Spirit Wolf (16 page)

Somehow the pain was therapeutic. His mind focused on it, and he almost forgot that awful, cutting, killing wind. Nash took his mittens off and put his hands under his armpits in his jacket. Moments later, his hands began aching, too. But perhaps more important, the pain was pulling the cobwebs from his brain. He was beginning to think again, and at that point, he recognized his father's face just inches away from his own.

“Nash, I've got to go into the drift after Nell. I'm asking you to back the roan when I call out. You've got to do it, boy, or I'll never get out.”

Uriah turned and plunged into the snow. He pushed, scrambled, swam out to the stranded horse and dropped the loop of rope over her head. Then he grabbed the reins and scrambled back. He needed to be out of the way when Nell tried to do what he would tell her to do.

“Haw, Nell! Haw!” Uriah yelled against the wind, tugging the horse's head around with the reins. At first Nell stood motionless. But she could no more ignore Uriah's commands than she could ignore the call of nature. She had leaned into harness too many times.

She began lunging, struggling to do her master's bidding. She was actually beginning to turn, even while sinking deeper in the snow. Uriah didn't dare put pressure on the rope now. It might break her neck, but if he didn't …

“Back the roan! Easy, Nash! Easy!”

Uriah didn't know if he had been heard above the screaming wind, but the rope tightened, and Nell was coming around. It was critical now. The horse was almost at right angles to the rope. If she fell, she might not be able to get back on her feet, but she lunged again, and her feet caught the lip of the coulee.

“Back, Nash. Take up the slack.”

A minute later, Nell was standing in snow at the edge of the coulee, sides heaving, and Uriah was yelling again at Nash. “I don't know where we are. I'm going to take Nell's reins so we won't drift apart again, and I'm giving the roan his head. If he takes us back to camp, we'll be okay.”

Nash knew his father had left the sentence unfinished. If the horses didn't take them to camp, if they wandered aimlessly, Nash and Uriah would pay with their lives. But there was no choice.

So they rode, rode on for hours, days, it seemed. The wind played hide-and-seek with their bodies, finding warmth wherever it hid and snatching it away.

The awareness that he was once again dead was rising in Nash, but he refused to give in to even so obvious a fact. Whenever he could muster the energy to raise his head, giving the wind a new angle of attack, he would see his father hunched on the roan like a boulder in a stream of swirling white water. He couldn't die with his father watching—he didn't want to be a disappointment—so he held on to his life and wouldn't let go. That was the hardest thing Nash had ever done. It took all his body's energy to keep his blood flowing. He tried to listen to the sound of his heart, knowing that when it quit, he could stop this pretense of life and sleep. His father couldn't blame him if his heart just quit.

On they rode, bodies slumped in their saddles, bound for wherever the horses chose to take them, betting their lives that the horses would take them to safety before they died.

Then the animals stopped, Nell almost bumping into the roan. It must be over now. There was no need to keep up the pretense any longer. Nash was so grateful, and he closed his eyes to sleep, only to awaken to the sound of someone screaming in his face.

“Nash, we made it. Flynn set up a windbreak for the horses. Climb down, and we'll get them taken care of.”

Nash climbed off the horse with no sense of relief, only the dread that the ordeal was not over yet. Still, it was a little better on the ground. Uriah had opened the corral, and Nash led Nell through.

Flynn had stretched a web of tarpaulins through the trees edging the windward side of the corral. The wind screamed its fury at being denied full access to the warm flesh of the horses there, but the tarpaulins held tight to their lashings, and the animals were bunched and reasonably comfortable.

Uriah filled buckets with oats for Nell and the roan and carried in the two buckets of water Flynn had left by the corral. As cold as it was, there was only a skiff of ice on the water. Flynn must have waited for them at the corral as long as he dared.

When Uriah had finished, he took some rope lying beside the corral and tied it with clumsy, frostbitten fingers end to end with the ropes he and Nash carried in their saddlebags.

Nash was standing in the lee of the tarps, stamping his feet, when Uriah walked up. “We're going to tie this to that tree, and then walk in the direction we think the lean-to is. If we don't bump into it, we can hang on the rope and swing back and forth in arcs till we find it. We have to be careful. We could still get lost, and we won't last much longer without shelter.”

Nash nodded. “What about the old man, Dad?”

“What do you mean?”

“Without shelter, he'll die too.”

“Indians are accustomed to this weather. He'll pull through.”

“No man could live through this storm without shelter, Dad.”

Uriah bowed his head to shield his face from the wind and the snow. Then he looked at Nash. “We're bunching up, aren't we boy? Predator and prey and we don't know which is which. We'll try to find him on the way to our lean-to, but we better move fast. We don't have much time.”

9

Nash's body was racked by the cold. He clenched his teeth to keep them from rattling against each other. Stepping back into the fierce wind from the corral windbreak took a major effort of will.

Uriah and Nash marched along an azimuth estimated by Uriah before they left the corral, guided by compass and paying out rope behind them. Their dead reckoning worked, but still they almost bumped into the old man before they saw him. He was still sitting on the log, with his back to the wind and the buffalo robe pulled over his head, shut tight against the elements.

Uriah reached out tentatively and touched the old man on the shoulder. At first there was no movement, and Nash thought the old man might be dead, but then the robe shifted a bit, leaving a narrow tunnel leading back to the glitter of the old man's eyes.

Uriah was shouting over the wind, and it appeared that he was screaming at the old man, venting some great anger.

“You better come with us,” Uriah said. “The storm will kill you.”

“You do not want me dead?” the old man asked.

“No, I do not want you dead,” Uriah said in a voice so soft that Nash almost didn't hear him.

The old man nodded and rose. He stood swaying for a moment against the wind, and Uriah reached out and took the Indian's arm. Uriah shot another azimuth, and the three of them lurched through the snow blindly following the needle on the compass, paying out more rope, but more slowly now, moving in an expanding arc from the corral toward their camp.

The navigation was more difficult this time and the men missed. They didn't know if they had gone too far or not far enough. They didn't know if their straight-line distance from the corral was correct or incorrect, so they began swinging in wide arcs, hanging on to the rope. Each time the group slowed, stopped, and headed back into the wind, Nash found it more difficult. The wind tore mercilessly at him, but he gritted his teeth to stop the shaking. He trudged on, one foot after another.

And suddenly, woodenly, they were there. Nash stood, leaning against the wind, until Uriah took his arm and pulled the boy down into the lean-to. It was cold there, too, but there was no wind, and compared to outside, it seemed almost warm. That illusion was enhanced when Uriah lit their kerosene lamp with shaking hands and hung it from the top brace of the lean-to. The lamp swayed back and forth as the wind buffeted the canvas, casting mellow light and deep shadows.

“Nash, get out of your boots. Take off everything but your long underwear.”

Nash tried to do as he had been told, but the knots he had tied that morning were too cunning for his numb fingers. The old man reached out and took Nash's feet. He unlaced the boots easily and slipped off the two pair of heavy wool socks Nash was wearing. Then, by the light of the swaying lamp, the old man examined Nash's toes and feet. He pressed the flesh. It turned white under his touch.

The old man traced the width and depth of the frostbite with his fingers. Still silent, he reached for Nash's hands and repeated his examination there. Before reaching for Uriah's feet, the old man looked into Uriah's eyes for a long moment. Still Uriah jerked when he felt the old man's touch, and his body tensed as the old man probed the extent of Uriah's injuries.

Running Wolf reached for a rawhide bag he had carried with him into the lean-to, and the buffalo robe slipped for a moment from his face.

Nash saw the old man's face more clearly than he had before. It was much darker than Nash remembered, and more heavily eroded by the runoff of the juices of youth. His hair was white, banded here and there with darker shades of gray, and braided into two strands that disappeared into the robe over his shoulders. The bones of his face pushed his wrinkled skin into a terrain as sharp and broken as the prairie on which he lived.

If the old man's face lacked the fineness of bone and skin of Europe's aristocracy, it was compensated with the regalness with which it was carried and the intelligence that glittered in the deep black eyes.

The rawhide bag contained a salve of sorts, made—if the substance could be judged by smell alone—from some kind of animal grease, perhaps bear.

“You will not lose your feet or hands,” the old man said. “But you must warm yourselves now.”

He took the lamp from the center pole and placed it on the floor of the lean-to. He motioned for Nash and Uriah to scoot, blanket-draped, close to the lamp, feet, hands, and spirit gathering warmth from its pale light.

“You must wait now for the pain.”

The wait was not long. The pain came as the cold had, an animal of prey creeping stealthily into toes and fingers. Uriah and Nash had stopped shivering. The lean-to was cold, but without the wind that howled its disappointment outside, their bodies had begun to warm within the sheath of blankets. They were warm enough to sleep, and they would have, but for the pain.

“Why does it have to hurt so much?” Nash asked through gritted teeth.

The question was rhetorical, Nash's attempt to reach into his mind and pry it away from the pain, and for a moment it worked. Then the old man grabbed Nash's attention, pulling it away from his pain.

“If it were not for pain,” the old man said, “man would have nothing. All other things were created by God and belong to Him. Only man's pain is his own.”

“Our luck is changing, Nash,” Uriah joked. “We just struck the mother lode.”

The old man began wheezing again, shoulders shaking as he laughed soundlessly.

But when Uriah turned to the old man a moment later, there was no laughter in his eyes.

“Why are you here?”

Running Wolf paused, straightening his shoulders a little. “I came because the wolf called me. He told me it was time.”

A ripple ran through the hairs on the back of Uriah's neck as the old man continued, turning to Nash. “This is the wolf that led me to the spirit lodge when I was a boy and gave me my name. He has called me on the wind many times since then, and always I have answered. You do not hunt a wolf. You hunt a spirit.”

“That's crazy,” Uriah said. “Spirits don't leave tracks in the snow. This wolf is huge, but he's a wolf, nothing more and nothing less.”

“He is a spirit wolf. If you saw his tracks, it is because he wanted you to.”

The old man peered deeply into Uriah's eyes, and Uriah felt helpless, lost in the depths of those two dark pools.

“The spirit wolf has been with my people always. He was with us in the fight with the white man. Many times I called to him for strength and courage, and always he was there …

“We fought the white man, and he killed the buffalo. We warred against the bluecoats, and they burned our villages. We fought until hunger caused our bellies to rub against our backbones. When we could no longer bear the cries of our children, we stopped fighting. We stopped fighting to fill our bellies.”

The old man gazed at Uriah. No emotion cracked that rough visage, but Uriah knew the old Indian was speaking from great pain. “The spirit wolf hungers for nothing but justice for his people, so he continued to fight long after we gave up. He has learned from the white man: it is better to war against buffalo and cattle and let hunger war against men. So he stalks the prairies, killing cattle and leaving them for his friends, the coyotes and the magpies.”

Uriah shook himself free from the old man's gaze, but he felt no relief, only a growing sense of dread. The old man was obviously insane, haunted by the spirits of his people. He was insane and armed with a long-bladed knife, and he was sitting less than an arm's length away.

Uriah began probing the extent of the old man's madness as the old man had charted the frostbite on his and Nash's feet and hands. “You said it was time, old man. Time for what?”

The old man pulled the buffalo robe tightly around his shoulders again and stared for a long moment at the kerosene lamp.

“Once I thought the buffalo were so many that they would always feed my people, but the white man killed them in the span of a young man's life. Once I thought the white men were so few that we could kill them all, but now they are more than the buffalo were.”

The old man spoke of killing dispassionately, and that frightened Uriah more than if he had shouted his madness at a world changed beyond his ken. There was a deliberateness to the old man's insanity, and the muscles of Uriah's back tensed as the story continued.

“The people of the reservation are changing. The young are taken from their homes and told that the way of the white man is better. They laugh at the old ones. They laugh at me. When I have gone, there will be no one. So the wolf called to me. I stepped away from the reservation and ran here on the wind. That is my real name, not what the white men call me on the reservation. I am Wolf Runs on the Wind.”