Spirit Wolf (2 page)

By the time Nash was finished, Uriah was tying a burlap bag behind the boy's saddle. They walked together to the house, each leading his horse.

Mary looked up from the stove as the door opened. She stood there, motionless, as though to prolong the moment, to postpone the goodbye.

Uriah busied himself, putting together the final bits and pieces of the supplies he and Nash would need. He seemed very intent on his tasks, too intent to speak, too intent to look into Mary's eyes.

Then, with his pockets stuffed with another handful of matches, more candles, and a few more pieces of jerky, Uriah reached up on the wall and took down the rifle and the shotgun, handing the shotgun to Nash.

Suddenly, Mary was beside Uriah holding his arms, speaking to him so rapidly and softly Nash could barely hear.

“Uriah, the Lazy KT is close to the reservation. You're as apt to bump into Indians as not.…”

Her voice hung there, saying nothing, saying everything.

Uriah's face went flat, like a washed-out photograph.

“The best thing for those Indians on the reservation is to stay on the reservation.”

“But what if they don't?” she asked, apprehension hanging on her voice like frost on a window.

“That's their lookout.” Uriah's voice was low and hard.

Mary stepped into Uriah's arms, holding him to her tightly, protectively. She stood there until the stiffness in Uriah's back and face eased, and then she looked into his eyes.

“Leave it be, Uriah, before it tears you apart.”

Uriah shook his head. “I can't. You know I can't.”

There was a catch in Mary's voice as she said, “No matter what happens, you come back, and bring Nashua with you.”

Then Mary turned to Nash. “You take care of yourself,” she said. “Do what your dad tells you. Stay warm and don't get too tired. The wolf isn't as important as you are. Remember that.”

Nash couldn't remember the last time his mother had hugged him. She'd stopped doing it, he thought, in a tacit recognition that he was growing up, but she hugged him now, bending only a little to reach him.

Mary followed Uriah and Nash to the door.

“Be careful,” she said as they stepped outside to the horses, hesitating a moment before mounting.

Nash looked back minutes later just before he nudged Nell into the creek ford. His mother was still standing in the doorway, a touch of color against the drabness that was the cabin.

Uriah stopped on the other side of the creek. “We'll stay at the Andersons' tonight. We should get there about dark.”

It was cold enough to paint breath against air as clear as a prism. Anything dark stood out so sharply against the snow it appeared etched on the mind.

As the two passed, the only sounds were the caws of magpies perched in the cottonwoods and the singing of the snow underfoot.

Uriah had slipped his rifle into the scabbard that hugged his horse's side. Nash balanced the family's twelve-gauge double-barreled shotgun with Damascus barrels over Nell's neck. Nash had hunted rabbits and birds with the shotgun before, but only halfheartedly. The weapon had a wicked kick and the knife-edged stock dropped so sharply the shooter knew he put his cheekbone in jeopardy every time he squeezed the trigger. Nash's respect for the double-barrel was so great he fired it only when, in his excitement, he forgot the consequences of squeezing the trigger. The gun was empty. His father carried the shells, double-ought buckshot, in his saddlebags.

“Not many people are accidentally shot with an empty gun,” he explained.

Uriah's rifle was a lever-action Winchester, a deer killer. Antelope and deer. Staples. Nature's meat market.

Nash remembered beefsteak from family meals in Minnesota. But there was no beefsteak in Montana. Deer steak hammered tender and coated with flour to take away the taste of sage and willow and wont. Beef, if you had beef, was for market. Venison was for the table.

Nash had killed his first deer that fall after the weather cooled enough to keep the meat until it aged. It was a dry doe. The rifle put her down, backbroken.

Nash walked toward the stricken deer. She was struggling to pull herself to safety, but her back legs wouldn't work. They dragged uselessly behind her like anchors. As Nash neared, she stopped struggling and turned to look at this man-creature who was killing her. Nash lifted the rifle to fire a bullet through her brain, to close those eyes that looked at him with such fear and wonder, but Uriah pushed the rifle aside. Bullets, like everything else, were too precious to waste.

The doe struggled again as Uriah approached. He straddled her, cradling her neck almost gently in his left arm. Then he began sawing at her throat with a knife honed to razor sharpness. Nash watched and listened to the doe bleat as the knife sought her lifeblood. Then the knife found her windpipe, and the only sound was her gasping breath, until the life drained out of her and her head sank to the ground.

And Uriah looked at Nash then, handing him the bloodied knife.

“Time you learned.”

Uriah grabbed a hind leg and held the deer open to Nash. The knife cut through hide and tissue to the body cavity below, and the smell came then, the smell of life and death emanating from the deer's guts and rising into the cold air. Nash cut the anus free and then sliced around the diaphragm, as he had seen his father do dozens of times. Then, holding his breath against the stench, he reached his arm deep into the deer's body and grasped her esophagus with his hand. He braced his legs and tugged until the windpipe tore free and the deer's guts spilled on the ground.

Nash ate meat from that deer, but never without seeing in his mind's eye that river of guts spilling on the ground. And he never again pointed a gun at game without seeing the look in that doe's eyes as his father cut her throat.

The horses were plowing through drifts caught in the lee of a little rise and their breath plumed up like smoke from a locomotive laboring up a hill.

Nash had been on only one train trip in his life, but he would never forget it. All the family's possessions—furniture, stock, tools—were loaded into a single “immigrant” car, the Brues into a hard-riding, smoke-filled passenger car. His mother had packed food to eat on the way, and the Brue family jolted, lurched, and jerked along for a thousand miles, passing the time at each stop feeding the stock and cleaning out their car. His father spent most of his time in the stockcar, peering out the crack in the door when he wasn't busy.

It was spring then, and emerald grass painted the prairies a pale green. Fields of wildflowers fled past the windows in startling bursts of color. The family thought the prairie was paradise then. Land that didn't have to be cleared to be plowed. Grass knee high stretched as far as the eye could see. They were playing a part in a story of high adventure and their excitement grew with each passing mile.

And then there was Billings, a little town walled between massive rimrocks overlooking the Yellowstone River. Uriah bought a newspaper there. The city was destined to grow, “far-sighted” businessmen said. It was blessed with good water, good land, and good people. An Indian had been cut to pieces under the wheels of a train. A hue and cry from the city's saloon owners followed the sheriff's conjecture that the Indian was drunk. No white man would serve an Indian liquor. No sir!

They switched trains in Laurel, heading south toward Wyoming. Finally they were in Bridger, unloading the immigrant car, free of the smoky confines of the train. Then came the ride to the homestead in the rattly, rough-riding wagon. Nash had never been so excited.

A few weeks later the family discovered that green was a rare and fleeting thing on the Montana prairie. The land scorched brown, mottled only by the color clinging to springs, creeks, and rivers.

Nell was laboring by the time they reached the top of the hill, and his father reined his roan to a stop.

“Not good to get them heated in weather like this.”

Nash climbed down and stretched his legs. “How much farther to the Andersons'?”

“Not far now. We'll be there by dark.”

About halfway across the flat, the man and the boy came to the road that tied their farm to the Andersons' and the homesteads of the dozen other families that had homesteaded along the foothills. It was easier going then, and Nell settled into a rocking, mile-eating gait. Nash fell into a half sleep, jerked awake as they pulled the horses to a stop on the edge of the Anderson homestead.

The Anderson place was frame lumber, black, with a layer of tar paper. Most places it would have been called a tar-paper shack. On the endless plains of Montana, it was called home. Lars was down by the creek, breaking ice to water his stock. Nash and Uriah saw him stop and wipe his face with a red bandana. He looked up as he felt the newcomers' eyes on him. Anderson studied Nash and Uriah for a moment, his memory sifting through horses and the way men sat them before he came up with their names. Then he stuck his arm into the air and waved them in.

Lars Anderson was grinning as they rode up.

“Well, I didn't expect to see you here, Uriah, Nash. But you're welcome. Climb down. Edna will have dinner ready in a bit. You have to stay with us tonight, you know. Too late to go anywhere else.”

“Thank you, Lars. We'll take you up on that. We'll give you a hand with the chores.”

It was all ritual: the invitation, the acceptance, and the offer to help with the chores were a bit of prairie etiquette as rigid as the protocol of any eastern drawing room.

Lars was slight, of medium height; his ordinary kind of face—save for the icy blue eyes and the constant grin—topped by a shock of brown hair. He was the kind of man people described as wiry, and maybe a little electric, too. When he talked, his arms fluttered through the air as though he were trying to keep his balance on a high wire.

“Uriah, you're looking a little peaked. Yes sir, you're looking a little peaked.”

“Now that you mention it, I've been feeling a little peaked,” Uriah answered with a grin. “Just don't know what to do about it.”

For a man who looked “a little peaked,” his father had an odd air of expectancy, Nash thought, and a moment later he learned why.

“I've got just the thing for you. Picked it up a couple of weeks ago in town. It's about as good a cure for what ails you as anything I've found. We have to go to the barn anyway to put the horses away, so I'll let you try some.”

“Well, thank you, Lars. I'll just take you up on that.”

They walked to the barn, leading the horses. The building was wholly unremarkable. Like most on Montana homesteads, it was built to make do until better times. The structure the little group stepped into was more shed than barn, but it offered some shelter.

Nash and his father slipped the saddles off the horses and rubbed the tired animals down. Meanwhile, Lars tossed a few forkfuls of hay to the horses. When the tasks were done, Lars reached above the doorframe and pulled down a bottle of whiskey. “I'm not sure what dosage you're supposed to take, but a good, long pull or two seems to do me a lot of good.”

His words were followed by the sound of a popping cork and the smell of whiskey. Lars passed the bottle to Uriah, and Uriah took a long drink. His face worked for a moment, tears filling his eyes as the raw whiskey burned his throat. But when he passed the bottle back to Lars, there was a grin on his face.

Lars took another long pull at the bottle, and his face flushed pink. He passed the bottle back to Uriah.

Uriah took another drink and winked at Nash as he handed the bottle to Lars. Lars managed to take a long swallow with only a slight grimace.

Uriah held up his hands when Lars tried to hand him the bottle again.

“That's all for me, Lars. Wouldn't do for me to drink any more before I see Edna. You know how those women are. Mary would be colder than an outhouse in a snowstorm if I showed up in my cups at one of her friends' homes.”

“Aye. And I wouldn't have to wait long to pay penance for my part in it either,” Lars said. “About the time you two stepped out of the door, Edna would be out here poking around for my bottle. Women just don't understand how taking a drink now and then picks up a man's spirits.”

“Well, your spirits picked me up considerable,” Uriah said, and the men roared. The whiskey worked fast on empty stomachs and both were humming as they walked up to the house.

They were met along the way by the younger Anderson kids, John, Elizabeth, and Joanne.

“What are you kids doing hanging back like that? You know the Brues. Now go tell your mother and Ettie that we have company for the night.” The three drifted off like snow riding a cold wind.

Ettie was the only student Nash's age in the Lone Pine School. They were as close as girls and boys can be in that awkward time between childhood and adulthood. She was pretty, like her mother, and when puberty took the hard edges off her, she would be close to beautiful. Nash wasn't really aware of that, nor did he ever wonder why when the cold was trying to steal the warmth from his bed he sometimes found himself thinking about her.

Ettie was setting the table as her father and the two visitors came through the door. She glanced up, smiled, and went back to her work. Edna stepped away from the stove.

“You two know you're always welcome here. Wash up and sit down at the table. I want to hear about Mary, and what brings the two of you out in weather like this.”

Edna was a little taller than her husband, light-complexioned like him, but more serious. Not stern, just serious. Lars said it was his job to plow and pitch hay, and it was Edna's job to take care of the kids and worry. She accomplished both tasks with great style.

Lars said grace amid the twittering of the younger children, and they all settled down to eat. There was stew—chunks of venison steaming in a mixture of potatoes and carrots—set off with bread fresh from the oven and covered with slabs of melting homemade butter.