half-a-hundred horses prancing and sidestepping nervously.
“Let’s go raise some Bannock hair for Joe!” Titus bellowed, savagely kicking heels into the pony’s ribs.
Away they all shot, dirt flying in clods, streams of it spraying up in cockscombs, streaming down in golden-lit clouds as they spread across the prairie at the gallop, that lone gray-white dog struggling to keep up with the lean, long-legged horses driven in furious pursuit of the Bannock.
Men after blood, revenge boiling in their veins.
By the time the fifty had crossed that four miles of river-bottom land, the three dozen Bannock had reached their village and issued their warning. Young boys were already driving in the small herd of ponies. Old people were gathering up the children. Women were frantically yanking lacing pins from lodges, tearing stakes from the ground, dragging lodge skins and poles from the anchor tripods. At the moment the first one of them spotted the oncoming trappers beneath the dusty cloud in the middistance, she raised a pitiful shriek.
In a flurry the women entirely abandoned their lodges and belongings, wheeling through the line of warriors, racing for the nearby bank of Horse Creek. Into the knee-deep water they churned on foot, turning upstream toward a narrow sandbar of an island where a few warriors beckoned, urging them on. Once onto the sandbar, the women took out their knives or tin cups, starting to dig in the soil while others tore at the skimpy willow and buckbrush, piling up all they could to construct some sort of shelter that, though it would not stop a bullet, would nonetheless hide them from view.
As Titus came off the pony in a run with the others, he slapped the horse on the rump, turning it away as the first of the arrows hissed overhead. He turned at the shrill whimper, expecting to find a friend he knew had been hit.
Instead he discovered Zeke, an arrow shaft trembling from a front shoulder. The old dog stumbled sideways, seized by pain and fear. As Bass whistled and headed for him in a sprint, Zeke tried biting at the shaft until he lost his balance and collapsed onto his side.
Lunging onto the dog, Bass flung his rifle aside and seized the shaft, tugging on it gently at first. Good—didn’t feel as if it had buried itself in bone. Quickly he spread his legs out and laid most of his weight atop the struggling animal while he folded Zeke’s muzzle into the crook of his left elbow, then ripped the arrow from the fleshy muscle.
Bright red blood slicked the grayish fur, oozing for a moment till Bass pushed a bit of the tobacco quid he had been chewing into the hole. Quickly he looked at the arrow he had tossed to the ground. The stone point was still attached—not enough time for the sinew to grow damp enough that the shaft would pull free.
As gunfire began all around him, trappers swearing and Bannock yelling, crying, wailing, and shrieking, Scratch rubbed the old dog’s ears.
“Ain’t your day to die, Zeke,” he whispered into the closest ear. “This ain’t your fight neither. G’won—you get back with them horses.”
Slowly Titus came onto his hands and knees, rocked back to let the dog lick at the oozy wound. Zeke peered up at him, then struggled to stand, throwing his head a few times before he managed to stand.
“G’won, get!”
Scratch flung an arm toward the horses peacefully grazing more than a hundred yards off. Reluctantly the dog started away, hobbling on three legs, favoring the one wounded foreleg. Zeke stopped once, some distance away, peered back at his master, then kept on.
Scratch dragged a hand under his nose, smearing the dribble, and cleared the clog in his throat—thanking the First Maker that the dog hadn’t been taken from him. Magpie and Flea needed a dog to play with and watch over them. Good thing that old mongrel was tough as he was. Scarred and stove-up though they were, the two of them made a handsome pair.
The hot afternoon breeze struck him full in the face as he raced the few yards toward the riverbank where he finally joined the rest. The smell of those Bannock was strong on the wind, a day rank with the stench of blood and dying.
Hour by hour the siege went on. Lead sang into the brush on that island. Every now and then arrows whined out of the willows on the sandbar, arcing down from the summer blue. Sometimes they struck a man in the leg, or a foot, perhaps pinned an arm to the ground until someone else freed him and wrapped the ragged wound.
“Goin’ back—get us some water,” George Ebbert said with cracked, dry lips as he crawled past the clump of red willow where Bass and Sweete held down their post.
“Take ’nother man with you, Squire,” Shad ordered. “Bring back what water you can. And load up with some ball and powder too.”
Bass nodded, his tongue starting to swell with thirst just the way it had on that death march he had made with McAfferty down on the Gila. “We’re gonna be here for a spell.”
The warriors were too far away from the white men to make sure kills with their arrows. And every time one of them showed enough of his brown body to make a target, a trapper’s rifle roared. Someone grunted on that island of misery. A woman cried out, wailing—until more warriors shrieked their war songs anew, drowning out her grief with their unremitting fury. On and on it went as the day aged and twilight came on.
Ebbert returned with water in some Mexican gourds and a few tin canteens. Meek and three more men had chosen to join him on the ride back from camp, their packs filled with lead balls of different calibers and horns of powder to resupply those who were laying siege to that bloody island. The sun continued to sink behind the western hills, and the first stars appeared. Finally it was dark, with nothing more than a thin rind of a new moon rising overhead.
“They’ll slip off now, won’t they?” someone asked in that still summer darkness.
“Not if we fire at that goddamned island from time to time,” Meek suggested, his voice uncannily flat and even.
“Joe’s right,” Sweete agreed. “Teach ’em not to budge. Keep their heads down.”
On into the night the half-a-hundred white men lay along the west bank of Horse Creek, taking their turns firing at the island where the Bannock had forted up, continuing to dig their foxholes. And all through that night the women wailed quietly, men sang war songs softly, and children whimpered. Bass felt sad for the children—they didn’t know no better.
But them big folks, men and women both—they were bad two ways of Sunday, and they deserved to die— stealing horses from the Nez Perce, a people what had been good to the white man since the first explorers with the Corps of Discovery crossed these mountains. And now they’d gone and killed a white man’s wife … an innocent woman who meant them Bannock no harm.
For that, this whole damned shitteree of brownskins was due a lesson.
Every minute or so one of the trappers fired his rifle at the island, keeping the enemy on the move, terrifying them as the short summer night dragged on. There would be no escape from their burrows on that sandbar.
Those first streaks of dawn fingered out of the east, and with them came a few arrows arcing out of the willows.
Then late that morning Bass grew concerned and slid over to Carson, telling him he would return after he rode back to camp. “My woman’s gonna be fretting. Likely she’s heard the shooting and gone looking for me.”
“Take your time,” Kit said. “We both got wives, so I know how they can worry a man.”
Waits-by-the-Water loped barefoot onto the sunny prairie toward Bass the moment she spotted him in the distance. She was crying by the time he lunged the horse to a halt and vaulted out of the saddle. Clumsily she hurried into his arms, Flea on her hip, Magpie wrapping her arms around her father’s leg.
Tears streamed down the woman’s cheeks as she mumbled words he didn’t understand; then suddenly she went silent, pulling back from him, hands brushing across his bloody shirt.
“It’s Zeke,” he confessed immediately, turning to point at the prairie. The dog was in the distance, gamely coming along the best he could on those three good legs.
“The dog, he is wounded?”
After explaining how Zeke was hit with the arrow, Waits cried all over again as the dog came up. Magpie leaped on him, locking her arms around his thick neck, smothering him with her tiny kisses.
Waits pressed her cheek against Bass’s neck. “We worried about you—”
“I come to tell you I’m fine,” he said. “But it isn’t over.”
While he wolfed down some of the meat she had cooked last night while waiting for him, washing it down with cool creek water, Scratch told her of the siege—its cause, the death of Meek’s Mountain Lamb. Then declared
