by Linda Jacobs
Beneath the earth, hot magma continued to roil. Sounds of steam hissing and whistling, and the rumbling and splashing of geysers punctuated the simpler sounds of the wind soughing in the trees.
And falling water.
Young Cord awakened with a start. Below him in the moonlight, the broad central plateau of the park spread beyond the foothills of the mountains. Yellowstone Lake filled the center of the depression he had dreamed was a lake of fire.
The vision must have come from his wayakin, but what form did the spirit take? A jay calling a warning? The thundering bison herd stampeding before being buried by superheated ash? Perhaps he was guarded by the cold, blue sheen of glacier ice.
Cord dreaded going back to Bitter Waters without finding his wayakin. His mother had told him some lost children never found a spiritual protector.
Suddenly, the moonlight fell onto a pair of yellow eyes glowing in the darkness. Cord stared into the night for a long time, until the rough shape of a wolf emerged. Hackles raised, the animal crouched and began to stalk.
Cord shouted, leaping to his feet and waving his arms.
The wolf flinched, but only for an instant. The rest of his pack appeared; at least ten animals surrounded Cord.
He fumbled on the ground for a stick, a rock. There was nothing, and his wild heartbeat threatened to burst his chest, until his hand closed over an angular sharp stone.
Drawing his arm back, he threw the rock as hard as he could.
With a sharp “kiyah,” the wolf leapt from the rocks and disappeared.
Cord picked up another missile. Although one of the animals had slunk away, the others paused, watching warily.
He shied another stone at the nearest predator and missed. Crouching, he picked up another.
Like smoke, the pack seemed to evaporate into the night.
Only then did Cord feel the sharp edge of the stone he clutched and look down to see what he held. Black and glassy, and glowing like a diamond, the obsidian reflected the light of the full moon.
Laura watched Cord close his fingers almost reverently, as if the simple stone were a thing of great value, and stow it in his trouser pocket. Then he turned away and poured steaming liquid into speckled tin cups. He handed one to her, his rough fingers brushing hers.
Sitting on twisted logs close to the fire, they drank the strong hot coffee. Cord said nothing more, but as they shared dried apples and jerky, he kept glancing at her.
Aunt Fanny said not paying attention would discourage a man. A widow for over twenty years and determined to love no one else, when Fanny’s still-black hair and buxom figure attracted unwanted attention, she kept men firmly at bay.
Laura found her gaze wandering back to Cord and looked away with a little jerk.
“If I didn’t hurt you last night,” Cord said evenly, “I’m probably not going to.”
Laura started, wondering if he read minds. “Probably,” she repeated, and kept her head averted, pretending to study the gray shapes of the mountains.
Cord exhaled in a way that might have been amusement.
She gave him a sharp look. He returned it.
Eyes that challenged looked out from a face whose lines made him look older than Laura thought he really was. Perhaps he was thirty, but living in the mountains seemed to have toughened him.
Without finishing his coffee, Cord stood and threw the last of it into the fire. With a sigh, Laura watched the hissing rise of steam and got to her feet, as well. The morning was more blue than gray now, and as she stretched her aching back, a rose finger of light touched the highest spire of the mountain peak. It reminded her how far she had traveled since yesterday’s sunrise.
Cord kicked at the burning brands, scattering the fire over the rounded rocks and gray sand of the beach. “I guess I should be glad you’re just going to Yellowstone to work,” he announced. “What if I’d rescued one of those spoiled rich girls who are good for nothing?”
In a broad willow bottom at the base of the squaretopped peak Cord pointed out as Mount Moran, he reined Dante in and called a halt for the night. Though the summer sun was still above the western range of the Tetons, he estimated aloud that it was around nine o’clock.
Then he turned to Laura in a matter-of-fact manner. “Seems to me it’s your turn to cook.”
She asked herself how difficult it could be to soak and boil some beans and add jerky to season them. Cord had surely never sampled the kind of delicacies that routinely graced the table at Fielding House.
With the sun sinking fast, he unlimbered his rifle and sat upon a boulder to clean it. Laura assumed he was doing routine maintenance until he rose, placed the weapon over his shoulder, and began walking through the marshy flats like a stalking cat.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Hunting.”
“What?”
“Birds.”
She knew a little about bird hunting from listening to man talk in Chicago drawing rooms, most notably that it was accomplished with a shotgun, not a rifle.
A moment later, the distinct flapping of wings accompanied a flock of plump birds bursting into the sky. Cord threw his rifle against his shoulder; sound cracked. He pumped the lever to chamber another round and fired again.
A pair of feathered bodies dropped to earth.
Cord turned to her with white teeth flashing. “Ptarmigan.”
He strode out twenty paces, bent, and retrieved the birds. Then came back to her with the same confident walk and held out the game.
She recoiled at the bright ruby blood drops on the multicolored feathers.
“Aren’t you going to cook?” The limp masses hung from his strong fingers.
“Perhaps,” she ventured, “you could clean them.”
A vertical line appeared between his black brows.
She drew in a breath and reached for the birds, her hand closing over the scaly legs. “I’ll need a knife.”
Cord reached to his hip, pulled a horn-handled hunting knife from a sheath, and offered it to her.
With the birds dangling from one hand, she took the knife in the other. Even as she did, she knew her best intent wouldn’t pluck, gut, and prepare these birds in a proper manner. Every piece of meat she’d ever seen had been cut at the butchers, or by one of the servants. She didn’t have the first idea where to make incisions without slashing into intestines and exposing her and Cord to the foulest of diseases.
“I’m sorry,” she admitted. “I don’t know what to do.”
He jerked birds and knife from her. “You’re not a tart, you’re not a cook, but you can shoot.” Blue eyes bored into hers. “Well, so can I, lady. What good do you do us?”
Upon awakening the next morning, Laura lay beside Cord on his spread-out sheepskin, a stone poking the small of her back. Even at dawn, this day promised to be warmer than the one before, as insects were already crawling on the long blades of river-bottom grass.
Forty-eight hours since she’d risen to a summer snowfall and watched men die. The memory, sharp and vivid, of Cord leveling his Colt at the outlaws, still had the power to make her breath come shallow.
Laura turned onto her side and looked at him. With his eyes closed, black lashes trembling with each inhalation, he once more looked vulnerable, something she knew he was not.
No, he was hard-edged and completely at home in this country that had a way of suspending the rules she’d chafed at in Chicago. Thinking of it in those terms, she almost wished she were the kind of woman who felt at ease in the wilderness. Despite the looming night shadows, no matter the yipping cry of coyotes, she breathed the cleanest air she’d ever known and gazed into the clearest sky.
Cord stirred and his eyes opened, their focus unerringly on hers. A small shock seemed to go through him; his pupils dilated. They studied one another across ten inches of bedding, the warm gust of his breath upon her cheek.
Should he choose to force his will upon her hundred-pound frame, she would be at his mercy.
This morning there was no bonfire, no coffee. Laura went to the river’s edge among the willows, dropped her dirty trousers, and managed to relieve herself without splashing her boots. She knelt on the bank, dipped up water to drink, and cupped handfuls onto her face.
When she came back, Cord had rolled the bedding into a tight bundle. Without a glance at her, he whistled to Dante and saddled him.
“We can’t both ride all the time or we’ll wear him out,” he said. “I’ll walk this morning.”
She refused his offer of a hand and mounted without assistance. Gathering the reins before he could try to lead the horse, she earned a look of grudging respect.
Though it shouldn’t matter, it helped make up for his telling her she was good for nothing.
As they set out north toward Yellowstone, Cord walked ahead through the green willow bottoms. After a few miles, they began to climb into a dense and darker forest. In places, the trees grew so close together that the horse had to be turned back to find a wider path.
In early afternoon, they came upon the brink of a steep-walled canyon.
Cord stepped to the edge while Laura dismounted. The verge overlooked vertical black lava walls studded with pines wherever there was enough soil for growth.
“Is that the Snake?” She pointed to the mesmerizing silver ribbon of river below.
“The Lewis. It feeds into the Snake.”
Lewis Canyon … They’d managed by traveling cross-country to enter Yellowstone without passing the military station at the south entrance.
Cord paced along the precipice. Being in the park was both a relief and a worry. The fewer checkpoints he had to go through, the less likely someone would detect he was part Nez Perce. Part was as good as all for some, and he’d seen everything, from the sly rapier of ostracism to the blunt bludgeon of assault. The farther he got without running into anyone, the less likely he’d be interrogated about the dead men at the stagecoach.
On the other hand, when he arrived at Lake, he’d be questioned about not checking his weapons at the park boundary.
He took off his hat and ran his hand through his matted hair. Usually fastidious in his grooming, after their dunking in the river he’d let things go. It would make it easier later for him to turn into someone Laura wouldn’t recognize.
Staring down hundreds of feet at the river, he thought he heard a twig snap in the thick stand of trees. He looked over his shoulder, but saw nothing save the straight trunks of lodgepole and the soft brown duff underfoot.
It was peaceful here, with the wind sweeping up over the canyon rim and a raven soaring on the drafts. The midday sun shone through the branches, making a checkered shade that shifted and moved across Laura’s face.
She took a half step back from Cord, but she wasn’t afraid of him anymore. His eyes reminded her of the highest part of the sky at midday, with a midnight blue ring around the iris. He had shed his sheepskin coat, and his denim shirt lay open at the neck, revealing a pulse in the hollow of his throat.
Behind them, Dante shied. In the same instant, Laura caught the stench of decay.
“There.” Cord pointed to some mounds of flesh and fur at the base of a tree.
The carcasses lay piled, their arrangement assuring there had been no accident. Deer; she knew them from the woods north of Chicago, and elk, which she had seen only in books. But the massive antlers she expected upon their heads were absent; empty sockets crawling with green flies all that remained of former
glory.
“Poachers.” His hand near his holstered Colt, Cord scanned the woods, then returned his focus to the fallen.
“But why?”
He bent and pulled back the dead animal’s lip to show a gap in the jaw where the eyeteeth had been removed. “Elk ivory. It makes into jewelry and trade goods.”
What kind of person would kill a magnificent animal for such a small prize? The tall blond man who had ridden away from the stagecoach leaped to mind. Might a person who would kill Angus Spiner and get virtually nothing but her pistol and her mother’s cameo also commit such an atrocity?
She surveyed the area again, noting that Cord was also edgy. “Do you suppose that outlaw … ?”
He spat onto the pine straw underfoot. “If not him, then the same kind of scum.”
Suddenly, Laura’s nostrils were assailed with a new odor that was far viler than the dead before them, like a mixture of rancid grease and vomit. She gagged. Cord whirled away. “Bear!”
She didn’t see one. Lodgepole grew thick to the canyon’s edge, and none of the trees were thick enough to hide a large animal. But Cord must have recognized the stench, and the poachers’ leavings were excellent bait for large predators.
As she ran behind Dante, he caught the scent and whinnied. She looked underneath his belly and saw Cord about ten feet away with his back to her, his Colt drawn.
A low growling and the bear lumbered into her line of view. Big and shaggy, the grizzly padded toward Cord on broad paws studded with claws at least four inches long.
Dante reared. The grizzly took a look at the horse and appeared to decide the man was more interesting.
Cord raised the Colt and fired into the air.
Rather than retreat, the grizzly lumbered toward him.
He fired again, this time into the animal.
It didn’t even flinch, but came on. Before Cord could get off another shot, a swipe of paw sent the Colt tumbling.
Cord dropped to the ground and curled into a ball, his arms over his head. “Mount up, Laura!” he shouted. “Ride!”
Dante danced and plunged. Laura reached for the reins, but the stallion rolled his eyes and tossed his head. As she struggled with the horse, her hand fell onto Cord’s 1886 Winchester, sheathed in its scabbard behind the saddle.
Laura pulled the long gun free and ran out from behind Dante.
The grizzly swiped a paw at Cord’s back, covered by thin cotton.
“Over here!” Laura screamed.
The bear looked at her, and then pulled up onto its hind legs to a height of at least seven feet. Clearly a huge male, he opened his mouth with a curl of snout and roared.
Raising the rifle to her shoulder, she fired. The gun kicked viciously, and her thumb caught her nose. Nearly blinded by instant, painful tears, she jacked another round into the chamber and fired again.
The bear fell to all fours and lumbered toward her, covering ground at an astonishing pace. She fought the impulse to drop the Winchester and flee. She’d heard a bear could outrun the fastest horse.
“Shoot him again!” Cord leaped to his feet and scrambled for his Colt.
Laura lined up the sights and wavered; she might kill Cord with a wild shot. While she hesitated, the bear rushed her.
Cord darted left.
She stood her ground, firing. The grizzly hit like a train, throwing the rifle up into the air and her onto her back. A vile greasy smell filled her head as she was crushed by dead weight.
With the air knocked out of her, she heard a shout.
“Dante!”
A rough shambling of hooves, more commands. “Back. No, go again.”
Was it her fate to die in this rough land? Each attempt at breath refused to lift her lungs against the weight pressing her into the earth.
“Dante. Pull.”
The sharp tone cut into her fading consciousness. If this were her end, how much better here than in some Chicago drawing room where every move and word was measured?
Then, as though no time had passed, or a thousand years, Laura opened her eyes and looked into sun radiating through the trees. It reminded her of a painting her mother had pointed out in her white leather Bible when Laura was small. Had the sky been any different back when Baby Moses floated in the bulrushes beneath rays of shining light?
Something touched her arm. “God, Laura …”
Cord knelt beside her on the l
itter of pine needles, his bronzed face pinched looking. Dante stood nearby, a slack rope hanging from his saddle. The bear lay a yard away with the same boneless look Laura had seen in Angus, the outlaw, and the poachers’ victims.
“Are you hurt?” Cord gestured at the mess of blood on the front of her flannel shirt.
Besides a lingering dizziness, she felt no pain. “Must be the bear’s.”
“You killed him.” Cord grinned.
“Did he hurt you?” she asked.
“I’m going to be black and blue where he swiped at me.” He rose, went to Dante, and retrieved his pewter flask of bourbon. Once more, as she had beside the raging Snake, she lifted it to her lips and drank. Cord twisted the top back into place without taking a sip.
His eyes sought hers. “I’m sorry for insulting your nerve.”
Laura found herself smiling. After twentysix sheltered years as her father’s daughter, she felt a sudden fierce joy at being filthy, at smelling of bear.
And at simply being alive.
CHAPTER FOUR
JUNE 22
Cord didn’t return her smile, but looked around the canyon rim with a listening air. Although the bear threat had been neutralized, not a bird sang or a chipmunk chattered in the still afternoon.
Even so, Cord put out a hand as though he had heard something and was waiting to learn what it was. Something disturbing in his expression made her quietly accept his hand to help her up.
Putting a finger to his lips, he kept his Colt in one hand and picked up the fallen Winchester. Still scanning the area with a wary eye, he reloaded his rifle, mounted Dante, and pulled Laura up to the saddle in front of him.
Riding hard, they pressed on to the north. Jolted against Cord, she managed to ask over her shoulder, “Do you think there was another bear?”
“One of the two-legged variety.”
Hours later, they forded the Lewis River in a broad meadow above the head of the canyon. Turning east from the river valley, they began climbing the northern base of what Cord called the Red Mountains. There, the steeper slope forced them to slow their headlong rush.
With the danger seeming to be behind them, she had time to think. No one in her family, not her father, not his sister, Fanny, and not Laura’s delicate cousin Constance, would believe she had raised the Winchester and fired into the approaching bulk of bear. They wouldn’t recognize her, riding this stallion in her boy’s clothing, a sense of pride swelling her chest beneath the stain of bear blood. Even Cord had apologized for thinking she didn’t have nerve.