Spirit Wolf (19 page)

The horses slipped and stumbled a couple of times as Uriah and Nash prodded them up the ridge, but they reached the top just moments later. The two worked along the edge of the coulee, staying back from the lip, riding up periodically to scan the patches of timber below for moving deer. They had nearly reached the head of the coulee when Nash noticed a flash of white near a juniper bush.

“Dad, there!” he whispered, slipping off Nell.

“Yeah, I've got him. Good eyes, Nash.”

Uriah knelt, sitting back on the heel of his right foot and bracing his left arm on his left knee. A shell snicked into the chamber; Uriah laid his cheek on the comb of the rifle stock. Then he dropped the hammer to half cock and leaned back from the weapon.

“He hasn't seen us,” Uriah whispered. “You want to take him?”

Nash shook his head, and Uriah leaned over the rifle again, thumbing the hammer to full cock. Nash knew as he watched the deer below that his father's finger was tightening on the trigger.

Uriah squeezed.

Crack!

The deer leapt at the shot, bouncing up the far side of the coulee, seeking sanctuary. It nearly reached the top before its legs crumpled under it, and it fell, slipping back down the hill until it lodged in a juniper bush.

“Got him in the lungs. Didn't dare try for a neck shot at that distance.”

Uriah was smiling. “Can't complain about a deer like that. Ran right up the hill for us. Saved us a lot of trouble.”

Uriah marked the spot where the deer had fallen and mounted the roan. Nash was quick to follow. The two rode around the head of the coulee about a quarter mile above and swung down the other side to the fallen deer. When Uriah spotted the gnarled pine that marked his firing point on the other side, he stopped, looking ahead for the rock outcropping that resembled a stern face. There it was, and below, just where it should be, was the blood-streaked trail, where the deer had slid down the hill.

Uriah pulled a rope off the roan, and Nash followed his father down the hill. The hill was steep and slick, and Nash slipped more than once, sliding down on his backside until his boots found purchase against a rock or a bush.

The deer was dead. Nash was grateful for that.

“I don't think I want to clean him here,” Uriah said. “Slick as it is, I might slip and open myself up. We'll take him back on top and gut him there.”

The deer was a full-bodied three point, and heavy. Uriah and Nash each grabbed an antler, lunging, skidding and falling toward the top of the hill a step at a time. Sometimes they slipped, and their work of the past ten or fifteen minutes would be lost as they tumbled downward with the deer, a mass of legs, bodies, elbows, and antlers.

It was hard work, and before long, both Uriah and Nash were gasping, sweat dripping off theirfaces to the snow below. When they were within twenty feet of the top, Uriah stopped, blowing like a winded horse.

In speech broken by long struggles to fill his tortured lungs with air, Uriah said, “Go up. Throw down a rope. Nell can pull him … the rest of the way.”

Nash scrambled to the top on leaden legs and tender feet, breath coming in short gasps. He threw one end of the rope to Uriah and tied the other to his saddle. Uriah dropped a loop over the buck's antlers. Then he grabbed the rope, holding the buck's head up while Nell pulled deer and man to the top.

Uriah stood for a long moment, hands on knees, gasping, before kneeling beside the buck, knife in hand. The gutting went quickly, and Nash helped his father clean the cavity with handfuls of snow, until the snow came away white.

“Getting late,” Uriah said, scrubbing his hands with snow. “We better get back. It's not far. We'll just drag the deer and skin him there.”

Flynn flagged them down at the edge of the camp. He was carrying a rifle, and Uriah knew Flynn was worried, or he wouldn't have dragged the old buffalo gun out from its hiding place.

“Nice buck,” Flynn said.

“Right where you said he'd be,” Uriah answered. “Any trouble?”

“Nope. Real quiet. Guess I'm just getting old and suspicious. On the other hand, maybe I got old
because
I'm suspicious,” Flynn said with a grin.

“You know, for a little help with the skinning and butchering, you could have some loin steak tonight that would probably make you sorry you ever ate anything else.”

“For a couple of loin steaks, I just might do that.”

Nash dragged the deer next to the tree where they had hung the sack of meat from the doe just a few days before. He dropped the carcass there, and walked Nell back to the corral, returning a moment later for the roan.

Flynn and Uriah cut the deer's legs off at the first joint, breaking them over their knees like sticks of wood. Then they skinned the lower section of each hind leg, leaving the main tendons at the back of the leg exposed. Flynn took a pine branch a couple inches in diameter and shoved it through the loops made by the tendons and bones of each hind leg. Then Flynn and Uriah tied a rope to the middle of the stick and hoisted the deer toward a low-hanging branch, while Nash took up the rope's slack from the other side.

“Nice heavy deer,” Flynn said, breathing deeply from the effort.

Then, beginning with the hind legs, each man began tugging the hide off the deer, using their knives occasionally when the skin clung stubbornly to the meat. When the hide was loose from the carcass and draped over the deer's head, Uriah took out his knife again, sawing away at the deer's neck until the head and hide fell to the ground.

Nash took the hide, being careful to hold it by the hair so he wouldn't be forced to touch the slick, sticky side of the skin, and dragged it over to the trees, where he hung it over a protruding branch. When he came back, Flynn was bent over the deer's head. Nash waited until Flynn was finished. Then he carried the deer's head, its opaque, blue eyes staring at nothing, and a bloody hole where the animal's mouth had been—Flynn liked deer tongue for sandwiches—to the trees too. He didn't know why he felt compelled to throw the head out of sight. Perhaps he never would.

As Nash walked up, Flynn and Uriah were deftly carving away the slab of tenderloin that lay on either side of the backbone between the ribs and the haunch. Nash glanced up the hill some two hundred feet away. The old man was still there, wrapped in his robe and watching them, but still Nash was surprised at what he saw.

“Dad,” he said softly. “The old man's drinking whiskey.”

Uriah looked up, but the bottle was hidden under the robe again. “Funny. Somehow, I didn't take him for a drinker.”

“Whiskey!” Flynn spat. “Would have been a kinder thing to have killed them all rather than given them whiskey.” But Flynn couldn't hold his anger, not with the prospect of those steaks on his mind. His face crinkled into a reluctant grin.

“On the other hand, I have just a wee bit more, and I don't think it would hurt us at all.”

“I'll take you up on that,” Uriah said, reaching for the pint Flynn pulled from inside his jacket. “Nash, you go up and invite the old man for dinner. We're going to have to figure some way to get him out of here when we leave.”

Nash walked toward the old man, stepping high to carve a path through the virgin snow that lay between the corral and the old man's camp.

No fire, Nash thought. How can that old man sit outside on a day like this without a fire?

Nash sat down across from the old man on the rock he had used in each of his earlier visits. He waited for the old man to speak. When he didn't, Nash did.

“Dad wants to know if you want to come to dinner. We've got some more liver.”

Nash's invitation died when the figure sitting across from him leapt across the dead fire pit and caught Nash by the neck. Bullsnake! Bullsnake had been sitting under the old man's robe. Bullsnake's fingers were cutting into Nash's windpipe, and he couldn't breathe. He had both hands on Bullsnake's wrist, trying to push the hand away from his throat, but he wasn't strong enough. He was too dizzy and weak. He could barely hear the words Bullsnake was hissing in his ear. “I'm going to teach you not to laugh at your betters, boy. It's going to be a lesson you'll never forget.”

And then Nash was falling. The snow took him in the face like a glass of ice-cold water, and he started breathing again, holding his burning throat in his hands.

Uriah was there. Nash didn't know where Uriah had come from, but all at once, he was there. As Nash's mind cleared, he realized that it wasn't his father at all. It was that creature with the opaque eyes his father had become when he was shoeing Nell. That creature was stalking across the campsite.

Bullsnake was saying something. Nash couldn't make it out, but the creature paid no attention. He just kept coming, and the smirk in Bullsnake's face turned to concern and then to fear. Bullsnake launched a roundhouse swing at the creature's chin, but the creature flicked the punch aside like a pesky fly.… Like a pesky fly.

It was years ago. Nash and his father had been sitting in the tack shed where Uriah was mending harness. It was one of those quiet days of fall. The harvest was in, and it was almost as though the farm had taken a deep sigh of relief.

Nash was playing step-and-fetch-it with his father. “Nash, get me that awl over there on the end of that shelf. No, no, son. The top shelf … How about taking some oil and working it into this harness? That would be a big help.”

Nash was enjoying himself. He liked the quiet, the smell of leather and oil and horse, the time with his father, the feeling of pulling his weight, the talk.

“You take care of your things, and your things will take care of you. Doing this now will save us—”
us
”—a lot of time next spring.”

They sat there together at the rough wood bench, worn smooth by tools and harness and elbows and hands.

Outside, the air was fresh as the scent of an apple orchard in spring, and bright and clear as it is at no other time of the year. The sun was lingering, sorry, it seemed, to leave the farm for the winter.

But the shed was dim, lit only by streams of light squeezing through cracks in the door and walls. Flies, big blue flies, had come to the shed for warmth the night before and were now buzzing about in the dim light. Uriah hung the oiled harness on the wall and then turned. Like the sun, he seemed reluctant to leave. His eyes drifted through the rays of light and caught on a fly buzzing about, looking for a place to lay its eggs and die.

And then Uriah's hand moved, moved faster than Nash believed anything could move. It flicked into a circle of light and snapped the fly out of the air. “Pesky damn flies,” Uriah said, dropping the crushed insect to the floor.

“You pick up in here, Nash, and when you're done, come inside. I think I might have a piece of stick candy stashed in there someplace.”

But Nash seemed preoccupied. “I'll be in in a minute.”

Uriah left the shed door open a bit as he stepped out, pausing for a moment to look back through the crack. Nash was standing in the middle of the little room, his fist darting out toward the flies and coming back empty.

“Pesky damn flies,” Nash said, and Uriah smiled as he walked toward the house.

Pesky damn flies. Uriah's hand snatched a fly off the point of Bullsnake's nose—once, twice, three times. Bullsnake's head snapped back until it seemed he had seen something terribly interesting in the sky directly overhead, as though he were unaware of the stream of blood that sprayed out of his nose like water coming off a drainpipe in a gully washer. He might have been out on his feet then, but his face pitched forward and down. Uriah's fist—driven by arm, shoulder, back, hip, and leg—met it on the way down, and Bullsnake's neck snapped back again. His legs buckled and he crashed to the ground, lying motionless there.

Uriah pounced on the fallen man, pinning him to the ground, and then Uriah's right fist moved back behind his shoulder. Nash knew that his father was cocking the fist. He knew that his father was going to beat Bullsnake to death. He knew, but he couldn't speak, couldn't move. He felt as though he were in a dream, watching what was happening without being a part of it. He knew he was watching his father beat a man to death, and he could do nothing.

But the killing blows didn't come.

Uriah looked up, and the opacity of his eyes fled like frost from a window on a warm winter morning. Nash knew it would be all right. His father had beaten the creature in a fair fight.

Still Uriah sat there, fist cocked simply because his rational mind had not yet reminded him to drop it. It was then that Uriah and Nash heard the ugly
snick
of a rifle hammer going on full cock and Flynn's voice, low and deadly. “I saw a man shot with a Sharps once. It damn near cut him in half.”

Uriah turned very slowly. Maxwell was crouched behind him with a long ugly knife held low and menacing in his right hand. And behind Maxwell stood Flynn, cradling a cocked Sharps rifle in his left arm. The unwavering muzzle, pointed square at the back of Maxwell's head, belied Flynn's look of a man absolutely at ease.

“If I were you, Maxwell,” Flynn continued in the same voice, “I'd drop that knife.”

Maxwell stood for a long moment without moving. Then he spoke. “Did you kill him?”

“No,” Uriah said.

Maxwell eased out of his crouch and dropped his knife, the snow muffling the sound of its falling.

“He ain't a bad kid. It's just that he can't keep his mouth shut.”

Maxwell walked over and knelt by Bullsnake, holding a handful of snow against the bridge of his nose to stop the bleeding. When the snow touched Bullsnake's face, he groaned.

“What happened to the old man?” Flynn asked.

“Bullsnake scared him off. Didn't rough him up or nothing. I told him that I wouldn't stand for that.”

“How far do you think an old man like that will get in weather like this without even a robe to keep him warm?”