Lord Grizzly, Second Edition (4 page)

The wind slipped in under Hugh's buckskin hunting shirt and brushed the gray hairs over his back and gave him a sudden rash of itching goose-pimples. “This child don't feel easy,” he muttered to himself. Looking up at the sky, he was surprised to see that the stars were gone, and that in the renewed darkness, a darkness even deeper than before, the trees and the Ree picket fence had disappeared. “In this country, if it ain't mosquitoes it's goose-pimples.”

Even as he spoke a notched spear of blue flaming lightning stroked out of the southwest sky high up and near. The lightning stabbed into the close tumbled hills, then flat-handed them with a loud quick spank of thunder.

“Storm,” Hugh said. “Now what?”

The wind relieved the ponies of the terrible mosquitoes, only to fill them with fear of an onrushing storm. The ponies neighed shrilly, and stomped in the plaffing sand, and drew back tight on their tie-ropes, and tried to gallop about despite tight rawhide hobbles. In the pitch dark only the spotted ponies could be made out, though sometimes Hugh wasn't sure whether it was ponies or spots before his eyes.

Hugh reached back a hand and touched the shoulder of his comepanyero sleeping near, the lad Johnnie Gardner. Johnnie's buckskin shirt was soft with sleep's sweat and buffalo grease. “Johnnie. Wake up, lad. Johnnie.”

“Huh?” Johnnie rose out of his rest with his flintlock already in hand, finger crooked around the trigger. “What? Where's the varmints?”

“Down, you wild rabbit you. You want a second part through your topknot?”

“Oh. What's up, Hugh, old hoss?”

“Storm comin' up. Slide along low now and wake up Dave Howard and George Flager and Wes Piper. And a couple more of the boys, Jim Clyman and Reed Gibson maybe, and make fast the ponies. They'll sceer if it blows dust-devils. Or rains too much lightnin'. And stay down.”

Johnnie was awake at last. “Boys back yet?”

“No, consarn it. But I heard a bad yell about an hour ago. I'm feared they had trouble.”

“Not gone under?” It was too dark to make out Johnnie's lean face, dusky with its day-old beard, but the whites of his eyes almost glowed the way they owled up at Hugh.

There was another jab of lightning; then a quick low blat of thunder.

The wild ponies squealed.

“I dunno.” Hugh motioned impatiently in the dark. “Get, now, and slide along like a good snake and get them ponies in hand. March!”

Johnnie crawled away on hands and knees. Hugh could hear his young companyero gliding along quietly, could hear him gently waking the boys. Some of the boys woke with a start like Johnnie's, sure the red devils were upon them at last and they about to go under.

Two huge drops of rain the size of well-chewed wads of tobacco plakked onto Hugh, one hitting the buckskin over his back and the other on his game leg. Then huge drops by the hundreds, by the thousands, pelted down. And the pushing wind became loud and bold, and it whined in the cottonwoods overhead and then in among the men, blowing pluming veils of fine grit sand over them, blinding, and at last waking them all, lashing them up into quick hands-over-the-face protective gestures. Some jerked down old wool hats and wolfskin caps, some lifted up hunting shirts over neck and head.

“Storm is right,” Hugh said, ducking flintlock and horse pistol and powder pouch around under his body.

Wham! A great ball of eerie whiteblue fire slammed into the sand bars immediately in front of Hugh, igniting the sand into a momentary molten glow of redgold.

In the thundering welter, in the intermittent lightning, Hugh's quick eye caught sight of two forms sliding over the sand bar, coming across the gap between the Ree barricade and his cottonwood butt, coming directly toward him, crawling right over where the lightning had just hit. Indians? Red devils? Sneaking up under the cover of all the heavenly shooting? Quick as the thought itself, Hugh trained his flintlock on them, left hand capped protectively over flint and the powder in the frizen.

He got ready to pull the hair trigger, when an urgent voice whuskered hoarsely across to him. “Hugh! Hugh! Don't shoot! It's us.”

“‘Us' who? Or sure's you're born you're headed for wolfmeat.”

“Hugh! It's us! Jim and Augie! Companyeros!”

“Whaugh! Climb in. And don't be slow about it. And lucky you are too. Because I took as fine a bead on your noddle as I ever took on a squirrel's eye.”

Jim Anderson and August Neill hunched toward him, bumping Hugh with their elbows and rifle butts as they slithered past him on their bellies and forted up with him behind the cottonwood butt. They were puffing. Their eyes were wide with fright, so wide Hugh could make them out in the dark without the aid of lightning. There was an oily herb-aromatic boary smell about the slim wiry lads, a smell they'd no doubt picked up while womaning with the Ree maidens.

Hugh asked, “Well, had enough of squaw meat now?”

“Hugh,” Jim Anderson said.

“You dumb nuts, stickin' behind so long. If a blackbird had your brains he'd fly backwards.”

“Hugh,” Jim said.

“Yeh?” Hugh grunted. “By the bye, where's Aaron Stephens?”

“That's what I was tryin' to tell you. Aaron's gone under.”

“What? Lost his hair?”

“Stabbed in a lodge and skulped.”

In a flash of lightning Hugh got a quick look at Jim Anderson's drawn haggard face. Jim looked puke-sick. “Then I did hear that yelp then.”

Augie Neill said, “They were like to get us too, only we saw them runnin' the kids and the old women and the dogs to the far side of the villages. And the braves were puttin' on red warpaint. Old Chief Grey Eyes too.”

“So that's why we ain't heard the dogs all night. There's trouble ahead all right. They mean war, or this child don't know sign.”

“That's what we was thinkin',” Augie said, his face showing that he too was shaken to the roots by what he had seen—a pounce and then a death. “So we pulled stakes pronto.”

Old Hugh thought a moment. “We better let the general know about Aaron. And that the red devils mean trouble soon's it's light. Lead and arrers will be as thick as a blizzard afore long.” Hugh kept squinting past the cottonwood butt, shivering under the hitting rain. Hugh could feel water trickling along the skin under his beard. It made him think of biting graybacks. “Augie, while all this commotion is goin' on, I want you to swim out to the gen'ral's boat and warn him. Tell him I think we ought to get up all the men and pull out with the ponies to high ground. That's my advice.”

“Now?” Augie asked. “Swim over in the cold and dark now?”

“We ain't got a skiff here. So you'll have to swim.”

“Why not Jim here?”

“What? Ye turned squaw now?” Hugh barked.

Augie hated to go. “Can't it wait awhile?”

“By the beard of bull barley, lad, ye're the ones as saw the kids and squaws and dogs hid. And saw the chiefs puttin' on red clay, didn't ye?”

“True enough,” Augie said reluctantly. “All right. I'll go. Shall I tell him Aaron's dead then?”

“What else? Unless the Resurrection has commenced in the meantime.”

Shortly after Augie Neill left, the storm quit, the sky became silent, the cottonwood leaves fell to whispering, and the restless mustangs took to flailing their whistling tails at the mosquitoes again. Hugh slapped at mosquito bites on his neck and under his chin and over the backs of his hands. He hit the back of his right hand so hard he almost pulled the trigger.

A quick series of yipping animal sounds, then of bird calls, came to them from the Ree picket fence.

“Listen,” Hugh said, cocking his grizzled head.

Jim listened; said after a moment, “Signals, them is. They're callin' to each other.”

Hugh put his ear to the ground. “They're movin' their horses too,” he grunted. “Just what I was afraid of. Well, it's the butcher shop for sure now at dawn.”

Jim shivered and his eyes half-closed over.

“Jim,” Hugh snapped, “Jim, I want you to make sure all the men're awake, every dag one of them, and tell ‘em to dry their flint and frizen and make sure of their charge.”

Jim said, “Maybe we should let the ponies go and get the devil aboard the boats again.”

“What, show tail to the red devils? Not in this country we don't, not if we want to live in it. If we do, every red nigger up the river, the Blackfeet and the Minnetaree, even our friends the Mandans, will know about it and then we'll really be in a fix.”

The quick thunderhead moved north. Stars came out. Then the delayed dawn opened up the east at last, and light came up all around them like a lamp turned up rapidly in a dark room. The cottonwood butt, the sand ahead, the picket fence curving around and slightly above them, and then the live cottonwoods beyond showed up clear and true in the crisp pink light.

The moiling Missouri came up clear too, below the island, spreading wide and immense to where its shoal waters lapped a cutbank a half-mile away. The tan river was almost wide and mighty enough to suggest a little of the earth's curvature. Ripples raced, eddies curled and uncurled, and tiny foaming whirlpools appeared and disappeared and reappeared. Floating uprooted trees and caught snags and riding sawyers sloshed about like old skeletons in a half-submerged dinosaur boneyard. A low roushing sound rose from the wrestling waters. Far over, on a sand bar in a farther shoal, the body of a blue heron hovered above the water, its stick legs lost in the distant perspective. The sharp cutbank of the far shore lifted abruptly into sleek-grassed tufted tumuli. And above them rose the rolling bluffs of the endless Dakota prairie lands.

Hugh saw Jim crawling in among the men, saw the men give one wild look around and then recharge their priming pans. There weren't enough cottonwood butts and other driftwood boles to go around; so some of the men barehanded began to scoop out low trenches in the sand bar. The men with the wild Indian ponies carefully kept horseflesh between themselves and the bristling Ree picket fence. The oncoming red dawn deepened the colors of the ponies, making gray a gun-barrel blue, and white a flashing silver, and chestnut a vivid maroon. The manes and tails of the ponies glowed like fox brush in firelight. Most of the ponies were broomtail hammerheads, though a few of the stallions were handsome. All were grassers and all were as mean as Satan.

Augie came back, dripping from his swim in the swift Missouri. He slid along the grit sand, the sand sticking in patches to his wet buckskins. “The general says not to worry, Hugh.”

Hugh glared at Augie. “Not to worry? Can't he read sign?”

Augie's young freckled face was mottled blue with river cold. Before Old Hugh's fierce whiskered glare, Augie's brown eyes slid off to one side. He shrugged. “Well, the gen'ral says he's goin' to take Grey Eyes' word for it that the Rees mean to keep peace with the Great White Chief. He thinks Grey Eyes'll honor his pledge.”

“Pledge! Might as well take the pledge of a snake. What a curious fix we're in now. The gen'ral's green as grass and the Rees have put on warpaint as red as buffalo blood and—”

A rifle popped from behind the Ree barricade. There was a quick whistling sound and then a groan behind Hugh. Hugh whirled around just in time to see Johnnie Gardner stagger against a sorrel pony. Johnnie's eyes rolled and he grabbed at his belly. The sorrel pony snorted; tried to rear away from Johnnie. But Johnnie grabbed the yellow mane and hung on. Men all around on the ground instinctively cowered in their shallow trenches.

“Johnnie!” Hugh yelled. “Johnnie lad! Down with ye. Down you darn fool. I told ye . . . oh! the boy's been hit mortal.”

A whole series of shots rang out then, one after the other, irregularly, the balls whistling by overhead. More groans escaped Johnnie and he pitched ahead in two little forward motions. Feathered arrows sailed in, whistling; hit the sorrel pony with dull punking sounds.

“Them red devils got my Johnnie lad!” Hugh groaned. He blinked his eyes. “Poor devil. Hit by so many balls he's been made a riddle of.”

There were more erratic shots, this time coming from all points along the circling Ree barricade. A deadly crossfire poured in among the exposed mountain men. Puffs of smoke rose in the wet air and slowly floated northward across the picket fence and above the breast-shaped dirt-covered lodges behind the fence.

The mountain men dodged and cursed. They began to return irregular fire. They reloaded methodically, swiftly, pouring in powder, driving home the patched ball with hickory wiping stick.

Another mountain man finally got hit. His slow writhing on the sand set off a howl of triumph from behind the Ree picket fence. When still another mountain man was hit, the Ree warwhoops rose to a shrill earsplitting crescendo.

“Listen to that horrible hubbub,” Jim Anderson said, shivering. “It's enough to curdle your blood into fly pepper.”

Hugh said, “Fust time ye heard it, is it, lad? Wait'll ye hear the Ree death cry. Right after he's skulped ye with a whole pack of cheerin' squaws lookin' on.”

The ponies smelled blood; began to whistle shrilly. They plunged from one end of their rawhide tethers to the other and in desperate terror shat quick mounds of steaming droppings and pawed at the moon.

“Rise and shine, boys!” Hugh yelled. “It's hard doin's now.”

Carefully studying the puffs of smoke and flashes of fire coming out of the Ree cottonwood pickets, Hugh thought he saw a movement at the foot of a particularly large upright barked pole. After a second he saw a red-streaked oldpenny face peer out at him. The dark cherry eyes danced wildly; the sensitive mobile mouth was drawn up into a ferocious pout. It was a Ree and he wore a warrior's headdress—the thighbone of a hawk caught in braids over the temple and standing up on each side of the head like horse ears. Hugh aimed Old Bullthrower carefully; fired. The red-streaked wild-eyed face vanished.