Johnny Mohawk

by Jenny Oldfield

  The black horse’s muscles bunched and tensed. His nostrils flared wide and his ears flattened. The bear kept on coming. Johnny went back on his haunches and raised his front hooves high in the air, whirling and flailing as he screamed a warning for the bear to stop.

  Kirstie lurched backward, strove for balance, found it. Her legs gripped the sides of the rearing horse; backward, forward, then back again she swayed as the horse’s front legs came up, down, and then up a second time.

  The bear saw the dangerous hooves, heard the scream and the mighty thud as Johnny hit the ground. She swerved off course from her angry attack, then slowed to a suspicious prowl, one eye on her cubs, one eye on Johnny Mohawk.

  “Help!” Lisa cried faintly. She stretched out her hand.

  Kirstie and Johnny lunged forward as the bear hovered at a distance of about twenty feet. Kirstie stooped to grab hold of her friend’s hand. “Jump up!” she cried, desperately hoping that Johnny understood what she was asking him to do now.

  Lisa used all her strength to hang onto Kirstie’s arm and swing herself onto the horse’s back. She made it, gasping for breath, clasping Kirstie around the waist as Johnny braced himself for the weight of an extra rider.

  “OK?” Kirstie yelled above the roar of the water, her heart thudding. She felt Lisa nod. “Go, Johnny!”

  Kicking him into action, she felt him surge away, strong and steady. The exit to the canyon loomed, steep rock to either side, the crash of the waterfall behind.

  “Good boy, Johnny!” she breathed, her heart in her mouth as he raced out of Dead Man’s Canyon and carried them to safety.

  “Gosh, am I glad you remembered what to do!” Lisa let out a long sigh. She was sitting on the ground high above Dead Man’s Canyon, waiting for her knees to stop trembling, her heartbeat to return to normal. “I’ve never been attacked by a bear before!”

  “Me, neither,” Kirstie confessed, standing between the recently retrieved Cadillac and Johnny Mohawk, searching the ravine for any sign that the bears might be following. “But I do know you should never back off. You have to wave your arms and yell. You start walking toward a bear and she’ll most likely run away.”

  Lisa was still shuddering from the experience. “I’m sure glad you got me out of there. Bears can kill calves and fawns,” she reminded Kirstie.

  “But they hardly ever come after humans. It was because we took her by surprise. And I don’t blame her. She must have thought we were after her cubs.”

  “How can anything so cute grow up into something so awesome? Did you see the little guys playing in the pool?” Lisa took a big breath and stood up. “Anyway, thanks, Kirstie!”

  “Thank Johnny,” she murmured ruefully, thinking she’d heard a rustling in the scrub below, then dismissing the idea. “And you know, we’re no nearer to finding Stevie and Rodeo Rocky.”

  “Don’t tell me. What’s he gonna do if he comes face to face with Mama Bear?”

  “What most people do, I guess, which is turn and run.” Kirstie pictured it with growing worry. “We’d better find him before she does. Are you OK to go on?”

  “Sure.” Lisa took Cadillac’s reins from Kirstie, but as she did, they heard a horse’s hooves heading down from the top of Miners’ Ridge.

  “Thank heavens!” Kirstie caught a glimpse of Rodeo Rocky’s sorrel coat and black mane through the trees.

  “Stevie!” Lisa called, hurrying her horse up the slope.

  “He’s limping!” Kirstie lost sight of him, but she heard the uneven tread. Then when Rocky came back into view, her heart sank. There was no Stevie; the horse’s saddle was empty.

  Lisa stopped. “Oh, no!” she whispered, staring and shaking her head.

  “Rocky’s seen us, he’s on his way down to meet us.” Instantly, Kirstie realized that the horse was the one who could lead them to Stevie. She told Lisa to mount and get ready, watching the ex–rodeo horse pick his way carefully down the slope, keeping his weight off the left front leg, which was torn and bloody.

  Lisa frowned and pointed to the wound. “How did that happen?”

  “Who knows? But look, he wants us to follow!” Kirstie saw Rocky dip his head and turn. Without a shadow of a doubt, he was telling them to come with him. He turned again, bad leg eased clear of the ground, waiting.

  So Kirstie went ahead of Lisa, fearing the worst. The riderless horse was bad news, but it figured: Stevie must have fallen way behind Troy and Brad in the race, somehow missed the entrance to Dead Man’s Canyon, and allowed Rocky to gallop recklessly up the steep slope onto the ridge. At some point, the horse had stumbled and hurt his leg. The fall had thrown the boy, who hadn’t been able to stay in the saddle because of his broken arm. Crazy! she said savagely to herself. This went way beyond the limits of showing off, or “saving face,” as Hadley called it. This was craziness, pure and simple.

  “What if Stevie’s dead?” Lisa half-gasped, half-sobbed. The scare in the ravine had wrecked her nerve, and now the sight of Rocky toiling up the hill, limping and bleeding, set her trembling all over again.

  Kirstie gritted her teeth and shook her head. “Don’t even think it!” She worked Johnny hard to catch up with Rocky, dreading what they might find behind each boulder, beyond each twist and bend in the sorrel horse’s difficult path.

  At last, they reached the top of the ridge. The pine trees which grew thickly on the slope thinned out. Ahead were two massive humps of earth and rubble which Kirstie recognized as waste from old mine workings. The bare heaps had grassed over during the decades that had passed since the miners had abandoned the old silver mine. Now wild roses grew and bloomed, their pale pink flowers dappled by sunlight and shade.

  Rocky had paused on the ridge, then limped on. He passed the waste heaps and drew level with an arched entrance blasted into the rock. The entrance was shut off by a crumbling wooden door where the sorrel horse stopped.

  “It’s the way into the mine!” Lisa whispered. “But where’s Stevie? I can’t see him!”

  Kirstie stared hard. There was a pile of brushwood against the door and scraped earth—telltale signs of a second den site. Another picture formed inside her head of Stevie falling from his horse by the mine entrance and coming face to face with the bears in their den, the mother surprised by the sudden intrusion, lumbering out of the entrance toward the injured boy …“No!” she whispered. The rest was too bad to imagine.

  “Stevie!” In her panic, Lisa had begun to shout. “Say something! Where are you?”

  “Some … thing … are you?” Her voice bounced off the wall of the ravine and echoed back at them.

  Down below, there was a small, scratchy sound, then the chuff-chuff-snort of a wary black bear still prowling along the near side of the canyon. Looking more closely, Kirstie spotted the cubs scrambling up the slope, tumbling over logs, rolling and picking themselves up.

  Lisa flung herself from Cadillac’s back and ran for the mine entrance. She rushed past Rodeo Rocky, pushing aside thorn bushes and brushwood close to the entrance. “I still can’t see him!” she cried to Kirstie.

  “Shh! Listen!” She cocked her head toward the archway of blasted rock beyond the stack of brushwood. The rotting door led to a tunnel that burrowed deep into the mountain with shafts leading off to the left and right: the miners’ warren that had once held a bright, gleaming promise of fabulous wealth—and danger. Men had died in the scramble for silver. Rockfalls and floods had put an end to their dreams.

  “Here!” a faint voice called out. “Lisa, I’m in here!”

  “Stevie?” Lisa spun around toward the door as Kirstie slipped from the saddle and quickly tethered both horses to a tree.

  “Go ahead. I’ll watch for the bears!” She went to crouch at the edge of the ridge, picking out the three black shapes as they made their way up the rocky slope.

  “I’m trapped. I can’t get out!” Stevie’s voice was muffled, cracked with fear.

  “Are you OK?” Wading through the brushwood, pushing it to o
ne side, Lisa began to shove against the door.

  “Yeah. There are bears out there. Watch out!”

  “I know. We saw them. Kirstie’s here with me. She’s keeping a lookout! What happened?”

  “Rocky wouldn’t go into the canyon. I guess he knew about the bears. He got spooked and loped onto the ridge. With my arm in this sling, I couldn’t handle him …” Stevie’s voice trailed off.

  Lisa pushed harder against the door. “It’s OK, tell me the rest later. The important thing is to get you out. How come this is jammed?”

  “Get a move on!” Kirstie pleaded. She decided not to tell Lisa and Stevie how close the bears were to the ridge. But she backed away from the edge, hoping that they couldn’t see or hear the activity outside the entrance to their summer den.

  “Rocks!” Stevie explained. “When I saw the bear coming at me over those waste heaps, I saw the door was hanging open and climbed in here to hide. But when I slammed the door shut, I loosened a whole lot of rock in the roof of the tunnel. It crashed down against the door.”

  “Did it hit you?” Lisa shoved and shoved without shifting the door.

  “No. I told you, I’m OK!”

  “Lisa, we gotta get him out of there!” Kirstie felt the hairs on her neck prickle as she heard the grunts of the adult bear grow closer. She ran to her friend’s side.

  “I’ve shoved all I can. It doesn’t work!”

  “OK, grab a plank of wood at the bottom edge. It’s rotten, see? Try pulling!”

  Together, they wrenched at the loose boards. The old wood creaked as it bent, then split with a loud splintering noise. Two long sections of wood came loose in their hands.

  “Again!” Lisa gasped. “We take out this whole section and give Stevie room to squeeze through!”

  Kirstie nodded. “Before the bears get here!”

  “How close are they?”

  “Pretty close. If they find Stevie holed up in there, they’ll tear the rest of this door right down. He won’t stand a chance!”

  So they heaved again, forcing the planks out of position until suddenly they split and snapped.

  “Now let’s see if the gap’s big enough!” Kirstie cried, easing her head and shoulders through. The stale air of the tunnel hit her nostrils and almost made her choke. There was pitch darkness, a century of damp and decay. Feeling with her fingertips, she discovered the rockfall that Stevie had told them about, which had piled stones against the shallow entrance.

  “Hurry!” It was Lisa’s turn to plead from the tangle of brushwood by the entrance.

  “Stevie, can you grab my hand?” Kirstie groped in the dark, reaching beyond the pile of rocks. She felt a hand take hold of hers and wrapped her fingers tight around it. Gradually, her eyes were growing used to the dark, and she made out the pale, oval shape of Stevie’s face, the white patch of the bandage covering the cut on his forehead.

  “Got it!” he whispered.

  “OK, now crawl up the heap of rocks … go easy, keep a hold … right!”

  He scrambled toward her, stumbling against the fallen rocks, finding footholds, crouching low to avoid the roof, lying flat to wriggle over the top of the pile.

  “Keep on coming!” Kirstie showed him there was room to squeeze through. “How are we doing out there?” she called over her shoulder to Lisa.

  “Oh, jeez!” The answer came as a terrified sigh.

  As Stevie finally scrambled through the tight gap into the daylight and Kirstie turned to see for herself, the bear appeared on the ridge. She was thirty feet from her den, on all fours, hauling herself out of the steep ravine, snapping twigs underfoot as she came.

  Kirstie, Stevie, and Lisa cowered by the mine entrance.

  The bear saw them: the humans who had invaded her territory. As she drew herself up onto her hind legs, they saw the strong limbs and great, curved claws, the light patch on her chest, the brown, square muzzle.

  Then the cubs scrambled onto the ridge behind their mother—a third of her size, more agile, and quicker than the heavy adult. Seeming not to notice the three intruders, they picked at leaves and scraped the ground for tasty roots, tangling themselves in bushes and bumping into tree trunks.

  Would the bear attack again? Kirstie crouched and stared at her. Now there was no Johnny or Rocky to rescue them; the horses were twenty paces along the ridge, pulling at their tethers but tied fast. It was up to her. Trembling, hardly able to breathe, she stood up.

  The bear watched without reacting.

  Kirstie raised both arms wide. She made herself tall, took a step toward the bear along the narrow ridge.

  The bear opened her jaws, snapped them shut. Behind her, the cubs played.

  Another step, then another. A twig snapped, a bramble caught against her leg …

  The bear’s small, black eyes blinked. She turned her head toward her cubs.

  “Give us five minutes and we’re out of here!” Kirstie spoke. What she said wasn’t important. It was the sound of her voice that mattered—calm, not threatening. “We’ll never get in your way again!”

  One of the cubs heard the sound of Kirstie’s voice and made a run toward her. The mother stuck out a paw and pushed him back. The cub rolled and scrambled onto his feet.

  “Five minutes!” Kirstie repeated. Tall as she could, taking another cautious step, she advanced.

  OK! The mother bear made her decision. Swiftly, she rounded up her cubs and herded them off the ridge, down the slope the way they had come. Her huge body crashed through bushes, her feet trampled the undergrowth. The ground shook. She was gone.

  10

  “No more races!” Lisa begged. “No more fooling around with the Jensens, Stevie, please!”

  Kirstie walked behind with Rocky and Johnny, leaving Lisa to sort things out with Stevie Kane. Give me a nice hot tub! she said to herself. Give me a day when nothing goes wrong. And never, ever make me have to face another black bear in the whole of my life!

  “I don’t know why I did it in the first place.” Stevie hung his head. “It was like Troy said, ‘You wanna race?’ and I said yes because I couldn’t say no, if you see what I mean.”

  “I know!” Lisa sympathized.

  I don’t! Kirstie thought, still shaking from the experience. The two horses walked quietly down the hill from Miners’ Ridge, saddles creaking, stirrups swaying gently as they plodded for home.

  “It wasn’t even as if my dad was looking on,” Stevie continued. “When he’s there, I always have to live up to …”

  “… Live up to what you think he wants you to be,” Lisa said with a sigh. “Yeah, I know.”

  “Do you?” He turned to look her in the face.

  “Yeah. It’s all mixed in with your mom dying, I guess. You want to live up to what your dad wants you to be because it’s what you both think your mom would have wanted, too. But I’m not sure that’s right. No way would your mom want you to do things you don’t want to do, only she’s not around to tell you that anymore. Do you see?”

  “Yeah …” Stevie said slowly, staring wide-eyed at Lisa.

  Amazed by Lisa’s long speech, Kirstie tried to puzzle it out. Well, yeah. It all came down to Stevie and his dad not coping …

  Lisa’s face was covered in blushes, but she was determined to set Stevie straight. “Your mom would want you to do what makes you happy. So what would that be?”

  There was a long silence. The leaves of the aspen trees shook, silver and green in the breeze. Overhead, the sky was bright blue.

  “Not to be a jockey, for a start.” Stevie spoke with a catch in his throat. “I like working with horses back home in Kerry, but I don’t want to ride in races and be the winner all the time. It’s too much pressure. I’m not good enough.”

  “So tell your dad,” Lisa said. “Tell him you want to ride out on trails, work in the stables, whatever.”

  They came out of the trees into the valley and the long sweep of green meadow that led to Half Moon Ranch.

  “I can’t!” Th
e idea made Stevie tense up and shake his head.

  “Why not?”

  “Because … !”

  “Because you’d lose face,” Kirstie said quietly.

  Lisa and Stevie turned quickly in surprise.

  “This is about keeping up an image,” she insisted. “It all has to do with your pride.”

  “It takes guts to tell the real truth.”

  This was Lisa’s final word on the subject as she, Kirstie, and Stevie approached the ranch.

  Paddy Kane came running over the footbridge with Troy and Brad Jensen. The Texan boys took Rodeo Rocky and Johnny Mohawk from Kirstie and led them to the water to drink.

  “What happened? Where were you?” Stevie’s father took him by the arm. Worry strained his voice, his hand shook as he looked into his son’s eyes.

  What would it be, Kirstie wondered, a cover-up or the truth?

  Stevie frowned. Then he tilted his head back with a touch of defiance. “I fell off my horse.”

  “Rodeo Rocky? The horse threw you?” Paddy Kane fed him the old story line.

  “No, I fell off!” Stevie insisted. He glanced quickly at Lisa, who stood close by. “I should never have got on him in the first place. I was stupid!”

  His father’s frown grew deep and puzzled. He noticed Sandy and Matt’s car drive through the gate and down the drive. “OK, so we’ll forget it this time,” he said hastily.

  “No, we won’t.” This was it, Stevie suggested by the tilt of his chin, the determined look in his gray eyes. “I was stupid enough this time to get thrown and get myself attacked by a bear. That meant I got other people involved …put them in danger!”

  “OK, OK!” Paddy Kane was all for marching Stevie off to their cabin before Matt and Sandy got out of the car to join them.

  “No.” Stevie stood his ground. “Lisa and Kirstie rescued me. Without them, I wouldn’t be here now!”

  Kirstie glanced at Lisa, whose eyes were fixed on Stevie.