“And that’s why she’s there. She’s not with her flock of magpies, holed up somewhere out of the wind and cold. The magpies don’t go south, so she has to make her living here, even on a bitter night like this one when snow covers the earth and there’s little to eat and it’s too cold even to find a bug or a scrap of food.”
It wasn’t much of a story; for the life of him, he couldn’t spin a story or make a plot or put the magpie in real danger, maybe because he knew magpies did well even in brutal cold, and somehow made a living and enjoyed life and made rowdy ruckuses whenever they felt like having fun, which was often. And if they detected danger, the magpies made more noise than a steam calliope. That’s one thing about a noisy flock of magpies: no creature on earth can ignore them.
“Well, this magpie should be off with her bunch, strutting and preening and looking for trouble and uproar, but she’s not. She’s sitting out there watching over my Victoria. Her mother taught her well, because most magpies wouldn’t bother. They would be off hunting grubs or bark beetles or pestering blue jays or annoying elk. But not this magpie. That’s because her mother taught her manners and duty. If she had a task, she would do it to the best of her ability. So, Victoria, this magpie out there is no ordinary bird.”
He paused to slide two or three small sticks into the dwindling fire, and waited for them to catch and flare.
A puff of snow filtered down from above, and it was followed by a soft whir of wings flashing black and white in the firelight. There was the magpie, walking cockily over the buffalo robes. It headed straight toward the bits of meat Skye had cut up for broth and with a few savage jerks of its head it downed the meat.
It peered up at Skye, who sat motionless, and Skye thought he was being scolded though he couldn’t quite say why. The whole episode was too startling for him to think sensibly or sort out this great oddity.
Magpie walked about the lodge, as if checking it all out. These birds had an odd, jerky walk, almost a swagger. So Skye sat very still.
Then he discovered Victoria was wide awake, not flushed or dazed but alert and aware. Magpie had waited for this moment, and hopped up on Victoria’s robes, and sat quietly in the dark, its head cocked, staring at her. Then magpie lifted its wings and flapped them, as if to fan Victoria’s face, and a moment later it popped up to a roost in the smoke hole, and vanished into the night.
Skye sat quietly for a while, uncertain of anything, not trusting his senses, and then he slipped over to Victoria and put his hand on her forehead.
It was cool.
seven
An occasional snowflake fell through the hole and hissed on the wavering fire. Skye saw no light at all up there, and knew a heavy overcast blanked out the stars. It was dark and quiet, but something had changed.
Victoria stared at him. She had barely spoken ever since the arrow had pierced her abdomen and lodged under her lungs. She looked awful: great black circles under her eyes, her flesh saturnine and unhealthy, her jet hair matted.
He discovered the broth in the pot, heated it a while, and then crawled beside her. She struggled up upon her elbows and he spooned some into her mouth. She was swallowing better. She took the rest of it and lay back.
He rose, his limbs aching from long confinement, and pulled his blanket capote around him and plucked up his camp hatchet. He opened the lodge flap and peered into a wall of white. The snow was already high. He stepped into the night, which was not cold, and waited for his eyes to adjust. But there was nothing to see. With the flap closed behind him, he stood in pitch-dark, sensing that if he moved a few steps he would be lost. He felt the snow lick his face and slide under his collar. He probed with the toe of his moccasin for some lodgepoles and found them. He pulled one free of the snow burying it, and chopped it into three- or four-foot lengths. When he was done he could not find the lodge. Nothing revealed itself to him, not even a wall of white. He lifted the longest of the segments and slowly rotated it until it struck something soft. Then, certain he had found the lodge, he kept the pole in contact and felt his way around it until he came to the door flap.
It had been a close call. He dragged the lengths of lodgepole into the lodge. He had ten or twelve lengths and judged he had enough wood for the night.
“Dammit,” said Victoria.
Skye smiled. She was going to get well.
He shed his snow-crusted capote and settled down, refreshed by the exercise. He arranged four pieces of wood so that their ends were burning, and lay back in his robes. They felt good. In all his years of life in the wilds, he had never slept in a truly comfortable bed, but this night he might.
He lay back in them, and pulled two more over him, and felt himself in a cocoon, safe enough even in this perilous place. The mystery of the magpie absorbed him. There were so many things he knew nothing of, and most of all Indian religion, if any of this could be called a religion.
He ached to know if the magpie really was Victoria’s spirit counselor and protector, and whether it had powers beyond Skye’s knowing. He thought back to the only religion he knew, the precepts of the Church of England that had shaped him, given him his moral and spiritual nature. Even after he was pressed into the Royal Navy, that belief was ever-present for the Sabbath was carefully observed on every ship of the fleet.
Who was God? And what was this lone magpie doing, invading the lodge of a Crow Indian woman and himself, only to fly off into a thick snowfall? He could not answer. Yet something had happened. Victoria’s fever had left her. A step toward healing had occurred. She took broth, spoke a little, and lay comfortably beside him.
Was there anything in this unreconcilable with his own beliefs? He didn’t know, and felt almost as powerless confronting these great issues as he had been confronting the wound that almost stole her life. He felt the comfort of a bed that gave gently under his shifting weight, the robes forming themselves to his hip and rib and shoulder, and then he fell into a deep sleep, the first since Victoria’s wounding. If the lodge grew cold, he did not know it.
When he awoke a gray overcast shone through the smoke hole. He had slept sometime into the morning. He sat up abruptly, worried that he had let down his guard, that danger loomed. He hastily pulled on the fine fringed calf-high moccasins Victoria had crafted for him out of buffalo bull hide, and pushed open the flap, his gaze sharp. A foot and a half of snow, maybe more, lay on the level, and he saw nothing but aching emptiness, a white world under a gray heaven. Not a track marred the smooth surface. It did not seem like a threatening place where Blackfeet lurked, where wolves lingered. Yet it was.
“A lot of snow,” he said to her.
“It will keep us safe,” she replied.
“Unless it starts blowing,” he said.
This could be a country of mountainous drifts, ten or twenty feet high, whipped into walls and barriers by prairie winds. There could be no passage through such a land.
The lodge was cold and clammy with their breath. Not an ember remained. He stirred the cold fire bed, and found nothing glowing, and the charred wood cold to his touch. She lay under three robes, looking no better except in her eyes, which were brighter this silent morning. He would build a fire if he could. It would not be easy.
He hunted through his possibles for his fire-making kit, and the tiny bit of bone-dry tinder he needed. He found it, and pinched some of the delicate shavings he preserved there. He dropped them into the fire pit, and then carefully shaved slivers of dry wood from the lodgepoles, until he had a small nest of tinder ready. He pulled his flint and striker from his kit, and slid his hand through the bow-shaped striker. Now he was ready. He held his flint stone over the nest of tinder and scraped hard, a practiced scrape of steel over stone, sending a shower of sparks into the cold tinder. None took. He struck again and again, and then, finally, a spark caught, and another, glowing in the delicate shavings. He blew gently, watched the spark glow as air struck it. In a few moments more, he had many tiny glows worming through the tinder, and then at last one
bloomed into a yellow flame. The rest caught.
Skye added thin twigs to the tiny flame until at last he had a flame he trusted to live. It brought no heat; that would come much later. For another half hour he nursed the flame until at last it was strong enough to consume the poles he pushed into the blaze. Only then did a faint heat begin to soften the harsh cold of the lodge and drive off the trapped moisture within it.
In the cities, people were using phosphorus lucifers, matches that ignited fires easily. But he could not afford them, and mostly they were not available even at the trading posts. So he lived by the means he had always used, first as a trapper and brigade leader, then as a hide hunter and occasional guide.
He cherished the warmth that gradually permeated the lodge and the robes that lay thickly about. He hurried the fire along with his breath, wanting it hot because the heavy gray smoke from cold fires was a telltale sign to enemies.
He stepped outside, knee deep in snow, and examined the smoke from his lodge. It drifted gray and heavy into the air but was almost invisible under the cast-iron sky. He studied the distant ridges, the naked limbs of trees, and every dimple in the snow, but saw nothing to alarm him.
There would be work; always work, for constant toil was the lot of anyone living far from the civilized world. He dug up poles from his stack of them and began cutting them into usable lengths, not an easy task with a hatchet. The pop and crack of his all-too-dull hatchet disturbed the deep silence, but that could not be helped. The snow itself damped sound, and in any case his refuge lay in a steep trench. In a while he had what he judged to be a day’s wood, and then he cut some more while he was about it. That wondrous sleep infused him with a rare energy, and he took advantage of it to get ahead, to put in wood against a bad time, such as another storm.
He scraped the snow off the lodge, traipsed a path to a latrine area, dug his forequarter of meat out of a drift and dragged it closer, stamped down the snow in front of the lodge, and piled fuel next to the door. By the time he had finished the short November day was dying.
He found her awake.
“It is going to snow again,” she said. “I feel it. Skye, go to the People while you can. Leave food and wood with me. I will make do. I have a flint and striker.”
He wouldn’t hear of it. “Among the British, the captain is the last man off of a sinking ship. He makes sure everyone else is safe first,” he said.
“What is this thing, the captain?”
“The chief. The one who commands others.”
She laughed, suddenly. “All right then, I am captain of this lodge and I’m ordering you to go.”
That was why he loved her so much. He reached across and clasped her hands in his.
“We will do this together, like two chiefs of the mighty Absaroka people.”
“Dammit, Skye …” she whispered.
“We’ll wait this out. You’ll be strong someday soon. If need be, I’ll make a sled and pull you out.”
“A sled?”
“You’ll see. I will haul you out of here on a bed if that’s what it takes.”
He fed the flames again as the light dimmed and the fierce November darkness settled over that small scrap of leather and wood that sheltered them.
A few flakes drifted through the vent and melted on the robes. He rose, opened the flap, and discovered a wall of white falling out of the sky, just visible in the twilight.
“See?” she said. “It’s too late for you now. You’re stuck with me, Skye.”
“That is how I always wanted it,” he said. “And it’s Mister Skye.”
eight
The snow came down through the blackness, smothering the land. It came on the tide of deepening cold. It burdened the buffalo-hide walls of the lodge, bulging them inward. It drifted through the smoke hole, hissing on the fire, glittering white on the robes.
The fire behaved badly, wavering and smoking up the lodge, until Skye finally realized it was feeding on air from above; snow had blocked the passage of air from the base of the lodge.
He pushed aside the flap and furiously pushed the snow out into the darkness. He flailed it away from the lodge. He shook the hide until the snow skidded into heaps. After that the fire burned better, at least for a while. But he knew he must stay awake all night to keep the fire from dying.
Victoria watched helplessly, barely able to sit up long enough to take some broth. There was something eerie about this storm that fell upon them in utter silence. Skye knew that if the lodgepoles he had salvaged for firewood gave out there would be little to burn. The hunting camp had consumed every scrap of deadwood on every tree even before the Blackfoot raid.
Life was running thin, and the silent strangling whiteness was carrying death in its soft wings. He knew what he had to do: stay awake. Periodically sweep snow away from the lodge. Cut meat from the haunches and cook it. Find lodgepoles in the snow-buried stack, bring them in and break them up and feed them to the relentless fire.
And all the while he had to nurse a desperately sick woman who needed broth and warmth and shelter. He stayed awake all that night, feeling he was waging a losing war and this unending storm would engulf him. She lay quietly, awake also, caught in her private thoughts. They spoke to each other without words, and often he knew exactly what she was thinking. It was in her to be testy now; the pain at her side and deep in her abdomen was maddening. She felt helpless, even more helpless than he felt in the face of this silent suffocation falling on them.
But finally a grudging dawn came. Through the smoke hole he saw the gray of low clouds and felt their uncaring. The world had ceased to remember the man and woman in a sea of emptiness.
The lodge had a rim of snow within it. Somehow snow had collected around the periphery, blown down the smoke hole. Only in the middle, close to the feeble flame, was there no whiteness.
He drew his capote close and pushed into the white world outside. Bitter cold air stung his face and sandpapered his throat and lungs. The sky was light gray and he could see no horizons because snow and gray blended imperceptibly together. It was plenty cold for November and would get colder. He had much to do, and hoped his hands wouldn’t numb entirely, or his ears freeze, before he accomplished it.
Now, with air so brutal, he needed more wood; he didn’t know how long the lodgepoles would last, but not long enough. He had only a hunting-camp hatchet and no easy way to fell limbs. He struck toward the creek-side trees, wallowing every foot of the way in snow that rose to his thighs, found Louse Creek still flowing, giving off steam in the icy air, and began the hunt for deadwood. Enough deadwood to keep Victoria safe.
But every step was an ordeal. He toiled at it, chopping off limbs he wasn’t sure were dead or dry. In a short time he was too numb to function, and headed back to the lodge. He would be the worst sort of fool to frostbite his feet or hands. All that effort had netted him only a few good sticks.
He slipped into the lodge, pulled his gauntlets free, and held his hands over the pitiful fire, but they didn’t warm. He found some wood, built the fire up, and slowly blood returned to his hands and the stinging in them subsided.
“Cold,” he said to her.
“Skye … if anything happens, I can’t help you.”
“I am being careful.”
“You should have left me.”
“If your magpie didn’t leave you, then I won’t either.”
That sally quieted her.
The next time out, he found a good thick limb, dead and dry, and hacked away until he felled it. He dragged it to his lodge and worked furiously to chop it into four or five long lengths. He could do the rest inside.
He staked the meat, which rested safely under snow, so he could find it. For now, he need not worry about food, but in time scurvy would destroy them both unless he found some roots and vegetables.
Somehow his labor warmed him, and he was able to improve their lot by the time the short day turned into an icy blackness. When he stumbled in, he found her sitting
up, and more. She had shifted her bed, moved herself closer to the firewood, and was tending the fire on her own.
“You shouldn’t be up,” he said.
“Go to hell, Skye.”
“It’s Mister Skye.”
“Go to hell, Mister Skye.”
He struggled out of his capote, pulled off his gauntlets, thrust his numb hands into her fire, and felt prickles, and then warmth.
“Tonight you sleep. I’ll keep the fire,” she said. “It’s no good if you’re too tired to keep us going.”
“But, Victoria …”
“English, they don’t know anything.”
He tumbled into his robes, thinking only to rest before he brewed her some broth or cooked a little meat, but next he knew there was light in the smoke hole and she was slumped in her bed. The fire burned steadily but the supply of wood inside the lodge was low.
He could not imagine losing so much time. Nor could he imagine sleeping so long, buried under several heavy robes. In fact, he didn’t remember any robes over him when he lay down to rest a moment at the end of the day.
He got up, rested. He ventured out, and found this day cloudless and cold and the snow thick. When the wind came up, as it would on a clear day like this one, it would heap the snow into giant drifts, imprisoning them.
Even as he stood there in the early light, absorbing the white world, he felt the first stirrings of air, slicing heat out of him. In some ways this bright and glaring and windy day would be the worst of all. The firewood was almost gone, but this bitter day he would have to work through heavy snow to find some, and it would be far away.
He was rested at least, and worked north, straight into the rising wind, heading for a thicket ahead. Then he stumbled over something, and found it was a dead cottonwood, limbs shattered and scattered, but under the snow. Good. He would mine that heap of snow for all he could.
The Fire Arrow Page 4
