“How do you know that?”
“You pay me to know. I’ll see you later.”
JC cocked his head and watched Paul stroll out of the room. His assistant knew more about JC’s life than he would fess up to, but since he trusted both Paul and Becky, he didn’t worry about them betraying him.
If he was wrong about either of them, his mistake could be deadly.
10
The Badlands (1885)—Ensley
When the sun began to sink toward the horizon in a blaze of red and orange, Ensley decided to stop hiking for the day—her fourth day in the wilderness. Tomorrow she should reach the end of Spring Creek, but she should head southwest first thing in the morning if she was going to Medora.
But if she did that, she wouldn’t have water, and right now, her survival depended on it. So, what should she do? Follow Spring Creek until it ended, then go north until she reached the Little Missouri River? If she did that, she’d have to travel several miles without water, and that scared the hell out of her.
She’d sleep on it and decide in the morning.
For now, though, it was time to find a suitable campsite, and the grove of cottonwoods ahead looked like a possibility. After scoping it out and finding a flat area with a few big trees that would provide okay shelter, she gathered wood and started a fire.
At the top of her to-do list was to make a new fishing spear using the Clovis Point. The spear had to be multifunctional. Besides fishing, she required it for protection. She also needed to make containers, and birchbark would work for that.
Following dinner, and after she made preparations for the night, she went looking for a sapling to use for the new spear. But how to chop it down? Her little knife wouldn’t work, and if she destroyed her ten-thousand-year-old Swiss Army knife, she’d be pissed. And it would never work as a hatchet anyway. But maybe she could place the blade at an angle against the tree and then hammered it with a piece of wood.
She picked up one of the logs she’d collected for the fire and went looking for a sapling. It had to be a couple of inches taller than she was, which would increase her reach while fishing or protecting herself. If it was shorter and she used it as a walking stick, too, the point could stab her if she tripped.
It took a few minutes, but she found a sapling that was the perfect height and small enough in diameter that she could chop it down.
She pressed the Clovis Point at an angle against the tree trunk and hammered it with the piece of wood, first on one side of the tree trunk and then the other, chipping away at the tree and creating a wedge all the way around until she could break it off.
Snap!
“Ha. That was easy.” She examined the Clovis Point and was relieved to find it wasn’t damaged. It was now her lucky talisman.
She dragged the sapling back to the campsite to scrape and shape it. When she was a kid, her father taught her how to make a spear. And although she hadn’t made one in several years, she hadn’t forgotten how to do it.
Looking back on all the things he taught her, she wondered how her father, a kid from the Philadelphia suburbs, had learned so many survival tricks. If anyone could be with her now, she wished it could be her dad. It didn’t take much to imagine him sitting next to her, directing each step. “Start at the top of your spear and scrape off about six inches of bark, like you’re peeling a carrot.”
She sensed his hand on hers as she used the log as a hammer again, banging it against the Clovis Point until she stripped off six inches of bark and shaped the end of the sapling into a sharp point.
Perfect. Now grease the point and roast it over the flames to fire-harden it.
“I don’t have any grease.”
Then use what you have.
Lip balm! That would work but would require the entire tube to grease the point. Well, hell. What did she want? Smooth lips or a spear? The spear won hands down.
To turn her roughly made spear into a long-term survival weapon was a three-step process. First, she greased up the top six inches of the pointed sapling with the beeswax lip balm. Step two was to fire-harden the edge by toasting it until it darkened. And the third step was to burnish it by rubbing the point with a stone to create a glass-like finish.
She moved through each step methodically, her soul soothed by the simple act of being proactive and creative, and for a while, she forgot about her predicament. And when she finished her project, she held up the spear, grinning. “It’s beautiful. A definite keeper.”
Now, if she could make a few bark containers, she’d be on a roll.
She wandered through the grove looking for a birch tree and was about to give up and go fishing when something moved, crunching the dead leaves. Her hand shot up, holding the spear at shoulder height.
“Who’s there? Show yourself.”
Her gaze darted around the shadowed grove until she spotted the leaf-cruncher—a cottontail rabbit, poking its nose around the trunk of the tree. Was she quick enough to spear it? She licked her lips, imagining the taste of roasted rabbit, but no, she wasn’t fast enough.
Thoughts of rabbit stew, stuffed rabbit, grilled rabbit, braised rabbit, and—what else? Kentucky Fried Rabbit—lingered long after he hopped away. But the critter had drawn her attention to a birch tree, whose bark had oils that kept it supple and made it easy to fold into shapes.
She banked thoughts of rabbit stew and, using the Clovis Point, tackled the job of stripping squares of bark. When she was satisfied with the results, she returned to her campfire and held a piece over the fire,
