kolar smiled and waved at him before disappearing back into the inn.

  When Canis picked up his sword, he was very pleased with its new balance. The armorer had fitted a secondary tang over the original one that had been broken. It forked several inches down onto the blade and extended to accommodate a longer hilt making room for two hands if Canis wanted to use it that way. He then wrapped it with a thick, twisted leather cord leaving ridges to ensure a good grip under the worst conditions, and included a short loop with a small gold tassel. It ended up being thicker than any other hilt Canis had ever handled. Not that he’d handled a great variety of swords, but it fit his long-fingered hand comfortably, and the extra weight balanced the blade much better.

  The smith only charged a single silver coin. “I happened to have everything ready at hand and even had a chance to get some sleep.”

  Canis studied the man for a moment, and then paid his asking price; this was a prosperous and bustling town, but it wasn’t Chicago. The school had paid five gold pieces for the sword Cepheid now carried, and it was half the size of this one.

  When he returned from the smith, Kolar waved him over. “Between Lord Jules’s patrols and those of the royal garrison out of North Platte, the road will be peaceful enough. From now on, the most trouble you’re going to have is in the towns. I suggest you start bringing the wolves in with us and having them stay on the wagons at night.”

  At the little town of Paxton, they left the last scraps of the old snows behind, but since they were still early in the winter, they were still surrounded by a white landscape. But due to the amount of traffic on the road, it was mostly dirty slush.

  It took them eight days to reach Platte and they stayed in four little towns along the way. Sure enough, in all but one of the towns, someon
e tried to help themselves to the gear packed under the wagons’ seats. All of them were deterred when they came face to face with one or more of the massive snarling wolves backed by a man with glowing eyes and a very long, very sharp sword. Not a drop of blood was shed over it.

  They spent two full days in Platte while the furriers and the blacksmiths swarmed over the wagons and the horses in preparation for crossing the plains.

  Kolar took great pleasure in taking Canis and Cepheid shopping. It was obvious that Canis had some experience with the idea and knew what to buy, but Cepheid was incensed. She was appalled when the ladies in the shops presented her with corsets and skirts. She refused even to look at the little lace-up boots that barely cleared her ankles. “How does a woman cross the street in clothes like these? She’s obviously not expected to breathe or stay dry. Those skirts drag in the mud unless she holds them up high all the time and those shoes…”

  Kolar was laughing so hard he couldn’t answer her.

  The lady in the shop was insulted. “A lady should dress properly and her gentleman is supposed to take care of her,” she said.

  Cepheid was growling softly when she stalked out of the shop. Her man took very good care of her, thank you very much, but how could he possibly protect her if he had to carry her everywhere?

  At the store where Canis bought his clothes, Cepheid also bought warm woolen pants and a stout linen shirt. By the time they had their new wardrobe, Canis had spent about half of the silver Kolar had handed him. They both had two pair of wool pants, four linen shirts, a heavy wool coat, and a cloak with a detachable lining so it could be worn in the summer as a dust cloak. They even bought several changes of silk under clothes to protect their skin from the itchy wool.

  With the lighter clothes, it was easier to tell that Cepheid was a woman instead of a boy, but she walked with such a stride that few people would make any remarks about her choice of dress. Of course, ‘Ice Eyes’, who always walked at her shoulder, was another deterrent to loose comments of any sort.

  The next place they stopped was the cobbler’s shop where they were able to buy boots that reached almost to their knees. By the time they quit the shop, Canis was convinced that the elderly man hadn’t seen that Cepheid was a woman. He was not a betting man, but he would have laid coin down that the man hadn’t seen anything above their knees. The passage of another silver coin here bought them their boots and also low cut shoes that were sturdier than slippers, but they would be comfortable for walking the city streets in the summer. Cepheid was as fascinated by them as she was with the idea of walking anywhere where there was no snow. She had seen slim stretches of ground with no snow, but they weren’t places where anyone walked unless they had to. Places without snow were at the bottom of very large trees, of which there were very few around her home, or right along the banks of the salt lake, and that was only a couple feet wide during the heat of summer.

  Among their shopping, Cepheid spotted a shop that made and sold bows. The one she had was the one Canis made for her on the trail. It worked well enough, but there was a fine composite bow on display and pulled them inside to see more. After trying several, Canis bought her one that was tipped with shiny black horn. She liked the red color in the wood too. In actuality, it was pretty and she could draw it. Canis bought her a fist full of shafts and a quiver to hold them to go with it. The quiver she picked out was soft leather with many tassels tipped with colorful beads; it was pretty too.

  When they were assembling to leave the city, Canis discovered that his horses all had new gear; even Star had a new pad that could pass for a saddle if it had to. When Canis looked at Kolar for an explanation, Kolar said, “Ah, the drivers all went together and did it for you…for what you did for us back on the trail. I can’t remember the last time we made it this far with our load and our hides still in tact. ‘Sides, you two got all them fine new clothes and those are fine animals, you ought to have fine gear to go with all the rest. That tattered array you had weren’t good enough.”

  Canis liked Kolar and appreciated the gesture. “Thank you. Perhaps I can do the same for you, someday.” Then they were mounting and heading out of town. Neither he nor Kolar spent much time on pleasantries when there was work to be done.

  It was four days of slow wet travel to the next town with an inn, and another three to the next one, and another four to the last town before they reached their next major stopping point. It snowed almost the entire way, but it was such a wet snow that it didn’t really pile up much more than a foot. However, underneath it all was several inches of soggy wet slush that carried the foot most any direction other than down, which turned walking into hard work. Even the horses had some trouble.

  When the lead team began to tire, Canis started to rotate their marching order every couple hours. By the time the last team had passed over a point, the road was more muddy mush and slush than snow. The drivers weren’t used to changing their marching order, but even they had to admit they made better time and the horses weren’t quite so tired at the end of the day.

  In the town of Kearney, Kolar picked up water barrels to fill at the crossing where they would leave the river to enter the desert plains. Canis thought they would be able to melt enough snow to use for drinking even for the horses, but Kolar had been this way many times, whereas Canis had only made a similar, though solitary and much slower, trek a hundred miles north of this whole route eight years ago. He would not presume to advise Kolar on how to take care of his stock on those memories. He was only curious as to how he planned to keep his water from freezing.

  By the time they left Kearney, the snow stopped and the wind picked up. Long before the end of the day, both Canis and Cepheid had discarded their fancy town clothes in favor of their trusty furs even to include their facemasks while the drivers hunched down in their cloaks and kept the horses moving.

  The puppies had long since outgrown their carrying sacks and had been doing fine keeping up with the wagons, but they were getting disoriented in this cutting ground blizzard so they rode on the horses with Cepheid and Canis. He told them to sit very still and they were happy to lean up against another warm body. They were still short enough for even Cepheid to see over as they perched in their laps.

  After two days of this, Canis was forced to search out the road because the wind driven snow had obscured all contours in the landscape. While Canis wove from side to side, probing for the sides of the road, Cepheid followed, leading the lead team, keeping to the center of his weave. The four Wulfen roamed the length of the caravan and kept the wagons in line since each driver could scarcely see the wagon in front of them.

  At Lexington, Canis went over all of the horses’ legs checking for ice cuts and bruises, then he ordered the stable master to feed them hot mash; they had worked hard. They spent two nights here hoping the wind would let up, but when it didn’t, they pushed on.

  Normally, it would have taken four days to reach the river crossing, but in wind driven snow, it took them an additional two days. The crossing itself took only a few hours, but there were chunks of ice flowing in the water so when they were on the other side Canis once again went over the horses while the drivers filled the barrels.

  Two days later the snows stopped, but the wind continued to blow out of the north with merciless aggression. As the clouds blew away, the temperature dropped. Visibility improved though and once again, Canis scouted around for bandits who might be interested in a lone caravan out in this windblown landscape.

  Over the next four days, the depth of the snow on the ground decreased to only the few inches trapped by the tall grass that would have reached up to the horses chests if it hadn’t been laid over by the wind and weighed down by the snow. Then as quickly as it had started, the wind stopped, leaving an unmarked and desolate landscape under an equally unmarked, pale blue sky.

  The Hunt

  They were only a few hours into their second day on the flat expanse of the plains when they found their way blocked by a her
d the likes of which neither Canis nor Cepheid had ever seen or heard of. There must have been thousands of the beasts in the herd, but they were such strange beasts. The head, shoulders, and front legs were massive and powerful and covered with curly dark brown hair. The flanks and back legs looked like they should have belonged to a smaller animal; they were undersized and the short hair was slick and shiny. This back half was a lighter brown in the younger members of the herd.

  “The winter must be hard if they are this far east,” commented Kolar.

  Canis could feel the hunting assessment going through the Wulfen.

  “Sharp horns and feet.”

  “Hard to get a grip on the throat.”

  “Hamstring, trip it up.”

  “Pull it down by its nose. Tender noses.”

  Canis smiled, almost showing his teeth. “I think we are going hunting.” He readied his bow and quiver. “We take only one,” he said to the Wulfen.

  “You be careful out there. Those buffalo are pretty agile,” said Kolar.

  As Canis trotted toward the herd, he spoke to his hunting companions. “They are called buffalo. They are agile. They are not mired in snow. Be careful, I cannot heal you when you hunt among the stars.”

  “You are the one who must be careful,” said Rrusharr. “You have never ridden this horse-creature on a hunt before.”

  By the time they reached the herd, it was moving at an easy lope, but it was picking up speed. Canis picked out a young bull and zeroed in on him. Rrusharr went immediately for the nose while Nnarr picked the heels. Ggrrawrr dodged between their target and the rest of the herd and leapt for an ear. His move, like no other, caused the bull to dodge away from the rest of the herd and Canis dashed in with Ggrrawrr to push it farther from the herd. Alone, it would be brought down quickly.