Tie My Bones to Her Back (18 page)

He didn’t know where the remaining Indians were. Maybe they’d only sent one of their number back to wherever the main body was camped, to get more reinforcements, or maybe they’d all gone. He knew he’d killed the leader of this band, and he’d probably killed the next oldest and most experienced warriors

with his sundown fusillade. He had to head south, back to McKay and Jenny. Milo had certainly gone that way, and more than likely, to cover his sorry performance, had told them that Otto was dead. Jenny would be grieving.

No, he couldn’t expect help until morning at the earliest, and maybe they wouldn’t come at all, certainly not if McKay believed he was dead at the hands of a large band of Hostiles.

He led the mule back down through the dark, taking his time, making sure of every step. “Don’t worry, old fellow,” he whispered in one tall ear, “we’re going to be all right come sunup.”

W
ALKS LIKE
B
ADGER
had heard the shots Otto fired the previous evening, when he killed the three front-running Kiowas at Owl’s Head Butte. Crazy for Horses led them in the direction of the gunfire, though it meant hooking a bit south again rather than onward to their destination. Halfway to the butte they met the ten surviving Kiowas. They were just boys, and frightened, though they refused to show it. A white man had killed five of their party, they said in sign language, for no good reason. By surprise. From a distance with a rifle that shoots today and kills tomorrow. Like the one Crazy was carrying. The spider had killed their leader, Bad Pants, who in his dying breath had ordered them to return to the main camp of the Kiowas and make medicine for his soul. They were obeying his orders as fast as they could. They were good soldiers.

Walks like Badger had also been the first to cut the spider’s trail, in the half-light of early morning, as they circled the butte shaped like an owl’s head. Walks didn’t speak much, but he had sharp ears and eyes.

Not to be outdone by a youngster, Crazy had sharpened his own senses then, and he was the first to see the spider far ahead of them soon after daybreak. The spider was riding a mule. Following a low meander of the prairie, the three Elk Soldiers kicked their horses into a gallop and tried to cut him off. But the spider had outsmarted them, cutting to his right as part of a zigzag pattern. Crazy had loaded the big new rifle and tried three shots at him, at a range of about half a mile, as the mule topped a ridge. He had not hit the spider, but he hoped he had frightened him. The mule walked steadily onward, yet it looked as if it was weakening. Perhaps the Kiowa boys had wounded it yesterday. Walks found blood in the mule’s dung a few minutes later, confirming Crazy’s guess. Black blood. The mule must have a wound in its belly. Soon it would die. Then they would kill the spider. In the storm that was coming, it would be easy.

T
HE NORTHER STRUCK
when Otto was within ten miles of the camp. The Indians were close on his trail. At least one of them had a rifle, a Sharps Big Fifty by the sound of it, and had tried a few ranging shots from a long way off. One bullet threw dust not far to his right. Where had the rifle been earlier? Why hadn’t they used it in their attack on the Owl’s Head, or even earlier? They could have killed oxen, mule, and horse at their leisure, or killed him and Milo just as easily. No, they wouldn’t have wanted to hurt the horse. He had seen no sign of firearms, though, and certainly not heard any shots. Maybe these weren’t the same Indians. He could make out only three of them this time, and their hair seemed braided on both sides now. A Cheyenne or Arapahoe hairstyle, possibly Sioux, though they weren’t likely to be this far south.

He saw the dirty line of the snow scudding toward him on the edge of the wind, wriggling like a bone-white sidewinder, moving with incredible speed. Then the wind’s sound came to his ears, a steadily increasing roar that became, as it neared, louder even than the nonstop artillery barrages at Gettysburg. Oh yes—a norther was indeed blue, he thought. The sky above the snow snake was almost the color of a brand-new Army uniform.

The Indians would make their move under cover of the storm. As soon as it hit and obscured him from their vision, he must break off to the right or left, sharply, and get Zeke into a gallop. The old mule was about blown. The blood he’d lost from the shoulder wound must have drained him more than Otto realized.

When the snow hit, Otto kicked Zeke in the sides, and the animal galloped a few hundred yards. But Otto could feel him faltering at every jump. Then Zeke threw up his head, blew bloody froth from his nostrils, and rolled his eyes backward in his head until he was almost looking at the man. Zeke stopped and fell forward to his knees. Otto slid from his back. Zeke rolled weakly onto his side. Only then did Otto see the broken-off shaft of an arrow protruding from Zeke’s side, low on his belly. Tears suddenly stung his eyes. Every time Otto had kicked him to get him galloping, his boot must have hit that arrow shaft. Zeke vomited black blood into the snow. His eyes stared up into Otto’s, and it seemed to the man that the mule was begging for something.

He drew the revolver and cocked the hammer. He imagined an X drawn from the animal’s right ear to left eye, then from left ear to right eye. He aimed at the spot where the lines crossed and pulled the trigger. At the buck of the shot, gunsmoke bloomed and blew away on the wind. The mule’s head fell, squarely brainshot. Didn’t feel a thing, Otto thought. Wish I could say as much.

Then he ran. The footing was already miserable, snow piling fast and slippery underfoot, half blinding him when the wind swirled around to the south. It nearly knocked him down a few times. He couldn’t see three feet ahead. He blundered into a thornbush, almost dropped the Sharps, recovered his balance, and pushed on. He smelled sage underfoot, sharp through the snowy wind. He thought he could make out a bluff through the sheets of horizontally blowing snow and he ran for it. Get to the top of that and make your stand, he thought. He staggered forward, but immediately the bluff was obscured by another sheet of stinging, blinding sleet that turned the whole world white to within an inch of his eyeballs.

Then, as suddenly, the air was clear.

The bluff was a horse with an Indian on its back. The Indian was coming toward him.

Fast.

The Indian had a long-handled war club in his right hand and was swinging its polished stone head counterclockwise in great circles as he galloped. Two braids, no warpaint on his face, only intense concentration. Otto raised the Sharps to his hip. The Indian was close. He fired.

Walks like Badger flew from the pony’s back.

O
TTO TOOK REFUGE
just below the lip of the wide, deep coulee into which he’d tumbled. Thick brush grew there. He nestled into it and let the snow build up on his back, head, and legs. The Indians couldn’t find him here without dogs, and even a foxhound would be hard-pressed to take a scent in this blowing hell of a weather. He tucked the Sharps under his body to protect the action from freezing.
Christus
, it was cold! Christ, that was a lucky shot. He couldn’t have been five feet from me when I fired. Didn’t have time to get the rifle to my shoulder. He’d have taken my head off with that damned club.
God but it’s cold!
Maybe the snow will insulate me some. I might lose a couple of toes, though. Frostbit already, feels like. I’m all sweated up from the run. Should be moving, so my longjohns don’t freeze from the sweat. Can’t, though. They’re out there.

Twice in the next hour he thought he saw one of them, moving wraithlike through the billows of falling, blowing snow. Never for long enough to take a shot, though, even if he was willing to risk one. The cold’s got to be getting to them, too, he thought. Indians are tough, but not that tough. Remember those poor hide men in the blizzards last winter. First one started in mid-December and blew for eight days. Two more storms in January. Major Dodge at the fort said more than a hundred buffalo hunters died along the Arkansas alone. Mules froze standing in their traces. The sky was a solid blast of ice particles. Bob Wright had to burn his wagons for firewood. Sawbones at the fort performed seventy amputations. Some fellows lost arms and legs, both. Washtub cases, they called them. Otto had talked to one of them, an old skinner named Josh Beasley. Beasley told him how it was, freezing like that. He begged Otto to shoot him, there in the fort’s infirmary with the stink of bedpans and gangrene all around. Shoot me, for Christ’s sake, or give me some cyanide, how can I live like this? I can’t shoot myself with no hand nor no feet, the frost even took my pecker off me. Tears in his eyes. Otto didn’t shoot him, though. But he told the sawbones. The sawbones said he’d maybe give old Josh a long, long pull on the laudanum bottle. And then a few more. It’s a pleasant way to go, he said.

Otto was shivering nonstop now, muscles out of control, great convulsive shudders that he knew would go away soon, leaving him incapable of movement. After that he’d go to sleep, like as not, and wake up a block of ice. You’ve got to move, he told himself. You’ve got to move—
now!

“H
AÁHE
, T
WO
S
HIELDS
.” It was Cut Ear. “I almost shot you for a spider.” He looked at Tom’s face. “What tried to eat your head, a white bear or a wolf?”

Tom merely grunted. “Have you had a fight with the spiders?”

“One of them,” Cut Ear said. “We hunt him even now. His mule died. He shot Walks like Badger through the shoulder. Tore him up pretty bad.” He told Tom about the Kiowas and the burned wagon. “The Kiowas said another spider ran away, on a good horse.”

“Do not kill the spider if you catch him,” Tom said. “He is my friend.”

“Crazy for Horses wants him badly. I said we must get out of the snow and the wind, but he wants this spider’s scalp.”

“Where is Crazy?”

Cut Ear made the sign for “Who knows?” Then he said, “Out there,” and swung his arm to indicate just about everywhere.

“We will find him,” Tom said.

_____

D
URING A BRIEF
lull in the storm, Otto saw a figure on horseback making slow progress in his direction through the snow. It was nearly three feet deep now. He had passed a small group of buffalo standing in the bottom of a draw, out of the wind. The buffalo stood like snow-crusted black boulders, with their heads down, facing into the wind. They hadn’t even raised their heads when he passed them, not fifty feet upwind. They must certainly have smelled him. But the storm had declared an armistice.

The figure he saw was no Indian. Then he recognized the horse. Vixen! It was Jenny out there. He ran toward her, stumbling through the drifts in nightmare slow motion. The wind hit again with renewed strength, almost toppling him into the snow with its sudden force. Blowing snow obscured her from his sight. He slogged forward, hoping he was headed right. He couldn’t see more than a foot or two in front of him now. But he knew the horse would not move far during the height of the wind. A horse’s instinct is to turn its tail to the weather in a storm like this. It will not walk happily into the teeth of a blizzard. Only a human being will do that. He pushed ahead.

A few minutes later, or perhaps they were hours, he banged into something large, hard, wet, and warm. He looked up, into the muzzle of the Henry. Heard the hammer snick back.

“Nicht schiessen
, Jenny!” he shouted. “Don’t fire!”

She raised the muzzle of the rifle as suddenly as she’d aimed it, then slid from the saddle and clutched him. Vixen turned to run away from the storm, but Jenny was still holding the reins. They huddled in the horse’s lee, hugging each other. Jenny was weeping with relief. The tears cut runnels through the sleet on her cheeks. She shivered violently.

“Wir müssen Schutz suchen vor’m Schneesturmr!”
Otto yelled in her ear. “Got to get out of the blizzard!” He remembered the buffalo back in the draw. “Bring the horse, we’ll need her when the blizzard blows out. Come on, we’re going this way.” He pulled her by the hand, back toward the buffalo.

They were still there, or at least a few of them. He counted five. The others must have walked around a bend in the draw, where they hoped to find more shelter from the icy wind. There were no tracks in the snow to indicate where they had gone. The tracks had drifted in already. He raised the Sharps and, from a range of no more than fifty feet, killed the closest buffalo with a brainshot through the back of its head. At the shot, the others started down the draw. He tried to work the lever for a second shot. It was frozen shut. He fumbled at it, but his fingers were stiff from the cold.

“Quick
—mit dem Henry
, shoot another!
Schnell, schnell
—we need two of them!”

Jenny raised the rifle. It wobbled in her numb hands. She couldn’t hold it steady. She pulled the trigger vainly until she nearly bent it. Then she saw the rifle was still at half-cock. It couldn’t fire no matter how hard she pulled. She withdrew her finger from the trigger, leaving a ragged strip of skin annealed to the brass.

Verdammt
, Otto thought. “It’s all right,” he said. “One dead buff will save us.”

He led Jenny and Vixen down into the draw and with his rip knife quickly opened the dead buffalo. It was a cow.
Verflucht noch einmal!
He should have picked a big bull, they’d both fit. But this band was all cows and calves, he now realized. The blowing snow had left him no way to gauge their size, or even their sex. He reached deep within the body cavity and pulled out the paunch and the intestines, heaping them beside the belly. Sweet steam boiled into the air from the empty body cavity. He reached up into the chest and pulled out the lungs, one by one. He rummaged in the hot gut pile and found the liver. He sliced off a long, bloody strip, then a piece of white tallow.

“Eat this,” he said. “It’ll warm you. And stick your hands in here, like I’m doing.” She obeyed. When Otto’s hands had warmed again, he sliced off a strip of liver for himself. Jenny chewed the slippery liver, swallowed, almost retched at the sharp, metallic taste of it, but kept the rich organ meat down.