Lake of Fire Page 4

  Laura knew what he meant. She’d tried to describe the biting aroma in the wind to her cousin Constance and hadn’t been able to make her understand. Of course, Constance, with her delicate airs, tended to stay inside when it threatened snow in Chicago.

  Cord threw more wood onto the fire, his shadow looming on a boulder. Then he pulled a bedroll from the items he’d been drying. Made of waterproof tan duck with a sheepskin lining, it carried the label of Sears and Roebuck. He went back for blankets. “This is all we have for bedding; we’ll have to share.”

  She hoped the firelight hid her flushed cheeks.

  Cord stirred the fire once more and lay down. She waited until he breathed with the even tempo of sleep before she climbed atop her side of the still-damp bedroll and pulled up the blankets. Keeping her coat on, she turned her back to him.

  After a while, the fire burned down. Hard diamonds of stars appeared, except for where the bulk of mountain blotted out the sky. Beyond the clearing where they slept, the blackness seemed absolute. Minute by minute, the night grew colder, tempting her to move closer to Cord.

  But Aunt Fanny had cautioned her and Constance that even a simple thing might drive a man to take liberties.

  Though Laura hugged herself, she continued to shiver. If this was June in Wyoming, she wondered how Cord could possibly love the winter here.

  Unless he was as hard as the land.

  Long after midnight, Cord drifted in and out of sleep. The woman beside him had threatened to shoot him if he touched her, but perhaps that had been bravado. The clothes he’d seen spread on the snow had either been a rich woman’s or those of one who made her living on her back.

  What would a wealthy woman be doing disguised as a boy on the Yellowstone stage?

  Cord shoved back the covers, sat up, and pulled on his boots. Laura stirred briefly, then settled, while he shrugged on his coat and rose. Picking his way with care through the rocks, and stepping over deadfall, he walked down to the dark shore.

  He needed to keep his focus on his business in Yellowstone. It could fall through for a number of reasons, if another party tried to bid things up … or if anyone discovered the truth about him.

  He stared out at the blacker peaks on the far side of the water. As he had put aside thoughts of Laura, he now refused to delve into his past.

  Yet, when he returned to his bedroll and settled into slumber, he found no respite from his roots.

  Outside his parents’ cabin, six-year-old Cord heard the wolves, a large pack calling each other home across the night. The wind whistled through the crack beneath the cabin door, and the draft ruffled his hair.

  Rolling over in his flannel nightshirt, he removed a loose chink of mud from between the logs over his bed. Outside, a wash of moonlight turned sage to silver and the gray granite spires of the Tetons to pearl. The wolves howled again, closer.

  Across the cabin, Cord’s mother, Sarah, sat up in bed, one slender hand at her throat. Even in the dim light, her hair shone like a silken curtain. “Franklin!” she hissed at her husband. “Wake up.”

  Cord’s father reached beside their bed for his Remington.

  Knowing he was on alert made Cord feel better, for Franklin Sutton was a man who made other men look small. The child of a French Canadian mother and a Maine woodsman, he had a big glossy head of hair and a thick black beard.

  A prickle of fear went down Cord’s spine as one of the wolves howled again, just outside.

  Sarah had told Cord the Nez Perce revered the wolf, believing it to be an awesome spirit with the power to change the seasons.

  Sarah shuddered, too, but oddly enough, Cord saw her run a finger over the brightly painted elk hide draped over the foot of his parents’ bed. She’d told him magical stories, of how her young man of the Nez Perce had come courting with stringers of freshly caught salmon, wreaths woven from mountain daisies, and finally the betrothal gift of the hide he’d painted himself. That was long ago, she had told him, before Cord’s father came and took her to live with him while he prospected the Teton wilderness for gold.

  Turning to Franklin, Sarah went into his arms, and Cord saw his father’s large hand stroke his mother’s hair.

  The front door of the cabin crashed back against the wall; a tall man stood silhouetted against the silver moonlight. He wore a breastplate of bones over a flannel shirt and trousers. Braids lay over his shoulders, and his hair swept up in a startling dark wing from his broad forehead.

  Two shorter men crowded into the doorway behind the first one.

  “Stop!” Franklin shouted, pointing his rifle at the man in the lead.

  Sarah gasped, “Bitter Waters.”

  Cord had seen her older half brother when he and his parents had traveled to the Wallowa Valley of Oregon, named for its winding waters … where Sarah had been raised … seen him from a distance. Bitter Waters had refused to receive his sister and her husband and son who were not of the People.

  Yet, in the middle of the night, wearing the striped paint of war, Bitter Waters turned to Sarah. “Two moons ago, I stood helpless and watched our mother, Seeyakoon, die.”

  Cord sucked in his breath. In his mother’s beloved valley, surrounded by snowcapped peaks less rugged than the Tetons, his grandmother had shown Cord her special touch with animals, from the smallest scurrying pika to the wild yearling horses being broken from the Nez Perce’s breeding herd. How beautiful Seeyakoon had been, with her supple white deerskin dresses and black hair softly blurring to gray.

  “We have been driven off our land,” Bitter Waters said. “Burned the white man’s Bible and seek a new life.” He spoke of war as he if were about to spit from the bad taste in his mouth.

  “Then go to your new life,” Sarah returned, “and leave my family in peace.”

  “The army pursues and kills us at every turn. We need everyone in whose veins flows the blood of the People to stand with us. Leave this white man, bring your child, and come.” He reached toward his trouser pocket.

  “Don’t move!” Franklin warned.

  Bitter Waters shrugged and drew out a muchfolded and grimy piece of paper. “Tarpas Illipt wrote this for you, Sarah, when Colonel Gibbon laid siege to us at Big Hole last moon.”

  Sarah did not reach to take the offered letter, but she seemed to hesitate, glancing at the painted blanket. Bitter Waters’s moccasins made no sound on the earthen floor as he moved toward her.

  Cord’s father raised his weapon and placed his cheek against the stock. He growled, “Get out,” and reached to chamber a round.

  “No!” Sarah leaped in front of her brother.

  Cord would never forget the shock that transformed his father’s face as the hammer connected and the Remington slam fired without a finger on the trigger. The explosion of sound filled the low log house.

  Sarah clutched her side and brought her hand away, dark with blood. She muttered something in Nez Perce that Cord did not understand.

  One of the two warriors with Bitter Waters reached to his belt. A blade flashed in the firelight.

  Arcing through the air, it struck flesh, a dull slicing thud.

  “No!” Bitter Waters shouted.

  Cord bit back his own cry as his father staggered, trying to grasp the wooden handle protruding from the center of his chest.

  Sarah screamed. The sound seemed to bubble in her throat, a liquid agony.

  His father went down.

  Rushing to his mother, Cord tried to grasp her hands, but she fell silent and slumped across the body of her husband, mingling their blood where they lay. Cord gaped at the impossible sight, wondering if Jesus was holding it against him that his mother’s people had burned God’s Book.

  Suddenly, smoke assailed Cord’s nostrils. Through a blur of tears, he saw one of the Nez Perce had stirred up the fire’s embers and scattered them. Flames climbed Sarah’s lace curtains and licked at the bark on the log walls. Bitter Waters snatched the painted elk hide from the foot of the bed and dragged Cord outside by t
he back of his nightshirt. Despite his struggles, his uncle wrapped him in the blanket and took him up with him onto a big gray horse.

  Fueled by the wind, fire turned the silver night to blood. The Nez Perce leaped astride their horses and barked as they had before, the sounds echoing over the terraced river bottom. Cord looked at the full moon that seemed to fall endlessly through a bank of scudding clouds and listened to the unearthly howling that had wakened him only minutes and a lifetime before.

  His home collapsed in a shower of sparks.

  CHAPTER THREE

  JUNE 21

  Are you going to sleep all day?” Cord called to the slender woman in his bedroll. Dawn barely grayed the eastern horizon, reflected in the smooth surface of Jenny Lake. She did not answer.

  The fire he had built blazed merrily. He dumped coffee into cold water and put it on to boil, his hands still shaking from the nightmare. No, not a dream, but the unvarnished truth that came back to haunt him when he least expected it. He had awakened gasping, while scalding tears poured across his temples. Quickly, he’d bitten his lip to silence himself.

  He looked at the sticks being consumed by the campfire and closed his eyes.

  His life forever divided into the time before and the time after … Riding to a neighboring ranch in the wagon behind the team. His father handing over the reins to Cord’s small hands, even though his mother said he must pass another snow before he was big enough. Sarah coming in from her garden, a paring knife in one hand, a bowl of cabbages and carrots propped on her hip … a smudge of mud on the tip of her nose. The warming scent of a winter stew, made with dried vegetables held over from summer’s bounty.

  How could fate have let his father’s gun malfunction and kill his mother … How could hate between white men and Nez Perce have driven Bitter Waters to think Sarah would leave her husband? What a terrible fortune was Cord’s; his mixed blood set him up to be despised by members of both races.

  A raven’s harsh call from a nearby fir was answered by another across the dark surface of Jenny Lake.

  Cord left the fire and went to check on Dante. He rubbed the soft black nose, and the horse bent to sniff his pockets. “Sorry, fella.” He wished he’d brought some of Dante’s favorite molasses candy.

  Although Cord had taken his saddle and tack off, he hadn’t tethered him for the night. The stallion wouldn’t wander, and he wanted to give Dante a fighting chance if a bear happened along. Plucking his bridle from a nearby aspen limb, he slipped the bit deftly between the horse’s lips and adjusted the straps.

  The simple labor pleased him. No matter how much time he spent in cities, his heart would always be in these mountains.

  Catching a whiff of coffee on the pungent, pinescented air, he was tempted to break out his rod and catch some breakfast trout. Grilled over hot coals until the skin crisped, the fish would make a succulent meal.

  Unfortunately, the rising light reminded him daylight was wasting. He walked back to the patch of soft sand and the bedroll where the woman … Laura … still slept. The curve of her lashes shadowed her cheek.

  How much easier it would be if he still believed she was a boy.

  “Time to get up!”

  Laura gasped at the deep voice and at the needles and lances of pain that struck her body from riding all day yesterday. Another not-too-gentle prod in the side, and she realized Cord stood over her, his long legs spread.

  “What’s the rush?” she snarled. “It’s not even sunrise.”

  “I don’t know about you, but I need to be on the road.” Though his tone was curt, a little curl of his hair stood up from sleeping on it; the errant strand made him look vulnerable.

  “All right, all right.” She’d slept in her clothes, so she was decent enough to push back the blankets and stagger to her feet. The insides of her thighs and her buttocks felt as if she had been flayed from hours riding bareback on Dante’s rump.

  Cord knelt and rolled the sheepskin bedding with swift efficient movements. Scooping up the blankets, he headed toward his horse.

  Stiffly, Laura moved to open the pack he’d taken food from yesterday, finding jerky and dried fruit, as well as a cloth sack of cornmeal. Digging deeper, she came up with a comb made of bone. With haste, while Cord was loading Dante, she untangled the knots in her hair and smoothed it over her shoulders.

  She walked down to the shore, cupped shockingly cold water, and washed her face. The clear lake lapped gently at her boots. Atop a nearby boulder, a striped chipmunk chattered.

  This time yesterday, she’d been sleeping in peace while Angus bedded down on the high driver’s seat. Today, she appreciated how easily she could have died, at the coach or in the numbing rush of the Snake. This land was truly as violent as the man who’d dispatched the gut-shot outlaw.

  If she had her journal, she would capture every detail.

  Her ablutions complete, Laura followed the aroma of coffee to the fire. Cord still occupied himself with the saddlebags, while she put the comb away in his pack. When she reached deep to replace it where she’d found it, her hand brushed something sharp.

  Carefully, her fingers traced the contours of the object. Not a knife; it was cold and smooth, almost slick to the touch. The ragged edge opened out into a thicker girth with almost-squared ends. It felt like an irregular piece of broken glass, but it was too weighty to be a chunk of even the finest crystal.

  Laura drew it out and recognized the material as obsidian. A professor friend of her father had a drawer of the black volcanic glass, each piece in a tray labeled with the locality and date he had collected it. She raised the stone and rubbed the smooth side against her cheek where it warmed perceptibly.

  “May I?”

  Laura jumped. She looked up, but Cord’s eyes were as opaque as the black glass he gestured her to hand to him.

  She placed it on his palm.

  Cord looked down at the obsidian and heard the ring of Bitter Waters’s voice. “Your spirit is weak. You were raised far from the People.”

  His uncle’s wife, Kamiah, burst out talking from where she prepared dinner on the other side of the rough canvas shelter in Yellowstone … the place they had ridden to after his family and home had been destroyed. Although Sarah had taught Cord the Lord’s Prayer and some other words in Nez Perce, most of what small-boned, fragile-looking Kamiah said was unintelligible to him. Thankfully, Bitter Waters spoke a stilted formal English that sounded as though he’d been taught by a Britisher.

  Kamiah gestured at Bitter Waters in apparent anger, a dusting of camas flour falling from her hands onto the tule rush mat on the earth. The starchy root was one of their staple foods. Boiled and mashed, baked in a pit of hot coals, or dried and pounded into flour, the roots of the camas were harvested in summer but used year-round.

  Notwithstanding his wife’s protest, the hard expression remained on his uncle’s sun-beaten features. “She thinks we should not send you out into these mountains, that we should wait until we have reached safety in the land of the Crow … or in Canada.” He did not speak of the prospect of being captured by the Army of the United States. “But women and children of the People have died on this journey, many on the battlefield at Big Hole where we had to abandon our tipis.”

  Leaning back on his heels, Bitter Waters delivered his verdict. “As no one is given tomorrow, you will seek your guardian spirit tonight.”

  And so, alone in the backcountry, Cord had hugged himself against the night wind and watched the moon rise over the jagged tops of Castor and Pollux, the highest peaks in the Absarokas. From the place Bitter Waters had left him, on a bare mountain peak covered in loose cinders, the enormous coin of moon appeared tinged red by the smoke of late summer forest fires.

  Could that bloody orb be his wayakin?

  His mother had taught Cord that in the Nez Perce way, a spiritual protector revealed itself in many and varied forms. A jackrabbit might pause to sniff at the wind, a distant mountain peak might catch the illumination of the setting
sun, or a hohots—a grizzly—could happen by.

  Sarah had told Cord how Heinmot Tooyalakekt, or Chief Joseph, as the white men called him, had discovered his wayakin in the hills overlooking the Wallowa Valley. After ten-year-old Heinmot had watched and waited for five suns without food or water, a storm poured fury upon the peaks, sending down jagged lightning bolts and rain that soothed his parched throat. Thereafter, Heinmot was known as Thunder Rolling in the Mountains.

  Twelve-year-old Sarah Tilkalept had wandered alone for a day and a night on her own pilgrimage, until the crisp tinkling of water pouring over a ledge of sandstone attracted her to a crystal pool. From that day forward, she adopted the name of her guardian spirit, Falling Water.

  Hours passed. Cord watched and waited for a sign.

  He steeled himself against his hunger and thirst, and tried to stay awake, lest the spirit pass him by while he slept. Repeatedly, he nodded, his head falling forward with a jerk that brought him back to that twilight between wakefulness and sleep.

  Suddenly, before his widened eyes, flames belched from the surrounding mountains, great pillars of fire rising to heaven. Liquid lava, cherry red, ran thick and viscous down the broad slopes, cooling and breaking into great blocks. Violent explosions threw vast clouds into the air, to the very edge of the inky night.

  Ash and rocks rained on the green valley, burying even the tallest trees beneath a deep suffocating blanket.

  In a single heartbeat, more than a thousand cubic miles of earth blew up into a roiling gray column that seemed to have a life of its own. Pyroclastic flows filled the canyons and valleys while smoking lava poured into the vast vacant chamber left by the explosion.

  More eruptions followed, though not as great as the first cataclysm.

  Cold winds came to the land, blowing down from the Arctic. Snow fell for many years. Vast mountains of ice ebbed and flowed, carving out valleys and leaving streams cut off to cascade to the valleys below. The glaciers left great grooves and dragged boulders hundreds of miles, only to leave them behind like a child’s forgotten building blocks.