Their faces were gaunt and tired, their wide eyes staring emptily upon nothing. A cold wind blew off the peaks, and I shivered. This was not the way I had hoped to come to my valley.
Rising, I walked down the path, and then waited for them to rise and follow. The Natchee watching our back trail came in. “There is nothing,” he said, “or nothing that can be seen. There is mist covering our valley, mist in the passes.”
Halting a half mile further along, I looked back at my straggling band. How did I, Jubal Sackett, a loner, come to be in this place with these people?
A cold wind stirred the limbs of a spruce near me and whined softly through a crack in the rocks. I shrugged my shoulders against the cold of the wind and beat my hands together. Slowly, the others were catching up.
There was a creek cut across our path not far ahead, and there we would build a fire, rest, and eat what we had.
We had been coming downhill for some time now, very slightly at first, but then the descent had grown steeper. The creek was free of ice, the water chuckling along over rocks and gravel, clear and cold. We gathered broken branches and bark for a fire. Building it, we gathered close. The Ponca woman, the best fisherman among us, went to the creek away from us.
I had not eaten when the others had. There was too little food as it was, and I was strong enough to survive. When I looked up at the mountains there was black rock, perhaps wet from melting snow, and a lone golden eagle swinging on wide wings against the sky and the snow.
A thin waterfall, thin from here at least, perhaps forty feet wide where it was, fell from rocky shelf to rocky shelf, mostly melting snow. By late spring it would be only a trickle. Now the mountain was stark and beautiful, a place for no man or animal, just for the clouds and eagles.
I brought sticks for the fire and added fuel. I watched the affectionate flames reach out and clasp the sticks in a fiery embrace, destroying what they loved.
My legs were tired. My back ached. I sat on a fallen tree and looked back the way we had come, rough, broken, and almost treeless.
The Ponca woman came to me in her black moccasins. She was a wide woman who smiled rarely but never complained. She pointed across the way at the mountains. The ones the Spanish call the Sangre de Cristos. “Caves,” she said. “Big!”
“You have been here before?”
“With Ponca,” she said. “My people hunt.”
“Thank you,” I said. “We will go to the caves.”
She did not linger, but returned to her fishing, and by the time the sun was high had caught a half dozen fish. It was a help.
Keokotah killed a ptarmigan. I saw nothing, but I thought of Itchakomi. She would wish to go home now, back to her own people and the warm weather beside the Great River. Well, I was a loner, anyway. And there were always the mountains. The thought brought me no comfort.
Keokotah came to me where I sat beside the stream. “Caves no good,” he said, “too much climb. Big hole inside. No good place for sleep.”
The thought of climbing high among the rocky peaks did not appeal and I said so. “We’ll go up the valley,” I said, “find a place there.”
“I see many tracks. Deer, elk, buffalo, turkey.” After a moment, “Your buffalo here. He look for you.”
Tired as I was I walked out on the grass beyond the creek. The buffalo was there and I went to it, standing beside it and scratching its ear. “If you’re going to stay with us,” I said, “I’ll put you to work.”
The thought had come suddenly, but the more I thought of it the better I liked it.
A few minutes before dark one of the Natchee killed an elk. We ate well that night, and for once I sat long beside the fire.
Itchakomi came and sat across from me. “My people say they go home,” she said suddenly. “Grass come soon. Much water in river. They go home quick.”
If they went, she would go. She would return to their home on the Great River.
For a moment my heart seemed to stop beating. I waited a moment and then said, “It will not be easy to get past the Conejeros, and Kapata will be waiting.”
She merely looked at me, saying nothing.
My mind struggled with the problem of how they could reach the Great River by way of the Arkansas without being seen. It would need a roundabout route unless … unless they could reach the river before it emerged from the mountains and ride it all the way down.
“I shall find a way to get you back,” I said.
She arose abruptly and left the fire. I started to speak, but all I saw was her back as she retreated. I sat for a few minutes, puzzled over her abrupt departure.
Women! I’d never understand them.
When I had been sitting there for several minutes Keokotah came to me. “Look,” I said, “they wish to go back. They will ride the river down.”
On the clay at the river’s edge I made a mark. “Here is where the river comes from the big canyon. South of there and back in here … that was our first camp. Now we have crossed to the west and we are in a long valley that’s roughly north and south. It seems to me that if we went up the valley we could get to that river in the canyon before it reaches open country. They might slip by during the night.”
He looked at the rough plan I’d drawn and put his finger at the head of the valley we were in. “What is there? We do not know.”
Of course he was right. And the water through that canyon would be rough. Yet rough water was to be preferred to the Conejeros and Kapata. The more I considered the idea the more logical it seemed.
What was the matter with Itchakomi? She was their leader, and if they were going to return—
I spoke of this to Keokotah. He glanced at me out of those cool black eyes and said, “Maybe she no wish to go. Maybe she think you try to be rid of her. Maybe she think you think she too much trouble.”
That was ridiculous. She was no trouble at all! Of course, if I had not become involved with them I might now be much further west, and might have had no trouble with the Conejeros, and certainly none with Kapata. But the possibility that she might not wish to return was nonsense.
She was a Sun, a person of importance among her people. She had come west to find a place for her people, and aside from the Conejeros this was a good place. The snow had almost gone from what I thought of as my valley. It was, I guessed, more than twenty miles long and four to five miles wide. There were several streams and the runoff from the mountains, and the valley was sheltered from the worst of the winds.
When morning came we moved north, but when we camped that night on a creek near the edge of the mountains, Keokotah came to me. “Maybe no good,” he said.
“It’s a beautiful valley,” I objected. “It is higher, and they would have to learn to plant different crops than they are used to, but I think it is a good place.”
“Much trail,” he said, gesturing back the way we had come. “I find Indian path, very old. Much Indian walk that path. Maybe he no like people here.”
“Conejeros?”
“No Conejeros. I think maybe Ute. Very strong people. Live in mountain valleys. Very strong.”
The place we had found was a good place, and the valley was fertile. As the grass began to turn it green, I could see from the variety of plant life that the soil was rich.
“We will go no further,” I said. “This is where we will stop.”
The location was one that was easily defended, tucked into a corner of the mountains on the east side of the valley. It was a place well supplied with water.
As soon as we went into camp several of the Natchee left to hunt.
“We must find how far it is to the river,” I said. “Tomorrow, I think—”
“You stay,” Keokotah said. “I go.”
There was a yearning in me to see what lay to the north, but it was also necessary that a fort be built, a place we could defend in case of another attack.