October Skies (22 page)

A woman.

He heard a third scream, higher pitched this time.

A child.

The young man knew the only women and children in these woods were the ‘white-faces’, the ones that had lost their way in the mountains. Black Feather said their fate was sealed now; none of them would last until the snows melted. If cold and hunger didn’t kill them all, then the dark spirit they had brought into the woods with them would.

His first instinct was to drop the hare that he was gutting, go find Black Feather and the others, and tell them what he’d heard. But the second cry, the child’s cry, alerted some deeper instinct in him. He couldn’t ignore the innocent cry of a child, not even a white-face child.

His thinking went no deeper than that. He dropped the hare, cleaned the blade of his knife with a wipe across his sleeve and strode swiftly in the direction from which the screams had come. He moved with the athletic agility and speed of a young man whose feet knew the terrain well, intuitively judging from the gentle undulations in the snow, where lay the dips, the bumps, the twisted roots that could snap an ankle.

The woman’s scream came again from up ahead.

This time he knew, from the abrupt and gargling way it came to an end, that it would be the woman’s last scream. He made an approximate best guess from which direction it had come, making allowances for the acoustic tricks the forest could play. He redoubled his pace, his feet flicking lightly through the shallowest snow, stone-stepping across the mounds of firm ground, from one boulder to another, vaulting with graceful agility over the fallen limbs of long-dead trees.

Up ahead he glimpsed, between trunks, spears of weak sunlight lancing down into a small glade and he detected, amidst this world of only two colours, virgin white and deep wooded green - an unmissable splash of bright crimson.

He slowed down the pace to ensure his arrival would be in complete silence, darting forward another dozen yards and then abruptly settling to the ground beneath the boughs of a fir tree. Catching his breath in quiet, controlled gasps, he looked out through the needles at the clearing beyond, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

There was a lot of blood.

Too much blood for whoever had lost it to live. That was immediately obvious to him.

Then he saw her.

Stretched over a fallen trunk, he could make out the body of a white-face woman, her dark clothes stained almost black with the blood spilling from her torso. Beside her, curled up in the snow on the ground, was a child, a little girl, hugging her knees and shuddering - convulsive twitches that racked her body in ebbs and flows.

She was alive - her eyes were wide. But he could also see her mind was gone. Shock had rescued her sanity, taken it someplace else.

He scanned the small clearing, looking for a trace of the creature that had done this.

A bear?

It was possible. Although they slept through the winter, Black Feather frequently cautioned that they could be very easily disturbed and enraged.

He noticed the smooth snow was trampled and flattened across the glade and stained dark with splatters and smears of blood.

Three distinct foot profiles - possibly four - mingled across the glade; a child, a woman, a male, and perhaps another. The story he tried reading in the snow was too complicated. But it was clear that a body had been dragged from the clearing whilst bleeding, leaving a trail that disappeared into the foliage on the far side.

An older mind would have advised caution at this point; he should back away and leave this scene behind him. This was the evil spirit Black Feather spoke of - he could sense it, smell it . . . the white-face evil. Only their evil could be so careless with its bloodletting, so uncontrolled, so savage.

But the young man was alone and too confident and curious to know better. In any case, he couldn’t leave this child - no older than his own sister - to die in the same brutal way as her mother appeared to have done.

The long, crooked blade of his hunting knife balanced ready for use in one hand, his other hand easing out the finely crafted flint-bladed tamahakan tucked into his belt, he rose with one slow, fluid movement and stepped out from beneath the tree into the clearing.

He listened carefully as he moved soundlessly. In the distance, echoing noisily through the forest, activity coming from the white-face camp could be heard. The thak-thak-thak of wood being chopped. A gentle breeze disturbed the snow-laden pine branches overhanging the clearing, and powder snow sifted lightly down with a gentle hiss from one bough to the next.

Approaching the shuddering child and the body splayed across the log, he could see more clearly how much damage had been wrought on the woman’s torso. Several deep gashes had opened her belly exposing ripped organs, and tatters of those same organs were draped out across the bark of the tree trunk. The gashes reminded him of the sort of wound a bear could make with one of its powerful front paws. But looking at the spacing and the length and depth of these gashes, it would have to have been a very large bear.

The girl was only a few feet away from him, shuddering and rocking. She didn’t see him; her eyes and her mind were far away.

He slowly reached one hand towards her, not sure how she would react to his touch.

It was then that he heard it.

A deep rasping of breath coming from the edge of the clearing and circling around beyond sight. In the silence of this sound-insulated glade it was deafening, echoing from all sides, a deep, pulsing, hoarse rattling . . . like that of a male buffalo, cornered and exhausted at the end of a hunt, blowing foam out of each nostril.

He noticed a long gun on the ground beyond the girl. He knew how these weapons were used, but not how to feed one. There had been no loud thunder before the screams, and he realised the white-face weapon would still be ready to use, still deadly.

The third white-face, the one that had been dragged away, must have dropped it. Which told him something useful about this creature.

It is a very fast creature. The white-face had no time to fire.

The breathing grew quiet now, as if awaiting his next move, daring him to reach out for the weapon and try using it.

 

Ben heard a voice cry out in alarm, then another. There was a commotion going on outside.

Broken Wing glanced up at him. ‘What isss?’

Ben shrugged. He leaned forward and poked his head out through the flap of their rabbit-hole-like shelter to see what was going on. He saw Mr Bowen’s head poking out from the shelter next door, and, further away, Mr Hussein’s - like curious prairie dogs.

He heard another cry of alarm and the challenge of a couple of male voices. The disturbance was coming from the far end of the camp.

Broken Wing kicked Keats, who was napping. ‘Keatttt!’ he shouted.

Keats grunted unconsciously.

Ben, meanwhile, reached for his medicine box, pulled himself out through the flap and quickly stood up, craning his neck to see what was going on. He could make out a gathering group amongst the far shelters, milling around something or someone. Ben automatically began to head towards them.

‘What’s going on?’ Mr McIntyre shouted out through the flap of his family’s shelter as Ben strode past.

‘I don’t know. I’m just going to see.’

Weyland pulled up alongside him as they crunched across the compacted snow and waded through ankle-deep drifts of fresh powder. The Virginian’s usual measured voice carried a tone of uncertainty as they approached the knot of people.

‘Thought I heard one of them Mormon gentlemen shout something about an Indian.’

They passed the oxen carcasses, entering the Mormons’ camp, weaving their way through the snowed-covered humps of shelters and pushing their way forward through the crowd.

Weyland made his way to the front and stopped dead. ‘Good God,’ he gasped.

Ben followed his gaze. The first thing his eyes registered was Emily, coated from head to foot in blood. She was cradled in the arms of a young Indian man. Ben presumed he was one of the Paiute hunting party encountered a week ago. He looked about the same age as Sam, seventeen or eighteen. The Indian was on his knees, holding as tightly to Emily, it seemed, as he was to life. From a deep, ragged gash that angled down from his left shoulder, across his chest and stomach to his groin, a tangled nest of his entrails had spilled onto Emily’s blood-soaked lap.

He gasped, short and shallow percussive breaths, his eyes glazed.

Mrs Zimmerman knelt down in front of him and reached out for Emily. The young Indian, wide-eyed and in shock, looked uncertainly at her. The woman offered a reassuring smile and nodded.

‘Let me take her,’ she said quietly.

The Indian glanced down at Emily before reluctantly releasing his tight hold of her. Mrs Zimmerman scooped Emily into her arms and stepped back.

‘Thank you,’ she uttered.

The Indian swayed momentarily before collapsing onto the snow, calling out something loudly. To Ben’s ears the words were unintelligible, but he noticed they were the same, over and over.

Keats noisily pushed through the crowd, barking at people to get out of his way.

‘The Indians are still out there,’ somebody in the crowd gasped.

The old guide emerged from the throng and knelt down beside the prone body of the young Paiute. Ben stepped forward to join him, crouching down quickly to examine the wound but knowing - as he had with the Zimmerman girl - that there was too much damage to save the young man. He looked at Keats and shook his head.

The Indian was still chanting something.

Somebody in the crowd muttered, ‘Those dark demons’ve killed the Dreytons,’ and there was a ripple of reaction through the crowd, followed by an outbreak of muttered, whispered prayers amongst them. Whether they were praying for Emily, her family, themselves or for the Indian, he couldn’t tell.

Keats grunted irritably at the growing cacophony of noise behind him. The young Paiute had stopped chanting and was now whispering. Keats crouched down close to the young man, who looked now to be only a few moments away from death, placing one gnarled cauliflower ear close to the Indian’s lips. Ben noticed tiny flecks of dark blood dotting Keats’s cheek as the Indian panted, and desperately whispered something.

‘What’s he saying?’ Ben asked quietly.

‘Can’t fuckin’ hear,’ Keats hissed. He turned to face the crowd. ‘Shut up!’ he barked angrily at them. The praying and hubbub of noise immediately settled down to a gentle rustle of breathing.

He dipped down again to listen to the dying Indian. The Paiute seemed to rally enough strength for his tormented and distant eyes to focus for a moment on Keats. He grabbed the old man’s arm and gasped something to him; a quick rattle of Ute that Ben wasn’t confident the old guide entirely understood. Then the young Indian’s eyes rolled, showing just the whites, and a last fluttering breath came from his mouth, flecking his lips with sprayed dots of blood.

They heard the distant caw of a murder of crows circling high above the trees some way into the forest, and the sibilant whispering of someone still praying amidst the crowd.

Ben reached out and closed the Indian’s eyes; even in death, the look of them unsettled him.

He turned to Keats. ‘So are you going to tell me what he was saying?’

Keats looked at him and shook his head, confused. ‘Didn’t seem to make much sense.’

 

‘So,’ said Sean Holmwood, tucking a fork into his pasta carbonara, ‘that sounds like an intriguing find.’

Julian returned a wry smile. Sean always calmly understated things. That was probably what made him such a good commissioning editor - he never gushed praise or approval; instead, he exuded it cautiously behind a poker face.