Cut Hand Page 5

  As we shared information and grew to truly know one another, I was able to see beyond my blind infatuation with the physical and appreciate the man. I genuinely liked, admired, and respected the object of my devotion. Nor did the trail lead just one way. I grew confident Cut felt much the same about me.

  One day near the northern edge of the Little Islands, he asked me a casual question. “Did you couple with women?”

  I noted the past tense. “One. I was never much interested in sex.”

  “I like to do it,” he said in perfect English as he reached for me. His lips, his mouth, his tongue drew the bones from my body, leaving me weak and dizzy. Then they bestowed some of his great strength so I was suffused with power and contentment. He delivered his seed before pulling mine from me and rubbing it on his chest like a potent ointment.

  I sensed danger in his next words. “Does it bother you that I fill you with my seed but take none of yours into me?”

  “No. We each have our place. I know mine. I know yours.”

  Not completely masking his relief, he responded, “Perhaps someday.”

  Still on uncertain ground over this win-tay concept, I shrugged. “If you wish. If not, I will be happy to be the flower to your bee.”

  He gave a low chuckle. “Said like one of the People. You are learning my tongue very well.”

  “Just so long as one of them isn’t acting the flower to your bee!”

  Cut Hand laughed again and pulled me to him, gently kissing my eyelids. “Ri’ eye, lef’ eye,” he intoned, mimicking our anatomy lesson, as he mounted me.

  Much later, he dragged me to my feet and tossed me into the stream. The cold water turned my skin blue, which he thought was hilarious as he waded in beside me.

  OUR CAREFREE life came to an abrupt end the next day. We were afoot to give the ponies a rest when Cut suddenly stopped me with a hand against my chest and bent to study the print of an unshod hoof in a sandy spot among the rocks. He carefully backtracked until he found where the rider had separated from a more sizeable party.

  “A scout,” he said in a low voice. “Main party close.” He was cautious. I was downright terrified.

  Cut led Arrow back over the trail, seeking the origin of the tracks of a large number of horses. After checking my rifle load, I followed along behind. At length, Cut halted and raised his hand. He needn’t have bothered. Long took his cues from Arrow.

  Motioning for me to remain still, Cut slid off his pony, handed me his reins, and cautiously made his way to a thick grove of trees to the right of the trail. I dismounted to gentle the ponies with a hand to their muzzles.

  Cut returned and led me to a scene I will never forget no matter my longevity. There were two wagons. One was overturned with its right front wheel smashed against a boulder. The scalped, carrion-ravaged body of a white man lay nearby. The second Conestoga stood in perfect condition with a bloodied man slumped across the seat. Each corpse was literally covered by bullet holes and arrow shafts. Judging from the items spilled from the overturned wagon, the dead men were traders.

  After laying them out and protecting what remained of the bodies with a covering of stones, I rummaged around in their goods. All food, tobacco, weapons, and whiskey were missing, but other gems lay abandoned. There was a veritable library of books on carpentry, medicine, physics, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Shakespeare. A well-stocked Pandora’s box of medicines held bitters, which some call quinine, ground amber for epilepsy and hypertension, balm, and barley water; a whole passel of familiar and strange curatives. Cut wouldn’t let me bring the saws and levels and other priceless stores.

  I hounded him into helping drag the undamaged Conestoga well off the trail and loading it with items from the wrecked wagon, after which we eliminated any sign leading to our hidden trove. Nervous over spending too long in one spot while hostiles were in the area, Cut demanded we leave. I gave in gracefully because I fully intended to return and retrieve that wagon. Its contents would make my future life infinitely more secure. As there was nothing to identify the men, there was no moral quandary over appropriating their belongings, since it was no less sinful to abandon such riches to the elements.

  We tracked the war party for the rest of the afternoon with only a St. Anthony’s meal—in other words, no meal at all. Once, Cut freed himself from his breechclout and pissed off the side of his moving pony. When I tried it, all I managed was to paint my leg. Thankfully, he was ahead of me or he would have laughed in spite of the danger. Even so, when we finally halted in the dead of night, I heard him sniffing. It was a mark in his favor that he didn’t ask after the source of the odor. We neither bathed nor made love that night. The forest did not feel right to him, so we lay silently in one another’s arms with the ponies tied at our shoulders. Sometime during the dark hours, I heard distant voices that held the sound of drunkenness.

  “Are they Pipe Stem?” I whispered.

  “No. Pipe Stem would have headed straight for their camp. They are most likely renegades. We’ll find out tomorrow.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Let them go their way, and we’ll go ours.”

  He paused before answering. “This is not the white man’s world, Billy. Here you need to know what is going on, or someone may rise up and scalp you.”

  I accepted his reply, although some part of me wondered if the danger of the thing was not the attraction. With that thought came another. Could the same be said for bringing me home with him… the novelty of the thing?

  We broke the party’s trail early the next morning. Their horse apples were stale, dropped the day before, but freshened as we grew closer. Catching the sound of renegades ahead, we dismounted and hid the ponies before cautiously making our way up a sharp rise. The stony ridge fell sharply away to reveal a small natural lea where four Indian ponies, eight heavier horses—obviously trace animals—and two riding mounts that could have been military grazed contentedly. Four warriors stood jabbering, each louder than the other. By the abundance of broken earthenware jugs littering the area, they were likely roostered.

  Cut signed to let me know the party totaled six men, with two out scouting. He barely finished before a horseman raced up, chattering and pointing back over his shoulder. He had cut our trail. Two of the others left with the scout; two remained behind.

  “The horses!” Cut whispered, frantically scrambling down the ridge. Suddenly he crouched down out of sight behind a stunted cedar. Not twenty-five paces ahead of us, the missing scout led his pony by the reins as he padded along in our tracks. Laying aside his rifle, Cut shrugged out of his bow and quiver.

  The raider’s head went up a fraction of a second before Cut leapt from cover. The man fought to raise his rifle, but Cut was too close. His knife sliced into the scout’s belly and jerked upward. The stricken warrior froze, his scream died, and his paralyzed finger failed to squeeze the trigger.

  Suddenly a savage apparition rode down on Cut, hatchet raised, face twisted into a mask of rage. I stepped from the trees and swung the stock of my long gun. It crunched against bone. The man rolled in the dirt. Instantly I was atop him to put my skinning knife between his ribs.

  Recovering quickly, Cut caught the reins of the pony as it passed and collected the other dead scout’s mount, which had shied away to munch placidly on bunch grass. As we gathered up the slain men’s weapons, Cut and I concluded the rider had been sent to collect his companion.

  Mounted on the captured ponies, we raced back to the small vale where the raiders held the horses, gambling that anyone remaining would assume it was his own men returning. The guard actually raised his hand in greeting before Cut sent two feathered shafts toward him. The man dropped without a sound.

  We paused long enough to make certain the raider was dead and collect his rifle, a breach-loading carbine. I now had three weapons; Cut, two. The tracks of the remainder of the party led straight to our trail. We dismounted and tied our ponies. Two of the men crouched in the trees not far from where Arrow
and Long were hidden. The third warrior was somewhere ahead investigating our mounts. Cut signed he was going to circle around to the far side of the trail, where the missing man was probably hidden.

  An hourglass passed, and my two were beginning to exchange glances, doubtless wondering why we had not yet appeared. I took a bead on the more distant warrior, afraid one of them might make some sort of move. One did. He checked his rear and found the bore of my common centered on his chest. He let out a cry before I shot him.

  I grabbed a second rifle as the other man whirled and fired. The ball gouged a furrow out of the meaty part of my right arm. He dropped his weapon and charged, loosing a horrendous scream that almost paralyzed me. Finally reacting, I adjusted for his movement and fired the second rifle. His body twitched, but he rolled out of sight behind a tree and came at me from a different direction. I planted a bullet from the third gun in his chest before he covered half the distance. Horrified, I saw the last remaining brave rise out of the brush. Cut was on him before he could fire his weapon.

  My companion stepped out of the trees across the trail and quickly assessed the situation. Lifting his rifles, he gave a piercing cry of triumph. Damned if I didn’t join right in. I let out a whoop and tore open my britches or I would have pissed my pants. Cut gave a roaring laugh before releasing his own excited stream. Then we examined each other’s wounds.

  My arm bled freely, but I considered that favorable as it would drain any contaminants from the lead. Cut had a gash on his hand, probably from his own knife when he took out the brave who almost got me. We hugged joyfully for a moment, found a small spring where we washed and bound our wounds, and then went to collect our spoils. Cut absolutely refused to bury any of the dead, so we abandoned them to the same carrion creatures who had feasted on their victims.

  By the standards of the country, we were wealthy when we finally set out on the trail to put some distance between the recent battleground and ourselves. A dozen and half breech-loaders and six Indian trade rifles as well as considerable ammunition comprised only a portion of the booty. The exciting thing to me was the discovery of more books: tomes on chemistry and the wheelwright trade and all sorts of useful subjects… plus the Holy Bible. Neither Cut nor I understood why the raiders had taken them. A few pages were torn out of one book, so perhaps they served as sanitary papers or fire starters.

  There were also trade items such as bolts of cloth, needles, thread, beads, dyes, and many other useful commodities… truly a treasure. The last thing we discovered stumped me. It was a canvas bag stuffed with coins, many of them gold, and a sheaf of bills of various issue. I’d have to sort it all out later. Of course to Cut, the real wealth was the eighteen horses we now owned.

  That night we camped above the cedar break that gave out onto the high plains easting of where we originally met. As I finished a supper out of our stores, I realized some military units were not armed with rifles of the quality we now possessed. Why did the Indians have so much gold and paper currency, things they were not known to value? And why did the white men drag heavy wagons up mountain trails when relatively unbroken plains stretched in every direction like an endless roadway?

  The more I thought on the matter, the clearer it became—this had been a rendezvous to buy guns, where greed on one side or the other resulted in tragedy. Honest gentlemen or nefarious cheats, it made no matter. Either way the traders were dead.

  In the midst of my cogitation, Cut covered me with a wild abandon born of the day’s bloodlust, making me wonder if killing always brought an urge to pizzle and a need for passion. I came with a loud groan, he with a great roar.

  Chapter 4

  THE NEXT day we hazed our horse herd down out of the wooded Little Islands onto the awesome plains under a bright blue sky broken by puffy white clouds. It was a different world. A fresh breeze ruffled new grass in a rhythm of nature’s making. A swath of torn sod revealed a broad buffalo run, a trace the great beasts had used for centuries. Cut explained deep sandy depressions as wallows where the shaggy creatures covered themselves in dust to defend against insects and other pests. We came across a bleached bison shoulder blade bearing man-made markings in red and black, an Indian signboard.

  Two hours after the sun’s zenith, Cut pulled Arrow to a halt as four horsemen materialized out of a thin line of trees marking a stream a hundred yards ahead of us. Warily, I cradled my rifle. Cut held up a restraining hand and let out a wild yell. Immediately the others replied and kicked their horses forward, swarming around us joyfully. Two appeared about Cut’s age. The other two were younger.

  “Bear Paw, you thought you were rid of me!” Cut laughed. “Buffalo Shoulder, have you learned to shoot straight yet?”

  “Cut Hand!” A broad man, heavy but not fat, drew up in front of Arrow. “Are you this white dog’s prisoner or is he yours?”

  “This white dog has killed five of the enemy since I’ve been with him. Three of those times, he saved my life.”

  “Hah!” the bigger youth laughed. “Cut Hand has a white man to guard his backside now.”

  “The man with the big shoulders has a bigger mouth,” I snapped, letting pique precede good sense.

  A fired grenado loosed among them would have caused less consternation than a white man speaking their own tongue. Cut’s quick frown told me I’d made a bobble.

  “Bear Paw,” he addressed the young man. “This is Teacher. His name is Billy Strobaw, but he is called Teacher. He is my friend. Do you understand? Billy, this is Bear Paw, so named because his big feet make a track like bear’s paw. We have hunted and fished and stolen horses together ever since we could walk. Don’t ever play the hand game with him or he will win all your ponies.”

  The big youth kicked his mount to my side and gave me a long, insolent look. His locks, which tended to curl slightly, were restrained by a beaded hairbine across his brow. Spatterdash leggings covered his lower limbs. His torso was brown and bare and heavily muscled. He struck me as a sport—a brash, showy man. We probably would not be friends, but Cut had purged the sting from our exchange.

  Cut rode to another man’s side. “Buffalo Shoulder and I played in the dirt before we could walk. This is the only man who can keep more shafts in the air at one time than I can when we play the arrow game. I think we covered our first girl together.”

  The young man grinned loosely, and I wondered if he was somewhat fishy, although he did not reek of strong drink. Yet his words firmed up my observation. “Got drunk the first time together too.”

  My heart dropped like a stone as reality—as welcome as a blizzard in autumn—set in. My beloved had a history with these people. How would I weather that? I swallowed hard and put on a good face as he continued.

  “These two pups are Little Eagle and Otter.”

  Little Eagle was thirteen or fourteen, the other boy about three years younger. Ages were difficult because these people appeared young in countenance and developed in physique.

  From that moment, I looked upon Cut’s people as handsome and well put together—made from the same leather, so to speak, as my beloved. Of course, in time I found a number of them bore crooked noses or squinty eyes or the usual imperfections, but on the whole they were attractive people. These members certainly fit that image. They were tall and ranged from almost chocolate to nutmeg in skin tone.

  As soon as introductions were completed, the others plied questions, liberally laced with teasing remarks. Cut put them aside, promising to reveal all after he greeted his family properly. The youngest, Otter, galloped away to spread the news of Cut Hand’s return. Little Eagle rode at my side and asked countless questions about my clothing, my rifles, the bandage on my arm… and the dried stain on my trousers. The others scattered to herd the horses.

  The stream beyond the trees proved to be the Yanube, a broad, shallow, cottonwood-lined waterway. I was to learn it possessed an immense carrying capacity during spring runoff. Once we forded the rapidly moving water at a walk-across, we turned north
, moving over undulating terrain on a parallel to the river for less than a league before we raised a snarl of new riders shouting in raucous welcome. The horsemen, mostly young and exuberant, wheeled about us on sturdy ponies, trying not to allow curiosity to cross the bounds of rudeness. Two more seemly figures rode among the tribesmen.

  One was Cut Hand’s father, Yellow Puma, a swamping, impressive figure astride a white mount. Solemnly, the chieftain clasped his son’s forearm and spoke in a low tone that did not reach my ears. It was amazing how much the colt resembled the stallion. I was looking at Cut twenty years from now.

  The other man, older than Yellow Puma, was something of a dry-bones, skinny as an orphaned calf except for a small, rounded paunch. His hard, suspicious eyes studied me obliquely. He was well practiced in the native art of seeing everything without directly engaging another’s eyes. I pegged him as a Jesuit, a designing, cunning man. This must be Spotted Hawk, the shaman Cut warned must be won over to our side. I eased Long’s nose to the ear of the man’s pony.

  “Greetings, Spotted Hawk.”

  Of course, Otter had told of the white man who spoke like the People, but this one would likely have shown no surprise even had he not been forewarned. It would be difficult to get on his high side.

  “I am Billy Strobaw, a friend of Cut Hand’s come to seek the shelter of your lodges.”

  The medicine man took my measure in one glance. “A man who comes in peace is never turned away,” he said. When called upon to speak at council, that low, rumbling voice would serve him well. “You are welcome to rest from your journey,” he continued, not once allowing the curiosity hiding behind his eyes to show.

  “Billy,” Cut spoke at my side. “This is my father, Yellow Puma. Father, this is the man called Teacher.” As coached, I performed the clasped forearm greeting. The muscles of that arm were as firm as those of his son.