Nate remembered a story he heard about how Ryker lost his ear. “I checked our back trail.”
“You don’t say.” Ryker smirked. “That isn’t what Tyne told me. She says you ran into some Indians and gave them a lock of her hair. Her mother is fit to be tied.”
“I’ll explain to Erleen and Peter when we stop for the night.”
“What I would like to know,” Ryker said much too casually, “is which tribe they belonged to.”
“Does it matter?”
“It does Tome. Were they Cheyenne? Nez Percé? Utes? Which?”
“I suspect Tyne already told you.”
Ryker hissed in anger. “You’re damn right she did. They were Blackfeet. And only four bucks.” He jerked on the reins to swing his sorrel back down the mountain. “Take the Woodrows on by your lonesome. I’ll catch up when I can.”
“No you don’t.” Lunging, Nate grabbed the sorrel’s bridle. “You’re staying with us. They hired you, not me.”
“Let go.” Ryker sought to break away. “I have a score to settle with those sons of bitches.” He went to raise his rifle.
In the blink of an eye Nate had a pistol in his hand. “I am not one for threats. But if you try to ride off, I’ll shoot you out of the saddle. Rile the Blackfeet and the Woodrows might suffer.”
“What about me?” Ryker was livid. “How about my suffering? Who do you think did this?” He snatched off his floppy hat and smacked the jagged scar tissue. “It was Blackfeet. A war party caught me when I was camped near the Missouri River. I thought for sure I was a goner. But do you know what those devils did?” He didn’t wait for Nate to answer. “They made me run a gauntlet. Instead of filling me with arrows and lifting my scalp, they stripped me naked and made me run between two rows of painted bucks armed with war-clubs and knives. Do you have any idea what that is like?”
As a matter of fact, Nate did. But he held his tongue.
“I was never so scared in my life, and I am not ashamed to admit it. There were twenty of them on either side, screeching and whooping and waving their weapons. I didn’t think I would live to reach the end. But when their leader prodded me with a lance, I took off like a spooked rabbit. I held my arms over my head but it didn’t do me much good. I hadn’t gone ten steps when it felt like every bone in my body was broke.” Ryker stopped, and trembled.
“You don’t need to tell me this.”
Ryker didn’t seem to hear him. “And God, the pain! I hurt so bad, it is a wonder I didn’t pass out. Then one of them hit me on the shin and I tripped and fell to my knees. That was when a tomahawk caught me on the side of my head.” Ryker ran his fingers over the hideous scar. “Took off my whole damn ear. But in a way it was a good thing.”
“How could that be good?”
“Because it brought me out of myself. It sank in that I was going to die unless I did something. Something they didn’t expect.” Ryker chuckled a strange sort of chuckle. “I went to my hands and knees, as if I was about to collapse, and they stopped beating on me. Maybe they figured I was done for, what with all the blood and my ear torn off, and all. But I tricked the bastards! I pushed between two of them and lit out of there like my backside was on fire.”
“And you got away,” Nate stated the obvious.
“It wasn’t easy. Some of those bucks were fast, damn fast. But I ran and I ran and somehow or other I outlasted them. They still might have caught me, but I found a hollow tree to hide in. They didn’t think to look in it and I heard them go right on by. I was never so glad of anything in all my born days.”
“You were lucky.” Nate knew of other frontiersmen who hadn’t been. Only three men, as far as he was aware, ever ran a gauntlet and survived. He was one of them.
“Ever since that terrible day, I’ve made it a point to kill every Blackfoot I come across. So far my tally is seven. That doesn’t count the three squaws I caught last winter out gathering firewood—” Ryker stopped.
“You killed women?”
“So what? They were Blackfoot and that was enough.” Ryker glared down the mountain. “Now you want me to let four of those vermin get away? You ask a lot. You and me aren’t even pards.”
“All I care about are the Woodrows,” Nate told him. If Ryker only killed one or two of the Blackfeet, the rest might go fetch friends.
“All right. All right.” Ryker swore. “I gave my word and I took their money so I reckon I have to see it through. But just so you know. I don’t appreciate you keeping it to yourself.” He gigged his sorrel toward the gap but abruptly drew sharp rein. “What the hell? What are you doing there, you old biddy?”
Aunt Aggie came out of the pass. “Watch your mouth, Mr. Ryker. I am a lady and you will treat me as such.”
“And if I don’t?” Ryker taunted.
“I will cut you some night when you are asleep. Cut you down low so that you can forget ever having children.”
“I’m shocked. I thought ladies don’t do things like that.”
“Some ladies have claws.”
Ryker snorted. “As for kids, who wants them? Raising a pack of brats isn’t one of my ambitions.”
“Nice man,” Aunt Aggie said as the frontiersman swung past her and on into the pass.
Nate kneed the bay over. “Did you mean what you said about cutting him?”
“At my age it is a waste of what precious time I have left to squander it saying things I don’t mean.”
“You are a hoot, Aunt Aggie.”
“And you aren’t one of the children, so Aggie will do. Or Agatha if you are of a mind.”
They followed after the rest. She kept glancing at him and cleared her throat but didn’t say anything.
“What?” Nate prompted.
“Tyne told me what you did. I suggested she not tell her parents, but she did anyway. Erleen is fit to scratch your eyes out over that lock of hair. She thinks you had no right.”
A shadow passed over them and Nate glanced up. He glimpsed a bald eagle with its pinions outspread go soaring off on the air currents. “I suppose I would feel the same in her shoes.”
“You had to give them the lock?”
“They wanted all of her.”
“Oh. Damn.”
“Don’t let Ryker hear you swear. He’ll think you are less of a lady than ever.”
Aggie chuckled, then sobered. “Erleen will still be mad. I love my sister dearly, but she can be a lunkhead at times. We’ve never been all that close. It’s the age difference. I am nearly twenty years older than she is.” Aggie chuckled louder. “Erleen was not supposed to happen. Our parents were considerably surprised when our mother found out she had a new loaf of bread in the oven.”
“I have never met a woman who talks like you do.”
“Open and frank? It comes with age. I hate to admit it, but when I was younger I was a lot like Erleen. Stuffy and snooty and convinced I had all the answers. Then I lost my Harold after thirty-eight years of wedlock. My oldest son went off to visit Europe, and stayed. My youngest took up with a woman of loose morals and under her influence wanted nothing more to do with me.” Aunt Aggie sighed. “That was when I woke up. When I realized that not only did I not have the answers, I didn’t even know the right questions.”
“I’m sorry,” Nate said.
Aunt Aggie’s face grew haunted with memories. “It’s not me. It’s life. We get so set in our ways that it never occurs to us that our ways might not be the way things really are. I took it for granted my husband would live as long as I did, and his heart up and gave out. I took it for granted my sons loved me so much they would never up and leave me alone in this world. But that is exactly what they went and did.”
They were well into the pass. Shimmering dust particles, raised by the others, hung suspended like so many tiny fireflies.
“Now I don’t know what to think,” Agatha went on. “Except that I still have my nieces and my nephews. They adore me and I adore them, and I will be there for them when they need me, even if
it kills me. Family is everything.”
Nate studied her. “Is that why you’re here? For Tyne and her sister and brothers?”
“And for Sully. He’s Peter’s brother, but he was as close Tome as if he were my own.” Agatha paused. “Sully always treated me nice. He was quite the backwoodsman, that one. Could live off the land if he had to. He knew all the wild creatures and their habits, and which plants were safe for people to eat.
He told me once that he learned from watching the animals. If a plant was safe for an animal, it was safe for us. Smart of him, don’t you think?”
Nate knew better, but he didn’t interrupt.
“Sully brought me venison from time to time, and we would sit and have wonderfully long talks.” Her lips pinched together. “It worries me that we haven’t heard from him.”
“Peter and Erleen should have come by themselves and left the children home with you.”
“We’re a family. My boys aside, when one of us is in trouble, we do what we can.”
“This isn’t the East.”
“Meaning we don’t know what we have let ourselves in for? But we’ve managed to get this far without mishap.”
“Have you forgotten the Blackfeet? That could have ended badly.” Nate sighed. “It is not the same here as back there. The animals are different. The plants are different. Life is different. Thing are not as tame. They call this the wilderness for a reason. It is wild and dangerous. And unless a person knows exactly what they are doing, their bones will be picked clean by buzzards.”
“My goodness. And I thought I had become a bit of a cynic.”
“I am telling you how it is.” Nate leaned over and touched her arm. “Be extra careful from now on. Keep watch over the children at all times. Once we are over the divide we are in unexplored country. We could run into anything. Anything at all.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“Good.”
“Besides, I thought you said you have been here before. That hardly makes it unexplored.”
“I was through this area once, yes, years ago. A few other whites might have passed through, too. But it’s never been fully explored. It’s as wild as wild can be, and it can bury you.”
Aunt Aggie coughed and then smiled. “I am beginning to understand why Mr. Ryker speaks so highly of you. Your woman—what did you say her name was again, Winona?—is very fortunate to have you for her man.”
The far end of the pass drew near. The others were waiting. Erleen was saying something to Ryker and Ryker didn’t look happy.
“You said Winona is a Shoshone, correct?”
Nate nodded.
“Why did you marry her? Her being an Indian, and all.”
“I never expected a question like that from you.”
“No. Please. Don’t misconstrue. I don’t hate the red race just because they are red, like so many of our kind do.”
“I married Winona because I love her. Because I care for her with all my heart and all my soul. She is the zest in my veins and the spring in my step. You could say she is the very reason I breathe.”
“Oh my. That was practically poetical. I bet you have a work or two by Byron in that library of yours.”
Nate grinned. “As a matter of fact, I do.”
The pass widened, and they were out of it. Below spread a spectacular panorama of peaks and valleys. Mountains so high, they plunged many of the valleys in near perpetual shadow. Mile after wild mile of country left largely untouched by the hand of man since the dawn of creation. The vast unknown, literal and true. Gazing out over it gave Nate King a rare ripple of goose bumps. He couldn’t say why but he felt a sudden unease.
“Your precious Sully couldn’t have picked a more godforsaken spot,” Ryker said to Peter and Erleen.
“He wanted somewhere where there was plenty of game,” Erleen said.
“His own Garden of Eden, as he liked to call it,” Peter added.
Ryker shifted in the saddle toward Nate. “Well, Blackfoot lover? You have been here and I haven’t. Which way? West? Southwest? Northwest? Where is that sandstone cliff Sully mentioned?”
“Southwest,” Nate said after some hesitation.
“Oh, hell. You don’t remember it all that well, do you? We could end up searching for a month of damn Sundays and not find the jackass.”
Erleen bristled. “Mr. Ryker! I will ask you for the final time to curb that cursing of yours. Must I constantly remind you there are children present?”
Ryker gestured at the spectacular sweep of majesty and mystery below the divide. “Lady, do you see that down there? Do you have any idea what we are in for? Because I promise you that before this is done, my cussing will be the least of your worries.”
Nate didn’t say anything. Ryker was right. It could be none of them would get out of there alive.
Horror
One lock was not enough.
Black Elk thought it would be. But after he held the wonderful yellow curls in his hand and felt how soft the hair was and marveled at how the sunlight turned the yellow to gold, he wasn’t content. He wanted more than one lock. He wanted the whole head, and the girl that went with the head.
The others listened to his appeal, but Black Elk could tell Mad Wolf was the only other one as eager to continue tracking the girl. Mad Wolf was always eager to kill whites. Mad Wolf was always eager to kill anything.
“I say we let them go,” Small Otter declared. “They gave you the hair you asked for. To kill them now would be bad medicine.”
“You see bad medicine in everything,” Black Elk said. “If a cloud passes in front of the sun, to you that is bad medicine.”
Mad Wolf and Double Walker smiled.
“And we will not make war on the women,” Black Elk went on. “We will not kill Golden Hair or the old one or the other two. Only the men, so we can take their guns and horses.”
Double Walker said, “And so you can take Golden Hair, as you call her, back to our village. What will Sparrowhawk and your other wives say? You have not asked them if they want to raise this white girl as their own.”
Black Elk grunted. He had four wives. Among the Blackfeet only a poor man had one wife. Warriors rich in horses and possessions had as many wives as they could support. The leader of their band had five. “They are my women. They will do as I say.”
Mad Wolf grinned and said to Double Walker, “He does not want Golden Hair for a daughter. He wants her for a fifth wife.”
“She looks young,” Double Walker said.
“I can wait a few winters.” Black Elk could wait for as long as need be to make her his wife. No one in his band, no one in the entire tribe, had a wife like her. Several warriors had white women in their lodges but none with hair so yellow. Hers was like the sun. She must be a favorite of the sun god, he thought. She would bring good medicine to his lodge and his people. And at night, under the blankets, he could run his fingers through her hair and—he grew warm at the imagining.
Small Otter was speaking. “There is another matter. This Grizzly Killer. His is a name we all have heard. He is white but he is Shoshone. It is said he has killed more of the silver tip bears than any man, white or red. It is said he has counted many coup.”
“Are you afraid?” Mad Wolf sneered.
For a moment Small Otter appeared ready to strike him. Instead he said, “If you truly think I am, we will set all our weapons aside except our knives and you can test my courage.”
It was Black Elk’s turn to grin. With a bow and arrow they were all about equal in skill. Mad Wolf was best with a lance. Double Walker, so big and so strong, was formidable with a war club. But with a knife Small Otter had no peer.
“Do not take me so seriously,” Mad Wolf said. “As for Grizzly Killer, yes, he has counted many coup. They say he has killed Sioux. He has killed our brothers, the Bloods and the Piegans. He has killed Black-feet. He is a great warrior.” His face lit with the passion that inspired him more than any other. “Think of our fame if we
kill him.”
“Think of your fame, you mean,” Double Walker said. “You are the one who wants to count more coup than any Blackfoot who ever lived.”
“I make no secret of that. We are warriors. Warriors kill. The more we kill, the greater we are. I will be the greatest one day. Our children and our grand-children and our grandchildren’s children will sing songs about me.”
“Here he goes again,” Small Otter said.
Black Elk held up a hand. “Enough. If Mad Wolf wants to kill Grizzly Killer, I wish him success. My interest is the girl, Golden Hair. But Mad Wolf and I cannot kill the white Shoshone or steal the white girl alone. Are you with us? Are we together in this?”
Double Walker shook his war club. “I am with you.”
“Good.”
Small Otter scowled. “We have been friends since we were little. We have grown together. We have hunted and played and gone on the war path together. So yes, I am with you. But I want it known I do not think we are doing right. I have a bad feeling.”
“You always have bad feelings,” Mad Wolf said.
Black Elk slung his bow across his back. “Then we are agreed. We must hurry. The whites are making for a pass high up that will take them to the other side of the mountains. But I know another way. A faster way. We can get to the other side ahead of them and catch them unprepared.”
Hurriedly they mounted. With Black Elk in the lead, they rode south along the edge of the forest until they came to a game trail pockmarked by elk and deer tracks. It led up a long slope to a wall of rock well below the summit. The wall had a break in it, a break barely wide enough for a horse, but it brought them to the other side of the mountain well before the whites could hope to make it through the high pass.
Drawing rein, the four Blackfeet surveyed the maze of peaks and shadowed valleys. All was deathly still, even the wind. Not so much as the chirp of a bird reached their ears.
“I do not like this country,” Small Otter said.
“There must be much game,” Double Walker remarked.
“And plenty of ghosts.”
Mad Wolf rolled his eyes. “Not that again.”
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