Beneath a Hunter's Moon

by Michael Zimmer

  The stranger was studying Big John closely in return, his gaze lingering almost enviably on the roan. “That was some slick shooting,” he finally allowed, drawing his eyes away from the stallion and nodding toward the fallen Chippewa.

  “Aye,” Big John replied immodestly. “A hundred and fifty yards, I’m guessin’, although he was movin’ toward me, which made it easier.” He rested the double rifle across his quilled pad saddle and nudged the roan closer, extending a hand. “Me name’s McTavish, although if ye’re to know me long, it’ll be Big John ye call me.”

  “Pike,” the stranger returned simply.

  “Pleased, Mister Pike, and happy I am not to be buryin’ ye this fine but frosty mornin’. Tell me, are there others who might be needin’ our assistance, or do ye travel alone?”

  “I’m alone,” Pike replied shortly.

  Gabriel’s voice came to them across the distance, tinged with impatience. He was trying to drive the Indian pony toward Big John and Pike, but the buckskin wasn’t having it. Every time Gabriel came near, it would lift its head, then trot off out of reach. And every time it did that, it would draw a little closer to the watching Chippewas.

  “Easy, Gabriel,” Big John said, edging a hand back to cover the twin hammers of his rifle.

  The Chippewas were starting to show some interest now, as if contemplating a quick charge. Then, like a child abruptly tiring of a game, the buckskin shook its head and galloped toward the Chippewas. Howling shrilly, the bronzed trio quirted their ponies forward, circling the buckskin and driving it away while Gabriel scampered Baldy in the opposite direction.

  “Damn,” Big John hissed, then offered Pike an apologetic shrug. “We could have used the pony, if yon beasty was all ye owned.”

  “It was,” Pike said grimly, turning his gaze on the fallen Appaloosa. “They got two pack horses and all my traps at first light.”

  “Ye’re not from around here, then?”

  Pike gave him a brief look. “Nope.” He started for the dead horse. “I’m from the west.”

  “A beaver trapper?”

  “Some.” Pike leaned his rifle against the Appaloosa’s hip, then bent to loosen the cinch on a heavy, gourd-horned Mexican saddle.

  Big John looked away, watching Gabriel’s cautious approach on the dead Chippewa. Pike paused, too, and in that instant Big John saw Gabriel as he knew Pike must, with an outsider’s untinted clarity.

  Big John had always thought of Gabriel as the boy he had been—quiet, responsible, prematurely dignified, a wise man’s soul in a youth’s body. Now, through Pike’s eyes, he saw him as he had become—slim and capable and proud.

  He was a half-breed sure, with his thick, raven-colored hair cut straight at the shoulder and his dark skin reddish-hued, after his mother’s people. His eyes were black as English flint, his teeth white and even between thin lips. He wore a dark blue factory coat with brass buttons and a tail split for riding, with an embroidered floral design of dyed moose hair added to the cuffs and collar, then wisping down both lapels. Beneath the coat was a yellow calico shirt and a red sash peppered with blue and green.

  Gabriel wore wool trousers the color of a mourning dove’s wing and buffalo-hide moccasins that came up under tight-fitting, knee-high leggings. A blue cloth cap with a leather brim held his hair in place. His long gun was an English-made Brown Bess, at least thirty years old; he’d shortened the barrel soon after obtaining the piece, then added brass tacks along the stock and forearm and a quilled leather sling to carry it across his back.

  Dismounting, Gabriel rolled the Chippewa onto his back. Looking up with a troubled expression, he said: “We know him. He is one of Tall Cloud’s nephews.”

  Big John grunted sharply. “Are ye sure?”

  “He is of the Turtle Mountain clan. I am sure of that.”

  A sudden regret unfurled within the lanky Scotsman. He glanced at Pike. “I’ve traded with old Tall Cloud and his kith many a winter. It doesn’t set right to be makin’ war on ’em now.”

  “Seems to me it was them making war,” Pike said.

  “Aye, and no denyin’ that, I suppose. ’Twas the breath of old Clootie hisself ye must have been feelin’, and no good way to die, butchered like a pup for the kettle at the hands of men ye don’t know. Still, ’tis a sorry business. Especially for me and the lad.”

  Pike shrugged unsympathetically and turned away. He’d worked the saddle’s underside stirrup free, but the cinch remained pinned beneath the Appaloosa’s body. From time to time as he struggled with the horsehair cinch, Pike would lift his head to look around, but, save for their own little knot of humanity, the wide, gently rolling plains were empty. Not even the shadow of a cloud marred the landscape, and the Chippewas had vanished as if swallowed by the earth itself.

  “’Tis the huntin’ of the buffalo they protest,” Big John said after a while, wanting Pike to understand the Chippewas’ position.

  “I wasn’t hunting buffalo,” Pike responded without looking up. He braced a foot against the Appaloosa’s hip and gave a hard yank. This time the cinch pulled free, almost dumping him on his butt.

  “True,” Big John acknowledged, “but even last season, I’m thinkin’, they would’ve rather traded with ye than tried to rob ye.” Eyeing Pike closely, he added offhandedly: “If ’twas them what blackened their faces first.”

  Pike straightened and hooked his thumbs in his belt. “And not some outsider who bit off more than he could chew, you mean?”

  “Aye, Mister Pike. I’m wonderin’.”

  “It was them that jumped me, McTavish.”

  Big John studied the gaunt trapper for several seconds, then nodded. “Fair enough, Mister Pike, and no insult meant.” Looking past them, he studied the distant rim of the horizon. “There were others, ye say, besides these four?”

  “A couple of dozen altogether. They jumped me at dawn while I was breaking camp. Most of ’em stayed to go through my packs, but these four hung on like burrs.”

  “How far back do ye suppose they’d be, them that stayed to strip ye packs.”

  Pike thought about it for a minute. “I was half the morning getting this far at a pretty hard run. I reckon they’d still be several hours away.”

  “And the others, lad?” Big John asked Gabriel. “Where are they?”

  Gabriel nodded toward a little scab of bare earth about a mile to the south. “They’ll wait there until we leave, then come for the body.”

  Big John studied the patch of dirt Gabriel had pointed out, realizing only then that it was the mouth of a coulée. Nodding thoughtfully, he turned to Pike. “Me and the lad were about to fix ourselves a bite to eat when we heard ye comin’, but it might be best if we pushed on a spell. If ye’ve no other engagements pressin’, ye’d be welcome to join us. I’ve a bay pony yonder that I’d be happy to make ye the loan of. ’Tis only a light pack he’s carryin’, and most of the cabbri what young Gabriel here added to the larder last night can be divided amongst us. What do ye say, Mister Pike?”

  Although Pike hesitated, he really didn’t have much of a choice. They were a long way from beaver country here. A long way from just about anywhere. Picking up his rifle, then hefting the saddle to his shoulder, the trapper said: “I reckon I’d be obliged to ride with you, McTavish.”

  Big John smiled. “Good. Fetch yeself along then and we’ll be off.” He reined his horse around to lead the way to the little flat where they’d picketed the bay. But with his back turned, Big John’s smile faded. He knew his killing of the young Chippewa would not soon be forgotten across the northern plains. Like a stone tossed carelessly into the middle of a still pond, it would ripple outward for a long time, and no way of knowing what it might eventually disturb.

  Chapter Two

  Gabriel put Baldy up the low east bank of the dry streambed where he and Big John had stopped for breakfast, then let him out to a lope. Although Big John and Pike were already some distance ahead, Gabriel held back. He liked to ride alone, and now he
had the American to think about.

  Gabriel had never cared much for the Americans he’d met. Most of them had been traders and cattle dealers up from Wisconsin or Missouri to barter with the half-bloods—the bois brûles—who ruled the Red River Valley of the north. In Gabriel’s opinion, the Americans were a loud and swaggering lot, bold-eyed among the half-blood women, given to lying and cheating when they thought they could get away with it, and sullen resentment when they couldn’t. As if they blamed the bois brûles for their own fumbled ruses.

  So far, Gabriel hadn’t detected that kind of arrogance in Pike, which only made his suspicion of the wiry trapper all the more puzzling. He felt vaguely intimidated by him, a feeling he was neither used to nor fully understood. He wasn’t afraid, but he sensed a threat in Pike’s presence, a need to keep his guard up.

  Baldy’s gait was rough and jarring, a not so subtle protest to the bouncing haunches of cabbri slung across the back of Gabriel’s pad saddle like a pair of oblong saddlebags. He’d lashed the pronghorn antelope’s shoulder across the top, behind his bedroll, while listening to the conversation between Big John and Pike.

  Gabriel could tell that Big John liked Pike, which only added to his confusion. He thought Pike liked Big John, too, although that didn’t surprise him. Most people liked Big John, even if they didn’t always agree with him. Like about the buffalo, or trading with the Hudson’s Bay Company.

  Big John despised Hudson’s Bay with a grudge that went back to the days of open warfare between H.B.C. and the old North West Company that Big John had worked for. After North West succumbed to Hudson’s Bay by merger in 1821—about the same time the Americans had started venturing into the Red River Valley from the south and east—Big John began encouraging the bois brûles to trade more vigorously with their southern neighbors. It was better to take a knife in the guts from the Americans, he often said, than one in the back from Hudson’s Bay.

  Gabriel wasn’t sure he agreed with Big John’s assessment of Hudson’s Bay, but then, he’d been too young to remember much about the hostilities between the Bay Company and the Nor’Westers, other than that it had been a horribly blood-soaked affair that left cultural wounds that were still unhealed.

  Big John’s stubborn prophecy of the buffalo’s demise was a bit harder for Gabriel to stomach. Bison had once ranged throughout the Red River Valley, but time and a steady influx of settlers had driven the shaggy beasts onto the high plains farther west.

  To the bois brûles, the buffalo’s withdrawal was nothing more than a natural response to the valley’s increasing population, but Big John seemed convinced it signaled the beginning of the end. Give it another twenty years, Big John insisted, and the buffalo would be gone entirely, the half-bloods forced to take up the hoe and plow.

  That kind of talk generated a lot of ill feelings among the bois brûles, to whom the buffalo were not just a means of subsistence, but in many ways the core of who they were as a people. They heard Big John’s words not as concern, but as accusation, and had anyone else made such high-handed indictments, there would have been trouble for sure, perhaps even bloodshed.

  Big John was too well-respected to be challenged openly, but recently Gabriel had begun to detect something he regarded as even more disturbing, a kind of patronizing concession to Big John’s beliefs, an erosion of respect for the tall Scotsman’s authority, manifested in condescending smiles or furtive rolls of the eyes.

  It bothered Gabriel to see it, bothered him all the more for his own occasional irritation with Big John’s views. Big John had been like a father to him for as long as he could remember, had always treated him fairly and with respect, and never disciplined him without just cause. It didn’t seem fair that something so trivial as a difference of opinion over a single issue could threaten all that Big John had come to stand for in the valley.

  Thinking of the unrest brewing among the bois brûles brought sadness to Gabriel’s heart. It would be good to talk to Charlo about it, and maybe talk to him about Pike, too. Old Charlo was like Big John in many ways. They had come to the pays sauvage—Indian country—in the same North West Company canoe brigade when they were both young men, not yet out of their teens. They’d wintered together for the first several seasons on the Jack River, at the northern tip of Lake Winnipeg, before migrating south.

  Charlo had once told Gabriel that Big John had better eyes than most people, then lightly tapped his chest and the side of his head with a forefinger, explaining that Big John saw with his heart and mind as well as his eyes. Gabriel knew Charlo also disagreed with Big John about the buffalo, but that hadn’t lessened the Indian’s esteem for him.

  Gabriel took comfort in that. It helped ease his own guilty feelings whenever he grew impatient with Big John. Gabriel knew they would stop at Charlo’s cabin on the way back to their farm along the Tongue River. They would want to see what news the old Indian might have for them, and to pass along their own. With his thoughts settled, Gabriel let Baldy have his head. He had fallen quite a ways behind, and wanted to catch up. Although he wasn’t overly concerned about the Chippewas slipping up behind them, he wasn’t a fool, either.

  * * * * *

  They reined in atop a high ridge overlooking the Pembina River, the land dropping off sharply before them, tumbled and broken, dotted with ginger-hued boulders that seemed to reflect the sun’s radiance. Groves of trees grew close in the hollows, their limbs furred yellow and scarlet and pale brown. Farther off, Gabriel could see stretches of the river itself where it wound through the steep Hair Hills that bordered the western edge of the Red River Valley. The Pembina’s banks were lined with box elder and cottonwood, scattered dogwood and tremblies, that the Americans called aspen.

  A gust of wind moved down the valley, causing the branches of the trees to dip and sway. Following the wind’s progress downstream, Gabriel was amused by how much it looked like fall. When he and Big John had left only a week ago, it had seemed as if winter had arrived for good, with saw-toothed flurries blowing out of the northwest and five inches of wet snow on the ground. All that had changed in the time they’d been gone. The snow had melted and the wind had shifted back out of the west, drying out the land and making it all seem crisp and fresh again.

  Dismounting, they loosened the cinches on their horses to let them blow. Big John put both fists against the small of his back and stretched in an exaggerated manner, groaning softly at the faint pop of his lower spine. Straightening and rolling his shoulders, he nodded toward the distant river and said to Pike: “Yonder’s the Pembina. She points south here, but will turn about soon enough and flow east, into the Red.”

  Pike looked and nodded, and Big John went on: “There’s a settlement of sorts where the Pembina leaves the Hair Hills, and a trading post at the Red. ’Tis American soil there, but no more than a good spit north to British holdin’s. Rupert’s Land, they call it, and a Hudson’s Bay post just north of the line for tradin’.”

  Big John went on casually, explaining the lay of the land, the direction of rivers, the location of various trading posts and half-blood communities. Pike, Gabriel noticed, took it all in silently, his quick, sun-washed eyes following closely as Big John pointed out different landmarks.

  When Big John was finished, Pike nodded toward the valley floor and murmured—“Smoke.”—as if not sure he should point out something so obvious.

  Spotting it for the first time, a bluish thread barely visible in the distance, Gabriel swallowed back his annoyance.

  “Aye, a friend’s fire,” Big John explained, then glanced at Gabriel. “The eyes of a hawk this one has, eh, lad?”

  Gabriel shrugged as if unimpressed. The animosity he’d felt toward Pike when they’d picked him up off the plains two days before remained as strong and as puzzling as ever. Pike hadn’t done anything to earn Gabriel’s distrust, but the feeling persisted, and Gabriel was powerless to ignore it.

  Leaning casually against Baldy’s hip, Gabriel stared back the way they’d come, see
ing in his mind the rolling plains stretching westward under the deep blue curve of the sky. It was five hundred miles or more to the Rocky Mountains, and nothing in between to stop a man or even slow him down. It was his land, those plains and these hills, and on east, too, across the Red River. The best of all worlds, of Indian and white, prairie and woods. The heart of the continent, Charlo claimed, and Gabriel believed him even though he had never been anywhere else.

  Big John and Pike were unlashing their coats from their saddles. It had been comfortably warm all afternoon, but as the sun dipped below the horizon, the air began to turn cool. Gabriel could already see the wispy puffs of his breath every time he exhaled. They were still some distance from Charlo’s cabin, and the trail down through the hills was a twisty one, steep enough in places that he wasn’t looking forward to challenging it in the dark.

  As if sharing his thoughts, Big John said: “We’ve a ways to travel yet, and night to hound us along. We’d best be movin’ on.” He glanced at the column of smoke, nearly obscured in the early twilight. “We’ll spend the night at Charlo’s.”

  “Charlo?” Pike asked.

  “Beneath yon smoke ye pointed out,” Big John explained. He mounted the roan, then looked at Gabriel. “Are ye comin’, lad?”

  “I know the way,” Gabriel replied shortly, keeping his back to the two men as he tugged at the knot holding his coat across the front of his saddle. He waited until they had dropped from sight below the rim of the hill before slipping into his coat and riding after them.

  They were an hour coming down off the ridge. Although the light was fading rapidly, there was still enough illumination to make out the grove of trees where Charlo’s cabin sat, to discern the ebony bars of a small corral to the side. They reined up several hundred yards away, sitting three abreast, and Gabriel uneasily lifted his musket to rest it across his left arm. Big John butted his rifle to his thigh, and, noting their silent preparations, Pike saw to his own weapons, the iron-mounted rifle and a heavy-bladed butcher knife sheathed at his hip.