Far as the Eye Can See (34 page)

“It’s a storm,” she says. “It will pass.”

I stand there watching the white balls on the ground rattled by the rain. I can hear the river roaring down below us.

When the rain stops and everything settles again, Ink says, “We should move.”

“On to Buford?”

“The rain has stopped.”

“You want to move now.”

She looks at me.

“It ain’t like I can make it back to Bozeman now. So what’s the point?”

She says nothing while we pack up the horses. She tries to let Little Fox know what we’re doing.

I climb up on Cricket, lead them back down to the riverbed, and we start heading east, following the river. I see a dead horse in the water, frozen stiff as a statue. Then I see a woman in a dress, a child gripping her arm as they go by in the current. I realize it is suddenly very cold and the water is like a wall of moving ice. Up ahead the darkening sky looks bruised.

“Big Ice,” Ink says. “Great chunks of it. I have seen it before.”

“My Lord,” I say. “If we’d of been out in the open, it’s likely them balls of ice would of killed us and the animals too.” I don’t want her to know how nervous this event has made me. I hope Little Fox and Ink didn’t see the child and the woman. My voice shakes when I talk, but maybe she thinks I’m cold. It’s easy thirty degrees colder than it was a hour ago. And I’m heading east with her. Getting farther away from Eveline. This makes my heart feel fat and heavy. But I don’t know what I can do about it. We’re riding along the Missouri, and soon we’ll be to Fort Buford.

“We are getting to the weather of spring,” she says.

“Maybe that big ice ain’t done,” I say.

Ink just rides on, looking back over her shoulder now and then. She’s thinking again. Her eyes shine in the weak light like a snake’s eyes, black and sparkling.

We ride along up the embankment a little and out of the mud, but next to the river for a while. The mist is still low to the ground, but now there’s a general fog all around. We can barely see in front of us. When it’s completely dark, I can’t even tell if there’s a moon. The air is drippy with the fog, so I start climbing to higher ground, trying to rise up out of the damp, swampy air. We get to more solid ground, but still no light nor clear air. I hear the breathing and chuffing of the horses, the sound of their hooves, and nothing else. Ink rides next to me, and Little Fox is behind her, holding her around the waist. When I look over at them I don’t see nothing but a dark shadow a little lower than me and off to my left. I know she’s there with him, but she ain’t got nothing to say. We’re just going steadily now, trying to get to morning.

When the sun begins to rise, it burns the fog until it turns into great columns of gray light that rise up to the top of the sky. There’s a breeze now, and it sweeps the fog past us and the world is shadows again and dark places in front of us. Sometime in the middle of that night, one of the horses riding behind us got cut loose. I don’t notice it until we’re getting ready to stop.

When I tell Ink about it, she sets Little Fox on the ground gently and then rides back, jumps from her horse, and picks up the rope. She studies it in the weak light, then gets back on her horse and rides back to me.

“You shouldn’t jump off your horse like that,” I say. “You could open one of them wounds again.”

“The rope was cut,” she says. She looks so sad, it’s almost a kind of purity—like she is innocent of everything in the world and don’t know death and decay yet, like a damn child. She’s been kidnapped and lived with the Indians for five years or more, she’s afraid of her husband’s fury, and she looks to me like a small, dark virgin child.

“You don’t have to worry,” I say. “If all he wants is horses, he can have them all.”

She looks at me.

“Except for Cricket here.”

“It is just his way of letting us know he is here,” she says. “It is his way.”

“He can’t be nowhere near,” I say. “Not through all we been through.”

She’s looking all around now, like some kind of wary animal in a streambed. Little Fox don’t understand. We’re still mounted, but he’s on the ground and it’s light enough he can see Ink’s face.

“He thinks I’m threatening you,” I say.

“No he doesn’t. He trusts you now.”

She speaks words to him that are soft and kind. It’s a tone in her voice I ain’t never heard before. He goes to her and she reaches down and helps him get back up behind her. I take the carbine off my shoulder and hold it ready in front of me. The sun’s high enough to gleam over the trees in front of us. To my right I see mountains, high and green in the new light.

“Want to head for them hills?” I say.

“Hump is watching us right now.”

Below us to our left is the river, wide and fast, deep with water that still steams with cold. All around us ain’t nothing but tall grass and a few clumps of bushes and trees that look black now and like any one of them might move.

I turn Cricket toward the mountains. “Follow me,” I say. Ink kicks her horse in the side and comes along, still looking behind her and all around in a kind of panicked, jerky movement, like a bird. Little Fox holds on for dear life.

“It ain’t nothing to worry about,” I say. We ain’t running. I keep my eye on the mountains. Ahead I see a place where the ground rises up and curves enough at the bottom that I think we can camp there. I want to camp up against that hill so it’s at my back, and I only have to keep watch of what’s in front of me.

When we get to the bottom of the hill, though, I see it’s really a pond there collecting water that runs over the crest and drops into it. I don’t like the noise it makes. I won’t be able to hear nothing else. So we go on up past the hill and the little waterfall into the trees at the foot of the mountain. By that time the sun has risen over the far trees on our left and we can almost see our shadow.

“It’s by God daylight,” I say. “We pretty much have to stop here.”

We go far enough into the forest that it’s still pretty dark. We’re in a long stretch of flat land that rises very slowly ahead of us. There ain’t nothing but tall black trees all around. The ground is covered with pine needles and not much else. It’s like a brown, smooth carpet under the shadow of the high branches.

“This place is not good,” Ink says.

“It’ll have to do.” I climb down off of Cricket and tie her to one of the thinner trees. I bring the rest of the horses around in front of us and tie the tether to the same tree. Ink sets Little Fox on the ground, then she rides a ways back from where we come and ties her horse to a tree down that way. She pulls the saddle off and then carries it back up to me and throws it down against a tree. “You sleep first,” she says.

“What’d you put that animal all the way down there for? Think he’ll make noise if Hump comes?”

She don’t say nothing.

“That horse’ll make noise like the other one did when he cut him loose,” I say.

“If it is Hump, he will not take the horse,” she says. “He took the first one to let us know he is here. If that one is taken, it is not Hump following us.”

“That’s right smart.”

We set up camp in the clearing between three fairly large pine trees. The branches hang low enough that it feels like a kind of roof over our heads. Sunlight leaks in, of course, but it don’t light up too much. It scatters so much around us, it looks a little like jewelry laying around.

I ask Ink if I can see her wounds again.

“They are fine,” she says. “I am healed.”

“Can’t hurt to check.”

She don’t look at me. She’s studying that horse she left down the hill a ways.

“Was you scared from all them balls of ice?” I say.

“No.” She turns to Little Fox, who sits on the ground next to her and asks him something. He nods and then looks at me. She says, “He’s seen it before too.”

“I got to admit, I was scared.”

She stays quiet. After a while I say, “You know, I got to where I think I can count on you.”

Now she looks at me. The white parts of her eyes around the dark, gleaming lenses and the white teeth in that dark face are almost eerie. Like she come up out of some dark place of the earth to judge us all, but all she says is “How long do you think before we get to Fort Buford?”

“Maybe the day after tomorrow, if we travel all night both nights.”

She nods and looks away again.

“You know,” I say, “I been kind of protective of you.”

“I know you have.”

“I have.” I feel kind of proud that I said it. I didn’t know I would, but it seems to fix something soft in her. She looks right into my eyes now.

“I am grateful to you,” she says.

When she says that, I think of Morning Breeze saying “Beech-i-lack” and suddenly I feel kind of sad that I’m going to take off and leave Ink in Fort Buford. I don’t think it’s anything but what she expects, but what if it ain’t? What if she’s starting to hope I don’t? I don’t want to shock her with it. “I really am sorry that I shot you,” I say. “But maybe it will turn out to be a good thing.”

She looks at me like I might of said something bad. “I would like to stop talking about it.”

“It’s enough that you know I wish I had not done it,” I say.

“I know it. You have never stopped speaking of it.”

I almost reach out to put my hand on her arm. We are in this bejeweled forest, bathed in dark and light, her black hair glistens and brightens with every movement of her head. I feel kind of close to her, but respectful too. I don’t want nothing from her at all. I ain’t going to get back to Eveline before she takes off without me. I know that now. It surprises me how it don’t make me angry as it should. It’s the damnedest thing: I don’t want to just say farewell to Ink, at least not so soon. I can wait for that time now. I ain’t in no all-fired hurry no more, and when it hits me that I ain’t so trapped by time, I smile at Ink and say, “I think we will both remember this journey.”

“You sleep,” she says. “I will keep watch.”

Little Fox stares at me. He does not know how to take this sudden calm talk between me and Ink. I reach out my hand toward him, and he leans back. “I won’t hurt you,” I say.

Ink leans close to him and says, “Nahveesay-eh. He is my friend.”

Then, by God, Little Fox says, “Tosunny cheost?” His voice is still raspy and wore-out, but Ink understands him.

“I am from the Sioux,” she says. “Nee-Se-Sioux. Nee-do-schi-vay?”

“O-dah, leeshee ey,” he says.

Ink turns to me. “His name is Little Moon.”

“Well, we got it half right,” I say. “Should we call him that from now on?”

“No,” she says. “When he can speak our language, we will let him decide.”

I lay down under a pretty low-hanging branch, but I can’t sleep. She sits a few feet away, holding the pistol in her lap. It’s getting warmer, and the moisture from the river finds its way even up here. I sit up.

“I can’t sleep right now,” I say. “I’m going to do a little hunting first.”

She nods her head.

“If I get something, you can sleep while I prepare it. Then, after we eat, I’ll try sleeping again myself. I do better with a full belly.”

It’s the first time we’ve stopped where there ain’t no water running next to us. We’ll have to go back out of the woods and a ways down the side of the mountain to get back to that pond we passed. But we got water in the canteens, and enough food that even if I don’t have no luck we won’t starve. Still, I want to find fresh meat. I take my carbine and give the bow and arrow to Little Fox and we head off on foot into the forest. We leave Ink sitting at the base of a tree with the pistol in her hands. “Do not fret,” she says. “I will not shoot you when you come back.”

Little Fox stops and looks at her. She waves, and then he comes along with me.

We walk up the slight incline toward deeper and darker places in the forest ahead. It turns out to be a long climb up a hill that gets more and more steep. After a while I realize we are climbing up the low side of the mountain, getting higher and higher. I got that cold feeling behind my eyes again, thinking about Hump. Maybe he could be in these trees. Little Fox don’t make no noise next to me. Even under ten years old, he moves like a cat, silent and ready. He’s already got a arrow nocked into the bow.

Near the middle of the day, I watch him kill a small deer. Except for the plunk of the bowstring, there ain’t no sound. I’m pretty well shocked to find out a deer makes a loud cry when it gets hit. That first one he shot, scuttling fast along the ground, didn’t make no noise at all. This one’s smaller. I roll it over and give Little Fox my hunting knife. He knows exactly what to do. He cuts from between the back legs up the belly to the soft white fur at the base of the throat. He cuts as shallow as he can, just under the skin, so he don’t open the sac that contains all the organs. Just as he’s about to reach inside the still-warm body for the windpipe so he can cut it free, I hear a pistol shot down the mountain and way back where we left Ink. It’s so loud, it swallows a few beats of my heart. Like it come from deep in there and not the woods at all. I wonder if Ink shot something herself; another rabbit maybe. But then I hear another shot. And another.