Beneath a Hunter's Moon

by Michael Zimmer

  Gabriel stared after them only a moment, then wiped the tears from his cheeks and went to where Baldy was tethered. He slipped out of his factory coat and tied it across the front of the saddle, then took off his bulky winter moccasins and secured them to his bedroll. He wrapped his bandanna over his mouth and nose to mask the frosty cloud of his breath, then readied the Brown Bess by feel. When he’d checked the belt axe and the two knives he carried at his waist, he was ready. He entered the trees as Big John and Charlo had done, quietly and without fanfare, and made his way alone toward the tiny, flickering glow that was the Sioux’ fire, nearly half a mile away.

  There was no fear in him, not even the familiar twinge of anxiety, just an incredible awareness. He felt every twig beneath the thin leather soles of his moccasins, could sense its tension and pull his foot back before it snapped. His toes glided into the crusted snow as if it were water, and his foot slid smoothly after them, with only minimal noise. He spotted an owl watching him from a high limb and changed direction before it whooed or flapped loudly away.

  A time or two he thought he heard one of the others behind him, but the sound was always small and never carried far. He didn’t even bother looking back. Gradually the light of the Sioux’ fire strengthened. Drawing closer, he spotted the overturned bullboat propped on a low brace between the Indians’ camp and the river, its pale hull glowing dull red from the reflection of the coals beneath it. A woman stood nearby but Gabriel couldn’t tell whether it was Lizette or Celine. Several men sat around the fire, talking animatedly.

  Stopping, Gabriel finally looked back. Hallet was following in his tracks, but the others were still hidden from view. He nodded as Hallet came up, and the two men sank to a crouch.

  “We will wait here a few minutes, before moving closer,” Gabriel whispered.

  Hallet cast a brief glance over his shoulder. “Noel and Pike are still coming.”

  Gabriel shook his head. “We will wait only a few minutes. We must not lag when Big John and Charlo begin their attack. That is the most important thing.”

  Hallet didn’t reply. He’d spotted the woman standing beside the bullboat and was studying her intently. After a couple of minutes, he shook his head in frustration. “It could be Lizette, but I’m not sure.” The bandanna over his mouth puffed in and out as he spoke, like the irregular beating of a heart, the oval patch of condensation right at his mouth whiskered with frost.

  “Look,” Gabriel whispered, nodding toward the Sioux camp.

  A couple of warriors had stood and were making their way to the boat. Lifting one side free of the props, they examined the drying hide, commenting on its condition to one another. Lizette Hallet—in the increased reflection from the drying fire Gabriel could see her clearly now—stood silently to one side.

  Hallet drew his breath in sharply, and, in a choked voice, said: “If I lose my Lizette…”

  “We will get them back,” Gabriel said grimly. He moved his hand back to cover the musket’s big lock. “Come, it is time to move closer.”

  With Hallet dogging his heels, Gabriel made his way carefully through the trees to a waist-thick limb, only recently fallen. Smaller branches arched upward from it, tapering into a lattice of twigs pointing crookedly toward the river. Crouched within the limb’s camouflage of twigs and branches, Gabriel surveyed the camp. He counted only eight or nine warriors, but remembered Charlo had said at least three of them were standing watch. Celine and Emmaline were sitting in the snow behind the bullboat, close to Lizette and within the light of the larger fire, although outside its circle of warmth. None of them had blankets or robes with which to combat the intense cold, although Lizette and Emmaline still had their capotes.

  Only Celine had been stripped of her outerwear. She wore the same dark, heavy dress that she’d come to the valley in, and sat, hunched and shivering, beside Emmaline, rocking steadily back and forth. Gabriel thought Big John must have been right. Celine was being punished for something, and would have to earn her clothing back with obedience.

  Hallet touched his arm, then nodded toward the flat meadow separating the trees from the distant line of hills they had come through that afternoon. It took Gabriel a couple of minutes to spot the warrior standing motionlessly beside a cottonwood, but, once he had, he soon picked out a second Indian, keeping watch about forty yards below where the first one stood. He tried to recount the braves lounging around the fire, but still couldn’t tell whether there were eight or nine. That left at least one, and possibly two, unaccounted for.

  Leaning close, Hallet whispered: “I saw someone moving near the river.”

  Big John and Charlo? Gabriel thought it probably had to be, although he knew it could also be one of the unaccounted for warriors.

  Then he heard a faint thud from the river’s edge, followed by a muffled cry, then a loud splash. The Sioux sitting around the fire sprang to their feet, and, at Gabriel’s side, Hallet’s fusil roared. One of the Indians at the fire was knocked spinning. A second later, Big John’s rifle flashed from the darkness of the riverbank. Gabriel snapped a shot at the scattering warriors. His ball struck one of the braves in the back and slammed him to the ground, face first.

  Lunging to his feet, Gabriel raced toward the Sioux camp, pulling his powder horn around to reload as he did. He kept his eyes on the warrior he’d shot, scrambling awkwardly into the brush, his shoulder glistening with blood.

  Hallet was sprinting through the trees for his wife and Gabriel ran after him. Lizette was trying to pull Celine toward the river, but she was resisting, fighting back with slaps and kicks. Emmaline had already vanished. Most of the Sioux had also disappeared into the trees, but at least three of them were dashing toward the captives.

  Gabriel cried an impotent warning as he spilled a haphazard powder charge down the barrel. He watched helplessly as the warriors closed in on the women, tomahawks raised. Then he heard the crack of Big John’s second barrel, and saw in that same instant the flowering muzzle flash of Charlo’s fowler.

  Two of the braves rushing the captives were blasted off their feet. The third skidded as he spun toward the trees; he was darting into the timber when Hallet threw his reloaded fusil to his shoulder and fired on the run. The third warrior jerked and staggered, then dropped to his knees, from there toppling slowly to his face.

  Thumbing an unpatched ball down the musket’s bore, Gabriel rapped the butt sharply against the ground, then jerked it up to the cradle of his left arm and quickly primed the pan. He stopped then, the musket held ready, but there were no targets in sight.

  The Sioux were gone.

  The clearing around the fire was empty save for the saddles and gear of the Indians. Taking his time now, Gabriel started to work his way around the camp in a large circle toward the river, being careful not to blind himself by looking directly into the brighter light of the clearing. Movement to his left preceded the cold whisk of an arrow paring the air close to his ear. He spun, shouldering the Bess, but the shattering crack of a rifle—Pike’s rifle, he thought—interrupted his aim. He heard the startled cry of the Indian, then the loud splash of a body tumbling into the river.

  A horse nickered from beyond the fire. There was a shout, a reply in Sioux, then the drumming of hoofs that quickly faded to the west.

  There was another cry then, of pain and surprise, followed by a Sioux’s triumphant shout. The cry was Pouliot’s, or at least it had sounded like Pouliot. A short silence followed, then the night erupted once more with shouts and cries, the sharp cracks of rifles and the more hollow booms of the smoothbores.

  Gabriel plunged recklessly forward. A Sioux sprang up before him, tomahawk flashing. Gabriel smashed him in the face with the musket’s butt, slashed downward with the barrel. There was a grunt that nearly drowned out the dull, wet plunk of steel against flesh and bone. A warm, bloody mist showered the back of Gabriel’s hand. As the Indian crumbled, he leaped over the body and ran on.

  He saw Charlo come into the clearing, then dodge
quickly to one side. He saw Big John approach the bullboat just as one of the Sioux who had been shot earlier sat up. The muzzle flash of the Indian’s fusil lit Big John’s face with an orange glow, staggering him backward.

  Pouliot seemed to appear out of nowhere, the left side of his shirt bloody around the shaft of an arrow protruding from his shoulder. His fusil was gone, but he stepped up behind the warrior who’d shot Big John and cleaved his skull with a belt axe. Leaving the hatchet embedded in the Indian’s head, he strode rapidly to the bullboat and flipped it over with his good arm. Emmaline was crouched beneath it like a rabbit under a bush. She cried out in terror when the boat was lifted away, then cried again with joy and jumped into her father’s arms. Holding her tightly, Pouliot darted into the shadows.

  Gabriel had come to a halt when Charlo ran into the clearing, then had watched in stunned disbelief as Big John fell. Pouliot’s rescue of his daughter took mere seconds. When he and the girl were gone, Gabriel’s gaze was drawn numbly back to Big John’s writhing form, the big Scotsman’s hands clutching and clawing at his face from which came hollow, breathless shrieks that made Gabriel’s scalp crawl.

  Gabriel started forward, but hadn’t gone more than a few paces when yet another scream yanked him to a stop. Pivoting, he saw Celine running toward the clearing from the direction of the open valley. A mounted Sioux was racing his pony after her. Gabriel shouted and lifted his musket, but the Sioux was already leaning from the back of his mount, his arm curling toward Celine’s waist, her body partially shielding his.

  Helplessly Gabriel watched the warrior grab Celine and pull her roughly across the horse’s withers. Then a rifle cracked from the edge of the trees and the Sioux pitched limply from the pony’s back.

  Celine fell with him, sprawling in the snow. Gabriel ran to her side. Goose-flesh pimpled the flesh of his arms as her unearthly screams raked the night. Her body jerked convulsively, and she was beating at the air and kicking at the snow as if still fighting off dead warriors.

  Gabriel dropped to his knees at her side, leaning the Brown Bess against a tree. Celine’s face snapped toward him, twisted with rage.

  “You don’t love me!” she yelled wildly. “You don’t love me!”

  He froze, transfixed by the stark intensity of her features, the lifeless depths of her eyes. He was only peripherally aware of her arm fumbling behind her. Then the look of hatred on her face faded. A smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. She came up fast, her hand flashing forward in a blur of polished steel.

  A hand grabbed Gabriel’s shoulder and yanked him back at the last instant. He fell in the snow and Pike stepped between him and the girl, holding out his hand to stop her rush. Celine screamed her frustration and lunged toward him, her arm darting like the strike of a snake. Pike grunted and spun away, wrapping an arm around the trunk of a tree to hold himself up. With his free hand he plucked clumsily at the hilt of the knife protruding from his chest, but he was too weak to pull it out. Then his knees buckled and he crumbled to the ground, dead before Gabriel could reach his side.

  Epilogue

  Placing the snow goggles in his hand, Isabella gently guided his fingers over the stone-polished cottonwood. The goggles were slim and one-piece, rather than the traditional two-piece units that were easier to make but harder to wear comfortably.

  Big John smiled his approval as he fitted them gingerly over the bridge of his nose. Pulling the two leather thongs behind his head, Isabella tied them snugly in place. The fit was perfect, the result of previous sizings. The twin wooden orbs protruded outward like the eyes of a lizard, but were hollowed within, the inner surfaces blackened with a mixture of grease and soot to reduce glare. The overall result was bug-eyed but effective. The slits through which he peered were about a sixteenth of an inch wide and extended nearly an inch horizontally. On the prairies when the winter sun was at its brightest, the Crees often used goggles similar to these to prevent snow blindness, although it was June now, and snow blindness hadn’t been a threat for months.

  Opening his eyes slowly, Big John couldn’t help a small wince at the sting of the midmorning sun, but his vision soon adjusted to the change in light and he found that the goggles actually helped more than he’d anticipated. By squinting, he was able to make out the bulky silhouette of the windmill, the darkness that was the shadows within the open-faced shed. Beyond the shed, the fringe of trees that lined the Tongue River was a solid, mist-green wall, but to the east he could make out the splotchy brown of buffalo-skin lodges where the Métis were gathering for the spring hunt.

  It wasn’t much, he supposed, this blurred and watery world, but it was more than he’d once expected. Isabella had finished the goggles in January, but it wasn’t until the last few days that he’d felt up to wearing them over the tender, pink flesh of his face for more than an hour or two at a time.

  Big John was sitting in the cane-bottomed rocker Isabella had moved outside for him, listening to the summer sounds—birds trilling along the river, the distant hum of locusts, the lowing of oxen from the big herd to the south. From the village there came the shouts and laughter of children, the calls of women from their lodges, and, farther off, the squeal of a Red River cart coming down the road from Pembina Post.

  There would be a wedding that night if the priest arrived in time. Gabriel Gilray and Susanne Leveille, and about time, most of them agreed.

  “Sacre,” Turcotte had joked only that morning. “Maybe next year, Big John, if Gabriel can capitaine Susanne, then maybe we let him capitaine a hunt, eh?”

  Turcotte’s remark had made Big John’s chest swell nearly to bursting with pride.

  Isabella placed a hand on his shoulder and he covered it with his own. The Sioux’s ball had missed his head, but the funneling blast of the ignited powder had charred his face horribly, searing the flesh clear to the bone along his cheek, ruining his sight forever. Yet sometimes he thought his partial blindness might be a blessing. His fingers had long ago told him his face was something he didn’t want to see.

  He’d been a long time recovering, and near enough to death at one point that Isabella had finally sent for a priest. Father Denning had arrived just after the Twelfth of Christmas in a dog sled driven by Joseph Breland, but by then Big John had passed his most critical stage. From that point on, his recovery had been steady, though agonizingly slow.

  Emotionally there had never, amazingly, been much trouble. Neither bitterness nor anger. He had, instead, experienced an unprecedented contentment, a feeling new to him, and strangely comforting. His place in the valley was secure now. He had a woman, a wife actually, married in a traditional Cree ceremony—Denning had been adamant in refusing a Catholic service, and Big John still stubbornly spurned conversion—and through her, two fine sons.

  Once, he had had a daughter as well, but she had hung herself in the same woods where her mother had committed suicide a dozen years before. Big John thought there had been a sort of collective relief among the Métis in that, a sense of something no one really understood coming full circle. A completion rather than an end.

  Big John had come to peace with himself in that, too. He supposed he was to blame in some ways, but it was a blame grounded mostly in ignorance. He rued only sending her away that first time. Perhaps none of this would have happened if he hadn’t, although he was realistic enough to think that it probably would have. He had accepted Celine’s death as he had his own blindness and loss of rank within the valley—with sadness and resignation, but no regret. À la façon du pays, he had once told Pike. The way of the land.

  THE END

  About the Author

  Michael Zimmer grew up on a small Colorado horse ranch, and began to break and train horses for spending money while still in high school. An American history enthusiast from a very early age, he has done extensive research on the Old West. His personal library contains over two thousand volumes covering that area west of the Mississippi from the late 1700s to the early decades of the twentieth
century. In addition to perusing first-hand accounts from the period, Zimmer is also a firm believer in field interpretation. He’s made it a point to master many of the skills used by our forefathers, and can start a campfire with flint and steel, gather, prepare, and survive on natural foods found in the wilderness, and has built and slept in shelters as diverse as bark lodges and snow caves. He owns and shoots a number of Old West firearms, and has done horseback treks using nineteenth-century Century tack, gear, and guidelines. Zimmer is the author of ten Western novels, and his work has been praised by Library Journal, Booklist, and Publisher’s Weekly as well as other Western writers. Jory Sherman, author of Grass Kingdom, writes: “He [Zimmer] takes you back in time to an exciting era in U.S. history so vividly that the reader will feel as if he has been over the old trails, trapped the shining streams, and gazed in wonder at the awesome grandeur of the Rocky Mountains. Here is a writer to welcome into the ranks of the very best novelists of today or anytime in the history of literature.” And Richard Wheeler, author of Goldfield, has said of Zimmer’s fourth novel, Fandango (1996): “One of the best mountain man novels ever written.” Zimmer lives in Utah with his wife Vanessa and two dogs. His website is www.michael-zimmer.com.