“‘Scoffs and scorns and contumelious taunts,’“ Shakespeare quoted. “I should be angry with you if the time were convenient.”
“Well?”
“Well what? Yes, we have storms, and yes, we have high winds. And soon we will have our very own steeple.”
Blue Water Woman refused to let him have the final say. “If you were any more pigheaded, you would have a snout and a curly tail.”
Shakespeare went to push to his feet and nearly pitched over the edge. Squatting back down, he responded, “Dwell I but in the suburbs of your good pleasure? Why must you dam the flow of my stream?”
“Oh my,” Blue Water Woman said, and giggled.
At that, Nate laughed.
“Enough of this tomfoolery,” Shakespeare snapped. “Go away, wench. We have a steeple and stairs to build and the day is wasting.”
Blue Water Woman’s grin evaporated. “What was that? No one said anything about stairs.”
“How do you expect us to get up to the steeple? We can’t use a ladder all the time,” Shakespeare said, as he clambered higher to resume work.
“Will these stairs be inside the cabin or outside the cabin?”
“What difference does it make?”
“If they are inside, that would mean you intend to put a hole in my roof. And I will shoot you before I let that happen.”
“Ye gods, woman. You could nitpick a man to death, even beyond the grave. But rest easy. The stairs will be outside, on the west end of the cabin, so we do not disturb you with our comings and goings.” Shakespeare bestowed a smirk on her. “See? I can be considerate, your broadsides to the contrary.”
“I think I will go visit Winona,” Blue Water Woman announced. “I need a drink and we are out of brandy.”
“Good riddance to you and small pox,” Shakespeare shot back. “Stay most of the day if you want, and when you ride home you can admire your new steeple. It will be the envy of the neighborhood.”
“I have always suspected it, but now I am sure. You are a lunatic.” Blue Water Woman sniffed and raised her chin high. “I must get my shawl.” She marched into the cabin.
“Women!” Shakespeare declared. “If God were not drunk when He created them, then He is the lunatic.”
Nate lifted planks and carried them toward the ladder. “Weren’t you a little hard on her?”
“Do you see these claw marks?” Shakespeare touched his perfectly fine neck. “She came near to drawing blood. I am lucky to be alive.”
“You are lucky she puts up with you.”
Shakespeare aligned a nail and raised the hammer, then glanced down at Nate. “The Bard had it right when it came to women. We should all do as he says and we will have a lot less indigestion.”
“What did he say?”
“‘Woo her, wed her, bed her, then rid the house of her.’“
Winona King was outside her cabin skinning a rabbit. She had caught it in a snare that morning, and by evening it would be chopped into bite-sized morsels and simmering in a stew. She loved rabbit stew. When she was little her mother had made it now and again, but nowhere near enough to suit her. Buffalo meat was their staple. They also ate venison a lot. Rabbit and other small game was resorted to only when buffalo and deer meat were not to be had.
Laying the rabbit on its back, Winona made slits down its hind legs. She peeled back the hide, slicing ligaments and muscle and scraping as required, careful to keep the edge of the knife toward the body, until she had the hide bunched around the rabbit’s neck. The hide would make fine trim for a couple of her buckskin dresses.
Absorbed in her work, Winona was startled when a shadow fell across her. Her husband had gone off earlier, and her daughter was across the lake visiting Degamawaku’s family.
Winona spun, her hand dropping to one of the pistols wedged under the leather belt she wore over her dress. Hostile red men and renegade whites roamed the mountains, and meat-eaters were abundant. Perils were so commonplace that she never ventured outside the cabin unarmed. Bitter experience had taught her the folly of doing so.
But now, about to unlimber a flintlock, Winona stopped with it half-drawn, and smiled.
“Tsaangu beaichehku,” Blue Water Woman said.
“Tsaangu beaichehku,” Winona said, which was Shoshone for ‘Good morning.’ While her friend knew some of her tongue and she knew some Salish, they usually used the language both knew almost as well as each knew her own. Decades of living under the same roof with a white man had made them fluent in the white tongue, so much so that both their husbands liked to boast they spoke English better than most whites. “This is a pleasant surprise.”
“I had to get away for a while,” Blue Water Woman said. “I hope you do not mind that I came here.”
“Mind?” Winona said, and laughed. “You are the sister I never had. Why would I mind?”
Blue Water Woman folded her arms across her bosom and poked the ground with the toe of a moccasin. “It is that husband of mine. There are times when I want to pull out my hair.”
“What has he done now?” Winona asked.
“You have not heard?” Blue Water Woman said. “He and your husband are building a steeple on our cabin.”
“Nate said that he was going over to help Shakespeare with a project, but he did not …” Winona paused and blinked. “Did you say a steeple?”
“Yes. You have been east of the Mississippi River. You have seen the houses of worship, as whites call them, with the big bells they ring when it is time for people to come and pray and sing?”
“Their churches, yes.”
“I am going to have a steeple without the church.”
It made no sense to Winona. Granted, her husband was deeply religious. In the evenings, after supper, she would sit in the rocking chair and sew or knit while he would be at the table reading, and often the book he read from was the Bible. She once asked Nate if he missed going to services, and he said that while it would be nice to mix with people who shared his beliefs, his body was his temple, and the congregation consisted of him and God. He then read a passage from Scripture to that effect.
“I should be thankful,” Blue Water Woman was saying, “that my idiot of a husband is not putting a bell in our steeple, or I would need to keep my ears plugged with wax.”
“But why a steeple?”
“So he can keep watch for the water devil.”
Winona started to laugh but caught herself. “You are serious?”
“I am afraid so.” Blue Water Woman sighed. “If I live a thousand winters, I will never understand him.”
“It is men,” Winona said. “They do not think like we do.”
“It is Shakespeare,” Blue Water Woman replied. “He does not think like anyone.”
Winona grinned.
“Show me one other white who spends every spare minute reading William Shakespeare or quotes him every time he opens his mouth. It is ridiculous.”
“Oh my,” Winona said. “If your husband ever heard you say that, he would throw a fit.”
“I may throw one myself when I get home and see their steeple,” Blue Water Woman said. “That is my man for you. Once he sets his mind to something, he does not rest until he has done what he set out to do. And now he has taken it into his head to go after the water devil.”
“You are worried.”
“I am glad Nate is helping. Shakespeare needs someone with common sense to keep an eye on him.”
Ever sensitive to her friend’s moods, Winona remarked, “But it is not his age that is bothering you, is it?”
“No,” Blue Water Woman admitted. She gazed out over the water and bit her lower lip. “It is the water devil.”
“I am sure Nate and Shakespeare will be careful,” Winona sought to soothe her.
“Careful is not always enough. Some things are better left alone. A grizzly in its den. An eagle in its nest. A creature as big as a horse that lives in the water.”
“In the water, yes. So long as Nate
and Shakespeare stay on land, they will be safe.”
“So long as they stay on land,” Blue Water Woman echoed.
Steeple Knight
Shakespeare McNair would never admit it to his wife, but to him this was great fun.
Shakespeare always liked a good challenge. Throughout his life, he overcame one challenge after another and enjoyed each triumph. Add to that his love of a mystery and the fact he got to spend a lot of time in the company of the man he regarded as the son he never had, and he had a new spring in his step and a perpetual boyish grin on his wrinkled and weathered face—when he was not around Blue Water Woman.
He was not trying to deceive her in any way. He loved that woman with every particle of his being. It was just that she would never understand what the mystery of the creature in the lake meant to him.
In a way, the mystery was like that of the mountains themselves when Shakespeare first came to the Rockies all those decades ago. He was one of the first, if not the first, to boldly go where no white man had gone before: to venture east of the mighty Mississippi River into the unknown realm beyond.
Often, Shakespeare relived those wonderful days in his mind’s eye. He saw again his first grizzly, witnessed the passage of his first nigh-endless herd of buffalo, set eyes again for the first time on the towering ramparts that would become his home for the rest of his life.
The thing in the lake was another first. It was new; it was different; it was unknown. Shakespeare had heard all the Indians’ accounts. But he had never beheld any of the creatures that spawned those accounts. Now he had his chance.
Shakespeare was not one of those whites who doubted everything Indians said on general principle. Some whites refused to believe anything Indians told them simply because they were Indians. A prominent man of the cloth had been quoted in the newspapers as stating that those of the red race were inveterate heathens and liars. Heathens, because they did not believe in the white God. Liars, because anyone who did not believe in the white God was incapable of being true in anything.
Shakespeare had chuckled when he read it. It was just plain silly. From his own experience, Shakespeare knew that most Indians viewed with low regard anyone who talked with two tongues. Honesty and truthfulness were highly esteemed.
So when Indians told Shakespeare about the early times, about the days when the land was overrun by many strange and fearsome beasts, he listened. He had poked fun at Blue Water Woman, but he did not doubt for a minute that her tribe, and many others, believed their legends to be true, and every legend had its kernel of truth.
King Valley, as Shakespeare did not mind calling it, since Nate was the one who came up with the idea of moving there, had long been known as bad medicine by the Crows and the Utes. The valley was a throwback to the old times. It was said that something lived up near the glacier that fed runoff into the lake. It was also whispered that the lake itself was the haunt of something. Both somethings were said to be from the time long ago, and best avoided.
Now, after repeated puzzling and bizarre incidents, Shakespeare would very much like to know what the something in the lake was.
For more than a week, he and Nate kept watch from the steeple every chance they got, sometimes together, sometimes singly. They had made a bench where they could sit in relative comfort and scan the lake through Nate’s spyglass.
Shakespeare was proud of the steeple. It had taken a lot of sweat to build. They only had enough planks to make it ten feet high, but combined with the height of the cabin, their new vantage afforded them a sweeping view of the lake, which was exactly what they needed.
The morning after they built it, Shakespeare took Blue Water Woman up the stairs and bid her sit on the seat and admire the view. Not only could they see more of the lake, but more of the valley, too.
Breathtaking to behold, the glory of creation unfolded before them in all its spectacular splendor.
Blue Water Woman sat and gazed quietly to the east, north, west, and south. Then she smiled in that mild manner she had, and said, “I like this. Your steeple is still silly, but I like this.”
Shakespeare made a show of clearing his throat. “You made all that fuss for nothing.”
“This will be a good place to come and sip tea when I want to get away from you.”
Shakespeare started to laugh, then caught himself, and thought it prudent to show some indignation. “‘Shall quips and sentences and paper bullets of the brain awe a man from the career of his humor?’“
“Do you know,” Blue Water Woman said, “that I have heard there are wives whose husbands talk plainly and simply and do not quote an old, moldy book every time they open their mouth?”
“My book is not moldy!” Shakespeare took immediate offense. “This is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Blue Water Woman smiled sweetly. “That is exactly my point.”
Shakespeare could not help it; he cackled. She was the only woman he had ever met who could hold her own in banter that most women would not abide and some could not understand. The Bard, after all, was an acquired taste. Shakespeare liked to think of old William S’s works as a fine wine distilled from the vineyard of the human condition. All there was to know, for those who wanted to know, could be found in the Bard’s recitals of humanity’s foibles and passions.
It was one of Shakespeare’s great regrets that he had never made it to England. A visit to the Bard’s own country would be heaven. He had it on reliable authority that people over there, by and large, adored the playwright, and read his plays for the pleasure of the reading. On the American side of the pond, William S had his partisans, but it was nothing like in Britain.
At this moment, though, seated on the bench in the steeple with the sun poised on the western brink of the world, Shakespeare was not thinking of the genius from Avon. He was scanning the lake from end to end through the spyglass. He saw fish jump. He saw ducks. He saw geese. He saw gulls. He saw a pair of red hawks. At one point a golden eagle dived and snared a fish in its great talons, then took wing again, flapping powerfully to gain altitude.
It was the eighth evening after the steeple’s completion. Shakespeare had spent every minute he could on the lookout and not seen any sign of his quarry. He had begun to think that maybe his wife was right and he had gone to a lot of trouble for nothing, that perhaps their sightings of the thing would be no more frequent than before.
Then, as he was sweeping the spyglass from west to east, a tingle of excitement coursed through him.
The wind was still, the lake a mirror, its surface as calm as calm could be. But suddenly, out toward the middle, the water swelled upward as if something were pushing it from below. Shakespeare watched in fascination as the swell moved to the west, leaving broad ripples in its wake.
“I’ve found you, by God!” Shakespeare exclaimed. He waited with bated breath for the thing to show itself, but all he saw was the swell. After sixty or seventy feet it grew smaller and smaller until finally the lake’s surface was as flat and smooth as a mirror again.
“Damn!” Shakespeare grumbled. What were they to do if the thing never showed itself? Some fish, after all, rarely left the depths, and when they did, they never broke the surface, but swam below it where searching eyes could not see them.
Still, Shakespeare was hopeful. He related his sighting to Nate the next day in the steeple as they sat talking over the best way to see the thing up close.
“The only way is to be out on the water when the creature comes up,” Shakespeare said.
“It is too bad you and I do not have a canoe,” Nate remarked. They rarely traveled by water, so he saw no need for one.
“Yes, that is too bad,” Shakespeare agreed, and smiled a devious smile. “But we know someone who does.”
The Nansusequas loved their new home. The tall trees, which had never been scarred by an axe, reminded them of the dense eastern woodland from which they came. The Nansusequa had always dwelled in the deep w
oods; it was why they called themselves the People of the Forest.
Only five escaped the massacre of their tribe. Wakumassee, the father, and Tihikanima, the mother, and their three children: Degamawaku, their son, who had been seeing a lot of Evelyn King; Tenikawaku, their oldest daughter; and Mikikawaku, their youngest.
The family always wore green. Their buckskins, their blankets, their robes—everything they owned was dyed green out of reverence for the source of the green world in which the Nansusequa lived. That Which Was In All Things, they called it, or simply the Manitoa.
On this particular morning, Wakumassee was outside their Great Lodge mending a fishing net when a clatter of hooves heralded the arrival of Shakespeare McNair on his white mare.
Waku beamed and put down the net to greet his visitor. He owed Nate King and McNair a debt impossible to repay. They had taken his family in when all was lost. They had permitted him and his loved ones to stay in the valley, safe from the whites who had slaughtered the rest of their kind.
“Welcome, friend!” Waku said. His English was not all that good, but he was working hard to master the tongue.
“‘Men of peace, well encountered!’“ Shakespeare declared, and warmly clapped him on the shoulders.
“Eh?” Wakumassee tried to sort out the words to make sense of the meaning. McNair was forever saying things that confused him. He had mentioned it once to Nate King and Nate had laughed and said not to worry, that NcNair said a lot of things that confused him, too.
“A hearty good morning to you, sirrah,” Shakespeare elaborated. He regarded the net with interest. “I say. I didn’t know you had one of those.”
“We like to fish,” Waku responded, proud he had said it as it should be said.
“I thought you were hunters.”
“Hunt too,” Waku said. He gestured to the east. “We fish much in rivers.” He paused. “I say that right?”
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