River Marked (12 page)

The nearest bit of clear riverbank was about thirty feet downstream. The sun long gone, the water was icy. I stumbled on a big rock on the river bottom and made a splash when I fell. I made some noise, too—frigid water on nice warm skin when I’m not expecting it tends to make me squeak. The man in the boat screamed—from the hoarseness of his voice, it wasn’t the first time he’d screamed tonight.

“It’s all right,” I said, regaining my feet. “You’re safe.”

He quit screaming, but I don’t think it was because he’d understood me. Sometimes fear is too big for that—so much of your being is focused on survival that anything else falls to the side. I’ve been there a couple of times.

The rocks under my feet were sharp, but once I was waist-deep, my weight didn’t press me down on them quite so hard. If I’d been headed downstream instead of upstream, I could have swum instead. Adam paced back and forth unhappily on the river’s edge.

The trees hung over the river, and the shore curved back under them. Finding a path through the debris that had collected in the small backwater along with the boat forced me to wade in through a bunch of underwater plants I didn’t see until I was in the middle of them.

My eyesight is pretty darn good at night, but the river was an impenetrable black veil, and anything below the surface was hidden. I hated not seeing. Who really knew what was in the Columbia?

Something brushed against my leg with a little more force than the rest of the weeds, and I let out an involuntary yip. Adam, invisible on the other side of the tree, whined.

“Sorry, sorry,” I told him. “I’m fine. Just caught my leg on one of those clumps of plants. I can’t see a damned thing under the water, and that and this guy reeking of fear has me all hopped up. Sorry.”

The stupid plant was persistent. It clung to my calf as I approached the boat, resisting my halfhearted attempts to shake it loose. The tendency of some water plants to wrap around arms and legs of unsuspecting swimmers is one of the leading causes of drowning. However, I reminded myself, I had my feet on the river bottom, so this one was only an irritant. Nothing to panic about.

I forgot about the plant as soon as I grabbed the side of the boat and got down to business. My eyes just barely cleared the side of the boat, so I couldn’t get a good look at the wounded man.

“It’s okay,” I told him. “We’ll get you out of this.”

I gave an experimental tug on the boat, but I was now up to my chest in the water, and the current threatened to push me off my feet. When I pulled on the boat, it was I who moved.

I shifted my grip, moving nearer to the bow. If I pulled the boat the way it was designed to move instead of sideways, it should require a lot less effort. As a last resort, I could climb in and use the motor—but the tree limbs were only a few inches above the gunnel, and I didn’t really want to scrape myself up getting in the boat.

I heard something and jerked my head up.

Four small heads poked out of the river about a dozen yards from the boat. Otters.

Great, that was just great. Just what the night needed.

“Otters,” I told Adam, my teeth beginning to chatter with the effect of the water. “If I start screaming, it’s because the otters have come to get me.”

He growled, a low, menacing sound, and the four heads disappeared. It wasn’t as reassuring as it might have been. But there were no sharp teeth fastened on any of my parts that were underwater, not yet anyway. The only thing grabbing me was the damned weed, which was still wrapped pretty tightly around my ankle.

I had a friend who swam once with sea otters just off the California coast. She said it was an unbelievable experience. They apparently were regular comrades to the divers in the area, playful and cute. They played a little rough—divers who swam with them regularly often had to replace their quarter-inch neoprene diving suits because otter teeth and claws are sharp—but most of the divers counted it worth the price.

River otters are smaller and even cuter than their oceangoing cousins. They also have the sweet temperament of a badger with a hangover. It wouldn’t have worried me much—I have sharp teeth when I want them, too. But right now I was in their environment and not mine.

I couldn’t see them. Worse for me, I couldn’t smell them or hear them, either. I could wait around for them to attack, or I could get the heck out of the river.

I got a good grip on the nose of the boat and managed to persuade it to move out a little. Five or six feet more, and I’d have it out where the river current would push it the way I wanted it to go.

The man in the boat began thrashing. It took me a second to realize he wasn’t just panicking—he’d gone for the pull on the engine. As the sudden roar of the engine broke the night, I grabbed onto the boat as hard as I could and let my feet leave the river bottom.

The boat lurched forward, and the weed around my ankle tightened painfully, and for a second I felt as though—But no weed is that tough, and the boat jerked me out of its hold and drove about fifteen feet downstream before I pulled myself into the boat. By that time he’d collapsed again, and his hand fell off the tiller just as I grabbed it.

I balanced on the seat and turned the boat back to shore, where Adam paced.

The man grabbed my arm, and I almost tipped the boat over before I braced against his weight. If I’d had shoes on, my feet would have slipped off the wet wood, and I’d have landed on him.

“Got to get away,” he said. His skin was as dark as mine—he was Indian, too, now that I finally had a good look at him—and still his lips managed to look pale.

“Got to get you to shore,” I yelled at him over the noise of the engine. “Before you bleed to death.”

There was a crunch as the bow of the boat hit the shoreline, then a mighty jerk as Adam grabbed a bowline I hadn’t seen or else I’d have used it. He pulled us up and all of the way out of the water onto the bank.

I managed to kill the engine because I’d already started the motion, and when the boat stopped suddenly, I used the momentum to roll all the way out of the boat and onto the ground. My other option would have been to land on the man we were trying to rescue. The drop was not far. I hit the ground with my unprotected shoulder, which was going to bruise, but mostly managed not to hurt myself.

Adam came over to me.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Check him.”

He raised himself over the side of the boat to look in. I got up at the same time. Either blood loss or the shock of seeing a huge wolf with big sharp teeth had finally driven our man, who was bleeding from the remaining half of his right foot, unconscious.

Adam glanced from me to him—and then bolted. In that brief glance, he told me to stay put while he went for help. Wolves communicate much more clearly than humans do in an emergency.

Adam would run all out, but we were probably five miles or more from the campsite. It would take him ten minutes to get there, maybe ten more to change back to human if he pushed it. I had no idea where the nearest hospital was or how long it would take for them to get the man there. Adam would figure it out.

With the sun down, the air was chilly, the river cold, and both the wounded man and I were wet and freezing. But there was nothing I could do about that at the moment.

I pulled him back down in the boat and propped up the damaged foot on the wooden cross member that doubled as a seat. The wound was just oozing blood, which seemed odd to me. Maybe the cold was useful, even if it was dangerous.

I was debating the benefits of shifting into coyote and sharing what warmth my wet fur would gain us both against trying to figure out how to get his wet shirt off and use it to bandage his foot without a knife. Both moves were likely to be useless or worse ... when I heard the hum of an engine out in the water.

Lights tracked over the shore and stopped on the white boat I was standing in. I waved my arms to call them in to shore. There were excited voices, but I couldn’t tell what they were saying because the sound of their engine drowned out the meaning. A small but much sleeker and more modern boat complete with lights approached us at speed.

Help was here. Unless these were the guys who’d sliced off the man’s foot. And me wearing nothing but Adam’s dog tags. Ah, well, it couldn’t be helped; my modesty wasn’t worth a man’s life.

The boat hadn’t quite beached itself when three men hopped into the river. One of them grabbed the bowline, and as soon as he did, the fourth man, who’d been staying the boat, cut the engine and jumped in, too.

“Benny?” “Faith?” and “Who are you?” gradually resolved themselves into Hank and Fred Owens, Jim Alvin, and Calvin Seeker—introduced to me by Jim Alvin, easily the oldest of them though only Calvin qualified as young.

It was only after the Owens brothers pulled out a first-aid kit and started to work on the wounded man that I realized we were all—victim, me, and the four in the rescuing boat—Indian.

Jim Alvin was in his sixties and smelled of woodsmoke and old tobacco. Calvin was somewhere in his late teens or early twenties. Hank and Fred were around my age, I thought, and close enough in appearance that they might well have been twins, though Hank didn’t talk at all. I don’t know if I would have noticed their dog tags if I hadn’t just received Adam’s. But I would still have noticed that they had some sort of emergency training by the efficiency of their movements and their focus as soon as they saw Benny Jamison.

Benny was the hurt man.

Jim interrogated me—for all that his questions were softspoken and quiet—while the Owens brothers did their best to save Benny.

“No sign of anyone else?” he asked me, after I told him how Adam and I had found the boat—and how Adam had run back to camp to get help and left me to do what I could.

“No.” I pulled the blanket they’d given me more securely around myself.

Benny woke up briefly when they started wrapping his foot with vet wrap. It sounded like it hurt.

Jim sighed. “Benny’s sister, Faith, was with him out fishing. They were supposed to be home for dinner. Julie, Benny’s wife, she called Fred tonight when Benny didn’t answer his phone. We were docking, but the Jamisons are good folk. We put the boat back in the water and started looking. What tribe did you say you were?”

I hadn’t, in spite of the fact that they had introduced themselves that way. All of them were from the Yakama (with three a’s, though the town was spelled Yakima) Nation. The Owens brothers were Yakama. Jim Alvin was Wish-ram and Yakama, as was Calvin Seeker. I didn’t think of myself that way. I was a walker and a mechanic, both of which served more often than not to make me separate from other people. I was Adam’s mate, which connected me to him and to the pack.

I was also cold and tired. It took me too long to remember.

“Blackfoot,” I said, then corrected myself. “Blackfeet.”

“You don’t know which?” asked Calvin, speaking for the first time—though he’d been watching me since they came ashore. I’d almost forgotten I was naked until I saw his face just before I’d been tossed a woolen blanket. I supposed polite disinterest was too much to ask from everyone. Three out of four wasn’t bad.

“I never knew my father—my mother is white. He told my mother he was from Browning, Montana,” I told them. The wool was doing a good job of warming the skin it covered.

Naked wrapped in a blanket among strangers didn’t use to bother me. Maybe if Calvin would have quit staring at the various pieces of me that the blanket didn’t cover, it still wouldn’t have bothered me. As it was, I did my best to keep Jim between Calvin and me.

“So you were raised white,” said Calvin in disapproving tones.

I should have told them I was Hispanic and any Indians in my bloodlines were South American and unknown. Half of my customers thought I was Hispanic. Telling them I was Hispanic felt like it would have been less of a lie than telling them I was Indian. As if I were claiming ties that weren’t there.

“Browning, Montana, makes him Blackfeet,” Jim told me kindly. “Piegan. The Blood and the Siksika are Blackfoot.”

I knew that. It just hadn’t tripped off my tongue.

“What were you doing out here? It’s an odd place to be running around at this time of night.” Jim didn’t say naked. He didn’t have to. “Boy,” he said abruptly to Calvin. “Don’t you make your mother ashamed of her son.”

The young man’s mouth tightened, but he looked away from me. A few years ago his regard wouldn’t have bothered me the way it did now. But things had happened since that made me uncomfortable standing nearly naked with four strangers—five if I counted Benny, which I didn’t.

“I just got married,” I told him, reminding my too-jittery self that Adam would be on his way back by now. If something happened, and I had no reason to think it would—especially as they had handed over a blanket to cover me without a word—Adam would be here before anything too bad happened. I wouldn’t be caught in the trap of assuming all men were bad—but I wouldn’t have been human if I weren’t wary. “We were swimming.”

“Good thing for Benny,” said Jim. “We’ve been by here twice. It would have been morning before we could have seen that boat under the trees. And morning would have been too late for him.”

Fred (I could tell because he wore a red flannel shirt, and Hank wore a gray one) left Benny to his brother and came over.

Evidently he’d been listening because he said, “I called 911, Jim, and they had already gotten a call from her husband. There is an ambulance on its way. I told the operator that we could get Benny up to the road. It’ll be a rough trip. The road’s only a half mile or so as the crow flies, but this is horrible country for a fast trek in the dark. But they’d have to make the trip twice that we need to make once.”

“What about taking him on the boat?” asked Calvin.

Fred shook his head. “We might get him to the hospital faster that way—but the ambulance will have medical personnel on board. He’ll get faster medical care, and time matters. If he stays in shock, we could lose him—but when he warms up, that foot is going to bleed like a fountain.”