Wilderness double editio.., p.8
Wilderness Double Edition 19, page 8
Winona refused to dignify the question with a reply. “He’s profoundly sorry the girls were taken. He’s apologized dozens of times. And he’d like to make good by helping us find them. What more can he do?” Nate stared at her, awaiting an answer.
“Can I help it if I do not think as highly of him as you do?” Winona said more severely than she intended.
“Is that what this is about? He’s got your dander up so many times it won’t ever come down?” Nate’s grin was clearly defined in the darkness. “I never thought I’d live to see the day when you would be so childish.”
In all the years of their union, her husband had never once insulted her. Nate was always so considerate, so tactful, that to hear him accuse her of immature behavior left Winona temporarily speechless. For him to do it so cavalierly was salt on the verbal wound. Sitting up, she declared, “I will have you know I am proud of the fact I have not once lost my temper with him.”
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you want him to stop badgering you, all you have to do is ignore him.” Winona’s anger mounted. “And I have said it before and I will say it again. He has stayed with us long enough. It is time he got on with his life. Time he went elsewhere. Anywhere would do.”
“He’s planning to head east with Melissa’s uncle,” Nate said. “Another month and he’ll be out of your hair for good.”
The mention of Melissa rekindled Winona’s misgivings for the girls. Tears welled up, and she bowed her head so her husband wouldn’t see them. To her, crying was a sign of a weak character. Shoshone girls were taught from an early age to bear hardship without complaint or the chronic shedding of tears. They were to be as strong, in their way, as the warriors were in theirs. Tears were acceptable only in certain special circumstances, the loss of a loved one enthroned at the top of the shortlist.
Practical reasons existed why crying was frowned upon, foremost among them being that loud sounds carried long distances. If the wind was blowing just right, the racket raised by a wailing woman could carry for half a mile or more—right to the eager ears of an enemy war party.
Shoshone women went about their daily duties quietly and efficiently, and while they liked to laugh and sing and enjoy themselves, always at the backs of their minds was the thought that they shouldn’t be too loud or the consequences could be disastrous.
“I am glad he is leaving,” Winona said belatedly. “He has caused nothing but trouble.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Nate took issue. “He always helps out with the chores, doesn’t he? He chops wood. He feeds the horses. He offered to skin the bobcat you shot.”
“And did a poor job of it,” Winona said. So poor, she would be lucky to get half the money she normally did when she sold it at the fort.
“The important thing is he offered,” Nate said.
Winona could see the debate would get them nowhere, so she delved to the meat of the issue. “I just want our lives to be as they were before this whole business began. I want to have the cabin to ourselves, and live as a family again.”
“We already do.”
“It is not the same,” Winona disagreed. In the old days, she could run around their cabin in the heavy robe he had bought her, when she wanted, but not now. In the old days, she liked to work in the garden with her dress hiked up around her knees, but she couldn’t nowadays. The only man permitted to see her in the slightest degree of undress was her husband. No one else. Ever. Period.
Nor did Winona feel comfortable being intimate with another man in the cabin. Among her people sexual relations were accepted as a matter of course, and it wasn’t unusual for a man and wife to indulge their passion in a lodge full of family members. But she wasn’t about to do so in the presence of strangers.
“When this is over I want him gone,” Winona said. “If he goes with Melissa’s uncle, fine. But one way or the other, I want him out of our lives.”
Ezriah Hampton seldom enjoyed a decent night’s sleep anymore. He hadn’t in ages. Ever since he had reached fifty he rarely slept more than three or four hours a night, even when he was dog tired. Someone once told him that the older a person was, the less sleep they needed, and evidently it was true.
Flat on his back on the bearskin rug in front of the King fireplace, a blanket tucked to his chin, he listened to the conversation in the bedroom and winced at each of Winona’s biting comments. As was always the case when he was upset, his good eye started to jiggle like a bug on a hot rock.
Ezriah hadn’t realized that Winona thought so poorly of him. Once again his mouth had gotten the better of him and offended someone he cared about and wouldn’t want to hurt in a million years.
It had always been that way.
At the tender age of seven a cousin had punched him in the mouth after he made a less-than-flattering comparison between the cousin’s face and the rear quarters of the cousin’s dog. At ten he had been slapped by a girl who didn’t appreciate having her mouth compared to a dead worm. At fourteen he had been involved in a fight with two older boys behind the general store where he’d worked in Baltimore after he remarked it must tax their mental capacity to open and close doors. When he was nineteen he had been involved in a tavern brawl after he accused a bartender of watering down the liquor.
Those were just the highlights. Year in and year out, Ezriah’s mouth had landed him in more hot water than most ten men. It fueled his cynical outlook on life, an outlook that stemmed from the death of his father on his sixth birthday. His father had been hurrying home with a present for his birthday and been struck and crushed by an out of control freight wagon.
A fluke, everyone called it. Just one of thousands of fatal accidents that occurred every year. But those accidents happened to other people, and Ezriah never forgave the Almighty for depriving him of the one person who loved him selflessly and completely. His mother, while having her tender moments, couldn’t be bothered to devote much attention to him. A son, interestingly enough, she’d never wanted. A son who, she never tired of pointing out, was an “accident” in himself.
It didn’t help that Ezriah had been born with a rapier wit. Glib remarks—some called them insults—rolled off his tongue in a nonstop torrent. Ironically, not everyone admired his sense of humor. More often than not, the recipients of his wit took extreme umbrage and sought to do him bodily harm.
Ezriah wearied of their stupidity, wearied of those to whom hypocrisy was a way of life and lies were voiced as gospel. He had moved into a small shack on the outskirts of Baltimore and was perfectly content keeping his own company.
Then a chance run-in with a trapper fresh in from the mountains of the far West changed everything. The trapper waxed eloquent about the grand adventure of frontier life. About the fantastic sights few men had ever seen. About the thrill of venturing where only a handful of brave souls had gone before. But what interested Ezriah most were the trapper’s offhanded remarks about the immensity of the wide-open spaces. How a man could travel for weeks on end and not meet another living soul. How a trapper’s life was a solitary life, “the loneliest profession in the whole wide world.”
A week later Ezriah sold most of his personal belongings to raise a stake, and mounted on a swayback nag, he’d headed west. In St. Louis he had stocked up on provisions and bought two packhorses. He’d also been embroiled in a donnybrook at a local liquor mill after he indelicately made mention of the resemblance between a foulmouthed barmaid and the sounds his lower orifice produced after a plate of baked beans.
It was early May when Ezriah started across the prairie. Deer and elk were so plentiful, his only problem was deciding which to shoot for supper. Buffalo were everywhere. It took three weeks to reach the Rockies, and to this day Ezriah never forgot the sheer overwhelming awe. They were everything he had been told, and more.
Up into the mountains Ezriah went, meandering ever higher until he reached what he deemed to be prime beaver country. Relying on a copy of The Trapper’s Guide by Sewell Newhouse, who claimed trappers could make a thousand dollars a year if they heeded his advice, he went about setting up his camp and the next day placed his very first trap, manufactured, coincidentally enough, by the same Sewell Newhouse. It didn’t occur to him until much later that Newhouse might have had a vested interest in publishing a manual that urged young Lionhearts into the depths of the wilds to use Newhouse’s traps.
The guide did contain a wealth of valuable information, though. Ezriah relied on it in selecting his supplies, including half a dozen of Newhouse’s patented steel traps, and he found that most everything the manual listed came in handy.
For over a month all went well. Ezriah had been happier than he’d ever been. Up one stream and down another he roamed, and it was a rare morning he didn’t find at least one beaver waiting to be skinned.
One day, en route to check his traps, Ezriah spied smoke in the distance. He’d investigated, and lo and behold, it was a party of six trappers. They were right friendly, and astounded when they learned he was trapping by his lonesome.
“Always have a partner,” cautioned one. “A man alone is easy pickings for savages and beasts alike.”
Ezriah scoffed at their timidity. He hadn’t seen any sign of Indians, and as for wild beasts, the most fierce animal he’d met was a jay that sometimes followed him on his daily rounds and squawked up a storm.
The trappers had asked Ezriah if he was attending the annual rendezvous, which was being held at Bear Lake that year. “Women, liquor, and frolics!” one exclaimed. “What more can you ask for?”
Intrigued, Ezriah had jotted down directions on how to reach the lake. And so it was that on a bright, sunny morning in early July he reached the south end of Bear Lake to find that the life of a trapper wasn’t as solitary as he’d been led to think. Upward of a hundred trappers were on hand, as well as hundreds of Shoshones, Flatheads, and Nez Perce eager to barter for trade goods available nowhere else.
Ezriah sold the plews he had collected for the princely sum of two hundred and eighty-four dollars and fifty cents. His pockets bulging, he had strolled among the booths, and soon discovered he wasn’t as rich as he thought he was. He needed to replenish his provisions, but he balked at the exorbitant prices the dealers were demanding. Everything was three to five times as costly as it had been in St. Louis. Gunpowder was going for a dollar-fifty a pound. Shot, the same. Sugar was a dollar a pound, tobacco a whopping three dollars a pound, and new traps cost nine dollars. Outright robbery, all legal and proper.
Greatly disillusioned, Ezriah had loaded his packhorses and set out for new trapping grounds. He needed to raise plews, lots and lots of plews, and to that end, he’d reckoned on locating virgin streams undefiled by human contact. To do so entailed pushing deeper into the mountains than anyone ever had.
They say ignorance is bliss, and in Ezriah’s ignorance he blissfully penetrated into the dark heart of the wilderness. He was the first to set foot in a valley where beaver were as abundant as grass. Envisioning enough money to choke a horse, he’d set out his traps and turned in that night as cheerful as a glutton at a pig roast.
His joy was short-lived.
The next day, as Ezriah rested in camp at noon after skinning four prime beaver, he’d heard rustling in the woods and turned just as Sa-gah-lee warriors poured out of the trees. They were on him before he could fire. In fierce triumph they bore him to the mesa on which they lived, and for the better part of the next two decades he was held captive.
The Sa-gah-lee were throwbacks to an earlier time, a primitive people who had isolated themselves from the rest of the world. They gave him the run of their sanctuary, but he wasn’t allowed to leave for fear he would return with more of his kind.
Repeatedly, Ezriah attempted to escape. He resorted to every trick he could think of to outwit them. Failure after failure weighed heavily on his spirit, and after about ten years he gave up trying. Monotonous days of boredom and drudgery blended one into the other, and then one morning new captives were brought in, Winona and Evelyn King, and Winona rekindled the flame of defiance he had thought long since extinguished. She was magnificent. She wouldn’t be cowed, wouldn’t meekly accept the dictates of the Sa-gah-lee. With her help, augmented by the timely arrival of her husband, Ezriah achieved the impossible. He regained his cherished freedom.
Ezriah owed her a debt he could never repay. He had never told her, but he admired her immensely. Out of habit he had taken to teasing her a lot. He did that with people he cared for. Poking fun was his way of showing he liked someone. He never expected her to take exception. He never figured she would despise him.
Stung to his core, Ezriah eased out from under his blankets and rose. He always slept fully dressed except for his hat and cloak, so it was a small matter to gather his effects and his rifle and slink to the door without being detected. Thankfully, the bolt didn’t grate when he slid it aside. Nor did the leather hinges creak when he cracked the door wide enough to slip on out.
Dawn was imminent. The eastern sky was several shades lighter than the west, and birds were warbling amid the trees.
Most of the horses were dozing. Ezriah opened the gate and entered the corral, speaking softly lest they become skittish. They hardly gave him a second glance. From the tack shed at the rear he chose a saddle blanket and saddle and threw them on the chestnut dun he had ridden the day before. He walked the horse out, slid the log rails into place, and forked leather as a golden ring banded the world.
Ezriah crossed the clearing to the trail head and paused. Gazing at the cabin door, he solemnly declared, “I owe you, Mrs. King. You saved my bacon, and I’ve repaid you by letting those bastards steal your pup. Well, never let it be said I don’t settle my debts.”
A lash of the reins, and Ezriah trotted to the lake and bore along the north shore to the glade in the woods. In his parfleche was enough pemmican to last a couple of weeks. He should be able to catch up to the kidnappers in a few days at the most. He might need to ride the chestnut into the ground, but the sacrifice of a horse to save two young lives was justifiable, in his estimation.
The trail was still as plain as the nose on Ezriah’s face.
Sunlight spread across the valley, dispelling lingering tendrils of night. A doe on its way to the lake for its morning drink darted from his path. A chipmunk emerging to greet the new day scolded him for scaring it witless.
Ezriah cradled his rifle in the crook of his left elbow and imagined how happy Winona would be when he returned with Evelyn and Melissa. He hadn’t forgotten the effigy. He remembered Killibrew’s warning all too well. But that didn’t deter him. He had something to prove—to himself and to Winona King.
Come what may.
Nate King was up before his wife. She had fallen asleep half an hour before sunrise, and he let her catch a few more winks. Dressing, he walked to the front door and was surprised to see that the bolt had been thrown. Glancing toward the fireplace, he was equally surprised that Ezriah Hampton was already up and about.
At that altitude the mornings were always brisk. Cold air bit into Nate’s lungs as he strode to the corral. As he always did, he counted the horses to make sure that none had been stolen. The Blackfeet, inveterate horse thieves, had raided him several times over the years.
Nate finished the count, then counted again to be sure he wasn’t mistaken. One of the animals was missing, the chestnut he ordinarily let Ezriah use. A line of hoof prints, ringed by the dew its hooves had displaced, angled to the trail down to the lake.
“What in the world?” Nate blurted, and ran to the trail head. Hampton was nowhere in sight. Perplexed, he scratched his chin and speculated aloud, “Where does that old coon think he’s going?” Unbidden, his talk with Winona flashed through his mind, and an awful premonition seized him.
“Dear God! No!” Whirling, Nate flew toward the cabin as if demons were nipping at his heels.
Seven
“When you see a grizzly, don’t panic. Wait and see if it runs or if it comes toward you. If you’re on horseback, ride like the wind before the bear can get too close. If you’re on foot, and the bear is close by, whatever you do, don’t run. Running from meat-eaters goads them into running after you. The best thing to do is stand still and look them right in the eyes. Show them you have no fear. Nine times out of ten they'll back down and leave you alone.”
Her father’s advice filtered through Evelyn King’s mind as she stared into the dark eyes of the mightiest predator in the mountains. Its bestial gaze bored into her as if seeing right through her. Its immense head, its huge hump, those legs as large as tree trunks tipped by long front claws that gleamed yellowish in the rising dawn light, were enough to send goose bumps rippling down her spine.
Sensing movement on her right, Evelyn shifted just as Melissa Braddock went to bolt. Grabbing Melissa’s wrist, Evelyn whispered, “Don’t move a muscle! Stand still or it might attack!”
Terrified, Melissa sought to break loose and flee, only to freeze at a rumbling growl from the monster in the cottonwoods.
The grizzly advanced a ponderous step.
Evelyn resisted an urge to do as Melissa had done, and locked eyes with the fearsome giant again. The silvertip halted. Raising its nostrils into the wind, it sniffed loudly a few times. The wind, though, was blowing from the west and carried their scent eastward, away from the bear.
Evelyn’s father had once referred to grizzlies as “walking noses.” She’d giggled, and he had gone on to explain that grizzlies depended on their sense of smell much more than their other senses. As with dogs and coyotes and wolves, bears identified other creatures primarily by scent. So sensitive were their nostrils, her father had seen grizzlies sniff out marmots deep in a burrow, dig them out, and devour them.
Evelyn remembered a trapper at a rendezvous whose name eluded her. He’d had a run-in with a grizzly, and was telling everyone who would listen how the bear had charged up to him snarling and baring its teeth, but stopped dead when the man stood his ground: “A single sniff and that mangy bear turned tail and fled like a bat out of Hades, girl. And do you know why? I’ll tell you. The Almighty, in His infinite wisdom, has put a fear of man-smell in all His critters. That’s why I haven’t taken a bath in pretty near fourteen years. The more I stink, the safer I am.”
