by Shirl Henke
Samuel felt Olivia stiffen in affront and grinned to himself. “She is swift to learn new things, aren’t you, Livy?”
Olivia gritted her teeth, hating the mock endearment. So this was woman’s work out in the wilderness. She had never needed to worry about such unpleasant realities, for her life in St. Louis had been smoothed by servants. Olivia had never so much as made her own tea, only poured it for guests at Emory Wescott’s elegant social gatherings. Both Indian women were staring at her, the older one curious and the younger one hostile. She would show them. She would show that smirking, odious colonel, too.
“Oh, give me a knife. I’ll clean the damn deer,” she said with a lot more bravado than she felt as she knelt down alongside the two women.
“No knife. Use hands,” the ever practical Walks Fast said.
“She knows better than to trust you with anything sharp.” Samuel chuckled, looking on with his arms crossed over his chest, highly amused.
Olivia gaped at the older woman as if she had lost her mind. “What do you mean, use my hands?” Her voice broke on the question.
“Pull out gut, liver.” Walks Fast finished widening the opening in the cavity, then raised the deer’s ribs with one hand while illustrating with her other hand how to root through the gore inside, working various organs out. Those and a portion of intestine would end up in the stew. Her companion wielded a knife expertly, cutting the treats free of the visceral membranes holding them.
The fetid warm stench emanating from inside the deer wafted on the heavy fog laden air, hitting Olivia with the first deep breath she took when she leaned forward over the carcass. She tried to focus her eyes but her vision was becoming increasingly blurry. The earth seemed to have begun spinning. In front of her Walks Fast extracted the greatest prize, a great purplish black clump of gelatinous slime, which she elevated in triumph.
“Liver, still warm,” she pronounced with satisfaction offering it to Samuel as the hunter’s due.
Several drops of blood spattered on Olivia’s hand as she watched the seemingly pulsating lump with horrified fascination. The Indian woman’s arms were stained up to the elbow with gore.
Samuel quickly realized his tactical error. He had been so delighted watching the haughty French belle being brought down several notches that he had forgotten the old Indian ritual, now enjoined by the white trappers and hunters, but one he had never had the stomach to enjoy. A ring of men had gathered around them, all eyeing the delicacy enviously. Before he could bluff his way out of the quandary, Olivia solved his dilemma by creating a diversion.
She fought the hot dizzying surges as she watched Samuel eye the raw dripping liver being offered to him. Sacred Blood, was he going to eat it? When she raised one hand up to rub across her suddenly dry mouth, the coppery smell and taste of blood assaulted her. She stared in horror at her own blood spattered hand and knew she’d smeared it across her face. Without further warning her stomach revolted.
Samuel caught her as she turned away from the deer and emptied her breakfast of coffee and hominy onto the moccasins of one of the French trappers who jumped back with a startled oath. Olivia wretched until nothing more would come up as Samuel held her head, careful to keep her fat plait of hair away from her face as she was wracked with spasm after spasm of dry heaves.
Around them the men burst into raucous laughter, jeering loudly at Shelby, saddled with such a useless female, masquerading in men’s britches but possessing the stomach of a five-year-old girl.
“Mon ami, I pity you, cooking and cleaning for such a helpless one.”
“What does she do when you stick her, hein?”
“Trade her in fer a good squaw, Colonel. They know how ta stick ‘n be stuck, both!”
Amid advice and catcalls, Samuel scooped Olivia up and carried her back to the water’s edge while Manuel Lisa sat in judgment over who got the liver and other delicacies, taking the first portion for himself. Finding a soft place in the sand, Shelby dropped her unceremoniously by the water’s edge. They were screened by a copse of dry winter grass, newly greening up, which lent an aura of seclusion as they faced each other.
She landed with a solid thunk, her pride actually injured a great deal more than her rump. Indignantly she sat up and tried to speak but was utterly humiliated when she could get out no more than a raspy squeak. Her whole mouth and throat were parched and sour from her earlier exertions.
“Drink some water and clean yourself up. Lisa will have the boat loaded and ready to shove off by the time the women finish dressing the deer,” he said not unkindly.
With that he was gone, leaving her alone in her misery, discarded like a piece of driftwood washed up on the river-bank. Olivia had never felt more wretched or alone in her life. The thought of spending months in the ghastly wilderness surrounded by savages red and white, worked to exhaustion, fed nothing but greasy tallow, salted meat and starchy tasteless hominy brought tears to her eyes. But crying never solved anything. Hadn’t she learned that when her parents died?
If only Samuel had turned out to be the charming suitor that she had first imagined, she would have been willing to endure the rigors of a journey all the way up the Missouri. “But my prince has turned into a toad,” she muttered disconsolately.
Well, the way he treated her these days, at least she was in no danger of catching warts. With that small consolation, Olivia made her rude toilette by the riverbank, then scrambled back toward the boat when she heard Manuel Lisa call out the order to shove off.
Over the next several days Olivia and Samuel fell into a routine, spending little time together. During the days he took an occasional turn poling but mostly he was ashore, scouring the rolling hills beyond the river bluffs where the woodlands teemed with game. She did manual chores, fetching and carrying while the big keelboat was propelled upstream, assisting with cooking and cleaning up when they camped. Her hands were reddened by cuts and blisters and her skin was itchy and miserable from sleeping on scratchy strouding and the grimy irritant of ground-in dirt. She longed for a tub of clean hot water and a bar of scented soap with an intensity she once would have only expended wishing for an Arabian horse or a diamond necklace.
The men pitched crude little tents ashore each night and slept on the ground. Mercifully Olivia and Samuel had their own cramped cots aboard Lisa’s boat, although her narrow spot between several crates was barely large enough to accommodate her.
Bone weary, she slept through the cacophony of male snoring as Manuel Lisa and Seth Walton sawed in harmony far into the night. At least she was spared the indignity of having to share a tent with Samuel Shelby.
Nonetheless, she had to admit that traveling up the river was an adventure. The chief means of propulsion was by poling. The men pushed fifteen-foot-long oak poles deep into the muddy bottom, using sheer brute strength to lever the boat forward as they walked back along the elevated narrow planks that ran from bow to stern on each side of the eighty-foot craft. Often with the hot spring sun beating down on them, the sweaty rivermen would remove their shuts and work bare-chested. At first scandalized, Olivia quickly became inured to the partial nudity, until Samuel began taking his turns.
She sat huddled in one corner, by the door of the cabin box, watching the rippling play of muscles across his broad back as he plied the unwieldy pole with surprising grace. Rivulets of sweat trickled down his sun darkened skin, which gleamed in the reflected light. What would his hot satiny flesh feel like—taste like? Unconsciously she found herself putting her fingertips to her lips, as if attempting to answer the illicit question. Ashamed of such unladylike musing, she looked away, watching the river bluffs rise to the east.
Great limestone cliffs lined both sides of the river for miles at a stretch. Eons of wind, water and blistering heat had scoured and sculpted the stone into fantastical shapes, bowed out in places, hollowed inward in others. Caves and pinnacles of silvery white were studded with the deep green verdancy of hardy pines that grew with nothing but tiny crevices
for purchase. The river stretched endlessly, over a mile wide yet mostly shallow except for a few narrow channels around the chains of islands strung along it. Some were overgrown with hardy stands of cedar and willow but many were simply ephemeral sandbars. When the wind picked up, it would blow the stinging particles in thick swirls, enveloping everything in its path. The Indians called the Missouri the Smoky River when this happened.
All manner of flotsam washed downstream with water from the spring thaws in the mountains. Once Olivia saw what looked like a cluster of boulders floating toward them. Panicked at the thought of having the boat pulverized into kindling by the weight, she screamed a warning, much to the amusement of the men. The floating stones were pumice, a coarse, light substance that could remain above water for short distances but was no threat to their safety.
Uprooted by the swirling current, whole trees floated by as well. Unlike the pumice stones, the trees were a danger. Often entire stretches of the bank washed away, carrying clumps of grasses, brush and densely tangled small trees which would eventually form barricades across narrow necks in the twisty river. The first time Olivia saw one she thought it was merely some sort of island they must get around.
Lisa ordered the men to pull to the bank. “Why don’t we just pole around the island?” she asked Samuel, who was studying the mass with a worried expression. At first she wondered if he would bother to answer her, but then he did.
“See how the island bobs and moves with the current? It isn’t solid land. It’s an embarras. The sudden pileup of all that wood and grass has made the current around it much too swift and treacherous to pole past.”
“Then how will we get by it?” she asked, daring to hope they might be forced to turn back to St. Louis.
“I imagine Lisa will use the cordelle ropes and let the men pull us through, but it will certainly slow us down. Stay right here unless I call you,” he instructed, then left to confer with the cluster of men at the opposite end of the boat.
The passage past the embarras was a nightmare. Lisa’s men were forced to wade into the rushing icy water, often shoulder-deep, with the cordelle ropes attached to their waists. They struggled to throw the ropes across low-lying tree limbs, sometimes resorting to climbing the trees. Then they attached pulleys so they could winch the boat upriver, agonizing foot by agonizing foot. Olivia watched Samuel’s dark head as he swam against the buffeting current with a rope in his hands. Once he gained solid footing a few feet ahead near the bank he stood up in waist-high water and searched for someplace to fasten the rope for leverage.
She watched horror-struck as her gaze traveled across the embarras where a mass of the roots jutted upward, securely embedded in the thicket. “No!” The word slipped out as she hunched at the bow of the boat, but no one heard her over the roaring of the river and the babel of curses. She closed her eyes in thankfulness when he decided not to swim to his target but instead attached a wicked looking grappling hook to the end of the rope and began whirling it in the air until he was able to wrap it around the roots and pull it tight. Several more men joined him to pull on the rope from the side of the boat.
On the bank to the left a large cottonwood towered high above and one limb jutted out over the rushing current. A young French-Canadian engagé took another cordelle rope and scrambled up the tree nimble as a squirrel. He crawled out onto the limb and secured the rope and pulley but suddenly an ominous cracking noise rose sharply over the din of the river and the limb snapped, tossing the youth into the boiling water below.
Samuel saw him fall and quickly kicked off after him. Dazed and semiconscious, Cousteau quickly floated downriver but Shelby’s swift powerful strokes cleanly cut through the water. He seized the lad by his sodden shirt. In minutes they were on the riverbank. Lisa yelled for Raoul Santandar, a Spaniard from New Orleans, to examine the injured fellow whose arm had been broken. Santandar was the nearest thing they had to a company physician. Setting the arm would have to wait while the dangerous operation of moving the boat past the embarras continued.
Several times the ropes slipped or gave way and the boat crashed against the sinking edges of the embarras, sustaining no major damage but sweeping two men who were poling into the water. The first quickly bobbed up, then swam ashore but the second was a poor swimmer and floundered, trying to climb back aboard the boat near the stern. He was helped back up by two of his fellows as Olivia watched from her vantage point.
From shore Samuel saw her move away from the secure position by the front of the cabin box where he had instructed her to remain. Damnation, a city bred female was a burdensome liability in the wilderness! “Get back inside the cabin where you’ll be safe,” he yelled at her.
Olivia either could not or would not hear as she watched the men pull their sodden comrade to safety. Never in her life, not even in the thick of a close horserace, had she seen so much excitement. For a brief time the adventure made her forget her own troubling and uncertain future.
Once the polers were back at their work, she scampered along the narrow end of the deck. The heavy mast high above her groaned beneath the bright afternoon sky as the ropes attached to it pulled it against the fierce current. She stepped over to where the rudder man held the sweep steady, guiding the boat that was now powered by human muscle and blood.
Suddenly the boat hit a sawyer, a submerged tree whose branches had been mired in the river bottom, leaving the massive trunk and roots to bob up without warning, smashing into any craft luckless enough to run afoul of it. The sawyer was big enough to capsize the boat. Only the men pulling the cordelle ropes with all their strength held it steady as the long craft eased by the clawing grasp of the tree’s roots.
But the bone-jarring impact caused one casualty. Olivia, made even more careless by her excitement, was catapulted overboard with a loud splash. And she could not swim a stroke!
Chapter Ten
Water closed in over her head like a coffin lid. Murky blackness, icy cold and fast moving, surrounded her as she thrashed frantically, trying to propel herself upward to breathe, to scream for help. What if no one saw her fall? What if they continued upriver without stopping, leaving her to a watery grave in the wilderness? No, she refused to accept such a horrible, lonely death.
Her hands and feet scraped the muddy bottom, restoring her sense of direction and allowing her a firm base from which to push off. She kicked upward with all her strength, clawing her way to the surface. The instant her face felt the cold fresh wind she sucked a great gulp of air into her lungs and screamed with all her might, “Samuel!” Then she was pulled beneath the swift rushing water once more.
Blackness closed in again. The relentless force of the current buffeted her as if she were no more than a hollow stick of driftwood. She thrashed and floundered, growing more hysterical each second her burning lungs were without oxygen. Suddenly a powerful band of steel-like strength and hardness encircled her waist, squeezing out what little breath she had left. Olivia kicked and flailed more desperately as she was lifted.
The bright light of day broke over her again and a hoarse voice muttered near her ear, “Stop struggling or by God I’ll drop you back for the fishes to eat!”
Now she could feel the warmth and solidity of his body as he held onto her, treading water while he tried to subdue her hysteria. “Samuel! You heard me,” she choked out, wrapping her arms around his neck as she coughed up wet sandy bile. It felt like she had swallowed half the Missouri River.
When Samuel had seen her tumble overboard and vanish into the roiling water, his heart had stopped beating for a moment before he collected himself and plunged from the embarras where he was working into the swiftly moving current. Thank God she had been able to come up once and cry out to him, else he might have dived repeatedly in vain, for the water was far too muddy and filled with bracken from the spring thaw to locate one slender woman without some clue as to what direction the undertow had taken her.
The fear that she was lost had squeezed his ches
t, almost paralyzing him. Her fiery head breaking the surface with his name on her lips had propelled him through the freezing water like a frantic otter. As soon as he made contact with her kicking, thrashing body he had seized hold of her with the strength born of desperation and some other even stronger emotion that he was loathe to name. All he felt now, he convinced himself, was fury. “Move around to my back and hold tight while I swim to shore,” he commanded. When she complied, he made for the bank with fast, sure strokes, feeling the soft allure of her supple body pressing against him as she held on for dear life.
Olivia could feel the tense anger that radiated from his body with each stroke. When they reached the shallows he hauled her up against him and half carried, half dragged her up the bank to a grassy spot where he pulled her down and knelt by her side.
Positioning her on all fours, he instructed, “Hang your head over and get out the rest of that water.” Samuel pounded on her back until her coughing yielded several violent regurgitations of brackish water and lumps of river bottom.
She raised her head after the last choking gasp, intending to thank him for saving her life but before she could utter a word his facial expression silenced her.
“Of all the stump stupid stunts you’ve ever pulled, this is the best yet! Don’t you have the brains of a possum? I told you to stay in the cabin box at the bow. What the hell were you doing hanging over the stern? You’re goddamn lucky you didn’t crack your skull on the sweep. But on second thought, that couldn’t have hurt one bit. You haven’t a brain inside the damn thing!”
“Are...you...quite finished?” she choked out, still struggling to get enough air into her aching lungs. Her throat was raw and her voice so hoarse that she was certain she must have swallowed enough twigs and leaves to build a vulture’s nest.
“Mademoiselle St. Etienne, I haven’t even begun. If you ever again disobey my orders, I will take down those raggedy britches and show you how the buffalo hunters tan a hide.”