Climb the Highest Mountain (9 page)

Anna sighed as she walked to a window to peek out at the scrubby, worthless-looking bunch of men that called themselves brave soldiers. None of them could hold a candle to Zeke Monroe. She actually chuckled to herself at the thought of any man cutting off a finger for being untrue to her. She had had so many men in her life she had lost count long ago.

No. Women like Anna Gale did not find men who cared like that. Only women like Abigail enjoyed that kind of love. She swallowed back the lump in her throat, suddenly worried about what had really happened at Sand Creek. Zeke often lived among his people. His oldest son’s nature was all Indian. Had they been involved in the massacre? She decided she would hire a man to go to Fort Lyon and quietly inquire. She could not have any direct contact with the Monroes. They had their own life to live, but she must know if they were all right, especially Zeke.

A man rode by in buckskins, laughing and holding up the long hair of an Indian woman’s scalp.

“Bastards!” Anna whispered. But she was in the minority. Not many people in these parts were on the side of the Indians, and those who dared voice such feelings usually suffered for it.

She walked to her large kitchen to start the evening meal for her boarders.

Chapter Six

Zeke returned to the campfire, carrying the religious pipe he used in his private worship. This was a time to thank his God for saving his son’s life, and it was a time to pray for wisdom for Wolf’s Blood, whose heart was aching and confused.

“We should be home in just a couple more days,” he told the boy who sat near the fire, an elkskin robe pulled around him. Zeke sat down and reached for his pouch of special tobacco and herbs, called
kinnikinnick
by the Indians. Opening it to extract a chunk of the very special mixture, he placed the tobacco into the red stone bowl of the pipe.

“Hoimaha will come to stay long this winter, I think,” Wolf’s Blood answered, speaking of the God of cold and snow as he pulled his robe closer and winced at the aching pain in his belly.

“You’re probably right,” Zeke replied. “But at least this is a sunny morning, and both of us need the peace and strength of the Gods, Wolf’s Blood. You speak of going north to fight with your uncle, Swift Arrow, but right now your heart is full of hurt. I love you and I don’t want you to go, but a man must do what his heart tells him. I want you to pray and think and be sure,
Wolf’s Blood. You know how it will hurt my heart to be apart from you.”

Their eyes met, and the boy nodded, tears in his eyes. How he worshiped his father! But there was a need in him now that was stronger even than that love—a need for revenge, a need to kill and plunder.

“And your leaving would be very hard on your mother,” Zeke continued, looking back at the pipe as he pushed the tobacco into the bowl. “You were the one child she could never really get close to, you know, never hold and cuddle and baby, even when you were small.”

Wolf’s Blood smiled lightly and shook his head. “White women are strange in the way they treat their children, always looking at them as if they are babies. Indian women are just the opposite, always looking at their babies as grown men and women, training them to be so at an early age.”

Zeke smiled. “Well, your mother is kind of a happy medium, I guess. I think she’s done a pretty damned good job of teaching all her children strength and independence. All they have to do is model themselves after Abbie, and they’ll be okay.”

The boy’s eyes saddened as he remembered his mother’s beaten, starved condition when he and his father had found her after she’d been held by Winston Garvey’s men. He had enjoyed raiding Garvey’s ranch, enjoyed helping his father drag off Garvey and two of the men who had abused his mother, enjoyed carving them into pieces out of revenge. Those had been Wolf’s Blood’s first killings, and now with Sand Creek to add to his memories of unfair tortures, he needed to kill more. The men who had abused his mother were Indian haters, as were those who had attacked the Cheyenne at Sand Creek. He would not forget what had happened there, nor would he forget sweet
Morning Bird. He thought of how his mother had looked when they’d found her at the cave. He had sensed that it had taken many months before his father and mother could be one again in body, but Abigail Monroe’s resilience and stamina always brought her back from disaster. She had a fighting spirit like some Indian women he knew. But he guessed that most of her strength and spirit came from his father, just as his father’s strength was drawn from Abbie. The boy had once dreamed of having that kind of relationship with Morning Bird, but that could not be now, and every time he thought of her there was a pain in his chest. And Wolf! If only he had his precious pet, that would help to ease his hurt. They were one in spirit, man and beast.

“Let’s pray to the animal spirits, Wolf’s Blood,” Zeke suggested as he lit his pipe. “You draw your strength and wisdom from the wolf, I draw mine from the eagle. Our animal spirits were shown to us in our own separate visions. Now there has been suffering, and it is a time for hard thinking and praying, especially for you, son.”

The man drew on the pipe, then held it up to the sky in honor of Heammawihio, the Wise One Above. He exhaled the smoke, considered a breath of prayer, then drew on the pipe again, exhaling the prayer smoke as he pointed the pipe toward the earth, toward Ahktunowihio, the God Who Lives Under the Ground, then offered the pipe to the four directions, east, west, north and south, in a sacrifice called Nivstanivoo, in prayer for long life. He closed his eyes then and handed the pipe to his son, breathing deeply and allowing the spirits to fill him as his son performed the same ceremony with the pipe. The sweet odor of the
kinnikinnick
hung in the still air. Both prayed quietly for several minutes before Zeke finally tamped out the
special tobacco and slid the precious prayer pipe into its soft, deerskin covering to protect the polished stone bowl and delicately carved cottonwood stem from scratches.

He drew the pipe bag closed and sighed. “If not for Abbie and the children, I’d go with you, Wolf’s Blood,” Zeke told the boy, already knowing there would be no stopping his son. “But I would know, just as you must already know, that it would be a pointless battle. I would go anyway, because it is right, and because a man must do those things. But I see the Cheyenne dying, Wolf’s Blood; I see all Indians dying. Those who are not shot down by white man’s bullets will die of starvation, for just as the white man kills off the buffalo, he kills off the Indian. I am sorry it cannot be like the old days for you. You will grow up in these troubled times, wanting to be part of something that is dying. It saddens my heart, but one day the choices will be made for you and you will have no control over them.”

“Then I will fight until that day comes, or until they kill me,” the boy replied staring at the flames of the small fire. “It can be no other way for me, Father, at least not for now. Perhaps in time I will be able to come home again. I cannot say.”

Zeke nodded, a lump in his throat. They had been so close over the years. From the time Wolf’s Blood was big enough to get on a horse and until the last few months when he started spending most of his time with the Cheyenne, he and his father had made a daily ritual of riding off together early in the morning, feeling the wind in their faces, galloping free and far, talking and worshiping. Wolf’s Blood had been the only child who had shown a desire to be totally Indian, and he had even participated in the torturous Sun Dance ritual to prove his manhood at the tender age of fifteen.

“You’ll never really get over Morning Bird,” Zeke was telling the boy, “just as I never got over my first wife’s death. But you are young, and you will love again. Love will do much to soothe your aching heart and ease your bad memories. Abbie has brought me great joy and warm comfort. Sometimes I feel that she has suffered from being married to me. I wish I could change that, but she loves me and doesn’t seem to mind.”

Wolf’s Blood poked at the fire with a stick. “How did you bear it, Father, finding your first wife tortured and raped, your little boy dead? I can hardly bear the thought of Morning Bird being dead, and it was so much worse for you.”

Zeke stared at the flames for a long time. “Who knows where people find the strength to bear some things. Maybe, at first, it’s anger that keeps us going. I had no thought except to find the men who did it and make them suffer … and they did, one by one, until I got every last one of them.” His dark eyes glittered with remembered hatred. “Then I knew my only hope of having a reason to live again would come from finding my Cheyenne mother, finding my people, so I came out here where I belonged. I hated Tennessee. People there treated me like something less than a dog. But I was Cheyenne, I was proud, I knew I was worth something! I lived for a long time among my own people after that, but fate often led me back into the white man’s world and I felt the same prejudices whenever I was around them … until I met your mother.” His eyes softened. “There are some good whites, Wolf’s Blood. You should remember that. Not many, but some. There’s my brother, Lance, and my other brother, Dan. There’s Bonnie Lewis, who was kind and loving enough to take Crooked Foot and adopt him and see to it that he got those operations. And years ago one of my best friends
was white—an ornery mountain man called Olin Wales. I still miss Olin at times. Then, of course, there was our former ranch hand, Dooley, who died trying to protect your mother from Garvey’s men. Dooley and I had been friends for a long time.”

“But they are just a few. We both know what most whites want—this land, all of it, and they want it free and clear of Indians. To get that they will ride through us and slaughter us like animals. What I saw at Sand Creek will burn in my belly for many years, Father!”

“I know, son. That’s why I’ll not stop you if you want to go north.” He met the boy’s eyes again. “But it will bring great sadness to my heart to be apart from you, Wolf’s Blood.”

The boy blinked back tears and looked away. “It will be the same for me, Father. Yet I cannot stop myself, just as you could not keep from going after those men who killed your first wife, even though you knew every lawman in Tennessee would come after you, just as soldiers will come after me and my uncle and the others I ride with. It does not matter.” He looked at his father again. “You once told me we must all be ready to die, that to die in battle was the only honorable way. I am a good fighter, Father. I will be careful and I will not die, but perhaps it will be God’s will that I do. If so, I will die bravely and with honor, and I am ready to walk Ekutsihimmiyo.”

Zeke reached out and grasped his shoulder. “I’m sure you are. But I will pray daily for your health and safety, and for the day you come back home.”

The boy put a hand over his father’s. “And I will pray for my father. I—” He stopped talking when Zeke suddenly put up his hand to be still and looked past Wolf’s Blood toward a distant hill.

“Someone is coming,” he said quietly. “Do you feel the horses’ hooves?”

Wolf’s Blood sat quietly for a moment, then rose and began kicking out the fire. “There are not many … maybe four or five,” he said as Zeke shoved the pipe into his parfleche.

“That’s my guess, too. Whoever it is, let me handle it, son. You aren’t healed yet. Any kind of strain could break you open all over again.”

They picked up their gear and threw it on the horses, just as four men appeared at the crest of the hill. The men stopped as Zeke and Wolf’s Blood mounted their horses. For a tense moment they all just sat looking at each other.

“Don’t try to ride off,” Zeke told his son quietly. “They’ll just chase us down out of curiosity, and I don’t want you riding hard. It could kill you. Besides, if they’re going to come after us, I’d rather be facing them than riding off with my back to them. See that extra long rifle across the neck of that one horse? That’s a Sharp’s rifle, the Big Fifty. They’re buffalo hunters.”

Wolf’s Blood’s face hardened more and his horse pranced restlessly. Buffalo hunters were probably the Indians’ worst enemies. They were slowly, but surely, destroying the very livelihood of the Indian. There was not a waking, sleeping, eating, hunting or fighting moment that the Indian did not use or wear something made from some part of the buffalo. Yet with the need among white settlers and railroad workers for meat, and with the new demand in the East for hides, the whites had allowed professional hunters full rights to slaughter every buffalo they could find.

“I hope they come!” the boy hissed. “It is a good day to kill buffalo hunters.”

Zeke grinned. “I agree. But you stay out of it unless I get myself into more than I can handle. You don’t have to prove your fighting skills to me, son. You saved my life with them once down in Kansas.”

The four men moved in a slow trot down the hill, and Zeke gripped his Henry .44 rifle allowing it to rest casually across his lap as he waited for the men to come closer. Wolf’s Blood had no weapon. He had lost everything at Sand Creek, except for the fancy Bowie knife Zeke had given him as a gift after he’d endured the Sun Dance ritual. He gripped the knife now, reaching inside his robe but leaving it in its beaded sheath that hung on a belt about his waist. His father had taught him well how to use that weapon.

The men came within several feet of Zeke and Wolf’s Blood. All of them were unkempt. They wore buffalo robes made from hides not fully dried and cured, and Zeke could smell them from where he sat. One was a very big man, too big for the poor horse that had to carry him. He was not only tall in the saddle, but wide and fat as well. Two of the others were of medium build, and the fourth was spindly looking. When he grinned at Zeke, he had two teeth missing in front. All sported unshaven faces and hands covered with dirt and buffalo blood.

“Out for a morning kill, are you?” Zeke asked. His horse tossed its head and whinnied as the four men studied him and Wolf’s Blood, eying them as Indians, for there was nothing about the appearance of Zeke and his son to suggest white blood.

The biggest man spit tobacco juice. “That’s right, Injun’,” he replied. “But it don’t necessarily have to be buffalo we kill.” He looked Zeke up and down. “Kill a buffalo or an Injun’—makes no difference to the white folks. So I expect we’ll take back more than just buffalo hides to camp tonight.” He looked at Wolf’s Blood and grinned. “We might maybe take the young one there alive. With no women in these parts, we could make use of him.”

That was all the goading Zeke needed. He had intended to try to convince the men to move on and then just leave, but visions of Sand Creek and the filthy words of the buffalo hunter combined to trigger that part of him that was wild and savage. In a quick flash his Henry .44 fired, its barrel shining in the morning sun as a hole exploded in the big man’s throat and he flew backward off his horse. It had happened so quickly that the other three men were confused. One man’s horse reared at the sudden gunshot, and the other two whinnied and pranced backward in startled fear. In that instant, Zeke’s gun clicked as he reloaded the chamber of his lever-action rifle, and he fired again, suddenly filled with rage at the harm men such as these brought to the Indians. A second man went down. The other two men turned their horses, not expecting this sudden and skillful reaction from one man who faced four threatening buffalo hunters.