Savage Beloved (23 page)

Two Eagles watched as each took a blanket from his bags and went to place it on Spotted Bear.

Candy was so touched by this show of affection, tears swam in her eyes.

Two Eagles smiled at his cousin, then spun around and hurried to his horse, where he swung into his saddle.

Candy was already in hers. She was ready, even eager, to ride again.

She knew the importance of getting Spotted Bear to his people’s shaman so that he could have proper treatment for the fever. She just hoped it wasn’t too late.

“You do forgive me, don’t you, Two Eagles, for keeping the truth from you?” Candy asked, bringing his eyes to her.

“You know I do,” Two Eagles said, smiling broadly at her. “You are my woman. How could I stop loving you for any reason? I have vowed my love to you, and it is forever. Do you hear? Forever.”

He swallowed hard and looked over his shoulder at Spotted Bear, who lay in a deep sleep. Then he gazed into Candy’s eyes again. “It is unbelievable that he lived through the scalping, for the horrible signs of what was done to him are so visible,” he said, shuddering. “He is a man of much bravery to live through such a horrendous event, and then he had the courage to keep to himself because he did not want to bring trouble into my village. He saw himself as a Ghost. How can he have thought that I could ever see him in such a way?”

“I had no idea that he was your cousin,” Candy said, glad that they were near the village.

She glanced down at Spotted Bear. He hadn’t stirred again.

She looked then at Shadow, who had caught up with them. She smiled when she saw that her wolf stayed close by Spotted Bear’s side.

She caught a glimpse of one of the wolves following
them. It remained hidden in the dense forest at the left side of the trail.

She imagined that the wolves feared for their friend Spotted Bear’s life and hated being separated from him!

“We are almost home,” Two Eagles said, drawing Candy’s attention back to him. “I shall ride ahead and prepare my people for Spotted Bear’s arrival. I shall also prepare my shaman. It is all in his hands now, whether my cousin lives or dies.”

Candy watched him ride away; his warriors continued on with her and Spotted Bear.

When they arrived at the village, everyone was standing outside, looking guardedly at the man on the travois.

Candy knew that there would be some who might never accept Spotted Bear’s presence in their village.

But that mattered not.

What did matter was that finally Spotted Bear was home, truly home, and his chief had accepted him, and his shaman was awaiting him.

Candy rode onward and stopped before Crying Wolf’s lodge, where Two Eagles stood, waiting.

Candy dismounted while Two Eagles gently unwrapped the blankets from around Spotted Bear, then lifted him into his arms and carried him inside the shaman’s lodge.

Candy waited outside.

When Two Eagles came out again, she gazed into his eyes as he looked lovingly into hers.

“He is now under the care of our shaman,” he said. “
Hiyu-wo
, come, my woman. Let us go
home. There we will await word about my cousin’s condition.”

Candy saw that their horses had been taken away and that the warriors had returned to their homes. She also noticed that everyone in the village had resumed their normal activities.

When Candy and Two Eagles were inside their tepee, where Shadow was already asleep on her pallet, Two Eagles placed his hands at Candy’s waist and turned her to face him.

“Thank you for being the woman that you are . . . a woman whose heart is loving and giving,” he said thickly. “Had you not gone when Shadow came for you, my cousin would have died.”

“He might still,” Candy murmured.

“He is in good hands, so I doubt that he will leave this earth just yet,” Two Eagles said. He took her by the hand and led her down beside his lodge fire, which was now only glowing embers. “If he was strong and brave enough to have lived through the scalping, he will not allow an ordinary fever to take him away from the life that now awaits him. I will make it all up to him; he will soon forget that time he felt he no longer belonged among his own people.”

Candy was relieved that he still loved her and wasn’t angry that she’d gone to help Spotted Bear. She was thankful that he had found her that day of her own misfortune, when she was crawling away from the massacre. She now knew that nothing would ever stand between them and their devotion to one another.

“I’m so tired,” Candy murmured, easing into Two Eagles’s arms as he held them out for her.

“Sleep,” he said, holding her close. “I shall hold you and watch you. I find it hard to take my eyes off you. You are everything precious on this earth.”

Candy melted into his embrace.

She went to sleep with a contented smile on her face.

The soul unto itself

Is an imperial friend—

Or the most agonizing spy
An enemy could send.
—Emily Dickinson

Candy was awakened abruptly by a sound like hailstones pummeling the tepee, yet the glow of the rising sun through the buckskin proved it was not a stormy morning.

“What can it be?” Candy asked, hurrying into a dress as Two Eagles threw on his clothes.

The sound increased in volume, and Candy jumped in alarm when something strange began falling through the smoke hole, crackling and popping as the objects fell into the flames in the fire pit. It sounded to her like corn popping.

She gazed, wide-eyed, as she recognized the objects.

She said “grasshoppers” at the same time that Two Eagles said “locusts.”

“Lord, I can’t believe my eyes,” Candy said as she stared at the insects falling into the flames, their bodies popping at contact.

“We’re being invaded by a swarm of locusts!” Two Eagles said, hurrying to the entrance flap. He shoved it aside, flinching when more locusts flew inside the tepee.

He dropped the flap closed, but not before he had seen what was happening outside. The sky was black with the swarm of locusts. They were dropping onto everything in his village; all of the tepees were crawling with them. He could hear the whinnying of the horses in the corrals as their flesh was struck by the insects.

“How bad is it?” Candy asked.

“I have never seen this many at one time,” Two Eagles said, watching as more insects continued to fall through the smoke hole.

“I remember one time long ago, when my father was stationed at Fort Jefferson Barracks in Missouri, grasshoppers came in such great numbers that everyone’s crops that year were ruined by them,” Candy said, shuddering.

She remembered the horrible insects getting caught in her hair that day. She would never forget how she’d fought in vain to remove them as she ran to her house. Her mother had finally managed to get them out, but not before some had burrowed in so deeply that those strands of hair had to be cut in order to remove the horrible insects.

“It is good that our crops are already harvested or we would have lost everything,” Two Eagles said, less tense now that the thumps against his lodge covering were beginning to lessen.

“But there are surely those who have not had their harvest yet,” Candy said, swatting at a locust that had landed on her arm. She shivered as she plucked the creature from the sleeve of her dress and tossed it outside.

“Perhaps you should stay inside while I go to see about the horses,” Two Eagles said.

“I would rather go with you,” Candy said. “I want to see what damage the grasshoppers have done.”

“You call them grasshoppers while I call them locusts,” Two Eagles repeated, sliding his feet into his moccasins as Candy did the same. “Why is that?”

“That is what we have always called them,” Candy said. “Back when they were so bad in Missouri, they were said to be Rocky Mountain locusts, yet we called them grasshoppers because they looked like the insects we normally saw in the summer in Missouri.”

She flinched when another locust fell down through the smoke hole and settled on the inside skin of the lodge, clinging upside down, its bulging eyes looking slowly around it.

“They came that summer day in sky-blackening swarms, devastating all vegetation in their path,” she said as Two Eagles plucked the insect from the wall, studying it as he held it closer.

“A relief and aid society was organized, but only to help people whose skin was white,” Candy said.
“The Indians that lived in that area, the peaceful Shawnee, lost everything that year, yet they received no assistance.”

She watched Two Eagles hold the entrance flap aside and release the insect into the air rather than kill it, and she thought what a kind man he was.

“No public outcry was heard for the hungry Shawnee, but they would not allow themselves to beg,” Candy said. Even then she had felt the plight of the red man, yet she was too small a child to offer them any help.

She had begged her father to help the Shawnee, but he had told her to mind her own business. He had told her never to offer redskins any kindness, for if she did, they would never stop asking things of her.

It was as though fate had determined that eventually her father would be shown no pity by red men, just as he had never shown pity to them. The Sioux had come and taken his life, as though they had known of the man’s past transgressions against men and women of their skin color.

Even children.

Yes, she had heard about her father’s raids on villages where no one was left living, man, woman, or child. But she had not wanted to believe such stories about her father. She had closed her eyes to the truth.

But when she had seen the head of the Wichita chief stored in that jar, she had to believe the very worst of her father.

Candy stepped outside with Two Eagles, gasping when she saw the thick layer of locusts on the
ground, some dead, some alive and crawling above a heap of their own kind.

Slowly people emerged from their tepees, stunned speechless by the sight.

Candy winced when she stepped farther outside beside Two Eagles, each step crunching locusts beneath their moccasins.

One by one, people came together in the center of the village to discuss what had happened, as Two Eagles, Candy, and several warriors hurried to the corrals to check the condition of their horses.

Candy clung to Two Eagles’s arm as she stepped up to the corral with him. The horses were now contentedly munching the locusts as though feed had fallen from the sky.

The horses were not harmed, their hides too thick to be hurt by the insects.

Two Eagles stroked his midnight-black stallion’s sleek mane, then turned back to Candy. “My people have much to do now,” he said decisively. “We must be sure to gather up all of the dead locusts and rid ourselves of them, or the stench will soon be all but deadly.”

He went to the center of the village, where everyone still stood.

“We must work tirelessly until the insects are gone from our village,” Two Eagles announced. He looked past the tepees to the river, then in another direction, where their crops had just been removed from the communal garden.

“We will take them to our empty garden, pile
them up, and burn them,” he said. “Let us begin now. We should not stop until all are removed.”

Everyone joined in the work, scraping up the locusts and placing them in baskets.

Candy worked as hard as anyone, laughing when Shadow romped and chased an occasional locust that had escaped the fire.

As the sun climbed high in the sky, Candy’s back ached fiercely, but she still stayed with the others, glad to be able to see the ground again in the village; soon the hard work would be over.

She stopped for a moment when she saw Two Eagles gazing off in the direction of Proud Wind’s village. She knew that he was wondering whether Proud Wind and his people had brought in their harvest before the locusts arrived.

Nymph of the downward smile

and sidelong glance,

In what diviner moments of the day

art thou most lovely?

—John Keats

Candy was exhausted from cleaning up the piles of dead locusts. She stood with the others as they watched the terrible things go up in smoke in the middle of what had not long ago been a garden filled with ripe corn.

Even the sentries had been drawn from their posts to help clean up the debris.

Candy gazed at Two Eagles as he stepped beside her. “I’m so glad that’s over,” she murmured, wiping a bead of perspiration from her brow. “But the stench. It’s horrible.”

“The wind is changing,” Two Eagles said, wiping a smudge of black soot from her cheek. “The smell of death will soon go in the opposite direction.”

Candy reached up and brushed some soot from his skin, then turned with him as they heard the sound of a horse and wagon approaching the village.

Worry filled Two Eagles. “It must be whites, for no Indians travel by wagon,” he said tightly.

He waved at his warriors, bringing them quickly into a circle around him. He instructed them to take the women and children and stay inside their lodges. They were only to come out if they saw a threat. In that case, they were to come out in full force, carrying firearms.

He then rushed back to Candy. He led her quickly to their tepee, closing the flap behind them.

“Stay here,” he said as he gently placed his hands on her shoulders. “Let none of the white people see you. You know the dangers.”

“Yes, I know,” Candy said, yet she felt strange hiding from her own people.

“I must go and see what brings the white eyes among my Wichita people,” Two Eagles said, placing a hand on Candy’s cheek. “I will send them away quickly,” he said, only pausing long enough to brush a comforting kiss across her lips before he left.

Candy knew she must not be seen, but she longed to hear what had brought the strangers into the village. She stepped to the closed flap and leaned an ear close to it.

Two Eagles stood just outside the entrance flap, his arms folded across his bare chest, as the wagon drew closer and closer.