Wilderness Double Edition 23, page 27
The valley was all Nate had hoped, and then some. He imagined three cabins ringing the lake, and walking along the shore hand in hand with Winona. Here they would be safe from the outside world. Here they need not worry about hostiles or cutthroats. Here was perfection, theirs for the taking.
“Grizzly Killer!” Chases Rabbits exclaimed. He pointed.
Nate had been so entranced by the scenic vista that he had not looked at the ground. Now he did, and a different sort of jolt speared through him, a jolt the likes of which only one creature on earth could cause. For there, clearly imprinted in the soil, were the tracks of a grizzly. A huge griz, by the size of them. The claw marks alone were nearly five inches long.
“We should go,” Chases Rabbits said timidly.
“We just got here,” Nate said. But the grizzly’s presence added an unwanted element. The valley was the bear’s home, and it might not take kindly to having its home violated.
It set Nate to thinking. Grizzlies were not nearly as numerous as they once had been along the Rockies’ eastern fringe. But here, deeper in, they were bound to be as plentiful as everything else. For someone who drew the great bears to him like honey, it did not bode well.
The tracks were a few days old. The grizzly could be anywhere by now. Still, Nate rode with the pistol in his left hand. It wouldn’t stop a griz. It wouldn’t even slow one down. But it was all he had besides his Bowie.
Chases Rabbits had the lance, which he nervously hefted. “Me not want fight grizzly.”
“And you think I do?” Nate would go to his grave happy if he never tangled with another silvertip. The thought of it caused his mouth to go dry. He looked down at his pistol and then, in one smooth motion, wedged it under his belt.
“Why you do that?” Chases Rabbits asked.
Nate did not answer. He brought the bay to a brisk walk, breathing deep of the dank scent of the woods. Pine needles covered the ground inches deep. Here and there shafts of sunlight pierced the forest like beams of celestial light from the Almighty.
The young Crow, whose eyesight was proving exceptionally keen, suddenly pointed again and blurted, “What that?”
In the shadows to the left was a white oval. Below it were what appeared to be uneven white lines. It did not look at all natural.
“Let’s find out,” Nate said, and reined toward it. He was almost on top of it when he recognized the white oval as the top of a human skull. An entire skeleton, clothed in tatters, lay partly against a tree. The white lines were the ribs, or what could be seen of them through what remained of the wearer’s buckskin shirt.
“Him dead many winters,” Chases Rabbits said.
Twenty or thirty years, by Nate’s best reckoning. Swinging down, he squatted beside the deceased. Assessing the cause of death was easy. The skull had been cracked by a blunt blow.
“Him white or red?”
The tatters offered no clue. Then Nate saw a silver thread, and bending closer, discovered a silver chain with a locket attached. The clasp would not work, so he snapped the chain and held it in his palm. On the back of the locket was inscribed To Micah, my one and only. He pried at the seam with his thumbnail and the locket opened. Inside was a lock of blond hair. “It was a white man.”
“Trapper?”
Nate surveyed the vicinity, but there was no trace of traps or packs or anything that would tell them what the man had been doing there. “I can’t rightly say.” Many of the bones had been gnawed on, and something, long ago, had cracked open the right thigh and eaten out all the marrow.
Nate was about to stand and climb back on the bay when a suggestion of color under the ribs prompted him to lean closer yet. A beetle came scuttling out of the rib cage, and he involuntarily recoiled.
Chases Rabbits laughed. “Bug scare Grizzly Killer!”
Nate bent down again. Tentatively extending his fingers between two ribs, he drew out a pencil-sized length of hardwood.
“What that?” Chases Rabbits inquired.
“Piece of an arrow,” Nate revealed. With the barbed point still attached.
“Tell which tribe?”
“No,” Nate admitted. The shaft bore faint painted symbols, red and yellow and maybe green, unlike any he had seen. The point, too, was not like any he ever came across. It was short, with sharp barbs that made it hard to pull out. A war arrow. Hunting arrows were fitted with longer tips rounded on their inner edges so hunters could extract them intact.
“Maybe Blackfoot,” Chases Rabbits speculated. “Blackfoot kill everybody.”
The Crows had long been at war with the Blackfoot Confederacy, so it was natural for Chases Rabbits to blame them, but Nate was certain they weren’t the culprits. Micah had been killed by a tribe Nate was not familiar with. That alone was remarkable. Nate had lived in the Rockies for decades. He had been to the Pacific Ocean. He had been to Santa Fe. At one time or another, he had met every tribe in the mountains. Or so he thought.
Placing the locket and the piece of arrow in his possibles bag, Nate stood and scanned the valley. Could it be, he mused, that the tribe lived there long ago? They weren’t there now, or he would have come across some sign by now. He studied the mountains to the west. Beyond lay country that had never been fully explored. Perhaps the tribe was there, undetected all these years. “Have your people ever gone past those peaks?”
“Me think not,” Chases Rabbits answered. “Why? Grizzly Killer not want go there?”
“One day maybe,” Nate said. After he had built his new cabin and his family was settled in.
“Not go,” Chases Rabbits urged. “Maybe not come back.”
Nate suspected the Crow knew more than he was saying, but it was unimportant at the moment. Forking leather, he descended to the valley floor. Here he could better determine the valley’s size. Seven miles in circumference was his estimate, with the valley floor running three miles from end to end. The glacial lake encompassed some ten acres.
The timbered slopes were unbroken except for the mouth of the canyon. Nate wondered if the canyon and the valley had been formed at the same time or whether the valley existed beforehand. If the latter, then the valley had been isolated from the outside world for untold ages, a pocket of ancient wilderness preserved in all its natural purity. Food for thought.
They came to the lake. Nate dismounted and walked to the water’s edge. It was so clear he could see to the bottom. Sinking onto a knee, he dipped his right hand in and sipped. The water was cold and delicious, the best water he had ever tasted. Never in all his travels had he ever come across a lake like this.
Scores of tracks had been left by animals that came to drink. Deer, elk, black bear, a badger, opossums, raccoons, coyotes, foxes, bobcats. The prints of a large mountain lion were conspicuous by their size. But they did not interest Nate nearly as much as the set of tracks he came on a minute later. “I’ll be damned,” he said, and hunkered to examine them.
“What they be?” Chases Rabbits had not dismounted and was following a few yards behind.
“Wolverine tracks.” A big one, too, and potential trouble for Nate and his loved ones. Wolverines rarely attacked humans, but their voracious appetites and fierce dispositions were not to be taken lightly.
Nate resumed walking. He had gone only a short way when he found what he had been looking for all along: more grizzly tracks. The prints here were clearer, the claws and the pads as distinct as if they had been made yesterday, when in fact they had been made more than a week before. He placed his foot next to one and whistled softly.
Chases Rabbits was similarly impressed. “Grizzly Killer sure want live here?”
“I can’t think of anywhere I would like to live more,” Nate replied.
“Valley plenty beautiful,” Chases Rabbits conceded. “That right word, yes? Beautiful?”
“That’s the right word, yes,” Nate agreed. The valley exceeded all his expectations. It was everything he could ever want and so much more. He marked the course of the stream as it wound up the mountain to its source. The glacier was a gigantic white mass tinged with green that looked for all the world like the blocks of ice sold from ice wagons.
“Look there!”
High on an escarpment to the south, dark brown creatures with white rumps were crossing the sheer face. It did not seem possible that anything could find purchase on vertical rock walls, yet the creatures moved from foothold to foothold in apparent disregard of the dizzying heights below.
“Mountain sheep.” Nate had not seen that many in a long time. Yet more evidence of the valley’s unspoiled splendor.
The one animal Nate had not come across sign of, and which he would very much have liked to, was beaver. He was about to turn and climb back on the bay when another rare set of tracks gave him pause. He had to study them before he recognized them for what they were: mink prints. Like weasels and martins, minks were meat-eaters. They would kill anything they could catch, usually by biting it in the neck. Their hides, unlike beaver pelts, were greatly prized, and fetched a good price in St. Louis.
A grizzly. A wolverine. Minks. The valley was a treasure trove of wildlife the likes of which Nate had not witnessed since his early days in the mountains. Only then, standing there in the midst of so much bounty, did he fully appreciate the impact humankind had inflicted on the wild things along the Front Range, as some mountaineers were calling it. This was how it had been. This was how it should be. A deep sense of sadness gripped him.
It wasn’t as if Nate had been blind to the changes. The beaver had been trapped and trapped until there were barely any left, but now that silk was the fashion of choice for fickle city and town dwellers, beaver were breeding in increased numbers and in a dozen years there would be almost as many as before.
Elk, once so common along the eastern range, now existed only in pockets at the highest elevations.
Wolves, once almost as numerous as coyotes, had been shot by whites every chance the whites got, and now only a few small packs roamed an area once home to dozens.
All this, and more, Nate had witnessed, and taken as the normal course of events. After all, no settler in his right mind wanted grizzlies and wolves nosing around his homestead. They were at best nuisances, at worst marauders, and Nate had not missed them one bit.
Until now. Strangely enough, Nate found himself missing those days when the Rockies lived up to their reputation as a virtual Garden of Eden. He vividly remembered the thrill of those early days, a thrill long since gone.
Nate refused to blame himself for his part in the decimation. A man had to eat, didn’t he? A man had to put food on the table for his family? He had done what he thought was right and he would not crucify himself over it. Hindsight always trumped foresight, because there was no predicting the future. A person made the best decisions they could based on events at the time, and if those decisions later turned out to be less-than-wise ones, well, that was the nature of the beast called life.
“Grizzly Killer!”
Something in the young warrior’s tone made Nate whirl.
Up where the canyon merged into the valley, four riders had appeared. Even at that distance, Nate could tell the four were staring at him and Chases Rabbits. The riders were in shadow, but Nate did not need to see them clearly to know who they were. “Rabid Wolf.”
“Him track us far. Must want you much dead.” Chases Rabbits paused. “Sorry. Must want you very much dead.”
“All this way,” Nate echoed. He had constantly watched their back trail. Several times he had doubled back and waited for someone to come along. At night he always looked for campfires. And never, not once, had he seen anything to suggest Rabid Wolf was shadowing them.
“That only way out of valley,” Chases Rabbits mentioned.
“Rabid Wolf doesn’t know that,” Nate said. For that matter, neither did they. There might be another way. But if it was, all Rabid Wolf had to do was wait up there for them to come to him and pick them off from ambush.
Even if they made it past him, Nate’s dream of making the valley his family’s new home had been dashed to bits on the hard rocks of Rabid Wolf’s hatred. Because now Rabid Wolf knew of the valley. Now Rabid Wolf could come here anytime. Winona and Evelyn would be in perpetual peril.
Nate couldn’t have that. After all the trouble he had gone to, after finding a haven like none other, he refused to let his chance to start anew be spoiled. There was a way to set things right. A simple, permanent solution. All he had to do was kill Rabid Wolf and the other three.
Chases Rabbits raised his lance to his shoulder. “How you want we do this?”
“I want you to wait in the woods to the west,” Nate said as he climbed on the bay. “If I don’t rejoin you by midnight, you’re on your own. Slip away when you can, and tell my wife and my daughter how much I loved them.”
“Wait.” Chases Rabbits gazed toward the canyon. “You fight alone? What about me?”
“I’m the one Rabid Wolf wants most,” Nate reminded him. “You said so yourself. So I’m the one who has it to do.”
“Has what to do? Kill them? But that mine to do too, Grizzly Killer.”
“We’ve been all through this.” Nate was disinclined to go through it again. The young Crow would only argue his ears off. “Bring the sorrel and follow me,” he directed, and rode toward the west end of the lake, away from the canyon and the four riders in the shadows.
Chases Rabbits was puzzled. “Why this way?”
“I have an idea,” Nate said. He did not say what that idea was.
When Chases Rabbits tried to catch up, he rode faster. Then, holding the reins in his left hand, he slid his right hand to the hilt of his Bowie and drew the knife without the young warrior noticing. Quickly, he cut half a dozen whangs from his sleeves. When he reached the trees, he slowed and called over his shoulder, “Keep an eye on them for me, will you? I’ll explain in a minute.” Ten yards farther, Nate drew rein. He swiftly knotted the whangs together. Chases Rabbits had stopped and was doing as Nate had told him. Sliding off, Nate walked back, the coiled whangs close to his leg. “Are they still up there?”
“They not move. Why they not come after us?”
“Because Rabid Wolf is waiting for me to come to him.” It was what Nate would do if he were in the Ute’s moccasins.
“You mean us,” Chases Rabbits amended.
“I mean me,” Nate said, and leaped. His arms were around the younger man before Chases Rabbits had any inkling what was happening. Twisting, Nate slammed him to the ground, not hard enough to hurt him but hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs and stun him for the few seconds it took for Nate to wrap the buckskin around his wrists and bind them.
“What you do?” Chases Rabbits found his voice. He struggled to rise, but Nate’s knee was on his chest and Nate outweighed him by a good hundred pounds. “Stop, Grizzly Killer! Let me up!”
Nate had his Bowie out and was cutting off more whangs. Once they were knotted together, he applied them to the Crow’s ankles, then smiled and stood back. “That should hold you long enough.”
“For what?” Chases Rabbits demanded, and intuitively understood. “No! This not right! We friends, remember? Friends fight enemies together!”
“Friends do not let friends die for them. I told you it was mine to do.” Nate took the lance and walked to the bay and mounted. He swore he could feel Chases Rabbits’ eyes boring into his back as he rode past him.
“Please, Grizzly Killer!”
Nate set off across the valley.
“Not do this! It wrong!”
Nate was sorry he had hurt the younger man’s feelings, but it couldn’t be helped. The time had come to end it.
One way or the other.
Twelve
They weren’t there, of course. They had watched him ride around the lake. They had sat their horses and stared as he crossed to the timber. Nate looked up as he entered the trees and Rabid Wolf and the three other hostiles were still there, still watching him. But when he came to a clearing a few minutes later and could see the mouth of the canyon, they were gone.
Firming his hold on the lance, Nate continued to climb. They would be waiting for him. They would pick their spots, and be ready. Four against one, and he with a pistol, his Bowie, and a weapon he had never used.
If things did not go as they should and Rabid Wolf came out on top, Nate hoped Chases Rabbits had the good sense to hide until the Utes left and then head for his village. Those whangs wouldn’t hold him long. Maybe half an hour. By the time the young Crow crossed the valley, it would all be over.
Nate felt surprisingly calm. He must not let any of the Utes escape. They must not get word to their people about the valley. He had friends among the Utes, but as Rabid Wolf proved, he also had enemies. The fewer who knew of his new home, the safer his family would be.
Nate had never been much of a believer in omens, but it was troubling that his family had not even packed up to move and here he was, protecting the site he had chosen from invaders. It had better not be a harbinger of things to come.
The woods had gone quiet. Not a single bird warbled. Not a single squirrel chattered. The wild things, always sensitive to the presence of man, were hiding their own presence.
Nate hurt terribly. His pulped lower lip was the worst, although the gash in his shoulder protested every time he moved his arm. He could use a week to recuperate. Lie around the cabin while Winona nursed him with herbs and soup and her tender touches. Lord, how he missed her.
So many years over the dam, yet Nate cared for his wife as much as he had when they first fell in love. No, that wasn’t entirely true. He cared for her more. Their love had deepened to a degree he never imagined possible. She was as much a part of him as his own skin. Or, more appropriately, his heart.
Funny, Nate thought, how life turned out. Never as a person thought it would. Never, even, as a person hoped it would. Life had a will of its own, and when its will and human will clashed, life always won out. One of the bitterest herbs to swallow was the discovery that in the grand ebb and flow of the river of life, human beings were no more than twigs, to be borne where the current carried them.
