The Scalp Hunters

by David Thompson

  “True,” St. Vrain conceded. “But all I have to do is snap my fingers and I’ll have twenty armed men ready to enforce my edict, along with a large number of our Indian friends.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “Yes.”

  The man’s bluntness rankled. Venom wasn’t used to being treated as if he was of no account. “I should gut you where you stand.”

  “You won’t find it easy. And keep in mind that if you try, you and your cutthroats won’t make it out the gate alive.”

  The hell of it was, Venom was forced to back down. St. Vrain’s men were a salty bunch, and the Indians all thought highly of him. “Listen. I’m not after scalps. We’re here to buy grub and tobacco and whatnot. Then we’ll be on our way.”

  St. Vrain turned to go. “Remember what I told you about the fifty-mile limit. Word will get back to me if you don’t heed. You might think you can lift a few scalps and get clean away, but how long would you last with a five-hundred-dollar bounty on your own hair?”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “Try me and find out.” St. Vrain walked to the stable door and turned. “Some of us, Mr. Venom, happen to like the Indians. We regard them as human beings. One of my partners, William Bent, is married to a Cheyenne. All he has to do is get word to them and every warrior in the tribe will descend upon you and do what should have been done years ago.”

  On that sour note, their talk had ended. Just thinking about it left a bitter taste in Venom’s mouth.

  A shout brought him out of his reverie.

  “Here come the Kyler twins! And Rubicon is with them!”

  To say Venom was surprised was an understatement. He contained his anger as the rest of his men converged, and when the twins and the black man drew rein, he jabbed a finger at Rubicon. “What the hell are you doing here? I thought I told you to track those Arapaho bucks.”

  “I did,” Rubicon said, his face alight with suppressed excitement. “I killed one and took his hair and was saving the other one for you, like you wanted. But then some others came along.”

  “Other Arapahos?”

  “No. Indians, the likes of which I’ve never seen, all of them wearing green buckskins.”

  “The deuce you say.”

  “A whole family, from what I could make out, five in all.”

  “This gets more interesting by the moment.”

  “There’s a mother and a couple of girls. One of them is almost full grown and as pretty as can be.”

  “Well, now.” Venom grinned.

  “There’s more. I’ve saved the best for last.”

  “Spit it out, damn you. What could be better than five scalps and some fun, besides?”

  “There’s a white girl with them.”

  Venom’s grin widened. “Did you hear him, boys? Christmas has come early this year.”

  Chapter Eight

  They headed west as fast they could without riding their horses into the ground. To the west were the mountains. To the west was King Valley and safety. Or so Evelyn hoped. The problem was getting there. Even riding hard, it would take seven to eight days to reach the foothills and another ten days to reach home.

  It was simply too far.

  Evelyn realized that if the scalp hunters came after them, they were as good as caught. Waku and his family had never sat on a horse until recently. They were middling riders, and their lack of experience would do them in. She could see the strain beginning to tell already, and they hadn’t been underway more than a few hours. Dega was doing well enough, but then he’d done a lot of riding with her. Teni did pretty well, too, but Tihi and the youngest, Miki, and Waku, himself, had yet to learn how to sit a horse so that a long, hard ride didn’t set their leg muscles to cramping and their insides to feeling as if they had been tossed around in a tornado.

  Plenty Elk rode the best of them all. He impressed Evelyn. She evidently impressed him, too, because at one point, when they stopped to rest, he signed that she was a good rider. She thanked him for the compliment and turned to see Dega watching, his expression peculiar.

  They pushed on until twilight and made camp in a basin where the glow of their fire wouldn’t give them away and they were sheltered from the night wind. Thanks to their water skin and plenty of jerky and pemmican they didn’t want for drink or food.

  The young Arapaho got the fire going, using buffalo droppings for fuel. She vividly remembered the time her mother took her to visit the Shoshones and her uncle, Touch the Clouds, gathered buffalo chips for a fire. She’d refused to sit near it because she was sure the stink would make her sick. Her mother and her uncle humored her, but when the cold got to her, she came and sat with them, and discovered, to her amazement, that the odor was more like that of a musty old rug than the foul reek she’d expected.

  Now, Evelyn hunkered and held her hands out to the dancing flames. She liked the warmth on her palms.

  Across from her, Waku moved his legs and winced.

  “You’re hurting, aren’t you?”

  “Some, yes,” Waku acknowledged.

  “You’ll hurt worse tomorrow night,” Evelyn predicted. “You’re just not used to the kind of riding we have to do.”

  Waku stretched and winced again. “Are you sure they will come, these scalp men?”

  “My pa told me about scalp hunters. He says there’s not a shred of virtue in any of them. They kill a person and don’t bat an eye. Old, young, male, female, human life means nothing. All they care about is money.” Evelyn listened to the yip of a coyote. “I don’t know how much they get for a scalp. But you can bet it’s enough to make what they do worth it to them, even with the risks. You and your family are money in their pokes. So, yes, I think they’ll come after us.”

  Waku gazed at his loved ones. Once again they were in danger. He missed the old times, before the massacre, before they were forced to flee, back when his world was peaceful and orderly and his family wasn’t constantly in danger.

  Dega was listening intently. “These scalp men come, we fight.” He would die rather than let Evelyn or his family be harmed.

  Evelyn wanted to avoid a clash if she could help it. They were bound to be outnumbered. The scalp hunters would be better armed, too, with rifles and pistols for every man.

  Resting her chin on her knees, Evelyn wrapped her arms around her legs and contemplated how in God’s name she could save her friends. It seemed hopeless. Here they were, surrounded by miles and miles of open prairie. There was nowhere to hide. There was no way to conceal their trail. The scalp hunters would track them and kill them, and that would be that.

  For a few moments Evelyn hung on the cusp of despair. But then something her pa had been drumming into her since she was a sprout took root. “Never give up,” he’d often said. “Kings aren’t quitters. When the going gets tough, we do what we have to.”

  Evelyn had more of her pa in her than she imagined. She refused to give up. She refused to let the scalp hunters kill her friends. But how to stop them when they were seasoned slayers while she was what some would call a slip of a girl and her friends were the most peaceable people on earth?

  As her pa would say, where there was a will, there was a way.

  Evelyn raised her head and peered into the night. Yes, they were in the middle of the prairie, but the prairie didn’t lack for cover. There were rolling hills and washes and gullies and tracts of woodland. There were streams and a few rivers. They must use the land to its best advantage.

  Dega had been noting her every expression, and at the look on her face he said, “Evelyn?”

  “Yes?”

  “What you think about?”

  “How to win?”

  “Win?” Dega recalled that to win was the purpose of a game called checkers she had been trying to teach him.

  “How to keep you and your family breathing. We have to make it cost the scalp hunters more than you are worth so they’ll give up and leave us be.” Evelyn gnawed her lower lip. “Either that, or we have
to kill every last one of the buzzards.”

  “Scalp men are birds?”

  Evelyn laughed. She had to remember that he took her every word literally. “Not the way you mean, no. When a white says someone is a buzzard, it means they are no account.”

  Dega tried to make sense of it. “Buzzard is same as vulture, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Vultures eat dead things. That what they do. That their…” Dega struggled for the right white word. “…purpose.” He beamed, pleased with himself.

  “Yes, that’s true, too.”

  “How that be bad?”

  “It isn’t. It’s the nature of things.”

  “Then how scalp hunters same as vultures?”

  Evelyn wrestled with her wits to get it across. “A lot of whites don’t like buzzards. Same as they don’t like skunks. So when they don’t like someone, whites call that person a buzzard or a polecat.”

  “Why whites no like vultures?”

  “Because they eat carrion. Sorry, they eat the flesh of dead things.”

  “But that what vultures do.”

  “As you said, it’s their purpose, yes.”

  Dega scrunched up his face in annoyance at his failure to understand. “So white people not like vulture to be vulture?”

  “It’s the eating of dead things. The notion makes white people sick to their stomachs. Besides which, buzzards are ugly as sin.”

  Dega was on the verge of a headache. Vultures couldn’t help doing what they did. It was their nature. As for being ugly, all living things were of Manitoa, each according to their own kind, and had a beauty in their own right. He’d always thought that a vulture in flight was a noble sight. Now Evelyn was saying whites thought vultures were ugly. “I be a poor white.”

  “How’s that again?”

  “Whites not think like Nansusequa. Whites think white. I try but not think same.”

  “Well, of course, silly,” Evelyn said. “You have to be you. Just as I have to be me. That doesn’t mean we can’t have a meeting of the minds, now does it?”

  Dega was ready to scream from confusion. She had just asked him a question and he had no idea what she had asked. She was right that he had to be him, but then, who else would he be? And she was right that she had to be her, but if she were someone else, she wouldn’t be Evelyn. And if he was him and she was her, how were their minds to meet? He pressed his palms to his temple.

  “Something the matter?”

  “My head hurt from too much think.”

  “You try too hard. Things will come to you naturally if you let them. All in good time, as us whites like to say.”

  Dega refused to give up. “How minds meet?”

  “Oh. When two people who don’t see eye to eye work things out so they do see eye to eye, we call that a meeting of the minds.”

  His despair mounting, Dega almost groaned out loud. Somehow they had gone from minds to eyes and back again. Here he wanted her to be proud of how well he talked, but again and again he became mired in confusion. Part of the problem was that he couldn’t grasp the nuances of the white tongue.

  “Don’t look so glum. You’re doing fine. My pa says that when he first met my ma, they had to communicate by sign for the longest time. She picked up his tongue quick, but he had to work hard at learning Shoshone.”

  The mention of sign caused Dega to glance at the Arapaho, who was staring sadly into the flames. Dega imagined he was thinking of the friends he had lost. Dega should feel sympathy, but he felt something else. “Think maybe I learn sign talk quick.”

  “I’ll teach you if you want, but it might be better to stick with English until you get that down.”

  Dega looked across the fire, into her eyes. “You like him?”

  “Who?”

  Dega nodded at the Arapaho.

  “He’s nice enough,” Evelyn allowed. She remembered the look Dega had given her earlier, and her intuition flared. “Why do you ask? You’re not jealous, are you?”

  “What be jealous?”

  Evelyn hesitated. He might take it the wrong way. “Jealous is when you like someone and don’t want anyone else to like them.”

  “No. I not jealous.” Dega wasn’t being honest. He had felt a twinge of…something…when she was signing to Plenty Elk. Something he never felt before, something raw and hot and disturbing.

  “Oh.” Evelyn was disappointed.

  Waku had been listening with keen interest without being obvious he was listening. His wife’s comments had kindled his curiosity. As near as he could make out, though, his son and Evelyn King did not act as he and Tihi did when they courted. If they were in love, they were hiding it, even from themselves. Yet there was no denying the looks they gave each other, usually when the other wasn’t looking. As he saw it, it would be a good while before they grew close enough to contemplate sharing the same lodge—his, or any other.

  From out of the dark came a grunt.

  Evelyn leaped to her feet with her Hawken in her hands. “That was a bear.” She hoped a black bear and not a grizzly. The latter was much more likely to attack.

  Dega rose, too, and notched an arrow to his bow. “Fire keep bear away.”

  “Not a griz. Not if it’s hungry enough.”

  Everyone listened and waited in tense expectation. The grunt was repeated, only closer.

  Turning, Evelyn saw a pair of glowing eyes. They were almost on a level with her own. “Don’t anyone do anything rash,” she whispered. “Dega, translate for your mother and sisters.”

  Eager to please her, Dega did.

  Little Miki edged over to Tihi and clasped her arm. “Mother?”

  “Be still and it will go away.”

  Plenty Elk stood and faced the bear. Raising his arms above his head, he let out with a loud screech.

  Evelyn jerked the Hawken to her shoulder. She had her thumb on the hammer, ready to curl it back, but the bear wheeled and melted into the darkness with a parting snort. Forgetting herself, she said to the young warrior, “That was a darned fool stunt. You could have gotten us killed.”

  Plenty Elk lowered his arms. ‘Question. What you speak?’

  Leaning the Hawken against her leg, Evelyn signed, ‘You maybe make bear mad. Bear attack.’

  ‘Bear no like war cry. Bear always go.’

  Not always, but Evelyn let it drop. She added chips to the fire so the flames blazed brighter, then scanned the night for glowing eyes. Only when she was convinced the monster had left did she sit back down, cross-legged, with the Hawken in her lap. She wouldn’t be able to sleep for hours now. “Stupid bear,” she muttered.

  “Why people no be nice?” Dega asked.

  Coming as it did out of the blue, the question mystified Evelyn. “Where did that come from?”

  “Nice come from heart.”

  “No, I mean, why did you ask?”

  “White men who kill my people. Scalp men who take hair for money. Other bad men. Why people no be nice?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  “I just do ask.”

  Evelyn chuckled. “I’ve wondered the same thing since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. The answer I came up with is that some people are naturally nice and some aren’t.”

  “That all?”

  “What more do you need?”

  “Scalp men have hearts with no nice.”

  “I couldn’t have put it better, myself. So when the time comes, don’t hold back. It will be them or us.”

  Dega stared at his mother and father and sisters. “I no want it be us.” He smiled. “I no want it be you.”

  Evelyn King grew warm all over.

  Chapter Nine

  The scalp hunters were in good spirits. The scent of prey was in the wind and the only thing they liked more than the hunt was spending the money they made from scalping the hunted.

  Venom had sent Rubicon on ahead to track. As usual, his men were strung out behind him in a line. They raised less dust that way. When one of his me
n came up beside him he didn’t look to see who it was. He knew. “Keep this up and I’ll get good and mad.”

  “It’s about the girl,” Logan said.

  “Which girl? There are two red and one white.”

  “The white girl,” Logan amended. He hesitated, cleared his throat, and declared, “I want her.”

  “You haven’t even set eyes on her yet.”

  “I still want her.”

  “Do you, now?” Venom didn’t keep the scorn out of his voice. “You must be confused. The rule has always been that each of us gets to keep the scalps of the redskins we kill. When it comes to other spoils, it’s share and share alike.”

  “You can make an exception if you want.”

  “I don’t want,” Venom said.

  Logan frowned and shifted in his saddle. “Damn it. Why not? I’ll pay the others a share of my scalp money if that’s what will persuade you.”

  “You’d do that?”

  “I need a woman. I need a woman bad. You wouldn’t understand because you don’t get the itch like I do.”

  “What else?” Venom prompted.

  “How do you mean?”

  Venom almost struck him. “You must take me for a fool. What’s the real reason you want this white girl when you could have the Injun girls or their mother?”

  Logan looked away. “You think you have me figured out.”

  “Go annoy someone else.” Venom went to lift his reins.

  “All right, all right.” Logan swore, then said, “I want her because she’s white. I don’t often get to do white girls, not how I like to do them, anyhow. It’d get me strung up faster than anything.”

  “So you reckon to have this white girl all to yourself? Take your sweet time doing those awful things you do?”

  “You’re a fine one to talk.”

  Venom enjoyed baiting him. “The answer is still no.”

  Logan scowled and opened his mouth but closed it again and visibly controlled himself. “I’m asking you nice.”

  “Are you now?” Venom smirked. “Have I ever told you how I feel about nice? Nice is for the weak. Nice is for the puny. Nice is for those too soft to take what they want. So they go around being nice to everybody and hope to get it that way.”