Beneath a Hunter's Moon

by Michael Zimmer

  Pouliot shrugged. “You come,” he said, reining his horse around. Almost reluctantly, Big John followed.

  Pouliot led him into an area of rolling hills, keeping his mount to an easy jog. It was a twenty-minute ride to the shallow basin where a dozen other Métis surrounded a crumpled buffalo. Big John spotted Gabriel’s Baldy and Breland’s black runner among them.

  There were a few terse greetings as he approached. Several of the men pulled their horses out of the way to allow him to ride through. Breland was already dismounted, stooped next to the dead bison. Hallet and Turcotte were also on foot, standing just behind him. Breland looked up as Big John halted his runner, his expression stricken, confidence gone. Glancing at the cow, Big John noticed for the first time the swatch of fabric attached to her head.

  “I saw this, but didn’t know what it was until I came back,” Hallet explained shakily. “I… I thought it was a coat, maybe. A piece of clothing.”

  Big John looked again, and his heart seemed to slam against the back of his throat. “By the Lord,” he croaked. His breath was ragged as he stepped down, then moved closer. “Are ye sure, man?” he demanded huskily of Hallet. “Are ye positive sure?”

  “It is the shirt Cyr wore the day of the hunt,” Breland said. He was watching Big John intently, as if unable to look any longer at what lay at his feet.

  Big John bent unwillingly over the cow’s neck to study what was left of the corpse. There wasn’t much. A deflated torso and a misshapened lump that had once been the head. The arms and legs were trampled stumps, the blood-stained remnants of a green wool shirt all that remained of his dress. The buffalo’s short, curved black horn was impaled deeply into the pelvic bone.

  “Look here,” Breland said, brushing back the cow’s long neck hair. Pushing his fingers into the thick inner wool, Big John discovered the narrow stub of a broken knife blade, the hair around it matted with old blood. Breland nodded soberly. “He was alive for a while. He tried to kill the cow with his knife, but the cow killed him, instead.”

  Big John walked back to his horse, using the time to compose himself. Casting an accusatory eye on Turcotte, he said: “Why haven’t ye pulled him free, man? Do ye not have the stomach for it?”

  “We tried, Big John.” Hallet’s voice quavered. “But he’s… stuck. We were afraid he’d come apart if we pulled much harder.”

  Big John swallowed with difficulty. “Then he’ll have to be buried with the horn in him.” He mounted the roan, settling himself before looking up. The eyes of every man there were upon him. Big John took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “He was me friend,” he whispered. “I can’t…” The words trailed off as his gaze returned to the empty sack of flesh. No one moved. No one spoke. Finally, with a terrible groan, he started to dismount.

  “No!” Gabriel said loudly, startling everyone. He slipped from Baldy’s back and strode over to the buffalo. Glancing at Turcotte, he said: “Give me your belt axe.”

  Turcotte handed it over. Gabriel pulled the hair back from the base of the horn and, with his fingers dangerously close, drove the bit into the hard, scaly protrusion. He worked swiftly and, as far as Big John could tell, never once looked at the corpse. The horn cracked before it broke, tipping Cyr’s body toward the ground. With the next blow, Gabriel severed the horn completely. What was left of Cyr’s body plopped into the grass, rolled once, then came to a stop.

  Breathing slightly harder than the effort would have seemed to require, Gabriel returned the axe to Turcotte, then went to his horse. Silently Turcotte began to skin the cow. He would use the hide to wrap the body in. Big John glanced at Breland, but Breland was still staring at the corpse in morbid fascination.

  “Wrap him tight, René,” Big John said heavily. “We’ll take him back to the caravan and see that he’s buried proper-like.”

  “We can’t,” Breland said, tearing his gaze away from the body. “Marie must not see this, Big John. We will bury him here, and no one must speak of it to her.”

  “No, Joseph, we’ll not be hidin’ this from Marie. She has a right to know what happened to her husband, no matter how difficult the tellin’ might be.”

  “We don’t even know for sure that this is him,” Hallet said.

  “We know,” Gabriel said flatly. He stared at Hallet until the hunter looked away, then turned to Breland. “We will do as Big John says.”

  This time, there was no debate.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Gripped by restlessness, Pike wandered away from the McTavish camp. Overhead, the stars were nearly obscured by a mantle of clouds that had blown in late that afternoon, and the moon had not yet risen. Only a few small buffalo-chip fires continued to dance and sputter in the stiffening breeze. Most of the half-breeds had turned in early, daunted by the reappearance of Etienne Cyr, nearly one hundred miles from where he had vanished.

  Cyr’s return had affected the Métis deeply, more so than even McKay’s death at the hands of the Sioux. They had gone through the motions of a funeral as if in a trance, then voted immediately afterward to move camp several miles closer to the herds. Even Cyr’s wife Marie had watched with more dismay than grief as the broken remnants of her husband were lowered into its grave.

  Pike shared their feelings of unease. Etienne Cyr’s reappearance was unnerving; it dredged up too many childhood nightmares. Turning his back to the wind, he dug the fixings from the overlap of his capote. He packed his short clay pipe tightly, then lit it with flint and steel and a spark struck into a piece of char cloth. With the pipe drawing smoothly, he eased down against a dished cart wheel and carefully stretched his legs. Despite the stiffness, he was satisfied with the pull of muscle across his ribs, the dulling ache in his hip. The swelling in his knee had gone down, too, and, although he hadn’t taken part in the day’s chase, he was determined to go out tomorrow. Duprée had been bragging earlier that he planned to drop twice as many buffalo on his next run, but Pike had decided to make him a liar. Henri Duprée’s time of reckoning had come at last, and the middle of a run seemed like the perfect place for it to happen.

  The woman caught him by surprise, and Pike swore under his breath and stood, annoyed at having let her get so close without detecting her. The woman said: “You are Monsieur Pike, non?”

  “Yeah, I’m Pike.”

  “Oui, I thought as much, but the night is so dark. I am Susanne Leveille, daughter of Jacques Leveille, of Saint Joseph.”

  “You skin for Charlo,” Pike said, picturing her in his mind—an attractive girl, finely featured. A good worker, too, he recalled.

  “I make Charlo’s pemmican and cure the hides he takes, oui.”

  “What do you want?”

  “You will go soon, non? To the montagnes, I mean.”

  Pike’s brows furrowed suspiciously. “Maybe.”

  “After the hunt, non?”

  But maybe was all he was willing to give.

  “You must say!” Susanne exclaimed with a quick stomp of her foot.

  Shrugging then, deciding it didn’t really matter, Pike said: “I don’t intend to go back to the valley. When the caravan turns around, I’ll keep moving west.”

  “You will take Celine when you go?”

  He stiffened at that. “No.”

  “But you must!”

  “No,” he said again, bluntly.

  “Monsieur, you must know that Celine has poisoned Gabriel’s heart. He must be left alone if he is to ever find his way again. Surely you can see that?”

  Pike doubted if he saw it quite the way Susanne Leveille did. Or Gabriel, for that matter. It was ironic, though, and more than a little humorous. He wondered if Gabriel knew how Susanne felt about him, that she was willing to humble herself in front of a stranger this way. Although Pike didn’t know her well, he thought Gabriel would be a fool to cast someone like her aside for Celine McTavish. Yet there was no accounting for what a man might do if he thought he was in love. It was a strange medicine, more potent than the strongest Pa
ss Brandy sold in Taos.

  “It is true, non?” Susanne persisted.

  Maybe, Pike thought, but that didn’t mean he was going to saddle himself with a crazy woman.

  “Monsieur! You must answer me,” Susanne demanded.

  “No,” Pike said gruffly. “I want nothing to do with her.”

  “But she came to you. When you returned from the Chippewas. You, monsieur.”

  “I don’t want her, girl. It’s her that wants, although I’m damned if I think she knows what it is she’s looking for.”

  “Gabriel,” Susanne replied simply. “It is Gabriel she wants.”

  But Pike wasn’t convinced of that, either. Not in the way Susanne Leveille meant it.

  “Then you will not help me?”

  He shook his head, not caring whether she saw his silent response or not.

  “Very well,” she said stiffly, then turned away.

  Pike watched the spot where she disappeared, thinking that maybe it would be a good thing if he did leave after tomorrow’s hunt. He was getting the prickly feeling that he’d already stayed too long.

  * * * * *

  By morning the clouds had thickened into a dense gray canopy, stretching from horizon to horizon. Now and again they would spit a few small, grainy flakes of snow that took their time melting against the rapidly freezing soil. The wind had strengthened overnight, too, numbing where it struck exposed flesh.

  Pike saddled the seal brown runner Michel Quesnelle had given him, his fingers stiff and clumsy on the latigo. From time to time he would glance across the camp to where Henri Duprée was saddling his own horse, boasting loudly to those around him of the buffalo he would take that day, the quantity of meat and hides he would harvest. Duprée had grown bolder of late, Pike thought, more arrogant. Familiarity had given him a confidence he’d lacked when he first arrived.

  Big John walked up just as Pike finished. “I didn’t think ye’d be goin’ out again so soon.”

  “A man can’t make meat idling about camp,” Pike said.

  “Well, and sure, but I’d say the women have enough to handle with what Gabriel and I shot yesterday. Isabella and I will be takin’ a cart out later today to bring in what the wolves have left us. There’s no reason ye have to hunt if ye don’t feel up to it just yet.”

  “Figured I’d give it a try,” Pike said. He pulled the heavy wooden stirrup down off the seat, then glanced at the sky. “Feels kinda like winter,” he remarked absently.

  “Aye, and here to stay this time. I can feel it in me bones.” He lifted his face to the spiraling dry flakes. “I’m hopin’ we can push on to Turtle Lake soon. ’Twill feel good to sit before a real fire again. We’ve used up most of the firewood we brought from Chain of Lakes in dryin’ the meat after the last hunt.”

  “What’s the matter?” Pike asked, grinning. “Buffalo shit don’t suit you any more?”

  Big John smiled good-naturedly. “’Tis a fact dried dung won’t warm a man the way a good wood fire will, though ’twas shelter from the storm I was hopin’ for.”

  Pike thrust a heavily moccasined foot into his stirrup and pulled himself up into the bulky cradle of his saddle. At the southern rim of the camp about twenty hunters had already gathered for the day’s run, but only a few others were still readying their mounts. The majority of the men would remain behind today, most of those going out, as Big John and Isabella planned, to bring in the meat and hides they hadn’t been able to retrieve yesterday.

  Stepping away from the brown, Big John said: “Luck to ye then, Mister Pike, and watch yeself. We’ve lost too many good men already this season.”

  Pike made a chore of gathering the brown’s reins, sliding them through his fingers until they hung evenly along the gelding’s neck. A feeling of warmth came over him for this old man, and a sense of shame after that. He had done McTavish wrong by horning his daughter—had bit the hand that fed him, his ma would’ve said—but it was too late now. There was no way to undo his wrong without destroying what little trust McTavish still had in him, and, as selfish as it was, Pike didn’t want to risk that. Not now.

  To the south, Turcotte was already leading his hunters through a gap in the carts, and Pike touched the brown’s sides with his spurs. He rode away without acknowledgment of McTavish’s good-bye, and, when he was free of the carts, he kicked the brown into a gallop to catch up with the rest of the party.

  * * * * *

  They angled more south than west, and by late morning came upon a small herd of several hundred buffalo, speckling the baseline of a range of snow-dusted hills. Turcotte called a halt, and the hunters crowded around him.

  “Where ’ave they gone, René?” Patterson queried.

  “Where do buffalo ever go?” Turcotte replied sourly, then answered his own question. “Wherever they please, but who ever knows where that is? Myself, I think we should hunt these. There will be enough, no?”

  “Maybe too many, even at half that,” another replied. His words caused a general uplifting of chins. The snow was coming down harder now, the flakes bigger and wetter, and it was finally starting to stick, turning the grass slick and white.

  “I’m nae anxious tae run me pony o’er such mountains as these,” Patterson said, inclining his head toward the low, jumbled hills behind the buffalo. “Such a land be made for sleds ’n’ such, this time o’ year, and nae a pony’s hoofs.”

  Turcotte nodded glumly. He looked like he would gladly call off the hunt if anyone suggested it.

  Pike, who had been hanging back silently, said: “Be a long ride out here for nothing if we turned back now.”

  “No one said we were turning back,” Hallet replied, giving Turcotte a hard glare.

  “Unless the American wants to,” Duprée added in a snickering tone. He was watching Pike closely, his lips pulled back to reveal the jagged, yellow tips of his teeth.

  “Non,” Turcotte said almost wearily. “We came to hunt, and hunt we will do.” He made a quick circular motion with his hand. “We form our line here.”

  Pike reined after Duprée, forcing his horse between him and Pierre Campbell. Duprée eyed him curiously in the thickening fall of snow, his dark, bearded face twisting in a frown. “I do not know you,” he said, “but I think you must know me, eh? You watch me always, like the wolf watches the lamb.”

  “I saw you the first time at Qu’Appelle Post,” Pike said. “You were leaving just as I rode in. I didn’t recognize you then, but I learned afterward that it was you.”

  “And then you come here, to the valley?”

  “I’ve been following you a long time. You and Rubiette.”

  Duprée’s eyes widened. “François…” he breathed with cautious understanding. “It was you? I thought maybe an Indian, a Sioux, at least.”

  At the far end of the line, Turcotte called—Ho!—and the Métis started forward at a brisk walk. Only Duprée and Pike held back.

  “Who are you?” Duprée whispered.

  “Just a trapper, Duprée. And a friend.”

  “A friend… but not of mine?”

  Pike shook his head. Duprée’s self-assurance was crumbling rapidly. Pike could see it in his face, in the quick darting of his eyes.

  “There was a Pike who traded for American Fur, out of Fort Union,” Duprée said hesitantly, his eyes narrowing. “But he was…” He licked nervously at his lips. “Non. That man, that Pike, I did not know him.” He stopped, staring.

  Leaning forward until his face was within inches of Duprée’s, Pike whispered sharply: “Weendigo!”

  The half-breed stared back as if seeing a ghost. Then he groaned and quirted his horse after the line of hunters. Pike held the brown back, breathing heavily. He wondered if he’d pushed it too far, too soon, by letting his anger get the better of him. If Duprée sought help from the others, it could ruin his plans.

  But Duprée didn’t stop when he caught up with the others. He didn’t even slow down. Ramming his horse through the ranks of Métis horsemen, he
continued his mad dash for the distant hills as if hell itself were snapping at his heels.

  At least half a dozen horses already keyed up for the run seemed to explode as Henri crashed his mount through the line. A couple bolted after him, their riders scrambling to regain control, and, with that, the race was on. Turcotte tried to call them back, but his own runner was lunging so frantically against its jawline bridle that it was all he could do just to keep his seat. A few held back with Turcotte, but the rest were quirting their horses furiously after Duprée. The run had started; nothing could stop it now.

  Cursing, Pike drove his spurs into the brown’s flanks. He swung wide around Turcotte and the half dozen or so with him. They were following at a lope, their faces dark with anger. Turcotte hailed him as he passed, but Pike was too intent on catching up with Duprée to respond.

  The snow was falling heavier by the minute, feathering down out of the west on a dying breeze. In the gray light the flakes looked as big as silver dollars. The drumming of the brown’s hoofs was muffled by the snow already on the ground, and the buffalo that had been clearly visible only moments before were now nearly imperceptible through the thickening veil of snow. Although Pike could see several riders ahead of him, he couldn’t see Duprée. With growing panic, he knew he would have to catch up before they reached the hills. Once there, it would be anyone’s guess as to which direction the half-breed took.

  Although Turcotte had halted them nearly half a mile from the herd, the leggy brown gelding seemed to cover that distance in no time. The buffalo had already taken flight and were scattering into the hills to the west. Even though these mounds hardly warranted the notice of a man who had trapped in the shadows of the Tetons, they were still fair-size—steep, rolling nubs covered with brown grass rapidly disappearing under a blanket of fresh-fallen snow.

  Most of the half-breeds continued straight into the hills after the main herd, but when Pike spotted several buffalo veering into the next valley to the south, being dogged by a man on a gray horse shaded similarly to Duprée’s, he figured he had little choice but to follow.