The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn (41 page)

“No, you’re not. Let’s stay put, for today at least.”

He knew by reason a day would make no difference, yet he faltered at the fear in her eyes. Stay or go? Either posed a risk. But staying would be giving in to weakness, and he couldn’t fail her. Not hours after he’d stood holding her before God and the Teagues, promising to protect and provide for her. Till death did they part.

He wasn’t dead. Not yet. Though he longed to hunch into his pain,
curl up and escape it if he could, he stiffened his spine. “I’m on my feet. The horse is saddled. Let’s go.”

Tamsen didn’t budge. “What if I went for help? I’ll follow the river to a settlement—”

“No …” He leaned against the cave entrance, trying to draw breath. Trying not to puke again.

Tamsen crossed to the horse and set her foot in the stirrup. He lurched after her. She got her foot back down and ended up supporting him while he sagged against her. “You don’t know this country, Tamsen. You’re as like to find harm as help.”

He groped for the saddle while she clutched at his sleeve, exasperated. “And you’re going to kill yourself out of stubbornness and—”

The horse whinnied, high and loud—in greeting. From nearby another horse answered. Jesse thrust Tamsen behind him and reached for his rifle in the saddle sling. It caught on the leather halfway drawn. The horse shifted, and next he knew he was sprawled on his back, pain ripping through him, the rifle out of reach. Tamsen’s cloak swirled near. Then she cried out and ran out of his range of vision. He found breath enough to bellow her name, then nearly screamed with the agony that tore through him. She shouted again. They had her. Would they murder him or leave him to freeze while …?

His ears at last made sense of
what
she was shouting. A name.
Cade
.

Jesse raised himself enough to see his pa’s winter moccasins hit the snow in time to be rocked back as Tamsen threw herself into his arms. Cade grabbed her to steady them both.

Astride another horse was Catches Bears, on his head a cocked hat with a rakish white plume of a feather, a blanket edged in red draping his shoulders.

Jesse struggled to sit up, but his head spun and his ribs shrieked. He fell back in the snow, knowing Bears would never let him live this
down—and frankly not caring. He closed his eyes and thanked the Almighty from the depths of his being.

Tamsen’s voice made his eyes open. “How did you find us?”

Bears snorted. “How do you find two wildcats quarreling in the woods?”

“Listen for their yowling,” Cade said dryly. He knelt beside Jesse, lips pressed tight, worry in the slant of his brows. “We were headed for Greenbird Cove, but stopped in at the Teagues’ first. Saved us the trip.”

“So you know everything?”

Cade nodded. Jesse saw the anger his pa was keeping in check. Then something like a grin twitched his mouth. “Except why I find my son on his back in the snow with his wife threatening to ride off and leave him.”

Absurdly pleased by the word
wife
, Jesse allowed them their amusement. “You’re busting to laugh. Don’t hold back on my account.”

“Don’t you dare laugh, either of you.” Tamsen’s cloak swished into view again, but it was clear by her tone she was nearly laughing herself—from relief, he hoped. “We’re trying to reach your father’s town,” she told Bears, her tone sobering a bit. “His ribs are broken—worse than he wants me to think. I feared we wouldn’t make it.”

Swathed in his blanket, Bears looked down at Tamsen.

“You will make it, Little Wildcat. But,” he added with a chin-jerk at Jesse and a feigned solemnity ruined by the bobbing of his jaunty white plume, “
he
will not enjoy the journey.”

Late December 1787

The old woman, called Blackbird, sat with legs crossed, back hunched in a bow, as her crooked fingers wove the strips of river cane spread before her. She was making a mat, like those scattering the dirt floor of the lodge. Some of the strips were the cane’s natural tan, others dyed shades of rust and black, the varying hues woven into an intricate diamond pattern.

Blackbird’s granddaughter, White Shell, newly married sister of Catches Bears, set aside the basket she was weaving to tend a pot of corn soup bubbling over the central fire.

Tamsen took the opportunity to examine the young woman’s work. The basket was actually two, one nested inside the other, but woven of a piece. White Shell had begun with the inside base and worked up the sides, where the canes bent downward, forming the rim. Then the outer basket was woven down toward its own base, enclosing the inner basket. She’d used only tan and rust shades, creating a simpler design than her grandmother’s, but the double construction was a feat of skill, the weave dense enough to hold corn flour.

Tamsen, who knew something of dyes, touched a cane of Blackbird’s mat, a russet one, still damp from soaking. “Is this color from bloodroot?”

White Shell peered past rising steam. “Yes. And the black? You know?”

“Butternut?”

“That is English word, I think. You make color?”

“Not for this manner of work.” Tamsen spoke slowly so the young woman could follow her English and brushed a fold of her petticoat. “For cloth.”

Blackbird, who spoke no English—or none she would admit to—raised her beadlike eyes from her work and said something that sounded like
i’hya
.

“That is word for this.” White Shell pointed to the cane strips. “All colors,
i’hya
. Cane, you call it.”

“I’hya.”
Tamsen had learned a smattering of Cherokee in the fortnight she and Jesse had taken refuge in Thunder-Going’s town. Though at first she’d been afraid to leave Jesse’s side, eventually she’d come to see that the town’s inhabitants were welcoming. She was, however, still a little awed by Blackbird. She leaned again to touch the old woman’s mat and said,
“Uwoduhi,”
hoping she’d said
beautiful
.

Hands never stilling, Blackbird spoke a stream of Cherokee.

“My grandmother thanks you for kind word.” White Shell gestured at the mat. “But this is simple. Not what she make before hands …” Lacking the words, she crooked her supple fingers into claws.

Blackbird nodded toward a sleeping bench, and the women began pulling out basket after basket, Tamsen marveling at the designs, the sturdy construction, the skill and time each had demanded. White Shell held up an oblong basket with a fitted lid. “This is make when my father is in belly.”

Before Thunder-Going-Away was born. Yet the basket was still tight enough it likely could hold water. “Your grandmother is what my people call a master craftsman. Or crafts
woman
.”

White Shell translated. Tamsen was gratified to see her words pleased the old woman. It was difficult to imagine, looking at her bent frame, whitened hair, eyes nearly lost in crinkled beds, but Blackbird had in her younger days gone on the warpath with the men. She’d fought Creeks, Chickasaws, and the French. Now she was what the Cherokees called
Ghighau
, Beloved Woman. She had a voice in the council, and her presence brought prestige to Thunder-Going’s settlement—still small as far as Cherokee towns went, comprising a mere dozen thatch-roofed lodges.

Tamsen, Jesse, and Cade had been given places in Thunder-Going’s lodge, since White Shell and her husband, along with Blackbird, had moved into their own. There Jesse had spent much of the past weeks flat on his back, his ribs healing. Gradually, as she’d ventured from his side, Tamsen had overcome her shyness with the
Ani-yun-wiya
, or the Real People, as the Cherokees called themselves, and accustomed herself to the rhythm of yet another strange way of life.

Every morning the women went to a nearby creek to bathe—even in winter, breaking through ice to reach the water. Once Tamsen accompanied White Shell but stopped short of joining the bathers, not just for dread of the cold. Going about with her hair uncovered was one thing, but bathing in the open?

This lack of privacy in a Cherokee town, for bathing and other intimate activities, was a thing she hadn’t yet reconciled with her own sense of modesty.

“Then where bathe?” White Shell, aglow in the first weeks of pregnancy, had asked in a cloud of frosted breath, standing knee-deep in frigid water, naked save for a short stroud skirt.

“In your father’s lodge, behind a buffalo hide. But only when no one’s there,” she added hastily.

The women tittered when White Shell translated her words, slipping wet feet into moccasins and wrapping themselves in blankets for the trek back through the cold.

“Even with Wildcat you not bare skin?”

Through a heated blush Tamsen tried to explain. “Jesse is my husband, but we … We’ve never …”

Tamsen faltered at discussing such matters, but White Shell’s curiosity was piqued. She widened her doe-brown eyes. “Never …?”

“Never done what you and your husband did to make that baby in your belly. Not yet.” If she’d hoped White Shell would fail to follow her blurted English, Tamsen hoped in vain. The woman’s round face scrunched in disbelief.

“I see why some
unega
—white men—take wife of
Ani-yun-wiya
. If as you say, from where so many
unega
come? Pop from the ground like mushrooms?”

Since that day at the creek, Tamsen had caught herself glancing at White Shell’s belly, distracted by thoughts of babies, and of making them with Jesse.

They slept each night beneath the same furs, barely touching, a restraint fallen between them. First his broken ribs had been the barrier, but as she’d struggled to adjust to the communal living of the Cherokees, the thought of finally consummating their union while Thunder-Going—often Cade as well—lay within full sight and hearing of them … It was just too much. Yet it was all she could think about.

“You try, with basket?” White Shell’s question snatched Tamsen back to the present. She was pointing at the cane strips spread between them. “You try weaving?”

“I—I’d like to try. But right now, I need to see Jesse.” Her cheeks warmed, though White Shell couldn’t know the ache of wanting breaking over her in waves, the pull she felt to go to Jesse, if only to see him and hear his voice. But as Tamsen rocked back on her heels to stand, she caught the watchful eyes of Blackbird and sensed, despite the barrier of language, the old woman understood perfectly.

Cracked ribs had to be the most confounding nuisance Jesse had ever put up with. The bruising across his midriff had faded to a sickly yellow brown. He could sneeze now without thinking it was like to finish him.
Still the ache would catch him unawares while reaching for a stick of wood or standing to his feet, leaving him frozen in place till it eased. So it didn’t surprise him when, sitting on his sleeping bench in Thunder-Going’s lodge, restless as a tethered hawk, he mentioned his aim of joining Cade on his next hunting foray and Cade said, “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

His pa didn’t even look up from the bearskin he’d taken on his way back from Greenbird Cove, where he’d gone after seeing Jesse and Tamsen settled with Thunder-Going, to gather more of their winter supplies and clothing.

“I can’t sit another day doing nothing, Pa.”

“Healing ain’t nothing.” Cade meant to use Thunder-Going’s town as a base for the winter hunt, but between Jesse’s injury and the late start, it promised a spare harvest. “Cracked ribs take their time mending. You know as much.”

Jesse glowered. Cade glanced up and glowered back.

The door-hide moved aside as Thunder-Going ducked within. He let the hide fall, eying them. “Look at the two of you, scowling at each other like bears awake in winter.”

Cade snorted. “This son of mine insists I take him hunting.”

Thunder-Going came to the fire and settled on a mat, taking up his pipe. Tamping fresh tobacco into the bowl, he said, “You might let this impatient one have his way, but here is what will follow: the woman who is my mother will come hunting too—to drag one of you back by his neck scruff.” Thunder-Going’s eyes crinkled. “I will let you guess which of you that will be.”