Native Wolf (2 page)

Drew nodded toward Chase’s empty glass. "You want another one?"

The madam stared at Chase in expectation—her bottle of whiskey uncorked and a knowing smile pasted on her brightly painted face. He declined with a shake of his head. He’d already had way too much to drink. She pouted, shrugging at Drew and re-corking the bottle.

Drew took a slow sip from his own glass, then swirled the golden brown liquid lazily around. "You want my advice?" he said. "Let it go."

"Nope," Chase said.

That was the one thing he couldn’t do. He’d had a vision from the Great Spirit. And a man didn’t take such things lightly. In that vision, Chase had seen his Konkow grandmother—not dead, as everyone had long believed, but alive and dwelling here in the white man’s town. Chase had been given a sacred message. The Great Spirit had told him that it was time for him to find her, to close the circle and heal the past.

So Chase had planned to make the long journey to the place of his birth. But that trip had been delayed. He’d missed seeing his grandmother alive by a matter of a few weeks. He’d failed the Great Spirit. Now he had to do everything he could to make amends.

"Listen, Chase." Drew set down his drink and clapped him on the shoulder. "She’s gone now. There’s nothin’ you can do to change that."

Remorse weighed heavily on Chase’s spirit. He scowled at his empty glass, working the muscles of his jaw. All those years, their grandmother must have believed she'd been forgotten by her people. He shrugged off Drew's hand. "I should have come sooner."

"You couldn’t. You know that. If you hadn’t put off the trip to mend Joe’s wagon, he would have been out of work this winter.”

He knew Drew was right. But the week of blacksmithing to repair Joe’s broken axle and shattered wheels had cost him everything. "I should have come."

"Ah, hell, Chase. It’s not like we knew her. We were still in cradleboards when we left. Grandmother Yoema was..."

Chase stiffened, his nostrils flaring. His sharp glare silenced his brother. It was unwise to speak the name of one who’d gone from this world. He glanced into the corners of the parlor reflected in the mirror, half expecting his grandmother’s summoned spirit to materialize.

"Look, Chase, even Father didn’t come," Drew argued. "He knew it wouldn’t do any good." He shook his head. “He said his goodbye a long time ago. For him, she died on the march.”

Chase’s jaw clenched at the painful reminder. Maybe he’d take that refill after all. He raised his empty glass toward the madam, who was happy to oblige him, then downed the three fingers of whiskey in one searing gulp.

The march. He knew the story well. A dozen years ago in this place, tensions between the land-hungry whites and the vanishing tribes had grown into rampant violence. Whites were slaughtered, natives massacred. Finally, the white soldiers—at a loss over what to do with the Indians they’d reduced to starvation—decided to relocate them. Rounded up like cattle, they were driven nearly a hundred miles to Nome Cult Reservation.

Only half of the natives survived the grueling march over rocky terrain. Chase figured that was still a good deal more than the army intended. Though Chase’s grandfather, the proud headman of the Konkow tribe, searched for his wife Yoema, he was unable to find her and assumed the soldiers had killed her. Grief-stricken, he starved himself to death on the journey.

But Chase’s recent vision had told him that Yoema had not been killed. Indeed, the letter that his Uncle Hintsuli had forwarded to the family from the reservation at Nome Cult several days ago confirmed that fact. Chase’s grandmother
was
alive...or at least she
had
been. She'd been kept all these years by a rancher near the old Konkow village. According to the letter, she’d succumbed only recently to a fever.

At the news, Chase’s parents, Sakote and Mattie, had mourned quietly. After all, like Drew said, they’d made peace with her passing long ago.

But Chase couldn’t let it go. The Great Spirit had called him to his grandmother’s side while she lay dying, and he’d failed her. Now, according to his vision, it was his obligation to help her finish her spirit’s journey, to complete the circle, to heal the past.

"Hey, tell me something," he mumbled to the madam, who was rearranging the flowers on their table. When she didn’t realize he was addressing her, he got her attention by reaching out and grabbing her wrist.

She gave a little gasp, and Drew frowned at him in clear disapproval. With a wince of apology, Chase released her. Sometimes a blacksmith forgot his own strength.

She swallowed visibly. "More whiskey, mister?" she asked.

He didn’t bother to answer. "Where’s the Parker Ranch?"

"Now wait a minute, Chase," Drew protested. "You can’t just go waltzin’ up and—“

"Where is it?" Chase locked gazes with the madam.

"Shit." Drew rolled his eyes and threw up his hands. "What are you gonna do, Chase?"

Chase ignored him, staring at the woman, willing her to tell him what he wanted to know.

She did. "It’s west of here, a couple of miles along the main road."

"Chase," Drew warned.

He nodded thanks to the woman.

"Chase!"

He turned to go, but Drew caught his arm. "You’re not goin’ there. Not now. Not in the middle of the night. Look, we’re both pretty liquored up. Wait till mornin’, and I’ll come with you. You can’t go off half-co-" His glance caught on something over Chase’s shoulder, and he suddenly stopped with his mouth agape.

Not much could leave Drew speechless. Chase frowned, glancing up at the reflection of the room in the mirror, just in time to glimpse the swish of blue skirts as one of the shady ladies upstairs entered a room and closed the door.

Chase could see by the look on Drew’s face that he’d get no more interference from his brother tonight. He shook his head in disgust.

"Enjoy yourself," he muttered, snapping up Drew’s whiskey and downing the rest of it. He plunked a silver dollar on the table, sure that by the time he hit the brothel door, his brother would be halfway up the stairs.

Once outside, the chill night air smacked Chase in the face, taking the edge off the dizzying effects of the whiskey. Still, he stopped on the boardwalk in front of the Parlor to get his bearings.

He shouldn’t have taken that last shot of whiskey. Hell, he probably shouldn’t have taken the last
three
. He’d never had Drew’s constitution. But he needed the whiskey’s fortification for the task ahead of him.

Overhead, a sky full of stars kept a close vigil on the earth. Their patterns circled the star in the north, showing him the way. He stepped off the boardwalk and trudged along the main street of Paradise. He passed a dry goods store, a schoolhouse, a hotel, a church, and four saloons, where the muffled music and flickering lamplight seeping through the doors signaled that—in the saloons at least—the night was young.

A full acorn-white moon helped him navigate the curving road. He descended the ridge, his boots soundless in the soft powder of the well-worn path. Eventually the fragrant pines thinned, yielding to stands of oak. Hills thick with spring growth rolled gently on either side of the road.

One of those new barbed wire fences sprang up, dividing the lush grass from the grazed. It served as a bitter reminder of how the ranchers’ distorted sense of entitlement had destroyed the beautiful land. Land that had once sustained hundreds of Konkows was now browsed to the dirt by the voracious beasts the white men brought with them. And to protect their cattle, the ranchers shot any creatures that threatened the land they claimed for their own, whether they were coyotes, wildcats, or Indians.

Chase’s mouth twisted as he looked into the distance at the endless stretch of fence. Such an expanse had once supported several Konkow villages. Now it belonged to one greedy man.

He gave his head a sobering snap, but it didn’t help much. He still weaved as he walked along the row of posts, following them until the moon had climbed two fingers higher into the heavens. Finally, an ostentatious sign across a gated side road announced THE PARKER RANCH in letters burned into the wood. At the corner of the sign, the letter P within a circle formed the ranch’s brand.

Chase spat his disgust into the dirt. Branding irons were the one thing he refused to forge in his blacksmith’s shop. The domineering whites thought they could own beasts. They felt justified in burning animal flesh with hot iron, trapping cattle behind fences of metal thorns, killing them with no blessing, no honor. He’d even heard that some of the whites believed the Konkows were animals, that ranchers herded and slaughtered them like livestock.

Chase was feeling the full effects of that last drink now. Anger flared in him as quickly as brush fire. He stared hard at the brand on the sign as rage shuddered through him. Had Parker believed that? The rancher had torn his grandmother Yoema from her husband’s side, made her his property, his slave. Had he branded
her
with his mark, too?

The idea sickened Chase. He staggered, clutching the barbed wire in his fist to regain his balance. He hardly felt the star-shaped barb piercing his palm.

Vengeance. The feeling rose so powerfully in him that he could taste it at the back of his throat. Here was his answer, he thought. This was why the Great Spirit had chosen him. He was suddenly sure of it. As blood of her blood, it was Chase’s obligation to exact revenge for the rancher’s atrocities upon his grandmother. That was the way to heal the past and close the circle.

Sweat beaded his upper lip as he let his gaze travel past the gate, down the winding road, along several outbuildings and a barn, finally fixing on a whitewashed house of shamefully lavish proportions. The opulence of it sharpened his wrath.

The stars overhead doubled in his vision. Chase shook his head to dispel the annoying blur. He clenched his fist tighter around the barbed wire, ignoring the trickle of blood that dripped through his fingers. If he was going to take vengeance, he had to have a clear head. It was a dangerous thing he attempted. He needed his wits about him.

With one hand on the knife sheathed at his hip, he stole through the gate. The long driveway allowed time for his anger to smolder, time to mull over his mode of revenge. What was fitting, he considered, for a monster who ripped apart families, who degraded natives like they were cattle, who kept old women enslaved until they died, never again to see their kin?

Chase ground his teeth, pulverizing any shred of mercy he possessed, the way tribal women ground acorns between rock. He had a sudden primitive urge to follow the old ways of his father’s people—beating the man with a club until his body broke or shooting him full of arrows until he screamed for death. But he couldn’t afford such luxuries, not now, not here on the man’s property.

Perhaps he’d steal the rancher away then, sever him from his family as Chase’s grandmother had been severed from the Konkows.

A horse whickered in the barn, startling Chase. He melted into the shadow of the golden oak that stood guard over the massive house.

Eventually, the air grew silent again, except for the distant baying of a lone coyote. Chase lifted his eyes to the grand mansion shining in the moonlight, and the corners of his mouth turned down.

Natives had probably built this princely manor for a white man who’d never soiled his hands in the Great Spirit’s earth. While revered Konkow headmen and gifted shamans like his grandmother blistered their palms and bent their backs to serve the rancher, Parker and his family lived like spoiled children, untouched by harsh winds or scorching sun or the indignity of hard labor. He wondered how Parker would fare as a slave, sweating and toiling for the profit of another.

Then a dark inspiration took hold. His lips slowly curved into a grim smile.

The march to Nome Cult.

He would force Parker to endure the march, as his people had. He’d prod the rancher across a hundred miles of rugged land, without water, without food, without shelter, until there was nothing left of him. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, as his white mother’s Bible preached. That was how his grandmother would be avenged. That was how her spirit would find peace.

Resolve and liquor made him bold. He silently climbed the steps and circled the porch until he found a window left open to capture the night breeze. He brushed aside the sheer curtain. Moonlight spilled like pale acorn soup, over the sill and into the darkened house.

A sudden swell of vertigo tipped him off-balance as he climbed through the window. He made a grab for the curtain, tearing the frail fabric. Luckily, he had enough presence of mind to silence an angry curse, and his feet finally found purchase on the polished wood floor.

He swayed, then straightened, swallowing hard as he perused the costly furnishings, which were as sumptuous as those at the Parlor.

A pair of sofas so plump they looked pregnant squatted on stubby legs carved with figures of leaves. Four rush-seat chairs stenciled with twining flowers sat against one wall. Delicate tables perched here and there on legs no thicker than a fawn’s. A massive marble fireplace with an iron grate dominated the room, and an ornate clock ticked softly on the mantel. An unlit chandelier hung from the ceiling like a giant crystal spider, and a dense, patterned carpet stretched in an oval pool over the floor. Sweeping down one side of the room was a mahogany staircase, and the walls were adorned with paper printed in pale vertical stripes.

His gaze settled on the enormous gilt-framed oil portrait hung above the mantel.

Letting the torn curtain fall closed, Chase ventured into the room to take a closer look. The title at the bottom read, SAMUEL AND CLAIRE PARKER. Hatred began to boil his blood as he let his eyes slide up to study the face of his enemy, the evil rancher who’d enslaved his grandmother.

Samuel Parker had a stern, wrinkled face, a balding head, dark eyes, and a trailing gray mustache that made him look even sterner. He was easy to hate. Chase’s lip curled as he savored the thought of dragging the villain out of bed.

Then his gaze lit on Claire Parker. A wave of lightheadedness washed over him. It was only the whiskey, he told himself. Yet he couldn’t take his eyes off of the face in the painting. The woman seemed half her husband’s age, as innocent and fair as Parker was darkly corrupt. She had long fair hair, partially swept up into a knot. Her features were delicate, and her eyes were serene and sweet. He’d never seen anyone so beautiful.