Sundancer's Woman

by Judith E. French

  “Please,” Elizabeth whispered. “She’s my daughter.”

  “And the boy?” he demanded between clenched teeth.

  “Both of them. They’re both mine.”

  “Hurry,” Talon called.

  Elizabeth grabbed a blanket and wrapped it around Rachel. From the space beneath Elizabeth’s old sleeping space, she pulled the deerskin bag that held their spare clothing. Jamie’s cloak lay on the floor by the door; Rachel’s moccasins and outer wrap had been carelessly tossed on a pile of furs. She jammed Rachel’s things into the bag and slung it over her shoulder. Only then did she go to her son and whisper in his ear.

  “Shh, it’s Mama. Jamie?”

  His eyelids flickered. A lazy smile crossed his lips. Elizabeth noticed that one front tooth was missing. “Mama?” he murmured in Iroquoian.

  “Mama,” she repeated in English. “Be quiet. Don’t make a sound.” She held out her arms.

  “Why are you—”

  “Shh,” she warned. “We’re playing a warrior’s game, Jamie. Are you old enough to play?”

  He nodded. Sitting up, he dropped his legs over the platform. Quickly, she slid his moccasins on and tied them tightly around his calves. Then she handed him his cape.

  “Is Father here? Did he—” the boy whispered.

  “Shh, you’ll make our team lose the game,” she replied, crouching low. “Jump on my back, and hold on, no matter what.” She glanced at Fire Talon. He nodded and started out of the longhouse.

  Hunt paused long enough to question. “Why? Why didn’t you trust me enough to tell me the truth?”

  She looked him straight in the eye. “If I had, would you have come for them?”

  Chapter 18

  Elizabeth was running in deep snow through a moonless night. Icy branches clawed at her face and clothing; her heart hammered in her chest. She staggered under the weight of both children—Rachel in her arms, Jamie clinging to her back—but she couldn’t stop running and she couldn’t run fast enough to escape Yellow Drum.

  She could hear the crunch of snow and the snap of underbrush behind her. The Seneca’s muscular thighs and legs seemed tireless; he gained on her with every stride. Elizabeth waited, dreading the war cry she knew would soon issue from his cruel lips. It didn’t come, but somehow, his silent pursuit was even more terrifying.

  Little Rachel began to sob, and Elizabeth clutched her against her breast. Each breath of frigid night air tore into Elizabeth’s chest, and with each step her limbs grew more wooden and her strength melted away.

  “Father! Father!” Jamie protested. He kicked and beat at her with both fists. “Don’t let her take me away!” he screamed. “I want my father!”

  Elizabeth stumbled to her knees in a piled drift. Somehow, she’d lost her mittens, and the snow was so cold it burned her bare hands. As she struggled to rise, her fingers touched the matted fur of an animal. Stifling a scream, she raised her head and gazed into the red, glowing eyes of a snarling wolf.

  “Give them to me,” Yellow Drum thundered. “They’re mine. Would you rather see them eaten alive?”

  She twisted around to see him bound toward her. His face was streaked with paint—half black, half yellow. Around his head, he swung a bloodstained war club.

  “Give me what’s mine,” he demanded. “Give me my son.”

  Elizabeth tried to dodge past the wolf, but the savage beast sprang at her. His fierce growl made Jamie cry out. Elizabeth looked down at her little daughter, but Rachel was gone. She’d fallen from her arms into the trampled snow.

  “Rachel! Rachel!” Elizabeth called frantically. Raw fear coiled in the pit of her stomach. She could hear Rachel whimpering, but she couldn’t find her. “Rachel!”

  “Elizabeth.” A strong hand shook her. “Elizabeth.”

  Bewildered, she forced her eyes open and looked up at the shadow kneeling beside her. “What ... ?” Her jaws ached as though she’d been clenching her teeth. “Hunt? Where—”

  “Shh, you fell asleep. You must have been dreaming.” His hand gripped her shoulder. It was too dark to see his face, but his voice was as hard as the frozen ground under her.

  “The children?”

  “Asleep. You cried out.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He cupped her chin tenderly with his lean, callused hand. “It’s all right. You were asleep.”

  Her heart was still racing; her mouth tasted of old metal. The remnants of the nightmare dug at her insides with bared claws. “Did I make too much noise?” She scrambled up. “Where are they?”

  He caught her wrist and brought her hand up to touch Rachel’s hair. Realization came flooding back. The snow ... the wolf ... even Yellow Drum had been a dream. Hunt had Rachel strapped to his back, still wrapped snugly in the blanket.

  “She’s still asleep?” Tears welled up in Elizabeth’s eyes and she dashed them away. Rachel was always a sound sleeper. Once, she’d slept through a dogfight between two village curs only inches from her cradleboard.

  “Not a peep out of her.”

  Elizabeth had to touch her, had to let her fingers slide through her baby’s silky hair and lightly stroke a chubby cheek. Warm breath stirred across her hand. “She’s all right.” It had been a bad dream ... just a dream, she assured herself. She hadn’t dropped Rachel in the snow. Yellow Drum hadn’t caught them ... not yet.

  “Of course, she’s all right. Did you think I’d drop her?”

  She wondered if Hunt was still angry with her. She could understand that. It was his right. She’d put his life in danger—put all their lives in danger—by not telling him the truth. But she’d do the same again even if it meant going to hell for it. “I trust you,” she replied softly.

  “You don’t trust me.” His words were terse, his tone different than she’d ever heard from him before ... not angry so much as full of regret.

  She sighed for what might have been. “Jamie?” she asked. “Is he—”

  “Asleep as well. Talon has him.”

  Talon? When had the war chief taken Jamie? she wondered. She’d carried her son a long way before she’d relinquished him into Fox’s powerful arms. Fox must have passed him to Fire Talon, she decided.

  After they’d gotten the children from the longhouse, she, Hunt, and Talon had retraced their cautious steps out of the village without being seen. In the meadow, Counts His Scalps and the remaining Shawnee braves had joined them. With the armed warriors protecting their backs, they’d retreated across the open ground and reached the comparative safety of the woods.

  The raiding party had been several hundred yards into the forest before a cry of alarm echoed from the village. Within seconds, Seneca drums beat a tattoo of danger, and war whoops sounded from the walls of the stockade. Fire Talon had quickened his strides, and the Shawnee had begun to run in earnest.

  “Where are we going?” Jamie had demanded angrily. “Who are these men? They aren’t Seneca. Who are they?”

  She hadn’t tried to answer his questions. She’d held him in her arms and run until she thought her heart would burst from the strain. Then, finally, when she was dropping behind despite every ounce of will, the brave known as Fox had held out his arms, and reluctantly, she’d given her precious son into his keeping.

  After what seemed hours they’d stopped to drink, then run again. Talon had signaled a halt to rest when they reached the crest of a hill. It was then that Elizabeth crouched and leaned her head against a tree trunk. Obviously, she’d dozed off and had a bad dream.

  Memory of that horror still made the skin prickle on her arms. The wolf had seemed so real. “I need to touch my son,” she said softly. She needed to put her hands on him, to assure herself that he was really all right.

  “He is here,” Fire Talon said in English. He caught her hand and brought it to her son’s shoulder. “The boy is strong and brave.”

  “You didn’t hurt him?” she asked.

  “Is this man one to harm a child?” Fire Talon rumbled in his deep
voice. “In Iroquoian, this man warned that he must be quiet for the safety of his mother and his sister. Your son made no sound after that. In time, he slept.”

  She gathered her courage to ask another question that had been troubling her. “Are they coming after us? What of the Seneca guards? The ones who watched from the walls? Are they dead?” She didn’t want to think of them dead; she knew too many people in the village.

  “The guards are tied and gagged,” Talon assured her, “but very much alive.” He grinned, and she caught a glimpse of white teeth in the darkness. “We took their scalplocks but no skin with them—not even a drop of blood.”

  “It will make a great story,” Fox boasted. “The women will sing of us.”

  The shaman, Counts, chuckled dryly. “If you dance before too many women, your wife, Shell Bead Girl, will have your scalp.”

  “She is too jealous,” Fox said. “Have I ever given her reason to distrust me?”

  “She knows you well,” Talon replied. “So long as she is vigilant, you will not stray into another cornfield.”

  “I only said the women would sing for us.” Fox’s hurt tone was obviously feigned for the amusement of his friends. “I never said I wanted their admiration. One wife is enough for any reasonable man.”

  “Since when is Fox considered reasonable?” Red Shirt teased.

  “I’m reasonable,” Fox countered. “Didn’t I suggest that we leave the Seneca alive?”

  “You did,” Count agreed, “after Talon ordered it. But it was I who thought to leave the Huron moccasin print on the ground outside the village walls.”

  “In the Shawnee village, Counts formed the plan,” Red Shirt added. “Who else but a wise shaman would leave a Huron footprint and a strip of Huron beadwork on a brier at the edge of the forest?”

  “Some would not think it honorable to blame the Huron for Shawnee mischief,” Talon said quietly.

  Counts His Scalps spat on the ground. “That for Huron honor,” he said harshly. “The Hurons roasted my father over a torture fire. Whatever evil I can do them I will do, so long as I live.”

  Talon chuckled. “This man has no great love for the Hurons either. And it is true that the Hurons started the last war between Iroquois and Shawnee. Perhaps the Seneca will not even find the footprint or the beads.”

  “They will find it,” Counts assured him. “And the time spent chasing Hurons will allow us to reach Shawnee land in safety.”

  Talon signaled that they should move on. Elizabeth took her place behind Hunt. “I don’t understand,” she whispered. “Why aren’t the Seneca coming after us?”

  “They will, in time,” Hunt replied. “Counts left signs that will confuse them. It should give us a good lead.”

  A shiver passed through Elizabeth. Hunt wasn’t shouting at her; his displeasure ran deeper than anger. Guilt plagued her; she’d done what she had to for her children, but Hunt might never forgive her. She didn’t know if she could mend the breach between them or not, but tonight was no time to try.

  Talon’s pace was grueling. She concentrated on keeping her footing in the dark; she couldn’t chance a fall that might be serious and could delay the Shawnee. They must get as far from Yellow Drum’s village as possible because when he returned, he would come after them. She was as sure of that as she was that the sun would rise in the east in the morning.

  Yellow Drum would come for his children. And she had no intention of letting them go ... not so long as she drew breath.

  Hunt strode along the semidark trail with Elizabeth and the Shawnee raiding party. On his back, he carried a sleeping Rachel, but the little girl was so light that he barely remembered she was there.

  Dawn came later than he’d expected it to this morning, spilling hues of lavender and rose over the wooded hilltops. The air was crisp and cold, heavy with the biting scents of fur and pine. So far they’d been lucky; they’d done what they’d come to do without losing a life or taking one. But their luck couldn’t last forever; Hunt could smell snow in the air. Winter was late in coming. When it hit, they’d feel the full force of North Wind’s fury. He could think of better situations than being caught in Iroquois territory in a blizzard.

  These were child-sized mountains compared to the great towering heaps of stone and earth beyond the great plains. Winter would hold the Cheyenne world in a white embrace. The cold would be fierce enough to snap the trunks of lodge pole pines, and the buffalo skin teepees would glow with the flickering light of fires as the People gathered to wait out the long months of the starving time.

  He wondered if his father had kept well. Wolf Robe was strong, but even a man in his prime could be brought low by a charging buffalo bull or a grizzly. He’d not look for Hunt during the winter, but when spring turned the prairie into a knee-high carpet of wildflowers and the buffalo cows dropped their calves, the leathery old warrior would scan the horizon for sight of his returning son.

  Wolf Robe, the warrior his brothers the Shawnee and Delaware called the Stranger, was a courageous and complex man. A vision quest and a blood feud with his brother had brought him east into the country of the rising sun, where he’d taken a Delaware wife and adopted a lonely white boy as his son. Years later, twice widowed, he’d returned to the mountains of his birth with Hunt at his side. The sibling whom Wolf Robe had fled to keep from killing was dead, and the Cheyenne welcomed him back with open hearts.

  Hunt could have had a good life with the Cheyenne. He’d learned their language and their customs; he’d even been invited to join the elite warrior society of Dog Soldiers. But the white part of him that he’d thought dead for so many years returned to plague his dreams. A curiosity as persistent as a scourge of chiggers under his skin tormented him until he decided to return to his own beginnings and learn more of the white race that had spawned him.

  Sometimes, in the deepest pitch of night, he let his mind drift back to the cabin he’d shared with his white sister, Becca. Her face was as clear to him as Wolf Robe’s. Becca had been the closest thing to a birth mother he’d ever known. A kindly Delaware woman, and later a Cheyenne, had sewn and cooked for him, and listened to his boyhood boasts and troubles. But none had been as dear as Becca.

  She was lost to him, returned to the whites in the town of New York. The Campbells had made inquiries after Hunt had become part of their family, but one red-haired woman in a sea of Dutch and English was impossible to trace. Her husband, Simon Brandt, was presumed dead, lost in one of his wilderness campaigns against the Shawnee. Becca, if she was still alive, could have married and taken a new last name, or she could have returned to Ireland.

  The Campbells had been surprised that Hunt held no ill will against Wolf Robe for his original capture. If he ever had, it had been lost long ago in the patience of his Indian father’s loving care. Simon Brandt had kicked and beat him with his fists. Marks from Brandt’s quirt had left permanent scars on Hunt’s back, but Wolf Robe had soothed those hurts with bear grease and rocked a lonely boy to sleep.

  The day of his capture was as lost to him as Becca. He remembered running—not away from the cabin, but toward it. He remembered smelling smoke ... and oddly enough, musty earth. And he remembered cobwebs in the tunnel they’d crawled out of to escape the burning cabin. The last whole image he had of his sister was the fear on her face as Wolf Robe carried him away in one direction while her captor pulled her in another.

  Wolf Robe had told him that she had been taken as a hostage for the safe release of a Shawnee medicine man. Later, they learned that Becca had been returned to the whites in a peace gesture. Wolf Robe had assured Hunt that his sister was safe and alive, and Wolf Robe never lied to him.

  Hunt felt the little girl on his back squirm and heard her sigh. She was waking up. He stepped off the trail and signaled to Elizabeth to take her. The child had slept through the night without a peep; it wouldn’t do to have her take fright and begin to cry now. A wailing babe could be heard a long way through these woods.

  Fox saw
them stop and clicked to Fire Talon. He glanced back and nodded. The braves fanned out to watch the forest around them for any sign of the enemy while Elizabeth untied her daughter and took her in her arms. Rachel opened her eyes sleepily and gave him a dazzling smile—her mother’s smile, complete with dimple on the left cheek.

  Hunt’s heart plummeted. He was still mad as hell at Elizabeth, but he didn’t kid himself. He was still crazy for her. And in the pit of his gut, he knew why she’d done what she’d done. Rationally, Elizabeth was right. He wouldn’t have gone for the children if he’d guessed there were two of them. She’d outfoxed him and made him look the fool in front of the Shawnee.

  He’d never been a man to let desire for a woman cloud his thinking, but this time was different. He couldn’t stop watching her ... couldn’t stop thinking about what it had been like making love to her. And all his anger couldn’t quench the fever for her that raged within him.

  Being close to her on the trail, sleeping near her, and standing watch with her were all enough to drive a man beyond control. The men’s clothing she wore—the skintight leggings and fringed breechcloth—left little of her feminine curves to his imagination. Even the hunting shirt strained across her small, upthrust breasts. The thoughts of cupping those soft breasts in his hands again ... of kissing and sucking them ... haunted him.

  He wanted her.... Wanted her so bad that he’d even thought of taking her and her son with him. Jamie could have fit in with his plans to go west. Hunt would never sire a son because of the illness that had left him sterile, but he could have been a father to Elizabeth’s boy. A real father didn’t have to be the man who planted the seed in a woman; Wolf Robe had taught him that. Jamie’s Seneca blood made no difference to him; if an Irish immigrant could become a Cheyenne Sun Dancer, so could an Iroquois.

  He’d lied to Elizabeth when he’d said he didn’t like children. As a young buck, he hadn’t thought much of them one way or another, but now that he was older, he’d wondered what it might be like to teach a son to track and find his way in the woods, to catch trout with his bare hands, and to paddle a canoe in white water.