by Jake Logan
“I know what you are doing, John, but I am fine. Just cold and sad. I will help you haul these things to the top.”
“I understand you want to help, but please, Sigrid, I need you to sit still until I come back. I don’t want to risk you trying to climb only to find you feel light-headed. Taking another tumble just won’t do, you hear me?”
“John, I cannot leave Arne.”
“We won’t leave him. I’ll get the rest up there, then come back for him. Okay?”
“Yes, okay.”
Slocum nodded, though she was looking away again. He pulled in a deep breath and began the long, hard work of dragging the broken sled to the top of the ridge.
16
Nearly two hours later found them partway down the other side of the ridge. He had been relieved to find this side was significantly more treed, boulders more abundant, and the terrain less steep. He could see why she had been in a hurry to get there.
“Thank you, John, for bringing Arne to me.” Sigrid nodded toward the canvas-wrapped bundle by her side.
Slocum nodded, but said nothing as he stared into the fire. What a day.
“The others will come closer in time. They are frightened. I still don’t know what happened, but I am glad you were here. I don’t know what I would have done.”
“Yes you do,” he said, offering her a half smile. “You would have come through it all just fine and you’d be here by the fire.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But I would be alone and without my Arne.” She laid her head on his shoulder and he lightly stroked her hair with his hand. “I am glad you were here, John.”
“So am I, Sigrid.”
A few quiet moments passed, then he said, “How’s your arm? Did I wrap it too tight?”
She laughed softly. It was a good sound to hear. He’d been afraid her arm was broken, but despite the wrenching it took, it appeared only to be badly bruised, although enough that she needed to keep it still. Per her instructions, he’d smeared it with one of her liniments, then wrapped it and fashioned a sling for her.
“You worry too much. You did just fine, Dr. Slocum.”
“Glad to hear it. You say we’re not far from the Cree camp?”
“A few more hours. But I think it best that we spend the night here. I don’t feel up to traveling anymore today. And this is a good camp you’ve made. Well out of the wind, and it looks to be a clear, starry night.”
They sat in silence awhile longer. Occasionally a dog whimpered. So far they hadn’t wanted Sigrid to tend to them, let alone Slocum. They stayed huddled together, pack-like, just beyond the fire’s glow. Slocum watched them, felt sorry for them—Sigrid had said Arne was one of the older dogs, and the father to a couple of the others.
“They will be fine,” Sigrid said, as if reading his mind. “They only need some time to think about what has happened.”
“Maybe they feel guilty?”
Sigrid had laughed at this, but then nodded. “It is possible. Dogs feel much more than people give them credit for. But guilt? I am not sure about that. Perhaps.”
“Sigrid, what can you tell me about the tribe?”
She drew a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Let me see. They are a band of Cree, but long ago they split from the main tribe. There was an argument about leadership, if I remember correctly what my father told me. This took place so long ago that some of the younger members no longer know the real reason for the split. You would call them a rogue band, but they consider themselves content. They prefer to live alone, isolated in their little mountain valley.”
Slocum nodded. “I can understand why. Even with all this snow and cold, it’s a beautiful place to be.”
“Mmm,” she said. “Now it’s my turn to ask a question.”
“Okay, let me have it.”
“This man you are chasing. You said he killed a man. What if he isn’t there with the tribe?”
“Aha, you are asking a question you already asked me last night.” He smiled. “Seems to me I said I’d cross that bridge when I got to it.”
“And that hasn’t changed?”
“I guess not. As I said, I will admit I have toyed with the idea of calling it quits, but that doesn’t sit well with me, makes me feel lazy. And I don’t like the idea of tasting that in the back of my throat for the rest of my days.”
She nodded. “Yes, I can understand that.” She yawned and closed her eyes. “You will do what you need to do, John Slocum, and I know you will make the right choice when you do.”
Early the next morning, Slocum awoke to see Sigrid sitting across from him, on the other side of the fire, in the midst of her dogs. They were all leaned against her, as if they each had to touch her somehow. She was smiling and stroking their ears and necks.
“Good morning, John,” she said.
“And to you.” He nodded, stood, and stretched. He was stiff after that big day of rough work and not being in top condition to begin with. “Well, I better get the sled attended to, see what sort of repairs I can give it, at least enough to get us to the village.”
Together, they inspected the damaged sled and found that one runner had snapped, but was still in place, and the entire framework had been stressed and suffered cracks along several pieces. But in the new day’s light, it looked more serviceable than he had imagined it would. “I bet we can have this pup mended in no time.” He rubbed his hands together and said, “Tell you what. I’ll get started on this if I can coerce you into making a pot of coffee . . .” Slocum looked at her hopefully.
“That sounds like a fair trade. Coffee it is then.”
• • •
The Cree village, which Slocum chose to think of it as, since he wasn’t sure how else to consider the breakaway band, was not what he’d expected. They had built log and sod huts dug into the hillside. He counted at least twenty of them, and they all faced down along a wide span of valley cut through with a river that must have been even prettier in summer.
The mountains loomed up large almost on three sides of them, but somehow the spot, though much higher up in the mountains than Sigrid’s place, seemed comfortable and homey, not barren and isolated as he’d pictured it.
The huts faced a number of what he assumed were communal fixtures such as a large fire pit, and pole racks for drying game. Off to the side stood what looked like a stone and mortar dome, man height and with an arched tiny doorway halfway up. “What is that?” said Slocum, nodding toward it.
“That is an oven for baking bread and smoking meats and other foods. My father helped them build it.”
“Smart man, that father of yours.”
She touched his sleeve. “John, they are good people, but they are wary of whites. Not many strangers have been through these parts. Please let me introduce you. It would be better that way.”
“Sure—I’d feel the same way.” He paused and gestured before him. “Ladies first.”
As soon as they were within sight of the little village, children came running out the entrances of the huts, mothers chasing after them, shouting.
“Kids are the same anywhere,” said Slocum quietly.
The dogs pulled the mended sled and reconfigured load fairly well, considering their obvious aches and pains and the sled’s cobbled condition. Slocum looked over at Sigrid and she was smiling. These people, he saw now, were as close to family as she had. He realized he knew very little at all about this amazing woman or her life here. Who would have guessed that such people lived—and thrived—in so isolated a place?
It seemed the entire tribe emptied out of the huts and drew tightly around Sigrid, talking and gently touching her, asking questions and kneeling to stroke the dogs. Their looks of concern for her and the dogs emphasized to him the level of their friendship with her.
Slocum had intentionally kept off to the side. He busied himself with looking at e
verything he could, searching for any sign of Delbert Calkins, while removing his snowshoes and fiddling with the harnesses. If Calkins had been the one they’d mentioned, and he must have been—how many blond dandies were roaming the Canadian Rockies?—then Slocum wanted to end this here and now. Finally Sigrid turned to him, smiling. She beckoned for him to come over. He did, smiling and nodding at them.
The younger men, some of whom he seemed to recognize from two days before, all regarded him with serious gazes, almost like brothers scrutinizing a potential suitor for their sister, while the older men bore the distinct hard stares of fathers and grandfathers. They all had folded arms. But the women smiled at him, and the children, obviously fully trusting of Sigrid, swarmed around him, giggling and laughing and clutching his legs.
Sigrid said something and they all laughed. Even the men cracked smiles.
Slocum smiled, too, and said, “What did you say?”
“That you didn’t know you were so popular with children, but that it seems you are willing to learn—whether you want to or not.”
He nodded. “Did you explain your arm, and other things?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Please ask them about Delbert Calkins.”
“Who?”
“The golden-haired man with the fancy clothes. If he’s here, I need to know before he makes a run for it.”
She did as he asked and the adults’ faces grew grim again. “What did they say, Sigrid?”
“That he was here, but . . .” She looked at the faces of her friends again, as if unsure about what they said.
“Sigrid, not telling me won’t make it go away.”
She turned back to him. “If I tell you, John, then you will leave.”
“That bad?”
She said nothing, but slowly nodded. “He left, but only this morning. Chief Mis-it Ha says he will help you to find him if capturing the man means that much to you. It is up to you, John. There is a very good chance that the man you seek will not make it over the mountains. The tribe did outfit him with a better coat and mittens, but only because he came to them so ill equipped and nearly dead. His horse died on the trail not far from here when he tried to force it through deep snows. But when the men returned from seeking me, they happened to tell him that there was another white man close by, someone they had not ever seen before. That is when he began acting strange.”
Slocum watched the men’s faces as she spoke, and it was obvious from their slight nods that some of them understood what she was saying.
“This morning they noticed he was gone and so was a pair of snowshoes.” She looked at him gravely. “John, they want to know why you seek him, what he could have done to deserve to have a lawman from the States follow him all this way, to terrify him so that he would risk his life in the high rocks.”
Slocum breathed deeply and nodded. “Sigrid, please tell them the truth. That he is a murderer of at least one person. He ruined a family, broke a young girl’s heart, and stole a whole lot of money from a whole lot of people. And make sure they know that I am not a lawman.”
“Then what are you?” It was the chief who spoke and to hear him speak such plain English startled Slocum. He had expected that some of them would comprehend much of what he said, but to hear such a response was a surprise.
“I am a man who agreed to help the family retrieve their money and, most importantly, to see that the man who killed the young man—he was a son and a brother—is brought back to the United States city where he committed the crime. There he will be dealt with in a court of law.”
The entire time Slocum spoke, he watched the chief’s face, but it was impassive. The two men seemed instead to engage in a second conversation at the same time, one with their eyes, each sizing up the other, each measuring the other against his own definition of a man.
“I will help you,” said the chief. “I do not want this man near us. Now that I know what he has done, I see now why I did not like him. He has done bad things and he came to us wearing too much of a false smile. He was too kind, too much of everything to be a good man who had lost his way. I was suspicious of him and I was right to be.”
Sigrid cleared her throat. “Mis-it Ha, if you will pardon me for saying so, do you think it wise to go on such a dangerous journey when your daughter is about to give birth?”
The chief smiled, touched Sigrid’s shoulder. “Daughter of Lars, that is why I must go. My daughter’s husband cannot go. He has too much to live for and I have lived a full life. If I do not come back, then it will be as it should be.”
Slocum shook his head. “I appreciate your kind offer, Chief, but I have tracked the man this far alone and I can follow through to the end just fine.”
“The way you did with the grizzly, John?”
For the first time, Slocum saw genuine anger on Sigrid’s face. Before he could respond, she turned away and, parting through the crowd, began untying the loaded sled. Soon she was offered assistance by women and children, who also untied the dogs. The entire mass of chattering people headed toward one of the dugouts, where he assumed they’d find the pregnant girl, the chief’s daughter.
Slocum turned back to the men, a dozen of whom stood before him, with the same puzzled, curious looks on their faces as before.
“What did she mean when she spoke of the grizzly?” said the chief.
The other men, too, gleaned enough of the question that they leaned forward, curious to hear his tale. Slocum nodded and said, “Okay then, might as well tell the entire embarrassing tale.”
And he did. They all nodded at the appropriate times, raised their eyebrows in understated surprise when they heard of what Slocum had been sure would be his final memories on earth—the effort of trying to end the bear’s assault by stabbing at it with his Bowie knife.
“And you did end up killing the bear with your knife? That is . . . very good work.” The chief was obviously impressed, and spoke to the men beside him. They nodded back to him and then to Slocum.
He hated to disappoint them, but he had to do it. “No.” He shook his head. “It was Sigrid.” He nodded toward the hut she had disappeared into. “With a Sharps rifle. She shot it and it collapsed on me. The next thing I knew I woke up in her house, all bandaged and tended to by her.”
The chief spoke briefly to his men, gesturing toward Slocum and thrusting his chin toward the hut. They spoke low among themselves for a few moments. Then the chief turned once again to him. “You are a lucky man, John Slocum, to have found such a gift as the daughter of Lars.”
“I know I am. More than you can imagine. She is an amazing woman.”
“Then you also know what she means to us all.”
“I have a pretty good idea of it, yes.”
“Good, then I don’t think I need to say more about that. We will protect her with our lives, you see. And that is why I must go with you.”
Slocum’s confusion must have been apparent on his face, because the chief said, “There is only one way that man can come. And it is down out of the mountains. He cannot get over the mountains the way he thinks. We are able to take care of him here, now that we know what sort of a man he is. We will not offer him any more of our kindness. But there are other ways he could take to come down from where he went.”
The chief’s eyes rose, and Slocum and a few of the other men looked west, toward what looked like a pass in the high peaks. As if to emphasize the danger of what they were looking at, a cold wind sliced at them from the north and made them all hunch under their furs. Slocum bunched the collar of his sheepskin coat tight with a mittened hand.
“If the man comes down the only other way I believe he can, that would bring him down into the valley of the daughter of Lars. And then she would be in danger. This cannot happen.”
“I understand. I do not want that any more than you do. But what makes you think he won’t
be able to make it through that pass up there?”
The chief smiled as if he were looking at a simple child. “That pass is not a pass. Just below where we are now looking is a steep cliff face. The rocks are impossible to climb. And it is rimmed with much snow high up. It is not a good place to be even in the warm time.”
“And in the winter?” said Slocum.
“In the winter, as you call it, that place can be impossible to leave.”
Slocum said nothing, but thought much about what the chief had said. He followed the men to the central fire pit and warmed his hands, eventually taking off his mittens, grateful for the heat.
Finally the chief spoke. “She is angry with you, but you know that.”
Slocum nodded, kept staring at the flames.
“It is because she thinks much of you, John Slocum.”
“And I her. But if that man has cornered himself, I need to get to him before he dies up there. If he figures out a way to come down that other passage you mentioned, the only other way down—and that seems most likely as he knows that this way would only lead him back to you here, people he stole from, then that means he would find his way to Sigrid’s. And that, as you say, cannot happen.”
Barely an hour later found Slocum slipping over his shoulders the straps of a woven pack basket in which he’d transferred a few essential items from his gear. A small, wizened Indian woman had given him a bundle of dried elk and bear meat, for which he was grateful. It smelled quite good and he’d no doubt it would serve him well in the harsh reaches ahead.
He double-checked his knife, his pistols, his ammunition, and lastly, his snowshoes. They were secured tightly to his boots. How long he could wear them he didn’t know, but if Delbert Calkins had worn a similar pair into the mountain pass, then so could he.
Lastly, he slung over his shoulder a borrowed sheath for his rifle. He was afraid the fur-wrapped sling might slide off his sheepskin coat, so he slipped it across his chest, bandolier style. It would be more difficult to grab in that position, but he doubted Delbert was anywhere nearby—at least not for a while yet.