In the Season of the Sun (20 page)

And yet, listening to Lone Walker alone on the windswept height, even the pragmatic and doubting Jacob Sun Gift felt his heart stir. Whether the Above Ones heard or not, there was power in the voice, power in the man.

The song brought back memories of when Jacob, as a thirteen-year-old boy, had huddled by the warrior's campfire and heard Lone Walker sing his spirit song. Jacob's heart had been filled with grief and hatred, emotions that had warred within him for many a day. But that was long ago; he was a Blackfoot brave, Sun Gift, son of Lone Walker, and there was room in his heart only for the people of his village, for a phantom girl, and, of course, for the wind.

Jacob looked up at Lone Walker and listened as the warrior's keening chant echoed down the long hills.

Of what use a singer? A song? Jacob straightened, senses suddenly alert. He cocked his head to one side, then standing slowly, faced the valley, his lanky frame casting a long shadow upon the sun-washed slope.

Lone Walker's voice faded. He had heard the same as his son. Now he waited, vigilant, patient as the sentinel pines dotting the golden hills.

Wait. Be patient. Be still. All things torturous to a young man. Yet Jacob endured.

And endured …

Then he heard it again. A gunshot and then another.

Jacob and Lone Walker were no longer alone in the valley. Someone had arrived. Someone in trouble.

21

T
ewa rode for her life beneath the fiery glare of the morning sun. Gunfire echoed throughout the long hills and lead slugs like angry bees fanned the air around her. She crouched low on the dun and let the horse's mane lash her face as she tried to make herself less of a target. She glanced over her shoulder at her pursuers, four Kootenai bucks, armed with flintlocks, knives, and war hammers. They had surprised her back up the valley of the Buffalo Horns. She'd had to abandon a fresh-killed antelope and her pack horse in order to save herself.

Tewa's strongly muscled thighs firmly held her astride the galloping horse as she twisted around and loosed an arrow from her elk horn bow at her pursuers. The feathered missile arced through the chinook-warmed air and passed harmlessly among the four braves strung out about fifty feet behind her. The hunters howled and raised their rifles aloft and dared the girl to try again.

The ground underfoot was moist and treacherous from recently melted snow. But the dun was mountain bred, a hardy animal whose powerful legs bore the young woman down the valley. Rifles thundered and a slug burned her shoulder and left a bloody furrow in its wake. Tewa grimaced and reined her charging steed toward the timbered slope. She caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of her eye, glanced aside, and recognized with sinking heart another couple of Kootenai bucks had emerged from a grove of aspen and were moving to head her off.

Tewa pressed against the dun and urged her gallant mount to even greater speed. A hundred yards became sixty, then thirty. The shadowing groves of pine and aspen, willow and fir, were a haven, a harbor of safety stretching out to her. All she had to do was lose herself in its emerald concealment.

Twenty yards. Ten. The two braves galloping to cut her off opened fire. Smoke blossomed from their rifles. She did not hear the roar of the guns. She only felt the dun beneath her shudder, falter a step, then regain its stride, blood spurting from its side as, dying, the mountain pony carried her to the tree-lined base of the ridge.

The woman gave a sharp cry of grief mingled with rage as the dun went down. Tewa, daughter of the wolf, kicked free, and hit the ground hard. She rolled onto her back, then slammed against the base of an aspen. She gasped for breath, clawed for her elk horn bow, and scrambled forward on hands and knees to retrieve the arrows that had spilled from her quiver.

She rose up on her knees and fired across the barrel-chested body of her horse as a lone brave ducked beneath the branches of an aspen, spied Tewa's wolf cowl, and raised his rifle. Her arrow caught him in the throat. The buck threw his rifle away and pitched off his mount. His fingers pawed at the shaft in his throat.

Tewa crawled to her feet and scampered away. She moved with all the speed of the animal whose pelt shrouded her dark, pretty features. She dashed straight upslope for a few minutes, a shadow wolf flitting among the trees, and then altered her direction, keeping to where the stand of timber grew the thickest. She paused beneath a stately pine. Part of the trunk exploded, showering her with splinters. She staggered back, momentarily blinded, then resumed her desperate race while the brave who had narrowly missed her reloaded and shouted for his companions to join him.

She scrambled over lichen-covered boulders and rotting logs, she glided soundlessly between the mottled white trunks of aspens and the ashen-hued saplings of ponderosa pine. Golden-yellow leaves crunched underfoot. Gray squirrels scampered out of harm's way.

Tewa paused to catch her breath and get her bearings. Something crashed through a balsam thicket, and the young woman whirled and fired her last arrow, spying too late the glossy black pelt of a fisher as the weasellike animal emerged from the thicket and headed upslope. Tewa groaned and started toward the undergrowth. She had wasted her last arrow and wanted it back.

She'd covered half a dozen yards when a Kootenai brave ran out from around a blind of aspens and all but tripped over her. She swung the elk horn bow and batted the brave's rifle aside. Flame and black smoke spewed from the muzzle, and the rifle ball ricocheted among the trees. The man was a head taller and fifty pounds heavier than the girl. But he was off balance and she hit him low, head-butting him in the groin. The brave gasped for air and fell over on his backside. But the gunshot had pinpointed her location. War cries rang out from three different directions. Tewa changed direction yet again and headed upslope, knowing full well her pursuers had her cornered.

The soft, shallow topsoil became patched with tabletops of gray-black stone. Aspens gave way entirely to ranks of ponderosas whose stately spires trembled in the wind. There was still hope, Tewa realized. If she could reach the top of the ridge, she might find a place to hide amid that jumble of boulders and weather-eroded ledges and cliffs.

She would have to outrun Kootenai though. And that posed a problem if they had kept their mounts. War cries sounded close at hand. No point to standing still and wondering. She broke from cover at a dead run. Thirty yards to her left, the brave she had knocked down and a companion broke through a thicket. They were both afoot. Good. She had been raised in the mountains. No man could match her in a foot race. She sprang onto the sun-washed slope and began the final leg of her ascent at a dead run.

With every yard she climbed, the men on her left fell behind. Her muscles ached, but she never slowed her pace. She gulped in the warm air and willed herself onward. Tewa heard the drum of unshod hooves on the rocky ground and glanced to the right as three more mounted Kootenai bucks galloped toward her. The air rang with their shouts of triumph.

Tewa ran with the last of her strength, her heart sinking as she veered toward a pair of massive boulders bordering a narrow gap.

The passage was wide enough to permit a single rider, and if the Kootenai tried to ride through, at least she could fight them one at a time, unless they chose to stand back and riddle her with bullets. She'd have to shame them into coming for her. It wasn't much of a chance. But it was all she had.

Tewa reached the gap and scampered through. The passage was about ten feet long and worn smooth from the runoff of melted snow. Actually the two boulders had once been one huge chunk of table rock that erosion or earthquake had split asunder.

As Tewa reached the opposite end of the passage, an arm shot out and caught her by her buckskin shirt, strangled her cry, and flung her back against the granite wall. A few dazed seconds, then her vision cleared. She raised her hands to ward off this new attacker. Her fingers closed around a Hawken rifle.

“Here!” said Jacob Sun Gift.

The woman stared in wide-eyed recognition at the yellow-haired, fair-skinned warrior who spoke her tongue and dressed as one of her father's people. “And make sure you use it on your enemies, little Tewa.”

Seeing Jacob again was startling enough. That he called her by name left her speechless.

“How …?”

Jacob didn't stay around long enough to hear the rest of the question. He scrambled up the face of the rock. Tewa watched him leave, then glanced down at the rifle in her hands. She had been chased long enough this day. She reentered the passage.

The Kootenai were a dozen yards from the gap and closing fast. Their attention focused on the shadowed passageway, they never noticed Jacob positioning himself atop the tablerock. One of the bucks brought up sharply as another horseman entered the fray.

Lone Walker bore down on the first man he saw. He had watched from the underbrush on the far side of the granite wall as the Kootenai braves had chased the hapless girl upslope. Now he attacked with all the fury of a father defending his own. He rode straight at the Kootenai and raised his Hawken rifle. The brave before him brandished a flintlock, its wooden stock outlined in brass tacks. Both weapons spoke as one. Horses collided. Lone Walker and his enemy went down in a tangle of flashing hooves and kicking limbs.

Jacob vaulted from the granite wall as the remaining two horsemen turned toward Lone Walker. Jacob tried for them both but miscalculated his leap. With a sickening snap, the bulk of his weight landed between the shoulder blades and the base of the neck of one brave. The other Kootenai escaped Jacob's grasp and rode out from the shadow of the wall. He wheeled his horse and faced the gap as Tewa fired.

The Hawken recoil shoved her back against the boulder. The Kootenai screamed, dropped his rifle, and galloped down the slope. The buck's left arm dangled uselessly at his side as he hunched forward and rode to safety. Farther down the hillside, the men afoot had already turned and fled.

Tewa strode out of the gap. She shook her fist and taunted the fleeing Kootenai. Her outcry reverberated through the hills. Jacob, for his part, staggered to his feet, happy not to have killed himself. His jaw was bruised from where he had clipped his chin on the skull of the man he had landed on. The Kootenai lay at his feet, his features hidden by his raven-feather headdress. The man was dead, his neck broken.

“If you are not falling off your horse, you are causing other people to fall off theirs,” Tewa said, facing him.

Jacob started to offer a retort. His elation at finding the girl was short lived. He looked past her as Lone Walker managed to stand and stumble toward them. The horses stood and shook the dust from their coats. The Kootenai with the brass-tacked rifle did not move. Suddenly Lone Walker veered sharply and braced himself against the granite wall.

Jacob saw the powder-singed hole in the side of the shirt soaked with blood.

“Father!” Jacob brushed past Tewa and reached Lone Walker as the Blackfoot slid down to his knees, scraping his cheek on the granite. The prayer singer looked up, smiled wanly, and collapsed in Jacob's arms.

22

I
t was the last thing Wolf Lance wanted to see in the waning daylight. While the sun balanced on the forested battlements west of the divide, Tewa led Jacob and Lone Walker through the winding wooded valley and up the steep hillside to a lodge concealed in a grove of Douglas fir. Her father stood by his mount, a chestnut-colored charger, as the horse grazed contentedly. The warrior seemed rooted in place, in truth, he was shocked that his daughter had disobeyed him.

Jacob quickly appraised the girl's father as the trail climbed toward the lodge. He saw a man of average height with sloping shoulders, powerful-looking arms, and broad hands. He moved suddenly, graceful like a wolverine, took up a rifle, then leapt astride his horse, whirled the animal about, and charged down the slope. The man's intentions were openly hostile. Jacob glanced back at his father, stretched out on a travois and apparently unconscious, and rode forward to put himself between Lone Walker and this new threat.

Wolf Lance was dressed much like his daughter, in buckskin leggings and shirt, and wolf pelts draping his shoulders and forming a cowl that concealed much of his features. Wolf Lance brought his horse to a skidding halt in front of his daughter's procession.

“Tewa … what have you done?” Wolf Lance blurted out. Dust drifted on the wind. Shadows lengthened on the land.

“See for yourself, Father,” Tewa said. She indicated the travois and the wounded brave supine on the makeshift litter.

Wolf Lance looked at Jacob, both angry at the young man's intrusion and quizzical as well, for Jacob was obviously a white man and yet obviously a Blackfoot. Tewa's father recognized the beaded workmanship of the Medicine Lake People, once his own.

“You ease up on that rifle,” Jacob said, blocking the way to the travois.

Wolf Lance hesitated, his finger still curled around the trigger of his flintlock. Then Tewa added, “My father, these two saved my life. I was trapped by our enemy, the Kootenai. Jacob Sun Gift and his father, Lone Walker, fought at my side.”

“Lone Walker!” Wolf Lance slipped from horseback and brushed past Jacob before the latter could reposition himself on the trail. Wolf Lance hurried to the travois, leaned his rifle against the pine sapling frame, and knelt alongside the wounded man. Lone Walker cracked a feeble smile, his eyes slitted as he looked at his old friend.

“You are not where you said you would be,” Lone Walker weakly admonished.

“I lied,” Wolf Lance replied, smiling, but his expression revealed his true concern.

Wolf Lance glanced up as Jacob's shadow fell across him.

“He needs much rest. I dug a Kootenai bullet out of his side. But I fear there is poison in him,” Jacob said.

“You speak our tongue; you dress and walk like one of the People,” Wolf Lance observed.