Far as the Eye Can See (2 page)

“Aw, Jesus,” I say, and she screams. She didn’t know how close I was. I crouch down and move to where I can see her face. She grimaces in pain and the whole front of her is covered in blood. She screams again when she sees me.

“Aw, Jesus,” I say again. “I’m sorry.” It’s a young girl, scrawny and dark. Long strands of wet black hair cover her eyes and run down into her mouth. She wears leather pants and shirt, and beads around her neck. She clutches a heavy pouch. She has a big hunting knife sheathed in leather, tied to her waist. I put the carbine down and kneel next to her. I’m afraid to touch her, but I got to see the wound. “Here,” I say, and I reach out and touch her on the shoulder. “Let me see.”

She looks at me, still breathing heavy, still frightened so completely her eyes dart like a trapped animal’s eyes, but she don’t move when I touch her. There’s something real fierce in her fear, if you know what I mean. Like she’ll quiver and all, but if I make a wrong move I’ll have that hunting knife to contend with. “You speak American?” I whisper. I smell urine. Her nose runs badly with mucus and her hair is all tangled in it. The eyes are dark, and yellow-rimmed. “Iisáakshi-m,” I say. “I thought you was a young man.” I know a little Crow and not much else of Indian languages. “Maybe you speak Crow?”

She closes her eyes, then whispers, “English.”

“I’m glad of it,” I say. Gently I try to unfold her, get her to lay on her back, but she won’t budge.

“Let me see the wound.”

She moves one of her arms down, then turns slightly, and I see where I got her. She’s hit in the side, all right, but it went along the front of her abdomen. She was laying in such a way that the bullet come in low and skimmed under her skin in front and out the other side. I hit flesh and only flesh. It burned her—I can see the skin black and still smoking a bit—and she is bleeding, but if I clean it up a bit, it won’t kill her.

“You’ll be all right,” I say. I am really glad I didn’t take another shot when I first seen her. “What the hell are you doing out here all by yourself?”

She’s stopped crying and sniffling but I can see she’s still in a lot of pain. I move some of the hair out of her face, and she opens her eyes and maybe sees me for the first time. I mean, she studies my face real hard. Her dark skin and black eyebrows make her look almost unnaturally evil, but it don’t scare me none. I never have believed in stuff I can’t see or hear or taste or smell or touch. I don’t believe in no devil nor demons. I think we’re all bad enough here on earth—we don’t need no outside help, if you know what I mean. I seen a lot of men praying and I seen them dying. Didn’t seem to matter if they was believers or not. A bullet don’t care what a fellow believes, and for sure folks don’t give a damn, neither.

The woman is helpless and small, wounded and needful. I can leave her here and she might die, but I ain’t gonna do that. Damn it, I know I ain’t gonna do that. I say to her, “You’ll be all right. I’ll take care of you.”

She watches me put the pistol in my belt and then put the sling on the carbine over my head so the gun is across my back. “I’m going to try and help you up,” I say. “You got no broke bones and you should be able to walk.” I lift her up, and she comes easily enough, though she lets out this little whimper of pain—or maybe it’s fear. “I know you’re hurt,” I say.

She says nothing, she just looks at me. Now her eyes are sad and kind of pitiful looking. I feel sorry for her. “You’re going to be all right,” I say. We move along pretty slowly. She takes little baby steps but then starts to move a little better. She holds her arm and hand across where her belly is ripped and the blood still runs. It looks almost black on her leather pants. I know she’s really hurting but she don’t cry out no more, and I’m starting to think she’s a lot tougher than she looks. “I’m sorry I shot you.”

No response.

“You’re so thin, it’s a damn miracle the bullet skimmed under the skin like that.”

She don’t even look at me.

“Why was you trying to sneak around behind me?”

She shakes her head and says something so drowned in tears and heavy breathing, I can’t understand it. I think she said she wasn’t doing no such thing.

“I thought you was trying to get behind me.”

“I just wanted to go around,” she gasps. She speaks American clear as a bell.

“You speak real good American,” I say. “Where you from?”

She coughs, then spits on the ground in front of us. I stop and check the little globule of spit close. “Ain’t no blood in it,” I say. “You’re gonna be all right.”

She wipes her nose, pulls some of the matted hair away from her face. She has wide cheekbones and a thin-lipped mouth. The skin around her top lip is so dark, it looks almost like a small mustache. Her lips are thin and pink.

We scoot back to where I’d let Cricket loose. She’s not far off. I let the girl ease down on the ground again and rest her head on my saddle. “Just wait there,” I tell her. Then I go to my saddlebag and get a clean piece of calico—I rip the back out of one of my shirts—and a ball of twine and a sewing needle. I got a bottle of whiskey in there and I grab that too. I don’t think the calico is gonna be big enough to wrap her. I pour a little whiskey on both wounds, clean them up as best I can. She has a long bruise that runs from one hole across her abdomen just under her belly button and right up to where the bullet went out. The skin there is tore all to hell. I use the twine to sew it up. She don’t move or bat a eye while I’m rooting around in that bloody thing. And right up to the second I close it up she was sure bleeding out of that hole. Much more than where the bullet gone in. It’s a good thing my shot was low. If I’d aimed just a inch or two higher, she’d of sure died. The bullet would of cut her right in two. I tell her as much, but she’s out cold by the time I finish wrapping the calico tightly around her middle. It fits better than I believed it would. I don’t know if she’s asleep or if she passed out.

She’s just a thick ball of black hair and, hanging underneath that, a sad, round face and just a slip of a body. I guess she needs something to eat. All I have is a sack of dried beans, a little raw sowbelly, a bag of coffee and sugar cubes, a few strips of beef jerky, and some hardtack. I go back to where her pouch is and find some leather leggings, some more dried beans, and a piece of sowbelly that looks to be at least a half a year old. It stinks to high heaven, but it will cook up just fine. I take it all back and set it down at her feet.

In a little while, Cricket comes back, looking lame as ever and disappointed.

“What’s the matter, old girl? Nothing much to eat around here, is there.” The Indian girl thinks I was talking to her. She opens her eyes a little and frowns. “Not you,” I say.

I think she might start crying again, but she reaches for my hand and tries to pull herself up. It’s just too much pain.

“You’re all bruised up down there,” I say. “You won’t be able to use them muscles for a spell.”

She takes a deep breath, then looks at me like a hungry puppy. “Help me up,” she says.

I try to be gentle but it hurts her to bend like that. I set her up against the saddle with her feet splayed out in front of her. She points to the blood on her moccasins.

“Dripped on them while we was walking,” I say. “But you ain’t bleeding no more.”

It looks like the saddle is causing her sizable pain. “You want me to lay you back down again?”

“No.”

“Looks like it’s hard to get air. You having trouble breathing?”

“No.”

“It must just be the pain, then.” I set there looking at her, wondering what I might do next.

After a while she seems to settle down. I get up and put the bridle back on Cricket and tether her to the trunk of a pretty thick juniper. I get some of the sugar out of my pack and feed it to her. “There’ll be plenty of grass up ahead, old girl,” I whisper.

The sky above us is absolutely white. Not a cloud nowhere and no depth to it. The sun is behind us now, so it does no good to crouch in the lee of the boulder. The only place that looks like a sky is the deep blue distance where it rumbles and sparks.

“Somebody’s getting wet,” I say, taking a place next to my wounded companion. “March thunderstorms can be pretty bad. You feel up to a little talk?”

She seems to nod, but she looks at me like she hopes I’ll change things somehow.

“What’s your name?”

“Ink,” she says. She don’t look away from me.

“That a Indian name?”

“I am called Stand Alone Woman by the Sioux.”

“What kind of name is Ink?”

“It is what my father called me when I was little. I am so dark. My real name is Diana.”

“Your daddy a white man?”

“My mother was Indian.”

“But he was white.”

“Yes.”

“So what the hell you doing out here?”

She grimaces a bit, seems to take in a little more air. “I am running away from my husband.”

“You married?”

“To a Miniconjou brave.”

“Really.”

“I did not want to be. I was taken when I was sixteen. They killed my father. My mother . . .” She stops.

“What about your mother?”

“I don’t know what happened to her. I never saw her after I got taken.”

“They took her too?”

“She was Nez Perce, but she was living with the Crow when she took up with my father.”

“Miniconjous don’t like the Crow.”

“Only white men like the Crow.”

“And you been with the Miniconjous how long?”

“I lost track of years. Seven or eight. I do not know. I was sixteen when they got me.”

“You don’t look much older than sixteen now,” I say.

She falls silent for a while. Maybe she wants to cry a little, but she don’t.

“Diana,” I say.

“I am Ink,” she says. She’s studied me all through this conversation, but now she looks away. She’s made up her mind that I ain’t gonna hurt her no more.

“You’re a pretty tough little thing, ain’t you,” I say.

“I have never seen hair as red as yours,” she says.

“Not even among the scalps your tribe taken?”

“Who are you?”

“I ain’t nobody,” I say.

“What is your name?”

I tell her I got lots of names but Bobby Hale will do.

“Why you got so many names?”

“I joined the Union army a few times during the war.”

“The big war in the east?”

“That’s the one.”

“What is your real name?”

“It ain’t nothing I want to tell,” I say. She looks at me. There’s something in her face now that surprises me—like she knows more than she lets on about a lot of things and she won’t let me in on a bit of it unless I tell her my born name. So I say, “My first name was Charlie. I didn’t like it. You’re Ink. I’m Bobby Hale. I been Bobby Hale since the war. It don’t matter what folks called me when I was growing up. I hated that name and was glad to get shed of it.”

A smile works its way to the surface around her mouth. I think the pain has eased up some.

“You feeling better?”

“I’m hungry,” she says.

“Well. You run away with nothing but that ’ere knife of yours, the leather on your back, and a pouch full of dried beans and rotten bacon, you’re bound to be pretty hungry before long. And since you couldn’t of come far that way, we must be pretty close to your village.”

Her eyes get a little bigger.

“Ain’t we?”

“I ran all night and most of today. We are a long way from there.”

“Where’d you think you was going?”

“The last place I lived with my father. Fort Buford.”

“Well, you was headed in the right direction, but it ain’t straight east. It’s way north of here too.”

She don’t say nothing.

“It’s where the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers meet.”

“That is where I must go.”

“I’m trying to get to Fort Ellis myself. It’s a long way in the other direction, west of here.”

“Are you a soldier?”

“I was with the army for a spell. A paid guide, kind of. I ain’t enlisted nor nothing. Now I’m avoiding them if I can.”

“But you go to Fort Ellis.”

“Well, I’m trying to get back to Bozeman. I ain’t going nowhere near the fort if I can help it.”

“My village was near the Musselshell River.”

“That’s a good ways.”

“I ran all night and most of the day. That is how far.”

“And you thought you was going to run all the way to Fort Buford.”

“I did not care,” she says. “Maybe I wanted to die. I thought I might run until I died. Then I ran into you.”

“Right about the time I seen you, I expect.”

She tries to move a bit, and again her face shows real pain. But she don’t make a sound. She reaches for her pouch and I hand it to her. She takes out the sowbelly and starts chewing on the end of it. It’s white and slippery and she almost drops it, but she gets a good bit of it in her mouth.

“That will make you sick,” I say.