The High Rocks

by Loren D. Estleman

  What was two days’ ride for a man alone on horseback was considerably more for a man and a woman hauling a litter through one of the worst blizzards on record. Missing Devil’s Crack cost us a full thirty-six hours. Most of the passes being closed to us, we were forced to rely on mountain trails and narrow clefts in the high rocks, some of them so cramped we had to dismount and walk our horses single file, Little Tree leading the mare by its bridle, me driving the big dun from behind as if it were an ox plowing a field. At these times we stopped often to disengage the broad litter where it had wedged itself between the rocks. In three days we made barely twenty miles.

  I had been wrong when I’d told Bear not to worry about the bullet in his back shifting while he was being moved. At intervals his paralysis gave way to agony as the lead wobbled about next to his spinal column, relieving his numbness just long enough for the pain to set in. Although he bore it without complaint, his suffering was evident in his features. That’s the essential difference between man and beast. I’d have shot a dog before letting it go through the hell he accepted as a matter of course.

  We were emerging from one of these clefts on a downhill grade toward the close of the third day when I stopped short and signaled the squaw, who was walking behind me, to draw back from the opening. A hundred yards beyond, the entire Flathead nation was pouring onto the circular plateau below us from a forest to the east. At its head rode Chief Two Sisters.

  He wore a white woven coat decorated with broad bands of green—the labor, most likely, of the squaw of some ambitious brave. His tarnished-silver hair was braided in front, loose in back, and bound with ornaments bearing the Salish symbols of strength and virility. In the waning light, his face was old and drawn but hard, the eyes sunken beneath his square, jutting brow, mouth turned downward into a permanent scowl. He shifted uncomfortably from time to time on his horse’s back, but I gathered that this was not so much from pain as from discomfort caused by the strip of deerhide that was wound tightly around his injured ribcage, part of which peeped above the V of his coat as he leaned over to dig a lump of ice out of the top of his moccasin boot. Like his braves, he rode with a rifle slung over his left shoulder. The difference was that while most of the others carried single-shot Spring-fields—the kind the army had given them several years earlier as a token of good faith—his was the Henry repeater that had been taken from me by Rocking Wolf. Apparently he didn’t share his nephew’s contempt for the weapon.

  At his side rode a muscular-looking individual in a buffalo robe, the only visible part of his face a narrow strip of flesh showing between a scarf wrapped around his lower features and a headdress crowned by a pair of curving buffalo horns. This had to be the medicine man whose antipathy toward me I had sensed in the chief’s lodge something over a lifetime ago. His eyes were hard and shifty, like those of medicine men everywhere.

  I watched from the cover of a vertical pillar of rock while the mass of warriors, with an occasional feminine face sprinkled among their numbers, slowed to a halt behind the chief’s raised right hand. Silence prevailed while Two Sisters scanned his surroundings. His eyes swung in my direction and I froze, my hand gripping the butt of the Deane-Adams. But they moved on without pausing, and when it was apparent that he had satisfied himself that they were alone on the plateau, the chief turned and said something to the man mounted at his side. The wind drowned out his words. Which was all right, because I wouldn’t have understood them anyway. The medicine man heard him out, then pulled down his scarf to reply. That’s when I received my second shock of the day.

  The face beneath the headdress was dusky, the nose broad and flat, the lips thick. Against this background, the whites of his eyes were startling. It was the kind of face you expected to see beneath the cap of a Pullman porter, or bent over your boots and grinning at its reflection in the fresh shine. The last place you would have looked for it was beside the chief of the most powerful Indian tribe in the Bitterroot. I’d known that some tribes took in Negroes out of spite for the white man, but I could think of no other instance in which one of these foundlings had risen to such influential rank. The entire party could have charged us at that moment and I would have been unable to react, I was that stunned.

  For a while it seemed that there was some disagreement between the two about whether they should camp there for the night or proceed into the cleft in which the three of us were crouched. At length, however, the order was given to dismount, and as darkness crept over them, the Flatheads began setting up their lodges.

  “We’ll camp here for tonight,” I whispered to Little Tree, after withdrawing from the opening. “Pull out before dawn, the way we came in. If they find us here we’ll be wolf-meat by tomorrow night.”

  “Lose one day,” the squaw pointed out.

  “Better a day than our scalps.”

  “Ain’t no need to pull out,” said Bear.

  I looked at him. Bundled up as he was aboard the litter, only his blue eyes showed, staring up at the sky.

  “Suicide must look pretty good from where you sit,” I said dryly.

  “How many injuns we got?” he asked me.

  “Four or five hundred. The whole shebang. Why?”

  “You know how long it takes to shove four or five hunnert riders single file through this crack?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Them Flatheads is anxious to clear these mountains before every pass gets blocked twixt here and the plains. Many as there are, they’ll save at least a day by going around the long way. Besides, Two Sisters ain’t exactly the kind to favor placing his whole tribe in a situation where they could get bushwacked as easy as in here. Just sit tight. They’ll be on their way by sunup tomorrow.”

  “And if they aren’t?”

  He met my gaze. “You reckon we can survive an extra day in this blizzard?”

  “No.”

  “Then I don’t see as we got much choice.”

  That ended the discussion. Above us, the wind squealed between broken pinnacles of ice and rock, casting bushels of dry white granules over us at ragged intervals. “How’s the back?” I asked Bear.

  “It ain’t good,” he said. “Every now and then, I get so’s I can move my legs a little; sometimes I almost figure I can get up. But it don’t last long.”

  I nodded. Then, “What do you know of a black man who rides with the Flatheads?”

  The scalp-hunter stiffened. “He with them now?”

  “You know him?”

  “That’s Black Kettle, or so he calls himself.” His voice was taut. “Blackfeet talk about him all the time. According to them, he worked as a slave on a plantation down in Georgia until he got caught up in an uprising and was wounded when the overseer’s men moved in with shotguns. They cut down about a dozen of them. Slaves ain’t cheap, so they patched him up, give him a whipping, and told him to get back to work. Sometime later he knifed the overseer and lit a shuck for the Northwest. That’s the story he give the Flatheads, anyhow. I reckon he was heading for Canada when he got took prisoner by Two Sisters.”

  “He dresses like a medicine man,” I said.

  “That’s what he is. Injuns and niggers take to each other like hot corn and butter, and crazy men are powerful medicine. He had to make it sooner or later.”

  “Black Kettle’s crazy?”

  “If he was a dog, he’d of been shot a long time ago.”

  “I take it he doesn’t care for white men.”

  Bear laughed, but without humor. “Next to him, Rocking Wolf is a Presbyterian minister.”

  “That explains it,” I said.

  “Explains what?”

  “Why your parents were killed. I’d always wondered what prompted Two Sisters to go on the warpath that year. I’m surprised you didn’t see it.”

  “I saw it.”

  “Then how come his scalp isn’t in that bag?” I nodded toward the gunny sack hanging from the horn of the dun’s saddle.

  “Don’t think I ain’t tr
ied,” he said. “He’s crafty. He never leaves camp, and I ain’t got to the point where I’m ready to take on more than one or two hunnert Flatheads at a shot.”

  “Meaning that someday you will?”

  “Meaning that someday I’m going to take Black Kettle’s kinky scalp.”

  We fell silent for a moment, listening to the wind and the faint noises drifting up from the camp below us. Finally, Bear said, “Any sign of Rocking Wolf?”

  “No. Maybe he’d dead. I don’t see how he could make it out there with neither horse nor rifle.”

  “We don’t know for sure that he don’t have a rifle. Besides, survival is an injun’s business; it’s the first thing he learns before he gets his feather. Likely they missed him somewhere.”

  “That’s one feat I hope we can duplicate,” I muttered.

  Little Tree and I unhitched the litter and did what we could to make ourselves comfortable, which proved to be a wasted effort. The cleft acted like a bellows in reverse, sucking in cold air and cascades of snow that rattled in gusts against our heavy clothing and burned our skin like hot ashes wherever it found a chink. We didn’t dare light a fire; for warmth we wrapped ourselves in our blankets and huddled together around Bear with our backs to the wind like cattle. Now and then a scent of wood smoke wafted over us from the direction of the plateau, which did nothing to improve our spirits. Further, there was no escaping the conviction that behind us, the shadows swarmed with wolves. It was going to be a long night for the three of us.

  Sunup—if it could be called that, hidden as it was behind the pewter-colored overcast—found me struggling to get to my feet, working the rust out of joints I hadn’t known I possessed until that morning. After relieving Little Tree of the Spencer, I crept forward to the granite promontory I had manned the previous afternoon. The plateau was a beehive of activity; Indians milled around leading horses, striking huts, extinguishing fires—in general, getting ready to depart. In the center of everything sat Two Sisters astride his painted horse, barking orders and directing the operation with sweeping gestures. While he was thus engaged, Black Kettle rode up to him. Immediately the two appeared to resume the argument they had carried out the day before, the medicine man gesticulating like a madman while his chief shook his head stubbornly. Watching, I got the impression that this was a common scene between them. Eventually Black Kettle threw up his hands, wheeled his horse, and cantered out of sight beyond the rock behind which I was crouching.

  That Two Sisters had won the argument was evident. The only question that remained was what stand he had taken. Had he opted to go around the mountain the long way, or was it his intention to defy what Bear had said about him and lead the tribe straight through the cleft? If it was the latter, we were as good as dead. There was no way we were going to hitch up Bear’s litter, turn around, and get out of there before the first Indian entered. I cursed myself for having taken the advice of an invalid who was more than likely suffering from delirium.

  “What our plans?”

  I started and swung the Spencer around, narrowly missing Little Tree’s head with the side of the barrel as I did so. She had come up behind me so silently that I hadn’t known she was there until she’d spoken. She was holding Ira Longbow’s Dance, which I’d given her previously, in her right hand. I relaxed my hold on the rifle.

  “You’re doing fine,” I told her. “Just keep that gun handy. If they come this way, we’re going to sell our lives as dearly as possible. It worked for Custer.”

  Either the speech sounded better then than it does now, or Little Tree’s training kept her from commenting. At any rate, it seemed to satisfy her, because she stopped asking questions I couldn’t answer.

  You had to hand it to the Flatheads for efficiency. Within ten minutes they had the plateau stripped of any evidence that their camp had ever existed, and were mounted and lined up along the northern edge waiting for the order to move. Beyond them, Black Kettle rode restlessly back and forth, a gray presence behind the driving sheets of snow.

  For a moment Two Sisters appeared to hesitate, which was understandable. If Bear’s assumption was correct, the chief had not heard from Rocking Wolf for days, and like any other uncle he was loath to depart without knowing his nephew’s fate. Finally, however, he made his decision; without a word he kneed his mount forward and led the way north—around the mountain.

  We watched in silence as the column of Flatheads paraded past the opening. Last to leave was the medicine man, who spent some time trotting about the deserted camp as if to blow off steam, casting frustrated glances in the direction of the cleft. The squaw and I flattened ourselves against the icecovered rock wall and listened to the beating of our own hearts, louder at this point than the shrieking wind. Minutes crept by, or maybe they were just seconds; it was impossible to judge. At last Black Kettle spun the horse about and, with an angry whoop, galloped off in the others’ wake.

  I let out my breath and lowered the rifle, the sights of which I’d had lined up on the black man’s broad chest. Beside me, Little Tree replaced the Dance’s hammer with a sigh of sliding metal. For a stretch neither of us spoke.

  “Hitch up the litter,” I said at last. I was surprised at the steadiness of my own voice.

  We took our time crossing the plateau, to avoid being spotted by stragglers as much as to ensure the scalp-hunter a comfortable ride, and reached the cover of the woods after an hour. From there we descended to the edge of a river some forty feet wide at its broadest point, where we stopped. It was one of those countless tributaries that take so many twists and turns on their way through the mountains that they wind up with either a dozen names or none at all. The wind had swept this one clean of snow, leaving the silvery surface of the ice bare but for serpentine ribbons of powder writhing across it in the wind. Its banks were lined with pine and cattails, the latter bowed beneath the weight of clinging frost and so deceptively fragile in appearance that they seemed ready to fall apart at the touch of a finger. Ice-laden hulks of fallen trees formed natural bridges across the water where they had been torn out of the ground in past storms.

  “We cross?” asked Little Tree.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “It took a lot of punishment when the Flatheads crossed. Let me have the mare.” I dismounted.

  “What you do?” She got down off the chestnut and handed me the reins.

  “I’ll have a better idea of how much this ice can hold once I cross over.” I swung into the mare’s saddle. “Wait for the high sign before you start across with Bear. Lead, don’t ride. If you hear it start to crack, get the hell off fast.”

  Out in the open, the wind was ruthless. It plucked at the brim of my hat and found its way inside my coat, billowing it out behind me. My breath froze in my nostrils and clung in crystals to the stubble on my cheeks and chin. Updrafts snatched my pants legs out of my boots, exposing bare skin to blasts of peppery snow.

  Suddenly, something hard struck the ice at the mare’s feet, sending up a geyser of splinters and shooting cracks out in all directions. Coming upon its heels, the sound of the shot was an anticlimax.

  12

  I left the saddle just as the mare reared, striking the ice hard on my right shoulder and rolling. The horse fled slipping and sliding in the direction from which we had come. I clawed my gun out of its holster and lay on my stomach gripping the weapon in both hands, my elbows propped up on the ice.

  There was nothing to shoot at. An unbroken line of brush and pine formed a barrier along the opposite bank, behind which an army could have hidden. Even the cloud of metallic gray gunsmoke drifting across the scene had been snatched away by the wind so fast that it was impossible to tell where it had originated. In a game of snipers, I was the only visible target for miles.

  “Get up, white skin!”

  Nearly drowned out as it was by the wailing gale, there was still no mistaking that voice. I remained prone.

  Another bullet spanged off the ice near my left elbow, spitting bits o
f crystal into my face. The shot echoed growlingly into the distance. I got up.

  “I would have bet money you’d lost your rifle back at Devil’s Crack,” I told Rocking Wolf. I held the gun against my right hip.

  “You would have lost.”

  I tried to place where the voice was coming from, but the wind roaring in my ears made that impossible.

  “You did well, white skin,” it continued. “I have the use of only one leg. When last we spoke the pain was too great for me to take aim. Since then I have grown used to it. Had I not, I would never have been able to come this far, where I knew you would one day pass.” He snapped off another shot, which whizzed past my ear and struck the ice ten feet behind me. Hairline cracks leaped out across the surface.

  “Where is Mountain That Walks?”

  I hesitated a beat before answering. It had just dawned on me that from where Rocking Wolf was—wherever he was—Bear and his squaw were invisible. “He’s dead,” I said.

  “You lie.” A fourth bullet pierced the ice directly in front of me. Water splattered over my boots. I leaped backward.

  “It’s the truth.” I spread my legs to distribute my weight; the surface was growing spongy. “He had a bullet in his back, put there by the bounty hunters we met west of the Crack. The bullet finally moved. I buried him twenty miles back.”

  There was no reply. I began to feel cold where my body had come into contact with the clammy surface of the ice. Finally the voice called out again.

  “Surrender your gun, white skin. Slide it across the ice. The one in your belt as well.”

  I obeyed. The revolver skidded ten feet and came to a stop just past the halfway point. The Colt followed, sliding beyond that and losing itself in the cattails on the other side. At that moment Rocking Wolf stepped out from behind a tangle of brambles and began hobbling toward me.

  Purple bruises had swollen his face into a caricature; his left eye was a crescent glittering between folds of puffy flesh and his lips were thick and torn. His bearskin hung in tatters from his thickset frame. He held the Winchester cradled in his left arm, the right supporting his weight upon a forked limb thrust beneath the armpit. The leg on that side—shattered, most likely, in his fall—dragged uselessly behind him. Any pretense he had made previously of masking his emotions had been abandoned, for the face that confronted me was twisted with hatred beyond even its physical mutilation.