Scarlet Plume, Second Edition (31 page)

It was straight up noon when she came to where the Big Sioux angled south. The time had come for her to strike out across the open country, northeast toward Skywater and New Ulm. She took a last drink of water, washed her hands and face, then started up the side of the steep bluff.

A soft wind greeted her when she topped the rise. It breathed out of the east, damp on her cheek. Ahead lay a prairie the color of wolfskin.

As she stood looking, little white mushroom scuds appeared in the sky.

Presently, breath caught, she headed out across the flat land.

The white scuds began to build up into cumulus clouds immediately ahead of her. She watched the clouds merge into towers of cream and gold.

She walked.

The undersides of the highest cloud towers turned black, and shafts of purple shadows began to trail to earth. The clouds moved with slow, massive silence ahead of her into the northeast.

She walked.

The sun shone hot on her neck and back. She stepped through undulating sweeps of gray-green grass. She could feel the soles of her moccasins thinning and wearing through.

She had tramped for perhaps two hours when she came upon a patch of bare, sandy ground. Across the middle of it, like a series of well-wrought brush strokes on yellow canvas, lay innumerable pairs of buggy tracks. And down the middle of each of the paired tracks lay the prints of horseshoes. All of the tracks were old.

Her face lighted up. Rollo’s trail at last. Now all she had to do was follow it and she would eventually arrive at New Ulm.

She walked.

Sand gave way to grass again. The trail was sometimes difficult to follow through deep grass. By keeping a sharp eye out for occasional broken stalks of joint grass, she managed to make it out.

Not even a shoot as big as a riding whip could be seen. She sometimes had the impression that she was making no headway whatever, that she was trudging on an endless grass treadmill.

The towering clouds ahead continued to merge, at last formed a mountain range of dazzling cream-gold peaks. Every now and then lightning rumpled the cloud bank. The entire mass seemed to move at about the same speed she walked, a couple of miles ahead. Deep in the purple shadows beneath it, against the horizon, hung striding sheets of rain.

Of a sudden the high prairie fell away into a little valley, down the center of which sparkled a twisting creek. Gooseberries and a few ash trees grew along the steep banks. Again she thought it a lovely surprise.

Rollo’s trail dipped down to the creek and crossed a red gravel ford. Two red rocks straddled the stream like the portals of a gate to a city. The two rocks, once a single rock, had been split down the middle and parted just enough to let the stream through.

She was about to start down the slope, when she spied the purple flowers of wild onions. Beside them grew a tangle of wild roses. She pulled up a dozen of the pencil-slim onions and gathered a handful of rose hips, then sat down on thick grass to eat them. She would save the strips of bacon in the parfleche for supper.

She ate slowly, chewing thoroughly. The wild onions were gently sweet, while the rose hips had the taste of citron. She wondered if the rose hips wouldn’t go good in a fruitcake.

She lay back in the grass a moment. She liked the warm spot in the lee of the rosebushes. On the slow wind came the smell of freshly fallen sweet rain. Lightning as swift as fireflies flew through the high escarpment of clouds.

She fell asleep.

A whispering in her ear awoke her.

She looked up into the blue sky. Again she had dreamed of Scarlet Plume. This time Scarlet Plume had led her back across the stepping-stones and up a path toward a white tepee. He whispered urgently to her in the pure Yankton Sioux tongue and she replied in kind. Ahead lay a horror of some sort. The dream left her feeling depressed.

Well, it was hardly surprising. She’d often found herself thinking about Scarlet Plume. Too often. And thoughts bred dreams. What a fool she’d been to let her mind dwell on him at all. He was red; she was white. He was a Stone Age savage; she was a civilized American. Yes. Yes. Therefore it was plainly sin to think of him. He was part of a past she had to forget. Gritting her teeth, determined to do the right thing from then on, she sprang to her feet.

She discovered then where the whispering came from. A roll of boiling brown water was coming down the little valley. It came on like curling surf. It swept up everything in its path: broken branches, tumbleweeds, uprooted bushes, buffalo bones, loose dirt, buffalo chips. Even as she watched, the whispering sound of it slowly swelled into a low tumbling roar. It was a cloudburst, of all things.

She looked northeast. The towering cloud bank had moved on while she’d slept. But it had thinned out to almost nothing, a dreamlike gauze. She understood then what had happened. The mountain cloud had opened up and let go.

The first surge of the cloudburst shot between the two split halves of red rock and rolled by in front of her. Too late she realized that her path was blocked. Now not even a good swimmer could make it.

She stared at the driving brown flood. It kept rising and rising, until finally it covered the split rocks, even came a third of the way up the slope. Dear Lord. As if she already hadn’t enough troubles.

Well, there was nothing for it now but that she would have to go around the cloudburst. It couldn’t have started too far upstream. A dozen miles at most. Soon she would come to where the stream ran shallow again, and then she could cross it and pick up Rollo’s trail somewhere to the east.

She had gone about a mile, when on one of her quick, furtive looks around to all sides, she sensed as much as spotted something following her. It was gray, and large, and it kept to the bushes. A wolf had picked up her trail.

Gasping, trembling, yet somehow managing to find it in herself to be resolute, she turned to face it. Her heart began to beat violently, her knees turned to mush.

The gray something stopped dead still at the edge of a clump of wild roses. As she watched, the gray something gradually vanished from sight. It reminded her of gray mist slimming away under a hot sun. Perhaps it wasn’t a wolf after all.

She waited to see if it would reappear out of the wild roses. It didn’t. She moved her head slowly from side to side to make sure it wasn’t spots before her eyes. It wasn’t. All the while the roaring flood in Split Rock Creek kept rising.

Her thoughts were like squirrels with their tails tied together and straining to go in all directions at once. If only she hadn’t come to Skywater to visit her sister Theodosia. None of this would then have come to pass. And Angela would have been alive. “Good night, Mama.” Those little words, how sweet they were. They were sweeter even than the doxology of the Christian Church.

A meadowlark lighted on a little ash. The top of the little ash had been cropped off by passing buffalo. The meadowlark sang, “I am the bird of fidelity and this I know for a certainty. Relief is near!”

She glanced at the wild roses again. Still no sign of anything gray moving in them.

She looked ahead. The little valley in that direction was bare of all growth. She decided that would be the test. If something really was following her it would have to cross that open space.

She had gone about a mile, when sure enough, there it was crossing the open space. The creature was gray, as she’d first thought, with a touch of cream over the shoulders where the wind ruffed the hair. And it was big.

She cried out, and broke into a stumbling run. As she ran she kept looking back over her shoulder.

After a bit it seemed to her that the creature moved oddly for a wolf. It had more the heavy-footed gait of a bear than the easy lope of a wolf. Somewhat clumsy. Crude even, at times.

She hurried on. She had to work to get her breath. She became light-headed.

The little valley changed. Soft feminine knolls gave way to rocky ground, then to towering palisades of red rock. The palisades took on bizarre forms: blockhouses without windows, foundered arks, fallen pulpits. The sudsing flood whirlpooled down swinging turns. The water took on a winy color from the purplish rock and red gravel. It tumbled along with a low, sullen roar.

The meadowlark followed her. It called from a low rock. Its yellow-streaked gray blended perfectly with lichen-covered rock. “I am the bird of fidelity and this I know for a certainty. Relief is near!”

She looked over her shoulder to see if the great wolf still followed her. It did. It seemed to be picking its way, though, with some care across the rough rocks. And it had fallen behind some.

She took hope at that. She was gaining on it. The wolf probably had a sore paw. Maybe she could lose it in the coming darkness.

She ran.

Wild elders appeared on high land. The sun was about to set, and the elders struck dark-purple shadows across the slender valley. The shadows offered refuge.

She glanced back. The gray shape was gone.

She stopped, catching a hand to her throat, suddenly panting. The gray shape had fallen behind or she had outrun it.

When she got her breath back she hurried on.

The valley deepened into a considerable canyon. The riverbanks became red cliffs. Wild cedars grew dark green on the heights and in clumps as thick as little farm groves. She had to pick her way around deep side gulches. The gullies on her side ran mere trickles, while those on the other side ran bank full. It meant the cloudburst had dropped mostly on the right side of Split Rock Creek.

The sun set in a sky as opaque as a faded robin egg. It cut a hole into the horizon, slipped into it, disappeared. Bland yellow light lingered for a time, then gradually changed to the color of fall grass.

On one of her quick, furtive looks around she saw it. The gray shape was back. It was directly west of her on a rise of land, not more than a hundred yards away.

All of a flutter, suddenly gone almost crazy, she looked wildly around for a place to hide.

The promontory she stood on was part of where the Split Rock canyon made a curving turn to the left. The promontory ended in an abrupt cliff. The cloudburst boiled some hundred feet straight below. No escape that way.

At the foot of one of the wild cedars along the edge, Judith spied a split in the earth. The rock under the mantle of earth had cracked apart, forming an opening. It resembled an irregularly smiling mouth, gums showing. It shot through her mind that this might be an entrance to a cave. If it was, she was safe. Parfleche in hand, she quickly sat down on the edge of the lip, swung her feet into the opening, then let herself down.

Her hands slipped on the wet red edge. Down she dropped. Her head banged against a rock wall. All light vanished.

A tear fell on her cheek. Again. Again.

Gradually she came to. She rose out of darkness, only to find she was still lying in darkness.

Something dropped on her cheek again. It was cold, so it couldn’t be tears. It had to be water dripping from somewhere above her. She moved slightly to avoid the drops.

She stared upward, straining, trying to make out where she was. She saw stars, one, two, three, four. She could just vaguely make out a frost-edged patch of black sky. The patch was shaped like a partly opened mouth. Then she knew where she was. Late at dusk she had tried to escape a gray wolf by dropping into a crack in the earth, and had come tumbling down into this place, cracking her head against a rock.

She ran her hands over her body. Nothing seemed broken. Everything felt all right.

She was surprised to find herself lying flat on her back. Nurses in a hospital couldn’t have done a better job of putting her to bed. She had been quite lucky after all. It was a miracle she wasn’t lying all of a tangle with a broken neck.

She ran a hand under her body and found a matting of cedar twigs, and under that a layer of soft dirt. She could smell the spicy aroma of the twigs. Only in one spot was there a hard lump, under her shoulder. She moved slightly. There. Comfortable again.

The sound of the rushing flood below seemed to have softened some. Most of the cloudburst had probably passed by. In the morning she could cross the creek and then head east to pick up the mail carrier’s buggy trail again.

She stared up at the four stars in the mouth of the cave. She could imagine, almost see, the gray wolf lying stretched out on the grass on the edge of the lip, head on its paws, patiently waiting for her to emerge. The wolf would lie as still as a lichen-covered stone. Only its eyes and nostrils would look alive.

She shuddered. “How could I have been such an utter fool as to let myself get into such an awful mess? All because of a silly notion, thinking I had to visit my sister once.”

Her buckskin clothes clung warmly to her skin. With both hands she slowly stroked her pear breasts upward. Fleetingly her lips shaped themselves to receive a kiss.

The stars moved.

It occurred to her that for once she had not dreamed of red him. Nor had she dreamed in the Sioux tongue. That was because she had lain unconscious, not asleep.

“I’ve just got to get him out of my mind. Burn out all memory of him.”

In her mind’s eye she saw him again as he danced up the buffalo near the Blue Mounds. All man. Magnificent. Shockingly a stud. And plainly a sin.

She slept.

She awoke ravenous. Soft light dreamed down through the mouth of the cave. A clean blue sky blossomed high above.

She remembered there were still a few strips of bacon left in her parfleche. She recalled having the parfleche in hand when she let herself down into the mouth of the cave. Ah, there it was. Of all things. Without knowing it she had been using it as a pillow. No wonder her head had felt comfortable all night. For good luck, she decided to save one strip of bacon for later in the day. “It’ll go good with broiled gopher.” She smiled wryly to herself.

She jerked off a fringe and tucked it away in the parfleche to mark the passing of another day. She was pleased to find herself calm.

She glanced up every now and then to see if the gray wolf was spying on her over the edge of the crack. Pretty soon the wolf would get tired of waiting for her to come out and then there would be an awful time. He would come down after her.