Far as the Eye Can See (29 page)

The wound where the bullet went in is doing fine. It’s tightly puckered and got enough dried blood caked there, it will make a nice scab. The other wound, I see, is fiery red around where I sewed it and beginning to ooze pus. “That’s a good sign,” I say. “You got a fight going on there.” When I pour some of the whiskey on it, she grabs my shoulder with the other hand and squeezes pretty hard. You’d think a little bitty thing like her wouldn’t be able to snap a match with those fingers, but it feels like she might of could broke my shoulder if she squeezed just a little bit harder.

She puts her head down and takes in air, then holds it. I know it really hurts.

“That’ll clean it,” I say. “It will fight the infection too. Just like your body’s trying to.”

She puts her shirt down over it and lays down on her back. I put the blanket over her, lay back down, and blow out the candle.

“You sure did come running,” she says.

In the morning I say, “So, what’s your husband’s name?”

“Hump.”

“I heard a him.”

“He is Sioux. Miniconjou. And he will kill you if he finds us.”

“Guess we better not be traveling in the day, then.”

We chew some of the hardtack, sitting by the tent. It’s not a bad morning. I stayed just outside the tent, awake most of the night listening for any sound. I seen the whole voyage of the moon across the sky, wondered at the faint light of its passage and the soft wind in the leaves around us. When I got out of the army, I thought I’d never have to be that awake again. Some folks never know what it’s like to lay like a predatory animal with all your senses so fired up, you feel like a fuse burning, like something that can strike faster than a shooting star and reach just as far. My eyes ached from the concentration.

“You set for a spell and watch,” I say. “I have to shut my eyes awhile.”

She nods and I crawl back into the tent.

I didn’t think I was sleeping, but then Ink shoves my shoulder to wake me. “Stop it,” she says.

“Stop what?”

“You were screaming.”

I sit up on my elbows. Outside the tent I see Cricket eating grass by the stream. “What was I saying?”

“I could not determine it.”

“I guess it was loud, though. Sometimes I dream about the war.”

“Very loud.”

She sits next to me, just inside the tent. She holds her hand over her abdomen.

“Let me see it,” I say.

She lifts her shirt and I move the bandage to where I can see the wound in the sunlight. Her whole belly is swollen, and pus still oozes around the stitches. “Can you ride, do you think?”

At first she shakes her head. Her eyes fix me good. “We can wait another day,” I say. “But I don’t want to. That looks bad.”

“If you can get me on the horse,” she says.

“The horse is lame. Walking with that limp’ll be awful bumpy.”

She gets to her feet. “Let me look at it.”

“I’ve studied the thing,” I say. “It’s something in the fetlock, or maybe a thin break in the cannon bone. Ain’t nothing you can do.”

“I want to look at it.”

She walks toward Cricket and I follow her. The horse raises up a little when she gets up next to her. “Easy,” she says. She knows what she is doing. She reaches down and lifts the front leg, then tilts the hoof up so she can see the bottom of it. She takes that hunting knife out of her belt and starts picking at something on the outer edge of the hoof. Cricket don’t move.

“You’re going to pull your stitches out,” I say. “I tried that. The hoof’s fine.”

“Look at this,” she says.

“What?”

She holds the tip of the knife up and there’s a spiny piece of what looks like yellow bone on the end of it. It looks kind of sticky, and I know right away what it is. “Buffalo bur,” I say. “I looked for that and couldn’t find none.”

“It was way up in between the hoof and the sole. It’s bad medicine.”

“Now you’re talking like a Indian.”

“There’s more of it here.” She starts back at it, more carefully now. She digs a little too far in against the side of the hoof and Cricket pulls away. I can see it really hurts Ink. She drops to her knees, doubled over.

Cricket moves toward the stream, still limping.

I kneel down next to Ink. “You all right?”

She sits back on her haunches and I can see the wound is bleeding again. She looks down at herself, then touches her shirt where the blood soaks through.

“That’s probably a good thing,” I say. “It will clean it out. But I should check the stitches.”

Sure enough, the stitches have come loose on the bad end of the wound and blood seeps through the opening. It don’t smell bad, and I think that is a real good sign. “I could probably put another stitch or two in there, but you know it ain’t bleeding real bad.”

“Leave it,” she says.

“Let me tie a fresh bandage around you.” I go to my pack and get the rest of my linen shirt. The sleeves, I realize, make a better bandage, so I use one and put the other one away for later. I don’t tie it too tight. Then I round up Cricket and try to finish what Ink started. The bur is in pretty far between the hoof itself and the soft skin under it. There’s another small spine in the frog at the back of the hoof. No wonder Cricket was limping. I dig it out gently with the knife. Then I dig a little more between the hoof wall and the sole. Cricket don’t like it, but I get all of the thing out.

“Don’t touch it,” Ink says. “That is just as bad for you in your hand as it would be stuck into your skin.”

“I didn’t touch it.”

“Take her down to the stream now and let her walk around in it.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” I say. I let Cricket walk around in the water a bit. She is still limping, but now it ain’t so bad. When we get back to the camp, Ink is laying down again, partway in the tent, to keep the sun out of her eyes.

“You okay?”

“How long was the horse limping?”

“A few days, maybe.”

“The longer that bur stays in, the more damage it does. It can kill her.”

“I know it.”

“It is bad medicine.”

“Well, she ain’t limping so bad now.”

She rises. “I will help you pack up.”

“We’ll wait until evening,” I say. “Dusk. It’s hard for most folks to see in the twilight and I don’t want nobody to see us on the trail.”

“We can’t see anybody, either.”

“I can,” I say. “I can see at night better than a bat.”

I leave her sitting by the tent and walk downstream to wash and take care of my morning business. When I come back, she’s squatting in the stream herself, just below the camp. I don’t want her to know I seen her, so I stop and crouch down, stare at the ground in front of me until she’s done.

When I get back to the camp later she says, “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For not staring at me when I was making water in the stream.”

I shake my head. “You sure are a Indian,” I say. “I don’t think your husband will be sneaking up on us.”

“He is like a ghost.”

“Folks used to say I could be pretty quiet.”

“You make noise like a careless bear.”

I look at her close to see if she’s serious. “I can be just as quiet as a cat.”

“Compared to Hump, a cat makes a lot of noise.”

“Well, you let me know if you hear something. Maybe you should of stayed awake all night listening to the breathing of all the insects.”

“I did stay awake. I listened with you the whole time.”

“The hell you did. You inhaled and exhaled so loudly, I had to focus between each breath to hear.”

She says nothing. I can see she don’t think much of me, or that I can protect her. When I try to get the pistol back, she holds it against her chest and looks at me now with them dark eyes.

“You can keep it,” I say. “If you can kill a jackrabbit with it, I reckon you can point it in the right direction and shoot.”

This makes her happy. I let her sleep awhile and later in the afternoon we pack everything up and get ready to go.

“I figure we’ll go straight back to the trail, then head north to the Missouri,” I tell her. “We’ll follow it east until we get to Fort Buford. It’ll be safe to drop you there—nobody will know who I am—and if I’m lucky, I might stumble on a wagon train going back west to Bozeman.”

It is almost impossible to get Ink up on Cricket without causing both of them pain. Cricket’s leg is better but she holds it up off the ground, and when I lift Ink under her arms and try to throw her over the saddle without hitting her stomach on it, Cricket turns her head and looks at me like I must be crazy.

“Sorry, old girl,” I say. I know she don’t feel nothing more heavy than we do when a fly lands on our back.

Ink sets absolutely still, her fierce eyes staring at the ground in front of us, and I know she is quietly bearing great pain. “Okay,” she says. “I am ready.”

“I’ll have to take it slow anyway,” I say. “Cricket’s hurtin’ too.”

I got my carbine slung over my shoulder, and Ink carries the pistol in a holster I tied to the saddle horn in front of her. She can reach for it and be ready to fire it pretty easy. What I want to do, though, is avoid seeing any folks at all.

We go for most of the night. Cricket don’t limp as bad as before, but the ride is just awful for Ink. I walk alongside and try to keep to soft ground, but it’s mostly stones and hard stubble where we’re headed, hills we got to climb, and small ravines and gullies that get in the way and would be too far to go around.

Several times we have to stop so Ink can piss. I think she’s glad we’re traveling at night. When the sky turns pink in front of us, I start looking for flat ground near a stream. I don’t want to be out in the open during the day, so I move us off the trail and we start down a long, sloping hill toward a stand of trees and what looks like a broad, level meadow. I don’t see no water, but we’ve got both canteens full, and I don’t want to keep going no longer.

“We’ll stop down here,” I say.

Ink leans forward in the saddle like she’s sleeping. Her head droops a little and I know she’s almost passed out if she ain’t sleeping. When we get to the bottom of the hill, she wraps her arms around my neck and I haul her down off of Cricket.

“It’ll be full daylight soon,” I say.

“I’m very hungry.”

“I know.” Except for them bits of hardtack that we shared last night, neither of us eat nothing since the skunk and the rabbit, and that’s almost nine hours. “When there’s a little more daylight, I’ll make a fire.”

We didn’t see no one along the trail, but lately I’ve had the feeling something is watching us. A couple of times during the long night, I noticed Cricket turn her head a little to the side and perk up her ears. So I decide not to set up the tent. I tie Cricket to a tree where there’s plenty of grass, and then take down my pack roll and carry it back to where Ink lays on the ground. She don’t say nothing. I unroll the pack and get a blanket for her and tell her to try and sleep. “I’ll wake you when I got something to eat,” I say.

“I think he is near,” she says.

“Hump?”

“I think he is following us.”

“You hear him?”

“No.” She takes a deep breath, lets out a blast of foul-smelling air. “No, but I can feel him.”

“Yeah, I got the same feeling. I think we’re both just a bit nervous.”

“I thought I saw your horse mark something.”

“I seen it too.”

“Hump will not make any noise at all,” she says.

“I’m ready,” I say. “Try and get some sleep.”

The trees around us are high and almost full, and the sun makes long shafts of light and shadow through the branches and new leaves. It looks like one of them tall-windowed churches the way the light comes down through the trees. There is almost no breeze and I know it will be a warm day. A mist covers the ground so it looks like we’re in the clouds—like we walked all night until we got to heaven—except we come a long way down a hill to get here. The air is moist and smells like horse sweat and wheatgrass. I think there must be water somewhere nearby. I don’t want to leave Ink by herself, though. I don’t even think I will hunt any distance away from her. If Hump is around here, I don’t want to run into him by myself.

The mist rises around mid-morning and I think it’s safe enough to walk around and gather up windblown wood—dry branches and twigs that been on the ground a long time. I don’t find no buffalo chips. I set the wood in the sun to dry out from the mist. I got Ink laying on a blanket with my pack roll under her head, just under the low branches of a big tree, out of the sunlight. She’s got a fever now, and when I look at the wound again, I see a black line about as thick as a finger running away from the wound and up her abdomen. I don’t like it at all. I’ve seen it before in a limb or two and it means that much flesh is dying and turning to gangrene poison. I have to lance it—cut the skin with a hot knife and get the poison out of there or she will die. I wish I had some maggots I could stuff into the wound.