Wilderness Double Edition 25 Page 2

  Third, Winona loved being near Shakespeare McNair and his Flathead mate, Blue Water Woman. They were her best friends, and she delighted in their companionship.

  Fourth, and this was perhaps the most important reason of all, her daughter liked it there. Liked it enough that Evelyn no longer talked about leaving and going back East to live. Part of that had to do with her terrible experiences on their last trip to the States, but part of it, an important part, had to do with the indisputable fact that at long, long last, Evelyn was learning to appreciate the wilderness she so long abhorred.

  It had always worried and upset Winona, her daughter’s loathing of the mountains and everything in them. Time without end, Evelyn had complained that it was stupid to live in the Rockies when they never knew from one day to the next if they would be alive to greet the next dawn.

  Evelyn had always hankered to head East, to live where she need not fear walking out the door. “I don’t need hostiles in my life, thank you very much,” she once commented to Winona. “Or grizzlies or painters or whatever else might take a notion to eat me.”

  Winona had tried to explain that there was more to life in the wild than the dangers. She sought to impress on Evelyn that the beauty and the grandeur more than made up for the perils, but it was always the perils Evelyn harped on, to the point where Evelyn had convinced herself it was outright lunacy to live west of the Mississippi.

  But now Evelyn was having second thoughts. She had not completely changed her mind, but she was open to the possibility that the mountains offered more than she used to admit. That alone, in Winona’s estimation, was cause for celebration, because the truth be known, she very much wanted her daughter to stay.

  Winona loved her children dearly. Having them both there in the new valley filled her with immense pleasure. She got to see them; she was able to help them if they needed it. Life was perfect.

  Now, stepping out of her cabin into the bright gleam of the new day, Winona drew up short. The love of her life was hunkered in front of the chicken coop, picking at the coop door with a fingernail. Smoothing her beaded buckskin dress, she walked over. “Will it need to be replaced, husband?” she asked in her impeccable English.

  Nate King shifted on the heels of his moccasins. “Afraid so. But I have a few boards left from when we put in our floor. It won’t take but two shakes of an antelope’s tail.”

  “It was brazen of the wolverine to try and eat our chickens.” Winona was glad it had not succeeded. Only recently had they bartered for six hens and a rooster from emigrants on a wagon train bound for Oregon Country, and it was a treat to have fresh eggs every morning.

  “Gluttons are worse than grizzlies,” Nate commented. Dreaded by white and red men alike, the Skunk Bear, as wolverines were also nicknamed, was widely considered to be the most formidable creature on the continent. Back in the days when Nate made his living as a trapper, gluttons had been the scourge of the trapping fraternity. The beasts raided trap lines, ripping the beaver from the steel jaws that held them fast. Many a trapper had gone out to check his line, only to find every trap sprung, with strips of flesh and hair all that remained of the prized plew that would add coins to the trapper’s purse. Nate had lost more than a few beaver himself to roving gluttons, and it always left him fuming mad.

  “There are far more grizzlies than wolverines,” Winona was saying. “But now that you have killed it, we need not fear a return visit.”

  “Zach was the one who shot it.” Nate had intended to, but the sight of the wolverine lying there in a pool of blood, with red rivulets oozing from its nose and mouth, had stayed his trigger finger. He let his son ride up and finish the job.

  “He wanted the hide,” Winona said. “He has been promising Louisa a rug for months.”

  “All’s well that ends well, then, fair Ophelia,” said a new voice, and around the corner of their cabin ambled a white-haired mountain man dressed as Nate was in buckskins, with an ammo pouch, powder horn and possibles bag slanted across his chest, a brace of pistols wedged under his wide leather belt, and a Hawken rifle in his hand.

  “Shakespeare!” Winona said in delight. Taking his calloused hands in hers, she pecked him on his wizened cheek. “To what do we owe this honor?”

  “Lou was over to our place and told us about your visitor,” Shakespeare McNair answered. “I reckoned I’d come over to check on your chickens.” He turned to the coop and quoted in greeting, “Good my Lord, how does your honor for this many a day?”

  “If you’re asking me what I think you’re asking me,” Nate responded, “I’m doing right fine. How about you?”

  “Excellent well,” Shakespeare answered, and grinned. “You are a fishmonger, I see.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “Good my Lord, what is your cause of distemper?”

  “There you go again,” Nate groused. “Talking that nonsense no one understands and doesn’t want to. One of these days you will talk plain English like the rest of us and the shock will keel me over.”

  McNair took a step back, his hand to his throat, and flushed from his neck to his hairline. “What did you just say? Did my ears perceive correctly? Did you insult the Bard?”

  “I might have,” Nate said. “One of us isn’t in love with him.”

  Sputtering, Shakespeare looked at Winona and then back at Nate, and in grand eloquent fashion demanded, “Is this the thanks I get for taking you under my wing when you were as green as grass? Is this how you express your gratitude for the years I’ve spent molding you into a frontiersman worthy of his powder? You heap abuse on genius far removed from our shallow brains?”

  Nate smiled innocently up at him. “Who would that be, again? James Fenimore Cooper?”

  Shakespeare looked fit to bust a blood vessel. “I shall laugh myself to death at this puppy-headed monster! A most scurvy monster! I could find it in my heart to beat him!”

  “Did he just call me a puppy?” Nate asked Winona.

  “There’s no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune!” Shakespeare fumed. “You know the Bard is my only earthly idol. You know I have a dog-eared copy of his works and committed to memory many of his marvelous truths. How dare you insult old William S.! How prove you that in the great heap of your knowledge?”

  Nate unfurled and stretched. As always, his mentor’s mock outrage never failed to amuse. At least he hoped it was mock. “All right. I admit defeat. William Shakespeare was the greatest scribbler who ever drew breath.”

  “Scribbler?” Shakespeare repeated. “That’s like saying Michelangelo dabbled in paint.”

  “He didn’t?”

  Shakespeare blinked and laughed, and Nate joined in the mirth. “You are a tribute to my taunts, young coon.”

  Winona breathed deep of the crisp mountain air. Here was yet another example of why she loved their new home so much. “Have you two ever noticed that you act more like five-year-olds than grown men?”

  “Was she talking to us?” Shakespeare asked.

  “It’s best if we ignore her,” Nate said.

  “You do,” Winona warned, “and that wolverine will seem tame compared to what I will do.”

  “Ah, yes, the carcajou,” Shakespeare said, using the French name. “I hear it had a hankering for chicken.” He examined the claw and teeth marks. “Your son tells me it was as big as a griz.”

  Winona snickered. “Our son enjoys telling tall tales, like his father.” She bobbed her chin toward the lake.

  “Remember that fish he caught? The one that was longer than his leg?”

  “It was,” Nate insisted. He had caught it on a bone hook and after ten minutes of fierce struggle, the hook snapped.

  Shakespeare winked at Winona. “Have I ever told you, my dear, about the time I came across a butterfly as big as a buffalo? I jumped on its back and flew around for a spell. Got as far as the Great Salt Lake and then it brought me back.”

  “It should have dumped you in,” Nate said.

  Winona chuckled and
made for the cabin. “I will put a fresh pot of coffee on, and a slice of pie, besides.”

  “We’ll be in soon,” Nate promised, and undid the small metal latch to the chicken coop door. The moment he opened it, out strutted the rooster, trailed by his harem. “And a cock-a-doodle-do to you,” Nate said.

  “My wife wanted me to thank you again for the eggs Winona gave us,” Shakespeare said. “There’s nothing better than a pemmican omelet to start the day.” He idly moved to the side of the coop, his gaze fixed on the lake. “How about if we go fishing later today? I’d sure like to catch one of those giant fish of yours.” Smirking, he glanced down, and stopped dead. “Hallo? What’s this?”

  “What’s what?”

  “You’d best take a gander for yourself, Horatio. If it was rabbits I wouldn’t bring it to your attention.”

  Nate walked over. “Even when you speak plain English you don’t make any sense.” He chortled, then felt the skin on the nape of his neck prickle. “I’ll be damned.”

  “The one you killed was female, was it not?”

  “So Zach said.” Nate sank onto his left knee and lightly touched his hand to an impression in the dirt.

  “I suppose you didn’t bother to check if she was nursing?” Shakespeare shook his head at their lapse and squatted beside his surrogate son. “How many do you make it out to be?”

  “Hard to say,” Nate responded. Few of the prints were clear; most were a jumble. “If I had to guess, I’d peg it as three.”

  “Possibly four,” Shakespeare said, tapping a partial track a few feet from the rest. “That fits for a good-sized litter.” He traced the outline of one of the clearer prints with a fingernail. “Look at the size of this one. These aren’t newborns. A year or more old, I reckon.”

  “Four wolverines,” Nate said, and felt unaccountably, briefly, cold. “And they were here with her the whole time. They might even have seen Zach finish her off.”

  A minute of silence ended with Shakespeare saying, “It could be you’ve put the fear of man into them. It could be they’ll avoid us from here on out.”

  “Or it could be,” Nate said slowly, “they’ll come back to take up where their mother left off. Or worse.”

  “Leave it to you to always look at the bright side,” Shakespeare said, but his tone lacked his customary humor. “To put your mind at rest, maybe a hunt is in order.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  Shakespeare squinted at him. “Don’t tell me. Does this have anything to do with your recent hare-brained notion to spread love and togetherness throughout the animal kingdom?”

  Nate chose not to reply.

  Sighing long and loud, Shakespeare stood and leaned against the coop. “I understand. Truly I do. You’re sick of the bloodshed. All the beaver you trapped, all the game you’ve shot, all the bears you’ve tangled with and all the hostiles who were out for your hair, that’s a heap of killing. I savvy completely. But if you turn the other cheek out here”—McNair gestured at the towering mountains—“you end up with your face ripped off or your throat slit.” He waited, and when Nate did not say anything, he asked, “Didn’t you learn your lesson with that silver-tip?”

  Not long after they moved into their new cabins, a grizzly had terrorized them. Nate had tried to spare it. He did all he could to avoid a clash, but the griz saw them as food and would not relent short of hot lead.

  “I take it you haven’t?” Shakespeare sounded disappointed. “You do unbend your noble strength, to think so brainsickly of things,” he quoted.

  “I don’t want to repeat past mistakes,” Nate said. “I don’t want to kill everything off here like I did in the last valley.”

  “You had to protect your loved ones. You had to eat. Feeding a family of four takes a lot of hunting.”

  “Granted,” Nate said, “but when we left, there weren’t but a few deer and elk and grouse and a porcupine or two in the whole valley. I had to ride twenty miles sometimes to find game for the cooking pot. In the old days I wouldn’t have to go more than a mile or two.”

  “Have it your way.” Shakespeare shrugged. “What do I know? Maybe the she-glutton’s brats will let you be. Maybe they learned their lesson when you killed their ma. Maybe they won’t come after your chickens.” He paused meaningfully. “Or anything or anyone else.”

  Two

  Evelyn King did not like being fourteen. She did not like being, as Shakespeare McNair called it, with that flowery way with words he had, at the “cusp of womanhood.” She did not like it in part because a lot of terrible things had happened to her in the past year. She had been kidnapped by a woman out for revenge against her family, and the ordeal the woman put her through had changed her outlook on life. Before that fateful day, Evelyn had always thought the best of people. She assumed they were good and decent until they proved otherwise. Now she was suspicious of everyone until they proved they deserved her trust. She would not make the same mistake twice.

  The other part of her discontent was more personal. It had to do with that “womanhood” business. Much to her amazement, and considerable dismay, she was being courted by a young Crow and a young Ute. Both wanted to take her as their wife. Both wanted her to come live with their people and be a mother to their children.

  The mere notion scared Evelyn near witless. She had never given much thought to being a wife and mother. Until her kidnapping, she had never thought about men in that way. Given her druthers, she would rather not think about them that way for a good long while yet.

  Now, strolling thoughtfully along the lake shore, her hands clasped behind her back, Evelyn pondered her dilemma and the state of affairs in general.

  Evelyn was dressed in a blue homespun dress she made herself. Blue was her favorite color. She loved the velvet blue of the sky and the rich, deep blue of the lake hinting at bottomless depths; she loved the vivid blue of the forget-me-not flowers that bloomed above the timberline late in the summer. The pattern for her dress came from a catalog her father brought from St. Louis. It was filled with delightful wonders, from clothes to hair brushes to items for the home and the kitchen.

  It was always Evelyn’s dream to live back East and own everything in that catalog and to have a nice house to put all those nice things in. In other words, to live in a civilized fashion.

  Evelyn never liked the wilderness. She could do without the hardships. She could do without enemy war parties, rattlesnakes, grizzlies and mountain lions. She could do without everything that made life in the wilds so fraught with danger.

  Until she was kidnapped, Evelyn regarded civilized life as heaven on earth, as the ideal way for people to live. But that image had been tarnished. Civilization, she learned the hard way, was not the idyllic bliss she imagined. Like the wilderness, it had a dark underside, elements so vile, so hideous, they were hidden from sight in dens of iniquity.

  Evelyn stopped and stared out over the lake. Her thoughts were straying. She had come outside to decide what to do about one of her suitors who was due to pay a visit soon, not to rehash the old debate of which she favored most; the untamed mountains or the orderly world of civilization.

  Evelyn was about to walk on when she heard her name called. Turning, she saw her mother hurrying toward her. She knew why when she saw what her mother was holding.

  “You forgot these,” Winona said in annoyance. If she had told her daughter once, she had told her a thousand times not to leave the cabin without them.

  “I’m only going a short way,” Evelyn justified her lapse.

  “Must we go through this again?” Winona responded. “Your father and I talk until our throats are hoarse but you refuse to listen. It is only common sense to take a few precautions.”

  To spare herself another of her mother’s lectures, she accepted the Hawken, a pair of pistols and a leather belt to wedge the pistols under, and a powder horn and ammo pouch. “Thank you, but you need not have bothered.”

  “For someone who worries so much about bears and th
e like, you don’t show much common sense.” Winona folded her arms and waited while Evelyn armed herself. “There. Now you won’t be eaten by the first meat eater that comes along, or taken by hostiles without a fight.”

  “We haven’t seen hide nor hair of a war party since we came here.”

  “That doesn’t mean we let down our guard.” Winona smiled and placed a hand on Evelyn’s shoulder. “I am happy you have come to terms with where we live but do not make the mistake of taking things for granted.”

  “I never do,” Evelyn said, unable to hide her resentment at the reminder.

  “There comes a time, daughter, when we must take responsibility for what we do.”

  “Don’t start,” Evelyn said. She did not want another talking to. She had heard it all before, many times over.

  “I do not understand you sometimes,” Winona said. “Just last night a wolverine tried to eat our chickens. Yet today you come out unarmed and alone and do not tell anyone where you are going.” She gently squeezed Evelyn’s shoulder. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

  Evelyn grew warm with anger. “I did not tell you because I’m not going very far. Only a hundred yards or so.”

  “And if a mountain lion or a bear happen by?” Winona persisted. “They would run you down before you were halfway to our cabin.” She waited for her daughter to say something, and when no reply was forthcoming, she turned toward their cabin. “Very well. I will not impose further.”

  Racked by guilt, Evelyn watched her mother’s retreating figure until she went in. Then, hefting the Hawken her father had special made for her, she continued north, saying aloud, “Some things never change.” Her mother meant well, but Evelyn resented being reminded of what she should and shouldn’t do. She would turn fifteen in a few months, and she was perfectly capable of deciding for herself.

  In a sulk, Evelyn paid little attention to what was going on around her until a loud splash startled her. She glanced at the lake but whatever made the splash was gone. A large fish, she guessed, had broken the surface. She went another thirty feet, to a boulder at the water’s edge, and sat facing the water. Her father had always told her never to sit with her back to the woods, but the woods were an arrow’s flight away. Besides, the mood she was in, she would like for something to try and sneak up on her just so she could shoot it.