A Westward Love

by V. J. Banis

  “I—I can’t,” she managed to gasp, but he either did not hear her or chose to ignore her.

  “Swim,” he said, giving her a shove.

  She swam, helped along by Morton. Her heart pounded and it was difficult to get her breath. She felt frightfully weak. The bank looked so far away, and all the while the water beat in her face.

  Her arms were leaden; she could scarcely lift them over the water. She was done for.

  She could feel herself being pulled along by the current. It was so much easier to drift, little caring now, too exhausted for fear.

  Morton was dragging her, stumbling and falling every step or two. It took her a moment to comprehend. He was walking on the bottom, or crawling at least, trying to drag the two of them ashore. She tried to help, putting her feet down and feeling sand beneath them.

  They floundered on, Morton doing most of the work, she scrambling along the sand as well as she could. There was the bank itself, wet sand at which she clawed with her hands. At last they scrambled out, free of the water’s pull. She sank into a clump of grass, so weak she could not move at all. For a brief time she sank into a stupor barely removed from unconsciousness. She had but a dim awareness some time later, it might have been minutes or hours, of Morton stirring, getting shakily to his feet.

  Morton. Morton who had saved her, but not Summers.

  That thought brought her awake. Summers was gone, lost in the river. She opened her eyes, staring for a moment at the damp sand. Finally she struggled to get to her knees.

  “Summers?” she asked, though she knew the answer already.

  Morton was kneeling by the water a few yards downstream. She saw that one of their packs had been washed ashore, some of the contents spilling on the bank. He was examining things now, laying aside what could be dried out and salvaged, tossing the rest back into the river.

  “He’s dead,” Morton said without looking at her. “I saw him washed downstream. One of the logs had cracked his head open, and his foot had gotten tangled in some of the ropes. You can forget about him.”

  She got shakily to her feet and staggered to the river’s edge, staring downstream, but there was nothing to be seen, only the red-brown water, rushing to disappear down the canyon and around the next bend.

  Summers was gone. It was like the wound of an arrow through her heart, a high, piercing pain that shot through her all at once, leaving a great open ache behind.

  She was left with Morton. As if reading her thoughts, he turned to stare at her then. For a long moment she met his gaze, trying to look unafraid. He outlasted her. She turned away finally and began to walk along the bank, searching as he had done for anything that might have been washed ashore.

  * * * * * * *

  Beneath the rapids the canyon opened into a wide, almost tropical valley. Here the water grew calmer, and here too they found several of the logs that had made up their raft, along with the main pack of their provisions, wet but most still usable. The dried horsemeat had gotten soaked and had to be dried again before it spoiled, but their salt and flour, wrapped in packets of oilskin, had come through safely. Summers had taken the precaution of wrapping their guns in oilskin as well, and these too had been washed ashore, so that they were neither without food nor without weapon.

  Nonetheless, the incident could be called nothing less than disastrous. A great many of their provisions, already getting perilously low, had been lost. The raft was gone, and they had many more miles of canyon river to navigate. They were without horses, only vaguely aware of where they were, with only the sketchiest idea of where California lay to their west.

  Worst of all, Summers was gone, the one man familiar with the west, the one she had depended on to get her to California. The one, too, she disliked reminding herself, who had stood protectively between herself and Morton.

  By evening they had set up a crude camp and were able to have a meal of flour cakes and muddy-tasting coffee made with river water. Neither had spoken much, absorbed in their own private thoughts, and both were still exhausted from their ordeal.

  They had lost much of their bedding, and even in the warm climate of the canyon nights were cool. She took one of the blankets and carried it to the far side of the fire from where Morton sat, spreading it on the ground for a bed. Morton, however, got up and came around to her.

  “Not enough blankets for two beds,” he said. “You’ll sleep over here with me.”

  “I’ll be all right,” she said, trying to sound more unconcerned than she felt.

  “Well now, I say you won’t be,” he said stubbornly. “I say you sleep over here with me.”

  She glanced past him. He had oiled the guns lest they rust from the dampness. They were sitting out on a rock near the fire. She tried to calculate how quickly she could get to them.

  “Mister Morton,” she said, getting to her feet, “I realize I am indebted to you for saving my life and I assure you, when we get to California, I will make every attempt to repay you, but....”

  “You repay me here,” he said. “Like you been repaying him. It’s my turn now.”

  He put out a hand for her. She tried to dodge it, making a dash for the guns, but for all his size Morton could move quickly. In an instant she was in his arms.

  “Let me go!” she cried, struggling against him. He held her arms pinned at her sides. She tried to kick him, but lost her footing on the loose sand and fell against him.

  “I listened to you,” he said, breathing heavily as he tried to find her mouth with his, “all them nights, listening to the two of you, thumping and moaning, and I thought, all right, I’m going to get my turn, some of these days, old Summers is going to make a mistake, getting all bright eyed over a woman like that, makes a man careless. Just you be patient, I told myself, you’ll get her ’fore it’s over. And I have.”

  She twisted her head to and fro, trying to avoid his kiss, but at last he buried her mouth under his, his breath foul, his beard coarse and scratching against her tender skin.

  She fought him, but her puny efforts were as nothing to the powerful trapper. He threw her to the ground with such violence that she was stunned for a moment. Before she could recover, he was upon her, pawing at her clothes, forcing her knees apart.

  He bit at her throat. She sank her teeth into his ear, trying to bite it off. He gave a yelp of pain, and lifting himself over her, struck her across the face with the back of his hand, so hard that it gave her a nosebleed.

  “Bitch!” he snarled, yanking his trousers down and falling upon her. Dazed and helpless, she felt a shockwave of pain as he entered her brutally.

  * * * * * * *

  She lay sickened and bruised, her thighs still sticky with his spending. She could not bear to look at him, at the thick hairy body, at the fleshy mouth with the missing teeth and the unkempt beard.

  Morton grabbed one of her breasts in a huge paw of a hand, squeezing until she whimpered from the pain. “You thinking I ain’t as nice as your mountain man, with his sweet talking and his fancy dancing, ain’t that right?”

  She turned her face then to look up at him, revulsion rising within her as she did so. “What a loathsome animal you are,” she said flatly.

  For a moment he glowered down at her. Then, to her surprise, he laughed softly. “Loathsome,” he said, repeating the word as if feeling it out. “Loathsome? And an animal to boot.” He laughed again, then his smile faded. “Well, I suppose I am, but you listen to me just the same, and you listen good. Summers is gone, dead. They ain’t nobody but you and me in this goddamn canyon that he led us into. Now I’m going to try to get us out of here if I can, but I ain’t going to have you shooting me in the back, and I ain’t going to have you giving me no trouble while I’m doing it. You are going to do what I say, and you’re going to give me what I want, when I want it, or I am going to leave you sitting on your pretty pink ass all by yourself here, till the Indians find you or the goddamn coyotes eat the tits off your corpse. It’s all the same to me. Are you l
istening to me?”

  “I despise you,” she said, her voice dripping venom. She hated him all the more because she knew the truth of what he was saying. Without him she would perish. He was her only hope now of reaching California alive. And she was only too painfully aware of the price she must pay.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said, grinning unconcernedly. “And I’m loathsome on top of it. All the same, you mind what I say and we’ll get along well enough, and I just might get us out of here with our skins on.”

  He got up and, without bothering to find a discreet spot or to conceal himself, relieved himself on the ground. She turned away in disgust.

  He brought the rest of the bedding and lay down beside her, curling his body against hers, burying his face in her hair. She lay numb and exhausted, sure she would be unable to sleep as they were, but fatigue had its way, and she was asleep before he was.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  She was surprised by the intensity with which she missed Summers. It was not only that she was now at the mercy of Morton, though that certainly was a part of it; but she missed the man himself, not merely his protection.

  As she hiked along the canyon river with Morton, she came to realize that she had loved Summers without ever having known it. She could not think when it had happened, for it had been subtle, a process of growing together. Now he was gone. She watched the river eagerly, looking for any sign of him. Occasionally they found some piece of gear, or a scrap of their raft, washed ashore well downriver; but of Summers’ body they saw nothing.

  At night Morton invariably assaulted her. She could think of no more fitting term for the forced and violent use he made of her body. She had learned not to resist him, but neither did she participate, merely lying passively beneath him until he had relieved himself.

  “Damned cold, ain’t you,” he grumbled, plainly dissatisfied with her performance and unable to improve upon it.

  It was hard not to compare this brutish act with what she had known with her former lover. She regretted now the frictions and ethics that had kept them apart for so long; she would rather have lain with him a hundred nights, a thousand, than the few she had known.

  Summers, though, was gone, as Morton was fond of pointing out. They were the living, faced with the task of remaining so. However she felt about his nightly assault on her, Morton was competent at survival. She found herself torn between despising him at night and being grateful for him by day. With him, her situation was precarious; without him, it would be hopeless. She did not, therefore, attempt to shoot him, as he had warned, or to run away from him when she had the opportunities. Where, after all, could she run?

  Daily they marched westward along the river. When they reached another of those stretches where the canyon walls came straight down to the water and walking was impossible, it was Morton who insisted they swim.

  “We’ll hold on to a log,” he said. “Let the river take us past this.”

  “But we might drown,” Claire argued.

  “We might, but we didn’t before, not in this river’s worst rapids.”

  In the end she had no choice but to enter the water with him, clinging anxiously to a driftwood log while the water, whose dangers had been all too forcibly impressed upon her, carried them swiftly along.

  In this way—walking when they could, swimming when they must—they traveled for a week through Summers’ great canyon, until at last the walls began to shrink and the valley to widen. Finally they emerged into a great, broad plain, its horizon marked by low, rock-carved mountains.

  “It’s a desert,” Morton said, staring westward toward the end of a day. The river, having carried them generally westward through the canyon, here turned sharply south. They had discussed this and decided jointly that their best hope lay in pressing toward the west where, from all that they had heard, lay the Mexican province of California.

  Now, staring with him at the vast, barren expanse before them, Claire wondered once again if they had made the right decision. She remembered Summers’ remarks on the great desert lying ahead of them. A desert that would make hell seem like paradise. How far did it reach? A day’s march? Two, three days? It looked endless, unconquerable. Though Morton seemed unfazed by the hardships they had endured, she was already exhausted. For weeks they had toiled onward with only brief pauses for rest. Even rested, she would have flinched to contemplate crossing the desert before them.

  At first the weather was mild, for it was winter and they were in the high desert. As they descended onto the desert floor the temperatures rose steadily. Even in winter the temperatures rose into the nineties at midday. They had rationed their water and food when they set out, but as the days passed and there was no end to the desert, they tightened their belts and reduced their rations still more, so that by the end of a week they were reduced to a mere mouthful of water twice a day, and two portions of dried meat, each portion weighing an ounce or so.

  The desert went on. They followed a course at an angle southward from the route of the sun. Before them lay another mountain range, not the high, snow-covered peaks they had left behind, but low and grim looking and bare of any vegetation. At first they had thought these the foothills of a taller range, and though there was always the threat of snow and more cold weather, the thought of mountain meadows, green grass, and clear cold water had given them the impetus to push on as their physical reserves dwindled.

  But when after a week of desert travel they at last crested one of the low hills, their hearts sank, for beyond they could see nothing but the desert, reaching far out of sight to the distant horizon.

  “Must be a hundred miles, maybe more,” Morton said grimly, staring ahead. He did not say what both knew. Even at their present parsimonious rate of consumption, food and water would be gone before they had crossed even a quarter of that distance.

  Before starting out, they had lightened their packs of everything they had regarded as nonessential. Now it was time to lighten them even further. Ruthlessly they cast aside all but the barest essentials for survival.

  Though time had now become their chief enemy, they spent the rest of that day camped on the mountain in the welcome shade of a great boulder. They planned to start out at night when the air was cooler, and they were less likely to sweat away their bodies’ precious reserves of fluid.

  With sundown they set out again; but travel by night had its drawbacks too. Nights were cool, which meant that their bodies were working harder to stay warm; the animals of the desert also prowled at night, so that they risked encounters with rattlers and fierce bobcats.

  There was one thing for which Claire could be thankful. Since they had started out into the desert, Morton had foregone his nightly rituals, not out of concern for her, but rather for the sake of conserving his own energy. By this time even the rugged trapper was beginning to show the effects of a week in the desert. As for Claire, her clothes now hung loosely upon her, and her hair, bleached almost white by the sun, hung tangled and dirty to her shoulders. Her boots were worn nearly through, so that the sharp stones of the desert cut her feet as she walked. Her lips, chapped by the hot dry air, were cracked and bleeding in several places. No one seeing her now would have recognized the elegant and frail-looking English lady who had set out scarcely more than a year ago from London. Gaunt and parched as she was in her filthy and tattered dress of elk hide, she looked every bit as much a creature of the wilderness as the man trekking beside her.

  They dared not stop for more than brief rests, pausing only in the worst heat of the day. They advanced into the desert, nearly out of provisions.

  It was during this time that she came closest to admiring the man who was both her captor and her protector. Whatever private assessment Morton might have made of their predicament, outwardly he clung to a stubborn optimism that, if it did nothing to solve the problems facing them, at least kept her from despair. Perhaps they could survive now as they had survived the mountains. If they found water; if they found food; if there wa
s an end to the desert soon.

  But they did not find an end to the desert soon. It stretched on before them, mile after endless mile. The sun beat down upon them from above and reflected blindingly back from the desert floor.

  Glancing upward, Claire was startled to see a line of hikers stumbling across the sand in single file before her. She blinked, realizing that each of them was the same, a duplicate of herself.

  The mirage vanished even as she stared at it, but the hallucinations began to appear after that with frightening regularity. Once it might be Morton appearing in the distance ahead, or a cool, serene lake shimmering in the sunlight.

  She stumbled and fell and would have been content to remain where she was, but Morton came to her and literally dragged her to her feet.

  “Got to be water here somewhere,” he muttered, half-carrying half-pulling her across the desert.

  Somewhat to their south they could see another line of low mountains and on these Morton was certain he could distinguish some green. Green plants meant water and perhaps some food, so they veered in that direction, stumbling doggedly on.

  Hope turned to despair, however, for when they reached the low rocky hills the green turned out to be greasewood, whose roots were able to find streams buried far beneath the earth’s surface, too deep to be of use to them.

  Their strength failing rapidly, they climbed feebly to the crest of the hill and looked westward—to see, after a second week of desert hardships, the unbroken desert still sprawling toward the distant horizon.

  They were out of water now and had no more than a spoonful of dried meat between them. Claire, thinking of Summers, could almost envy him his watery death in the river.

  They took what shade they could beneath the greasewood trees, waiting once again for the cool of the evening. For herself, Claire might have given up at this point, but Morton, his determination apparently unquenchable, would not hear of quitting. He gave her the larger share of what little food was left and insisted that she carry a small, smooth stone in her mouth.