Deep as the Rivers (Santa Fe Trilogy) (18 page)

   
Samuel spit out a mouthful of silty vile-tasting brown water, causing the campfire flames to sputter. He threw the cup to the ground as a fit of coughing seized him. Something had lodged in his throat! He blinked his eyes rapidly and coughed harder, trying to dislodge the lump. When he finally succeeded, he stared at the ground in amazement. A clump of burned whole coffee beans! He picked up the pot and dumped its contents onto the fire, watching as a goodly portion of his supply of high-grade coffee beans bounced into the flames while the muddy coffee water extinguished them.

   
He looked at her in bald amazement. “Either you are too incredibly stupid to know that coffee beans should be ground before being boiled, or else you deliberately set out to choke and poison me. I hope for your sake that it was stupidity.”

   
His voice was conversationally soft but she could read the blazing fury darkening his eyes. A small tic at his left temple further warned her that she had gone too far with her act of defiance. Olivia scanned the camp looking for help, knowing none was available. If she cried out, God only knew how many of the rough dangerous men might join in Samuel’s sport. She’d best take her chances with him.

   
“I am not stupid,” she said, deliberately enunciating each syllable. “Do your worst.”

   
Olivia sat bolt-upright, eyes blazing and chin high, glaring at him as if he were the one who might be mentally deficient. Only her small hands, balled into fists, gave away her fear. In spite of his anger, once again he could not help admiring her gall, but he could not let such gross insubordination pass without punishment. Life in the wilderness was chancy and dangerous at best and greenhorn lives often hung on their willingness to obey the orders of those more experienced.

   
He considered turning her across his knee and paddling that delectable little rump, but decided it would be dangerous to tempt fate with two dozen women-hungry rivermen looking on. When the two squaws dragged the deer carcass to a clearing near their fire and set to work with skinning knives, he was struck by an inspiration. With an evil smile wreathing his face he said, “Walks Fast and Wind Scent need some help with that deer and it’s apparent that you need to learn how to cook. Come with me.”

   
He stood up, motioning for her to follow. When she was slow to respond, he reached down and seized one slender wrist, yanking her up. “Don’t push me any further. Lisa’s more than ready to get rid of you. I don’t think you have the survival skills to last an hour alone in this wilderness,” he added with just enough menace in his voice to convince her that he might be serious.

   
Olivia stumbled as he pulled her behind him. She jerked away but continued to follow his lead until they came to where the women were working. She gagged at the grisly sight before her. The deer lay on the hard-packed sandy earth, with blood seeping from a small hole on the upper side of its head just below the ear. A wide chocolate eye stared sightlessly up at the morning sky. One squaw held onto the carcass while the other plied a sharp blade, splitting its belly from front to back. Gooey red entrails, steaming with warmth, started to ooze out of the opening.

   
“Good kill. Clean inside. No bloody shot-up,” Walks Fast said in serviceable English, beaming at Samuel. She was Osage, plump and toothless and of indeterminate age, married to an American trapper named McElroy.

   
“I’ve brought my woman to learn how to clean and prepare meat. Put her to work. She is eager to help.”

   
Wind Scent, a comely young Sioux currently living with a Frenchman, looked disdainfully at Olivia. “She has many summers not to know such a simple thing.”

   
Samuel felt Olivia stiffen in affront and grinned to himself. “She is swift to learn new things, aren’t you, Livy?”

   
Olivia gritted her teeth, hating the mock endearment. So this was woman’s work out in the wilderness. She had never needed to worry about such unpleasant realities, for her life in St. Louis had been smoothed by servants. Olivia had never so much as made her own tea, only poured it for guests at Emory Wescott’s elegant social gatherings. Both Indian women were staring at her, the older one curious and the younger one hostile. She would show them. She would show that smirking, odious colonel, too.

   
“Oh, give me a knife. I’ll clean the damn deer,” she said with a lot more bravado than she felt as she knelt down alongside the two women.

   
“No knife. Use hands,” the ever practical Walks Fast said.

   
“She knows better than to trust you with anything sharp.” Samuel chuckled, looking on with his arms crossed over his chest, highly amused.

   
Olivia gaped at the older woman as if she had lost her mind. “What do you mean, use my hands?” Her voice broke on the question.

   
“Pull out gut, liver.” Walks Fast finished widening the opening in the cavity, then raised the deer’s ribs with one hand while illustrating with her other hand how to root through the gore inside, working various organs out. Those and a portion of intestine would end up in the stew. Her companion wielded a knife expertly, cutting the treats free of the visceral membranes holding them.

   
The fetid warm stench emanating from inside the deer wafted on the heavy fog laden air, hitting Olivia with the first deep breath she took when she leaned forward over the carcass. She tried to focus her eyes but her vision was becoming increasingly blurry. The earth seemed to have begun spinning. In front of her Walks Fast extracted the greatest prize, a great purplish black clump of gelatinous slime, which she elevated in triumph.

   
“Liver, still warm,” she pronounced with satisfaction offering it to Samuel as the hunter’s due.

   
Several drops of blood spattered on Olivia’s hand as she watched the seemingly pulsating lump with horrified fascination. The Indian woman’s arms were stained up to the elbow with gore.

   
Samuel quickly realized his tactical error. He had been so delighted watching the haughty French belle being brought down several notches that he had forgotten the old Indian ritual, now enjoined by the white trappers and hunters, but one he had never had the stomach to enjoy. A ring of men had gathered around them, all eyeing the delicacy enviously. Before he could bluff his way out of the quandary, Olivia solved his dilemma by creating a diversion.

   
She fought the hot dizzying surges as she watched Samuel eye the raw dripping liver being offered to him. Sacred Blood, was he going to eat it? When she raised one hand up to rub across her suddenly dry mouth, the coppery smell and taste of blood assaulted her. She stared in horror at her own blood spattered hand and knew she’d smeared it across her face. Without further warning her stomach revolted.

   
Samuel caught her as she turned away from the deer and emptied her breakfast of coffee and hominy onto the moccasins of one of the French trappers who jumped back with a startled oath. Olivia wretched until nothing more would come up as Samuel held her head, careful to keep her fat plait of hair away from her face as she was wracked with spasm after spasm of dry heaves.

   
Around them the men burst into raucous laughter, jeering loudly at Shelby, saddled with such a useless female, masquerading in men’s britches but possessing the stomach of a five-year-old girl.

   
“
Mon ami
, I pity you, cooking and cleaning for such a helpless one.”

   
“What does she do when you stick her,
hein
?”

   
“Trade her in fer a good squaw, Colonel. They know how ta stick ‘n be stuck, both!”

   
Amid advice and catcalls, Samuel scooped Olivia up and carried her back to the water’s edge while Manuel Lisa sat in judgment over who got the liver and other delicacies, taking the first portion for himself. Finding a soft place in the sand, Shelby dropped her unceremoniously by the water’s edge. They were screened by a copse of dry winter grass, newly greening up, which lent an aura of seclusion as they faced each other.

   
She landed with a solid thunk, her pride actually injured a great deal more than her rump. Indignantly she sat up and tried to speak but was utterly humiliated when she could get out no more than a raspy squeak. Her whole mouth and throat were parched and sour from her earlier exertions.

   
“Drink some water and clean yourself up. Lisa will have the boat loaded and ready to shove off by the time the women finish dressing the deer,” he said not unkindly.

   
With that he was gone, leaving her alone in her misery, discarded like a piece of driftwood washed up on the river-bank. Olivia had never felt more wretched or alone in her life. The thought of spending months in the ghastly wilderness surrounded by savages red and white, worked to exhaustion, fed nothing but greasy tallow, salted meat and starchy tasteless hominy brought tears to her eyes. But crying never solved anything. Hadn’t she learned that when her parents died?

   
If only Samuel had turned out to be the charming suitor that she had first imagined, she would have been willing to endure the rigors of a journey all the way up the Missouri. “But my prince has turned into a toad,” she muttered disconsolately.

   
Well, the way he treated her these days, at least she was in no danger of catching warts. With that small consolation, Olivia made her rude toilette by the riverbank, then scrambled back toward the boat when she heard Manuel Lisa call out the order to shove off.

   
Over the next several days Olivia and Samuel fell into a routine, spending little time together. During the days he took an occasional turn poling but mostly he was ashore, scouring the rolling hills beyond the river bluffs where the woodlands teemed with game. She did manual chores, fetching and carrying while the big keelboat was propelled upstream, assisting with cooking and cleaning up when they camped. Her hands were reddened by cuts and blisters and her skin was itchy and miserable from sleeping on scratchy strouding and the grimy irritant of ground-in dirt. She longed for a tub of clean hot water and a bar of scented soap with an intensity she once would have only expended wishing for an Arabian horse or a diamond necklace.

   
The men pitched crude little tents ashore each night and slept on the ground. Mercifully Olivia and Samuel had their own cramped cots aboard Lisa’s boat, although her narrow spot between several crates was barely large enough to accommodate her.

   
Bone weary, she slept through the cacophony of male snoring as Manuel Lisa and Seth Walton sawed in harmony far into the night. At least she was spared the indignity of having to share a tent with Samuel Shelby.

   
Nonetheless, she had to admit that traveling up the river was an adventure. The chief means of propulsion was by poling. The men pushed fifteen-foot-long oak poles deep into the muddy bottom, using sheer brute strength to lever the boat forward as they walked back along the elevated narrow planks that ran from bow to stern on each side of the eighty-foot craft. Often with the hot spring sun beating down on them, the sweaty rivermen would remove their shuts and work bare-chested. At first scandalized, Olivia quickly became inured to the partial nudity, until Samuel began taking his turns.

   
She sat huddled in one corner, by the door of the cabin box, watching the rippling play of muscles across his broad back as he plied the unwieldy pole with surprising grace. Rivulets of sweat trickled down his sun darkened skin, which gleamed in the reflected light. What would his hot satiny flesh feel like—taste like? Unconsciously she found herself putting her fingertips to her lips, as if attempting to answer the illicit question. Ashamed of such unladylike musing, she looked away, watching the river bluffs rise to the east.

   
Great limestone cliffs lined both sides of the river for miles at a stretch. Eons of wind, water and blistering heat had scoured and sculpted the stone into fantastical shapes, bowed out in places, hollowed inward in others. Caves and pinnacles of silvery white were studded with the deep green verdancy of hardy pines that grew with nothing but tiny crevices for purchase. The river stretched endlessly, over a mile wide yet mostly shallow except for a few narrow channels around the chains of islands strung along it. Some were overgrown with hardy stands of cedar and willow but many were simply ephemeral sandbars. When the wind picked up, it would blow the stinging particles in thick swirls, enveloping everything in its path. The Indians called the Missouri the Smoky River when this happened.

   
All manner of flotsam washed downstream with water from the spring thaws in the mountains. Once Olivia saw what looked like a cluster of boulders floating toward them. Panicked at the thought of having the boat pulverized into kindling by the weight, she screamed a warning, much to the amusement of the men. The floating stones were pumice, a coarse, light substance that could remain above water for short distances but was no threat to their safety.

   
Uprooted by the swirling current, whole trees floated by as well. Unlike the pumice stones, the trees were a danger. Often entire stretches of the bank washed away, carrying clumps of grasses, brush and densely tangled small trees which would eventually form barricades across narrow necks in the twisty river. The first time Olivia saw one she thought it was merely some sort of island they must get around.