Spirit Wolf, page 8
“Then the lodge and everything in it began spinning like eddies along the Yellowstone. Everything disappeared. I awoke to find myselflying on the ground outside the brush lodge where my father had left me.
“I was tired and weak, but I drank from a nearby stream and walked back to the village. My father had been watching, and he met me before I reached the lodges. He walked ahead of me into camp, singing, ‘Behold my son, he has had a great vision.’
“I told my vision to the men of the camp, and they agreed that it was strong, and that I should do as the wolf told me. So I rode two days on my best horse to a stream with a forked cottonwood on the bank. I waited there until a wolf came, and I killed it.
“From the time of the vision, my name among the Cheyenne has been Running Wolf, and from that time, I have never been afraid.”
Nash had listened quietly while the old man spoke. He rose and threw another stick on the fire, promising himself that he would bring the old man more wood.
“But I don’t understand why you came here,” Nash said. “You have no horse, no gun, and no food. What do you want?”
The old Indian didn’t answer.
Nash hesitated a long moment, not knowing how to say what must be said next, and then the words came in a rush. “It’s not your fault, but you are causing trouble. I don’t know why, but you are. You could be hurt, or maybe someone in camp will do something he shouldn’t do. Maybe it would be better if you just went away.”
“I know about the trouble in this camp,” the old man said. “I can smell it, but that smell does not come from me. I am not afraid.
“I would like to smoke. Will you ask the man Flynn if he has tobacco for me? Come back tomorrow night, and I will tell you why I am here.”
Nash walked away from the old man’s fire, an empty feeling in his gut, as though he had not eaten for days.
Uriah was already in his bedroll, and the little lean-to felt almost warm compared to the breeze kicking up outside. Nash climbed between his blankets, and for the second night, he lay awake, watching shadows play across the canvas roof until the fire died to ash.
6
Uriah had already left the lean-to when Nash awoke the next morning. The boy slipped into his clothes, pulled on his coat, and stepped out into the middle of the night. The stars were still bright, and Nash knew it couldn’t be more than three thirty or four o’clock in the morning. That was early, even for Uriah.
Nash waited a few moments and then decided that his father intended to leave early. He began gathering kindling to strike a fire, but before he finished, he heard the creak of saddle leather as Uriah rode up to the lean-to, leading old Nell. Uriah didn’t bother dismounting.
“No reason to wait for breakfast. Let’s go.”
Nash climbed on Nell, kicking her a little to catch up with his father, who was already little more than a shadow on the snow ahead. When he pulled abreast, Nash asked, “Why so early?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
They rode a while further before Uriah asked, so offhandedly he gave his concern away, “What were you and that old Indian talking about?”
“He did most of the talking,” Nash said, trying to be as offhanded as his father and failing just as abysmally. “He was telling me about a vision he had when he—When he was about the same age I am. He called it a spirit wolf, and he was the same color and had the same green eyes as the wolf Flynn was telling us about.
“He said his father took him into the hills, and he waited three days and nights without food or water, and he had a vision about this wolf. He said you could look into that wolf’s eyes and see what the world had been and what it was going to be.”
There was a question hiding in Nash’s answer, and Uriah heard it. He pulled the roan to a stop and turned sideways in the saddle, his weight on the offside stirrup. His voice was low, and he seemed to be making a special effort to articulate each word. “Visions,” Uriah said, “make no more sense than goblins or ghosts or witches. That boy—the old man now—was so tired and hungry and thirsty that his mind played tricks on him. If you were to stand in the sun for three days and nights without food or water, you’d have a vision, too. Only you’d dream about your classmates, or the county fair, or something like that. Our minds paint strange pictures for us to wonder at, but those pictures have no more substance than shadows on a cabin wall.”
“But, Dad, there was more,” Nash said. “He was told to ride two days west from the Cheyenne camp to a stream where there was a forked cottonwood and wait there for a wolf to come. He found the stream and the tree, and a wolf did come, and he killed it.”
Uriah straightened a little in the saddle before speaking. “There are dozens of streams around here,” he said. “Ride two days in any direction, and you’ll likely stumble across one. Where there’s water, there’s cottonwoods, and I have yet to see a stand of cottonwood without forked trees in it.
“That old man must be close to eighty. When he was your age, these plains were thick with buffalo. Their bones are scattered from hell to breakfast around here. And wherever there were buffalo, there were wolves. Seeing that wolf he killed was just pure coincidence. Nothing more.
“Now it’s different with us. We aren’t going to run across that killer wolf by coincidence. We’re going to have to work for that bounty money.”
The two rode on. Nash was tired enough to go to sleep, but it was just too cold. He could feel his cheeks stiffen as the cold cut off circulation. He wrapped his bandana around his face, breathing through a double layer of cotton, and that helped, but it wasn’t long before the moisture in his breath rimed the cloth with frost. The cold had dulled Nash’s senses. It wasn’t until the bandana took the sting from his face that Nash noticed the North Star hanging like a shard of the sun. They were traveling almost directly west. They rode another hour. Then Uriah stopped to relieve himself, steam rising from the hole he burned into the frost-lined snow. Nash got off and stretched, waiting for his father.
“We’re going to drop down onto a big flat in another couple miles,” Uriah said. “There’s a little creek that follows a shallow coulee back and forth across the bottom. Sometimes it almost loops back on itself. We’re going to use that to hunt this fast. We will be heading northwest, so we’ll have the sun at our backs. I’ll be on one side of the coulee and you on the other. Just remember, if there’s a coulee in front of you, follow it around until you see me. If the coulee is behind you, cut across the flat on the top and set up an ambush on the other side, waiting for me. Leave Nell back from the edge. Don’t silhouette yourself. Take your time, slip down into a bush or behind some rocks and wait. Got that?”
Nash nodded, but he wasn’t sure what Uriah was talking about. He understood better when they started down a long ridge to the valley floor below. It was light enough to see the general lay of the land, and Nash could mark the course of the creek from the occasional cottonwood that poked its crown over the center.
When they came to the creek, Uriah pushed the roan off a relatively steep bank, leaning back against the stirrups until his mount came to a stop on the coulee floor. He followed a little cut that meandered up the other wall until he popped out on top. Uriah waved good-bye in the growing light, and set across the valley floor on the other side at a lope. Nash kicked Nell into a walk, riding back a little from the edge of the coulee, his complete attention focused on the scene below. The coulee, marked as it was by steep walls that shaded the creek, was a world unique in itself. With adequate water, and without the baking sun, plants flourished in summer, their dried skeletons now poking out of the snow.
It was a perfect place for the wolf to hide. Casual observers from the ridges overlooking the valley would never guess the extent of the creek that lay below. The heavy brush lining the banks provided excellent cover by day, water, and the promise of game as it moved down from the ridges toward the water in the evening.
The creek bed below was crisscrossed with tracks, and whenever those tracks wove their way in and around a copse of juniper or willow, Nash would stop, shotgun at the ready, and wait to see if an animal would bolt from the cover. Most times they did, and Nash would swing the heavy double-barrel toward the movement until it proved to be a cottontail or jackrabbit or sometimes a bird. Once Nash watched as a huge white owl lifted out of a thicket with great strokes of its silent wings.
The coulee was angling generally south and it nearly touched the valley wall there before swinging back north by northeast toward the other side of the valley. Nash’s mind was beginning to drift, lulled into inattention by Nell’s rocking gait and his lack of sleep the night before. He would have some tales to tell when he got back to school. His teacher would probably call him up before the class and announce, “Children (emphasizing that she wasn’t referring to Nash), our own Nashua is going to tell us about his adventures hunting the last wolf in the Pryor Mountains.”
And then he would look around the room at all those wondering eyes and settle on Ettie, and …
“Nash.”
His father’s voice jerked him back to reality just in time to see Uriah climbing out of a juniper under the lip of the coulee rim beyond him.
“You have to stay awake, boy. I said that wolf wasn’t as dangerous as Flynn made him out to be. I didn’t say he would come up to you and lick your hand. You head across and set up. I’ll swing around. If you see the wolf, you’ll only see him for a second or two, so be ready.”
Nash put the sun to his back and pointed Nell across the broad expanse of valley floor. His shadow stretched off ahead of him like a surrealist painting of a man on a horse, a long-legged, long-necked creature carrying a long-necked, long-bodied man-boy on its back.
Nash tried to pull back into himself, into the warmth of the coat and cap and gloves and boots. But even the gentle wave created by Nell as she cut through the sea of frozen air overlaying the valley floor stung Nash’s cheeks and sapped his energy. He held off shivering, because he knew once he started, he would never stop—at least, not short of a fire built somewhere in the coulee ahead, its smoke signaling the end of hunting that day.
Nash guided Nell toward a cottonwood he saw poking above the coulee wall ahead. As he drew within two hundred yards of the tree, he pulled Nell up in a patch of grass scoured clean of snow at the whim of one northerly wind or another and tied her to a patch of sagebrush. She would graze there until Nash returned.
The shotgun felt heavy as he walked toward the coulee. Most times when he picked up the old double-barrel, he felt the power latent in the weapon and not the weight. But now it was weight. The weapon had become a tool to Nash, nothing more romantic than a hammer for pounding nails. He was coming of age.
He slowed his pace as he neared the lip of the coulee, taking care where he stepped to prevent rocks hidden under the snow from rattling off or sticks from breaking. He went into a crouch, not consciously but from habit. The closer he could get to the coulee before he was seen, the better his chance of getting a shot at anything that bolted from below. As he neared the edge, he knelt and leaned forward a little to peer down. He caught a flicker of movement and tensed, relaxing again as the cottontail darted out from behind a juniper bush. The rabbit was a good sign that Nash hadn’t frightened the animal as he came up. That probably meant that he hadn’t spooked any other animals either.
There was a lip of sandstone overhanging the creek bed and at one point, a juniper grew in front of the stone ledge. Nash decided to make that his stand. The sun was behind him, and its rays would light the coulee and confuse the vision of any animal trying to see against the brightness of the sun into the shadows on the coulee wall. He squirmed into place, hiding the sharp lines of his silhouette with the rough-edged juniper branches, and settled down to wait. Sitting there motionless, Nash waited as the cold came to him. He felt it first in his toes and then in his fingertips. Cold is a gentle lover that comes in mincing steps, teasing the edges of its chosen’s senses until they no longer warn of the danger of cold’s embrace. Nash struggled silently to drive the cold away, wiggling his toes and fingers to maintain circulation. His feet were beginning to hurt, a sharp pain. But Nash knew the real pain would come later.
His toes had been frostbitten before. He remembered taking his shoes off that day at the cabin. His feet looked white, dead. But he knew they weren’t dead when his mother put them in a pan of water heated on the stove. As the water did its work and the blood began to flow freely through the frozen flesh, Nash almost screamed. It was as though his feet had stored their agony, waiting for blood to cry their pain. His feet had swollen, and his toes blackened, but within a few days, he could gimp around the cabin without wincing. It was not a bad case of frostbite, Doc Wilson said when he stopped a few weeks later. If it had been bad, Nash would likely have lost his toes, and maybe his feet.
Nash rocked his body, rolling the blood through his feet and back up his legs, willing warmth where there was cold. And suddenly he forgot the cold. His whole being focused on the flash of gray that streaked into the juniper stand below, just ahead of the rattle of Uriah’s horse coming up the coulee.
As Nash rose, he eased the hammer back on the double-barrel, depressing the trigger so there would be no tell-tale click when the hammer came to full cock. But Nash’s fingers were numbed by the cold, and the hammer slipped. Ka-thump! A cloud of black powder smoke chased the concussion into the coulee and the opposite wall exploded in white under the hail of buckshot. The recoil sent Nash stumbling back, and he almost tripped on a low-hanging branch. But then he saw a flash as the wolf busted loose from cover, running hell-bent for invisibility promised by a bend in the coulee some sixty yards beyond. The hammer was back on the second barrel, and Nash swung that long-barreled scattergun like an instrument of fate. When the muzzle covered the fleeing animal and then swung a little ahead, Nash squeezed the trigger. Ka-thump! The recoil tipped up the gun’s muzzle, and Nash’s perspective with it. By the time he realigned his eye on his target, it was no longer there. And at that precise moment, Uriah came galloping up on the roan.
“Did you get him, Nash?”
“Don’t know. Thought I had him, but I don’t see him now.”
“Load up and drop down into the coulee. I’ll watch from up here. See if you drew blood. If he’s wounded bad enough, he’ll be close. If he isn’t, we’ll let him stiffen up and bleed before we go after him.”
Nash’s hands were shaking as he broke open the double-barrel and dropped two shells into the chambers, chung, like rocks dropped into a well. Nash cradled the shotgun in the crook of his left arm, leaving his right hand free to grasp bushes as he made his way down the slippery wall of the coulee to the bottom. He found the tracks there and followed holes in the snow that marked the animal’s long stretching stride to the point where Nash had fired the shot. There was blood there, sprayed out into the snow as the buckshot coursed through the animal’s body.
“He’s hit, Dad. Looks to be pretty bad,” Nash called up to his father.
“Get out of the coulee, Nash. Now! We’ll sit up here and wait. Spook him now and who knows how far he’ll run.”
“I will, Dad. But just a minute.”
Nash followed the tracks toward a juniper bush that hung out over the course of the creek just ahead. The tracks showed that the animal was struggling, and gouts of blood lined the trail. As Nash neared the bush, he heard a low whine. He edged sideways, training the shotgun on the noise. It was a coyote, hurt too badly to move.
“Coyote, Dad. I shot a coyote.”
There was a pause, and then the sound of Uriah’s voice, tinged just a little with disappointment. “Kill it, Nash. We can get a few dollars bounty and something for the hide.”
Nash raised his shotgun, putting the bead on the suffering animal.
“No, Nash. Don’t waste the shell. That buckshot will tear him up too much. Use a stick.”
“Dad, the hide isn’t worth much anyway. It’s more trouble than it’s worth. Why can’t I just shoot him?”
“Nash, the animal’s suffering. Kill him, boy. It’ll be a kindness.”
Nash looked around the coulee floor for a stick. He finally found a dead juniper and broke off a branch. The clean fresh scent of the wood lingered in his nose as he turned to walk to the coyote. As he approached, the animal struggled to escape, but it was too badly injured. Nash raised the limb over his head and brought it crashing down on the coyote, but a branch deflected his aim and the club struck the coyote on the shoulder. The wounded animal yelped in pain, and tears blurred Nash’s eyes as he swung the club again at the coyote’s head. This time his aim was true, and he heard the sickening crunch as the club drove splinters of the coyote’s skull into its brain.
Nash reached under the bush and dragged the animal out. It was a fine-looking creature—its pelt was prime—but Nash noticed only the bloody concavity where the coyote’s forehead had been and the macabre grin on the animal’s face, its lips pulled back from its teeth in death.
As Nash stepped away from the animal, a rope sailed down from the top of the coulee and landed beside the boy. “Tie it on,” Uriah said. “I’ll pull him up. We’ll follow the coulee until I can cross again. No sense hunting anymore around here. If the wolf ever was here, he’ll be long gone.”
Nash scrambled out of the coulee and walked back to get Nell. The walking warmed his feet, and Nash was thankful for that as he walked up to the grazing animal. He tightened the cinch and climbed on.
By the time Nash returned to the coulee, Uriah had tied the coyote behind the saddle on the roan. The horse was rolling his eyes, but he was well broken and ultimately put up with even that foolishness.
“Keep an eye out,” Uriah said. “We might spook something yet.”
