In the Season of the Sun (41 page)

“Sparrow Woman gave this to me. It belonged to Lone Walker and works powerful medicine,” Jacob explained. He touched the thunderbird. “Man.” He placed another finger on the morning star. “Woman,” he said and traced the water symbol binding the other two signs. “They are called together. So it will ever be.” He touched his lips to the carved mouthpiece and played upon the flute, his fingers experimenting with the holes that altered the tonal pitch of each note. Jacob lowered the instrument. “With this flute, my mother and father made their lives one. I am to play it only for she who walks in my heart, for Sparrow Woman has said no woman can resist its sweet medicine.” A smile touched his lips.

“She has spoken the truth.” Tewa lifted the buffalo robe as Jacob set the flute on the altar before the remains of the fire and joined her. His mouth covered hers. She guided him into her. Flesh and silhouette became one. Tewa gave herself completely, drawing the fire of his passion deeply within her. Jacob whispered her name over and over again in a litany of love.

Called together in the Great Circle of Life, they entered the mystery and made sweet medicine—Jacob the thunderbird and Tewa the morning star and between them peace, flowing like a river.

Jacob woke and rolled out from underneath the buffalo robe, pulled on his buckskin trousers, and stood by the circle of embers in the center of the tepee. Tewa rose up on her elbows and started to speak. Jacob waved her to silence, put a finger to his lips, and ducked through the entrance flap.

The last of the morning stars glimmered in the west as the sun's amber glow warmed the eastern horizon and dappled the broken battlements of clouds in hues of orange and ruby fire. Jacob sucked in a lungful of high country air, exhaled slowly, and sensed his whole being come to life. He turned toward the village and spied two men watching him. Otter Tail and Yellow Eagle stood among a thicket of firs a stone's throw from Tewa's lodge. They hadn't been waiting long enough for the dew to settle on their rifle barrels. Jacob's mare had whinnied as the men approached. The gray's warning had roused Jacob from his sleep. He wondered if Yellow Eagle had summoned the courage—or enough hate—to shoot him. He knew only one way to find out and would have started toward the grove, but Otter Tail and Yellow Eagle started toward him. So Jacob held his ground and waited, unarmed and watchful. He stretched forth his empty hands.

“Well, my friend, have you come at last to kill me?” Jacob called out.

The two men walked up to him. Otter Tail held back, allowing Yellow Eagle to limp forward and take the lead. Jacob towered over Yellow Eagle, but the latter's big bore rifle more than balanced the odds.

However, the hot-tempered young warrior appeared to have calmed down. He lowered his eyes a moment and stared at the rifle in his hands, then looked at Jacob.

“Two Stars called many of us together in a council of war,” Yellow Eagle said. Jacob marveled at the old one's stamina as Yellow Eagle continued. “He told us of how you saved his life. And more. He spoke of your brother.…” The brave hesitated, then met Jacob's studied stare. “You and your white brother will bring our enemies to this valley, our valley. You have arranged to lead them into Ever Shadow.”

“To destroy them,” Jacob said.

“Two Stars also said this,” Yellow Eagle replied. “Why would you do such a thing to your own people?”

“I am among my people.” Jacob placed his hand on Yellow Eagle's shoulder. “I will fight by your side and die by your side if need be. Tell me, then, Yellow Eagle, who is your brother?”

A hawk on high circled lazily in the sighing wind. Shadows shifted on the valley floor, receded from the rims. The tribal herd grazed contentedly in an arc close to the village, young stallions pranced before the mares, and frisky colts raced through the tender spring grasses greening the landscape, dotted with pink-and-fuschia blossoming bitterroots.

Yet it was a threatened country. Men from the east were marching to take it away. The people of Medicine Lake must ride to war again. And Jacob Sun Gift would ride with them.

Yellow Eagle, his expression still heavy with grief, glanced around at Otter Tail, who nodded and then stepped forward to join the other two, his cherubic features grown serious now. Let there be a time for laughter again, after the killing, after the bloodshed.

Yellow Eagle placed his rifle in Jacob's hands. “Forgive me, my brother.”

Jacob returned the rifle. “You will need this. Here's my plan.”

48

T
hunder and rain, sheet lightning shimmering across the sky, ghost light and spirit song. Magic in the night. The shaman prays; the shaman invokes his power. It is his only defense.

Walks With The Bear waited by the fire while the trappers dug down into their blankets and tried to sleep. Above the treetops, electricity scarred the black night and the wind moaned. Bear shuddered. Sweat beaded his lips and the inside of his mouth and throat burned. Still, he kept his vigil until the last of the white men dozed off and he was alone with his fears and his horror.

The Shoshoni kept a tight grip on the cutlass he had taken from the shaman. It was the only weapon he had against the terrible magic. Ever since leaving Fort Promise, Lone Walker had begun his nightly chant. The trappers didn't seem to care. They ignored the medicine man—he was a valuable prisoner true enough, but they considered him helpless.

By all the power of the Above Ones, couldn't they hear? Were they deaf? The Shoshoni heard and he knew the Blackfoot must be silenced, now before the worst happened.

Bear must kill him, tonight, with his own long knife. Lone Walker's medicine was too strong to allow him to live.

Bear hefted the cutlass in his strong right hand and started across the camp to the tree where Lone Walker was firmly bound and supposedly helpless.

Lone Walker saw the man moving toward him, stealing steadily among the sleeping men.
Closer now
. Lone Walker willed him forward while beneath his breath he sang softly.

“Above Ones, open the darkness,

Hear me. Black spirit, born

Of fire, washed in the blood of the wolf,

Strike now.

I have said it.

Let it be so.”

Bear gasped and halted in his tracks. Lone Walker repeated his chant in a low, unobtrusive tone of voice. It might have been the voice of the wind. He stretched forth his bound hands and, in the lurid lightning's glare, Bear could see the shaman held a smoothly polished stone, tapered at one end, rounded on the other. He pointed the tapered end at Bear as he sang.

Bear gasped and raised the cutlass as if to ward off a physical blow. Rain washed his features and glistened on the length of steel. His hand fluttered to his throat to grasp the medicine bag every Shoshoni wore and remembered again with dismay that he had somehow lost it during the battle at Fort Promise. He felt naked and unprotected without it. But there was nothing to be done. He could wait no longer. So summoning the last ounce of his courage, he started forward, ignoring the rain pummeling his skull and shoulders.

Lone Walker continued to chant. He shifted his stance, rattling the chain that secured him to the ponderosa pine. He opened his cupped hands as Bear began his attack. And this time, in the ghastly ghost-fire cast by the storm, the Shoshoni saw all that the Blackfoot possessed, not only the spirit stone but Bear's own medicine pouch. It was this Lone Walker had been praying over, working his malevolent incantations, summoning the dire spirits of illness and death.

Bear faltered in his attack, then recoiled from the shaman in terror as Lone Walker wrapped the leather cord attached to the Shoshoni's pouch around the length of the medicine stone.

“Black hound,

Thunder spirit,

Strike in water

And in fire.

I call you in vengeance,

Blood for Blood.

Let it be as I have said.

As I have said.

As I have said.”

The Shoshoni gasped and spun on his heels and raced away from the shaman, unable to bear the brunt of such a terrible prayer. He darted away like a shadow flittering through the trees and broke from cover to race beneath the bones of the rain while all around him voices in the storm called him by name. Demons rose from the mud-churned ground and wind whipped stalks of buffalo grass in pursuit of the hapless brave. He cut and slashed at the specters that swelled up like a mighty tide to engulf him. He held the cutlass above his head and screamed. Lightning cracked and a bolt of yellow fire lifted the Shoshoni aloft, where for a second or two he danced like a puppet on a string.

Back at camp, Kilhenny and Tom Milam and a half-dozen other men crawled from their bedrolls at the sound of the Shoshoni's baleful shriek and the clap of thunder as a sky bolt struck close to the camp. The rest of the party, sixty-eight men, stumbled awake, wondering if they were under attack.

“What the hell?” Kilhenny bellowed.

Tom Milam grabbed his rifle, trotted out of the camp, and headed toward the clearing. He vanished among the trees only to reappear a few moments later, holding the smoking, twisted remains of a cutlass.

The rain beat a steady downpour that bowed the branches and nearly drowned out the grumbling trappers. Pike Wallace and Skintop Pritchard held their rifles ready and checked the surrounding forest. Pike saw the cutlass and muttered, “Saints preserve us.”

The storm had begun to ease in intensity and Tom raised the ruined cutlass for all to see. Everyone knew who it belonged to. Con Vogel, crouched in his blankets, shivered at the thought of the Shoshoni's remains. Iron Mike muttered to the men closest to him that it was too bad Tom Milam hadn't been holding the cutlass when the lightning struck. Tom shook his head, indicating Bear was dead.

“That's a bad omen.” Pike tugged his water-soaked tam tightly down onto his skull.

“Like hell,” Skintop Pritchard snapped, more than a little worried himself but damn if he'd admit it. “So the Injun's dead. Seems like we're two days out and off to a good start. One redskin, dead.”

“Yeah, but he was our Injun. A good'un,” Pike reminded the man.

“Now he's a good'un,” said Pritchard and spat into a nearby mud puddle.

Pike Wallace wagged his silver head and gave up talking to his companion. The man was hopeless.

Tom Milam continued over to Lone Walker. The Blackfoot watched him with some interest, for something about this proud, dangerous young man struck him as familiar.

“So now you have had your revenge, shaman.” Tom dropped the cutlass at Lone Walker's feet and squatted in front of the medicine man and looked him straight in the eye. “Maybe you'll have another opportunity before long,” he said, lowering his voice. “I am Jacob's brother.” He thumped the smoldering blade, stood, and sauntered back into camp.

Lone Walker glanced down at the weapon and placed the spirit stone and medicine bag upon the ruined blade.

Jacob's brother?… Vengeance!…“As I have said.”
Lone Walker's fierce gaze swept across the army of renegades Coyote Kilhenny had assembled. From the depths of the shaman's proud, warrior's heart, the words formed. And he began to sing anew.

In three days the hills lining the Medicine Lake pass had been transformed. Only a Blackfoot would have noticed the difference. To the unaccustomed eye, the forest-fringed slopes appeared choked with a barrier of heavy brush, grown thick and dry a couple of hundred feet above the floor of the pass.

A closer inspection of the bordering tangle revealed a mass of rawhide-bound clumps, dead branches and dry twigs tied into rounded bales like giant tumbleweeds taller than a man and equally as wide. The bales were secured by horsehair ropes to the trees behind them. Sever the ropes and send the bales tumbling down the slope into the pass below.

Jacob looked out upon his handiwork and nodded in satisfaction. Now if his plan worked—no—it had to work! He glanced over his shoulder as Tewa walked her charger along the face of the slope, keeping just back of the ropes. She rode with head held high, a bold, proud woman, skilled in battle and as brave as any warrior. But then, she was the daughter of Wolf Lance and had celebrated her tenth winter with a raid deep into Kootenai country over on the dry side of the Continental Divide. And yet, for all her prowess, Jacob experienced another facet, glimpsed and indeed embraced a different Tewa, a woman of tender seduction and girlish desire, wholly feminine, full of fire. She was a mystery to him. And he loved her all the more for it.

“Jacob,” Tewa called out and worked her way through the trees. “Crow Fox has returned to the village.”

“I watched him come through the pass.” Jacob walked toward her and she dismounted into his embrace. He drew her close to him and his pulse quickened. There was no doubting or, for that matter, hiding his desire. He brushed the wolf cowl back from her features.

“Saa-vaa,”
Tewa said, “there is no time for this with our enemies only a little more than a day's ride away. Crow Fox narrowly escaped capture to bring us word.”

Jacob's eyes widened. “So close? They made better time.” He released her and walked back out of the pines to once again inspect his handiwork, the bales of dry underbrush like a wall along the slope. Across the pass on the opposite rims, Yellow Eagle and half a dozen braves were making a similar check of their own barricade.

“Will this stop them?” Tewa asked.

“If not, it'll sure make things interesting for a time,” Jacob laughed gruffly. He stepped out from the shadows, and Yellow Eagle, spying him, waved. Jacob waved back.

“I am glad he no longer wishes to kill you,” Tewa said.

“I'm glad a lot of people no longer wish to kill me.”

A wind, sounding like the onrush of a locomotive, worked its way through the pass, ruffling the yellow-green grass carpeting the valley floor. Jacob brushed his sun-bleached hair back from his face. His eyes gleamed like yellow gold as he studied the woman at his side.