Scarlet Plume, Second Edition (33 page)

She breathed shallow.

The presence of the snakes explained something to her. With them around, it was hardly a wonder she hadn’t seen any gophers or mice the last while. In filmy reverie, smiling bemused to herself, she wondered how all those snakes could have missed that fat gopher in her dream.

She itched at the edges of her hairline. It was time to go on. She staggered to her feet.

Careful of where she walked amongst the snakes, she followed Rollo’s trail across the patch of gravel and then through more deep ripgrass.

The eagle saw her go. It fluffed its wings in disgust; then, falling from its perch, it lifted and disappeared into the northern skies.

Her toes and shins bled again. She stopped. She stared at the oozing scarlet. She would have to do something about it.

She emptied her parfleche. To her astonishment she found four strips of dried meat neatly tucked in one corner.

She stared at the dried jerky. How in God’s name had it got into her parfleche? She couldn’t for the life of her recall having packed the jerky when she escaped the Yanktons. And she certainly hadn’t taken it from that cabin in Sioux Falls. She couldn’t understand it. Couldn’t. Bible times were surely past. Another Elijah miracle was hardly likely. “And the barrel of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail.”

Well, there the jerky was and she was hungry. She should just simply accept it and eat it without worrying about where it came from.

“So many outlandish things have happened to me lately it really shouldn’t surprise me though. Live long enough and a miracle is bound to happen to you sometime.”

After a little chewing the jerky became quite savory. The four strips worked down to a little ball of tough tissue. She chewed and chewed the little ball. It retained its savor. It reminded her of one of her childhood dreams, that she could buy a piece of gum that would never lose its sweetness no matter how much she chewed it.

She stumbled down to the edge of the River Of The Rock, between some golden ash, and cupped herself a long drink to wash it down. She washed her face and hands and laved her cut, bleeding feet. The tough, dry jerky and the tepid water restored her.

Up on the riverbank gleamed a flat red rock. It gave her an idea. She spread her parfleche out on it and with a sharp-edged stone pounded and cut the parfleche in half. With a pointed stick she punched holes along the edges. She took the fringes she had saved, one for each day since her escape, and fashioned crude shoes for her raw feet. It was clumsy footwear but it would do. As for the fringes she had saved so far, well, what was the use of counting the passing days? She would get to St. Paul when she got there.

She walked on, light-headed.

She came upon a meadow where the grass had been cropped short by passing buffalo. Patches of sunflowers nodded in the soft wind. She loved the flowing wash of the sunned petals. Her brain hazed over with gold. She took one of the riper flowers and ate it. It was all a dream.

“Cannibal at last.”

Her hair itched. She was too tired to scratch the itching.

She could feel sweat gather between her shoulder blades. It trickled down her spine and then down along the inside of her legs. Splotches of sweat showed in the armpits of her weathered tunic.

She walked.

Within the hour the gnawing in her belly was back. It came with a scalding thirst in the throat. She drank more water from the warm river. It didn’t help. She kneaded the gnawing with her knuckles. She was so gaunt she could feel the buttony knob of her navel through her leather tunic. It slid around under her knuckles like a fifty-cent piece lost in the lining of a coat.

Once, looking down, she was surprised to find herself trudging along pigeon-toed through the prairie grass. It was the way Smoky Day walked. And Tinkling. And all the Yankton women. It was the manner of all women with heavy burdens to bear. She recalled the days when she used to walk with her toes pointed out a little. As in a fresh tintype she could see herself stepping briskly along in black kid button shoes down a boardwalk in St. Paul.

She watched herself walk. Yes. She now definitely walked different. Well, why not. It seemed the sensible way to walk, especially if one was weak. Walking with the toes turned in helped a body keep one’s balance. Also, it enabled one to take full advantage of the length of the foot. Walking mile after mile, every inch counted.

She followed the river north. The ridge of the Blue Mounds fell away behind her. Trees became fewer. Except where beavers had built dams, the river ran shallow.

She crossed a ford. She gave herself another long drink. She groomed her hair in the mirroring surface, retightening the rope of gold braids about her head.

A meadowlark sang from a nodding sunflower. “I am the bird of fidelity and this I know for a certainty. Relief is near!”

Memory of the gray shape came to her. She hadn’t seen it since Split Rock Creek. Casually she looked around to see if it might not have returned. It hadn’t.

The itching along her hairline became so fiendish she finally just had to dig into it with her fingernails. A scab, something, caught under a fingernail. It felt like something caught between one’s teeth. The something scab seemed to move. She held it close up. Yes, it moved. A louse. Her blue eyes widened. She looked again to make doubly sure. Yes, all its little legs were waving madly at her. Lice had awakened in her hair. The Yanktons had been lousy after all, despite Smoky Day’s assurances they were a clean people. Judith cracked the louse carefully between her thumbnails.

She found more lice, using her fingernails as a rake. She killed them too. She recalled having seen Sunflower searching through her husband, Pounce’s, hair for lice. When Sunflower found some she carefully bit into them, then ate them. A case of where the eaten turned on the eater.

She trudged on, one big toe after another.

The sun slowly eyed itself down the sky.

A pinkish-brown bird, a ruffed grouse, a hen, fluttered in the grass ahead of her. It flapped along as though one of its wings were broken, crying piteously.

It took Judith a moment to understand it was a ruse. The ruffed grouse was a mother and to protect her chicks she was trying to draw attention to herself.

Tender fowl. Meat. Judith’s tongue worked. Somewhere underfoot sat hidden a half-dozen wild pullets. She loved pullets. Mmm. A single suck on a well-done pullet leg and the meat just fell off in one’s mouth.

She searched the wind-woven grass very carefully. The pullets had to be somewhere around.

The mother became desperate. She put on an even more elaborate act of being hurt.

Judith decided the wild pullets were immediately underfoot. She knelt. She lifted first one swatch of gray-green grass, then another.

A fingertip touched a prickly fallen rose. Judith sucked at the fingertip, then nipped out a thorn with her nails.

Ah, there they were. Cleverly hidden under a burdock. All six were sitting in a row, very much like six Sioux children sitting in a Bible class, brown eyes bright, waiting for the magic word. Mmm, they looked good. Broiled over a stick fire out in the open, they would be just wonderful. The second on the right was the fattest.

She set herself. Then she pounced. She caught the one she wanted, the second on the right. The grouse pullet squealed. It struggled desperately. The other five pullets immediately fluttered up, and on a cry from the mother, dove into the grass a dozen feet away, disappearing in perfect camouflage. The mother next flew straight for Judith, bristling, beak foremost. The mother came at her with such fury Judith had to throw up an arm to protect her eyes. The mother with her pecking beak and snapping wingtips and scratching toes seemed to be everywhere at once. Judith finally had to put up both arms, and in so doing involuntarily let go of the chick. On that the attack ceased, and by the time Judith’s eyes cleared, mother and chick had also vanished in perfect camouflage.

Judith sighed. “Well, I can’t say as I really blame her. Poor creature.”

Judith tramped on. Presently the mail carrier’s trail left the River Of The Rock and went northeast up a creek valley.

Two days later, Judith came upon fresh moccasin tracks. She spotted them as she knelt for a drink in a sandy place along the creek. The moccasin tracks were clearly fresh and they belonged to a grown man. The man’s moccasins had been patched and the mark of the seam was the first to fill with water seeping up from below.

Judith snapped a quick jerking look around, so quick her neck cracked. No one was in sight.

Yet the tracks were fresh. Whoever it was had seen her coming and had quickly hidden himself. It was probably some red brute from Mad Bear’s band and playfully biding his time to scalp her.

Well, let him scalp her. She was too tired to care. She was ready for the hereafter, as ready as she ever would be.

She knelt. Nose tip touching running water, she sipped herself a slow drink.

As she rose to her feet, she spotted a plum pit lying off to one side of the moccasin tracks. The pit was fresh, still wet. Someone had spit it out only moments before.

Plums? Again she looked around to all sides, this time slowly. There were no plum trees in the little creek valley that she could see. And wasn’t it a bit late in the season for plums? In fact, too late. What was going on?

She looked down at the fresh moccasin prints again. In a vague way, forlornly, she wished she were strong again, as she was in the days when she’d helped her father make hay. Let her have that strength again and she would take a club to the Indian and kill him. Yes. Kill him. And, now that she thought of it, maybe even eat him. It certainly was an idea.

In her mind she could see herself skulking after the Indian. If he were fat, all the better. She would overtake him from the rear and bash his head in. She would have one good hearty meal at last. Broil one of his big muscular arms and slowly gnaw away on it, a hand to either end of the bone. Mmm. Good. People were fools not to eat human flesh when they were starving to death. It had to be the best meat, no? since the human being was the true end of creation. The best for the best. Yes. Her mouth watered. Nothing like a well-broiled human arm. Savor it with some sweet wild onion, sprinkle on a little ground-up rose hips, and it would make quite a delicacy.

She blinked. She caught herself standing crouched, ready to pounce, hand up as though about to strike with a club.

A most unhappy thought came to her. She stood very still, considering it, full of patience for herself. Yes. Yes. It was probably true. She knew now. She was slowly losing her mind.

She wavered on. She hardly realized she moved.

The creek ran quietly through seas of deep bluejoint. Sometimes the effect of the wind streaming through the top of the head-high grass was like a pack of bushy-tailed dogs chasing across a meadow. The sides of the valley gradually deepened. Naturally terraced bluffs and ribboned cliffs appeared. Scars of old Indian villages were visible on some of the hills, ocher spots where the green flesh was worn away. One of the bluffs, on which the sun shone just right, had the look of a freshly baked loaf of bread shiny with melted butter. There were plover everywhere and the calls of the curlew were maddening.

Ahead of her, on a slight rise of ground where a side stream came in from the north, a body lay prone in the air about a dozen feet above ground.

She stopped dead in her tracks. She was at last, truly, seeing things. She had come to the end of her rope. Her brain had snapped.

She fastened all of her attention on it. Her eyes went over the apparition piece by piece. She stood slightly humped over, trying to ride out the blow, the shock, of knowing she had gone insane.

At last, staring hotly, she saw it wasn’t an apparition after all, that it was actually an Indian wrapped in a buffalo robe. The Indian lay on some kind of platform. Four posts supported it.

It was an Indian burial out on the plains. An honored chief of some sort lay on a scaffold.

She approached it warily, looking up at it. She wondered if relatives had left food behind to sustain the chief on his long journey down the spirit road. She hoped so. She could use the food better than a dead body could.

Then she began to wonder how fresh the body was. If it was only a day or so old, she could still have herself that broiled arm after all.

She stood under it. She shook the posts supporting it. A gourd made a soft belling noise. She shook the scaffold again. A piece of buffalo fur slipped open on one side, and out rolled a white skull. The skull fell with a light thump at her feet.

She looked at the weathered skull with regret. No meat there.

A voice suddenly sounded behind her, a familiar voice. “I see that the white woman feels sad. I want to shake hands with her. That is all I have to say.”

Judith turned slowly, not wanting to see what she knew she was going to see.

Scarlet Plume. He was holding out a hand to her. There was a warm, grave smile on his wide, dark face. The usual yellow dot inside the blue circle lay on his left cheekbone.

She also saw something else. It made her wild inside. He was wearing a creamy wolfskin over his shoulders, the same wolfskin she had left behind in the brown cabin in Sioux Falls. Numbly she realized he had been following her all along. He was the gray shape that had been haunting her.

4

She was caught.

She flew at him in a fury. She tried to scratch him, hit him, bite him.

Scarlet Plume suffered her.

Soon the little strength she had left was expended, and she fell at his feet in a heap.

He stood looking down at her. A smile wavered on his warm, liberal lips. “I see that the Woman With The Sunned Hair has painted herself for a dance in a special way. There are roses of starvation upon her skin.”

She lay quivering.

“Also I see that she has come to honor the grave of stranger dead.”

Sioux words burst from her. “Why do you bury your dead in midair? So that anybody can find the body?”

“Let the white man hide his dead in the ground if he is ashamed of them. That is his way. But the red man keeps his dead in sight so that he may remember them. That is his way.” The scarlet plume at the back of his head twiggled a little in the soft breeze. “Later, when the flesh has departed, and there is nothing left but the bones, then the red man returns the bones to the earth his mother.”