The High Rocks Page 11

  “It wouldn’t surprise me if He did.” I returned my gun to its holster and stuck the Colt inside my belt. Then I stood back. “Get going.”

  The bounty hunter remained motionless, eyeing me suspiciously.

  “What in hell do you think you’re doing?” Bear approached on foot, leading his horse and carrying the Spencer.

  Near the burning cabin, Little Tree had gotten up out of the snow and was watching the scene with glittering black eyes. Her face, although round, was smooth and unwrinkled and somewhat pleasant. Her ordeal hadn’t seemed to upset her as much as might be expected, but then she was living with the most dangerous man in the Northwest and was probably used to such conditions.

  “Now we’re even,” I told Church. “Pick up your friend and go.”

  “What about my gun?” he asked.

  “I’m fair,” I said. “I’m not stupid. You need something to shoot game, you’ve got Strakey’s pistol.”

  He stood his ground a moment longer, watching me, or so I thought, in his cockeyed fashion. Then he nodded. “We left our horses on the other side of the mountain.” He turned to see to his partner.

  Old man Strakey’s hands and face had gotten the worst of the burning; blisters the size of Michigan cherries were beginning to swell on the skin. But he got up with Church’s help and staggered off supported by the bounty hunter, his tattered clothes still smoking. When their backs were turned, Bear raised his rifle and sighted down the barrel. I grabbed it and pushed it away. The scalp-hunter glared and made as if to strike me with the butt, only to check the motion when he found himself staring down the bore of my revolver.

  “I’ve got this jackass sense of honor that will probably get me killed someday,” I explained. “But he handed me my life once, and now I’m returning the favor.”

  “I’m obliged, Murdock.″ Church had stopped just past the corner of the cabin, now a flaming shell, to look back. Despite his lack of size, he appeared to have no difficulty supporting his companion’s bulk. “It won′t get you no prizes, though,” he added. “Now I only got to split that five thousand two ways.”

  Bear was forced to watch them leave while I kept him covered. When they were out of sight and my gun had been put away, he turned to the woman and barked at her in rapid Blackfoot. She replied softly in the same tongue. He nodded once, curtly.

  “Let’s ride,” he said.

  “Where to?” I asked.

  “There’s a Blackfoot village a day’s ride west of here, in the plains. I′m going to leave Little Tree with her own people until this is over. Which it would of been but for you.”

  He had his foot in the stirrup and was about to mount the dun when he arched his back suddenly and toppled backward seven feet to the ground, where he lay as lifelessly as Ira Longbow’s mutilated corpse.

  10

  The heat of the fire was terrific on the back of my neck as I loosened the rough woolen scarf that enveloped Bear’s throat beneath the collar of the bearskin. His great chest swelled with his first unfettered breath, then relaxed as he exhaled mightily. His face was flushed and slick with perspiration. He blinked and looked at me.

  “What happened?”

  “That’s my question,” I said.

  “Don’t know. Everything went gray and I felt myself going over.” He gritted his teeth and grunted as if undertaking some superhuman effort, but succeeded only in lifting his head a fraction of an inch up out of the snow. Gasping, he let it drop back. “I can’t move.” I prodded his slablike ribcage with my fist. “Feel that?”

  “No.”

  “How about this?” I smacked his left thigh with the flat of my hand.

  He shook his head.

  “Try lifting your hands.”

  His right hand came up readily. Its mate remained still at his side. Something glimmered in his clear blue eyes. Fear?

  I looked at Little Tree, who had knelt in the snow on the other side of him. “Do you speak English?”

  “Some little.” Her voice was soft, almost inaudible.

  “Help me get him into the shelter of that rock.” I jerked my head in the direction of the mountain, where internal stresses had long ago thrust a broken shard of rock several yards square away from the mountain so that it formed an awning four feet above the ground.

  We were half an hour pulling and shoving Bear’s three hundred and fifty pounds through the snow to where the sloping shelf formed a bulwark against the elements. That done, I directed the squaw to fetch my horse from among the maples at the top of the slope where I had tethered it. “We’ll stay here for tonight,” I told Bear, once I’d caught my breath. “Tomorrow we start for Staghorn.”

  “We will like hell!” Again he tried to get up, with the same results. He fell back panting.

  “That bullet you picked up is a lot deeper than you let on,” I said. “The same thing happened to the captain of my outfit at Gettysburg. He had a ball from a Confederate rifle pressing against his spine, paralyzing him. Your lead must have just shifted. If it shifts back in the right direction, you might be able to move again.”

  “And if it don’t?”

  “It will probably kill you.”

  “Can’t you get it out?”

  “I’m not even going to try. If I made a mistake, I’d either kill you or paralyze you for life. I’ve got to get you to a doctor.”

  He snorted. “Why bother? Me dying is the only way you’re going to get back to town with your scalp.”

  “That wouldn’t say much for me, would it? You’ve saved my hide twice.”

  “I reckon you was right,″ he said, after a pause.

  “About what?”

  “About that honor of yours getting you killed.”

  “Staghorn’s only a couple of days’ ride from here,” I said, ignoring the remark. “What they’ve got for a doctor is worse than no doctor at all, but if I can get you to town I may be able to send for one that can do some good.”

  “No go Staghorn,” said Little Tree.

  I looked up. She had finished tethering my mare to a stripling that grew flush with the wall of the mountain and was standing just beyond the shelf with her fists clenched at her sides. Her expression was wooden.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Bear hang.”

  “How did you find out about that?”

  She shrugged. “White man’s way. Kill men, white man hang. No go Staghorn.”

  “We don’t know that he’ll hang,” I said, and looked at Bear. “It’s your decision. You can either go to town and take your chances with the law or stay here and wait for Church.”

  “Some choice,” he growled.

  “Sorry, but I don’t have anything better to offer.”

  “Go Blackfoot village,” said Little Tree. “Medicine man there.”

  I shook my head. “I have nothing against your beliefs, but no amount of wailing and shaking of rattles is going to get that bullet out of his back. It’s Staghorn or nowhere.”

  “How you going to get me over the mountains?” challenged the scalp-hunter. “I don’t roll easy.”

  “We can fix up a litter.”

  “What you mean ‘we’?”

  “Little Tree and I. Don’t say she’s hot going; there’s a blizzard coming, and it′s been too long since I rode the Bitterroot regularly for me to attack it in weather like that without a guide. You’d be no help at all in your condition. If you decide to go, she’s coming along.”

  He didn’t like it, but there was no fighting my logic. “Ain’t you afeared all that moving might shove the bullet the wrong way?” he said, after a moment.

  “It’s a chance we have to take. But I wouldn’t worry too much about it. If it were going to shift that easily, it probably would have while we were moving you just now.”

  His brow darkened. “They why in hell did you do it?”

  At that moment, the entire front of the blazing cabin collapsed with a resounding frump, sending fiery logs rolling and skidding across the snow
. Now the structure was nothing more than a pile of burning timber with a stone chimney rising naked from one corner.

  “Would you rather we left you there to fry?” I asked him.

  He appeared to think things over. Finally he said, “You might as well go ahead and build the litter. We won’t live to see morning anyway.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  His eyes slid past my shoulder. I turned to follow his gaze. At the top of the slope, dozens of sleek gray forms milled about among the bare maples, sniffing the ground from time to time and exposing lolling red tongues to the frigid air. There were more than a hundred of them. One, a big monster with a shaggy mane and a dangling ear, stood partway down the grade with its legs straddling our trail, staring at the smoldering wreckage of the cabin as if mesmerized by the flames.

  “Didn’t take them as long to finish off that dead bounty hunter as I figured,” Bear said.

  I gave Little Tree the bowie knife and instructed her to cut some brush for a windbreak while I disposed of Ira Longbow’s body in a snowbank as far away from the shelter as possible. On her way to the scrub, the squaw picked up the Spencer from the ground where Bear had dropped it when he fell and took it along for protection from the wolves. I swept up Longbow’s revolver and stuck it into my belt beside Church’s Colt. All told, and assuming that Bear had enough ammunition on him for another full load, I estimated we had approximately forty rounds among us. If the woman and I were lucky enough to down an animal with each shot, that left us with only about sixty wolves to deal with. What was I worrying about?

  That afternoon we built a fire using sticks of unburned wood from the ruins of the cabin and left an opening a foot wide in the windbreak for the smoke to escape. Over it Little Tree cooked a neck of venison that she had rescued from a small storage cellar beneath the wreckage—we had no time for Bear’s special method of roasting—and afterward we ate in silence while snow piled up outside the shelter. I thought that if this weather continued, most of the mountain passes would soon be blocked, and wondered if perhaps the Flatheads weren’t already on their way to the plains to winter and make plans for the spring uprising, new moon or no. I didn’t dwell on it. I had enough to occupy my mind without wasting time on something over which I had no control.

  I used what brush I could rustle up to construct a litter, bound together with the last of the fringe from Bear’s buckskin shirt. When it was finished it didn’t look as if it would support his tremendous weight, but it was the best I could manage without access to the maples atop the ridge, where the wolves had bedded down to wait out the remaining daylight. We’d find out for sure tomorrow—if any of us lived that long.

  Night settled like lampblack over the mountains. Bear slept quietly beneath his blanket, Little Tree beside him wrapped in mine, while I took the first watch at the opening. I had the scalp-hunter’s Spencer across my lap.

  The warmth inside the shelter with the fire going made me drowsy. More than once I caught myself just before my chin hit my chest and was forced to scrub my face with handfuls of snow taken from outside the opening to wake up. After a while, though, even that became useless, and I dozed off around ten.

  I awoke to find the fire guttering among chunks of glowing charcoal and the snow in front of the shelter alive with wolves. Then I realized that it had been the horses’ frantic neighing that had awakened me. I started involuntarily. The movement startled a big male that had been sniffing curiously at the windbreak into going for my right hand. I jerked it back. The wolf′s jaws closed over empty air with a snap. Before it could react, I swung the Spencer around and caught it on the end of the snout with the butt. It yelped in rage and pain and lunged forward through the opening, jaws working like a sewing machine.

  Its breath was hot and rank on my face when I swung the rifle back the other way, thrust the muzzle into the thick fur at the animal’s throat, and pulled the trigger. The air exploded inside the shelter. Blood and meat and tufts of fur flew all over. The wolf slumped over me heavily, its jaws still agape, eyes wide open and glassy.

  Bear and the woman were awake—what else could they be?—but if they were talking I couldn’t hear them, because my ears were still ringing from the blast. My clothes were slimy with blood from my collar to the tops of my boots. Bits of fur floated down all around me. The air stank of cordite and something else just as strong. Burning hair. I looked down and saw that the animal’s coat was smoldering where its hindquarters had come to rest in the middle of the dying fire. Using both hands, I rolled the limp body off my legs and with some effort succeeded in pushing it out through the opening with my feet. Immediately it was fallen upon by its fellows, who tore at it and dragged it away, fighting over it among themselves. In the center of the melee, the rangy male with one limp ear lunged this way and that, drawing blood from flanks and shoulders until order was restored. Then, holding the pack at bay with threatening snarls, it stepped forward and helped itself to the bounty. At length some of the others joined in cautiously, but the majority was left to pace restlessly back and forth and watch the proceedings with twitching tails and murder in their eyes. In no time at all there was nothing left of the corpse but bones and hair.

  Little Tree insisted upon helping me off with my coat and pants, and while I huddled next to the rebuilt fire wrapped in the blanket she had just relinquished, scrubbed them in the snow outside the opening to remove the worst of the blood. The wolves, their appetites sated temporarily, eyed her from a safe distance beyond reach of the flames. Their eyes glittered greenly from time to time in the reflected firelight. When she was finished she hung the garments from the windbreak to dry.

  “Now we got one less cartridge than we had before,” Bear said. He was staring up at the stone ceiling, snug beneath his coarse-woven Indian blanket. His voice came faintly, as if from a long way off; the whining noise in my ears had only just begun to fade.

  “What should I have done? Strangle him?”

  “You got my knife, ain’t you?”

  I reached down to feel the hilt of the bowie in the top of my right boot, where I had stuck it after Little Tree had returned it to me. “I never thought about it,” I admitted. “Much as I’d have liked to try my hand at killing a full-grown timber wolf with a knife while it was gnawing happily away at my throat. Especially after that same knife had been used to cut brush.”

  He had no answer for that. Or, if he had, he kept it to himself. In any case he did not pursue the point.

  “I see to horses,” said Little Tree. She picked up the Spencer and stepped out through the opening.

  There was silence inside the shelter after that, while Bear and I listened to the wind whistle past the opening. It gusted at intervals, hooting gleefully as it buckled the fragile walls of the enclosure and blew smoke into our faces. Razor-edged blasts spat bits of snow through chinks in the windbreak.

  “I fell asleep,” I said.

  “Figured that,” Bear replied.

  “I figured you did. That’s why I admitted it.”

  The squaw returned. “Horses all right. I watch now. You sleep.”

  I was in no mood to argue. My head was throbbing and I was tired of propping my eyelids open with my thumbs. I drew the blanket up to my chin and stretched out beside the fire. I was asleep before my head hit the floor of the shelter, which was merciful, because it was frozen hard as rock.

  The blizzard was upon us in full force when we broke camp the next morning. Wind roared past our ears, whipped stinging grains of ice like bits of ground glass into our faces, whited out the landscape until it was impossible to sort out earth from sky. Under such conditions, I was glad I’d held firm on the subject of Little Tree going along to act as guide. She would ride the mare while I hauled her mate behind the big dun.

  Although the litter creaked beneath Bear’s weight when we lifted one end of it, it proved strong enough to support him, and once I had flattened the ends of the wooden supports with the blade of the bowie to form runne
rs, the entire burden slid across the surface of the snow as easily as any sled. I secured the litter with a thong to the scalp-hunter’s saddle so that it dragged behind the dun, and mounted gingerly, the way any experienced rider does when stepping into a strange pair of stirrups. The big horse fidgeted beneath the rig and the unfamiliar weight on its back, but at a word from its prostrate master it adjusted itself grudgingly to the situation. I stroked its sleek mahogany neck to show it who was in command.

  “Everything all right back there?” I shouted to Bear, over the howling gale.

  “Let’s just ride.”

  We started with a jolt. Leather creaked, limb groaned against green limb, makeshift runners scraped over fresh powder. In our wake rode Little Tree to keep an eye on our progress. I cast a glance back in her direction. Beyond her, vague gray shapes bounded through the flying snow toward the bank in which I had buried Ira Longbow. They swarmed over it, digging with all four paws. Soon, however, even that scene was lost amid the swirling particles of white.

  11

  We were crossing over old ground in the beginning, but if we hadn’t known what direction we were going, none of us would have realized it. What had been hills of snow were now sinkholes, hollowed out by the wind, while level spots through which Bear and I had passed without hindrance a few days earlier were heaped as high as ten feet. Whole stands of pine and maple had been all but obliterated; in other places they had been swept clean where before only their pointed tops had shown. What landmarks remained were blurred behind drifting clouds of white powder so that they resembled features in a grainy tintype.

  The wind was tearing out of the east at between forty and fifty miles per hour. I had my kerchief tied over the lower part of my face as feeble protection against frostbite, while Little Tree rode with her chin huddled in the collar of her fur-faced cowhide jacket, one of a handful of items she had been able to salvage from the unburned cellar of the cabin. Bear, the most likely candidate for death by freezing due to his immobile state, was wrapped from head to foot in every available blanket. But for the snow, we might have been veiled mourners transporting the mummified remains of our king to a tomb on the banks of the Nile.