Nate King leaped to his feet and drew his pistols, but he didn’t shoot. A wounded grizzly was fierce beyond belief.
Winona likewise jumped up and wedged her rifle to her shoulder. And she likewise didn’t shoot. Should she miss a vital spot, the bear would be on them before she could reload. Armed with claws as long as her fingers and teeth that could crush bone, it would tear them to pieces. “Do we stand our ground or back away?”
Nate’s every instinct was screaming at him to get out of there. If they could reach the horses before the bear reached them, they stood a good chance of escaping. Then again, over a short distance a bear was every bit as fast as a horse, or even faster.
“Husband?”
“We stand our ground.” Nate had decided to rely on the tried and true. It might work. It might not. The only way to find out was to put the grizz to the test. With that in mind, he raised his arms and hollered at the top of his lungs, “Get out of here, consarn you!”
The grizzly stopped at the river’s edge. Dripping water, it regarded them with unnerving calm while ponderously swinging its massive head from side to side. Then it stopped swinging its head and growled.
“Go, you nuisance,” Nate tried again.
The bear growled louder.
“We should slowly back away,” Winona said.
Just then the sorrel whinnied in fright, drawing the grizzly’s attention to the horses. Winona braced for a rush, ready to try to bring it down. They needed their horses. To be stranded on foot in the middle of the prairie would compound the dangers they faced. Worse, it would take them months to reach the Mississippi River.
Raising its nose to the wind, the grizzly sniffed.
Nate glanced at the frying pan. The scent of their food had drawn the bear in. Maybe he could appease it enough that it would leave them be. Bending, he snatched up the buffalo heart and held it out in front of him for the bear to see. “Is this what you’re after, damn you?”
“Don’t anger him,” Winona said.
As if Nate would. He tossed the heart as close to the grizz as he could without hitting it. “There. Eat it and go.” For a few moments he thought the bear would ignore it.
Sniffing, the grizzly lowered its head. It nudged the heart with its nose a few times, opened its mouth, and the heart was gone.
“It will want more,” Winona predicted. In her opinion, feeding the grizzly was a bad idea. Once its appetite was whetted, it might decide they or their horses should be part of its meal.
Nate picked up what was left of the buffalo tongue. He threw it and it landed with a plop.
The grizzly took a few steps and practically wolfed the tongue down. It stared at Nate as if expecting more.
“That’s all you get.”
The bear grunted.
“I warned you,” Winona said. She fixed a bead on the bear’s throat and thumbed back her rifle’s hammer.
“Wait.” Nate waved his arms and hopped up and down. “Leave us be! I’ve given you all I’m going to!”
The bear growled.
“I have a bad feeling, husband.” Winona gauged the distance to her sorrel and realized that if the grizzly charged, it would be on them before she could mount. She edged closer to Nate. If they were to die, they would die together.
Nate yelled again, but the grizzly was not the least bit intimidated. Instead, it started toward them, moving slowly, its head low to the ground.
“It’s going to attack.” Winona touched her finger to the rear trigger to set the front trigger.
“Not if I can help it,” Nate said. Loud noise hadn’t worked. Feeding it hadn’t done any good. He had one thing left to try. Turning, he grabbed the unlit end of a burning brand.
“That might make only make him madder.”
“Let’s find out.” Nate held the brand in front of him and advanced toward the bear. He had to act before the flames went out.
The grizzly reared. It sniffed, and growled, and swung a huge paw at a smoky tendril.
“I will shove this down your throat!” Nate hollered, and sprang, thrusting at the bear’s mouth and nose.
With a tremendous snort of displeasure, the grizzly dropped onto all fours and wheeled. Instead of running off, though, it looked back as if it had not made up its mind whether to go or press the issue.
Nate took a desperate gamble. Bounding forward, he jammed the fiery brand against the bear’s hindquarters. Hair sizzled and burned, and the grizzly half-twisted as if to attack him. If it did, he would be clawed to ribbons before he got off a shot. Then Winona shouted and fired one of her pistols into the air, and the bear, with a roar that seemed to shake the cottonwoods, ran to the Platte and plunged in. Spray flew in its wake as it crossed. Presently, it clambered up the far side. Another moment and the vegetation swallowed its retreating bulk.
Nate waited to see if the bear would come back a second time. Heat on his hand prompted him to cast the brand to the ground.
“What do you think?” Winona asked.
“I think we should pack up, ride five or six miles, and make a new camp,” Nate proposed. It was the only way to be sure.
“I agree.” Winona had never told him, but she harbored a secret dread that a grizzly might one day be the death of him. Part of it had to do with his frequent encounters with the giant silver-tips back when they first became man and wife. Granted, the Rockies teemed with grizzlies then, before the tide of beaver trappers and the influx of settlers thinned their numbers. But still, it had seemed to her that Nate bumped into one every time she turned around, and she lived in daily fear that a grizzly would make her a widow.
“Damn bears.” Nate did not like having to go to all the trouble to pack up and throw on their saddles and put out the fire. He added a few choice words he seldom used.
“Remember what we agreed about swearing,” Winona said. The habit didn’t make much sense to her. Among her people, a man who couldn’t control his tongue was not held in high esteem. Whites, though, took delight in uttering streams of cuss words, usually with no more cause than venting their spleen. She witnessed many an outburst at the rendezvous and trading posts and elsewhere. Fortunately, her husband never picked up the habit, which suited her just fine.
Nate kept an eye on the river, but the bear didn’t reappear. In due course they were in the saddle and on the move. He let her go ahead of him so he could watch their back trail.
“That didn’t turn out so badly,” Winona cheerfully remarked. “Our luck, as you whites would say, still holds.”
“The day isn’t over yet.”
“My goodness,” Winona teased. “When did you become such a cynic?” She was proud she remembered that word. The whites had a wealth of language that she loved to mine.
“The day I realized we all die.”
Winona shifted and stared. “What has gotten into you?”
“I don’t know,” Nate said. But he did. The incident with the buffalo earlier, the near disaster with the bear, had reminded him that life in the wilderness was a perpetual struggle. He tended to forget that fact now and then. And when he did, something came along to remind him.
Not that Nate regretted the decision he had made years ago, after the beaver trade died out, to stay in the mountains. He could have gone back east. A lot of trappers did. They were in it for the money, and when beaver fell out of fashion and the best of plews became next to worthless, they forsook the trapping trade for greener pastures.
But not Nate. For him, trapping was never about money. It was the freedom he enjoyed. The sense that he was his own man and could do as he pleased, when he pleased, and was never beholden to anyone.
Life wasn’t like that in the States. Back east, people were ruled by law and society. They must conform, or else. Those who wouldn’t or couldn’t ended up as outcasts or behind bars.
Nate sometimes wondered what his life would have been like had he not answered his uncle’s summons and come west. More than likely he would have gone on to be an accountant and spent his years chained to a desk, scribbling in a ledger.
Strange how life worked out, Nate reflected. Wanderlust brought him to the frontier; love kept him there. Love for Winona and the love of being his own man. He could never go back. He could never give up his freedom to be a cog in a machine.
“Husband?”
Nate came out of himself. He checked that the bear wasn’t after them, then responded, “What is it?”
“There is death ahead.”
Nate looked up. Through a gap in the trees he spied black shapes describing circles high in the air, and some not so high. There had to be two dozen or more. “Buzzards.”
“What can have brought all of them?”
“We’ll find out directly.” The last time Nate saw so many was after a Shoshone buffalo hunt. He happened to gaze up while skinning and there had been scores of the aerial scavengers waiting for the Shoshones to leave so they could descend and feast. It was uncanny, that ability of theirs to wing in from all points of the compass when there were corpses and carrion to be had. Usually one buzzard would happen by and circle. Before long, there would be two or three. Within half an hour, the sky would be full of them. How they knew where to gather was a mystery. They didn’t rely on sight, that much Nate knew, because once he saw several buzzards come winging over a mountain to join others feeding on a dead elk, and the new arrivals couldn’t possibly have seen the elk from the other side of the mountain. He reasoned it had to be the same sort of thing that pigeons used to find their way to their roosts from hundreds of miles away, but what it was or how it worked was beyond him.
Winona drew rein and waited for him to come up next to her. “Do you smell what I smell?”
Nate nodded. The unmistakable stink of burning flesh. Not animal flesh, either. Human flesh had an odor all its own.
“I have a bad feeling about this.”
Nate swung down, saying quietly, “Whites always say that bad things come in threes.” First the buff, then the grizz, now this. “Stay with the horses while I go have a look-see.”
“Nothing doing.” Winona swung a leg over her sorrel and slid down. “In case you have forgotten, I am your woman and you are my man. Where you go, I go.”
“Even if I ask real nice?”
Winona snorted.
Crouching, Nate stealthily threaded through the thick undergrowth. He made no more noise than the breeze, with hardly a rustle of a leaf or stem.
Winona matched him, moving in perfect mimicry, stepping where he stepped.
The odor grew stronger.
Soon the trees thinned. Wary of being spotted, Nate slowed. They were near the prairie, and he saw the source of the smell. “Dear God.”
Winona looked away, steeled herself, and looked back. “I never get used to it. No matter how many times, I never do.”
Nate absently nodded. “It won’t be the last time.” Not with hostilities so widespread.
A stone’s throw from the trees stood two wagons. Their teams were gone, and their canvas tops had been cut off. Belongings lay scattered everywhere, most smashed or hacked to bits, a few intact, everything from a butter churn to tools to clothes to a piano. But it wasn’t the possessions that caused Nate’s breath to catch in his throat. It was what was left of the people who owned them.
“I think one is still alive,” Winona whispered.
So did Nate.
There were four, all told. Two men of middle years, a woman who had to be in her sixties, and a strapping young man who had not yet seen twenty. The first two had been lashed to wagon wheels and then things were done to them, things involving knives and tomahawks and body parts that were no longer part of their bodies.
The young man fared the worst. Staked out spread-eagle, he’d been stripped and then worked on with a knife. His eye sockets were empty, his nose was gone, and the ruin of his mouth exposed bared teeth where his lips had once been.
It was the old woman who was still alive. She, too, had been staked out and stripped. She had all her body parts. She just didn’t have any skin.
Nate warily moved into the open. The tracks of unshod horses led off to the northeast. “Whoever did this is long gone.”
“Dakotas, maybe,” Winona said. “Or Pawnees.”
The old woman weakly turned her head and her watery eyes blinked. She tried twice to speak, then croaked at Nate, “You’re white; aren’t you?”
Nate could barely stand to look at her. The human body without skin was hideous. “I am.”
“They took my daughter and her kids. And Tom’s wife. I could hear them scream as they were dragged off.”
Nate said nothing.
“We were bound for Oregon country.”
“Only the two wagons?” Nate was surprised. Normally, for mutual protection, whites traveled in trains of twenty or more.
“We thought we could make it on our own.”
Nate waited for the inevitable.
The woman’s watery eyes focused on his face. “I hurt, mister. I hurt awful bad. And I could be a long time dying.”
“A long time,” Nate agreed.
“Do me a favor, will you?”
Knowing full well what she wanted, Nate King nodded.