Far as the Eye Can See (37 page)

She gets down and walks a ways. I stay where I am. She ties her horse to a tree, then starts unpacking her bedroll. She’s still wearing Treat’s shirt, vest, and trousers. She’s got the vest buttoned in the front, but it hangs on her loosely. The armholes dangle very low on her and there’s blood on the front of the shirt near the collar on one side.

When we get camp set up, and I’ve got the horses tethered, I leave her with Little Fox and the Colt Dragoon, and ride off on Cricket a-hunting again. It’s a bright, hot day, but the sun only breaks through the canopy of the trees in long, sweeping needles and curtains of light. It looks like I wandered into some kind of giant church—a great dome of heaven, maybe. I don’t get far in the woods before I stumble on a bear with her cubs. She’s huge and brown. You don’t mess with grizzly bears, especially when there’s a cub around, so I make a wide circle around her. She’s moving in the other direction, further into the trees. I don’t worry about Ink none. Not with the bear anyway. I wonder if she’ll ever say another word.

About a mile or so north of where I left Ink, I see a doe. She’s laying down until she hears me, and as I come through the brush she stands up and I raise my carbine and shoot her before she can bolt. She’s small and light. Lighter than Ink, probably. But she’ll do. I throw her over Cricket’s back, across my saddle, then jump up behind her and hold on as we move along back toward camp.

On the way I see the grizzly again. This time she’s coming down the trail, headed for our camp. Cricket don’t like it much, but I force her to gallop toward the bear. I shout, then fire my carbine in the air, and the grizzly lets out a kind of grunt—like a big drunk growing sober—and then moves off in the other direction.

Ink is sleeping at the base of a tree with the Colt pistol in her lap. Little Fox is crouched next to her, ready, the bow in his hands with a arrow in it. “Don’t shoot me,” I say. When Ink wakes and sees me, her eyes change some, but I can’t tell if she’s happy to see me or the doe. She cleans it good and cuts up the meat and I make a campfire. In these woods it don’t matter about the smoke. She cooks the meat over the fire and we eat in silence. I figure there’s no point in trying to get her to talk to me and I don’t have nothing to say. Little Fox watches both of us. When we finish eating, he moves over next to her and puts his hand up on the back of her neck, staring into her eyes. “Ha-ho,” he whispers. “Ha-ho.”

She starts crying again. She puts her arms around him and looks at me. “ ‘Friend,’ ” she says. “He just called me ‘friend.’ ”

“Well, you are,” I say. “He knows it.”

She pats his head, fighting her tears.

“He stayed with me all through this,” I said. “Running like hell, he stayed right with me. He’s a young brave, is what he is.”

She tries to tell him what I said in Cheyenne. He pulls back and looks up at her, but he don’t say nothing.

She spends most of the day scraping the deerskin with her sheath knife and rubbing it with wood ash from the fire. Then she pours salt all over it and lays it out on the ground in a place where the sun breaks through.

“That won’t be ready to wear for a long time,” I say.

She’s gotten all the hair off of it, and there ain’t no flesh or blood I can see. It’s a clean piece of leather now. When it dries out completely, she’ll finish tanning it and then she can make a shirt and wear it. She’s got enough for trousers, too, I think.

I sleep for a good long while in the afternoon, and when I wake she’s got the deer meat packed in a kind of pouch she’s crafted from a small portion of the skin. She’s salted all of it to keep the flies away. She’s draped the rest of the cleaned skin over one of the other horses and strapped it down. She ain’t got the scalps on her saddle no more. Little Fox is already mounted, and she clambers up on her horse and waits for me.

“I’d like to wash my face,” I say. I get my canteen and splash myself. The whole time they set there watching me.

When I get up on Cricket, I say, “I don’t blame you if you want to kill me.”

There’s still sun, but it’s well below the trees now and not breaking through much at all. I can barely see her face in the dim light, but I see her eyes glistening and I know she is frowning. Then she whispers, “No.”

I say, “Well, I wouldn’t blame you.”

She turns her mount and I follow her again, headed south and west toward Bighorn country. We get to the Powder River and ride along next to it in the dark. It’s hard to go with a person that you know must hate the sight of you for being a white man. I don’t think she’ll kill me but I can feel that hate coming off her like a odor or something.

We ride for a hour or so until the ground levels off again. We are very near the river. I can hear the water rushing over stones and through cuts along its way. What’s left of the moon rises over the high ground, about half full but not strong enough to make a shadow. The sky is streaked white with stars that seem to run behind low, thin clouds.

Suddenly, out of the blue and not really looking at me, Ink says, “Why would I want to kill you?”

I am so surprised to hear her voice again, it takes me back a second. Then I say, “I know what they done. They was white men. I’m a white man. If I was you, I’d hate all men. All white men anyway.”

“I hate those men.”

“Yeah, well.”

We find a good place to cross the Powder River, then we keep next to the Yellowstone as it goes south and west. I don’t know why, but it feels like I want her to talk for her own good and mine. Finally I say, “You okay?”

“I am many sleeps away from okay.”

“Many sleeps?”

“I am Indian,” she says. “Right now I am Indian.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“To me,” she says, “you are Indian too.”

“I’ve killed enough of Indians, I think they might not take kindly to it if I enlist among ’em.”

“Are you an Indian fighter?”

“No. But I ended up fighting a lot of them anyway. If you want to call it fighting.”

She looks at me.

“When I shot you, I was fighting Indians.”

“That is how you fight?”

“It’s how a lot of us fight. From a distance. The cavalry rides right in among ’em if they can catch ’em sleeping.”

We get quiet again for a while. I wait for her to say something else, and when she don’t, I say, “You ain’t never gonna talk about what happened, are you?”

“No,” she says. “No. I will not.”

“I understand it,” I say. “You mind if I ask where we’re going? We must be near where your village was when you run off.”

“I want to take Little Fox back to his people.”

“So we’re
looking
for Indians?”

“He has told me where to look—in the Bighorn country. That is where we’re going.”

“We can’t go into that country,” I say. “We should cross to the north side of this here river and go on west to Bozeman. We should not go further south.”

“We go this way,” Ink says. “We have been over this country and we know what is in front of us.”

“What about Hump?”

“He is not here. I know it.”

“You was waiting for him up in them trees near Buford all this time, wasn’t you?”

She says nothing.

“You waited for him, and when you was sure he wasn’t after you no more . . .”

She looks at me.

“You think you’ll find his people back in that country? There’s soldiers all over it. I know. I was among ’em.”

“If we don’t find his village, then we’ll go to Indian country. No white men.”

“I don’t know where you think that is.”

“We go to Idaho. To the land of the Nez Perce.”

“Why we got to go through the same country we just left?”

“We know the trail. That is best and easiest,” she says. “It is where Little Fox thinks his people are. We can travel at night.”

It hits me that she’s saying more words to me than at any time since she was taken. “Look,” I say. “I
can’t
go back there.”

Now she looks at me.

“I want to go west real bad too,” I say. And then when Ink looks at me, I realize I can’t explain it to her. Anyway, it’ll be well into July before we ever get to Bozeman. Eveline’s probably halfway to Utah by now. “I ain’t told you much of this, but I’m on the run too,” I say. “It’s one of the reasons I shot you.”

She pulls back a little on her horse and stops. I stop too. Cricket nods her head up and down a bit, then starts eating the saw grass in front of her.

“What do you mean, you are on the run?”

“I got soldiers
and
Indians after me.”

She wheels her horse around and faces me. It’s just dark enough that I can see the whites of Ink’s eyes and the shadows of the horses. Little Fox has gone on a little but now he stops too. He turns his horse and sets there waiting. There ain’t a peep out of him. We stand there like that, Cricket facing her horse and Ink staring at me to beat all, then she motions for me to let go of the packhorses. I remove the lariat from the lead horse but leave them all tethered together, and they start feeding in the field around us and just off the trail. I ain’t telling her nothing if I don’t have to, but then she says, “What did you do?”

“It don’t matter. If the wrong soldier or Indian finds me, I’m a dead man.”

“Why?”

“I killed a peace party.” I don’t want to, but I tell her all about it. I let her have the whole story about Big Tree and White Dog. The anger I felt and how I seen White Dog and that red bandana and something in me snapped. “It was a accident,” I say. “I didn’t know it was a peace party. Hell, I didn’t even know I’d do what I done.” It sounds good to me. I don’t know if I really believe it. What I done surprised me, I’ll own up to that. But I can’t half believe it was something I had no control of or didn’t want.

“But how does any of them know it was you?”

“The trooper that left me there watching the trail knows, and them two braves that got away seen me too. They got a good look at me.”

She shakes her head. “What about your betrothed? You will not get back to her sooner this way, knowing the trails as we do?”

“Hell, she ain’t in Bozeman no more. She said she’d wait ’til June. We’re well-nigh into that now.”

“We will go south first,” she says.

“A lot of them folks on both sides know me,” I say. “I can’t take the chance to be in any a their company.”

“No one is chasing you,” Ink says, and I think I sense a kind of contempt in her voice.

“I don’t know that,” I say. “I do know if the right fellow sees me, he’ll chase me.”

“We will travel at night,” she says. “We have done just fine trav­eling at night.”

She’s right about that, I have to admit. She got taken in broad daylight, but we done pretty well in the dark.

We let the horses feed a bit longer, then start off again, almost directly south. I don’t argue with her. All that night, it is one hell of a quiet ride. I only hear the water rippling in the river, the soft tread of the horses on meadow grass and mud, and the creak of my saddle. It is kind of creepy, to tell the truth: I’m riding alone under a pale sliver of moon with eight horses and this little thing next to me, and Ink that stares off in the starlight like a cat. And she will
be
like a cat to me. She will be with me as long as she needs, and when she is done she’ll wander off by herself, a-looking at the world. From that moment I won’t exist no more.

We follow the Yellowstone all the way to the Tongue River. We trail south along that river for a few days, then head directly west. Little Fox helps out when we set up camp. He’s especially good with the horses. I leave most of that work to him now. It’s nice some days to talk to him at least. He is amazed at my thick beard and long red hair. He likes the stories I tell even though he don’t understand a word. Ink sets there and listens. She’s always got her ears perked up, and since I know she can hear better than a elk or a squirrel, I don’t pay no attention to what’s happening around us.

Some nights, riding in the dark, I realize as I listen to the creaking of my saddle and the soft clinking of metal in Cricket’s bridle that I miss Ink a little. The woman she was before she got taken. She’s all business now and don’t pay me no attention at all except to tell me what to do. I think if I don’t do what she wants she’ll judge me in ways I can’t abide. She might even be afraid of me and what I might eventually do and I don’t want that. I think it’s real important that she knows I will protect her. I know it don’t make no sense, but I believe that’s what keeps me going along behind her in the dark.

In another week we cross Rosebud Creek and I know we’re near the Bighorn River. I get more and more nervous with every mile. In the dim light of early morning we cross a wide trail—horses and travois tracks through the countryside that are as broad as the tracks left by a wagon train. The next morning, just before we stop for the day, we cross several places where we see wagon tracks and the prints of hundreds of shod horses. I know Brisbin and Gibbon are in this area and probably by now Reno and Custer too. I never seen so many Indian tracks, though. We ride down into a coulee and stay next to a pretty big river. I think it must be the Bighorn. We camp at dawn near a small creek that runs off the river. I tell Ink this valley is thick with soldiers and Indians and it ain’t safe no more to be moving around in it. As I tie the horses up close by, I notice a lot of tracks on the ground here too. Horse and travois tracks make a wide path along this side of the river. It’s a damn miracle we ain’t been run over in our sleep.