fourteen

Skye’s bones healed steadily, but not the rest of him. One May day he was on a crutch the army lent him. One June day he hobbled around needing only a staff to cling to. Then the post surgeon, Balboa, cut away the plaster, and Skye discovered his leg was not going to flex at the knee anymore. The rotation at the knee didn’t amount to much. Skye stared at the offending limb, and then at Victoria, and shook his head.

It was time to try riding. He managed to sit his pony, but only with the sore leg hanging free, out of the stirrup. Still, he could ride, and soon was able to go awhile on horse before the pain forced him to the ground.

He developed a new gait, one in which he furiously arced his injured leg forward and progressed with a rolling lurch. It took so much energy to walk that way that he soon wore out, and then his face was drawn and white, and his eyes turned as black as obsidian. Pain lines radiated from his mouth, and a perpetual frown furrowed his brow.

Still, he was tough. No man of the borders was ever tougher, and Skye was learning new ways to endure. He was alive, and was flying his flags. Victoria had never heard a word of complaint. And not a word about the pain running through his body. There was just obdurate silence, quietness, and determination.

It was time to leave Fort Ellis. Victoria had dreaded the moment but the Skyes had worn out their welcome. Skye had said nothing of his plans. Whatever their future, it was locked in his mind. Victoria felt left out, isolated, and sometimes angry. It was as if he had crawled into himself and would not come out. One June day Skye thanked Colonel Blossom, and he and Victoria turned their ponies toward the mountains.

She didn’t know where he intended to go. She sat easily on her pony, even though her own bones ached these days. But she was used to that. She was aging in a different manner, turning into a dry husk of a woman, and filled with an odd lightness. She didn’t query him about anything. His plans would all come clear—if he had any plans. That was the terrible reality of age. The future simply vanishes. If he was heading for the Bend of the Yellowstone, and planned to stay there, she would know his plans were unchanged. He would build a house there or die trying.

She couldn’t imagine it. She had watched white men build permanent houses. First they gathered rock for the foundation, dragging it from quarries on sleds they called stone boats. Then they trenched the earth with their spades and made it level. Then they mortared the rock into low walls. Then they built a framework of timbers for the floor and covered it with thick sawn wood. They felled straight pines, preferably lodgepole, barked them, skinned away the irregularities with a drawknife, notched the ends with an axe, and raised log walls with block and tackle, log by log by log. They sawed out a doorway and windows and cut lumber to frame them. They raised log rafters and laid down thick roof planks gotten from a mill, and shingled them with shakes they split off of short chunks of log. They added an iron stove or a big hearth of mortared stone, and framed rooms within. And that was just the beginning. They added doors and windows, stairs, porches and outhouses, a kitchen, a spring house, a well or piped-in spring water. They built sheds for their horses and hay. It took a lot of men to do all that, and it wasn’t done quickly. And if they had livestock they would need to fence the land, and plant gardens, and build a paddock for the horses. That was one thing about white men she admired. Some of them worked ceaselessly, unlike the Absaroka men, who gambled and hunted and told stories and made war, and died, but rarely toiled at anything.

They made only a few miles that day, but the next day they topped the divide and descended a drainage that would take them to the Yellowstone. The day after that they were back in what the white men called Indian Country, though it was only twenty-odd miles from Bozeman City. Skye rode to the place where the ox had destroyed his body, and pointed. There was nothing to see. Whatever happened was locked in Skye’s head, and he would not share it.

He sat on the horse, surveying the place he obviously loved, the place that had wrought dreams in him. Spring rains had greened the slopes. Puffball clouds hung on snowy peaks. The river, gorged with snowmelt, sparkled in bold sunlight.

She watched him quietly, knowing something of what was passing through his heart. He didn’t move for the longest time, but she knew the exact moment of surrender. Something in him changed. He was letting go of this dream, defeated by age and wounds and a hard life. Instead of sagging into his saddle, he stiffened, sat more rigidly, clamped the old top hat tighter. It was as if, in defeat, he would fly all his flags.

“Mary’s with her people?” he asked.

The question rose out of the mists.

“I told her get the hell down there.”

“You had a reason.”

“She ain’t herself, dammit. I told her to visit her brother. Talk to all them goddamn nieces and nephews and aunts and uncles and cousins and clan. Talk Shoshone with all of them Snakes around there.”

“Where’s the lodge?”

“I told her to take it.”

“I always liked Chief Washakie,” he said.

And so it was settled.

But the Eastern Shoshone were far away, and it would take many days to reach them. He didn’t want to say what both of them were thinking. Mary was younger and strong, and would help care for them.

But Victoria felt a searing pain, not only her own pain but his, for in that moment he was surrendering his dream of a homestead at this place that sang to him, a home with a great porch where he could watch the last light of the sun fall upon the vaulting mountains that formed the spine of the whole world, and gild them.

They rode quietly eastward. Both of them were thinking the same thing; she didn’t know how she knew that, but she did. To reach Mary, they would have to cross the Yellowstone, which now was at flood tide, wide and cold and swift and cruel. This was the time of year when gravelly fords vanished, hidden logs careened down the river, ice floes jammed themselves into temporary dams, and the water was barely above freezing. Still, they didn’t have to deal with any of that for a few weeks. They were many sleeps away from the place where they would turn south.

They struggled downriver. Skye had turned stoic. Sometimes he looked ashen, his lips compressed, the ridges of corded muscle lining his face. A June thundershower pelted them where there was no shelter, and they endured the slap of rain and the spray of hail. Afterward, they found a dry place, built a fire, stripped, and set their clothing and unrolled blankets to drying on a rustic frame. She still enjoyed the sight of Skye naked, all fishbelly white except for his face and hands and neck, and his venerable hat perched on gray locks. Nothing was quite as amusing as a naked white man. She was brown everywhere, brown and slim, with withered arms and small breasts.

A magpie had joined them, gaudy black and white, bold and raucous. She nodded. This one perched on a limb, then on the heap of driftwood she gathered, and then paraded back and forth, its lurching walk different from that of any other bird.

“Go to hell,” she said to the magpie.

The bird heckled her and flapped away.

Skye cleaned the rain off his Sharps while she gathered wood to keep the smoky fire blazing. Everything that took work was now up to her. She unsaddled the ponies, haltered and picketed them on good grass. She dug into the burlap sack, extracting more flour she would turn into fry cakes. They had enough stuff from the liveryman for a few more days. June nights in the mountains were plenty cold, but with luck they would have their wet clothes dried before they were chilled.

A night fog descended just about the time when Victoria thought the clothing might be wearable, and they were glad to crawl into the slightly damp leather and pull blankets over them. Skye carefully settled his leg, and then drew the wool around it. Warmth mitigated the pain a little. Victoria studied the night sky, hoping it would not rain again. This time of year, it rained often and hard, and sometimes hailed. She wished they might have their lodge, but that was far away, and they had no ponies to carry it.

“We could go back to your people,” Skye said.

“No damned good,” she said. She was thinking of Skye’s age and bad leg, and the way her people moved about all summer and fall, gathering, hunting, and warring. The Shoshones were more sedentary.

“Where then? Up to you,” he said.

That shocked her. Up to her?

“Magpie,” she said.

She would go where her spirit sister, the magpie, led her. Skye didn’t respond at first. He lived in a different world, with one Creator and no spirit helpers. They had talked about this many times, and it had come down to respect. He respected her beliefs; she respected his white-man religion.

“Suits me,” he said.

She didn’t like it. She didn’t like this deep change in him. She wanted the old Skye, bold and strong and decisive, looking after her and keeping her fed and safe and warm. She tried to imagine what life was like for him now. Always before, he could command his body. It had been injured many times but he still lorded over his body, made his legs work, ignored pain, did what needed doing, whether it was hunting or fighting or finding shelter, or protecting her from a lion or a bear. But now his body was weaker, and it hurt, and he could not tell his leg to bend and walk and carry his weight and take him across meadows to the very horizon. His life was lost in a haze of pain now. She knew pain herself, the pain that came with many winters, that crept across her shoulders and collected at the small of her back and made her legs wobbly. But there was no way to get their youth back.

Her heart ached for him. He had the harder life, from a pressed British seaman to a mountain man to a guide, to a man living with her in the fashion of her people. He’s the one who had to adapt, surrender his London upbringing, make himself a new man in this world of mountains and plains she knew so well. Had it been a good life? She was shocked at her own thought. Placing his life in the past, like that. He was alive beside her. He had never complained, never even talked about the pain that wracked him. She reached across to his blanketed form and touched his arm.

Two days later they had run through the white man’s food the liveryman had given them, and Skye said he would hunt. He could not walk toward game, so he would wait beside the Yellowstone for game to come to him. His Sharps was too heavy for her now, or she would hunt with it, and her strength had waned so she could no longer use her bow and arrows as she once had as a young huntress.

So he settled himself beside a fallen cottonwood, downwind of where he thought game might come to drink, and waited until twilight for game to come. He rested the heavy Sharps across the log, tried to make his bad leg comfortable, and eyed a place in the riverbank where he had seen the split hoofprints of deer. And then one did come; actually two, a doe and a newborn fawn still on her teat, a small spotted waif of a deer-child. The mother looked everywhere, her tail twitching, and then drifted toward the riverbank, across the sights of Skye’s Sharps.

But he did not shoot. He could not say why, except it had to do with his age and a reverence for new life. He watched the doe drink for a few moments, and then drift into shadow, the baby a few paces away, and then vanish into brush.

“Goddammit,” Victoria said. “I was afraid you’d shoot her.”