Dreams Beneath Your Feet

 

Praise for the Rendezvous Series

“An entertaining, vivid portrait of frontier America as seen through the eyes of an impressionable youth”

—
Booklist
on
So Wild a Dream

“Blevins's sweeping vision of the American frontier is just plain irresistible.”

—W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear,
authors of
People of the Thunder,
on
So Wild a Dream

“Win Blevins is my hero. . . .
So Wild a Dream
reads like spare prose poetry, limning vulnerable, yet heroic human characters against the untrammeled frontier of the early nineteenth century.”

—Loren D. Estleman, author of
The Branch and the Scaffold

“Blevins possesses a rare skill in masterfully telling a story to paper. He is a true storyteller in the tradition of Native people.”

—Lee Francis, associate professor of Native American Studies,

University of New Mexico, on
So Wild a Dream

“
So Wild a Dream
is a fabulous beginning of what promises to become a classic series that will be on college reading lists in history classes studying the fur-trade era.”

—
Roundup Magazine

“The glory years of frontier life, fresh and rich.”

—
Kirkus Reviews
on
Beauty for Ashes

“A rousing installment in a fine epic of the American frontier.”

—
Publishers Weekly
on
Beauty for Ashes

“Loaded with action, drama, vivid descriptions, and colorful historical characters, this is a whopper of a Western yarn.”

—
Publishers Weekly
on
A Long and Winding Road

“Blevins has done his research and knows the mountain men as well as anyone could—to read this tale is to get a true sense of what their ordeal and adventures must have been like.”

—
Library Journal
on
Dancing with the Golden Bear

 

 

 

 

 

Also by Win Blevins

Stone Song

The Rock Child

ravenShadow

Give Your Heart to the Hawks

 

RENDEZVOUS SERIES

So Wild a Dream

Beauty for Ashes

Dancing with the Golden Bear

Heaven Is a Long Way Off

A Long and Winding Road

Dreams Beneath Your Feet

 

 

 

 

 

A Novel of the Mountain Men

WIN BLEVINS

 

A Tom Doherty Associates Book
New York

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

DREAMS BENEATH YOUR FEET

Copyright © 2008 by Win Blevins

All rights reserved.

A Forge Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Forge
^®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN 978-0-7653-4486-1

First Edition: December 2008

First Mass Market Edition: December 2009

Printed in the United States of America

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To Meredith,
who is my California home
wherever we go

 

 

 

A series of six historical novels requires a lot of expertise, and I got it from good colleagues and knowledgeable friends. Dale Walker, my editor, has been as wise and helpful as always. He has been an enormous source of support for more than a decade. The Honorable Clyde Hall of the Fort Hall Reservation has been my guide, both professionally and personally, in matters of the culture and spirituality of Native peoples. Dick James has shared his encyclopedic knowledge about mountain men. Many Native friends and fellow writers have helped me along the way. Thanks—I'm indebted to you all.

Thanks to Dean Koontz for permission to quote from his excellent novel
Life Expectancy
.

Every day throughout this writing, my wife, Meredith, helped as only the best of mates can. My love, respect, and gratitude for her are boundless.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ours is a story mad with the impossible, it is by
chaos out of dream, it began as dream and it has
continued as dream to the last headlines you read in
a newspaper. And of our dreams there are two things
above all others to be said, that only madmen could
have dreamed them or would have dared to—and
that we have shown a considerable faculty
for making them come true.

 

—B
ERNARD
D
E
V
OTO

 

 

 

In
So Wild a Dream,
challenged by the half-breed Hannibal, Sam follows his heart west. After traveling to St. Louis with the con man Grumble and the madam Abby, Sam goes to the Rocky Mountains with a fur brigade and begins to learn ways of the trappers and the Indians. At the end he is forced to walk seven hundred miles alone, lost and starving, to the nearest fort.

In
Beauty for Ashes,
Sam courts the Crow girl Meadowlark. Helping Sam attempt a daring feat to win her hand, her brother is killed. Seeking reconciliation, Sam goes through the rigors of a sun dance, and Meadowlark elopes with him. Her family takes her back by force and kicks Sam out of the village. But Meadowlark runs away to join Sam, and at the trapper rendezvous they are married.

Dancing with the Golden Bear
launches Sam and Meadowlark to California with a fur brigade. After terrible hardships crossing
the desert, they reach the Golden Clime and the ocean. But Meadowlark dies in childbirth. On a harrowing journey across the Sierra Nevada and the deserts beyond, Sam passes through the dark night of the soul.

In
Heaven Is a Long Way Off,
Sam returns to California for his daughter, only to discover that she, her uncle Flat Dog, and her aunt Julia have been kidnapped. Sam brings off harrowing rescues and makes a wild escape on a river in flood. On the way back to the Crows, he becomes deeply involved in rescuing teenagers from slavery. Finally he returns his daughter to her village and finds his rival waiting to kill him.

At the beginning of
A Long and Winding Road,
the sisters of Tomás, Sam's adopted son, are married and shortly afterward kidnapped by Indians. Father and son swear to rescue the women. The search takes them deep into Navajo country, then far north to the trappers' rendezvous on the Green River, to Bent's Fort, and at last back to Taos, New Mexico, and a surprising confrontation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

S
AM
M
ORGAN HEARD
his partner, Hannibal, get up and step to the dead fire. Morning by morning, they took turns rising first, using cold fingers to get a little flame going and start some coffee.

First light would come along within a few minutes. They both had an instinct for first light, and it would arrive with the first sip of coffee.

Sam savored the warmth of his buffalo robes and the pad of his folded blanket coat under his head. In the aspens the mare Paladin and the other horses chuffed from time to time, clomped, and dreamed of a country free of horseflies.

Sam inventoried these familiar camp sounds. He could tell his mare from Hannibal's gelding Brownie and from the packhorses by her step alone. In the other direction he heard the Henry's Fork River. He listened to the pouring of the coffee water and the ping of the pot hung on the rod above the flames. He reached out and
touched the cold barrel of the Celt, the flintlock rifle he inherited from his father.

One familiar part of Sam's world was missing. This past winter his pet coyote, Coy, aged sixteen, walked out in the snows and never came back. Walking was difficult for the old coyote, and Sam was sure that he had gone deliberately, knowing that his time had come.

Sam missed him. As a pup Coy saved Sam from a prairie fire, and they had been together day and night for a coyote lifetime.

Making the coffee, Hannibal MacKye chuckled at himself. He and Sam had traded for a few beans before they left Fort Hall on this hunt, but they'd been making brew from the same grounds for two weeks now.

Toasty in his bedroll, Sam waited for the first two words of every morning, “Coffee's hot.” Then the men would squat across the fire from each other and sip the flavored water without a word. Since they had ridden together for nearly two decades—trapped beaver, lived with Indians, rambled from the plains to the peaks to the Pacific—they had their routines. Their way was a little silence on waking, a span of time untouched by talk.