His bad dreams troubled Erden. Several times he’d flailed out at enemies in his sleep and she’d had to tame his arms. “An evil spirit has entered your open mouth,” she said. “It has gone to live in your heart. Come, my husband, you must take the purification bath.”
That Indian wild he wasn’t. “No, the morning bath in chilly water is sufficient.”
She held his bearded head against her bare bosom. She whispered in the dark, “Yet it is the evil spirit of a bad witch who has entered your heart. You must prepare for the purification hut.”
“No.”
“I would help you prepare it but the woman must not touch the purification hut.”
“No.”
After fright’s sweat had dried, and his heart went back to beating normal, he withdrew from her taming touches. Sometimes he slept. Sometimes he didn’t.
“Come, sleep well, my husband.”
He shuddered.
“What, has the evil witch come again?”
God, God, if only he’d waited. As he’d wanted to.
One morning, after a bath in the brook, where they chased and splashed each other shrilling through stiff webs of frost, hilarious with the joy of being tinglingly alive so early in the dawn, he caught up with her, grabbing a braid just as they reentered their cave. She didn’t resist; instead with a shy little ducking motion cuddled against him.
“A hawk has at last caught you, Little Swallow.”
“What have I done that my husband no longer looks for acorns?”
“What is this you say?”
“The wild squirrels still hunt for acorns in the forest.”
His breath caught in his beard.
“My foster father and mother sported on their sleeping robe together many winter nights. Now that I am a maiden and you are a brave, must it be forbidden us?”
Then he understood why it was she had been so willing and ready the first time.
“When I was a child it was explained to me that this sport was only for the grownups, and not for children. That someday after my nose had bled it would also be granted me.”
He trembled.
“Husband?”
He picked her up. Convulsively, yet with an effort at tenderness, he carried her to their sleeping room and placed her upon their robe bed.
Drops of water still dappled her rose-brown cheeks. One glistening jewel stood trembling on the very point of her nose, reflecting her paired gray eyes. As she lay in his arms, she stirred, and a clear drop slid off her near nipple and ran over the curve of her plum breast. As it ran the drop collected other drops, and after a moment, hitting her slim arm where it lay tight against her body, it rivuleted onto his arm. The little pouring of drops was warm.
Lightly he stroked her belly. Her skin was still catchy with moisture.
“Husband.”
“Swallow.”
She raised a round knee and moved it coyly from side to side. “Husband?”
Two women called him husband.
“Bearded one?”
His hand moved. He had not willed the moving of it. The hand trembled between her plum breasts. The hand stole tenderly up to her slender neck and again played at choking her. Then the hand moved up to her hair and touched her braids.
A sliding smile widened her lips.
He’d often seen such a smile on Katherine’s lips. It did not become Erden.
The edges of Erden’s lips parted with a wisping sound.
“Yes?” He remembered what Katherine had taught him about a woman, how to kiss her behind the ears and over the closed eyes with the lips hardly touching, and behind the point of the chin with a quick darting tongue tip, and along the patch of tan around the nipple of the breast with nipping lips, and finally in the soft depression in the V of the collarbone kissing in rhythm with the beat of the heart. This he could never do with Erden.
Another whisper parted her lips. “Husband?”
“Yes?” He recalled his ritual of touches with Erden the first time. It’d been a good thing to do. So with a fingertip he again touched her right brow and then her left, and touched the point of her nose, displacing the glistening jewel drop, and touched the point of her chin, and touched the point of her right shoulder and then her left, and ticked her right hip where the point of the bone whitened her white skin and then her left, and dropped a fingertip on her right kneecap and then her left, and tapped her right ankle bone and then her left, and took hold of her right big toe and gave it a pull, and then her left.
She quivered with delight. “That sport my Dakota father and mother did not have on the sleeping robe.”
The drops of water on her skin shrank before his very eyes. He watched one of them on her cheek diminish to a bead of dew, then close to nothing.
She moved her body to find his hand.
He savored the musky smell of buffalo rising out of the robe beneath them.
Again she undulated her body to find his hand.
He caught sight of his tumble of silken phallus. He remembered that when he’d been with Katherine there had been such an edge of lust for her that he thought he would break before she could give him enough of herself. Here with Erden it was pure.
Erden became impatient. She was gentle about it but she was firm. “Husband?”
“Swallow.”
She took hold of his hand and placed it where she wished it to be.
His middle fingers fell upon a wound, freshly cut. He remembered when the knot of her had been as intricate as a rosebud.
A ripple began in her neck, moved down her body, ended with a comb of motion under his hand.
His tumble of flesh swelled. Silken skin began to shin.
“Husband?”
Of a sudden a bobolink began to sing in his head. Good. It must not be as with the ram, a brutal driving. Birds had it better. Especially the tinkling bobolinks.
She placed her hand on his hand and pressed down.
A fingertip broke through.
An undulation, as delicate as the sidewise sliding of an eye, touched the tip of his finger. “Husband.”
He held. He turned his head. Could this be woman? He had to know.
Of a sudden both her eyes wept. Big yellow tears. Her face became a torment of joy and hunger.
He leaned to kiss her closed eyes. The taste of salt burst on his tongue.
“Wan-sum?”
His bobolink speared straight up and its song became a frenzy of sweet desire. It was still pure. As he’d always wanted it.
He moved, and she moved, and there was a sweet sliding of flesh within flesh, and of a sudden there were many bobolinks tumbling about everywhere, and flights of spirits were caroling above tree tips. A routed yearning flowering over.
His eyes parted. Beneath him lay a woman ennobled. She too had heard and seen the bobolinks. Sha.
“Wakan.”
His eyes opened further.
The aspect of the mother had also awakened in her face. Suffering. Understanding. Forgiveness. He remembered having seen it once before, on the face of a female wolf at the moment of giving birth to puppies. Beautiful.
Something snapped in his head. It snapped loud enough to make him blink. Yes. He’d lived this moment before too. Besides the female wolf, some other mother somewhere had also looked exactly like this. But when or where he couldn’t remember.
After breakfast, Erden spoke of their son to come.
Ransom had popped a ripe plum into his mouth and on the word “son” almost gagged. Words of another time sparked a dazzling green in his head: “And I want children. A son. To start off a new line with. And by new I mean new. I don’t know who I am or where I came from. So with me and my son we start fresh.”
“Was it a bad plum, my husband?”
He swallowed the fruit, pit and all. “It was.”
Erden handed him a bladder of spring water. “A drink will help it down.”
He drank. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. He thought: “What a holy
terror I turned out to be. No-good tramp. First took on a retired whore for a wife. Then practically raped a pure wild girl. What if I have a son by both of them?”
Erden studied him. “Husband?”
He couldn’t look her in the eye. “And here I’ve killed men for less.”
“Come.” She tugged at his leather sleeve. “Come.”
Numbly he followed her. Both love and belly made him go.
Several miles down the canyon they came upon the beaver dam he remembered seeing the first time he came up the canyon. It was a wide place and the beaver dam had backed up water and mud into a meadow. Frost had turned all the quaking aspen and white birch into veils of shivering gold. Bushes were lemon-tipped.
She led him directly to a thicket of wild roses on the far side. She reached into the thorny branches and came up with a handful of wrinlded scarlet hips. She gave him a few, ate some herself.
He savored them. Their taste was like that of dried apples.
“Meat relish.” Again she made a basket out of her skirt held up at the waist.
They picked until they had a couple of quarts of them. Bits of wrinkled red skin caught in their teeth.
He couldn’t resist a quick look for colors in the stream splaying out over the wet meadow. And he did it despite her frowning. He poured sand from one hand to the other. There were colors all right. Plenty. Sometimes so many his hand became heavy with them. He found several nuggets the size of cow-pumpkin seeds.
“Husband?”
He stood up. His eyes roved speculative. “Sure. Everything washing down from above gets caught here behind this beaver dam. The meadow’s probably loaded with gold. Another place for me to stake out.” He nodded. “I’ll placer- mine this. And I’ll use a crusher on that rotting quartz above.” He waggled his head from side to side. “Lord, Lord. Right now I’m probably the richest man on earth.”
She nudged him with an elbow. “There is meat,” she whispered low. “Shh.”
His eyes moved.
There it was. A young doe. Not with kid either.
He waited a second to fix it all in place, then drew and fired. He dropped it.
They returned to their cave happily burdened with food.
As he skinned out the doe, knife swift, hands and wrists bloody, he said to himself, “Before the snow catches you in here, you’d better gallop back to Cheyenne and let Katherine know. Break it all off clean.”
He cut them steaks for the day.
“And instead I’ll become a man of the country.” He cut flesh deftly. “Marry me this wild one.”
He hung up jerky to cure.
“Someday I’ll take Erden into town. Dress her up. Build her a big brick house and give her servants and a carriage.”
Ransom was the hunter and provider. Erden was the nest- maker and counselor.
From the meat he brought in and the hips she picked, Erden made several parfleches of pemmican. She caught small fish in the stream, suckers, chub, dace, and after cleaning them, hung them up to be smoked. She dried bullberries. Soon their cave had the smell of a country grocery store.
Ransom kept deferring his trip back to Cheyenne, and instead filled the days with sorties in all directions.
Several times he spoke of going over and having a look at the principal peak in the Black Hills.
Erden forbade him to go. She was emphatic. “The great Hill of Thunder is the Forbidden Hill. Wakantanka is much offended when buckskin two-leggeds ascend it. He is known to have struck down those who have tried this.”
He was half-inclined to believe her.
“There is a place near the Forbidden Hill where white smoke puffs out of the ground. It is the place where a certain Great White Giant once defied the gods. He looked for gold. He was struck down and thrown under the grass and rocks.”
“This is a true thing?”
“The white smoke is the breathing of the Great White Giant buried beneath.”
“It is difficult for a white one to believe this, Little Swallow.”
“Often unnatural noises are heard. These are the moans of the Great White Giant when the rocks press upon him in punishment for entering our country.”
The whites were trespassers all right. Greedy.
“Sometimes the gods feel sorry for him and they let him up. His tracks have been seen in the snow. They are as long as a good man’s arm. He staggers about.” Erden’s gray eyes glowed. “When it appears that the Great White Giant will run away, the gods once again hurl him under the grass and rocks.”
“How is it that Little Swallow chooses to live in such an evil country?”
Her eyes opened wide. “The gods have love in their hearts for Psin-psin-cadan. This they have shown.”
He fell silent.
She looked about the cave and their rich store of provender. “They have provided her with a home and with food. They have also provided her”—she looked down demure— “with a noble husband.”
Noble? He squirmed. Katherine had once used the same word.
To vary their diet, he decided to go after some fat squirrels he’d spotted in a grove of red pine below the beaver dam.
“Does my husband go?”
“Blue Swallow, I have a great fondness for squirrel soup.”
“You will see the Forbidden Hill?”
He stiffened. “You doubt the word of your husband?”
“It is good. Go.”
“You do not wish to go?”
“It is time to air the bedding.”
He examined her point for point. Was she with child? “I will be back by sundown.”
“Turn and go.”
He saw to his gun and shells, slipped a strip of jerky in a. pocket, clapped on his sombrero, and was off.
A hundred steps below the beaver dam with its wide meadow he spotted fresh boot tracks in the sand along the stream. There were also places where pans of sand had been newly scooped out of the bottom of the stream. Someone had only yesterday been panning the stream.
“By the Lord! So the Army hasn’t been able to keep them out after all. And I hain’t got around to setting out my claim stakes yet.”
He forgot all about the squirrel soup.
He hurried back to the beaver dam. With his knife he cut off five stakes, cut his name into each of them, measured off three hundred feet along the gulch from rim to rim just above the beaver dam, and with a rock drove a stake down on each corner and then one in the center of the meadow.
He also hurried to set out stake claims around his white-quartz find higher in the Hills.
His thoughts were in a boil. The moment the Black Hills became United States property, he was a rich man and could put on tails. But, at the same time, the moment the prospectors came streaming in, it would be the end of Erden’s paradise.
He said nothing to Erden about the fresh boot tracks.
But Erden sensed something. She mocked him with a child-bride’s smile. “I have the pot. Where are the fat squirrels?”
“I did not see them.”
A white man’s lie.
The next day, very chilly, while both were sunning themselves in the door of their cave, they heard the sound of a great whistling high in the Hills.
Erden’s gray eyes became dots of troubled darkness. She turned pale. “Ai. Ai. Wakantanka is greatly offended. What have we done?”
A few minutes later yet another majestic wail rose high over the Hills. Presently the vast wall split up into myriads of echoes, and gradually faded away.
“Quickly. We must take the purification bath,” she cried.
“The man in his hut and the woman in the stream.”
Ransom didn’t move. He wasn’t about to let himself be stampeded by something he was sure he could explain if given a little time.
“Hurry. Or we shall be struck down.”
He sat his ground.
“Hurry, my husband.”
He thought the idea of a bath all right. “I will wash in the stream in the usual way,”
he said. He shivered, thinking of the ice-coated water. “I will purify my skin with many hands of rough sand.”
She clapped a hand to her mouth at his blasphemy, then hurried off to take her bath.
His eyes narrowed as he watched her fly about. He combed his black beard with his fingers. A rush of compassion for her as well as an impulse to hurt her came together in him.
A few days later he managed to get away again. He immediately checked his claim stakes around the meadow just above the beaver dam.
The stakes were gone. Even the holes in which the stakes had been driven home were gone.
He stared. It couldn’t be true.
Yet, look as he might, there wasn’t a sign anywhere that he or anyone else had ever passed through the spot. Even the strange fresh boot tracks he’d found earlier in the sand were gone.
He couldn’t cipher it. There had been no rain to erase them.
Then the thought shot through his mind that Erden was the only one who could have erased all sign so thoroughly. She had been Indian trained.
“The little dickens. She really don’t want me to have that gold.”
He stared some more. “Well, we’ll see about that.”
Grimly he whittled himself new stakes, cut his name on them, hammered them home.
He next checked his white-quartz claim. Damn. The stakes there were gone too. These he also replaced.
He said nothing about what he’d found when he returned to their cave.
Three days later he casually announced he was going to make another try for the fat squirrels.
When he checked his stakes they were gone again. Both claims.
“I’ll be goddamned. When in hell did she do it? I’ve been with her every blessed second day and night.” He clawed at his black beard. “Unless she puts me to sleep with some kind of Indian herb in my meat and then does it.” He scratched some more. “You know, I wouldn’t put it past her. She’s a stubborn little thing.” Cool smoke coiled in his green eyes. “I’m gonna have to watch her closer.”
He once more put down stakes to his two claims.
King of Spades Page 19
