When darkness fell we were alone on the snow. I thought he might see me, but he only looked at the sky and the mountains.
“Tomorrow will be fair,” he said. “We must be on watch. I think they will come.”
He stood back and looked at our lodge and where it stood. “It is well hidden,” he said.
Our eyes met and he looked quickly away. “You are a Sun,” he said suddenly.
“I am a woman,” I said.
He looked at me again and said, “Yes, you certainly are.”
A little snow blew from a spruce, drifting down over us. “I must not keep you standing in the cold,” he said. “Yours is a warmer country than this.”
The buffalo bull stood watching us. “We killed its mother,” he said. “It has no one else. Its mother disappeared and I was there.”
“You are strange man,” I said. I could believe he was a Ni’kwana among his own people, for he had power over animals. It truly was a medicine bull, for no buffalo ever, ever followed a man or let a man approach it.
We started back to the lodge, and then I slipped on the ice. I fell, and he caught me. For a moment he held me, his arm around my waist, and then he helped me get my feet on the snow, let go of me, and stepped back. His face was flushed. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“Oh, yes! It was the ice,” I said.
I was all right. I was more all right than ever. I thanked in my thoughts the Indian girl I saw do that back on the Great River. It was a silly thing for a woman to do, especially when there was no ice.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Alone I sought a place among the silent peaks, following a frozen stream where snow on either side banked the trees to their icy necks. My snowshoes whispered on the snow, and blown flakes touched my cheeks with cold fingers. This was no place for men, but a place for gods to linger, a place to wait in silence for the world to end.
Pausing, I shivered, looking along the vast hollow between the peaks and across the valley beyond to even mightier mountains. It was a place of majesty and rare beauty, but there was no game here, no tracks of either animals or birds. The wind hung a veil of snow across the scene and then dropped it casually aside, as though it had not been.
My family could thrive in Grassy Cove. For myself, if someday I built a home, this valley would be the place for it. The thought came unbidden and unexpected, and I tried to keep it from my mind, but the valley lay there, a vast expanse of snow broken by trees, and a fringe of trees clung like eyelashes to the calm, still face of the mountains. To go further now would be foolish and no doubt time wasted, yet I did push on, to get a better glimpse of the valley.
Then for a long time I stood looking and thinking what it must be like with the snow gone and the valley all green with summer. It was a thing to think about. Then I turned, starting back.
What was I looking for? Another place like Shooting Creek? This was infinitely more vast, far more lonely, but a man could find a place here. I’d have to come back when the grass was green.
The way back was downhill most of the distance I’d come, and once far off I saw a deer floundering in the snow. The meat would be poor at this time of year and after a hard winter, but I would be glad of anything. It was growing late and I had miles to go.
In the late afternoon, the trees were black against the snow, the sky a dull gray, flat and cold to the horizon. If I had broken my leg in such a place as this I’d never have survived. So I moved with care, avoiding things that seemed to lie under the snow, whether fallen trees or rocks, one did not know.
Glancing up at the high shoulders of the mountain, its head sunk between them for protection, I knew no matter how quiet and serene it looked that there was endless war up there, a war of the winds from whatever direction, and they would be no gentle winds. As if to answer my thought, a veil of snow lifted from the mountain and blew itself away down the country. I shivered again and was glad when I came to the shelter of trees.
I did not like coming home without meat, for there would be hungry eyes looking for me and expecting more than I could give, but there was nothing. I had seen that one deer, far off, and nothing else. It was cold, too cold to be out, too cold for animals to be moving.
I took off my snowshoes and stood them near the opening and stamped the snow from my feet before I went in. There had been only a trail of smoke above the lodge, but inside it was warm and quiet.
Keokotah looked up when I entered and shrugged. He had been out, I knew, and had found nothing. Nor had the others.
No matter when spring came, it would not be soon enough.
Yet I thought of the valley. When the weather broke I would go over there. It was far away, not as close as it had seemed in all that endless white. I would find a trail where bears went, or deer. There might even be buffalo over there, although they did not favor the mountain valleys.
Itchakomi looked at me and there was something in her expression, something I could not place, but it left me uneasy. I went to my place and sat down, not asking for food. There would be little enough of that.
There was no talking in the lodge that day, and less moving about. From time to time one of us ventured into the cold to look for enemies, but they, too, must have been remaining inside.
When I ventured out just after daybreak a few stars still lingered. But the sky was clear, and when the sun arose, it was warm. By midmorning there were edges of melt around some of the rocks and on the south sides of the trees. By midday it was warm and quite pleasant. Two of the Natchee left at once to hunt down the valley, and two more went back to our former home.
It was a risk, but there might be game there, and none of us wished to starve.
Keokotah came to join me where I repaired my snow-shoes. “Now they come. The young men will be eager for war. They will wish to take scalps, to count coup, to win honors. You see it.”
“We must be ready.”
“You go among the mountains then?”
For a moment I stopped working and looked through the trees at the far-off mountainside. Would I go? I shied from the question.
“There is a valley over there,” I gestured. “I want to see it.”
“Only a valley?” There was amusement in his eyes. “Or a place to build a lodge?”
I flushed. “Well, it would be a good place. I just thought I’d have a look. After all, it’s a place I haven’t seen.”
The days grew warmer, and the snow melted. There were slides in the higher mountains, and suddenly there were buds on the trees and a showing of green on the distant hills.
Spring was born with a trickling of water from melting snow and a dancing in the air. At home in Shooting Creek they would be opening all the doors and windows to rid themselves of bad air captured during the winter months, and hanging out the bedding, too. There were always times when doors and windows could be opened, but the circulation of air in the cabins was never good enough. We had no problem with that here, for soon the men were sleeping under the trees.
Keokotah was hunting in and around the scraggy peaks, and two of the Natchee had gone to the valley again.
One Natchee indicated my buffalo, feeding on the slope not far off. “Eat?”
“No,” I said. “He’s a friend, a pet.”
“We hungry.”
“There will be meat.”
“No meat, we eat him.”
For a moment I stared at him. “He has followed me because he trusts me. He eats from my hand. I will not have him killed.”
Fortunately, Keokotah came back with a young bear. It was not enough for so many, but it took the edge from our hunger. The Ponca woman caught fish in the stream, now free of ice, and then Unstwita came back with meat from a big buck.