Wilderness Double Edition 13

by David Robbins

  Winona resumed sewing. She was not unduly worried about the wolf. It was unusual for one to venture as close as this one had done, but it had not bothered their horses or the chickens she had acquired a year ago. Wolves generally shunned humans. And they were more apt to be abroad after dark than during the day. So her daughter should be safe.

  The wolf was the farthest thing from little Evelyn’s mind. She was enjoying how sunlight dappled the trail, and how the tall pines on both sides arched so high they seemed to brush the sky.

  If anyone had asked Evelyn what one word best described her outlook on life, she would have said “happy.” She was always happy. Happy she had a wonderful mother and father. Happy they lived in a cozy cabin. Happy their valley teemed with chipmunks and squirrels and birds to amuse and delight her. Happy, most of all, simply to be alive.

  The only complaint Evelyn had with life was that the Great Mystery had seen fit to give her a brother. She would rather have had a sister. She and Zachary were forever squabbling, and had been ever since she was old enough to walk and talk. Her father assured her it was perfectly normal, but that did not make having to put up with Zach any easier.

  Take their last fight, for instance. He had started it. All because she had taken a peek at his silly claw collection and lost one when she’d used it to dig in the dirt. Eagle claws were easy to come by. The Shoshones had enough to fill a bucket. But Zach had ranted and raved, saying she had no business touching his things when he was not there. Why, he’d even had the nerve to accuse her of being a thief! His own sister! Boys could be such pains, but brothers were worst of all.

  At the moment Zach was gone, though, so all was right with the world. Evelyn saw a robin tugging at a big, fat worm, and giggled. She watched a gray squirrel leap from branch to branch at a dizzying height, and marveled that it didn’t fall and break its neck. A chipmunk scolded her from the safety of a boulder, so she stuck her tongue out at it.

  Then Evelyn was at the lake, standing on the shore with the wind whipping her hair. As always, ducks and geese swam gaily about or dived for fish.

  A few gulls winged above, screeching like harpies. She used to feed them crumbs and such until one bit her hand hard enough to break the skin and draw blood. Ever since, they were her least favorite birds. Next to buzzards, of course. Buzzards had never done anything to hurt her; they were just plain ugly.

  Evelyn skipped to the left, to where the first flowers could usually be found. To her utmost joy, some were in bloom. The blue ones. The ones she was named after.

  Blue Flower was her Shoshone name. Everyone in the family had one. Zach was known as Stalking Coyote, which she thought was wrong. He should be called Stalking Skunk. Her father was known far and wide among many tribes as the fearless Grizzly Killer. Everyone said he had killed more of the great bears than any man alive, white or red. It made her proud. She was never afraid when he was around.

  He had been gone, though, since early morning, off looking for that wolf. It had come around again the previous night. At daybreak her father had found its tracks out by the corral. A bad mistake on the wolf’s part. Her pa never let anything hurt the horses. Any painter or bear or other meat-eater that showed too much interest in them usually wound up as a rug or a blanket or something.

  Evelyn clasped a stem to pluck a flower. But she changed her mind. Too few were in bloom yet. She should wait until more were. Turning she watched a duck stretch its wings and shake as if it had the shivers. Animals are so silly. Except for the scary ones.

  Mountain lions terrified her. Once, a big one had attacked her and her mother near that very spot. It had nearly killed them. Now and then she had awful dreams about it. She would see the huge cat slinking toward her, its curved claws digging into the earth. She would see its terrible teeth, and those piercing eyes. And just as it sprang, she would wake up in a sweat, scared out of her wits. On occasion she screamed, waking the whole family. Her ma would comfort her; her pa would make her tea. They never got mad. Zach did, though. He said she was acting “just like a girl.” Well, how else was she supposed to act? She was a girl.

  Boys were so dumb.

  Evelyn strayed eastward along the shore. She liked to find smooth, round stones and skip them on the water. Her brother had taught her how. One of the nicest things he had ever done.

  She found one and threw it. Four skips, and it sank. Hoping to do better, she searched for another, for one that was flatter. The flat stones were always the best. Spotting a likely prospect, she pranced over and bent. Then gasped.

  Imbedded in the soft soil at the lake’s edge were the freshly made tracks of a huge wolf. It had to be the same wolf that had been skulking around their cabin. Evelyn straightened and scoured the forest. The wolf might be watching her at that very moment. She slipped a hand into her leather bag and palmed the pistol.

  A jay was pecking at a pinecone. Several chipmunks were chasing one another. One of the gulls had alighted on the shore not ten feet away and was waiting for a morsel it would never get.

  The wolf could not possibly be nearby, Evelyn decided. When predators were on the prowl, smaller creatures always hid. She picked up the stone, but instead of skipping it on the lake she hurled it at the gull, which took to the air with a squawk.

  Evelyn’s only regret was that she had no friends her own age to play with. Not there in the valley, anyway. Their nearest neighbor was Scott Kendall, who lived with his family about twenty miles to the south. The Kendalls had a girl, Vail Marie, who was a little younger than Evelyn was, and as sweet as peaches. But they did not get to see one another very often.

  Shakespeare McNair lived about thirty miles to the north. Unfortunately, he and his wife did not have any children, and were too old to start having any.

  There was another young couple, a pair her father had saved from hostiles. Nice folks, they had staked out a homestead on the prairie far below. They were planning to have kids, they claimed. But they were taking their sweet time about it. By the time they did, she would be old enough to have some of her own.

  So at times, Evelyn felt quite lonely. Which was why she enjoyed the family’s annual visits to the Shoshones. Each and every summer they would go and live with her mother’s people. The village always teemed with children, and Evelyn had many close friends among them. One girl, Gray Dove, was her best friend in all the world. They always spent hours playing with their dolls or doing other fun things.

  Evelyn was proud of her dolls. Her mother had made them. One was in the likeness of a Shoshone woman; another was a baby in a cradleboard. The last, at Evelyn’s own request, was a trapper, a mountain man just like her pa. Her mother had even added a beard made of horsehair. Evelyn loved to have her dolls do the things her parents did. She would reenact whatever struck her fancy. What made it specially enjoyable was that her doll family, unlike her real one, did not have a boy to always cause trouble.

  Evelyn would never admit it to her brother, but she did love him dearly. She was worried about him, too. Not long ago she had overheard her mother and father talking. They were upset that Zach did not seem to like white people much anymore. Her father, in particular, had been very sad.

  So Evelyn has asked Zach about it. He’d told her that he was tired of whites always hating him for no reason. She’d come right out and said he was all wrong, that she had never seen whites acting that way. Zach had replied that she was too young to understand, but that one day she would, and on that day he would feel sorry for her. Why had he said such a strange thing?

  Evelyn roved further along the lake. She was feeling brave. She could still see the trail to the cabin, and she still held her pistol. Her very own pistol. It had been one of the proudest days of her life when her folks had given it to her. As her pa had put it, “We trust you enough to know you will use it wisely.”

  Naturally, Zach had laughed and said she would probably blow her foot off. It was too bad she couldn’t shoot him.

  A shriek in the trees startled her. A red
headed woodpecker had taken wing, as if spooked. Evelyn saw it streak off, then saw a dark shape moving through the brush under the tree in which the woodpecker had been. Her breath caught in her throat. Whatever it was, it stood as high as she was.

  Turning, Evelyn hurried toward the trail. The creature turned also, and shadowed her. When she went faster, it did. Her skin prickled as if from a heat rash, and fear sprouted, numbing her.

  She was being stalked!

  He was a big man with shoulders wider than most, his powerful frame rippling with corded muscle. Black hair and a black beard framed a rugged face, a face that had known much hardship, yet one that could radiate much softness. Scars from past battles with beasts and bestial men showed that here was someone to be reckoned with. Buckskins clothed him; knee-high moccasins covered his feet. An ammo pouch and powder horn were slanted crosswise across his chest. Matching pistols adorned his waist. In his right hand was a Hawken, and on the stock was a brass plate bearing an inscription: “From Samuel Hawken to his good friend, Nathaniel King. The Year of Our Lord 1832.”

  Nate King had many friends. Among the trapping fraternity he was as highly regarded as Jim Bridger and Joseph Walker. Like Bridger, he was always ready to lend a hand to those in need. Like Walker, he was one of the few mountaineers to have trekked all the way to the Pacific Ocean and back.

  Among the Shoshones, the Crows, and the Flatheads, Nate King was as highly regarded as their most famed warriors. The exploits of Grizzly Killer were told and retold around campfires far and wide. Since he always talked with a straight tongue, and since he always treated all Indians as equals and not as inferiors, he had earned their highest and deepest respect.

  Among the Blackfeet, the Piegans, and the Bloods he was also held in respect, but for an entirely different reason. He was their enemy, their mightiest adversary, the one white they had tried to slay again and again. They believed that the greatness of a people could be measured by the greatness of their enemies, so Nate King’s greatness added luster to their own. The warrior who finally claimed his scalp would live in legend forever.

  Now, on this brightly sunny afternoon, the man known as Grizzly Killer paused and knit his brow in deep thought. For the better part of the day he had been tracking the lone wolf that had taken a strange interest in his homestead. It had been two weeks since the first tracks appeared, down by the lake. He had not thought much of it at the time. Wolves passed through the valley routinely. So did grizzlies and cougars and wolverines. So long as they were only passing through, he didn’t mind. It was when they lingered, when they developed a craving for horseflesh or posed a threat to his loved ones, that Nate either chased them off or shot them dead.

  Life in the wilderness was not like life in the cities. Take New York City, where Nate had been born and raised. There, the worst a man had to worry about were footpads and 1863 robbers. And if he avoided the parts of the city where the ruffians were common, even they posed little danger. A man need not go around armed. He could rely on the constables to deal with the riffraff.

  How different the untamed mountains were. Here, men and women alike had to be on their guard every minute of every day. Anyone who went around unarmed was asking for an early grave.

  Footpads and robbers would be considered tame perils in comparison to fierce carnivores and war parties.

  Nate did not mind having to take precautions. Being a walking armory had become second nature to him. And he had become accustomed to the stress of always worrying whether his loved ones would make it through each day. Even so, at times it got to him. At times he wondered if all of them would be better off moving back East, where they could live to ripe old ages.

  Nate would never forget the first time he’d mentioned it to his wife. Winona had studied him as if to verify he were serious; then she’d done the last thing he’d expected. She’d laughed long and loud. He had not asked why. He’d known she would tell him when she was done, and he’d been right.

  “You would have us live like prairie dogs?”

  “Prairie dogs?”

  “Yes. They live close together in narrow burrows. The same as those of your kind who live in cities. You have told me how it is. How your father’s lodge almost touched the lodges of others, they were so close. How you could not take ten steps without being on land claimed by someone else.” She had paused. “You said it was like those pickles crammed in a barrel at Bent’s Fort. Remember?”

  Nate had speculated how it was that women could recollect every word a man ever said when a difference of opinion arose, but could never recall their own. “Yes.” Winona had gestured at the crown of snowcapped peaks that encircled their haven, at the azure sky, at the shimmering lake. “Would you have us give up all this to be pickles?”

  So much for Nate’s idea.

  Now he sighed and bent to the wolf tracks again. The beast had circled the cabin several times during the night, then paced near the corral. Oddly enough, the horses had not acted up, not even his black stallion, which he could always count on to raise a ruckus when a predator was in the vicinity.

  From the corral, the tracks had led to the front door. Nate shuddered to think that while his family slept in blissful ignorance, the wolf had been sniffing at the jamb. Why? It was damned peculiar behavior.

  The prints had borne to the north, through a belt of pines to low hills that flanked craggy heights. Nate hoped they would lead to the animal’s lair, but the wolf had climbed to a bench and squatted a while. Perhaps to howl to attract others of its kind, although Nate had a hunch it was a loner, a wolf that shunned the society of other wolves and went on bloody killing sprees. Deranged, they did things no normal wolf would ever do.

  Just as this one was doing.

  Leaving the shelf, the wolf had gone to the southeast. Toward the lake. Nate followed the tracks, noting the wolf’s gait, the depth of the impressions, the shape of the pads. Something about them nagged at the back of his mind. It was a possible he had seen them before. But he had come across so many in his widespread travels, he could not be sure.

  The wolf had held to a steady lope. It had detoured once to investigate a marmot den. And again to inspect an area where a buck and several doe had bedded down.

  Nate’s thoughts wandered.

  Of late he had taken to musing on how he would have turned out if he’d stayed in New York. Would he be a bookkeeper, as he had once planned? Would he, day after day, be slaving away at a tiny desk over a musty ledger? Working himself into an early grave for a miser who wrung every minute’s worth of effort out of employees treated as slaves? If his uncle had never written him and asked him to come West, would he still be languishing in a prison of his own making? Or would he have come to his senses anyway? He liked to believe so. But it might be wishful thinking.

  Sad to say, most folks got into a rut and stayed there. They lived in quiet desperation, forever yearning for a better life, but never able to claw up out of the holes they had fallen into. They accepted what life handed them, without complaint.

  Not Nate. Even as a child, he had dreamed of something better. All those years under his father’s heel had not dimmed the hope that burned at his core. The hope that one day he would live free, to do as he wanted, where he wanted, when he wanted.

  And that day had come. Thanks to his Uncle Zeke, who’d lured him West under false pretenses, he now enjoyed the kind of life he had always dreamed about. No one told him what to do. No one was constantly looking over his shoulder. No one would ever boss him around again.

  Except Winona. But wives didn’t count. They had a God-given right to wrap their husbands around their little fingers. It said so right in Scripture: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh.”

  Shakespeare had reminded him of that one night many years ago. Nate had been peeved because Winona wanted him to build a woodshed at the rear of the cabin. “What’s wrong with just stacking the limbs outside the door, lik
e we’ve always done?” he had complained. “It’ll take me two days to build a shed the size she wants.”

  McNair had taken a twig from his mouth and chuckled. “Then it will be two days well spent. Think how happy she’ll be.”

  “For how long? Until she comes up with something else for me to do. She’s never satisfied.”

  His mentor and dearest friend had shaken his head. “Women never are. Son, you’ve only been married a year. So I reckon you haven’t realized yet that females are the spurs that prod us males into bettering our lives in spite of ourselves.”

  “Balderdash.”

  “You have a noble and true conceit,” McNair had quoted. “Most men do. They think they should be the lords and masters of their castles. But in Proverbs it says, ‘Every wise woman buildeth her house.’ So don’t hold it against Winona if she’s doing what she was created to do.”

  “Oh? And what are men created to do?”

  “Act pigheaded.”

  Nate had laughed.

  “ ‘All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women merely players. They have their exists and their entrances. And one man in his time plays many parts.’ ” Shakespeare had grown wistful. “His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, mewling and puking in his nurse’s arms. Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like a snail unwillingly to school.”

  “Don’t forget the canings,” Nate quipped. “I never will.”

  Shakespeare had gone on, quoting. “Then the lover, sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad made to his mistress’s eyebrow.”

  “Or her heart.”

  “Aye. Then a soldier, full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth.”

  Nate had thought of his grandfather, who had been a ranger during the revolution against the British.