.45-Caliber Firebrand

by Peter Brandvold

  20

  “CRISTO!” CAMILLA SAID over Cuno’s right shoulder. “De que es una oso grande!”

  Cuno studied the trunk of the pine tree ahead of him. It was scarred with the long, deep slashes of a bear’s claws—some a half inch deep and nearly eight feet up from the ground. Some of the bark around the tree’s base looked damp.

  Cuno swung his right leg over the saddle horn, dropped straight down to the ground, and hitched his deerskin breeches up his thighs as he crouched. He picked up a chunk of the damp bark, and made a face as the vinegar and raw-alcohol scent of the bear piss, mixed with the tang of pine sap, assaulted his senses.

  “Not only a big bear,” he said, looking around warily as he straightened and dropped the fetid bark, “but a recent one. This marking is only about a half hour old.”

  “What are you waiting for?” the girl said, turning her head this way and that, her large brown eyes fearful. She grabbed the saddle’s cantle and leaned forward as though to launch the paint into a run. “Let’s go! Vamos!”

  Cuno had already grabbed the apple and was hauling himself back into the saddle. He didn’t care to tangle with any grizzly, especially the size of the one who’d marked the pine, any more than the girl did.

  As he settled into the saddle and loosened his Winchester in the sheath under his knee, the girl wrapped her arms tightly around his waist. Nudging Renegade with his heels and starting forward, he studied the pine-studded canyon floor around him, hoping the bear had headed in a different direction than the one he and the girl were heading.

  However, after having ridden an hour away from the wagons, angling southeast, he was no longer sure he was following the course he’d intended.

  As Renegade clomped forward, toward a slight clearing in the canyon where the sunlight splashed down unimpeded on scalloped sand and boulder snags, he said, unable to keep the irritation from his voice, “Are you sure this is the right way? When we were higher, you said it was the next canyon south.”

  Camilla said, “No, I am no longer certain. I told you to go back and we would try the other one.”

  “I thought this one would lead to the other one, and it still might. I’d just like a little assurance that we’re even still headed toward the gap.”

  “It looked simpler when we were higher up.”

  “It usually does,” Cuno grunted.

  “Go here,” Camilla said as a lightning-topped cedar slipped past them on their right.

  “Where?”

  “Here.” Camilla pointed her mittened hand to the left, rocking back and forth impatiently once again. “Down that passage, see? That should take us to the passage we are looking for. I remember that one now.”

  “Sure you do,” Cuno grunted, his unease about the bear and his fear of getting lost raking his tender nerves.

  He heard the girl mutter something behind him in Spanish. She’d spoken too softly and quickly for him to be sure but he thought she’d called him a bullheaded gringo who lies down with mules or somesuch. He snorted and watched the walls of the canyon drop down around him, purple shade angling out from the ridge to his right.

  He didn’t see any more bear sign here, but in the gravel and sand of the wash’s floor he spied the tracks of two horses. Not Indian ponies; Indians didn’t shoe their mounts, and both these horses were shod.

  Camilla saw the tracks as well, and she said, “We are not the first ones through here today.”

  “They might be soldiers scouting out from the fort.” Cuno looked around at the canyon’s steep walls, which, a hundred yards up, leaned back away from the canyon, strewn with large boulders pushing out velvet shade wedges contrasting sharply with the sun-blasted rock around them. “Or market hunters.”

  “They might be desperadoes,” Camilla said dully. “Like the lawmen you killed last night. These mountains are honeycombed with all kinds.”

  Cuno glanced over his shoulder. “How did you know I killed the lawmen?”

  “I heard you speaking to Senor Parker.”

  Cuno turned forward. “I figured you were asleep.”

  “Who can sleep out here, with men like that lurking, and Indians chasing us?”

  “Well, you read the lawmen right,” Cuno said, moving with the horse’s sway. “They weren’t all that law-abiding.”

  “It takes a woman to read a man.”

  “I reckon.”

  Camilla was right—the narrow canyon led into the one she’d been looking for. The floor of this canyon rose steeply as it curved to the south, and in the mid-afternoon Cuno stopped Renegade on a high, cold saddle showing the deep ruts of many wagons over the years, but few recent ones.

  To the left of the saddle was a higher ridge with scattered pines growing out of a sandstone dike. To the right was a deep river canyon in which a violet stream slid, glistening around large boulders and naked pines that had fallen from the slopes during rock slides.

  Cuno glanced at the gap between the slope on his left and the canyon on his right.

  “Just enough room for the wagons,” he said, as he dropped down from Renegade’s back.

  “Watch your step.”

  Cuno turned to the girl. She nodded at a large plop of bear scat pebbled with bright red berries and bristling with deer fur. Glancing around the plop, he found a paw print as large as the ones that had marked the pine.

  “Our friend gets around.”

  “And he probably doesn’t want anyone else around,” Camilla said.

  Cuno stared back the way they’d come, then up toward the ridge crest. Hoping the bear was somewhere up there now, looking for a place to hole up for the winter, he turned to peer down the eastern side of the saddle.

  Low ridges—some rocky dikes, others carpeted with fur or the short, tough grass that grows at high altitudes—tumbled away in the purple distance. There was a slight tan gap marking a broad valley at the edge of the Rawhides before more ridges rose, shouldering against each other and defining another, separate range—either the Mummies or the Never Summers.

  He knew he wouldn’t see it from here even with his binoculars, but the army outpost lay in the valley at the edge of the Rawhides. Still a good two- or three-day pull with the wagons, but at least he could see their destination from here.

  Relief swelled in him, and he glanced back at Camilla. “You were right. This pass should take us down to the fort.”

  The girl just stared at him, her dark brown face and almond-shaped brown eyes expressionless as her hair whipped around in the cold breeze.

  “Right,” Cuno growled, grabbing Renegade’s reins. “We ain’t there yet . . .”

  The horse dropped down the gradually sloping ridge with his head hanging and his knees starting to get that flop that meant he was tired.

  When they gained the narrow valley bottom, Cuno gigged the horse down through pines to a stream in a deep, rocky bed and dismounted. The wind whooshed in the tops of the pines and firs. Squirrels chattered angrily. Occasional branches broke and fell with a muffled crash.

  “We’ll rest here.” Cuno reached up and placed his hands around Camilla’s waist. “Gotta give Renegade a breather and a few oats before we head back to the wagons.”

  He pulled the girl out of the saddle. He smelled her earthy fragrance—an odd mix of cherry, wood, and salt—and felt her long, coarse hair blowing against his windburned cheeks as he set her down.

  He kept his hands around her waist for a moment, staring down at her. He hadn’t been this close to her before, and he hadn’t realized how pretty she was. Aside from the scar along her jaw, her cheeks were incredibly smooth, her hair the color of dark chocolate. Her lips, too wide to be called delicate, were alluring just the same.

  Her brown eyes were guarded and grave, as though she were withholding a terrible secret. With hands laid flat against his chest, she looked up at him, frowning, a vaguely puzzled, faintly annoyed expression in her gaze. She held her lips in a straight line.

  Blood warmed Cuno’s ears as he felt a pr
imordial pull in his loins. What bliss it would be to ignore the peril they were all in and pull this girl to him and kiss her and make love to her for the rest of the day, here in the crisp sunlight with his bedroll wrapped around them. His heart thudded as he realized his hand was moving up to slide a lock of hair from her right eye. At once chagrined and incredulous, he dropped his gaze and stayed his hand and turned toward Renegade.

  “We’ll take about twenty minutes,” he grunted, loosening the latigo cinch with a single, hard pull. “Best tend to business, if you got any. I’ll build a fire, brew some coffee.”

  In the periphery of his vision, he saw her standing behind him, flanking him, not moving or saying anything. He tightened his jaws and took his time with the buckle and then untying his blanket roll from the saddle. When he turned, she was striding off through the wind-tossed trees, ducking under pine boughs, her heavy wool skirts blowing out around the tops of her beaded moccasins.

  When she returned, he had a small fire going and the coffeepot was chugging on a flat stone. He’d fed Renegade a couple handfuls of oats, and now the horse stood droopy eyed in the golden sunlight shafting through the trees, latigo and reins hanging free.

  Cuno sat on a fallen log from the end of which a chipmunk kept appearing to read him the riot act before ducking back inside the log, which apparently was nearly hollow. The warmth of the fire felt good, for even at midday the temperature hadn’t risen much above thirty degrees.

  Eyes down, Camilla strode up to a tree kitty-corner to Cuno and slumped down on the ground, in a broad patch of sunlight, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. She leaned her head back, still not looking at Cuno, but gazing off through the trees and lifting a hand to slide her blowing hair away from her eyes.

  Cuno tossed his bedroll toward her. It hit the ground and rolled to her right. “Cover up with that, if you like.”

  She looked at the bedroll almost angrily, then lifted her face again to the golden light shafting through the trees. “The sun is enough.”

  Cuno shrugged, then dropped to a knee by the fire to fill the two tin cups he’d set out. He’d filled one of the cups when the girl rose suddenly and strode out toward the stream murmuring in its narrow, rocky bed.

  He lowered the pot to watch her, frowning. A few yards from the water she stopped and raised a hand to shield the light from her eyes. She was staring up the opposite slope sparsely studded with pines, cedars, and firs, with here and there a lumpy boulder sheathed in dead brush.

  Suddenly, a bugling scream sounded behind Cuno. Heart hammering and ears ringing, he whipped around.

  At first, he thought Renegade had been bit by a rattlesnake, as the horse, screaming, leapt nearly straight up in the air so that all four hooves left the ground at the same time. When the paint hit the ground again, he skitter-hopped sideways and, turning his head with white-ringed eyes toward Cuno, gave another drum-rattling whinny.

  Cuno’s eyes dropped to look around for a snake, forgetting for a half second that snakes wouldn’t be up this high nor out this late in the season. Then he whipped around again as Renegade lifted another bugling cry and, following the horse’s terrified gaze across the rocky streambed beyond Camilla, saw the grizzly moving down the far slope in a shamble-footed gait, its haunches rippling, its shaggy cinnamon coat blowing in the wind.

  The bear was a big male with powerful shoulders and hips and with paws the size of dinner plates. Moving swiftly down through the sunlight-dappled slope, meandering around trees and boulders and dislodging sliderock around him, he swung his head from side to side and loosed an enraged bellow that joined Renegade’s terrified screams in an otherworldly din that echoed off the ridges like a warlock’s cry.

  Adding to the din was Camilla’s scream. She wheeled toward Cuno, tripped in the rocks, and fell.

  Hearing Renegade’s hooves thudding away behind him, Cuno bolted through the trees and over the rocks to the girl. She was just gaining her feet when he reached her, and, on the other side of the streambed, the roaring, rambling bruin was just making the base of the hill.

  Cuno grabbed Camilla’s mittened hand. “Come on!”

  He pulled her back across the rocks and through the branches, hoping like hell that Renegade hadn’t run far. As they approached the edge of the trees, just beyond the fire, he shouted, “Renegade . . . goddamnit!”

  The horse galloped up canyon, sixty yards away and growing smaller as the reins bounced along the ground behind him and the saddle hung down his side—not only the saddle, but the saddle sheath with the Winchester ’73, as well.

  Cuno cursed again. There was no point calling for the horse. Horses had an instinctual, primordial terror of bears and bobcats, and the paint wasn’t coming back till the bruin was gone.

  Cuno swung back around to see the bear lumbering at an angle across the streambed, heading toward him and Camilla. His thoughts raced, and he looked around wildly. They couldn’t climb any of the surrounding trees, because the lowest branches were too high, and the bear would merely shake them out of the pines like ripe apples.

  Peering north across the canyon, he saw a clay-colored shelf of sandstone jutting out of the bank and surrounded by shrubs and stunt confiers. It looked like a giant, sun-dried cow pie. There were several slot caves between the layers—a good hundred yards away, but one of those caves was their only hope of escape.

  If the slots were deep enough.

  “Run!” Cuno said, pushing Camilla toward the humping sandstone. “Head for those rocks yonder. I’m right behind you!”

  Camilla stood, bald terror in her eyes. The bear was mewling and kicking stones as he crossed the stream. “Why don’t you shoot him?”

  “Only got my forty-five. It’ll just rile him.” Cuno grabbed his saddlebags and shouted without turning around. “Run!”

  He draped his saddlebags over his shoulder and grabbed his blanket roll. As he headed back away from the smoking fire, he glanced over his shoulder.

  The bruin had stopped in the middle of the streambed to stand on his hind legs, lift his snout, and beat his chest like an enraged ape as he loosed a tooth-splintering roar. Cuno stopped and turned back toward the stream, palming his .45. The bullets would only nip the bear like annoying blackflies, but the reports might scare him off.

  Cuno hammered two rounds into a tree at the edge of the streambed, blowing out gouts of bark and pine slivers.

  The bear lifted his snout again and roared even louder. Then he dropped down to all fours and bolted off his back feet, driving forward like a large, furry locomotive on a downhill run, making a beeline for Cuno.

  “Bad idea,” the freighter muttered, wheeling, holstering his .45, and snapping the keeper thong over the hammer as he broke into a sprint across the canyon.

  Behind him, the bear’s running footsteps thudded loudly as the bear bolted through the trees, breaking branches and mewling like a Brahma bull in a cholla patch.

  “Oh, Christ,” Cuno muttered, breath raking in and out of his lungs. “If it ain’t one damn thing, it’s another!”

  21

  CUNO BOUNDED FORWARD, running hard, the saddlebags flapping down his chest and back, as he clutched his blanket roll in his right hand. He’d instinctively grabbed the gear, knowing he and Camilla would need it if they survived the bear.

  Ahead, Camilla was running through another streambed branching off from the one behind, lifting her skirts above her ankles and snatching terrified looks over her shoulder.

  Cuno shouted, “Keep going!”

  The girl hissed something in Spanish, and Cuno wasn’t sure if she was berating him or the bear.

  The water of this intersecting stream wasn’t as deep as the first—probably just a feeder creek—but it splashed up above Cuno’s knees as he lunged forward, nearly slipping on the ice-rimed stones. As Camilla approached the stream’s opposite side, she slipped on one of the icy rocks and fell to a knee but pushed herself back up quickly and scrambled, half crawling, up the grassy bank beyo
nd.

  As Cuno made the stream’s opposite side, he turned to look behind. The bear was running full out, charging like a bull buffalo with his head down, razor-edge fangs bared. As the bruin plunged into the shallow stream, Cuno lunged up the bank.

  “Hurry!” He slipped the bedroll into his left hand and reached down to grab Camilla’s arm with his right, then hoisted her up the slope behind him. In the corner of his vision, the bear was gaining on them, the harsh sunlight reflecting off the beast’s thick, silvery-cinnamon coat and off the water droplets flying up around him.

  “Santa Maria!” Camilla screamed as Cuno pulled her up off her right knee and she glanced behind to see the bear barreling across the rocky streambed. “I won’t make it!”

  Cuno gave her arm another tug and she screamed as he pulled her onto both feet, half dragging the girl along behind him. The largest slot cave was now fifty yards away, the gap widening with agonizing slowness, the bear trudging up the hill behind them, so close that Cuno could hear the bruin’s ragged breaths.

  There were several gaps between layers of the crenellated sandstone. Cuno headed for the largest one, about as long as he was tall and about two feet high. Impossible to tell how deep it was, but they were about to find out.

  Cuno glanced behind once more. The bear was so close he could see the whites in the animal’s eyes. There were several hairless patches along his neck and shoulders—likely old battle scars—and his smell was nearly as eye-watering strong as a skunk’s.

  Cuno pushed Camilla down in front of him with more force than he’d intended. “Go on!”

  The girl gave a yowl as she hit the ground, then scrambled on hands and knees into the gap, gravel flying out around her. Cuno dropped to his knees as the shadow of the charging bear passed over him and brushed across the face of the scarp. He threw down the saddlebags, blanket roll, and himself when the bear was about ten feet behind him. Diving into the gap, he felt a sharp scrape across his boot as the bear swept a claw-tined paw at him, bellowing raucously.

  “Hurry!” Camilla shrieked as, grabbing Cuno’s right shoulder, she pulled him back into the dark, musty gap.