It was better than he had hoped for. A huge, bright fireball bellowed out from the stack when the fire ignited the gunpowder, and the dead wood was soon blazing, casting an eerie backlight behind the hanging body. “I am the Mountain Hawk,” he shouted once more before jumping on his horse and hightailing it down the other side of the hill, trailing his other two horses behind him.
Time was important now. It was critical to the success of his plan that he should circle around behind the Gros Ventre camp so as to be in position to act at the peak of confusion. He raced through the night, dodging the gullies and breaks, praying that the paint could find its footing. Out of the cover of the trees and across the open valley he galloped, trusting to luck that he did not meet one of the scouts who had been patrolling the village. He could already hear the sounds coming from the Indian camp over the pounding of his horses’ hooves.
In the Gros Ventre village, there was an explosion of frenzied activity. Chief Wounded Horse, confused at first, quickly shouted to all who could hear his voice to arm themselves and ride. Like a disturbed anthill, angry warriors, long awaiting the fateful coming of the Mountain Hawk, now scurried frantically to grab their weapons and run for their ponies. Terrified women screamed as they witnessed the fiery spectacle on the hill where a spirit in the form of a man hovered over the ground like a hawk.
In the midst of the stampede to charge toward the hill, Wounded Horse looked around and discovered Three Toes and his wife, standing and staring at the fearful sight. “Go and guard the boy! Don’t let him out of your sight!” the chief commanded.
Three Toes nodded excitedly and hurried back to his lodge, leaving his wife to gape horrified at the ghostly scene. He reached the lodge just in time to stop White Eagle from joining in the chaos. He had not learned many words of their tongue, but he was sure he had heard “Mountain Hawk.”
“Back inside,” Three Toes ordered. “It is not for you to see.”
White Eagle resisted but was forcefully taken back in the tipi. “I heard them shouting about the Mountain Hawk,” he insisted. “Is my father here?” Three Toes did not answer, pushing the boy back. “If my father is here, let me go to him!”
Three Toes sat the boy down, and tried to calm him. “Your father is not here,” he said. “It is nothing—a fire on the hill, that is all. It’s best that you stay here.”
White Eagle made up his mind to dash around the old man, and go out to see for himself what had caused such an uproar in the village. He was on his feet when he heard the ripping of the tipi wall behind him. Turning at the sound, he was startled to see the long blade of a skinning knife as it parted the inner lining of the tipi. He jumped back in fright when Trace suddenly burst through the opening. Then recognizing the tall mountain man, his heart leaped for joy.
There was no time for a joyous reunion. Stepping past the stunned boy, Trace sprang immediately upon Three Toes, quickly pinning the old man to the ground. Three Toes struggled briefly in an effort to defend himself, but he realized at once that he was no match for the powerful mountain man.
“Don’t kill him!” White Eagle cried out. “He has been kind to me.”
Trace hesitated, looking at the boy, then back at the old man, caught helplessly in his grip. “Hand me that rope,” he said, nodding toward a coil of rawhide line hanging from a lodgepole. When Three Toes was securely bound and gagged, Trace dragged the old man over to the side of the lodge. While Trace was taking care of Three Toes, White Eagle stood at the entrance to the tipi, keeping watch for Raven, Three Toes’s wife. She was apparently in the middle of the crowd of children and women who were anxiously watching the fiery apparition on the hill.
“Come,” Trace said, and pushed through the slit in the back of the tipi. Outside in the cold night air, he paused only long enough to see that White Eagle was right behind him, then made for the riverbank at a trot. Behind them, the sounds of the frightened women drifted over the camp like the moaning of the wind, as Trace and his son ran along the bank to the willows where the horses were tied.
“Gray Thunder!” White Eagle cried when they reached the willows.
“What!” Trace responded, reacting at once, ready to fend off an attack.
“Gray Thunder,” White Eagle repeated, rushing up to the spotted gray horse and hugging its neck affectionately. “You brought my pony.”
“Oh,” Trace responded, relieved to find they had not been discovered by the Gros Ventres. “Well, jump on him, and let’s get the hell outta here.” They were wasted words, for White Eagle was on his pony’s back before Trace finished saying them.
They rode hard, pushing their horses constantly to keep up the pace. Trace led them down the river, always riding on the common trails so that their tracks were intermingled with hundreds of others. After an hour of hard riding, Trace eased off to let the horses rest. There was no sign of anyone pursuing them, so they let the horses walk for a while before picking up a faster pace. Daybreak found them some thirty miles down the river, and far enough from the Gros Ventre camp to stop and rest.
Trace told White Eagle to gather some wood to make a small fire, while he cut some cottonwood limbs to strip for horse feed. In short order, the boy had a cheerful fire going, and he knelt before it warming his hands, never taking his eyes off the tall man in buckskins who was now feeding handfuls of cottonwood bark to the three horses. After the horses were taken care of, Trace got some coffee and salt pork from his pack and proceeded to make them a little breakfast.
Fascinated by the man who had come to rescue him, and still watching his every move, White Eagle finally asked the question that needed definite confirmation. “Are you really my father?”
Trace paused for a moment to glance at the boy. “I reckon I am.” Then he turned his attention back to the pork he was heating over the fire.
“You are the Mountain Hawk,” the boy stated in tones of undisguised wonder.
While still focusing upon the strips of salty meat that had now begun to sizzle slightly, Trace said, “I think I already told you I ain’t no mountain hawk. I’m an ordinary man, like everybody else.” He was concerned that the boy was going to set standards for him that he couldn’t live up to.
White Eagle smiled. You are the Mountain Hawk, he said to himself. Then he asked, “Then what do I call you? Father?”
“Hell no!” Trace reacted immediately, looking up at the awestruck face of the eleven-year-old. “Call me Trace,” he said, then meeting the probing brown eyes of his natural son, reconsidered. “Whatever you want—you can call me father if you want to.”
Pleased, White Eagle sat back and accepted the cup of steaming black coffee from his father’s hand. “I am glad you came for me, Father. We will live in the mountains together.”
Trace raised his eyebrows as he turned to face the boy. “I kinda thought you might be anxious to get back to your mother’s people with Chief Washakie.”
“I want to stay with you.”
This option was not really one that Trace had considered. There followed a lengthy pause while he thought about the possibility. Finally, he said, “We’ll see. We’ll have to think about it.”
White Eagle smiled inwardly while he chewed the tough strip of meat. I will stay with you. There was a natural streak of determination in the boy—his mother would have said stubbornness—that he had apparently inherited from his father.
CHAPTER 16
Old Man Winter had come on with a vengeance that year, with the north winds blowing wave after wave of his icy breath through the tiny valley that a handful of settlers had christened “Promise.” On this bitter morning, Buck Ransom stood outside the door of his simple one-room log cabin, his eyes squinting against the sun’s glare of the frozen valley. It was the first time he had seen the sun in over a week. It had been a hell of a storm, the kind of trick Old Man Winter enjoyed playing on mortals—waiting until he had everybody fooled with signs of spring, then slappin’ ’em down with one last blizzard.
He took a dee
p breath of air so frigid that it made his lungs ache deep down inside him. Holed up in his cabin for weeks at a time, Buck had all he could do to keep from becoming terminally melancholy. To combat it, he told himself stories from the past, reliving the days when he and his old companion, Frank Brown, trapped beaver for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. When it reached the point where he was talking directly to Frank about things that happened at the rendezvous on the Green River or the Wind River, or Popo Agie, he suddenly realized that he had better get out of his cabin and see some real people.
Now on this frozen morning, his thoughts turned to his friend, Trace McCall, and the day they had parted company near the Bighorns. “I wonder if Trace has found that boy yet,” he said aloud—a habit he had acquired during the long winter weeks. It had been months since Trace had ridden off after White Eagle. It was not the first time Trace had stayed away all winter, but Buck had a nagging fear this time because Trace was heading deep into hostile territory. If he caught up with the boy as soon as he had expected, they would have been back in a month. “Maybe he found the boy and took him up in Wind River country to find his mother’s people,” Buck speculated, hoping that accounted for his friend’s long absence. That young’un’s likely dead, Buck thought, as he made his way around the cabin to the lean-to where his horses were.
“You’re damn lucky I took in some hay from Jordan Thrash,” he said to the buckskin mare. “You’d be scratching around in the snow for your supper.”
The mare whinnied and jerked her head up. Buck thought she was answering his comment until the other two horses in the shed snorted and whinnied also, announcing the presence of other horses. Buck turned to look out across the valley. Two riders leading a packhorse made their way slowly down the western slope to the valley floor. Buck could see that one of them was probably a boy. The other, even at that distance, could be none other than Trace McCall. No other man sat a horse like that, straight and tall, riding easy like man and horse came out of the womb together.
Buck felt his pulse quicken with strength as a flood of joy and relief overwhelmed him after the long solitary winter. His family had returned. The sight of Trace and the boy brought a tear to the eye of the grizzled old trapper. Maybe I ain’t gonna die alone in this damn cabin after all.
CHARLES G. WEST lives in Punta Gorda, Florida, and was the proprietor of a commercial typesetting and printing business. He now devotes his full time to writing historical fiction. Son of the Hawk is his ninth novel.
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