The Snowflake (5 page)

“You left him.” Buck stared long into my eyes.

I swayed with exhaustion and elation and all of the wretched, glorious truth of it. The words tumbled out like a long-stopped fountain. “He fell. I cut him out of the traces, like you do with the dogs when they fall and . . . and I left him there.”

He gripped my face between hard, warm hands, strong and knowing hands. “Is he alive?”

I shook my head, knowing the look in my eyes was as wild as I felt. “He’s dead. My brother is dead.”

“You are sure? We could send out a search party . . .” He left the words hanging, both of us knowing that no one had the strength to go back. It would be a miracle if we could continue to go forward.

I shook my head, tears of freeing rain rolling down my cheeks. “I should have dragged his body here so he could have a decent burial. I should have—”

Buck shook my shoulders, his gaze piercing like blue lightning. “Ellen, listen to me. He was dying. We all saw it. It was only a matter of time.” He squeezed my shoulders in a tender-tight grip. “You couldn’t have dragged him and you know it. You did the only thing you could.”

I shuddered, shaking from head to toe, nodding at the truth of his words while my eyes overflowed with tears that instantly froze on my cheeks.

“Okay then.” He took me into his arms where it was warm and safe. His shoulder felt just as I had imagined it would.

After a long while Buck led me to the fire and pressed both Jonah’s and my last biscuit into my chest. “Keep up your strength; he would want you to have it. God knows I would have done anything to save my wife.” He added the last in low bitterness as he raised the bread to my mouth.

I chewed the frozen morsel out of duty, my gaze locked to his, knowing Jonah would have wanted me to choke on it.

The snow again covered us while we slept, blowing bits of dancing elegance and deadly ice. The freckle-faced farm boy, the youngest among us, and two dogs didn’t rise in the morning. As we stood in a circle around their snow grave and said a prayer, exhaustion made me too wrung out to even cry.

Buck’s prayer sounded like everything he did—sure, confident, that balance of humility mixed with a bone-deep, trusting faith that rang with the knowledge of who he was as a man and where he stood as a creation of God.

I’d never known either.

I laid a wreath of leafy, frozen stems, their leaves slick and solid with ice, upon the mound that would serve as a grave, and then we all turned and packed up for another day of laborious marching.

“Buck, how long ago did your wife die?” The question escaped my vocal chords even though I knew I shouldn’t be talking. It was wasteful and greedy to ask him questions when we should reserve each heartbeat for the test ahead.

He glanced over at me, met my eyes, and seemed to be weighing whether to start this conversation. “Last spring, about seven months ago.”

“Were you married long?”

Buck gazed straight ahead, but I saw the infinitesimal nod. “Going on five years.”

I was quiet, thinking about that. My parents were married about the same amount of time before . . . before my father left. I was three and Jonah five. I had little flickers of memories of my father—the feel of his beard against my cheek, being lifted into the air and shrieking with terrified delight as he spun with me above his head, my mother’s face when he left for work one day and did not come back. The look on her face a month later, a year later, and at the end of her life. Her eyes had gone from pain-filled questioning to lifeless stone.

“You never married?” Buck’s question interrupted my memories.

I shook my head in a quick movement. At twenty-four I supposed I was an old maid. “With her last breath my mother made me promise to take care of Jonah. He didn’t like it if a man started showing interest in me. We moved twice to different cities when a man seemed determined enough to begin courting.”

“You had to take care of your brother? Shouldn’t it have been the other way around?”

I tapped my forehead with my finger. “Jonah wasn’t quite right after my father left us. Something snapped inside him. I didn’t know what to do, how to help him, and by the time my mother died, he couldn’t hold a job for very long. He wouldn’t eat or bathe. He always thought people were watching or following us. He especially didn’t like it if a man showed any interest in me.”

“So, you’ve never been in love?”

I laughed and it sounded more bitter than I liked. “Never even been kissed.”

Buck stopped, his gaze locked with mine and then dropped to my lips as a gradual thoughtfulness spread across his face.

I blushed and dropped my gaze, more out of breath than the marching was causing.

He reached out and took my snowy, mittened hand in his, his look of calm assurance telling me he didn’t care that the men behind us would notice and speculate. “I reckon that will change someday.”

He sounded bemused instead of the sadness that thickened his tone when he spoke of his wife. I wasn’t sure if he thought he would correct my lack of experience or someone else, now that my warden was gone. A part of me hoped he was referring to himself, but another part of me knew his heart still belonged to another. I pulled my hand from his grip, and we started walking again.

“What was your wife’s name?”

“Kalage was her Tlingit name, but the English name she went by was Deborah.”

“Which name did you call her?”

Buck flushed, looking embarrassed for the first time.

I raised my brows at him. “You can tell me.”

Buck turned his head and mumbled something. “It sounds silly.” He sped up our pace through the knee-deep snow.

“I won’t think it’s silly.”

“I called her my Little Two-Face because she was so quiet and shy in front of others and so stubborn and sure of herself when it was just the two of us.” He chuckled. “Once she smacked me over the head with a frying pan, and no one would believe it of her when I told my friends why I had a lump the size of a goose egg on my head.”

“A frying pan?” I widened my eyes at him and laughed. “What had you done?”

Buck shrugged and then cast a glance toward me with a glimmer of humor in his eyes. “I only said I didn’t like her cooking. She made these horrible-tasting Tlingit meals, and one day I had choked down the last one. I told her to learn how to cook like a regular American woman.”

A laugh escaped my throat. I would have liked her. “And did she? Learn to cook like you wanted?”

Buck sobered. “She didn’t have time. Though I think she would have. She was shot a couple of weeks later.”

“I’m sorry, Buck.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“Is that why you are going to Dawson City? Are you tracking them?”

Buck studied me for a moment, assessment in his eyes. “I can’t go on with my life until I confront her killer. I need to know how any . . . person . . .”—he struggled to continue—“could be so careless, so”—his fists balled up and his throat worked—“heinous as to shoot someone and then run off.” His voice lowered to rough rasping, and his eyes filled with tears as he stared into my eyes. “Maybe I’ll be careless. Maybe my gun will slip as I’m forcing the story out of him and hauling him to the Northwest Mounted Police office. Maybe so.”

His words made me shiver. It felt colder now, the air sweeping in and stinging the exposed skin of my neck. The gray sky above me held nothing but more emptiness.

It was the sixth day of the snowbound march. Just one, maybe two more days, and they should reach Dawson City. Buck took out his compass and watched the needle shiver as if it were freezing, then point northeast.

He took shallow breaths, noting that the temperature was dropping. Any deep breaths brought spasms to his lungs.
Lord, this isn’t good. It isn’t good at all. No food and the temperature dropping. We need fresh meat and a warm breeze, Lord. And we’re going to need both soon.

Buck turned toward the group, all readying for the day’s march, and scanned the men, assessing their strength. They were all moving in a slow-motion daze, but he called over the strongest three.

“I’m sending the three of you to scout for fresh meat.” He looked each one, direct and hard, in the eye. “I don’t need to tell you how badly we need this, and I’m depending on each of you to stay strong and do your best.”

They nodded somber agreement.

“Fan out and continue northeast so you don’t fall too far behind the rest of us.”

“Someone needs to question Sinclair, boss. We all know he did it.” Ronnie Nelson forced the words between clenched teeth.

Buck nodded. Word had spread that someone had stolen provisions, and suspicious eyes hardened by the restless desperation of hunger followed the one man they all thought responsible. “Believe me, I did. If he stole the food, he either ate it or cached it somewhere because he doesn’t have it. There’s nothing else to be done about it, and we’re wasting precious energy worrying about it. Let’s focus on getting some fresh meat, okay?”

The men nodded in a grim fashion and trudged off to fetch their guns.

Buck sensed eyes on him, the hair on the back of his neck standing on end. With a quick movement he turned.

Sinclair.

The man stood a few feet behind him with a strangely dilated gaze. Buck let out a breath and took a step toward him.

Sinclair shrieked and held out a quivering hand that said stop.

Buck took another step. “I just want to talk to you.”

Sinclair drew out a long, wicked-looking knife.

Where had he gotten that? Buck stopped. “I’m not going to hurt you. It’s okay. Just put down the knife.”

The knife shook in Sinclair’s hand as the big man stared unseeing into Buck’s eyes. Suddenly Sinclair turned and rushed toward the camp, running as fast as his stocky legs could carry him.

Buck ran after him, but the man was surprisingly fast. The men around the camp scattered as he rushed into their midst. One pulled out a gun and another grabbed Buck’s gun and tossed it to him. They all stopped and stared at Sinclair as he slowed to a disjointed jog, looking lost and baffled.

Ellen was just coming over a small rise back toward camp with an armful of wood. Sinclair must have seen her first as he changed directions and charged toward her. She couldn’t see him! The wood was stacked as high as the top of her head on one side, the side Sinclair was approaching from.

Buck shot off toward them. “Ellen! Stay back!”

She dropped the wood and looked around her, but it was too late. Sinclair pinned her arms down from behind with one hand while the other held the knife under her chin.

Ellen held perfectly still as Buck neared, slow and cautious now. “Come on, man. You don’t want to hurt Ellen. She’s been so kind to you, kind to all of us, remember?”

Sinclair didn’t move or say a word in acknowledgment.

“We’re almost to Dawson. Don’t give up! You can make it!”

A small light of recognition flashed in Sinclair’s eyes. He hesitated, swayed; the knife wavered in his hand.

Buck used the moment to full advantage, striking with coiled speed born from his fear for Ellen. He rushed Sinclair and slammed down on the arm holding the weapon with bone-crushing strength.

The knife flew some distance and sank into the snow where one of the men rushed to grab it. Sinclair fell back as Ellen fell forward into Buck’s arms.

Buck, his breath coming harsh from between his teeth, pointed his gun at Sinclair, resisting the very strong urge to pull the trigger. He was about to order Sinclair be tied up, but the man collapsed over his knees and was sobbing like a baby.

“I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. I don’t know what came over me.” He looked at Buck with wide, earnest eyes.

Ellen grasped Buck’s collar. “It’s okay. Let him go. He’s just afraid.”

Buck gazed down into Ellen’s pleading eyes and gave a short nod. “Stay away from him though, okay?”

Ellen nodded, her eyes grim with all the truth of what this march was uncovering in all of them.

She walked back to the knot of observing men as Buck walked up and held out a hand toward Sinclair. “Get up, soldier! It’s time to march!”

Sinclair stared up at him with a tear-soaked face, tears that had frozen into tracks of crackling ice, but his eyes had returned to normal. He took Buck’s hand, stood, his gaze darting sheepishly around at the group.