Nan Ryan (27 page)

Only then did he turn over and float toward the bank. He was so weary and so chilled to the bone he had to struggle to make it back up to the rocky cliffs to where he’d left his trousers. He didn’t bother with putting the pants back on. Holding them wadded and clutched to his groin, he walked back to his tipi.

Wet, cold, and utterly exhausted, Starkeeper sank down to his bed of fur and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Chapter 25

They walked together under the rising sun of the new day, Golden Star and her grandson. Starkeeper respectfully adjusted his customary longstrided steps to the slow, short ones of his aged grandmother. Solicitously he held her arm, steadying her, but she was the one to choose their destination.

Stifling a yawn, the tall, sleepy man carefully hid his irritation at being awakened so early. The intrusion had been no surprise. He had expected as much.

At daybreak Starkeeper had come instantly awake when Golden Star softly called his name from just outside the closed flap of his canvas tipi. Agilely he had rolled up from his soft bed, hurriedly dressed, and come out to meet her.

“We will walk together, Grandson,” Golden Star said as the first gray light of dawn delineated the eastern horizon.

Starkeeper nodded and took her arm, knowing what was in store for him, dreading it: a probing interrogation followed by a scathing lecture.

The pair made their sure, unhurried way to a spot on the river where they’d spent many golden hours together when Starkeeper was a child. It was a place of eye-pleasing beauty, and at this early-morning hour a mist rose from the placid waters. A few wild irises and sturdy cattails still graced the grassy banks. From somewhere nearby a sweet-voiced western mockingbird greeted the brand-new day. Golden Star and her grandson stood silent in the peaceful glade, she nostalgic, he impatient.

When she spoke, Golden Star said, “I remember the first summer we came here to this place. So long ago. When you were only eight—yesterday.”

Starkeeper said nothing. He exhaled when finally she took his hand and pointed, indicating where she wished to sit. With his help she was finally settled comfortably on the ground, her brittle back resting against a smooth rise of rock which was decorated with crude carvings made by a small boy with his first hunting knife. Starkeeper dropped to the ground before her.

With no preamble, Golden Star said, “Who is this pale beauty? Why have you brought her here? What have you done, Grandson?”

Starkeeper’s dark eyes squarely met the shrewdly alert ones of his aged inquisitor. He told Golden Star most of what had happened, omitting the fact that he had been beaten with an ax handle. Like any proud Shoshoni male, Starkeeper had, from the time he was a boy, instinctively concealed from others his personal hurts and disappointments.

So, leaving out the bodily injury done him, he started with the hot day he was prospecting alone in the Colorado mountains and saw the mountain lion being needlessly beaten. He concluded with last night, when he and his beautiful captive had ridden into Wind River.

The old Indian woman listened carefully, by turns nodding, frowning, gritting her teeth, and shaking her head in anger and despair. But when she spoke, it was not to offer sympathy to the grandson who had been trapped and chained by the white man.

“Starkeeper”—she addressed him with narrowed black eyes—“I am ashamed of you as I have never been before. Why did you seize the pale woman? You say she is the one who set you free. She offered you mercy, compassion. Why would you punish her for extending kindness, for turning you loose?”

“I haven’t harmed her, Grandmother. She was frightened in the beginning, but that couldn’t be helped.” Shame nagged at him as he explained the reason for his less than sterling behavior. No one on this earth could make him feel quite as guilty as this tiny Shoshoni woman he loved and respected. “I took her as bait to draw out the man who caught and chained me. The pale beauty is his woman; he’ll come after her. When he does—”

“I think not,” Golden Star interrupted.

“Yes, he will. I know he’ll—”

“That is not what I mean, Grandson.” She again cut him short. “I believe there is another, far more selfish reason that you took her from that train.”

Starkeeper shrugged wide shoulders. “What other reason could there possibly be?”

She said bluntly, “You want her for yourself.”

Stung by the accusation, which was uncomfortably close to the truth, Starkeeper at last turned his head and looked away. “No, I don’t,” he said in that flat monotone. But his dark eyes held a trace of melancholy when he added, “She means nothing to me.”

“If that is so,” cautioned Golden Star, “then you must make it plain to her.”

His head snapped around. “Jesus, I can’t make it any clearer.”

“Since when do you swear before your elders!” she snapped back at him. Then, softening, she smiled at the grandson she loved more than life itself. “A woman is a thing not to be understood,” she told him with quiet authority. “While it is true that the pale beauty does not hold you in great esteem, she
is
attracted to you. She is, I am afraid, helplessly drawn to you.”

Starkeeper’s handsome face hardened. “Grandmother, the curiosity of beautiful white women is something I’ve been used to since my first week in college.”

The old woman nodded. “So you have, so you have,” she said thoughtfully. Her eyebrows lifted questioningly, and she touched her grandson’s knee. “Perhaps this one is different?”

“No,” he assured her with a bitter edge to his voice, “this pale beauty is exactly like all the others.”

By noontime on that first day at the Wind River Reservation, Diane was aware that Starkeeper was purposely avoiding her. She knew as well that it was more for his sake than for hers. He had no real regard for her; that wasn’t the reason he stayed away. It had nothing to do with honor and respect and a wish to keep her safe, even from himself.

No.

It was because of the fierce, undeniable physical attraction that existed between them. Diane reasoned that ironically, had the handsome, sensual Starkeeper been
less
attracted to her, more than likely he would have casually made love to her by now. Such a deduction might be a somewhat conceited view, but it was a correct one nonetheless. The reason she could see it so clearly was that she felt much the same way about him. The mutual attraction was so potent, so powerful it was unsafe for them to be alone together.

So Diane was relieved that Starkeeper apparently meant to stay away from her. At least she told herself she was relieved. But after she had been at Wind River for two full days without once seeing that tall, commanding lithe frame approaching her, or looking into those beautiful black eyes, or hearing that deep, intriguing voice, Diane realized, regretfully, that she missed him.

Her attempts at trying not to think about him were hopeless since Golden Star spoke of little else. From the talkative old woman Diane learned that Starkeeper had gone away to the Carlisle Indian School in far-off Pennsylvania when he was just thirteen. It was there that he had learned to speak English.

“My grandson is trilingual, you know,” Golden Star told Diane, beaming with pride. “He speaks his native Shoshoni, English, and Spanish, all fluently. He’s a very intelligent man.”

“I’m sure he is.”

“And a patient one!” That appealing child’s merry laugh erupted from Golden Star’s lips. “He taught me to speak English, and my head”—she touched her skull with an arthritic forefinger—“is very hard. I do not learn quickly. But never once did Starkeeper raise his voice,” Golden Star mused, sighing. “Such a sweet young boy. Such a dear—”

As if she had been questioned, Golden Star told Diane that Starkeeper’s father had been a mighty warrior chief. Chief Red Fox’s Shoshoni tribe had lived in the Nevada Territory. “The chief had come one summer for a visit with his Wind River kinfolks.” Golden Star paused, and her black eyes disappeared into folds of wrinkled flesh as she smiled in fond remembrance. “The chief was thirty years old and very strong and very handsome, and he had no wife. So all the winsome young Wind River maidens buzzed around him like bees after sweet pollen in the springtime.” Her eyes opened, and she looked at Diane. “But Chief Red Fox saw the shy, beautiful sixteen-year-old Daughter-of-the-Stars—my precious only child—and fell immediately in love with her. The two of them were married within a week and Chief Red Fox took my daughter back to his Nevada village.”

All traces of her smile disappeared as Golden Star went on to say that when Starkeeper was only three years old, Chief Red Fox was ambushed and killed by the hated Arapahos. The grieving Daughter-of-the-Stars brought her young son home to Wind River. Only twenty-two when she lost her husband, Daughter-of-the-Stars never married again. When Starkeeper was a happy, healthy boy of ten, Daughter-of-the-Stars fell ill with a fever and died.

Diane listened intently, fascinated, longing to solve some of the dark mystery that was Starkeeper. She was not surprised when Golden Star told her that her grandson had made such high marks at Carlisle he was accepted into the Colorado School of Mines when he was only sixteen and that he had earned a degree in geology by the time he turned twenty.

“My grandson is very bright,” Golden Star again pointed out, “a brilliant man.”

Diane knew instinctively that the way to learn the most about the enigmatic Starkeeper was to allow his grandmother to tell—without being prodded—those things about him which she wanted to reveal. So, with effort, Diane was patient when the aged woman lapsed into silence or lost her train of thought or skipped back and forth from present to past, leaving her waiting anxiously for an explanation that never came.

But she couldn’t keep from asking one question. “Golden Star, when Starkeeper and I arrived at Wind River, you asked if I was from Nevada. Why would you think that?”

Those shrewd black eyes pinned Diane. “I did not know at the time the circumstances of your meeting. I thought … I hoped you were.… Nevada is my grandson’s home.”

“Oh? He lives there with his father’s people?”

Golden Star shook her head. “All of Chief Red Fox’s people have gone on to the Great Mystery.” Almost immediately she preened and stated, “My grandson owns a big, fine mansion in Nevada. He is a very rich man.”

“Is he?” Diane replied, hiding her skepticism. She serfously doubted that Starkeeper was wealthy. What pathetic definition of wealth could have had him alone up in the wilds of Colorado wearing breechcloth and moccasins? She waited, thinking Golden Star might elaborate, tell more about his Nevada home or how he made all his money.

But she didn’t.

Distracted by other thoughts crowding into her mind, Golden Star forgot entirely that she had been talking about Starkeeper’s home in Nevada. She got off on the topic of when he was a young man. Back when he had just passed his sixteenth birthday and gone away to college.

“… and he had the most beautiful black braids,” Golden Star said, smiling, “just like satin.” Abruptly a veil seemed to fall over her wrinkled face, and her expression became cold. She turned glittery black eyes on Diane and said, “Do you know what happened to my grandson that first day he walked up the steps at the Colorado School of Mines?”

“No, Golden Star. What happened?”

The old woman’s bottom lip began to tremble, and her eyes snapped with rage. “A gang of white boys held Starkeeper down and cut off those beautiful black braids.”

Diane’s expressive eyebrows drew together, and her violet eyes deepened to purple. “No!” she exclaimed, horrified. “Starkeeper told you they actually cut—”

“I see you know nothing about my proud grandson,” Golden Star impatiently interrupted. “Starkeeper was not the one who told me. Starkeeper would
never
have told me about such a thing!”

Day three at Wind River.

Diane and Golden Star went down to the river at mid-morning. Diane washed her long raven hair and let it dry in the sun while the aged Indian woman talked of the days gone by, of carefree, happy summers when she herself was young and pretty. Of long, cold winters when several friendly tribes would occupy the same stream and there was plenty of food and the big winter camp would be a place of constant rest and enjoyment.

But no matter where Golden Star’s conversations began, they always returned to Starkeeper. Starkeeper swathed to the chin in his cradle, peering out at everything from his mother’s back. Starkeeper as a young boy learning to become a tracker and hunter—essentials for becoming a good provider. Starkeeper learning skill, endurance, and daring. And, most important of all, the ability to withstand pain. Mental as well as physical.

With a chuckle Golden Star told of how the young, quick-witted Starkeeper had learned to gamble with the aged warriors who passed their days in games of chance, how he had won a prized pony in a gambling exercise when he was just eleven. Continuing to smile, she told of how the pretty maidens had begun to take notice of Starkeeper by the time he was twelve.

Golden Star’s loud sigh filled the peaceful glade as she confided, “In the summer of his fifteenth year Starkeeper came home from Carlisle. He was as tall and strong as he is today and beautiful in the way only the very young and very innocent are beautiful.” She paused, looked embarrassed, and bowed her head. “My grandson lost a great deal of his innocence that summer.” Quickly she pointed out that he never misbehaved with any of the pretty unmarried girls of the village. He had been properly raised! He was never even alone with a maiden.