In Darkest Depths

Blue Water Woman couldn’t. To the west and north the woods only came to within a hundred yards of the water. To the south grew grass. To the east the forest was slightly closer, but the closest trees were short and thin.

“I thought not,” Shakespeare said triumphantly. “Now will you go pester a chipmunk and leave us be?”

“Not so fast,” Blue Water Woman said. “How high will this steeple of yours be?”

“As high as it needs to be for us to see out to the middle of the lake. But I would say no more than thirty feet.”

Blue Water Woman stared at the chicken coop, which was eight feet high, then at the roof of their cabin. “Do you have a brain?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You are not building a thirty-foot steeple on my roof.”

“I keep telling you. It is our roof, and I will do as I please.”

“Not if you want to share my bed, you will not.”

Shakespeare stiffened, then said to Nate, “Did you hear her, Horatio? Blackmail. She thinks she can threaten me with the loss of a few cuddles.” Of Blue Water Woman he demanded, “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t.”

“I will give you more than one. That lumber you are using was for the storage shed you have been promising to build. The roof might not be strong enough to bear the weight of the steeple. We have bad lightning storms from time to time, and lighting likes to strike things that are up high. We have strong winds, too, and a Chinook might bring your steeple crashing down.” Blue Water Woman paused in her litany. “Shall I go on?”

“Scoffs and scorns and contumelious taunts,” Shakespeare quoted. “I should be angry with you if the time were convenient.”

“Well?”

“Well what? Yes, we have storms, and yes, we have high winds. And soon we will have our very own steeple.”

Blue Water Woman refused to let him have the final say. “If you were any more pigheaded, you would have a snout and a curly tail.”

Shakespeare went to push to his feet and nearly pitched over the edge. Squatting back down, he responded, “Dwell I but in the suburbs of your good pleasure? Why must you dam the flow of my stream?”

“Oh my,” Blue Water Woman said, and giggled.

At that, Nate laughed.

“Enough of this tomfoolery,” Shakespeare snapped. “Go away, wench. We have a steeple and stairs to build and the day is wasting.”

Blue Water Woman’s grin evaporated. “What was that? No one said anything about stairs.”

“How do you expect us to get up to the steeple? We can’t use a ladder all the time,” Shakespeare said, as he clambered higher to resume work.

“Will these stairs be inside the cabin or outside the cabin?”

“What difference does it make?”

“If they are inside, that would mean you intend to put a hole in my roof. And I will shoot you before I let that happen.”

“Ye gods, woman. You could nitpick a man to death, even beyond the grave. But rest easy. The stairs will be outside, on the west end of the cabin, so we do not disturb you with our comings and goings.” Shakespeare bestowed a smirk on her. “See? I can be considerate, your broadsides to the contrary.”

“I think I will go visit Winona,” Blue Water Woman announced. “I need a drink and we are out of brandy.”

“Good riddance to you and small pox,” Shakespeare shot back. “Stay most of the day if you want, and when you ride home you can admire your new steeple. It will be the envy of the neighborhood.”

“I have always suspected it, but now I am sure. You are a lunatic.” Blue Water Woman sniffed and raised her chin high. “I must get my shawl.” She marched into the cabin.

“Women!” Shakespeare declared. “If God were not drunk when He created them, then He is the lunatic.”

Nate lifted planks and carried them toward the ladder. “Weren’t you a little hard on her?”

“Do you see these claw marks?” Shakespeare touched his perfectly fine neck. “She came near to drawing blood. I am lucky to be alive.”

“You are lucky she puts up with you.”

Shakespeare aligned a nail and raised the hammer, then glanced down at Nate. “The Bard had it right when it came to women. We should all do as he says and we will have a lot less indigestion.”

“What did he say?”

“Woo her, wed her, bed her, then rid the house of her.”

Winona King was outside her cabin skinning a rabbit. She had caught it in a snare that morning, and by evening it would be chopped into bite-sized morsels and simmering in a stew. She loved rabbit stew. When she was little her mother had made it now and again, but nowhere near enough to suit her. Buffalo meat was their staple. They also ate venison a lot. Rabbit and other small game was resorted to only when buffalo and deer meat were not to be had.

Laying the rabbit on its back, Winona made slits down its hind legs. She peeled back the hide, slicing ligaments and muscle and scraping as required, careful to keep the edge of the knife toward the body, until she had the hide bunched around the rabbit’s neck. The hide would make fine trim for a couple of her buckskin dresses.

Absorbed in her work, Winona was startled when a shadow fell across her. Her husband had gone off earlier, and her daughter was across the lake visiting Degamawaku’s family.

Winona spun, her hand dropping to one of the pistols wedged under the leather belt she wore over her dress. Hostile red men and renegade whites roamed the mountains, and meat-eaters were abundant. Perils were so commonplace that she never ventured outside the cabin unarmed. Bitter experience had taught her the folly of doing so.

But now, about to unlimber a flintlock, Winona stopped with it half-drawn, and smiled.

“Tsaangu beaichehku,” Blue Water Woman said.

“Tsaangu beaichehku,” Winona said, which was Shoshone for ‘Good morning.’ While her friend knew some of her tongue and she knew some Salish, they usually used the language both knew almost as well as each knew her own. Decades of living under the same roof with a white man had made them fluent in the white tongue, so much so that both their husbands liked to boast they spoke English better than most whites. “This is a pleasant surprise.”

“I had to get away for a while,” Blue Water Woman said. “I hope you do not mind that I came here.”

“Mind?” Winona said, and laughed. “You are the sister I never had. Why would I mind?”

Blue Water Woman folded her arms across her bosom and poked the ground with the toe of a moccasin. “It is that husband of mine. There are times when I want to pull out my hair.”

“What has he done now?” Winona asked.

“You have not heard?” Blue Water Woman said. “He and your husband are building a steeple on our cabin.”

“Nate said that he was going over to help Shakespeare with a project, but he did not—” Winona paused and blinked. “Did you say a steeple?”

“Yes. You have been east of the Mississippi River. You have seen the houses of worship, as whites call them, with the big bells they ring when it is time for people to come and pray and sing?”

“Their churches, yes.”

“I am going to have a steeple without the church.”

It made no sense to Winona. Granted, her husband was deeply religious. In the evenings, after supper, she would sit in the rocking chair and sew or knit while he would be at the table reading, and often the book he read from was the Bible. She once asked Nate if he missed going to services, and he said that while it would be nice to mix with people who shared his beliefs, his body was his temple, and the congregation consisted of him and God. He then read a passage from Scripture to that effect.

“I should be thankful,” Blue Water Woman was saying, “that my idiot of a husband is not putting a bell in our