Dega motioned for his family to seek cover. He could not say whether the men were white or red until one turned to pick up a stick and threw it for the dog to fetch.
“More whites!” Waku said angrily. “Will there never be an end to them?”
Dega did not admit it, but he was thinking the same thing. Had all they had gone through been for nothing? Was the safety they sought an illusion?
“What do we do?” Teni asked.
“What else?” Dega responded. They skirted the lake and a cabin they spotted in the trees. Several more large dogs gamboled about but did not spot them or catch their scent.
By dark they had gone half the valley’s length. They made a cold camp in the recesses of a thick.
“I’m hungry.” Miki voiced one of her few complaints.
“Tomorrow we eat,” Dega promised. He dared not rove about with the dogs in the vicinity. All it would take was an errant breeze and they would have more whites baying at their heels.
With the setting of the sun, the temperature dropped and kept on dropping until the air was uncomfortably chill. At that altitude the Hunters Moon would start early, a prelude to ever colder days and nights. Their threadbare buckskins could ill keep them warm.
An uncomfortably brisk dawn broke on their worn, shivering forms. Dega roused the rest and they plodded westward.
They had finally reached the Rockies, but that was only the first step. Now they must find a suitable home, a valley like the one they had just passed through, a haven for them and them alone.
Toward noon, Waku downed a doe. They dragged it into a ravine and Tihi kindled a fire. They were famished. No sooner did the mouth-watering aroma of the haunch fill the air than they tore at the red, dripping meat, and stuffed themselves until they could not swallow another mouthful.
Tihi wanted to save the hide to use in making a dress but Dega assured her she would soon have more and better hides to choose from, as many as she needed to make new clothes for all of them.
Ridge after ridge, valley after valley, fell behind them. Everywhere, game abounded. Now and then they came across hoofprints, but nowhere was there a trace of human habitation.
Three nearly identical snow-crowned peaks fell behind them. They followed a stream to where it forked to northwest and southwest. After talking it over, they took the former. It brought them to a humpbacked ridge. They followed the ridge to where a portion had buckled, leaving a fir-choked gap.
Curious, they entered the gap and discovered a hidden canyon.
A sense of excitement gripped them. They hiked faster, eager to see where the canyon led.
It ended at the rim of a magnificent bowl-shaped valley, one of the largest they had come across. Entirely ringed by mountains, it was a world unto itself. On one of the peaks glistened a mass of greenish-white ice. A sparkling blue lake, only partly visible, was the final factor that compelled Dega to say, “We have found our new home.”
“I agree,” Waku declared. “Here we will be safe from all our enemies.”
“A new home!” Miki said breathlessly.
Tihi clasped her hands to her bosom. “Land of our own. A lodge of our own. A lake for us and us alone. It is a dream.”
They were halfway to the valley floor when the pines thinned enough to permit a clear view of the lake. Shock brought them to a stop.
Dega threw back his head and nearly shrieked in rage.
“It cannot be,” Teni said softly.
Tihi bowed her head and said forlornly, “More whites. Everywhere we go, there are more whites.”
Little Miki turned away, covered her face, and began sobbing softly.
To their mutual surprise, Waku did the last thing they would expect him to do; he laughed. The cold, hard, brittle laugh of a man who had been pushed as far as he was willing to be pushed. “I warned you. I warned all of you. The whites are everywhere. There is no getting away from them.”
“We must go on,” Tihi said.
“There will be other valleys.” Dega tried to soothe them.
“No,” Wakumassee said.
“Husband?”
“There will not be other valleys. We have come far enough. It is this valley we like, and this valley we will claim.”
Teni pointed at the lake, at the three cabins along its shore. “They were here before us.”
“So?”
Tihi absorbed the full meaning of his retort. “What you suggest is not the Nansusequa way.”
“You keep forgetting. We must cast off the old ways and adopt new ones if we are to survive in this new land.”
“What would you have us do, Father?” Teni bluntly demanded.
“Kill them.”
In the silence that fell, they could hear the beat of a raven’s wings as it flew overhead.
Tihi was the first to break the spell, saying guardedly, “Kill people who have done us no harm?”
“They are white.”
Tihi stared at the cabins. Smoke rose lazily from two of the three chimneys. She imagined families inside, families like her own. “Has it come to this? That is not reason enough, and you know it.”
“Whites wiped out our people. Whites destroyed our village.”
“But not these whites,” Tihi stressed. “You would punish them for the actions of others?”
“Did those other whites do less to us? They punished all the Nansusequa because of something Dega did.”
“That was different,” Tihi insisted.
“Lives for lives. Homes for homes. I see nothing different about it,” Waku disagreed. “What do you say, Dega?”
Degamawaku was deeply torn. He agreed with his mother that the whites below had done nothing to merit the fate being contemplated, but he also agreed with his father that whites were their enemies. All whites, not just the ones who attacked their village.
“Is your tongue caught in thorns?”
“Why not drive them off instead of killing them?” Dega proposed. He was not sure how, but there must be a way.
Waku snorted. “You have become as soft as your mother. Do you think the whites will give up this valley without spilling blood? Would you give it up if you were them? No, you would not.”
“We can find another valley,” Tihi said.
Gesturing at Miki, Waku said, “Look at your youngest. Look at her clothes. Do you see how thin she is? Do you see the holes in her dress?”
“I see them.”
“Hasn’t she suffered enough?” Waku demanded. “Would you put her through another moon of this?” Tihi did not answer.
Until that moment Teni had been silent, holding her own council. Now she cleared her throat and said, “I side with Father.”
“What?” Tihi could not credit her ears.
“I am tired, Mother. Tired in my body. Tired in my spirit. I want to eat regular meals again. I want to wear clean clothes. I want to be clean. I want a lodge roof over my head at night, and the crackle of a fire to keep me warm. I want all that. I want it here. I want it now.”
“See?” Waku crowed.
“It is wrong.”
“No more so than burning our village to the ground,” Waku said. “But we will not burn the cabins. The Snow Moon is not far off. We will need to keep warm when it is cold. The cabins will do nicely.”
“You have everything worked out,” Tihi said, and she did not intend it as a compliment.
“You will thank me when this is over.” Waku grinned. “Whoever these whites are, they must die so that we may live.”
Fourteen
Nate King found the strange tracks on a brisk autumn morning when the mountain air cracked like a whip at every sound. The horses had been skittish the night before, and at first light he was dressed and went out to the corral. They were all there, huddled in a corner.
Nate suspected a mountain lion was to blame. The grizzly that had ruled the valley was gone, black bears seldom bothered horses, and the wolves that haunted the range to the south usually announced their nocturnal
visits with howls and yips. But though Nate scoured the ground around the corral and the cabin long and hard, he could not find a single cougar track.
Mystified, Nate gazed across the lake at the rising sun. The lake surface was perfectly still and reflected the blazing orb as clearly as a mirror. It gave the illusion there were two suns. Shouldering the Hawken, he pivoted on his heel to go back inside—and was struck cold. Not by a lead ball or a barbed arrow, but by what he had failed to notice because the light was not quite right.
“What on earth?” Nate turned left and then right. Everywhere he looked, he saw strange tracks, if tracks they were. Whatever was responsible had circled the cabin not once or twice but many times, and apparently crept close to the window and the door to listen.
Nate’s skin crawled. Hunkering, he examined them closely. They were not in any way human. They were not animal tracks. Nor were they bird tracks. But exactly what they were was beyond him.
They were in pairs. Roughly circular, each no bigger than a walnut, they were spaced about the length of Nate’s forearm apart. Whatever made them left the faintest of impressions, suggesting the creature was as light as a feather.
Nate had his nose practically touching the dirt and he still could not make sense of them. He traced a few with his fingertip. He sniffed at them. They were a complete and bewildering mystery.
Nate decided to go in and tell Winona. As he rose, his gaze strayed past the woodpile. He had spent hours every day over the course of the past week stockpiling firewood for the upcoming winter, and yesterday he had left the axe imbedded in the log he was chopping.
The axe was gone.
Nate ran to the log. All around it were more circles. The logical conclusion was that whatever made them had taken the axe. The circles led toward the forest. Once among the trees the trail disappeared. The hard ground and thick undergrowth were to blame.
Stumped, Nate sat on the log. He was still there a quarter of an hour later when the cabin door opened and Winona came out, looking as lovely as the day he had become her husband.
“There you are. Your breakfast is getting cold.”
“Do you believe in leprechauns?” Nate asked her.
“In what?” Winona had to think before she remembered him telling her once about little men in a land far across the great saltwater sea. The subject came up while they were discussing the Shoshone belief in a race of deadly dwarves that lived deep in the mountains. “Do you mean the green men with the pots of gold?”
“That’s them,” Nate said.
“Have you seen one?” Winona asked, and laughed.
“No, but I’ve seen something that has me flummoxed.” Nate clasped her hand and led her to the corral. He did not say anything. He simply pointed at set after set of the peculiar circles and saw her eyes widen and her mouth drop.
“What are they?”
“You tell me and we will both know.” Nate told her about the axe. “Has anything else gone missing I might not know about?”
Winona gave a start and glanced at the cabin. “It can’t be.”
“You saw a little green man with a pot of gold?”
“No. I was chopping onions for your supper two days ago. I left the knife on the counter and came out to close the chickens in the coop for the night. When I went back in, the knife was not there.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me?” Nate chided. It was rare for her to be so forgetful.
“You were at Shakespeare’s and Evelyn was at Zach’s. I heard no one. I saw no one. I figured I imagined leaving it on the counter and it must be somewhere else.”
“You searched, though, and couldn’t find it,” Nate guessed.
“Haa,” Winona answered. In her bafflement she forgot herself and spoke in Shoshone.
“I’m going to have a look around,” Nate said. “Maybe we’ve been bigger dunderheads than we think.”
“Haggai enne?”
“Whatever it is has been skulking about longer than a few days.” Nate said. He estimated that some of the tracks were a week old or more.
“I will keep your breakfast warm,” Winona promised.
“Keep Evelyn inside, too,” Nate suggested. “I don’t want her wandering around until we get to the bottom of this.”
The lake was the likeliest place to start. Or, rather, the soft soil at the lake’s edge, where wind-whipped waves lapped the shore. Sure enough, Nate found more circles, some old, some recent. He examined them as closely as he had the others, and was thus engrossed when a shadow fell across him.
“I hesitate to ask what you are doing, Horatio. Did you lose a nose hair? Or do you have a newfound fascination for dirt?”
Nate arched an eyebrow at his mentor. “Didn’t you boast once that you could track anything, anywhere, anytime?”
“I might have,” Shakespeare said. “Was I drunk?”
“Let’s see you make sense of these.” Nate again pointed out the circles without saying anything.
Shakespeare blinked, then blinked some more. He had, in fact, drunk too much red wine the night he made the boast, but it was no idle claim. Red men and whites alike widely regarded him as one of the best trackers alive, if not the best. But the circles stumped him. He ranged along the shore from Nate’s cabin to his own, finding new circles as he went. “I’ll be damned,” he said when they reached his place.
“The tracks go right up to your door and window, just like they do mine,” Nate mentioned.
“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies,” Shakespeare paraphrased, “but this is deuced bizarre.”
“I wonder if we’ll find some at Zach’s?”
“Fetch your bay. I’ll throw a saddle on my mare and join you.”
About to turn, Nate paused. “Hold on. Have you lost anything lately?”
Shakespeare snickered. “My nose hairs are intact, thank you.”
“I’m serious, you ornery goat. Has anything gone missing? Anything at all? Anything that disappeared and you couldn’t explain it?” Nate shared an account of the axe and the knife.
“This is getting spooky.” Shakespeare pulled at his beard, a habit of his when he was deep in thought. “About a week ago I left a rope on a peg by my corral and when I went to get it, it was gone.”
They looked at one another, and Nate summed up both their sentiments with, “What in hell is going on?”
From his vantage in the woods to the west of the lake, Degamawaku of the Nansusequa had watched the two white men in growing puzzlement. He had seen the big one with the black beard scour the ground as if reading sign, and then the reactions of the woman and the white-haired man. Dega would very much like to know what they had found.
Crouched behind a spruce, Dega absently fingered his rifle and reviewed all he had learned about the valley’s inhabitants over the course of the seven sleeps his family had been spying on them.
His father still insisted killing was the answer. But these whites were not like the whites from New Albion. For one thing, the two white men had taken Indian wives. For another, the white men showed by their attire that they had adopted Indian ways, additional proof, in Dega’s opinion, that they were not bigots like the hateful whites in New Albion.
There was a third man, the youngest, half white and half red, who had the cabin on the north shore. Based on the young one’s features and build, Dega suspected he was the son of the white man with the black beard. Although a half-breed, he had a white wife.
Then there was the girl.
The first time Dega saw her was six days ago when she came out of the cabin carrying a basket and entered a much smaller structure that, as near as he could determine, served no other purpose than that of a chicken lodge. When she came back out, the basket was filled with eggs. She had paused to gaze at the sky and then at the woods in which Dega lay hidden.
Something unexpected happened to Degamawaku of the Nansusequa. A pleasant tingle coursed through him from head to toe. He had been struc
k by the beauty of her features and by the graceful manner in which she carried herself. He noted, too, that she was about his age.
The girl had turned and gone in the cabin, and for the longest time Dega had stared fixedly at the cabin door, hoping she would reappear. Eventually she did. She emerged carrying a rifle and with a pair of pistols wedged under a belt about her slender waist. She came straight toward the woods, and him.
For a few brief moments of panic, Dega thought she knew he was there. But no, she passed within a few arm’s lengths of his hiding place and hiked on into the forest.
Waku had warned Dega not to do anything that would give their presence away, yet Dega found himself rising and padding on cat’s feet in the girl’s wake. Partly, he was curious as to what she was up to. But a larger part was his desire to see more of her.
The girl’s face and eyes betrayed a keenness of mind that intrigued Dega. Her eyes, in particular, fascinated him. They were green, the color the Nansusequa associated with Manitoa, the nurturer of all things. They were the color of the forest, his home. Green was special, apart and above all other colors—and it was the color of her eyes.
Dega liked the confident air she had. He had met white girls in New Albion who were as timid as fawns and never ventured from the settlement without a man along to protect them. But this girl needed no protector. She was at home in the woods. She walked with a confident stride. Once, the underbrush to her left crackled and she whipped around, her rifle ready, but it was only a long-eared rabbit. She laughed as it bounded off, and went on.
Dega could not shake the sound of that laugh. It stuck with him. He would hear it in his head when he lay under the stars at night, or during other quiet moments.
He almost gave himself away, that day he followed her. She had gone over a rise and he had hurried so he would not lose sight of her. He was almost to the top when he heard soft humming and realized she had stopped. Quickly, he ducked and backpedaled, circling once he was sure she had not heard him.
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