With caution born of long experience, two riders made their way along the green belt of vegetation that fringed the winding Platte River.
The man was big and broad of shoulder. Endless hours in the sun had bronzed his features so that he might easily be mistaken for an Indian were it not for his beard and his piercing green eyes. His fringed buckskins, his possibles bag and ammo pouch and powder horn, marked him as a frontiersman. In his long hair he wore a single white feather that hung down at the back. A wide leather belt girthed his waist. Wedged under it were a pair of flintlock pistols. On his left hip hung a bowie, on his right a tomahawk.
The woman was average-sized and shapely, her soft doeskin dress decorated with blue beads. Both her hair and her eyes were dark. She also had an ammo pouch and powder horn. Two pistols were tucked under her thin belt. The bone hilt of a knife jutted a sheath on her right hip. In addition, across her saddle she held a Hawken rifle.
Wildlife teemed about them. In the thickets sparrows chirped and flitted. A robin warbled high in a tree. A startled rabbit bounded from their path. A doe and her fawn rose from their rest to prick up their long ears and then bolt in alarm.
“I do so love the Platte,” Winona King said in her flawless English. A gifted linguist, she was well versed in several tongues.
Nate King grunted. “As a river it makes a great puddle.”
Winona laughed merrily. The Platte wasn’t much as rivers went, so shallow and narrow that she was surprised the whites hadn’t named it Platte Creek. “At least it runs all year,” she noted. Unlike some of the waterways in the Rockies that dried up during the summer months. “We won’t die of thirst before we reach Missouri.”
“We wouldn’t go thirsty anyway,” Nate said a trifle indignantly. He took her remark as a slight slur on his ability. If they had to, they could always mop up the morning dew with a cloth or shirt and wring out enough water to keep them alive.
“My, someone is prickly today,” Winona teased.
“And you’ve been awful happy for days now,” Nate remarked. Not that she had a sour disposition. Quite the contrary. His wife was usually cheerful and good-natured. The same could be said of most Shoshones. It stemmed in part from their outlook on life, which differed drastically from the outlook of many whites.
“I am happy,” Winona admitted. “We have not had much time alone together in a good long while. And I am looking forward to visiting St. Louis again.”
“I’m not,” Nate grumbled. Not given the reason for their journey. Frowning, he glanced down at the rifle sheath tied to the side of his big bay. The stock of his Hawken poked from the end. His busted Hawken. And he without any means to repair it short of taking it to the men who had made it for him, the famed Hawken brothers of St. Louis.
“Now, now,” Winona said. “It was an accident. It could have happened to anyone.”
“I suppose.” But Nate took little consolation in this fact. He prided himself on always being careful, on not making mistakes, and he made one the morning he went to the corral at the back of their cabin to calm their agitated horses. He’d had his rifle with him, as always, and after opening the gate, he leaned it against the rails. A mistake, as it turned out, for when he reached for one of the horses, it shied and kicked, and a flailing hoof struck the Hawken, bending the breech and cracking the stock.
“Blame the cat, not yourself,” Winona said.
Nate’s frown became a scowl. A mountain lion had taken to paying their cabin frequent visits. A young mountain lion, he suspected, drawn by the scent of their horses. In turn, its scent was to blame for getting the horses so worked up. It hadn’t attacked the horses yet, but if things kept up, it was only a matter of time. As soon as he got back from St. Louis, he was going after it.
Winona breathed deep and asked, “Don’t you love the prairie, husband?”
Nate grunted a second time. He liked the prairie just fine, but he liked the mountains more. Give him the snowcapped peaks and miles-high majesty of the Rockies any day over the vista of unending grass broken by occasional strips of woodland.
“Am I talking to myself?”
“I heard you,” Nate said.
“You could have fooled me.”
Nate twisted in the saddle. “I have a lot on my mind, is all.” Which wasn’t entirely true, but he didn’t want her to think he was still in a funk over his rifle, even if he was.
“Such as?”
Nate thought fast. “Our daughter.”
“Oh.” Winona had been thinking about Evelyn a lot lately, too. Their little girl was no longer little. Evelyn had grown into a fine young woman, and several young men had noticed. For a while a Crow and an Ute had courted her. But now it was a young man from an Eastern tribe whose family had settled in their valley. Degamawaku was his name, or Dega as they called him, and it was obvious to everyone— except Evelyn—that Dega was very much in love with her.
“That’s all you have to say?”
“What will be, will be, as you whites have it. There is little we can do. She is old enough to make her own decisions. If she picks Dega for her husband, all we can do is wish them the best.”
Nate was making a habit of grunting. He liked Dega, genuinely liked him, but he wasn’t entirely sure Evelyn should take up with him. He would prefer she stayed single for a few more years. He said as much.
“We can’t control love, husband,” Winona remarked. She was a good example. She had never expected to give her heart to a white man. She had never even entertained the thought. But along he came, those many years ago, and she had fallen deeply and hopelessly in love with him.
“I suppose,” Nate begrudged her.
Winona chuckled.
“What?”
“How did you put it? As a conversationalist you make a great tree stump.”
“Only you,” Nate said.
“Only me what?”
“Would use the word ‘conversationalist.’ Most whites use ten-cent words. But you’re partial to the fifty-dollar variety.”
“I can’t help it if whites don’t know their own tongue.” Truth was, Winona took great pride in her ability to learn new languages.
Despite himself, Nate grinned. Back when they first met, she’d picked up English so fast, it astounded him. It was his first inkling that his new wife was, in some respects, smarter than he would ever be. For him, learning a new tongue was like wrestling a grizz. He was a plodding turtle to her hare.
Suddenly Nate stiffened. The gentle gurgling of the Platte and the singing of the birds had lulled him into briefly letting down his mental guard. He wasn’t paying as much attention as he should to their surroundings. Crackling and rustling from up ahead remedied that.
Drawing rein, Nate put a hand on one of his pistols. He figured it might be more deer or maybe even elk. But then a brown silhouette appeared against the backdrop of verdant green. “No,” Nate said.
The vegetation parted, framing a huge shaggy head with a shaggy mane and beard. Sickle horns glinted in the sunlight. Black nostrils flared and the creature snorted. The next instant it exploded out of the greenery.
“Buffalo!” Nate had time to cry as he reined sharply and jabbed his heels. His bay responded superbly, bounding out of the brute’s path and away from its raking horns.
Winona had seen Nate stop. She could not see what he was looking at, but she did hear the snort and knew what made it. Even as he shouted his warning, she yanked on the sorrel’s reins. The buffalo streaked past the bay and was on top of her in the blink of an eye. The split-second warning enabled her to evade it, but with inches to spare.
Nate drew one of his pistols, a .55-caliber smoothbore flintlock, powerful enough to bring the buff down but only if he hit it in the vitals. And that was no easy task. A thick skull protected the brain and the internal organs were encased in layers of muscle and hide. Still, he had to try. As the bull spun to come at them again, Nate took a hasty bead on a gleaming eye and fired.
At the blast the buffalo jerked its head, but it wasn’t severely hurt. The lead ball had missed the eye and glanced off the thick bone that ringed it.
“Ride!” Winona urged, and goaded her sorrel into a gallop. She made for the open prairie, where her horse had a better chance of outrunning the horned behemoth.
The buffalo veered after her.
Fear coursed through Nate. The thing was almost on top of her. Another few seconds and it would slam into Winona’s mount with the impact of a battering ram. He had witnessed the result before, when a Shoshone warrior failed to get out of the way of a charging bull and its raking horn ripped the warrior’s horse open like a hot knife ripping through butter.
“No!” Nate cried. He rode straight at the bull, unsure if his bay would do as he wanted or break away at the last instant. The jolt of the impact nearly unhorsed him. But it had the desired effect. The bay’s shoulder slammed against the buffalo’s, throwing the buff off stride and causing it to stumble and nearly fall. Then Nate was past and flying in the wake of his wife’s sorrel. “Keep going! Don’t stop!”
Winona had started to rein around. His rash move to save her both horrified and elated her. Horror, because the bay might have gone down, leaving Nate at the buff’s mercy. Elation, because of the depth of his love for her. Then there was no time to think of anything but flight; the bull was thundering after them in determined fury.
Nate caught up to her just as she reached the open prairie and they galloped side-by-side. He saw no other buffs, which was peculiar. Buffalo were nearly always in herds. A glance back explained why this one was alone. It was old, and from the way it ran, one of its front legs had been hurt at one time and hadn’t mended as it should. Old and crippled, but that made it no less formidable. Six feet high at the shoulders, with a horn spread of three feet, and weighing upward of two thousand pounds, qualified it as a veritable monster.
The drum of hooves rang in Nate’s ears as he lashed his reins and slapped his legs. The bay and the sorrel were neck and neck, their manes and tails flying. The buff was a good ten yards back and wasn’t gaining, but it wasn’t losing ground, either.
“Faster!” Winona cried, and tried to urge her sorrel to greater effort. But it was already galloping as fast as it could.
Nate had slid his spent flintlock under his belt and now drew the other one. He didn’t want to shoot again if he could help it, but if the buff caught up he wouldn’t have a choice. At that moment he deeply regretted not being able to use his rifle. A single well-placed shot could bring the bull down as slickly as could be.
Intent on the buffalo, Nate wasn’t watching the ground in front of them. Then Winona hollered.
In their haste to escape they had blundered onto a prairie dog town. A large prairie dog town, covering some twenty to thirty acres. Scores upon scores of conical dirt mounds over a foot high and two feet wide dotted the prairie, all laced with entrance and exit holes large enough for a horse to step into and break its leg.
Nate’s skin crawled. Under normal circumstances he wouldn’t ride anywhere near a prairie dog colony. No sane rider would. At any moment he expected to hear an ominous crack and feel the bay lurch under him.
Winona saw a prairie dog rise onto its hind legs and utter a shrill whistle. Normally she regarded its kind as adorable and liked to watch their playful antics. But not now, not here. Her sorrel’s front hoof came down dangerously close to a hole, and she almost cried out.
“Slow down!” Nate shouted. He didn’t want to, not with the hairy engine of destruction bearing down on them. But they couldn’t afford to lose either of their mounts.
Winona was going to do more than that. She had made up her mind to stop the buffalo herself. She had her rifle, and she was a good shot. She slowed and shifted, jamming the stock to her shoulder. But try as she might, she couldn’t hold the rifle steady. No matter. Thumbing back the hammer, she sighted down the bouncing barrel as best she could.
Suddenly the sorrel whinnied.
Nate saw it step into a hole. His breath caught in his throat and his blood became ice. He reined to the right to try and grab Winona, but she was thrown over the sorrel’s neck and hit hard on her shoulder. Panic-stricken, Nate hauled on the reins to bring his bay to a stop.
Pain filled Winona. For a few seconds she lay dazed. It didn’t feel like any of her bones were broken. She was aware she had lost her rifle.
“Winona!”
A snort brought Winona out of herself, and she looked up to see the bull bearing down on her, its great head lowered to rend and tear. Fear balled her gut, but it didn’t stop her from groping about for her Hawken.
The snap of a bone breaking was as loud as a gunshot. In a whirl of legs and tail, the buffalo crashed to the ground and slid on its side, plowing prairie dog mounds under its enormous bulk and raising a choking cloud of dust.
Winona coughed and swatted at the dust and rolled over, and suddenly she was nose to nose with one of the most formidable creatures in the wild.
The bull was trying to get back up but its broken leg wouldn’t bear its weight. Down it crashed, almost on top of her. Its eyes locked on hers.
“Don’t move!” Nate warned.
Winona froze. She could feel the buffalo’s warm breath on her cheek. Its odor filled her nostrils.
Nate extended his pistol and once again aimed at an eye. He was close enough now that he shouldn’t miss.
Then the bull rumbled deep in its barrel chest, twisted its head, and hooked a horn at Winona’s face.