Spirit Wolf (11 page)

He slowed his pace as he neared the lip of the coulee, taking care where he stepped to prevent rocks hidden under the snow from rattling off or sticks from breaking. He went into a crouch, not consciously but from habit. The closer he could get to the coulee before he was seen, the better his chance of getting a shot at anything that bolted from below. As he neared the edge, he knelt and leaned forward a little to peer down. He caught a flicker of movement and tensed, relaxing again as the cottontail darted out from behind a juniper bush. The rabbit was a good sign that Nash hadn't frightened the animal as he came up. That probably meant that he hadn't spooked any other animals either.

There was a lip of sandstone overhanging the creek bed and at one point, a juniper grew in front of the stone ledge. Nash decided to make that his stand. The sun was behind him, and its rays would light the coulee and confuse the vision of any animal trying to see against the brightness of the sun into the shadows on the coulee wall. He squirmed into place, hiding the sharp lines of his silhouette with the rough-edged juniper branches, and settled down to wait. Sitting there motionless, Nash waited as the cold came to him. He felt it first in his toes and then in his fingertips. Cold is a gentle lover that comes in mincing steps, teasing the edges of its chosen's senses until they no longer warn of the danger of cold's embrace. Nash struggled silently to drive the cold away, wiggling his toes and fingers to maintain circulation. His feet were beginning to hurt, a sharp pain. But Nash knew the real pain would come later.

His toes had been frostbitten before. He remembered taking his shoes off that day at the cabin. His feet looked white, dead. But he knew they weren't dead when his mother put them in a pan of water heated on the stove. As the water did its work and the blood began to flow freely through the frozen flesh, Nash almost screamed. It was as though his feet had stored their agony, waiting for blood to cry their pain. His feet had swollen, and his toes blackened, but within a few days, he could gimp around the cabin without wincing. It was not a bad case of frostbite, Doc Wilson said when he stopped a few weeks later. If it had been bad, Nash would likely have lost his toes, and maybe his feet.

Nash rocked his body, rolling the blood through his feet and back up his legs, willing warmth where there was cold. And suddenly he forgot the cold. His whole being focused on the flash of gray that streaked into the juniper stand below, just ahead of the rattle of Uriah's horse coming up the coulee.

As Nash rose, he eased the hammer back on the double-barrel, depressing the trigger so there would be no tell-tale click when the hammer came to full cock. But Nash's fingers were numbed by the cold, and the hammer slipped.
Ka-thump!
A cloud of black powder smoke chased the concussion into the coulee and the opposite wall exploded in white under the hail of buckshot. The recoil sent Nash stumbling back, and he almost tripped on a low-hanging branch. But then he saw a flash as the wolf busted loose from cover, running hell-bent for invisibility promised by a bend in the coulee some sixty yards beyond. The hammer was back on the second barrel, and Nash swung that long-barreled scattergun like an instrument of fate. When the muzzle covered the fleeing animal and then swung a little ahead, Nash squeezed the trigger.
Ka-thump!
The recoil tipped up the gun's muzzle, and Nash's perspective with it. By the time he realigned his eye on his target, it was no longer there. And at that precise moment, Uriah came galloping up on the roan.

“Did you get him, Nash?”

“Don't know. Thought I had him, but I don't see him now.”

“Load up and drop down into the coulee. I'll watch from up here. See if you drew blood. If he's wounded bad enough, he'll be close. If he isn't, we'll let him stiffen up and bleed before we go after him.”

Nash's hands were shaking as he broke open the double-barrel and dropped two shells into the chambers,
chung
, like rocks dropped into a well. Nash cradled the shotgun in the crook of his left arm, leaving his right hand free to grasp bushes as he made his way down the slippery wall of the coulee to the bottom. He found the tracks there and followed holes in the snow that marked the animal's long stretching stride to the point where Nash had fired the shot. There was blood there, sprayed out into the snow as the buckshot coursed through the animal's body.

“He's hit, Dad. Looks to be pretty bad,” Nash called up to his father.

“Get out of the coulee, Nash. Now! We'll sit up here and wait. Spook him now and who knows how far he'll run.”

“I will, Dad. But just a minute.”

Nash followed the tracks toward a juniper bush that hung out over the course of the creek just ahead. The tracks showed that the animal was struggling, and gouts of blood lined the trail. As Nash neared the bush, he heard a low whine. He edged sideways, training the shotgun on the noise. It was a coyote, hurt too badly to move.

“Coyote, Dad. I shot a coyote.”

There was a pause, and then the sound of Uriah's voice, tinged just a little with disappointment. “Kill it, Nash. We can get a few dollars bounty and something for the hide.”

Nash raised his shotgun, putting the bead on the suffering animal.

“No, Nash. Don't waste the shell. That buckshot will tear him up too much. Use a stick.”

“Dad, the hide isn't worth much anyway. It's more trouble than it's worth. Why can't I just shoot him?”

“Nash, the animal's suffering. Kill him, boy. It'll be a kindness.”

Nash looked around the coulee floor for a stick. He finally found a dead juniper and broke off a branch. The clean fresh scent of the wood lingered in his nose as he turned to walk to the coyote. As he approached, the animal struggled to escape, but it was too badly injured. Nash raised the limb over his head and brought it crashing down on the coyote, but a branch deflected his aim and the club struck the coyote on the shoulder. The wounded animal yelped in pain, and tears blurred Nash's eyes as he swung the club again at the coyote's head. This time his aim was true, and he heard the sickening crunch as the club drove splinters of the coyote's skull into its brain.

Nash reached under the bush and dragged the animal out. It was a fine-looking creature—its pelt was prime—but Nash noticed only the bloody concavity where the coyote's forehead had been and the macabre grin on the animal's face, its lips pulled back from its teeth in death.

As Nash stepped away from the animal, a rope sailed down from the top of the coulee and landed beside the boy. “Tie it on,” Uriah said. “I'll pull him up. We'll follow the coulee until I can cross again. No sense hunting anymore around here. If the wolf ever was here, he'll be long gone.”

Nash scrambled out of the coulee and walked back to get Nell. The walking warmed his feet, and Nash was thankful for that as he walked up to the grazing animal. He tightened the cinch and climbed on.

By the time Nash returned to the coulee, Uriah had tied the coyote behind the saddle on the roan. The horse was rolling his eyes, but he was well broken and ultimately put up with even that foolishness.

“Keep an eye out,” Uriah said. “We might spook something yet.”

Nash tried to concentrate on the coulee floor, but his mind clung to the moment when the club broke the coyote's skull. Nash had heard that sickening thump before during the summer of the watermelon.

The Brues planted watermelon each summer, not so much out of hope as stubbornness. There simply wasn't enough sun and water to grow the melons most years in Montana. But during that one magic summer, all the elements came together, and Nash watched the watermelon—just one—maturing at the end of the vine. Even in that wet year, the watermelon represented dozens and dozens of trips to the creek and back, carrying buckets of water so the plant could suck nourishment from the stingy soil.

And all that summer, Nash had dreamed about carrying the melon to the creek and leaving it there until it was cold and crisp. He knew how the knife would feel as it sliced the watermelon into thick, juice-oozing slabs. He saw in his mind's eye a chunk of bright red melon as it was raised to his lips, and the burst of flavor as his teeth crushed the melon into sweetness.

And one day Uriah put a knuckle to the melon and was rewarded with a perfect thump. Uriah and Mary watched, smiling, as Nash picked the melon and carried it toward the house. Then Nash stumbled. The melon fell, scattering blood-red fruit and black seeds over the garden. Nash could still hear the thump the watermelon made as it burst against the clay soil of the garden. It sounded just like the thump the stick made as it crushed the coyote's skull. He had cried then too.

The coulee walls were steep here, and Uriah and Nash rode for nearly half an hour before finding a place where Uriah could cross.

“We'll ride along the rims up there,” Uriah said. “Make our way back to camp. Might be that we'll cut a track or spot something.”

When they reached the top, Uriah pulled the roan to a stop and swung down. “Let's eat.”

Uriah reached into the saddlebag, pulling out the remainder of the roast venison from home and a loaf of bread. Nash climbed down off Nell and joined his father on a log that had long since parted with its bark. The venison and bread were an inch away from being frozen and the meat stringy, but Nash thought his sandwich was delicious. The two sat there chewing the tough meat, minds playing with the past and future. But Nash's mind soon settled on the past few days and a question that had been nagging him.

“Dad, why does that old Indian bother you so much?”

Uriah stopped eating for a moment, then he continued as though he hadn't heard Nash's question.

Despite Nash's concern that he was stepping into something that might not be so easy to step out of, the boy continued. “He's just an old man. He told me to call him Grandfather.”

“Grandfather?” Uriah said as though he were talking to himself. “He asked you to call him Grandfather?”

And then there was more silence. When Uriah finally spoke, his voice was low and constrained, as though he were excising some emotion from his body, and he wanted the surgery to be as painless as possible.

“Maybe I can call him Grandfather too.…” Uriah said, his voice trailing off into nothingness. Nash watched his father's face and listened to the silence until he could bear it no more. Then Uriah spoke. “I wasn't sure I would ever tell you this, Nash. I wasn't sure that I ever wanted you to know, but maybe this is best.

“I never knew my grandfather. He died before I was born, before my father was grown. Grandpa and Grandma Brue died on the same day. My father wouldn't tell me how they died … until that night. It was an old story then, but Dad told it as though it had happened the day before, and when he finished, I understood why it was so clear in his mind.

“Grandma and Grandpa Brue came over from the old country, and they made their way west to settle with a whole colony of Scandinavians in Minnesota. The whole country was covered by trees then, big oak a hundred or more years old. Grandpa Brue worked that land like he was made of oak himself. Dad would go to bed with the sound of Grandpa's ax ringing through the woods and awaken the next morning to the same sound.

“They built their cabin from that oak. They wanted it to last forever, and I guess it did, at least for them. They're both buried along the creek, near the ashes of the cabin. Grass grows belly deep to a tall horse there, almost as though the old man is still farming the place, willing it to grow, even though he's been dead now a good many years. Grandpa was a farmer. He watered the crops with his own sweat, and they flourished. You might think a man who worked so hard for what he had would be stingy, but not him. He shared the bounty he carved out of those woods with everyone who came along, even Indians.

“From what Dad said, Grandma Brue worked hard as Grandpa did. I guess the Brues are cursed with making their women's lives hard.”

Uriah's voice was dead. Emotion was gone from his face, and he continued the story as though he were repeating it from memory.

“Grandma was pretty. Dad said she had long blond hair and eyes bright as a Minnesota lake. Grandpa was tall, rangy, with big hands and calluses hard as cowhide. Dad told me he would never forget the sound of their laughter—or their screams.

“I don't know how it started. Some said it was all over a bunch of eggs some Santee tried to steal from a farmer down at New Ulm, but it was deeper than that. The Santee had stayed in Minnesota when the other bands moved out on the Great Plains. They had a reservation along the south side of the Minnesota River. They hunted some and got an annuity, but mostly, it was hand-to-mouth.

“Still some people thought that was too much. They wanted the reservation lands for settlement. They had even asked President Lincoln to back their claims, so the whole reservation was on edge.

“Everything came apart when the Santee massacred a white family. Some men came to the farm to warn Grandpa, but he wasn't really worried. He and Grandma had been good to the Santee, and they thought they had some friends on the reservation—if whites and Indians can ever really be friends.”

Uriah leaned over, his elbow on his knee. His hand was clasped tightly over his eyes as though to shield himself from the visions in his mind.

Nash thought that was the end of it, that Uriah would stop now, concede the pain was too great to continue, but just as a sigh of relief was beginning to whistle through Nash's teeth, Uriah spoke again. “And then one day when Grandpa was out in the yard splitting some kindling, the Santee came. Grandpa knew them. They had been there a dozen times before, and he wasn't worried. But something alarmed Grandma, and she sent Dad out back and told him to stay out of sight until the Indians left.

“Dad shinnied up a big oak about fifty yards behind the cabin and crawled out on a big limb where he could watch what was going on without being seen. Right away he could see there was trouble. He couldn't hear what they were saying, but he could tell there was an argument going on. Then one of those red devils stepped up and swung an ax at Grandpa's head. Grandpa was still holding his ax, and he blocked the blow. They all jumped him then and knocked him to the ground. He was stunned, I guess, and that was for the best because they started to cut him to pieces. He must not really have known what he was doing, but he kept crawling toward the cabin as though he meant to protect Grandma. He had what was left of his mind on reaching the cabin and saving his wife, and that kept him alive a lot longer than any man should have to live. The Santee were playing with him the way a cat plays with a mouse, but it wasn't until a couple of them started to skin him that he started to scream.