Beyond Squaw Creek

squirmed around on his chest. She leaped up suddenly, straddling him, pressing her knees to his ribs, scuttling forward.

Arching her back and propping herself on her arms, she raised her bottom and slid her silky nest around on his shaft. The bear grease and her own fluids blended, crackling, as the fire snapped and popped, sending sparks toward the lodge’s black smoke hole.

The girl’s head hovered over Fargo, her chin up, eyes squeezed shut. She groaned and grunted, waggling her upturned ass and jerking her shoulders—a wild, half-crazed bitch in the grip of an undeniable, elemental desire.

Her love nest slid down over Fargo like a hot, wet glove fresh from the warming rack of a stoked oven.

The Trailsman sucked a sharp breath, tipping his head back, setting his teeth against the exquisite torture. She rose slowly up, dropped slowly down, groaning and sighing, tossing her head, her rich hair sliding across her shoulders. He closed his eyes and pinched her nipples, kneaded the grease into her breasts.

Outside, the drums thumped. The fires danced across the curving buffalo-hide walls, shunting bizarrely shaped shadows. A man sang softly—Fargo recognized the primitive, beseeching strains of Iron Shirt. A rattle shook.

The girl’s knees dug into Fargo’s sides, and she increased her rhythm, rising and falling more quickly, her sighs turning to squeals, her fingers raking the hard slabs of his pectorals. In seconds, she was raising and lowering her ass so quickly that she became a ragged brown blur in the air above and before him.

“Mmmmhhh!” Her grunts were like a panther’s death spasms. “Uhnnn-nah!”

Over and over she repeated the cries as she bounced up and down on her knees, which gripped and dug into his ribs like a vise. The firelight played over her slender, bouncing body, the brown skin smooth as bone beneath his caressing hands. Her pink-tipped orbs bounced and swayed in blurs of frenzied motion beneath the clacking necklace.

“Ach-ah-eeeeee!” she chortled, as, with one final, violent thrust, she dug all ten fingers into his chest and threw her head back on her shoulders, shuddering as though she’d been struck by lightning.

The Trailsman clamped his jaws together as the girl’s spasms gripped him. His own passion leaped to its climax, his seed firing straight up into the girl’s heat.

He lifted his head, clutched her thighs with both hands, and ground his heels into the robes as he bucked up against her, spending himself. Exhausted, he lowered his head, closed his eyes, and let his exhaustion wash over him.

The drums ceased. Iron Shirt’s singing faded.

The girl climbed off him, panting, flinging her hair back over her head, and padded off. He heard a rattle of cookware and the murmur of poured liquid.

His nose caught the scent of warm mint, and then her voice was a throaty whisper in his left ear. “Drink.”

Head still reeling from the previous beating and the torrid sex, Fargo opened his eyes. The girl knelt beside him, offering a small wooden bowl. From the murky liquid inside, swirling steam wafted the heady aroma of fresh mint.

Thirsty, but too weary and disoriented to ask for water, he lifted his head, sipped at the bowl that the girl held to his lips. The minty fluid slid down his throat easily. He took several deep gulps, his body craving the sustenance.

He’d barely taken the last sip before his head grew heavy as a smithy’s forge. The shadow and light-swept lodge pivoted sharply, and a loud screech rose between his ears.

He clutched the bed beneath him, as though at the edges of a swamping canoe. As his head fell back against the robes, his lids dropped like fifty-pound seed bags over his eyes, and downy white birds wafted across the purple gelatinous murk that had become his brain.

The birds winged through his skull for a long time, lulling him into a sleep nearly as deep as death. It was his own name that called him back as the ocean floor once again surged beneath him.

Recognizing the voice, he swam up from unconsciousness, hearing the birds’ final muffled cries and wing beats, and opened his eyes. Wincing at a pain spasm, he found himself reclining against a naked, sand-peppered thigh. He was outside, on the ground, and staring up at the pretty, pale countenance—framed by mussed, sand- streaked, fire red hair—of Valeria Howard.

Frowning down at him, raking her hands through his hair, she exclaimed in a trembling voice, “Skye, you’re alive!” She ran her hands across his face as though she were blind. “Oh, God, what did they do to you?”

Fargo glanced down at the ten half-moon-shaped cuts in his chest, and remembered the mauling he’d taken from the princess. He rose onto his butt, found that his wrists were bound with braided rawhide. His ankles were bound, as well, with an additional length connecting his ankles to a cottonwood post embedded firmly in the ground a few feet away. He and Valeria were naked, scraped, sand-caked, sunburned, and tied like dogs.

He cursed, yanked on the lanyard binding his ankles to the pole. Feeling as though he were still locked in the belly of a bizarre dream, his head still swimming from the braining, the tea, and the sex, he looked around.

The sun was angling westward in a cloud-spotted sky, which meant it was early afternoon. He must have been out here since last night. The buffalo-hide lodges rose above the willows in the south, smoke rising and floating between the lodge poles. In the north, the confluence of the two streams gurgled and rushed softly, while birds flitted in the brush lining the banks.

Only thirty yards west lay the cold, gray ashes of the fire pit.

Valeria sat back against the pole they were bound to, arms covering her breasts, knees raised. The sun and mosquitoes had splotched her otherwise smooth face. Her hair was tangled about her head.

She looked at once indignant, enraged, and terrified. “I thought you were dead.” Her eyes dropped to the cuts on his chest. “What on earth did they do to you, Skye?”

Fargo felt his face warm with chagrin as he glanced away from her. “Some things are just too awful to talk about.”

The brush along the river snapped. He turned toward it, ducked quickly as a rock careened over his head to bounce across the sand behind him.

The boy who’d thrown it—maybe six or seven years old and wearing only a loincloth but armed with a slingshot—threw his head back, pointing at Fargo as he laughed. The other two boys making their way out of the shrubs behind him laughed, as well. The three broke into runs as they headed for the village, cackling and chortling.

Fargo picked up a stone and slung it after them.

“They’ve been doing that all day,” Valeria said hatefully. “The children come by and throw things. The dogs bark and growl. The braves make lewd gestures. An old woman came out and rapped me with a willow switch. I don’t understand how you slept through all that.”

“Well, I had a long night.”

“I’m so scared. The braves have been gathering wood for another fire.” Valeria’s voice trembled as she turned her eyes to the fire pit, on the other side of which fresh willow and cottonwood branches were heaped. “What’re we going to do?”

Fargo pulled at the leather lanyard binding him to the pole. There was no give whatever, and the expert knots were small and taut as sutures.

He inspected the braided rawhide binding his wrists. Those knots, too, would be impossible to untie, impossible to cut without a knife.

Clarifying rage burning through him, Fargo flung his wrists apart, the rawhide snapping taut and cutting into the chafed skin. If he didn’t think of a way out of here soon, he and Valeria both would no doubt be sacrificed to the Assiniboine war gods, under the sharp knife of demented Lieutenant Duke, and to the ethereal singing of Iron Shirt.

Fargo exhaled slowly and peered toward the dun hills rising beyond the stream, where Prairie Dog Charley had no doubt met a slow, bloody end last night.

“What’re we gonna do?” Fargo mused through a long sigh. “Good question.”