Mountain Magic

by Simmons, Trana Mae

  "He says more or less that you won fair and square," Silas interpreted after Tall Man spoke. "He says he's honored to've played the bones with someone as good as you and that it ain't no disgrace for him to lose to such a better player."

  Jon stuck his hand out to Tall Man and the Nez Perce grasped it for a quick shake before he started to turn away.

  "Hey, wait a minute," Jon said, grabbing the Indian man's arm. "What happens now?"

  Tall Man said something to Silas and gestured at the pile of goods on the ground, then to the woman.

  "He says you can either take your winnin's and go, or stay and have supper with him and his woman," Silas explained. "I think the first choice is the best one, lessen you fancy roasted dog meat. Me, I ain't never developed a taste for it."

  Jon stifled a grimace and dropped Tall Man's arm. "But what about her?" he asked Silas.

  "She belongs to you now, boyo," Silas said in an exasperated voice. "Ain't you figured that out yet?"

  "But...but, Silas. What the heck are we gonna do with her?"

  "Up to you, I reckon. You can try to lose her to someone else, iffen you want to git rid of her. But she's yours 'til then."

  Jon turned toward where the woman stood, her back to him as she stared into the fire. The buckskin garment fit snugly across her rump and her matted hair fell down almost to her waist. It would probably reach half-way down her legs if she brushed it out.

  "What if I offer to give her back?" he said pleadingly to Silas.

  "Wouldn't be perlite," Silas said. "You'd insult Tall Man and we might's well leave rendezvous right now. We'd never get no tradin' done."

  "Wait!" Jon called as Tall Man moved away.

  The Indian paused and shot Jon a puzzled look.

  "Ask...Silas, ask him what her name is. We don't even know her name."

  Silas spoke to Tall Man and the Indian's unfathomable countenance changed with a quicksilver movement into a picture of mirth. He spoke a few words and disappeared into his wigwam.

  Silas's roar of laughter split the air. Gale after gale swept over Jon, and Jon's face darkened in anger as he stalked over to the old man.

  "Tell me what he said, Silas," he demanded.

  Silas straightened and looked at Jon. As soon as his eyes fell on his partner, Silas broke up again, clenching his arms across his stomach and clutching it. His shoulders shook and he danced around, buckskin fringe bobbing as he whooped his merriment, gasping for breath between whoops.

  "Silas! Damn you, quit cackling and tell me what he said her name was!"

  "It...it's...oh, lordy. I can't breathe! Har! Har, har! Oh...ugh...hardy har!"

  Jon grabbed Silas's shoulders and shook him roughly. "Damn it, shut up and answer me!"

  "Make...make up...your mind," Silas gasped between breaths. "Can't...can't shut up...an' talk, too."

  Jon released Silas in disgust and glanced at the woman. To his amazement, he found the first sign of emotion on her face. Her lips were barely uptilted and the eyes beneath her half-mast eyelids confirmed an expression of sly amusement. Catching his gaze on her, she quickly froze her expression again into stoniness and turned away.

  "I...oh, I think maybe I can talk now," Silas said with a loud guffaw. "Got to. Can't wait to see your face when I...."

  Silas lost his power of speech again and burst into more guffaws. He wiped at the tears streaming down his plump cheeks into the white beard on his face and snorted. Grabbing a dirty handkerchief from his pocket, he tried to blow his dripping nose, the convulsions from his laughter adding force to his efforts. Finally he took a deep breath and straightened again, only to see Jon stomping away.

  "I'll see you back at our camp after you're done making a jackass of yourself!" Jon tossed over his shoulder.

  Silas's laughter stilled immediately and he jerked his wolfskin hat from his gray locks. Turning to the woman, he clasped the hat against his chest and tried to fix his face into the proper measure of respect.

  "I apologize, ma'am," he said. "You got to admit, though, that the Indians usually come up with a name to fit the person. Reckon you've given them some sort of hell if they pinned such a moniker on you."

  Caitlyn's lips quirked and she let out her own guffaw. "Reckon I did, you old fart," she said with a laugh. "And reckon I can show either one of you two why they call me Smelly Woman with Wolf's Teeth below Belly, you get any ideas 'bout seein' if you can get any further with rapin' me than they did. I'll cook your darned meals and help tan your hides. Won't poison you with my cookin', since I might just end up worse off with whoever else I have to take up with. But I bed down alone of a night!"

  Silas took a step forward and peered at her face. "Thought so," he mused. "Ain't a drop of Indian blood in you, is there? Bet your skin's white as milk under all that dirt. What's your real name?"

  "Cat'll do," Caitlyn said with a shrug. "'Lessen you wanna call me Smelly."

  "Well," Silas drawled as he raised a hand to scratch at his beard. "Don't seem right to call a white woman Smelly. But ain't never heard of one called Cat, neither, 'cept maybe one."

  "You got crawly critters in that there beard, old man, you best get rid of 'em. One of them hops over here on me, you're gonna find yourself doused with kerosene while you sleep. Don't hold with lettin' no bugs live on me."

  "Hell, Cat," Silas replied, settling the issue of her name. "Take more than six legs on a critter to hold onto that dirt coverin' you. 'Sides, ain't lice. I just naturally scratch my beard when I's a thinkin'. And you surely do give a man a lot to think about."

  "Long's that's all you do," Caitlyn warned, her blue eyes flashing a warning in the reflected firelight. "Can't do nothin' 'bout what you think on, but I sure can make you sorry if you try to act on them there thoughts. 'Specially if they ain't tolerable towards me."

  "How old you be, Cat?"

  "Don't rightly know. 'Spect it's somewhere between eighteen and nineteen. Paw's been dead nigh on a year now — the only paw I remember, anyway. I kept track of the winters we lived out, and Paw, he said he thought I was probably around five when he got me."

  "Great gobs of goose dip!" Silas said in surprise. "You ain't that git ol' Mad Mick O'Shaunessy drug around with him, are ya? You mean Ol' Mick's dead?"

  Caitlyn's blue eyes filled with tears and she angrily blinked them away. "Don't too many folks win over a grizzly bear," she said. "'Specially when he lets the bear get too close while he's shovin' me up a tree. Bear swiped the rifle away a'for Paw could get it aimed."

  "Ol' Mad Mick," Silas said with a sad shake of his head. "One more of my old pards gone. 'Course I ain't seen him in a few years. You didn't have them bumps on your chest last time I laid eyes on you."

  Caitlyn took a step back and grabbed a piece of wood from the fire, holding it out between them. "You won't be lookin' at no more bumps on any girl's chest, you keep a lookin' at mine."

  "Hey there, gal," Silas soothed. "Wouldn't never cross my mind to try anythin' with my old pard Mick's girl. Hell, that man loved you to pieces and reckon you can count on me to pertect you just like he did. Wouldn't have it no other way. You got my solemn word as a mountain man on that."

  The promise eased Caitlyn's mind. She'd live with these men all her life and nothing meant more to them than their word — especially if given in an oath as a mountain man. They considered themselves a breed apart from so-called civilized folks, who looked you in the eye and smiled, while they lied and stole you blind. She dropped the flaming branch back into the fire.

  "What about him?" Caitlyn's flick of the head indicated the direction Jon had taken.

  "Well," Silas admitted. "He's a tenderfoot from back east, but so far he seems to be one of the rare good 'uns that show up out here from time to time. I wouldn't've took up with him, I didn't think there was somethin' there worth savin'. Watched him for a few days a'for I made myself known. He didn't kill nothin' he didn't need to eat and kept a clean camp."

  "He's almost as big as Paw was," Caitlyn mused. "Colore
d different, though. Paw's hair was more red than yellow."

  "Yeah, I recall," Silas replied. "Look, you got anythin' in that there tent you want to take along? 'Course ol' Miz Tall Man didn't look none too happy 'bout losing her slave. Don't reckon she'll be real glad 'bout lettin' you take anythin' with you."

  Caitlyn raised her hand and unconsciously caressed the small, leather bound book wrapped in oilskin resting in her bodice as she shook her head. One day she was going to get someone to read that book to her — or maybe even screw up her courage and ask someone to learn her to read, something she and Paw had both yearned for. Then she could see what it had to say for herself.

  "No, nothin'," she told Silas. "And you're right. Sky Woman's not happy about seein' me leave, but it ain't because of me bein' her slave. She's been pretty good to me. She ain't Tall Man's wife, neither. She's his sister and her and Paw...well, man gets lonesome in the mountains. I didn't have no one else to go to after Paw got killed, it bein' well into the fall and all."

  "I see," Silas said. "An' I guess it was Tall Man who pinned that there moniker on you, when he tried to make you somethin' other than his sister's friend, huh?."

  "Wasn't just only him," Caitlyn said with a shrug. "Found it was easier to make myself sort of unappealin' to the men. 'Course, maybe I ought to see if Sky Woman'll let me have my wolf's jaw from my blanket roll."

  The flap on the wigwam burst open and Sky Woman came through, slapping at an arm that tried to haul her back inside. She bared her teeth and bit the arm, and it released her. Sky Woman smiled grimly at the yelp of pain that accompanied the arm retreating into the wigwam.

  Sky Woman ran over to Caitlyn and thrust a bundle into her arms. "Take this with you, my daughter," she said in Nez Perce. "It is my gift to you. Soon now, when you find yourself without the desire to hide and instead wish to show your beauty to a man, you will wish to have this."

  Caitlyn drew back a corner of the buckskin bundle and gasped. She thrust the bundle back at Sky Woman and shook her head.

  "I...I can't accept this, my mother," she said in English. "It's the dress you wore when you and Paw...."

  Sky Woman closed Caitlyn's hands over the bundle. She spoke in Nez Perce still, but her reply proved to Silas that Sky Woman understood Caitlyn's words, as Caitlyn had comprehended hers.

  "Do you so soon forget your Indian training, Daughter?" Sky Woman said with a smile. "It is not done — to return a gift. A gift is given with the heart and you deny the love offered if you return the gift."

  "I'm sorry." Caitlyn hung her head. "I...oh, Sky Woman, I'm gonna miss you," she said when she looked up.

  "And I, you, my daughter. But we will meet again. I feel it here, in my heart, where my love for you will sleep until we find one another again. And the yellow-haired one — the one who thinks he has won you now?"

  "What about him, my mother?"

  "I see goodness in him, Daughter. He will treat you kindly, as he has done already."

  "Yeah," Caitlyn spat without thinking. "And he'll probably be tryin' to get in my britches every time I turn around, just like every other male critter I've got near since Paw died. Ain't nobody gonna tie me down and keep me penned up in a cabin nursin' babies while they roam the mountains. I grew up here and I aim to die here, where Paw and I were happy."

  Sky Woman reached out and touched Caitlyn's cheek. "It is not always so when you find love with a man, Daughter. I was happy to wait for your father to return to me, even without a baby from him to ease my loneliness. It will be so with you some day. You have much love to offer a man who is worthy of you."

  "My love died with Paw," Caitlyn said in a flat voice. "'Cept for what I've got left for you, I reckon. Like I told Paw's friend here, I'll earn my keep. I ain't got much choice, other than to try to find someone else to take me in or else trap on my own. And I ain't got the gear for trappin' myself right now. But some day I'm gonna be able to cut free from this — somehow I'm gonna get back to mine and Paw's cabin, and then I'll have what I need."

  Silas silently watched the two women embrace and plopped his wolfskin hat back on his head when Caitlyn reluctantly pulled away from the woman she called mother and joined him.

  "You ready?" he asked quietly.

  "Yes," Caitlyn replied. "I...." She felt over the bundle as they walked, then paused to look back at the wigwam. Sky Woman had already gone inside, and her furious voice escaped the confines of the buffalo-skin structure.

  "Somethin' you forgot?" Silas questioned.

  "My wolf's jaw," she admitted. "Sky Woman didn't give it to me with the dress."

  "You won't need it with me an' Jon to pertect you," Silas assured her as he took her arm and started forward again. "We ain't gonna let anyone close enough to try to hurt you."

  But she would be close to these two men, Caitlyn thought to herself. Paw's friend she had no doubts about. Silas — she recalled him now, and the dolly he carved her one year near Christmas time.

  The other one, though. Jon. Her neck still tingled where his fingertip had brushed it and she had opened her eyes in time to see the deadly glint in Jon's when he knocked Tall Man's grip from her chin. Blue eyes, lighter than her own, reminding her of a clear mountain lake on a summer day.

  And she would be in close contact with him, the three of them stuffed into the narrow quarters of a winter cabin for months. There would be barely enough room to move around each other with a man as large as Jon taking up most of the space.

  Caitlyn clutched her bundle closer to her chest as they walked. He'd probably make her take a bath, too, she realized, not entirely unhappy with the thought. She couldn't imagine a man who smelled as good as the one called Jon suffering with the odor clinging to her for long. It offended her own nostrils, too, even if she was the one who'd surreptitiously stolen the glands from the wolverine Tall Man trapped last winter to mix the scent with the mud on her legs from time to time.

  Oh, well, she sighed to herself as they approached the small lean-to Jon and Silas had fashioned between two pine trees. Life goes on until a person dies. She had made her adjustments after Mad Mick O'Shaunessy found her nearly dead of hunger and thirst, scrounging near the stinking bodies for food. She'd even taken Mick's last name, when all she could recall about herself was her first name.

  And she'd adjusted when, after years of Mick's loving protectiveness, she had found herself alone again. It hadn't been too bad, since she and Mick had lived off and on with the Nez Perce over the years anyway.

  Mick had always told her to keep herself free to experience the almost daily new adventures that were part of a mountain man's life — adventures the men lived and breathed for. Freedom they would have withered away without.

  They'd never discussed the future, even though death was a part of their living. Mountain men died many ways. The Blackfeet were still as wild as ever and would torture to death any man they caught near their hunting grounds — white or Indian. Seemingly innocuous wounds could fester without proper medication and kill quickly, poisoning a body while he tried to reach a friendly Indian camp for treatment. Snakes, it went without saying. And grizzlies, like the giant that had broken Mick's back with one swipe of a huge paw and carried him off. Heck, she'd even heard of one mountain man who died from a silly old bee sting!

  She and Paw had ignored how near death hovered about them in favor of savoring each day they were allowed. Even when Paw fell for Sky Woman, he and Caitlyn remained close. He probably figured Sky Woman had told her all about the business between a man and woman, she supposed, but Sky Woman hadn't mentioned it. Instead, she had taught Caitlyn by her actions — her caressing touches when she passed Paw, her eyes following him, glowing with her feelings.

  Caitlyn studied the figure crouched in front of the fire when Silas pulled her to a stop on the edge of the camp. Jon favored a red, woolen cap over the animal fur hats most of the men donned in the cool, evening mountain air, and his blond hair curled beneath it, falling almost to his shoulders. She'd already no
ticed that his body put most of even the Indian men she had seen to shame — a flat belly and wider shoulders than any she had ever laid eyes on before. Most of the mountain men she ran across usually had a paunch, even the young ones, attesting to a liking for whiskey or rum.

  She'd had a chance to look at his face while he crouched over the bones. It was pleasingly free of a beard like many mountain men cultivated, and he must use some scent after he shaved. His profile had reminded her of a picture of a man in one of the rare books she and Paw had run across in their travels. The man had been standing in the front of a strange-looking ship with a curved prow, the head of a woman decorating it.

  She had dreamed about that man a time or two here lately, and it had almost been like her dream stood before her when she first looked upon Jon. It had taken every bit of willpower she could muster to calm the flutter in her heart. She hadn't yet decided what the warmth she felt in her belly meant.

  "You might as well come on in," Jon growled over his shoulder. "I can smell that the two of you must be close."

  ****

  Chapter 2

  Surprised at the stab of hurt Jon's words caused, Caitlyn dropped her bundle and pulled away from Silas to stride over to the fire.

  "Well, I can smell you, too," she said as she propped her hands on her slender hips and glared at him. "You smell like you been rollin' around with one of them women for pay waitin' at the edge of rendezvous. Hell, you better not wear that smelly stuff when you're tryin' to kill us some meat. Any animal with a lick of sense could smell you comin' two miles away and hightail it for safety!"

  Jon surged to his feet. "At least I don't smell like a dead skunk at high noon in the desert! You're not spending one night in this camp unless you take a bath. I don't care how damned cold that mountain water is!"

  "I plan to," Caitlyn said with a smug look. "Just soon's we get a couple things clear and you lend me a bar of soap."

  "Any clearing up we do will come from me to you! And you're damned right you're gonna take a...." Jon sputtered to a stop, an amazed look on his face. "You...you speak English!"