Lake of Fire (6 page)

“No!” Bitter Waters shouted.

Cord bit back his own cry as his father staggered, trying to grasp the wooden handle protruding from the center of his chest.

Sarah screamed. The sound seemed to bubble in her throat, a liquid agony.

His father went down.

Rushing to his mother, Cord tried to grasp her hands, but she fell silent and slumped across the body of her husband, mingling their blood where they lay. Cord gaped at the impossible sight, wondering if Jesus was holding it against him that his mother’s people had burned God’s Book.

Suddenly, smoke assailed Cord’s nostrils. Through a blur of tears, he saw one of the Nez Perce had stirred up the fire’s embers and scattered them. Flames climbed Sarah’s lace curtains and licked at the bark on the log walls. Bitter Waters snatched the painted elk hide from the foot of the bed and dragged Cord outside by the back of his nightshirt. Despite his struggles, his uncle wrapped him in the blanket and took him up with him onto a big gray horse.

Fueled by the wind, fire turned the silver night to blood. The Nez Perce leaped astride their horses and barked as they had before, the sounds echoing over the terraced river bottom. Cord looked at the full moon that seemed to fall endlessly through a bank of scudding clouds and listened to the unearthly howling that had wakened him only minutes and a lifetime before.

His home collapsed in a shower of sparks.

A
re you going to sleep all day?” Cord called to the slender woman in his bedroll. Dawn barely grayed the eastern horizon, reflected in the smooth surface of Jenny Lake. She did not answer.

The fire he had built blazed merrily. He dumped coffee into cold water and put it on to boil, his hands still shaking from the nightmare. No, not a dream, but the unvarnished truth that came back to haunt him when he least expected it. He had awakened gasping, while scalding tears poured across his temples. Quickly, he’d bitten his lip to silence himself.

He looked at the sticks being consumed by the campfire and closed his eyes.

His life forever divided into the time before and the time after … Riding to a neighboring ranch in the wagon behind the team. His father handing over the reins to Cord’s small hands, even though his mother said
he must pass another snow before he was big enough. Sarah coming in from her garden, a paring knife in one hand, a bowl of cabbages and carrots propped on her hip … a smudge of mud on the tip of her nose. The warming scent of a winter stew, made with dried vegetables held over from summer’s bounty.

How could fate have let his father’s gun malfunction and kill his mother … How could hate between white men and Nez Perce have driven Bitter Waters to think Sarah would leave her husband? What a terrible fortune was Cord’s; his mixed blood set him up to be despised by members of both races.

A raven’s harsh call from a nearby fir was answered by another across the dark surface of Jenny Lake.

Cord left the fire and went to check on Dante. He rubbed the soft black nose, and the horse bent to sniff his pockets. “Sorry, fella.” He wished he’d brought some of Dante’s favorite molasses candy.

Although Cord had taken his saddle and tack off, he hadn’t tethered him for the night. The stallion wouldn’t wander, and he wanted to give Dante a fighting chance if a bear happened along. Plucking his bridle from a nearby aspen limb, he slipped the bit deftly between the horse’s lips and adjusted the straps.

The simple labor pleased him. No matter how much time he spent in cities, his heart would always be in these mountains.

Catching a whiff of coffee on the pungent, pinescented air, he was tempted to break out his rod and catch some breakfast trout. Grilled over hot coals
until the skin crisped, the fish would make a succulent meal.

Unfortunately, the rising light reminded him daylight was wasting. He walked back to the patch of soft sand and the bedroll where the woman … Laura … still slept. The curve of her lashes shadowed her cheek.

How much easier it would be if he still believed she was a boy.

“Time to get up!”

Laura gasped at the deep voice and at the needles and lances of pain that struck her body from riding all day yesterday. Another not-too-gentle prod in the side, and she realized Cord stood over her, his long legs spread.

“What’s the rush?” she snarled. “It’s not even sunrise.”

“I don’t know about you, but I need to be on the road.” Though his tone was curt, a little curl of his hair stood up from sleeping on it; the errant strand made him look vulnerable.

“All right, all right.” She’d slept in her clothes, so she was decent enough to push back the blankets and stagger to her feet. The insides of her thighs and her buttocks felt as if she had been flayed from hours riding bareback on Dante’s rump.

Cord knelt and rolled the sheepskin bedding with
swift efficient movements. Scooping up the blankets, he headed toward his horse.

Stiffly, Laura moved to open the pack he’d taken food from yesterday, finding jerky and dried fruit, as well as a cloth sack of cornmeal. Digging deeper, she came up with a comb made of bone. With haste, while Cord was loading Dante, she untangled the knots in her hair and smoothed it over her shoulders.

She walked down to the shore, cupped shockingly cold water, and washed her face. The clear lake lapped gently at her boots. Atop a nearby boulder, a striped chipmunk chattered.

This time yesterday, she’d been sleeping in peace while Angus bedded down on the high driver’s seat. Today, she appreciated how easily she could have died, at the coach or in the numbing rush of the Snake. This land was truly as violent as the man who’d dispatched the gut-shot outlaw.

If she had her journal, she would capture every detail.

Her ablutions complete, Laura followed the aroma of coffee to the fire. Cord still occupied himself with the saddlebags, while she put the comb away in his pack. When she reached deep to replace it where she’d found it, her hand brushed something sharp.

Carefully, her fingers traced the contours of the object. Not a knife; it was cold and smooth, almost slick to the touch. The ragged edge opened out into a thicker girth with almost-squared ends. It felt like an irregular piece of broken glass, but it was too weighty
to be a chunk of even the finest crystal.

Laura drew it out and recognized the material as obsidian. A professor friend of her father had a drawer of the black volcanic glass, each piece in a tray labeled with the locality and date he had collected it. She raised the stone and rubbed the smooth side against her cheek where it warmed perceptibly.

“May I?”

Laura jumped. She looked up, but Cord’s eyes were as opaque as the black glass he gestured her to hand to him.

She placed it on his palm.

Cord looked down at the obsidian and heard the ring of Bitter Waters’s voice. “Your spirit is weak. You were raised far from the People.”

His uncle’s wife, Kamiah, burst out talking from where she prepared dinner on the other side of the rough canvas shelter in Yellowstone … the place they had ridden to after his family and home had been destroyed. Although Sarah had taught Cord the Lord’s Prayer and some other words in Nez Perce, most of what small-boned, fragile-looking Kamiah said was unintelligible to him. Thankfully, Bitter Waters spoke a stilted formal English that sounded as though he’d been taught by a Britisher.

Kamiah gestured at Bitter Waters in apparent anger, a dusting of camas flour falling from her hands
onto the tule rush mat on the earth. The starchy root was one of their staple foods. Boiled and mashed, baked in a pit of hot coals, or dried and pounded into flour, the roots of the camas were harvested in summer but used year-round.

Notwithstanding his wife’s protest, the hard expression remained on his uncle’s sun-beaten features. “She thinks we should not send you out into these mountains, that we should wait until we have reached safety in the land of the Crow … or in Canada.” He did not speak of the prospect of being captured by the Army of the United States. “But women and children of the People have died on this journey, many on the battlefield at Big Hole where we had to abandon our tipis.”

Leaning back on his heels, Bitter Waters delivered his verdict. “As no one is given tomorrow, you will seek your guardian spirit tonight.”

And so, alone in the backcountry, Cord had hugged himself against the night wind and watched the moon rise over the jagged tops of Castor and Pollux, the highest peaks in the Absarokas. From the place Bitter Waters had left him, on a bare mountain peak covered in loose cinders, the enormous coin of moon appeared tinged red by the smoke of late summer forest fires.

Could that bloody orb be his
wayakin?

His mother had taught Cord that in the Nez Perce way, a spiritual protector revealed itself in many and varied forms. A jackrabbit might pause to sniff at the wind, a distant mountain peak might catch the
illumination of the setting sun, or a
hohots
—a grizzly—could happen by.

Sarah had told Cord how Heinmot Tooyalakekt, or Chief Joseph, as the white men called him, had discovered his
wayakin
in the hills overlooking the Wallowa Valley. After ten-year-old Heinmot had watched and waited for five suns without food or water, a storm poured fury upon the peaks, sending down jagged lightning bolts and rain that soothed his parched throat. Thereafter, Heinmot was known as Thunder Rolling in the Mountains.

Twelve-year-old Sarah Tilkalept had wandered alone for a day and a night on her own pilgrimage, until the crisp tinkling of water pouring over a ledge of sandstone attracted her to a crystal pool. From that day forward, she adopted the name of her guardian spirit, Falling Water.

Hours passed. Cord watched and waited for a sign.

He steeled himself against his hunger and thirst, and tried to stay awake, lest the spirit pass him by while he slept. Repeatedly, he nodded, his head falling forward with a jerk that brought him back to that twilight between wakefulness and sleep.

Suddenly, before his widened eyes, flames belched from the surrounding mountains, great pillars of fire rising to heaven. Liquid lava, cherry red, ran thick and viscous down the broad slopes, cooling and breaking into great blocks. Violent explosions threw vast clouds into the air, to the very edge of the inky night.

Ash and rocks rained on the green valley, burying
even the tallest trees beneath a deep suffocating blanket.

In a single heartbeat, more than a thousand cubic miles of earth blew up into a roiling gray column that seemed to have a life of its own. Pyroclastic flows filled the canyons and valleys while smoking lava poured into the vast vacant chamber left by the explosion.

More eruptions followed, though not as great as the first cataclysm.

Cold winds came to the land, blowing down from the Arctic. Snow fell for many years. Vast mountains of ice ebbed and flowed, carving out valleys and leaving streams cut off to cascade to the valleys below. The glaciers left great grooves and dragged boulders hundreds of miles, only to leave them behind like a child’s forgotten building blocks.

Beneath the earth, hot magma continued to roil. Sounds of steam hissing and whistling, and the rumbling and splashing of geysers punctuated the simpler sounds of the wind soughing in the trees.

And falling water.

Young Cord awakened with a start. Below him in the moonlight, the broad central plateau of the park spread beyond the foothills of the mountains. Yellowstone Lake filled the center of the depression he had dreamed was a lake of fire.

The vision must have come from his
wayakin
, but what form did the spirit take? A jay calling a warning? The thundering bison herd stampeding before being buried by superheated ash? Perhaps he was guarded by the cold, blue sheen of glacier ice.

Cord dreaded going back to Bitter Waters without finding his
wayakin
. His mother had told him some lost children never found a spiritual protector.

Suddenly, the moonlight fell onto a pair of yellow eyes glowing in the darkness. Cord stared into the night for a long time, until the rough shape of a wolf emerged. Hackles raised, the animal crouched and began to stalk.