In the Season of the Sun (32 page)

“Brownrigg has been in my employ for some time. I hired him on in Independence.” Harveson finished his coffee, rose from the divan, and crossed to his desk. “He began reporting to me on the trip upriver, describing how Coyote Kilhenny's been winning over even the men I handpicked for this expedition. Men whose loyalty I thought unquestionable.”

“I don't understand.” Abigail paused a moment to think. “Or maybe I do.” She drained the contents of her cup, the liquid brought warming strength to her limbs.

“He's promised them whole shares of the profits to be realized from our venture, sister.
Our
venture.”

“It seems we underestimated Coyote Kilhenny. He is not the simple rogue he appears to be.”

“Simple, ha—like Cassius.” Harveson slapped his fist into the palm of his hand. “Curse me for a fool. His ambitions are as great as my own, I fear.” He stretched a hand out and leaned on the bookcase.

“But what does a man like him know about running a post like this?” Abigail blurted. “He may know bear traps and forest trails, but I warrant profit and loss columns would be beyond even his considerable talents.”

“Maybe so,” Harveson concurred, smoothing his silver hair. “But then, one of my ledgers is missing. And a journal I kept during the last year when I was planning all this.”

“He still doesn't have your talent. Nor mine.”

“We will still have to be on our guard. My authority over these men has dangerously eroded.”

“All that will change when the boats arrive.” Abigail tried to sound hopeful.

“If we're around to see them. Kilhenny for all his size has a lean and hungry look.” Nate Harveson laughed softly. “I can count on Smead and his crew. And there may be others.…” He started to suggest Tom Milam and then thought better of it.

“Does Kilhenny have an idea when the boats are due in?” Abigail asked.

“No.”

“It can't be too soon.” She was concerned, but like her brother, resolute that the likes of Coyote Kilhenny would not prevail against them. Abigail knew her brother wanted to know about Tom. She didn't know what to tell him, other than she had fallen in love with Tom Milam. But would he go against the man who had been his father, who had saved him from the Indians and raised him as his own?

Abigail had plenty of dreams, but answers were in short supply.

Tom allowed Abigail to proceed without him through the open gates of the fort. He waited about a quarter of an hour and then walked from the woods. In these early-morning hours, men were sprawled asleep by the remnants of the bonfire and at their posts, where heavily armed sentries dozed upon the ramparts of the fort.

Tom spied the familiar figure of Coyote Kilhenny sitting in a ladder-backed rocking chair on the flat roof of the barracks at the east wall of the compound. Tom headed straight toward the man on the roof as sunlight gradually warmed the trampled earth and roused the sentries from their illicit slumber.

“C'mon up, lad,” Kilhenny said as Tom drew to within a stone's throw of the log barracks. The crisscrossed logs at the corner of the barracks made for an easy climb and in a matter of seconds Tom was on the roof and sat on his haunches in the shadow of the rocking chair. The sky was a limitless azure expanse, devoid of clouds, where the last few stars of evening winked out before the risen sun like candle flames extinguished by a sudden gust of wind.

“Figured you to be asleep,” Tom said.

“Someone has to keep watch. Hell, one man could have made off with the stock and emptied the corral and no one the wiser.” Kilhenny reached down for the cider jug at his side and sloshed the contents, taking reassurance he still had some drink close at hand.

“I didn't mean exactly asleep.” Tom took the jug and helped himself to a swallow of hard cider.

Coyote Kilhenny had been amusing himself with Harveson's mulatto servant ever since the trip upriver. “Naw,” he said. “I gave her away. I got what I needed from her.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Down below. Underneath my bed. A ledger and a book of notes, written in Nate Harveson's own hand.” Kilhenny brushed a tangle of rust-red hair out of his face. “She took them for me, yesterday morning.”

Tom's interest was aroused now. What was the crafty half-breed really up to?

“I want you to study on them, lad.”

“Me?”

“Sure. You read better than I ever will. There's more to running a trading post than being handy with these,” Coyote said, thumping the percussion pistols holstered across his chest. “I want you to study on them, learn about purchasing supplies, figure profit margins, how and what to keep in stock. And laying out land plots. Nate's got him drawn some maps. You need to know them by heart.”

“I still don't understand.”

“Blast it. Open your ears, laddie buck. You don't think I aim to stand in that little man's shadow for long, do you?”

“You gave your word.…”

“There ain't but three people in this whole world I'd stand by—Pike, Skintop, sonuvabitch that he is, and you. No one else counts. And nothing I say to them counts either.” Kilhenny held out his hands and Tom leaned forward and passed the jug of cider to the half-breed Scot. Tom's shirt parted and the snake on the chain glinted in the sunlight. “What was that your pa used to say about that ring?”

“Keep the snake on your hand and it'll never coil around your heart,” Tom answered, tucking the ring back inside his shirt.

“I didn't have much truck with your pa,” Kilhenny said. “But he knew how to die. He had courage. It speaks well for a man.” Kilhenny tilted the jug to his lips and drank deeply, lowered it, and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his flannel coat. “He wasn't afraid of his destiny. And neither am I.”

“I don't want trouble for the Harvesons.”

“Abigail Harveson's got you wound up tighter than Methuselah's pocket watch. I better not let her lead you into the woods alone, again.”

“We walked together,” Tom corrected.

Kilhenny chuckled. “Every man says the same thing. I said it once myself.”

“This is different.”

“It's always different. Always the same.” There was a note of wistfulness in the man's voice. Tom realized there was more to Kilhenny than he would ever completely learn. “I aim to have my way in this matter. What Harveson does is up to him.” Kilhenny sighed and began to rock back and forth. The chair creaked with every forward motion, the joints protesting the trapper's solid, heavy burden. Kilhenny had seen Brownrigg exit Harveson's house. He wondered what Harveson was up to and decided to have a talk with Brownrigg. He looked at Tom and smiled in satisfaction remembering how Tom had looked at ten years of age, scared but proud, standing all alone on the prairie. He saw himself reaching down to the boy and lifting him up to ride behind him on the saddle.

“Comes a time, a man needs to know he'll leave something more behind than his bones,” Kilhenny said. Eleven years ago seemed like yesterday. “That wasn't just a boy I brought out of the wilderness. You were my future. I aim to build something before I go under. And leave it for you, to carry on for me.”

Tom met the half-breed's stare. “Well, I'll be, so there's some chinking loose in that rough bark you call skin. I'd never believed it.”

“Wait and see, laddie buck,” Kilhenny said gruffly. “You live long enough, you'll lose a little mud along the way, mark my words.” With that sage advice, Kilhenny clasped his hands behind his head and relaxed in the sun, let the warmth leach the winter from his limbs. He'd do what needed to be done. And so would Tom.

36

L
one Walker looked east through diaphanous veils of prayer smoke swirling against the sky. He added leaves of elk mint to the fire and a few dried Juneberries and wafted an eagle feather through the smoke, fanning the flames of the prayer fire.

“All-Father,

It is good the sun upon the hills

And Cold Maker has left us that

Our young men might hunt and

Bring food to our lodges.

Happy are your people yet

Still is my heart.

I have dreamed that all of

Ever Shadow lay between my son

And I.

And our spirits could not speak.”

Lone Walker sang his prayer song apart from the village. He had built his medicine fire by the shore of the lake. His voice would have carried across the glassy still waters, but he sang softly. His keening voice just carried enough that the people of the village knew he was singing, making medicine with the All-Father. Every morning he made his prayer smoke. It was a ritual the Blackfeet of Medicine Lake not only accepted as natural but took comfort in.

“All-Father,

Glad are we for the swiftness of the horse

And the warmth of the Life-Giver Above.

My Prayer Smoke rises from Beauty into Beauty.”

Jacob led his horse down to the lake. He'd just ridden the big gray mare for the first time only a day ago and he anticipated trouble the moment he swung a leg over the animal's back. But a temperamental horse was the least of his concerns as he listened to Lone Walker, a few yards away.

“The song is like the smoke,” he said aloud. “It soon vanishes.” Jacob had little use for his father's rituals. He could see no purpose in lifting his prayers to a God who if he existed at all was a capricious deity, deaf to the world of men. Maybe such things were lost to him, feelings and beliefs he could never understand. After all, he was a white man, braided hair, beaded buckskins, and all. At least there were those men and women in the village who had begun to make him feel apart from the tribe. Ever since the death of Wolf Lance, five months past, Jacob felt just as exiled by their attitudes as Tewa was exiled through the course of her own action. She was of the People yet kept to her lodge on the hillside, a solitary warrior woman who had been touched by tragedy and the Great Spirit.

“Why do you sing?” Jacob asked.

“I sing that we might know and understand the way of things,” Lone Walker replied. “And I sing that the world will not end.”

Jacob looked toward the lodge nestled back in the pines upslope from where Lone Walker had built his sacred fire. My wedding lodge, Jacob wryly reminded himself, and to Lone Walker replied, “Perhaps you are too late.” He walked away, following the lakeshore.

Lone Walker watched him leave and his heart was filled with sympathy for his adopted son. There was talk in the village of driving Jacob out of Ever Shadow and forcing him to leave the People behind, never to return to Medicine Lake. Of course, such talk always reached Lone Walker secondhand and rose infrequently at best. The death of such a noted warrior as Wolf Lance had upset the tribal elders, but none of them had demanded banishment for Jacob. Lone Walker wondered if even the scattered outcry against Jacob would have occurred had the young man been born a Blackfoot.

As for Tewa—men called her Warrior Woman. She had ridden with raiding parties and captured Kootenai ponies and added Kootenai scalps to her war lance. She had decorated her lodge with symbols of charging horses and the figure of a woman carrying an elk horn bow loosing arrows at her enemies. Already, the people of the village held her in reverence, as one touched by the Above Ones and led onto a special path. They kept their distance from her and accorded her the deference shown the tribe's most honored warriors or medicine men. Still, Jacob was drawn to that lodge on the hillside, like a moth to a flame perhaps, or, even more so, like the hunter drawn into the mysterious heart of the forest where the wild wolf waits.

Jacob walked his horse into the lake until the icy cold surface of the water lapped at the mare's underbelly.

“Gentle now.” He kept his voice low and soothing to the wary animal. “Gentle now.” The water served a twofold purpose. It would cushion his fall if the mare bucked him off. It would also make the mare work harder to dislodge him once he mounted up.

Jacob grabbed a handful of mane and swung up onto the animal's back. Jacob's legs tightened as the animal shied, then plunged forward, kicking up spray and soaking herself and the white man. The mare reared, arched its back, kicked its hind legs out, fought the man and the water for all of five minutes and then as abruptly quit, tossed its head, and waited, obedient to the reins and the soft-bit hackamore.

Jacob, eager to take his chances on hard ground, rode the mare out of the lake. The mare had had its fill of fighting; the strong, sturdy animal only wanted to run. And Jacob gave her the lead and rode at a gallop toward the entrance to the valley.

Tewa stood before her lodge and watched the spectacle of man and beast vying for dominance, and in her own heart felt a kinship for the gray mare. She too struggled, tried to battle free of the burdensome shadow of her father's death. She warred with the feelings in her heart as she watched Jacob emerge from the lake and head off down the valley. She wanted to run to her own fierce charger and ride with him and suffered guilt anew that she should even consider such an act and with her father's killer no less.

A twig broke behind her and she spun around. Sparrow Woman emerged from a thicket of fir trees that had screened the woman's climb. Though no man might approach Tewa's lodge, Sparrow Woman was under no such taboo. She carried a parfleche freshly filled with elk mint and bitterroot and dried chokecherries and handed the parfleche to Tewa, who pretended she hadn't been watching Jacob from afar. Sparrow Woman knew different but said nothing of the matter.

“What do you want of me?” Tewa asked gruffly. She brought out her scraping stones and squatted down by a rack on which she had fixed an elk skin. She began working the pelt with the stone scraper, smoothing the skin to make it more pliable.

“I want nothing of you … only for you.” Sparrow Woman ignored the younger woman's brusqueness. Patience emanated from her as she knelt by Tewa and took up one of the pelts that had already been worked and began to stitch it with a length of sinew. “I have walked your path. It is a lonely journey.” She looked across the valley where the far slope was dotted with burial scaffolds overlooking a verdant meadow.