In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4)

by Cindy Brandner

  He dug in his bag for his thermos and took a long swallow of the cold tea he’d brewed over a campfire that morning. He would love to be by a fire right now, one with a roof above it preferably. A fire, a roof and someone to talk to.

  “Ye’re gettin’ greedy, man,” he said, the sound of his voice like a shock wave in the quiet of the night. He was talking to himself more and more these days, and while it didn’t worry him too much, he did think it would be nice to have someone else answer back occasionally. After all, he already knew his own opinion on most matters.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a proper conversation with someone—probably that last night with Eddy. He missed Eddy. He missed the wise-cracking and the talk, but mostly he missed the companionship of a man who spoke when he needed to and understood the want for silence as well. In the end they hadn’t walked all the way to South Dakota—they’d bought used motorbikes in Wyoming and ridden after that—and the time, whether walking or riding, had done what Eddy had intended it should and cleared his head, creating a space between his life in San Francisco and the unmapped future which lay before him. They arrived on the Ridge on a hot September day. Pine Ridge to be exact, the most notorious reservation in the United States. It was then he realized Eddy’s history was a whole lot more complicated than he had ever suspected.

  They hadn’t stepped a foot onto the reservation until after dark set in and then had holed up in a cabin high in the pines, a good distance away from the settlement. The cabin windows had been shot out at some point and the roof was falling in. Eddy had said they couldn’t even light a fire until after dark.

  “Are we hiding?” Casey asked. He was certain Eddy must have people here that even if they weren’t family, had been friends.

  “I have some bad history here. I probably shouldn’t have come back, but I didn’t figure anyone would see us up on the ridge. This cabin has been deserted a long time. A guy was murdered here and people think his spirit hangs round it, so they avoid it.”

  “It doesn’t bother you?”

  Eddy shook his head and pushed his hair back from his face. “No, it don’t bother me, it’s my brother after all.”

  “Yer brother was murdered in this cabin?”

  “Yeah, he was.”

  “What happened?”

  Eddy shrugged. “He was a throwback, my brother, to the days when men like Crazy Horse rode these plains. He had a warrior’s heart and he couldn’t help but fight. The goons—that’s what people here call the tribal police—didn’t like him, he was always stirring people up, wanting change, trying to remind the people of what we once were, of what we might be again. He was a leader and people listened to him. He went after the tribal council, it was run by this guy who was corrupt and pretty much lived in the white man’s pocket. The same guy headed up the goons too. People were starting to turn against them, they wouldn’t vote the way they were supposed to, they wouldn’t go along with the tribal line. You’d have to understand how it was back then, how it still is really. It was terrifying to live out here, people armed to the teeth roaming around at night, goons coming in and busting up houses and people, just because they didn’t like their politics. The murder rate on the reservation is seventeen times the national average. It’s a place of no hope and it’s dark man, the kind of dark that sucks your soul out and makes you want to drink yourself blind, so you can’t see what’s coming because it’s never anything good.”

  “So they killed him?”

  Eddy nodded. “Yeah, they strung him up in the trees behind the cabin and then shot him full of holes. It was during my second tour of Nam. I was filled with a lot of anger when I came home. I went after the guys who I was certain killed him. Upshot of all this is that there’s a warrant out on me and there were cops sniffing around in San Francisco—they were going to catch up with me any day. It seemed a good time to vamoose—for both of us.”

  “Ye took a great risk coming here, no?” Casey said quietly.

  Eddy gave that eloquent shrug that spoke volumes.

  “Everything is a risk, sometimes doing nothing is the greatest risk of all. I was told to bring you here.”

  “By who?”

  “I asked the Great Spirit to give me a dream that would tell me what to do with you.”

  “Do with me?”

  “Yes,” Eddy grinned, “I said tell me what to do with this white bastard so I can get rid of him.”

  “So what dream were ye given?”

  “I saw a wolf—big black bastard sitting on the butte, the one we’re sitting on right now. He sat there for a long time, gazing off into the distance. You know that gaze that has no horizon to it, it just looks forever and you don’t know if it finds what it seeks or if it seeks anything. Then out of the tree line came a she-wolf, silver, like she was made from moonlight. She had green eyes, just like you said—a woman who holds the ocean in her eyes—and she came and sat beside the big black one. The two wolves sat for a long time and then she turned and ran back into the tree line and I saw she had pups waiting there, one black and one silver and the big black got up and followed her. By the way, man,” he added, “can I just say I’m a little pissed that you got a wolf while I got a fucking frog.”

  “I’m startin’ to think it’s no accident we became friends.”

  “It’s not,” Eddy said all trace of joking gone from him. “The wolf is my brother. Both of my people and of my actual brother, Will. I knew you were another because I could see the wolf in you, but also because my brother told me you’d come.”

  “He told you?”

  “Yes, he visits me in dreams sometimes. He gives me advice, tells me what to do, just like he did when he was alive. He was always a bossy son-of-a-bitch. I dreamed about you before I met you. I saw you sitting in a field talking to my brother, and he looked up at me and smiled in the middle of this really intense conversation you two were having and I knew he had brought you to me for a reason.”

  “What was the reason?”

  Eddy looked at him. “I think he meant for you to be my brother for a little while. I could help you and you helped me get my head straight again. Now I’m supposed to send you home.”

  A wolf, he thought, sitting now on an ancient potato ridge, the pain in his knee dying back to a dull fire. A wolf—fitting to be sure, wild and running the edge of civilization, reviled by town and homestead alike. Aye, there was a resemblance he thought, sniffing at his clothes. A bath, a haircut and shave wouldn’t come amiss about now.

  He stood up slowly, his pants damp from sitting so long on the soil. His knee was aching but it felt like it was going to bear up for a little while, at least until he could find a place to bed down for the night. He shouldered his bag and it was then he saw a trail leading up the mountainside. It sparked something in him, that strange electric jolt in the blood which he had come to believe signaled something from his past—an event, a person, a place.

  The trail called to him in the way land called to a man—with no more than a glance, a scent of smoky earth, a rustle in the trees, a horizon over the hill, a bend in the path through the forest. And so he answered the call.

  Chapter Sixty-two

  Peace Comes Dropping Slow

  IRELAND WAS A SMALL COUNTRY, but even small countries have their wild places where no man has set foot for many a year, where seasons pass and trees fall and stone shatters and there is none to witness it but God and the occasional beast straying off its normal pathway. It was such a place he sought, and it was, high in the passes of the Wicklow Mountains, such a place he found.

  Casey came upon the hut the day after he had sat in the abandoned potato field. He had followed the trail all the way up the mountain and there it was, sitting in a small crook of great stone with a dark pine wood at its back. It looked to him like an old shepherd’s croft, used only when the animals were brought high into the mountains to graze the summer grasses. Apart from a couple of old bird nests and a crushed wasp’s nest it appeared that nei
ther man nor beast had set foot here for some years.

  He bought himself an old truck and then went about collecting the supplies he would need to make the hut habitable for the winter. He had money enough to get through a year, even two if he was careful. Eddy had made certain of that. Eddy, as it turned out, had bet on Casey during that last fight and walked away with a bundle. He gave Casey half. When Casey protested he said, “It was your fight, take the damn money.”

  It was the work of a week to repair the hearth and the chimney and then to remove the detritus so that the chimney might draw well. The work was easy for him. Wood seemed to obey the command of his hands, shaping itself to become something else, something more, function within form, grace in the grain. He lost himself to it, the scent of the wood and the unexpected beads of sap that smelled like a hot summer’s day in a pine forest. He leveled the floor, for it was just hard-packed dirt. He laid large, flat stones and put down a vapor barrier, then built a floor of pine planking set on two-by-fours.

  His needs were few—a simple bedframe, a mattress he found at a secondhand shop which had come almost new from the estate of an old woman who had died recently. He bought a pot and a frying pan, a bowl and a plate and a set of utensils. He made a table and set one chair at it, for there would be no one to share his meals or make talk with him in the cold winter nights.

  His life in America already seemed distant, something he had put behind him with little trouble and no regret. He missed Eddy but he understood it had been time for them to part.

  “Where will ye go?” he asked Eddy that last morning before they went their separate ways. Eddy seemed rather fatalistic in his view of the future, but Casey hated to think of him on the run for the rest of his life, or locked up in a prison where he wasn’t likely to see the light of day ever again.

  “I’ll head for Canada. I have Cree relatives in Alberta. They’ll take me in and if the long arm of the law extends that far, there’s always the Northwest Territories and living with my Inuit second cousin.”

  “The array of your relatives never fails to stupefy me.”

  “Man, I told you long ago, we are a family that gets around.”

  “Ye’ve got no worries about gettin’ over the border?”

  “Longest, friendliest border in the world, man, with plenty of wilderness along the route. For a running man with two good feet, it ain’t no thing.”

  He’d grabbed Eddy in a fierce hug then, a little frightened at the notion of being without the one person he knew from this life. They parted and looked at each other.

  “May the four winds blow you safely home, brother,” Eddy said and then he was gone with the rising sun at his back. Casey stood for a moment watching him, and then he turned toward the east and began to walk.

  It snowed on the last day of November. It was snowing when he awoke with the dawn, big soft flakes that drifted like feathers lining the nest of mountain and wood. He sat for a while with his cup of tea, watching it pile up thick and soft, muffling the usual morning sounds. He had always found snow to be peaceful, it shut the world out and allowed a man space to just be and think his own thoughts.

  His wee hut stood snug in its spot, with the clouds seemingly wrapped round the chimney. It was like the hut was suspended between snow and sky, the entire world a soft blue-white. Casey stood and took a deep breath of the clear air, so pure it almost rang like crystal. Something of himself had been restored here in this mountain fastness, but with that restoration had come a thing that stirred restlessly in his blood and bone marrow. He dreamed more often of the woman here, as if something in the land spoke of her at night when his defenses were low. In one dream he had seen her clearly, had even touched her, but couldn’t recall her face when he awoke in the morning. He found himself out of sorts and frustrated all through that day, his axe hand clumsy and his feet not as sure as they normally were. He cursed himself for a fool much of the day, though he swore he felt the silk of her along his palms through to the evening. Finally he cracked the ice on the small pond which sat in a hollow just down from the hut, and drenched his hands in it until they were so cold that the pain was like burning and he could no longer feel the woman’s heat upon them.

  His days wore a rhythm, a measured beat that was soothing to him. He was up with the sun each morning, bathed and dressed just as the rosy light of dawn crept in through the east window. He had his breakfast out in the open air on fine days—porridge with honey and cream when he had it on hand. After breakfast it was time to gather wood. He had dry pine, five cords deep in a lean-to he’d built against the hut. He’d made a trip into the closest decent-sized town before the snow fell, where he bought flour, sugar, oats, potatoes and carrots in sacks. He stocked up on tea and bought two bottles of whiskey. He put together a medical kit and bought himself warm clothes to last the season.

  As the days passed and he lost himself to the rhythm of life lived with the land he found himself humming tunes he didn’t know, songs he could not remember the names of, but just the notes made him happy. He realized one day that peace had come to him, dropping slow as the poet had long ago said, but there inside him nevertheless. What remained to him now was to find the man he had once been, or to make a life and peace with the one he now was.

  The clouds were shredding over the mountain pass, the low winter sun gilding the hilltops in the gaps between long, lingering ribbons of fog. The trees were dressed fine, the maiden birches silk-wrapped with snow, the firs frost-tipped, throwing their dark branches into greater relief. He shouldered his rifle and stepped out of the tree line. He’d had company while he was gone hunting for there were traces of a delicate-hoofed deer which had left its tidy prints, neatly spaced, with small drifts where the hooves had glanced off the snow.

  He walked the long track in to his hut. It was going to be cold tonight, he would need to build the fire high and hot, and rise during the night to replenish it. He’d caught two rabbits today and he would make stew with them. It would last him a few days, if he rationed it out carefully.

  Inside the hut he built the fire quickly, glad that he had split a box full of dry pine kindling before he left on his hunting trip. It didn’t take long for it to build to a fine blaze and the heat of it felt lovely against his face and hands.

  He grabbed the kettle from its wee stone shelf by the fire. A flicker of movement caught his eye as he stood up, kettle in hand. He went to the window, eyes narrowed against the fir-shadowed snow. It had been too big to be a hare, or even one of the shy deer that fed on the edges of the meadow at dusk. His eyes swept the long shadows, the pitch dark near the trees, where a man could hide. He tracked back, looking away from the tree line, across the meadow’s open expanse and then froze.

  It was a man and he wasn’t hiding, he was standing out clear on the track, just standing and looking toward the hut. He was a big bastard, and Casey felt a thread of fear run through him like a red hot wire. He had a loaded rifle at his disposal and the skill to take the man out from his own doorstep and yet he felt afraid to go outside and confront him.

  He grabbed his coat and shoved his feet into his boots. The rifle was still loaded and ready to go and he grabbed it up like it was an extension of his arm.

  Outside it was already colder than it had been a mere twenty minutes before and the breath he sucked in had ice crystals in it. He cocked the rifle, looking down its sight line. He walked over the snow; his boots crunching so loudly that it sounded like pistol shots echoing in the night, his adrenaline making his ears overly sensitive. There was no way the man didn’t see him, so the sound hardly mattered.

  “What do ye want?” he said loudly, and the words cracked off the trees, shaking down a soft rain of snow along the edge of the wood.

  The man didn’t answer, just stood there like a specter from another time, the wind moving his hair a bit. Casey didn’t like his silence, faced with the business end of a rifle most men would start to explain themselves quickly. This man seemed entirely unfazed by the pos
sibility of getting shot.

  Casey walked forward a few steps more, but the man did not move, though Casey could feel him watching with an intensity that was unnerving.

  “Who are ye? An’ what the hell do ye want? Speak up, man, or I’ll shoot ye where ye stand.” His voice sounded weak, sapped of its strength by the cold and the man’s strange stillness. He fired off a shot well above the man’s head and still he did not move. He almost seemed to absorb the atmosphere around, pulling in what little light there was near him.

  How long Casey stood there, he could not have said, only it seemed seconds and an eternity at the same time. His eyes had begun to water from the cold and he blinked. The night and its shadows were playing tricks with his eyes. It seemed like the man was melting away at his edges, becoming less substantial, not so much a man as a collection of shadows. And then even that dispersed, getting murky around its edges, though maybe the man was just backing down the track, ready to turn and run at the first opportunity. Suddenly there was no one there, just the wind and the soft drifts of snow released from the tree boughs.

  He walked all the way down to where he knew the man had been standing, for he’d marked the spot with his eyes as being right in line with a fir that had a distinctive bent top. He kept the rifle cocked and ready, in case the man was lying in wait for him somewhere just off the track.