Black Hills (9781101559116) (15 page)

“I'm guessin' they'll be back; we gotta get you outta here, and we gotta find some shelter. There's a norther a comin'.”

“Mister, it's not fair you getting dragged into this, but if you're willing to help, I have to let you. I don't know how to protect Rebecca on my own.”

As always, Cormac packed the scattergun and his extra pistol last, each tied separately for quick access if needed, as the scattergun already had been once.

They needed to make time, and the fastest way was for Cormac to walk and let them ride on Horse. Mrs. Ferguson needed to ride and Cormac couldn't ride with her while making her husband walk. It was Lop Ear's turn to carry the pack. Cormac had the husband wear his own coat and hat and let Mrs. Ferguson wrap herself in his slicker around the blanket from his bedroll.

They were packed and on the trail within ten minutes. He didn't bother to put out the fire. As cold as it was, that fire wasn't going anywhere.

“We'll head upriver for a ways to get some distance between us and them, and then we'll swing inland to find shelter. I think this storm is gonna be a norther, and they can get rough. I would imagine if we can stay out of their way until it starts, there'll be no tracks to follow and they'll head for home and that'll be the end of it.”

Cormac Lynch stepped out smartly. There was no mistaking the weather was quickly getting colder. They came upon some hills after what Cormac thought to be about two miles and turned inland as snow flurries began. The temperature continued to drop rapidly, and the snow got heavier. Luckily, with no wind to push it, it was falling straight down. If it had not been for the circumstances, it would have been a very pleasant walk.

Away from the river, the land was no longer flat, and the going became harder. Cormac had the Fergusons walk a ways to get warmed up, but the doing of it slowed them down, and he re-mounted them at the first sign of her getting warm and loosening her blanket wrapping.

The snow was deepening, and the wind had started blowing, dropping the temperature even more and putting a bite in the air. Cormac knew the signs of a Dakota blizzard in the making. Birds, rabbits, and squirrels were nowhere to be seen; they were already holed up in their lairs. Cormac needed to find a hidey-hole for them, too, and soon.

They came upon a stream flowing out of a tree-filled canyon with hills eventually climbing to four or five hundred feet and followed it upward. Somewhere in the canyon would be shelter. On a flat plain in the middle of a blizzard was no place for anyone with a choice and a lick of common sense. Sitting in the saddle, Mrs. Ferguson pulled the blanket up around her head, like a tent held together from the inside, and Mr. Ferguson had his arms wrapped around her from behind with his own head down, letting his hat be his windbreak.

God was done fooling around and was getting serious; he'd given all the warning he was intending on. The piercing icy wind that penetrated the marrow was bitter cold and lashing out brutally with the driven snow turning to sleet and being driven nearly horizontal, dropping the visibility to less than ten feet. Walking into the wind, the icy sleet covered the faces of Cormac and John Ferguson and found its way down their necks and under their collars. They were getting wet through and through.

The blanket wrapping Mrs. Ferguson's upper body had become sleet-coated over the slicker and had frozen solid into a private shelter. Her wisely holding it away from her body as much as possible kept an air space around her to be warmed by her breath, with her husband's body to protect her back. Her legs, however, were not so lucky and became soaked, and were probably beginning to freeze. Her blanket-tent was showing signs of cold-chill shakes making it clear that her body temperature was dropping too far and too fast.

Although Cormac had waterproofed his shoes with melted tallow, the coating of ice forming on the outside was beginning to freeze his feet, and they were becoming painful and throbbing with every step. Frostbite would not be far behind. The Fergusons' feet would be wet, and lack of use would make them even colder than his own. Forced to keep looking around for shelter, Cormac couldn't hide his face, and it was an open target upon which ice was forming into a mask. It was a freezing, bitter cold.

Cormac knew he could wait no longer; if there was to be a shelter, he would have to build it. As they traveled up the canyon with the river on their left, the wind suddenly dropped as they followed the river around a left-hand corner. They found themselves facing a tight stand of twenty or thirty spruce trees on their right, about twenty feet from the river and close to an embankment. Cormac guessed the embankment would measure out to be about twenty-five feet high with the bottom having been hollowed out to leave a large overhang, which had been cut out by previous flash floods racing around the corner many times a year for many years: a cave with a roof, but no sidewalls. Deadfall wood for fires was abundant. They had found their windbreak. “Thank you,” Cormac said, looking upward into the freezing fury of the storm as he helped Mrs. Ferguson into the shelter. “Thank you very much.”

In a matter of minutes, Cormac and John Ferguson had a large fire radiating heat into their makeshift home. Whatever he was or was not, John Ferguson was no slacker; he pitched in without being told. He was a worker, and they worked well together.

After removing the pack and saddle, Cormac dried the horses with an empty gunnysack, and then, with fallen logs, the two men built a three-foot-high reflecting wall on the opposite side of the fire from the hollow to direct the heat inward. With an axe from Cormac's pack, they cut and stacked enough firewood under the overhang to last a few days. An abundant amount was still there for the taking, but Cormac wanted to get in a goodly supply before it became snow-covered and wetter than it already was.

While they were busy, Mrs. Ferguson had taken charge and set up a kitchen close to the fire with items from Cormac's pack. Using melted snow, she had made a pot of stew from his supply of jerked beef, potatoes, and his last wild onion as well as had a batch of pan-bread nearly done baking on some embers she had pulled from the fire.

If they were careful, they had enough food for three or four days, plenty of water, and a better-than-expected shelter. There was enough of a shallow overhang leading off to one side to give them a path around the corner from the living area to allow them a place to take care of private concerns.

It would be necessary to ration the horses' grain a bit, but there was a decent amount of tall dead grass somewhat protected by the trees, most likely not needing too much effort to keep open. They'd get by.

Cormac surveyed their situation while he quickly got on the outside of Mrs. Ferguson's more-than-welcome vittles. She had rationed their portions to make what food they had stretch as far as possible. That woman had a head on her shoulders, she did. All in all, their little group was in pretty good shape; they were going to be just fine. And, for a few days at least, Cormac was going to have food that actually tasted good.

A
lthough Mrs. Ferguson's coffee wouldn't float any horseshoes, it did hit the spot, and she did right well on the stew, especially considering the few ingredients with which she had to work. Cormac allowed as how it was far better than anything he would have made. He was more than happy to turn the cooking over to her.

They had themselves a real, old-fashioned blizzard kicking up a fuss. Outside of the area protected by their overhang, visibility was down to five or six feet. The stream twenty feet away was invisible in the whiteness, obliterated by the primeval force driving the sleet and snow nearly parallel with the ground. Forecasting outward in his mind, Cormac knew from experience that nothing was moving for miles around except that icy-cold, powerful Missouri River.

The fancy riverboat would be tied up someplace, people and animals large and small would be hunkered down and tucked into houses, holes, barns, or anyplace they could find to hide from the ferocity of the storm. He knew they were in better shape than most. The people and animals in the open and exposed to the full onslaught of the storm would huddle and group together; only the strongest would survive. This was nature in the raw—every bit as terrible as it was awesome.

“Shortly after we were married, I received an appointment as a professor of history at Harvard College,” said John Ferguson in answer to Cormac's question about his previous occupation. “I had applied for it nearly two years before. It was almost like a wedding present. We had to move there, but the extra money came in handy.” Once they had everything arranged the way they wanted, they had settled in for a chat by the fire, and the talk had turned to frontiers. “The frontier was one of the subjects I included in some of my history lessons,” he said. “Having found history interesting since I was a pup, it's easy for me to talk about it.

“Since the beginning of time, people have always pushed out new frontiers; that's what they do. The definition of a frontier is the part of a country next to an unexplored region. It was taken from a French word meaning borderland. In the very beginning of America, the frontiers were on the fringe of the settlements on the far eastern coast, and any exploration was, of necessity, to the west. Hence the frontier, in this country, has always meant the Western Frontier, and the people moving there were said to be moving ‘out West' and were changed by the doing.

“The frontiersmen shed their restraints, made bold decisions, and considered themselves to be more ‘American' than their eastern counterparts because they were taking great risks and helping in the expansion and growth of our country.”

A particularly hard gust of icy wind was redirected into their hollow, flaring up their fire and sending a thick trail of fiery sparks harmlessly out into the storm and causing them to hold shut their unbuttoned coats until it passed.

“There was the Appalachian frontier west of Connecticut that instigated the French and Indian wars in 1760, and the western part of Georgia was a frontier before heavy population pushed the frontier farther westward. Kentucky and Tennessee were frontiers with heroes like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, and in turn, the Dakota Territory became a frontier, and then on to Wyoming and Montana. Piece by piece, frontiers swept the nation, and now it's populated coast to coast, with a lot of open spaces in the middle of course.

“Someday the oceans will be considered a frontier, and who knows, it's outlandish to think of, but maybe someday a thousand years from now, maybe even the stars and the heavens will be a frontier. Looking up at the stars from our farm on a warm summer night, Rebecca and I often talked about what it might be like to look down at the earth from the stars, from God's point of view. It must be really beautiful. I'll bet he's proud of his work.

“It sounds silly now, in light of all that has happened, but I guess the romance of the whole frontier idea was part of our decision to move west. We wanted to be involved in that expansion. We wanted to do our part to help shape America. I know it sounds foolish now, but we didn't realize the depth of the risk we would be facing.

“In retrospect, whatever possessed us to think we could become farmers with no experience to back us up is totally inconceivable. The accounts we read in periodicals and fiction stories made western life out to be appealing and romantic, but we were totally unprepared.”

Mrs. Ferguson listened intently to her husband, nodding her agreement from time to time. “Lest you somehow think otherwise,” she interjected, “we would do it over again. We would just have prepared more thoroughly. I was in complete agreement with my husband's decisions.”

“Even his poker bet?”

She smiled wryly. “Especially his poker bet. He had no choice; the situation had gone too far. He had been sold a bill of goods by some very experienced con men who led him like a lamb to the slaughter. I'm from the hills but I met John on a shopping trip to town and for the last ten years before moving to Missoura, we had been living in cities under police control, letting somebody else protect us, and again, we have no experience or knowledge of this sort of thing.

“Now, we're going to Pierre so he can take the job working for my sister's husband, and I will take in laundry until we get enough money to buy another farm, a place to raise our children and teach them the things that we have learned. We know more about it now, and we won't make the same mistakes. But he was just trying to salvage our money the best he could and take care of me.

“He found himself in a stressful situation, and people don't always make the right decisions under those conditions. One can only do what one can do based upon the experience they have, and in this case, he had no experience to draw from. But considering the facts, I think he did quite well. I'm very proud of him.”