Two in the Field (52 page)

Like yelling ‘uncle,’ I thought, struggling to remember the syllables.

Goose launched a long-winded oration on the joys of sweat-lodging, which he said served as a preparation for every other ceremony in Lakota life. Pointing to the dirt scooped out to make the fire pit, he said he hoped that
Unci
, Grandmother Earth, didn’t feel slighted because we hadn’t fastened tobacco and other gifts to the saplings and put sage on the floor. Because of our great hurry, he’d resorted to halfway measures. But at least the limestones hadn’t cracked. And of course he’d been plenty smart to throw in cedar bark, so that the steam, Grandfather’s Breath, was fragrant, and therefore it—

“Mitakuye oyasin!”
I bellowed, causing them to jump.

Linc guffawed as Goose pulled the tarp open and let steam escape. Even so, I couldn’t take any more. I burst through the opening and went kicking and splashing and rolling in the stream like a maniac.

“How’d you stand it so long?” I asked when Linc finally emerged.

“Had some practice.” Avoiding my gaze, he said quickly, “Goose claims the steam helps to get in touch with the Spirit World.”

“Yeah, well, it nearly sent me there direct.”

He grinned and repeated my words to Goose.

The Lakota pointed up at the Milky Way.
“Wanaghi tachanku,”
he said.
“Wanaghi yata.”

“It’s the trail of spirits,” Linc explained, “bound for the Spirit World, where people go when fate comes for them.”

I gazed upward. After the sweat lodge, my senses felt as if they’d been stripped and washed. Things stood out in sharper than normal relief, and the night seemed alive with energy flows. “Everybody goes there?”

“No, see there, at the fork.” Goose pointed high overhead, where the luminous pathway split, the greater part sweeping across the sky, the other trailing away in a pale nebula. “There stands
Tate
, the wind,” Linc translated. “He guards the Spirit Trail and admits those that
Skan
, the sky, says are worthy.”

“Based on what?”

“Skan reads the tattoo-like marks formed on the spirits during their earthly lives.” The sky was the source of all power, Linc explained, and gave each person his ghost or spirit. It would be the Ghost who testified for us when our time came.

The ghost …

“Tomorrow we go into the Hills?” I said.

Linc nodded. “He says we’re ready as can be.”

The air was mild but her hands were cold in mine. I squeezed her arm and said that her throw displayed the makings of a ballplayer.

She managed a weak smile.

“What is it, Cait?”

She said nothing but kept her eyes fixed on the Hills. I looked too. In the ominous black mass my imagination carved bears’ snouts and arching backs, and I remembered the grizzly in my dream. Then LeCaron came into my thoughts, unbidden and unwelcome. He was somewhere in those mountains right now.
I slid closer and encircled Cait with my arm. She tilted her head against my shoulder, a shiver passing through her.

“How do you always stay so warm?” she said, sounding both curious and a trifle sad.

I held her tighter. “Thinking about Tim?”

“You know I am,” she said quietly. “And other things, too.”

I looked down the slope of her forehead, barely able to make out the freckles on her nose. “What other things?”

“There’s a fear in me, Samuel.” She pulled back to see my face. The moon made her eyes luminescent. “And not over Tim alone.”

“What, then?”

She hesitated as if reaching a decision, then said tentatively, “Remember when I first confessed my love for you?”

“Táim in grá leat,”
I said, repeating the Gaelic phrase she had used. “I’ll never forget it.”

“When I said that, Samuel, I pledged myself to you. I was to be yours forever.” Her voice held a tremor. “After Colm’s passing, I never thought such a thing could exist again for me.”

I waited for her to go on.

“Remember how frightened I was? Colm was taken while I still carried his child. Afterward, I wanted never to be hurt like that again. Yet when you arrived, it seemed that fate had sent you, and I felt myself opening despite my great fear—terror, to say it truly.”

“Cait, I—”

“Now I’m in that place again.” Her eyes brimmed with tears and she raised her hands to cover her face. “I’m deathly afraid of losing you again.”

I pulled her fingers away and kissed her wet eyes. I kissed her cheeks. She sat very still, as if helpless. To what extent she wanted to resist, I couldn’t have guessed. A clue seemed to materialize,
however, when I bent toward her mouth and she leaned away.
So much for that
, I thought, but she surprised me by touching her forefinger to her tongue, then with that finger gently moistened my lips.

“Chapped,” she murmured.

The action was probably more a mother’s nurturing touch than a lover’s caress. But that didn’t stop it from being incredibly sexy.

I started to say something, my voice sounding strange in my ears.

“Shh,” she whispered and stroked my cheek.

As our mouths met, her lips seemed to form silent words against mine before they parted and our tongues met. I tasted her again after so long, scarcely believing it was happening. Her arms circled my neck and at last we held each other without restraint.

In the past, we’d come together hungrily, a riotous discharge of pent-up forces. Now our hands and lips moved over each other in more leisurely rediscovery, and when we finally melded together, the joyful, slow sweetness of it dispelled, for a time, all uncertainties. My soul, it seemed, had returned from some distant place. In the moonlight I saw that although Cait was thinner—not surprising, given the ravages of our journey—the contours of her body retained their rounded fullness. I lost myself in the beauty of her while Cait traced with her fingers the marks from Dyson’s bullets still on my torso. For a timeless interval we gazed into each other’s eyes.

“I’ve been true to you,” she said softly, her breath warm on my face. “True all this time, Samuel.”

I’d been faithful too, I assured her, and had loved her every minute we’d been apart.

Her hips moved in rhythm with mine.

“Promise me, Samuel,” she said, “you won’t leave again?”

I heard the pleading urgency in her voice, and realized I couldn’t guarantee anything. I hadn’t intended to leave her before. How could I know I wouldn’t be yanked away again? But just then that particular caveat didn’t seem nearly so important as the force of my will, my intent, never to depart again. To be with her all the days and nights to come.

“I promise,” I said.

Her lips touched my eyes, my nose, my lips. I bent to kiss her breasts, and she gripped my hair, and now we moved less gently. Desire lifted us up beside the glowing moon, then higher yet. As I felt myself about to come, a soft moan escaped her and she murmured something.

“Hmmmm?”

She said it again, too low to make out.

On the edge of release, I gripped her hips and thrust even deeper and demanded that she tell me.

She arched her back and grated out something that sounded like “seed.” Then, straining hard against me, the syllables just discernible, she said, “I want your seed, Samuel.”

In a rush that replicated, in its own modest way, the Milky Way blazing above us, I duly delivered it, and not too long after, utterly spent, we crawled into her little tent and lay in each other arms.

“I love you,” she breathed against my ear.

Nobody in the world slept better that night.

We followed Bear Butte Creek into the Hills between gloomy cliffs of limestone and sandstone. Beaver dams formed marshy ponds in which moss-grown trees resembled tortured bodies. Indian trails were everywhere, but Goose found no signs of recent use.

The goldbugs worked like crazy during every halt, filling
their pans with gravel and silt, immersing them in stream water, shaking them vigorously to sift everything, then washing away the lighter soil and tossing off the stones. Gold, if any, remained with other heavy metal-bearing sands. The artistry involved came next—a dexterous twist of the pan to spread the contents evenly over the bottom. Finally the flecks of gold, known as “colors,” were removed by means of matchstick or fingernail and stored in bottles or buckskin pouches.

Maybe for them it was useful as practice. To me it looked like a whole lot of effort for a minuscule return. So much for tales of rich nuggets waiting in river beds and grains clumped on upended roots.

One of the goldbugs asserted that a big-volume placer operation could extract only a few cents worth per pan and still make a profit. A lone prospector, however, had to average at least ten cents. I looked dubiously at the motes in his pan. “You getting that much?”

“Not yet, but signs are good.” His eyes were those of an addict. “Here, try it.”

I handled the pan clumsily but felt a flicker of gambler’s greed myself when I saw several shiny grains. Not unlike seeing the first digits on a lottery ticket match the winning numbers.

Goose’s initial amusement at the goldbugs’ antics gave way to thoughtful detachment as he watched them pull the flakes from the earth. I got the feeling that he didn’t fully understand what they were up to—but he didn’t like it.

Striding eagerly toward a likely-looking gravel area, one of the goldbugs was about to step over a log onto what looked like dried-up sludge. Goose yelled and pulled him back just in time. Using a fallen bough as a pole, Goose plunged it through the crust to reveal a watery ooze rimmed by yellowish curds. The bough, about five feet long, nosed beneath the surface and vanished
with a faint sucking sound. Goose said that even bears sometimes drowned in such swampholes.

That night we huddled beneath our tarps as lightning seemed to strike on all sides at once, illuminating the trees and pinnacles above us. Goose took out a bone flute and sounded long, quivering notes in a haunting pattern, as if talking back to the thunder reverberating wildly off the peaks.

“Wakinyan,”
he said solemnly after a particularly deafening salvo.

“What does that mean?” I said.

“Near as I can tell,” Linc replied, “some kind of bird whose voice is thunder.”

Another cataclysmic bolt lit the world and shook the earth.

“Is the bird friendly?”

“Does it
sound
friendly?”

We made our way along Whitewater Creek, where canyon walls rose hundreds of feet and dozens of tributary streams made for slow headway. Quartz outcroppings and gravel bars electrified the goldbugs. We were starting to see prospect holes and claim placards curled around spikes, and in one place it looked like foundations had been laid out for cabins. We grew increasingly jittery, and Goose took to scouting far out in front.

“Looks like everybody just up and left,” Linc mused.

“Maybe the army took ’em out.”

“That was at least a month back,” he said. “There’s been folks here since.”

“Hey!” One of the goldbugs held up his portable scale. “I’m settling here! Three bucks’ color in one pan!”

He promptly changed his mind when Goose returned with the news that he’d found another corpse. Unlike the wretch who’d had his vitals burned out, this one was more recently
dead. Goose led us to a shallow gully where a large white man sprawled face down, his shirt soaked with blood from what looked like puncture wounds. Linc rolled him over. He was cold and stiff but hadn’t been mutilated by his killers or worked on yet by animals. His face was bloated almost beyond recognition.