Beneath a Hunter's Moon

by Michael Zimmer

  Pike cradled his rifle to check the priming, blowing out the old and sprinkling in a fresh charge. He’d cleaned the bore haphazardly last night, and wished there was time to do a better job now, with light to see by. He’d been remiss in not waking up sooner to care for his weapons, but figured he could blame the bourbon for that.

  “You did good yesterday, American,” Charlo said. “A bois brûle could not have done better. The way you fought while trapped on the prairie is the talk on everyone’s tongue this morning.” He handed Pike a chunk of pemmican. “Eat. It will help you mend.”

  Pike eyed the fat-laced ball of meat suspiciously, then shrugged and pinched off a bite. He wadded it in his cheek like a chaw of tobacco to allow the fat to melt at its own pace, then set the rest of the ball on a cart hub where it would be handy. The light changed slowly. What had been obscure only seconds before now began to take shape, though it revealed nothing new.

  “If they come, it will be soon,” Charlo said tersely. He stood ready, legs braced, shoulders rigid. His long-barreled fowler was poked between the spokes of a wheel and the cart bed, the big cock eared all the way back. The hazy light receded slowly to reveal an empty horizon. Not even the dead warriors who had been left behind yesterday remained.

  An uncertain silence gripped the camp. They could see clearly for nearly a mile in every direction, yet nothing seemed to threaten them. After nearly half an hour, Charlo began to relax. He stepped back and glanced around curiously. Others were doing the same.

  “This is not like the Sioux,” he said to no one in particular.

  “Maybe we hurt ’em too much yesterday,” Pike ventured.

  Then the call they waited for came. “Voila les Sioux! Voila les Sioux!”

  The cry was raised from the opposite side of the camp. Pike looked in that direction but couldn’t see beyond the wall of carts.

  “Sacre diable,” Charlo muttered passionately. “You cannot trust a Sioux.” He spat for emphasis, but held his station.

  “How many?” someone called.

  “Only a few,” was the answer.

  “They come slowly,” added another.

  Charlo looked at Pike. “What do you think, American? Does that sound like them god damned Sioux to you?”

  Pike shook his head. “Not even to parley.”

  Far to the south, a fusil was discharged. A hopeful murmur began to spread among the half-breeds. It was Marie Breland who made it official. “It is Joseph! Joseph has returned!”

  Charlo chuckled. “I think she must be right, eh?”

  He and Pike walked across the camp to the southern rim of carts to watch the small party of horsemen loping in. Joseph Breland did indeed ride in the van, but, as they drew near, Pike noticed that there were ten riders, rather than nine, with an extra pack horse bringing up the rear. With a gasp of anticipation, Marie Cyr pushed through the crowd, but her hope was short-lived. It wasn’t Etienne Cyr who returned with Breland, but a stranger.

  Pike’s grip tightened on his rifle. Although he’d never seen the man up close, he recognized him from the description McKenzie had given him, that and the knee-length leather coat and the bright green tuque he’d seen the day he shot Rubiette.

  It was Henri Duprée.

  Chapter Twenty

  “B eaucoup buffalo to the southwest,” Joseph Breland said tiredly. He was drinking tea from a china cup in a blue willow pattern, his big, sun-darkened hand dwarfing the fragile vessel. With breakfast behind them and the land still empty of Sioux, the Métis had gathered in council to listen to Breland and the others speak, and to decide what their next move should be.

  “In places the land is made dark by their numbers,” added another.

  “’Twas Paget’s bunch wha’ spooked ’em our way,” Jim Patterson chimed in.

  “Paget?” Big John seemed to perk up. “Ye found the Pembina hunters, did ye?”

  “On the Sheyenne,” Breland confirmed. “We almost stampeded the buffalo into them last week, but they were able to turn the herd away before any harm was done. Then they ran the same bunch. It was some of these that splintered off to the west and a little north, toward us again. Maybe three days from here, with the carts.”

  “Hah!” Turcotte cried, grinning broadly. “So we beat the Pembina hunters to the buffalo, after all.”

  Several of the men cheered. Gabriel knew it had galled everyone to have to turn away from Devil’s Lake because of the Pembina caravan.

  “And of Etienne?” Big John inquired, bringing up what had only been lightly touched upon before.

  “No trace, as I have already said,” Breland replied. Then his voice took on a more thoughtful note. “None at all.” He seemed baffled by that.

  “And ye, Henri?” Big John turned his gaze on Nicolas Quesnelle’s brother-in-law, his expression flat. “Do ye bring us news from the plains that we can use?”

  With the council’s attention fixed suddenly upon him, Duprée shifted uncomfortably. He was a short, pot-bellied man of forty or forty-five, with a dark beard and shaggy brows, his long hair unkempt beneath a wolf-skin cap. He seemed to weigh his answer carefully before voicing it. “Non. I see no one until Breland.”

  “And ye partner? What of him?”

  Duprée glared at Big John. “François returned to the Qu’Appelle.”

  Antoine Toussaint scowled. “Big John, the man we found…”

  “Aye, Antoine, ’tis me own thinkin’.” To Duprée, he added: “’Twas a man found a few days back, taller than yeself but just as dirty, wearin’ a yellow shirt. He’d been shot.”

  Duprée’s eyes darted like a trapped animal’s, but he shook his head. “I do not know.”

  “Ye don’t know if ye partner owned a yellow shirt?”

  Again, Duprée shook his head.

  Big John laughed softly, with disdain. “Well, sure, who’d expect a man to know the color of his partner’s shirt?”

  Eyes narrowing dangerously, Duprée repeated his earlier declaration that François Rubiette had returned to the country along the Qu’Appelle River, to the northwest. Inexplicably Gabriel’s attention was drawn away from the core of speakers at the center of the council to Pike, who stood alone outside the circled hunters, hunched painfully with his wounds. Pike was watching Duprée with a rattlesnake’s obsidian stare, and Gabriel realized suddenly that Duprée was aware of it, too, and that he was more nervous because of that than from Big John’s interrogation.

  “The Pembina caravan?” Charlo said to Breland, changing the subject. “Have they had trouble with the Sioux this year?”

  Breland shook his head. “Non, Charlo. From Lac du Diable they sent a delegation to Renville’s post to treaty with the Sioux, and have paid in blankets and ammunition for the right to hunt unmolested along the Sheyenne.”

  An uneasy murmur greeted Breland’s announcement. Turcotte said: “What will they do if they do not fill their carts along the Sheyenne?”

  Breland’s smile was as thin as stretched gut. “They will go where there are buffalo, René, for they are bois brûles, and could do no less. But for now they hunt in peace, which is good for them but maybe not so good for us. Paget said that a lot of the Yanktons did not wish to see such a treaty made. But, it is done, and, for the time being, it is being honored by our red brothers.”

  Musing aloud, Big John said: “’Twas a wise move on their part, though, and one we should have pushed for ourselves.”

  “The Sioux dae nae own the buffalo, Big John,” Patterson said with an edge to his words.

  “I was thinkin’ of Little John, Jim, and his wife and the small ones. A treaty might have saved the man his life.”

  “The Yanktons did not want a treaty,” Gabriel reminded him. “They did not come to parley. They attacked from ambush and killed Little John and wounded four others without warning. I think they will attack again, sooner or later.”

  “Gabriel’s right,” Hallet said. “It was the Sioux who tried to slip up behind us like snakes in the grass. Now
a man is dead, and the blame is theirs, not ours. I say Paget’s a fool if he thinks they won’t attack because of a treaty only a few of Joseph Renville’s relatives signed.”

  “Paget is no fool,” Breland said. “He watches like a hawk and will not be taken by surprise.”

  “What does that matter?” Gabriel asked. “If there are buffalo to the southwest, then that is the direction we must go in, not toward Turtle Lake.”

  “What of the Sioux?” asked Toussaint.

  “Let the devil take the Sioux,” Hallet replied darkly.

  “Non, Charles,” Turcotte said grimly. “Le diable would not want Black Fish or his warriors cluttering his fire.”

  There was a general burst of laughter at that. When it died, Turcotte continued. “We must go forward, as young Gabriel says, for we cannot squat here forever like old men with stoppered bowels waiting for our enemies to return. But we must also be cautious, for now the Yanktons have shown us that their hearts are bad this year.” He glanced around the circle of men. “And now, also, we must send scouts ahead, so that we know where the buffalo that Joseph spoke of have gone. Also, we must know if the Pembina hunters are following them, scattering them even more. The caravan should continue southwest, but someone must ride ahead to find the buffalo. It can be delayed no longer.”

  Turcotte had been arguing for sending scouts ahead ever since their first camp at the base of the Hair Hills, but this time, no one objected. In the silence that followed, Big John said: “I’ll go, René.”

  “No.” Breland leaned forward, his eyes on Big John. “To scout is a younger man’s duty.”

  “Enough younger men have died, Joseph,” Big John replied. “I’ll go, alone.”

  “Big John cannot go alone,” Charlo interjected. “Yet he speaks the truth when he says enough younger men have died. We have too many widows and fatherless children as it is. I will go with him.”

  Before anyone could second it, Gabriel stood and let the butt of his musket strike the earth between his feet. “No, I will go with Big John.” He said it boldly, and, when no one spoke against him, he nodded, relieved that he hadn’t been challenged.

  Turcotte said: “It is settled then.”

  “But what of water?” a bois brûle named Grahm asked. “At Turtle Lake there is plenty for our oxen.”

  Others took up similar issues, but Gabriel didn’t wait to hear them out. He had no patience for details today. And he was looking forward to riding with Big John again. He wanted to reëxperience the solitude of the plains with someone capable of appreciating its silence. The possibility of running into more Sioux didn’t worry him. The Sioux were always a threat when a man traveled across their lands, but when had that ever stopped a bois brûle?

  He roped Baldy out of the restless herd still penned inside the cordon and led him to his cart. Alec was already there, standing where he could watch the plain for Indians, yet also keep an eye on the council. He grinned when Gabriel came up.

  “Let me go, big brother.”

  “Shoo, you and Big John? You would kill one another within an hour.” Gabriel saddled Baldy, then got his bedroll from behind the cart. He packed some pemmican and tea and a little tin kettle inside his sleeping robe, then lashed it behind the seat. Inside his heavy coat he wrapped mittens and extra moccasins, then tied that across the front of his saddle. When he was ready, he went to sit with Alec so that he could listen to the men from a distance, yet also allow his thoughts to wander.

  “Now it comes,” Alec said with obvious relish, nodding toward a group of women who had been standing at the edge of the council. Charlo was already speaking to Marie Cyr.

  “We have come to hunt buffalo, Marie,” the old, white-haired hunter was saying. “We cannot remain here and wait for the Sioux to return.”

  “We’ve searched for Etienne,” Hallet added. “He couldn’t be found. We must go on.”

  In Assiniboine, Marie Cyr said accusingly: “Would you leave behind one of your friends, Charles Hallet? Or is it only those who are not close to you that you would abandon?”

  Hallet’s face darkened, and a grumbling passed through the council. Several of the men turned to glare at their wives for allowing this breach of etiquette. Others refused to look up at all.

  “We have searched,” Breland insisted. “Perhaps he was found by others.”

  “What others, Joseph? Did you see him or hear of him at Paget’s camp? Or is it the Sioux you speak of when you say others?”

  In English, Big John said: “What would ye have us do, Marie? Say it, and I’ll do it meself, for Etienne was me friend, and as fine a man as any who’s ever run the humped ones. But”—he spread his hands in a helpless gesture—“what more can we do? Tell me.”

  Staying in Assiniboine, Marie said shrilly: “What am I to do, Tall Man? What am I to do without a husband, or a father for my children?”

  Big John’s words were audible to them all. “Ye’ll be doin’ what every other widow has done before ye. Ye’ll find yeself another to hunt and farm for ye, whose hides ye can tan and whose pemmican ye can mix. Ye’re a fine worker, Marie, and ye’ll be comin’ with us in the spring, proud as a swan with a new husband. Ye will now. I’d bet prime beaver on that.”

  But Marie just stared until Big John’s face turned red and his eyes slowly lowered. Then she turned away, her movements as measured as those of an ancient grandmother, and went back to her carts. The wives of Quesnelle, LaBarge, Leveille, and several others walked with her, their heads bowed under their shawls.

  Alec shook his head in disgust. “She should know better,” he said. “It is not right for a woman to speak that way to men.”

  “She has a right,” Gabriel replied quietly. He watched as she sat down in front of her small lodge, her children gathering silently around her like chicks to a hen. Only she, among them all, kept her head up, although she didn’t speak or even seem to notice the other women standing nearby. Yet in spite of the rigid way she held herself, her grief was obvious, and Gabriel wondered how anyone could say she didn’t have a right to speak her mind. He stood and gathered Baldy’s reins above the piebald’s neck.

  “Where are you going?” Alec demanded.

  “To wait for Big John.” Stepping into the saddle, Gabriel rode over to where a cart had been wheeled out of the way for Breland’s return. Alec’s friend, Isidore Turcotte, stood guard there, his fusil clutched across his chest. Gabriel pulled up and cocked a leg above the coat tied across the front of his saddle. He was aware of Isidore watching him, but neither glanced at the youth nor spoke. He was still there an hour later when Big John finally rode up, his roan packed for the long journey ahead.

  * * * * *

  It was late that same afternoon when Gabriel and Big John came to the site of an old prairie fire, something from before the rains. It lay before them like a giant brand on the earth, the blackened grass beaten down by wind and weather, discoloring the soil. Letting his gaze run along the distant line of the southern horizon, Gabriel saw nothing that wasn’t black.

  “Well, ’tis a surprise, to be sure,” Big John said after several moments’ reflection. “But, I see no choice other than to cross it. If the buffalo are headin’ west, like Joseph says, it would take too long for us to backtrack around the burn with our carts.”

  “If it is a big burn, we could travel for days without grass to feed the stock. The water may be bad as well.”

  “’Tis a possibility, though I’d be more worried about grass than water, what with all the rain we’ve had of late.”

  Gabriel shrugged and looked away, knowing Big John had already made up his mind, and that they would push on across the burn in search of buffalo somewhere on the other side. Abruptly he heeled Baldy into the blackened grass.

  “Where are ye goin’, lad?” Big John called. “I’ve not heard ye opinion yet.”

  Gabriel hauled up and looked back. “The decision is already made, Big John. Now we must go on to see where the burn ends and the good grass be
gins again, before the carts follow too deeply in.”

  But Big John seemed wary. “Are ye thinkin’ we should turn away, Gabriel? ’Tis Breland’s route ye’d rather follow, where there’s grass, sure, and water along the Sheyenne?”

  Gabriel’s lips narrowed in resentment. “And Paget’s hunters already ahead of us?”

  A smile touched Big John’s face. “’Tis what I was thinkin’, as well, for such is what we’d surely be doin’ was we to backtrack. Ye made a wise decision, lad.”

  His anger flaring, Gabriel pulled Baldy around and rode back to Big John’s side. “But it wasn’t my decision, Big John. It was yours. You had already made up your mind that we would cross the burn. Don’t try to make it sound like it was my idea.”

  Big John sighed. “Well, there’s truth to ye words, Gabriel, and I won’t deny it. Still, it did me heart good to have ye tell me why ye agreed that we should go on, to consider all the facts and…”

  Gabriel’s voice rose sharply, cutting him off. “Like a good little half-breed? Is that what you mean?”

  Big John’s eyes widened. “I said no such thing, lad!”

  “Didn’t you?” Gabriel drove his heels into Baldy’s ribs, forcing his smaller horse into Big John’s roan. The roan bared its teeth and laid back its ears, but Gabriel used his quirt to slash the horse across its nose before it could bite.

  “Here now!” Big John roared, pulling the stallion’s head around. Shock replaced the anger on his face when Gabriel raised his quirt once more. Instinctively Big John lifted an arm in self-defense. They froze that way. Then the rage in him quickly abated, and he lowered his quirt.

  “By the Lord, Gabriel,” Big John breathed. “Has it come to this, that ye’d try to lash me like I was naught but a thief?”

  Shamefully Gabriel said: “I did not mean that.”

  “Well now, I’m thinkin’ ye did, or ye wouldn’t have come near to doin’ it.” Big John’s voice softened. “What I’d like to know, son, is why?”

  Gabriel looked away. Far to the southwest, little more than a knob on the horizon, lay the heights of Dogden Butte. It was an old and familiar landmark to the bois brûles, a sight he’d seen many times and from many different angles. Yet he had never been there, had never scaled its heights to view the eagles’ nests some said dotted its sheer southern slope, or rolled stones down its side. For all he knew, there weren’t even any stones on top of the Dogden, or eagles, either.