Tie My Bones to Her Back (34 page)

She found Vixen standing in short hobbles, still saddled but grazing near a spring at the base of the butte. The mare raised her head as Jenny approached, her nostrils flaring to taste the air, then nickered in recognition. Jenny dismounted from her Indian pony, slapped it on the rump to send it back to the herd. She laid a palm on Vixen’s soft, damp muzzle and kneaded gently.
“No. ja, mein Pferdchen
, I’ve got you back now, my good pony, and in a while we’ll ride away from all this. We’ll go someplace quiet and green and peaceful where it’s never winter and the grass grows deep.” She loosed the hobbles. Vixen tossed her head and nickered again, then resumed grazing.

F
ROM HIS VANTAGE
point at the top of the butte, Raleigh had watched her ride up, first through the field glasses, then over the sights of his rifle. It would have been easy to kill her, and he knew he should. But he also knew that if he bushwhacked her, what lingering grip he maintained on his self-respect would slip away entirely. Maybe she’ll just take the horse and go, he thought. But he knew she wouldn’t be content with that. She was out to find him. Maybe to kill him. He pressed the set trigger until it clicked, then snugged down over the comb of the stock, held her in the sights, the bead in the middle of her chest, his trigger finger still resting on the guard. One touch on the hair trigger and she would die.

How many buffalo had he killed this way? Two thousand, three thousand, no, more like five . . . Don’t even try to count them. Too many.

He was sick unto death of killing.

L
EAVING THE MARE
on faith and green grass, Jenny studied the rock face. If he’s smart, he’ll be covering the route of his own climb, she thought. He could drop me from up there near the horns before I heard the shot. I’ve got to find a better way up.

She walked around the butte looking for it, and found a route on the far, sheer side of the buffalo’s neck—a steep and dangerous climb, but safe at least from Raleigh’s rifle. Or so she hoped.

This climb would require both hands. Jenny cut a length of rawhide from the riata looped over her shoulders and knotted it securely, top and bottom, to the wrist and barrel of the Sharps, slung the rifle across her back, and confronted the cliff. The Sharps weighed nearly eleven pounds, the bandolier of spare am munition another five, and although at first the added weight threw her off balance, she learned to lean forward in compensation. The entire base of the cliff was sharp, shifting rubble, tumbled scree rattling under her feet as she started up the slope. Hell hear me, she thought, and shoot down from the lip. She picked her way more carefully, her moccasins sensitive to the give and play of the rocks beneath her feet.

When she reached the top of the scree, she gazed for a long time upward. A groove seemed to run down from the stone bull’s earhole to where she stood, a wind- and rain-worn channel eroded over the eons into the shape of a shallow S, about two or three feet deep, as best she could see. Seams and crevices—black lines and bruises of purple shadow under the noonday sun that now glared down on the prairie—would provide hand- and toeholds for her ascent.

Picking her way carefully from seam to bulge to fissure, she climbed toward the buffalo’s head. Now and then, as the sun worked hot on the rock face, stones fell free above her and came rattling down the chute with murderous speed. A few of the smaller ones hit her. The bigger ones, those which might have smacked her like a fly from the face of the cliff to fall—probably dead before she hit the ground—bounced clear and missed her. She timed her climb in spurts, from one protective outbulge on the channel’s route to the next, resting for minutes sometimes between bulges. The feature which represented the buffalo’s ear was a tall, lichen-grown outcropping of extruded granite that stuck out a good three feet from the vertical wall, angling upward from the channel she’d just climbed. Out of breath from the climb, shoulders bruised, blood from a rock cut trickling down through her hair into her eyebrows, her toes and fingertips raw, she crouched beneath it and tried to compose her thoughts.

Would Raleigh still be up there when she reached the top? She was on the far side of the butte from the battle. She had heard no heavy gunfire for a long while now, only a few sporadic shots. McKay might well have departed, gone back down the gentle slope of the buffalo’s neck and shoulders and remounted Vixen, be on his way to God knows where. I should have waited for him by the horse, laid an ambush for him there, instead of climbing a cliff I’m incapable of climbing, risking my life in a fool’s game.

She squinted upward at the sun. Calm down, she thought. The sun hasn’t moved a handspan since you’ve been climbing—not fifteen minutes yet. You’ve made good time, with a heavy load at that. She breathed deeply for a minute or two. In the shadow of the overhang, her blood cooled. She looked downward. She had climbed a long way. The height did not frighten her. Rather, it elated her. She had always been easy with altitude. As a girl in Wisconsin she had scaled the tallest white pines on the farm, in search of birds’ eggs or nestlings or glossy pinecones, often staying up there for hours on end in the silken green heights, cool in the breezes and the astringent perfume of pine, watching the busy flights of the mother birds feeding their young, quite to Mutti’s earthbound consternation. She had enjoyed the view from the top of those trees, from the top of anything, for that matter, and often she’d thought back then as a girl that she would be happy to have been born an eagle. She had watched a nest of eaglets pip out of their shells one afternoon, scrawny, unfeathered, big-headed, clumsy, quite ugly—but in many ways people were uglier.

Make no mistake, though, girl. You are not an eagle. Don’t fall.

She worked her way up onto the overhang, almost losing her grip once, pulled backward for a frightful instant by the sudden, shifting weight of the Sharps, but caught herself by the tips of her bleeding fingers. On the ledge of the buffalo’s ear she saw a cave leading in and down into the bowels of the butte. She stuck her head in the cave opening and heard what sounded like a burble of water coming from within. She tossed a pebble in. It skidded across the rock and fell, clattering, for a long time before she heard the splash.

Yes, the spring rose inside the butte, as the Cheyennes had said.

From the buffalo’s ear to the top of his steeply crowned skull was only a short climb. She scrambled to the base of the bull’s truncated right horn and looked carefully around, toward the skyline. The “wool” of this granite buffalo consisted of mesquite, cholla, ocotilla, and prickly pear. Everything lay in shadows, every shadow moved with the wind. But then she saw something that did not move. It was linear, blue-black—the barrel of a rifle.

Suddenly, as with animals she had hunted, Raleigh sprang clear to her eyes against the background. His fringed deerskin hunting shirt blended smoothly with the sun-blanched vegetation. He was lying on his belly, the rifle beside him, its action oddly enough open, peering through field glasses away from her toward the battle. Slowly she rose to her feet. She brushed a trickle of blood from her eyes. She was drenched in sweat. Her knees trembled, whether from the climb or the imminence of her final confrontation with this long-sought enemy she did not know. Don’t worry about it. You’ve got him now.

She unslung the Sharps, eased the loading lever forward to lower the breechblock and ensure that there was indeed a round in the chamber, saw the welcome gleam of the brass cartridge, then cocked the hammer all the way back. The sear clicked. Raleigh did not seem to notice. She reached her trigger finger backward carefully and pressed the set trigger. It clicked, too, but less sharply than the hammer. The rifle was ready to fire. Just the touch of her finger on the hair trigger now would drop the hammer with explosive force.

She walked toward him, slow and Cheyenne-quiet.

Then from the killing ground half a mile away came the sound of a great explosion.

A
S HE SAW
the mushroom cloud rise from the blast and a moment later felt the slap of the shock wave, Raleigh felt a nudge between his shoulder blades. He started to put down the field glasses.

“Keep them up there near your eyes, Captain McKay,” Jenny said. “I wouldn’t think twice about touching this trigger.” He lowered the glasses despite her words, rolled over into a recumbent position, and grinned up at her. She did not shoot. But the rifle was still aimed squarely at his chest, her forefinger near the hair trigger.

“Jenny, ol’ gal, I been expectin’ you, saw you nosin’ around down there by the pony half an hour ago. You must’ve come the long way up the mountain.” He looked toward the cliff and nodded admiringly. “Stiff climb, too tough for an ol’ bag o’ bones like me. Say, it’s sure good to see you.” Raleigh offered her the field glasses. “Lie down here next of me and take a gander at this. Your Hostiles’ve won the battle.”

Insouciant as ever.

“Damn you, Captain McKay!”

“Hey, come on, ol’ gal,” he said, still grinning, his bright blue eyes all atwinkle. “Let’s let bygones be bygones. There’s redskins killin’ white folks down there, we gotta pull together, forget our petty squabbles of the past. Here, look . . .” He pointed to his own rifle, lying well away out of arm’s reach, action open and its chamber empty. “I knew you were cornin’ and left my piece unloaded—on purpose, so you wouldn’t think I was layin’ for you. Come on, Jenny, now be a good sport, won’t you?”

“I came here to kill you.”

“Aw, hell,” he said, and the grin began to lose its luster. “Look, I’m damn sorry for. . . what happened that day. I was way out of line, I know it. Eaten up with regret, that’s what I been ever since, Jenny. I was hungover and skunk-mean stupid is all I can say. And I’ll make it up to you, I promise. I’ll take the Pledge, I swear, won’t never touch nary a drop again, long as I live. I been all messed up in my thinkin’, you know, the war and all, too much killin’, men and buffalo both, and if I never hold another rifle in my hands it’ll be too damn soon. I’ve been overlong in the wilds, this country gets to a fellow he’s out in it too long, so empty, nothin’ but wolf howl for company, wolves and bufflers and buzzards and alkali dust and the sun shinin’ clear ever’ day you wake up, no drop of rain, the stink of dead meat, it gets to you, it sure does; and I been thinking it’d be nice to go back East for a while, o1’ gal, I got enough money saved up now, we could buy us a real nice little farm I know up there in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, the old Catawba, the war passed it by and Reconstruction’s hardly touched it, I’ve had my eye on her quite some whiles now, just you and me, Jenny, put out the land on shares, raise us some tabacca, good cash crop that, good rich soil for it back there in the Piedmont, good climate too, none of these damn winters that bite so fierce, good folks thereabouts, you wouldn’t even have to keep house, Jenny, hire us a couple niggers for that, why, you’d be a
lady
—think of it, ridin’ out of the mornin’ on blooded stock, tall bays, and us ridin’ easy in the dew, lookin’ over the holdin’s, we can get a start on our horse herd soon’s the Injins clear out here now. That Lordship I been workin’ for has good horses: we’ll rope a few and head back East, grow watermelons . . . Why, I could do with a nice cool slice of watermelon right now, couldn’t you, Jenny? . . . A big nice formal flower garden. Not too far from town, a pretty town at that, Tuliptree, North Carolina, three churches, the courthouse, railroad station, a bell tower, even a playhouse where the minstrel show holds forth when they comes through, seminary school for the young’uns. Why, I might could run for judge, McKay is a name well known in those parts, the Honorable Judge McKay and His Ladywife. Hellfire, gal, I
love
you, don’t you see?—and I’ll love you through all eternity.” He paused for the clincher.
“Will you marry me
?”

He watched her eyes.

He did not like what he saw there. A hard face, sun-seared. A cruel face, like a red nigger’s . . . Tears welled and spilled down his cheeks. Slowly, smiling weakly up at her in apology, he reached back to his hip pocket and withdrew the ivory comb. He began fussily to reshape his wind-snarled hair.

As if that would help.

God, what a weakling! Jenny thought, sudden rage boiling hot in her belly. She remembered it all now:
Raleigh standing over her, undoing his belt, then Milo pinning her arms as Raleigh fell on her, tore down her trousers, forced her legs up and back—his face close to hers, stench of stale booze on his hot, fast breath, his face sagging as he penetrated her, the face of an elderly bloodhound—pinned down, restrained, skewered, hurting and helpless no matter her strength—his weak rebel yell as he spasmed and rolled away. Then Milo was on top of her, even worse, and Raleigh watching and cheering him on—Raleigh, spent, combing his hair with the ivory comb, grinning as he watched . . .

Lieber Gott mach mich fromm das ich in dein Himmel komm’.

“Not in a million years,’ she said, as coolly as she could muster. “But I’ll take a lock of your hair as a keepsake of your gracious proposal—your kind ministrations of the past.”

Raleigh reached behind him as if to repocket the comb. From under his hunting shirt where it had been tucked in his waistband he drew the Whitney. A well-practiced draw.

Jenny was quicker. She swung the heavy butt of the Sharps and caught him flush on the chin. He fell back, his eyes rolling upward, unfocused, unconscious. Jenny retrieved the pistol and stuck it in the belt at the small of her own back. Then she pulled McKay’s rifle out of reach and laid the Sharps next to it. She had plans for him. From the sheath at her hip she withdrew her skinning knife.

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