Embrace the Day Page 24

  She put her shawl around him and brought the ends of it about her shoulders, fashioning a sling. She was clumsy and off-balance, being so slight of stature, but her limbs were strong and wiry from years of running and hefting great bundles on the tribe's frequent migrations.

  Whispering Rain paused to listen to the winter stillness of the woods as her eyes surveyed the steaming licks below her. Her relief came in a little frozen breath; there was no sign of the attackers. Fitting her hands and feet into gaps in the sandy rock, she began a slow, arduous climb downward. It was full dark of night by the time she dropped to the packed-earth surface of the river bank. The impact caused her wound to begin bleeding again. Whispering Rain ignored it and turned slowly, dreading the sight that was about to greet her.

  Wisps of smoke trickled skyward, emanating from the pitiful remains of the scattered makeshift dwellings. The camp looked like a battlefield, littered by the dark, still shapes of her parents, her half sister, Melassa, and Melassa's husband, Scotach. Sickness bounded to her throat, and she fought it down with an effort.

  Whispering Rain swore softly to Matchemenetoo, the Devil Spirit, when she recognized her father's body. His head was a mass of gore, black in the deepening night. The hunters had claimed his scalp. Many white men sported Indian pelts. Still cursing, she crossed to her mother's body. Amy Parker, it seemed, had died as peacefully as she had lived. A single ribbon of darkening blood circled her throat like a necklace. Her hands were folded on her breast; her face was smooth, its lines softened by the release of her spirit.

  Whispering Rain set Small Thunder down beside the caved-in remains of a hut some yards away from the bodies, where the partial walls offered a bit of shelter from the driving blast of wind.

  Activity kept her emotions at bay. She had little trouble making a fire. Sifting through a smoldering pile of ashes, she scooped a few live coals into a shard of clay pottery and laid them in front of the shelter. She coaxed a blaze from bits of charred cloth and dried bark chips and then wrapped Small Thunder snugly in a torn blanket.

  "Stay here," she told him, her breath coming in visible puffs. "I'll get you something to eat."

  But when she returned with a small quantity of jerked venison that had survived the pillaging, she found that Small Thunder had fallen asleep. Tears were drying on his face, streaking through the dusting of dirt on his cheeks. Whispering Rain's breath caught in her throat. Small Thunder understood. He was too little to comprehend everything, but he obviously knew all was lost.

  Tscha-yah-ki. Everything.

  Whispering Rain put a hand to her cheek. It came away dry. She couldn't remember ever shedding a tear and now, when at last there was cause to indulge her grief, she found she couldn't cry. Years of battling imagined weaknesses had driven the tears from her.

  Sighing, she returned to the main part of the encampment, forcing her mind to empty itself of all thought as she prepared to mourn her dead. If she allowed herself to think too much, she'd never be able to cope with the ravaged faces, the slack limbs, the staring eyes.

  She worked until the winter cold was replaced by the sweat of exertion, bringing the bodies to a flat where the springs warmed the earth to a sticky mud. Lacking tools, she couldn't provide proper narrow graves and had decided into let the earth take them slowly, swallowing their remains.

  Using her shawl she cleansed their faces, beloved faces that had once laughed around the council fires. She paused to loosen her hair of its braids, wishing she had paint of yellow and vermilion to draw whorls of mourning upon her face. She covered the bodies with burned and bloodied shreds of fabric and laid a single smooth stone at the feet of each one. The tobacco she sprinkled over them was not the sacred nilu famu, but it would have to suffice as the final sacrament.

  Then Whispering Rain stepped back and watched the firelight flicker off the makeshift bier. She stared as deep, silent, heartfelt grief gripped her in stillness, until the wind chilled the sweat on her body.

  At last she began the breathy, undulating notes of the death chant. Her voice rose to the barren night sky, quavering with melancholy, embodying all the tenderness, sorrow, and despair that she felt.

  When her song was done, she trudged to the river's edge to scrub her body with sand until her limbs stung and her flesh glowed pink in the firelight. There should be no anger in mourning, yet Whispering Rain couldn't help herself.

  Rage intruded upon the hollow grief in her heart. Surprisingly, she realized that some of her fury belonged to her parents. They had to ride down among the white man, ignoring the elders' decision that the course of wisdom lay west, into the sun. You should have heeded the elders, she raged in silence. Didn't you know what would happen?

  Whispering Rain set her jaw. Of course they knew. The reprisals, the furious vengeance. The struggle went on until fighting meant only death. The hallowed hunting ground, which the ancients had decreed could belong to no tribe, had been measured and surveyed and parceled out by land-hungry settlers who named it Kentucky and called themselves Americans.

  They'd never stop coming.

  Whispering Rain retreated to the shelter where she'd left the boy. When she tried to settle down, a hard object dug into her back. Frowning, she groped among the blankets and debris until she extracted a rifle. Somehow the weapon, along with all its firing implements, had escaped plunder. Whispering Rain gathered the things close with the cold certainty that she would be needing the metequa—the white man's weapon.

  What didn't occur to her, as she lay back and stared up at the cold, white points of light in the dawning sky, was how soon she would use the rifle to spit vengeance on one of her family's murderers.

  A twig snapped. She would never have remarked on it had it not been for the utter, unmoving stillness of the dawn. She sat up, listening intently now. There was a crunch of frozen mud being trodden upon—by a foot heavier than that of a deer or wildcat.

  Whispering Rain took up the rifle, biting her lip as she tried to remember the steps in loading it. Her father, proud of her quickness of mind, had shown her. Twice. She prayed it had been enough.

  Her fingers trembled as she inserted a small swab of flax into the barrel and tamped it down with the ramrod. Find-ing no measuring device, she placed an unknown quantity of powder into the muzzle. The footsteps grew louder, and Small Thunder whimpered and shifted in his sleep.

  "Nen-nemki," she murmured, "be still."

  Swallowing the panic that rose in her throat, she continued loading. The bullet, wrapped in a bit of greased patching, went down into the muzzle, aided by the ramrod, which, mercifully, slid silently. Quaking with apprehension, she added powder to the firing pan to prime it.

  Closing the pan, she rose slowly to her feet, her injured leg thudding with pain. She had no idea whether or not the rifle would fire; she could well have left out a step in the loading. The flint might not work. But there was no time to worry about the weapon's shortcomings.

  She stepped away from the shelter to divert the intruder's attention from Small Thunder's presence. And found herself facing a tall man who swayed drunkenly in the dawn light. A man with eyes so yellow and cold that his very stare sent terror twisting down her spine. Behind him, a scruffy young boy of perhaps nine hung in the purple shadows, holding the reins of a horse.

  Her breath caught with a hiss as recognition dawned. She brought the barrel of the rifle up, level with his belly. Then she spoke his name disparagingly.

  "Elkanah Harper." His clothes stank of the scalps he'd taken; one bitten-off ear marked him as a horse thief.

  He swayed a little and laughed harshly. "Aye!" he shouted, not at all concerned by the cold round eye of the gun pointed at his midsection, " 'Tis Elk, and glad I am that I came back to see that me and my boys did the job up right."

  He hooked a thumb into his belt loop, fingers playing on the handle of his long knife. " 'Pears we overlooked a couple of redskins, Caleb," he said over his shoulder. "Where's your father and his brother?"

  T
he boy shrugged.

  "Goddamned boys o' mine," Harper swore. "Must've stopped below the bluffs to water the horses." He turned his yellow-eyed gaze back to the girl, exuding malevolence.

  "Guess me an' my grandson'll have to deal with you ourselves." The boy quailed and shrank back.

  Whispering Rain felt sickness well up in her. This was the eldest of the Harpers, the man who had assured her father in Chillicothe that it was safe to make salt at the licks for trading in Lexington. Who had given Coonahaw detailed directions, fed him firewater, won his trust.

  She met his eyes. They were bleary with drink and full of gleeful cruelty.

  "You knew," she said accusingly. "You sent us here."

  He laughed again. "My boys did a good job killin', eh?"

  "Not good enough," Whispering Rain told him. "They left me, Coonahaw's daughter, behind. To avenge my father."

  Harper was not as drunk as Whispering Rain had hoped. As he spoke, he edged closer. She saw his fingers twitch a little in anticipation of seizing her rifle.

  "Don't," she cautioned him. "I do not relish killing as you do, but I will take your life. Go away, Harper."

  He shook his head slowly from side to side. "You'll come with me, squaw."

  "Never!"

  He laughed in her face. But the laughter was meant to disarm her, to cover his sudden lunge.

  Whispering Rain squeezed the trigger. The flint struck a spark against the frizzen, and the metequa barked its thunder at Harper. The ball struck him, not in the belly where she'd aimed, but higher, piercing his heart.

  The boy dropped the horse's reins and scampered away in terror.

  "Bitch!" Elk spat raggedly, clawing at the sooty, gaping hole in his chest.

  Elkanah Harper's boys appeared over the rise in time to see a young squaw with a little boy clutched to her breast, fleeing southward on their father's horse.

  Luke Adair threw himself to the ground at the sharp crack of a rifle report. He grimaced in silent pain as his knee struck a frozen clod of mud, and then he rose slowly, cautiously, to look around. His sigh of relief froze in the air before his mouth. The shot hadn't been meant for him; it was too far away. But now he moved with more caution. Deep in the wilderness, both Indian and white were likely to shoot first and wonder about the target afterward.

  Such dangers never dissuaded Luke from his frequent forays into the thick, river-creased woodlands of Kentucky. It was worth the danger to come here, to hear the wind moaning through pines on high ridges, to see the relic stands of ancient hemlocks, to feel his horse's footsteps springing on a cushion of humus. Beyond the hastily tamed regions of central Kentucky were places where a man could still touch the land.

  Luke set out hunting whenever he could, especially in winter when work on the farm slowed down and the family settled into their snug house near Lexington to huddle against the chill.

  Too much closeness, Luke decided. Too much of his parents' tacit trust in his dependability, of Israel's incomprehensible orations on theology, of pretty Sarah's incessant prattle over her dolls and bright bits of calico. And especially too much of Hance's careless, half-formed dreams of glory, which were constantly thwarted by his own recklessness.

  Luke ventured out for the solitude as much as he did for the hunting. Always alone, always on his favorite dun mare, a fleet Chippewa-bred horse. Luke enjoyed the independence of traveling alone, not having to think about planting schedules or sick cows or getting Hance out of his latest scrape. Here Luke answered only to his own needs, and it was a welcome relief after a long season of responsibility.

  At the moment his own need was to find the source of the rifle shot, to ascertain that he wasn't the one being hunted. The rifle was Indian; of that much he was sure. Redskins used low-grade powder, which gave the report a slightly different quality.

  Hoofbeats sent him and his horse backing into a dense stand of hackberry. An eagle mare burst into view, its eyes rolled back fearfully, showing white. Luke saw a flash of moccasin-clad feet and a well-greased fringe of doeskin. An Indian woman, clutching a child in front of her. She rode past him, ducking low over the horse's shoulder, and disappeared from view.

  Luke was about to emerge from his cover when two more riders appeared, well mounted, urging their beasts on with curses. The men reminded Luke of a pair of scraggly wolves.

  Stay out of it, Luke admonished himself. But even as the thought squirmed through his mind, he was mounting and spurring his horse in the direction the hunters—and the hunted squaw—had taken.

  He couldn't imagine the sort of men who would ride down a lone Indian woman…

  Yes, he could. Hance was capable of that. And maybe Roarke, too. The two of them had had enough brushes with redskins to develop a deep, abiding hatred of all their kind. Luke despised Indians, too, but his hatred was more focused, more controlled. An entire race of people wasn't responsible for nearly killing him twelve years ago and carrying off his sister. Luke reserved every shred of his loathing for the one brave called Black Bear.

  He rode on, bending low beneath a leafless hickory branch. The fires of rage had subsided over the years. Black Bear was probably dead, and Rebecca undoubtedly so. Luke had done his grieving.

  The hunters never saw him. They veered northward, toward the river, having lost their quarry. Luke felt a breath of relief escape him and slowed his horse to a meandering walk. He hadn't given the squaw enough credit. She'd managed to elude the hunters with her inborn sense of woodcraft.

  Wandering southward, Luke began to seek out a place to make camp for the night. Lost in thought, he didn't realize what he'd stumbled upon until he was in the midst of a burnt-out Indian camp.

  Sickness constricted his throat. Four bodies had been laid out on a mud flat in deathly repose. Swallowing bile, he saw that the women had been butchered every bit as ruthlessly as the braves. The sympathy that suddenly burst within his heart felt strange to Luke. Why feel compassion for redskins?

  He supposed it was the waste, the utter senselessness of the massacre. Yet he knew redskins to be equally indiscriminate in their killing. One of them had recently made short work of a white man, Luke saw. Some distance from the rest of the bodies lay a filthy, grizzled carcass, the face twisted into an eternal snarl.

  Shaking his head, Luke walked away from the camp, putting a cold hand to his roiling innards. The freezing temperature had preserved the scarlet hue of the blood that crept out across the frozen ground.

  A sudden wave of longing for his family welled up in Luke. He'd been gone a month, time enough to forget the tension of all his responsibilities. The cold bodies made him long to embrace someone warm and alive, like Sarah, who was fond of crawling into his lap and begging for stories.

  The trail to Lexington took him along the Licking River. He paused to eat, to water his horse, and to savor the last of the day. The bleak winter sun carved deep shadows into the cliffs above the water. A flock of geese appeared soundlessly, hanging still in the air for an instant. Then they wheeled out over the river in perfect V formation and were gone.

  A small sound drifted through the evening silence. A human sound. Tensing, Luke scanned the cliffs above the river and edged toward a great limestone outcrop.

  The sound grew stronger as he neared it. A voice, sweet and clear, issued from a large cave. Tethering his horse to a bush, Luke climbed to the opening in the cliff. What he found made his throat constrict with emotion.

  An Indian girl—or was she a grown woman?—sat on a ragged horse blanket cradling a small child in her arms, crooning some sweet melody. Her face was set impassively, and her cheeks were dry, yet the aching mournfulness in her voice indicated grief more poignantly than a flood of tears.

  Touched, Luke took a step toward her.

  Whispering Rain tensed every nerve when a long, broad shadow closed the mouth of the cave where she hid. Driven by instinct, she clutched Small Thunder closer while her other hand reached for the primed rifle. Her head snapped up, and her eyes clouded with
confusion. She was staring at a man far too magnificent to be one of Harper's sons.

  He removed his hat and raked his hand through a mane of clay-colored hair. The white winter sun illuminated arresting features that looked as if they'd been hewn from iron maple by a master's skilled hand. A proud, firm jaw and squarish chin, a straight nose and oddly soft lips, lips that made Whispering Rain feel something dreadful and forbidden curl within her.

  With an inner tremble she lifted her eyes to his. The color reminded her of a dew-wet leaf in springtime, but he was staring at her with a chilly hardness that made her shiver. She recognized the hardness as hatred.

  Whispering Rain swallowed. She was in an awkward position to fend him off, but he hadn't yet taken his knife or tomahawk from his belt.

  The speed with which she set Small Thunder down awoke the child, who began to whimper. In one quick movement, Whispering Rain thrust him behind her and seized the rifle.

  The man's foot slammed down on the barrel, pinning the weapon on the floor of the cave.

  "Don't," he ordered curtly.

  With a grunt of fear, she tried to pry it up. The man uttered a curse and took the rifle, twisting it roughly from her hands. He regarded the rusting, dirty muzzle for a moment, his mouth drawn taut in disapproval.

  "Now then," he said, half to himself, "what's to become of you two?"

  From somewhere in the corner of her mind burst a wealth of English words, words schooled into her by her mother's teaching.

  "Do you really wonder?" she snapped. "I should think it is obvious."

  His eyes widened in surprise. "So you speak English, do you, little squaw? Damned well, too."

  She stared at him, unsmiling.

  "You were being chased earlier today," he continued. "How the devil did you lose the hunters?"

  "I abandoned the horse and fled on foot. They followed the horse's trail."

  He gave a slight nod of approval. "Where will you go?"

  His question indicated that he didn't mean to kill her. But Whispering Rain felt no rush of gratitude. She knew she would probably die anyway, alone in the forest with a small child and a leg wound that left a trail of blood to tempt marauding wolves and bears.