Far as the Eye Can See (27 page)

When I couldn’t yell no longer, I sat down again. A few birds flown overhead and I seen their shadows cross over the glistening stones that was once White Dog’s eyes. I didn’t know what I might do or where I’d go. Then I thought of Eveline. My Eveline. I couldn’t go directly west. The whole army was a-coming that way. But I had to get back to her. She would understand. When I remembered her—when I seen her eyes in my memory—it like to made me cry. I ain’t ashamed of it. I howled again, only this time I was shouting her name. I figured I’d go northeast toward the Missouri River, then turn west once I was well beyond the Yellowstone country. I intended to take Eveline out of that part of the world. I didn’t know where I was going for sure; maybe all the way to Oregon.

I had to keep a eye out for folks in front of me or behind me or to either side. I had to steer clear of every living soul all the way back to Bozeman. It was me and Cricket and only the gear I had tied to the back of my saddle. I needed to kill something pretty quick so I could eat. The winter was dying, sure enough, and it would be spring before long.

I was north of the Yellowstone River, and well south of the Missouri. I rode most of the day in the wide country along the Yellowstone valley, looking all the time for any sign of human life. I looked for any kind of timber so I could ride in shadow and out of sight.

The whole time I was hunting for game. Near nightfall, with no luck and nothing to eat, I pitched my tent and made camp a few paces from the Yellowstone River, back among the trees and underbrush where I could tie Cricket and keep her out of sight. I hunched in the tent under the buffalo robes and slept with the moist night air dripping out of my hair and down my face. I did not hear a single thing except the murmuring water and the toads singing to beat all.

In the morning, going further up the trail, I seen a lot of smoke up ahead of me. I turned north, toward a high ridge that looked out over the whole country. Cricket climbed steadily up a rocky slope, and sometime during that climb she come up lame. I didn’t notice it right away because near the top I got down on foot and she walked behind me. When I could see the broad land before me—when I could see as far as any human eye can ever see—I realized I had gone around one of the biggest encampments of Indians I ever seen. Maybe a hundred tepees, and smoke curling from every one of them.

I had no way of knowing if those fellows in the peace party who got away was in amongst them, so I couldn’t trust my luck enough to let them see me. I watched them for a spell, then walked due north along the ridge with Cricket behind me. I known from what I seen on top of that ridge that I wasn’t never going to find no stand of pines, and I’d have to eat nothing but bitterroot and dried venison for the next few days because I wasn’t going to be firing no gun where any of them Indians could hear it. What’s worse, Colonel Brisbin told me that Benteen was coming up from the south, and Custer was coming from the east into this country to meet up with Gibbon. I felt trapped. And all I wanted to do was get back to Eveline.

The ground started to break downward on the north side and I got up on Cricket and tried to sidle down onto more level ground. That’s when I noticed she was lame. I didn’t say nothing out loud, but she could tell I was feeling like the unluckiest bastard in the world. She looked so ashamed of herself.

Near the bottom of the ridge I found a trail that headed due west, so I got on it and walked into a stiff breeze. I was walking that a way for two days, and then I run into Ink and shot her.

Part Four

Ink

1876

Chapter 18

When I shot
Ink she was scared to death, her heart beating like a drum. Now she’s asleep and the sky is turning purple. Wind begins to move through the bushes and rocks. Cricket frets and turns around her tether, stamping and shuttering.

I take the opportunity to move Ink to the lee of the boulder, where she’ll at least be able to keep her head dry. She don’t even stir. It’s like dragging a small stump across the ground. I push the saddle way back under the base of the stone, set the stirrup up so she can have something to rest her head on. The wind is strong enough now that trying to pitch the tent would be foolish. I check to be sure she ain’t bleeding no more, then I scrunch up under the stone with her, holding the rifle across my lap. The pistol digs into my abdomen, but I leave it there so it will remain dry when the rain comes.

The wind whistles in the bushes and dry branches. Ink opens her eyes and looks at me with a fierce expression. I don’t think she knows who I am just yet. Then she remembers.

“Did you shoot me?”

“Yeah, I did. I’m sorry about it.”

“My stomach is on fire.”

“It will be for a while,” I say. “Pray that lasts a bit, because once it starts itching, you’ll wish you had the pain again.”

“Am I bleeding?”

“I just checked it. It’s fine.”

“I am hungry.”

“Once this rain passes,” I say, “I’ll set us up for the night.”

“You got food?”

I reach into my saddlebag stuffed next to the saddle and get her another piece of raw sowbelly. “Chew on this awhile. It’ll settle the hunger some.”

She gives me a look.

“You already eat what’s left of yours. It’s all I got now, unless you want some hardtack.”

“I don’t want more of this,” she says. But she gnaws on it for a spell. Cold wind gusts in circles around us, then the rain starts. Big, heavy drops at first that raise little puffs of dust on the ground when they hit. But then it comes down like something poured from a railroad water tank, so hard you can’t believe it’s only drops of water. It falls like curtains, one wave after another, and before a minute passes, both Ink and me are soaked through. But it don’t matter: it’s cool rain that washes the air and makes you forget sweat and exhaustion.

The rain begins to form little streams and pools and it splashes around us. I move to cover the stock on my carbine. I think to bury it under my shirt, but that’s sopping wet, so I end up laying it down behind the saddle. I have to move Ink’s head and force her to expose more of herself to the rain.

“You don’t care if I get wet,” she says.

“It’s cool rain. It will feel good and you could use the cleanup.” I make some room for the rifle behind the saddle, then push it back again so she can put her head down. “That gun cost me near a month’s wages, and it ain’t no good to get it wet. Especially the metal parts.”

I settle on the ground next to her with my head on my pack roll. She’s on her back, but she’s got her head turned my way, watching me.

I stare into her eyes for a while, see how long it will take her to look away. She lets it last just long enough, but then she looks up to the rock above her head. I close my eyes and try to drift off. It ain’t easy with the rain. She makes a little sound in her throat and I say, “You all right?” I keep my eyes closed.

“I have to sleep.”

“I guess we both do.”

“If my husband finds us, he will kill you.”

“I expect,” I say. “Wouldn’t be the first to try it.”

She’s quiet for a while, and I think that she must of fallen asleep finally; but when I open my eyes to look, she’s staring at me again. “I am so cold,” she says.

“Where’d you learn to speak American?” I say.

“I went to Catholic school in St. Louis until I was ten. And it is not ‘American.’ It is English.”

“Ain’t it the same thing?”

“I don’t think it is.”

“Well, look at you now. All the way out here, and the bride of a Indian. Ain’t no need for English with them folks, is there?”

“I am cold,” she says again.

“Well, Jesus,” I say. I turn over and get a blanket out of my roll. “This here will be wet as hell in five minutes, and heavy too.” It takes a little effort to get it out, but when I do, she reaches for it.

“Wait a minute,” I say.

“Just put it up here, under my head,” she says. “I don’t want it to get wet.”

I stuff it up behind her head so it’s on top of the saddle and balled up around her head and face. She actually smiles at me. “That feels warm,” she says.

“I’m glad of it. When the rain stops, you can use it to cover up and keep from freezing to death.” I see her lower teeth chattering. “I’m sorry,” I say. “By Jesus, I’m sorry.”

She don’t say nothing.

It’s quiet for what seems like a long time, and when I look over at her she’s got her eyes closed. The high cheekbones look bronze in the returning sunlight. Her eyebrows are dark and thick over her eyes. They stretch over her nose a bit and meet in the middle, but they’re real thin there so you’d hardly notice it. Everything about her is dark. The eyes when they’re open look fierce—like she’s made up her mind to hurt you and is just about to launch whatever it is that will do it. Her thin pink lips curve a little downward in the middle, and she’s got a small dent in her chin. She’s right nice to look at.

Not that I’m interested. Except for my aunt in Pittsburgh, the women on the wagon train coming out here, and Morning Breeze—which don’t really count, since she forsaken me and went with another—I don’t have what you’d call wide experience with the opposite sex. I ain’t talking about amorous time with women—I tried a few of the whores in Petersburg after the war; I mean I just never had much to do with women, ever, until I met Eveline. I intend to keep my promise and get back before June. I still got time to do it. I know Christine is a-telling Eveline right now that I ain’t coming back. It’s already almost April, and the closer I get to June, the more I worry about Eveline doing exactly what she said she would do: she will go on west with her sister and forget about me. She’ll just assume I was lying when I said I’d come back, or I went and got myself killed. And she don’t even know how much I come to feel about her.

The only worries I have about my new companion is she might slow me down. I still got lots of ground to cover between here and Fort Ellis. And I got to cover this ground when both Indians and white men probably want to find me and kill me. I don’t tell Ink none of this, but I expect I’ll have to take her with me. It won’t matter what she wants—I got to get her to a safe place and leave her there. It’s the only thing I can do to make up for putting a bullet through her.

So I decide we got to go straight north to get away from whoever is chasing her. I know we’re at least four or five days south of the Missouri River, and if we keep heading north we’ll run into it. I hate to be going sideways from where I want to go, but I don’t see no other way. If I head further south, I run into many of rivers, big and small, and the Black Hills. There’s lots of tribes down that way I’d like to avoid, not to mention the damned U.S. Army. If I go straight west, the way I was going when I run into Ink, we’ll have her husband in our path. The only way we can go is north. Once we find the Missouri, I figure we can follow it along as it winds east. Fort Buford can’t be too far from where we’ll be when we get to the river. The fort is at the point where the Missouri turns directly south. I might lose a day or two, but not much more than that. I figure I can leave her there and make better time getting back to Bozeman. But right now she can’t walk, and I think I might open her wounds again if I try and lift her into the saddle.

When the rain is completely stopped and we can see the sun, I leave her sleeping and carry my gear and everything a ways off the trail and set up camp near a small stream that runs down out of the hills on our left. The water is clear and moves fast over white stones. Where it falls down a little over the rocks it makes a trickling sound that relaxes me.

When I get back to her she’s still sleeping, so I nudge her on the shoulder to wake her. She is groggy and can’t fully open her eyes to the light.

“Come on,” I say. “You done enough sleeping for a while.”

“I thought you left me.”

“I set up camp over that way,” I say. I help her walk over there—it’s only about a mile off the trail—but it’s down a slight embankment, below the line of rocks, and there are plenty of pine trees and bushes to shelter us and keep folks from stumbling in where they ain’t wanted. She’s such a little bitty thing, when she’s walking next to me I have to lean down pretty far just to keep my arm under hers so I can keep her up. She don’t say nothing, but I figure she knows by now I ain’t gonna hurt her. When she sees the water in that stream she is happy to drop to her knees and settle herself again up against my saddle. I get her a cup of the water right away and she gulps it down. Like she ain’t had no water in days. I think she’s pretty happy to see the tent too.

“I was afraid you ran off,” she says.

“I left Cricket tied right there so you could see her. You should of known I wasn’t going nowhere.”

“I didn’t see the horse.”

“Yeah, well. I ain’t going nowhere now but to fetch her. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

I walk back to the trail and untie Cricket and we start toward the camp, working our way around as much of the underbrush as we can. I want to keep her on grass too. There’s thick mud in places. Even the places where we have grass to walk on the ground is slippery, and she keeps favoring that right front leg. I’m afraid she’ll slip and make it worse, so I take it real slow. She is wet and tired and damn hungry. There’s plenty of grass at the camp, so when we get back I don’t bother to tether her. I let her roam and eat what she needs. With no saddle or bridle, she looks as wild as any bronco you might see on the plains, except she’s sleek and well-groomed. I wish she didn’t come up lame, though.