In Darkest Depths

“I need some air.”

“I am sorry I care so much, Carcajou.”

“It is my soul that calls upon my name,” Shakespeare softly quoted. “How silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night, like softest music to attending ears.” He smiled and went out, remembering to take his rifle from beside the door. The cool evening air was a welcome relief from the flush of ardor. Overhead, stars had blossomed.

Shakespeare walked to the lake and gazed out over the dark waters. He thought of the thing in the depths, and more of the lines he had read countless times tripped from his troubled lips. “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.” He stopped, and scowled. “There’s the rub. I am not ready. I would savor her until the end of time if I could.”

The crunch of a step brought Shakespeare around with his Hawken rising. The tall, broad-shouldered figure strolling toward him showed white teeth in a warm smile.

“I thought I saw you out here,” Nate King said.

“Horatio!” Shakespeare delightedly exclaimed, using his pet name for the man he loved as a son. He clapped Nate on the arm. “You are a balm to these tired eyes.”

“I just got back from Bent’s Fort,” Nate related. “I brought the sugar and flour the women wanted and enough powder to last us all for the next year.”

“You just got back, you say?” Shakespeare asked. It was a ten-day ride to the trading post and another ten days to return. “How is it you are over here talking to me instead of treating that adorable wife of yours to your company?”

“Winona just told me that you plan to try and catch the creature in the lake.”

“Oh, hell,” Shakespeare said.

“What is the matter?”

“I am not a dunce. My wife has been talking to your wife and now she sends you to do their handiwork.” Shakespeare kicked a stone, and it rolled into the water. “Females! They cut off our heads with a gilded axe and smile as they deliver the killing stroke.”

“Was that the Bard?”

“Somewhat,” Shakespeare said. “But you can turn around and go right back to your cabin. I want to do it and I will do it, and I don’t care who thinks I shouldn’t.”

Nate grinned. “Stamp your foot a few times and you will remind me of Zach when he was five years old.”

“Fah!” Shakespeare rejoined.

“Simmer down.”

“I will not. At my age a little simmering is good for the blood.”

“It is true what they say, then. The older we get, the younger we act.”

“What sock did you pull that one out of? It is mine to do, do you hear me? I will pit brain and sinew against the water devil, and may the real devil take the hindmost.”

“Be sure you are right, and then go ahead,” Nate said. “That motto worked for Davy Crockett, and it will work for us.”

“Us, Horatio?”

“That is why I came over,” Nate said. “Remember the grizzly that lived in the valley when we first came here? We tried to live in peace with it, but it chased my son over a cliff and tried to make a meal of my family and me. I had no choice but to kill it.” Nate turned toward the lake. “We need to know what is out there and whether it is a danger to our families.”

“Then you are not here to talk me out of going after it?”

“On the contrary. I am here to tell you I am with you. We will see this through together.”

Shakespeare McNair chortled. “This is the reason you are the manly apple of my eye. To battle, then, Horatio! Unleash the dogs of war!”

Bats in The Belfry

It was not quite ten o’clock the next morning when loud banging and scraping noises drew Blue Water Woman out of her cabin to stare in bewilderment at the roof. Planks left over from the chicken coop were unevenly stacked at one end. In the center, hammering away, was her husband. Their ladder was propped against the side of the cabin, and Nate King was just coming down it.

“Good morning,” he greeted her.

“Good morning to you,” Blue Water Woman responded, and then focused on the man she had married. “Carcajou?”

Shakespeare went on hammering.

“Do not pretend you cannot hear me,” Blue Water Woman said.

With an exaggerated sigh, Shakespeare lowered his hammer and shifted on his knees. “What is it, woman? Can’t you see we men are busy at important work?”

“You did not tell me Nate was here.”

“Do you expect me to mention every trifle? Should I tell you when I heed Nature’s call? Or pick my teeth?”

“Someone got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, and it was not me.”

“Me either,” Shakespeare said, selecting a nail. “If my disposition were any sunnier, you could not stand to look at me except on cloudy days.”

“What are you doing to my roof?”

Shakespeare reacted as if she had slapped him. “Your roof? We both live under it. Which makes it mine as much as yours and entitles me to make improvements if I so desire.”

Blue Water Woman put her hands on her hips. “How do you improve a roof that has nothing wrong with it?”

Nate was filling his arms with planks. He looked up at McNair. “You didn’t tell her what we are going to do?”

“Stay out of this, Horatio.”

“I took it for granted you would,” Nate said. To Blue Water Woman he said, “It was his idea. A darned good one, too.”

“Perhaps you will share his brilliance with me since he saw fit not to,” Blue Water Woman prompted.

“We figure that we need to get a good look at the thing in the lake so we will have a better idea of how to deal with it,” Nate explained. “And the higher we are, the more of the lake we can see.”

“What does that have to do with my roof?”

Shakespeare slid to the edge and balanced on his hands and knees. “We are building a steeple.”

“A what?”

“Do you remember that time we went back East? All the churches we saw with bell towers on top? Those are called steeples.”

“You are turning our cabin into a church?”

Shakespeare did his strangled goose impression. “Honestly, woman. The silly notions you come up with. Have I taken out our table and chairs and replaced them with pews? Have I torn down the fireplace and put in an altar?”

“Do not give yourself ideas.”

“All I am building is a steeple. Then Nate and I will take turns keeping watch through his spyglass. Our big handicap has been that we can’t see much of the lake from the ground, but the steeple will remedy that.”

“You couldn’t climb a tree?”

Shakespeare made a sweeping motion with his arm. “Show me a single tree anywhere near the water and we will use it instead.”