The Scalp Hunters

Chapter Two

Green was the color of life. Green was the color of the Manitoa in all things. Green was the color most revered by the Nansusequa. Once, they were a proud and peaceful people, living deep in the virgin woodland of the East. Now there were only five Nansusequa left. The rest had been massacred by outraged whites. It didn’t matter that the whites were to blame for the outrage; they wanted the land the Nansusequa lived on for themselves.

One family escaped the slaughter. Their peace chief, Wakumassee, fled with his wife and son and daughters. Their flight took them to the Mississippi River and across a nigh-endless sea of grass. After much hardship, they wound up at the base of emerald foothills, bumps compared to the snowbound peaks beyond that reared majestically miles high into the sky.

Fate brought them to a remote valley where Nate King befriended them and invited them to stay. Grateful beyond measure, they accepted. Every day Wakumassee gave thanks for the gift of King’s friendship and for the happiness of having a place where his loved ones were safe. A haven far removed from the greed and bigotry that cost the Nansusequa so dearly.

It was a sobering thought; Waku and his family were the last of their kind, the last of the People of the Forest. For untold winters his people had lived in harmony with the green world around them and thrived. Then along came the white man. To their kind, the land wasn’t a friend to be nurtured and cherished; it was property to be owned and used as the whites saw fit. When Waku first met them, it had taken a while for him to understand their way of seeing the world. When he finally did, he had been shocked to his core.

To be fair, not all whites were that way. Nate King wasn’t. Shakespeare McNair wasn’t. There were others, whites who regarded the world much as the Nansusequa did, as a precious gift to be treated with the utmost respect.

Now, drawing rein on the horse Nate King had given him, Waku gazed out over the vast rolling prairie and breathed deep of the grass-scented air. The warm sun on his face, the wind that stirred his long black hair—life was good again.

“Why have we stopped, husband?” asked Tihikanima. Her green dress, like his green buckskins, were symbols of their devotion to Manitoa. “Have you seen something I haven’t? Is there danger?”

Waku grunted. His wife tended to worry. But then, it was his opinion, based on many winters of marriage, that if women didn’t have something to fret about, they made something up so they could. An opinion he kept to himself. “Be at peace, woman. All is well.”

“Is it?” asked Tenikawaku, their oldest daughter, who had seen but seventeen winters. She bobbed her head at two of their party who had fallen behind.

Mikikawaku, at twelve the youngest, giggled. “Our brother spends more time with her than he does with us.”

The brother she referred to was Degamawaku. At nineteen winters, he was as lithe and tawny as a cougar. He had the dark hair and dark eyes of the Nansusequa, and at the moment those eyes were on the white girl who rode beside him.

Evelyn King was close to Tenikawaku’s age. She wore buckskins and moccasins and had a Hawken rifle cradled in her left arm and a pair of pistols tucked under a leather belt. Vitality gleamed in her green eyes, the same vitality that made her every movement as fluid as the graceful leaps of an antelope. “Look at me, Dega.”

Degamawaku was puzzled. Why did she tell him to look at her when he already was? He was trying hard to master the white tongue, but it was proving as easy as wrestling a mud-slick snake. “I look.”

“Here I am, wearing buckskins instead of a dress and traipsing around the prairie with you and your family. You’d never think to look at me that two years ago I had it fixed in my head that I was going to move back to the States.”

“The States?”

“Yes. Remember? That’s what my people call the land east of what you call the Father of Rivers. I was bound and determined to be a city girl and spend the rest of my days in civilized society.”

Dega wasn’t sure what all of that meant. He seemed to recall that whites called their villages “cities.” What appalled him was the idea that she wanted to leave the mountains. “You still want go?”

Evelyn shook her head. “No. I’ve changed my mind. I’ve decided to stay out here.”

“Why?”

Evelyn glanced away. She wasn’t about to tell him of the strange feelings that had come over her lately, feelings the likes of which she never felt, feelings she only felt when she was around him or thinking about him.

“Why?” Dega asked again to show her he was genuinely interested.

Evelyn shrugged. “It’s just one of those things. We think we know what we want when we don’t. I reckon if we all knew our own minds as well as we like to think we do, we wouldn’t make as many mistakes.”

Dega tried to link her words into some semblance of meaning. As best he could work it out, she was saying that it was important to think. “True,” he agreed. Given his limited grasp of her tongue, he had found that simple answers were best.

Evelyn smiled. “Have you noticed how much alike we are? Oh, I know you’re red and I’m white, and you’re a guy and I’m a girl. But deep down we have a lot in common.”

Dega uttered the first thing that popped into his head. “We both have noses and feet.”

Peals of mirth rippled from Evelyn. “Goodness gracious, the things you come up with. You’re a hoot, Dega, and that’s no lie.”

Dega remembered being told once that a “hoot” was the sound an owl made. But since he hadn’t made an owl sound he must be missing her meaning. “I hoot?”

“It means you make me smile.”

“That good, yes?” Dega asked. His people had long believed that making others happy was one of the reasons they came into the world. Making Evelyn happy was especially important to him.

“That’s very good.” Evelyn glanced away again. She was becoming much too brazen, she told herself. Never once, by word or deed, had Dega so much as hinted that he cared for her any more deeply than he cared for his sisters.

“I be glad you come hunt,” Dega remarked.

“That’s another thing. I’ve never been much of a hunter. Oh, I’ve killed for the supper pot. But I never went on a buffalo hunt with the Shoshones even though my mother and uncle practically begged me.”

“My father want buffalo meat.” Dega had been perfectly content to stay in King Valley and spend every spare moment he could with Evelyn. Then his father took it into his head to go hunt buffalo.

“Blame Shakespeare McNair. He went on and on about how exciting it is to bring down a big buff, and he got your pa all excited.” Evelyn gestured. “Now here we are.”

So long as she was there, Dega didn’t care where they were. “Here,” he said happily.

“It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

“What?”

“How life works out sometimes. We’re walking along minding our own business and life kicks us in the britches.”

Confusion racked Dega. He remembered that “britches” was a white word for “pants,” and that “life” referred to being alive, but he couldn’t fathom what being alive had to do with being kicked in the pants. So he did what he often did when she confused him; he smiled and repeated what she had just said. “In the britches.”

Evelyn loved his smile. She had never told him that, but he had the nicest teeth. Strange that she should notice. To her best recollection, she’d never paid much attention to teeth before. “My pa likes to say it’s the Almighty’s way of keeping us humble.”

“Humble?”

“You know. Meek and mild and respectful.”

“Respectful?”

“Yes. When you treat another person the way you’d want them to treat you. Nice. Friendly. With respect.”

Dega brightened. At last something he understood. “Respect be good. Nansusequa believe respect all things.”

“A fine philosophy as far as it goes. But how do you respect a bear about to eat you? Or a hostile about to slit your throat?” Evelyn could think of a host of other instances.

Dega was amazed at how her mind worked. It was always bouncing around all over the place. “Can respect bear. Just not let bear eat you.”

Evelyn chuckled. “True enough, I suppose. But the last thing on my mind when something is trying to fill its belly with mouthfuls of me is treating it with respect. I’d rather shoot it.” She caught herself, and shook her head. “Listen to me. I sound more like my brother every day, don’t I?”

Dega answered as honestly as he knew how. “Brother sound like man. You sound like woman.”

“I certainly hope so, you charmer you.”

For the life of him, Dega couldn’t recall what a charmer was. She was smiling, though, so he figured it must be a good thing. “Me great charmer.”

More mirth spilled from Evelyn. She liked his sense of humor almost as much as she liked his teeth. “You know, I’ve never met anyone I can talk to as freely as I can talk to you.”

“Talking you much nice,” Dega said. Inside he cringed at his poor use of the white tongue. It was so hard to master. His father said it was because the Nansusequa tongue and the white tongue were so unlike. In the Nansusequa language, a word had one meaning and one meaning only. In the white language a word might have five meanings and each was shaded differently so that it must be used exactly right or it made no sense. Recently he had begun to despair of ever learning it well enough to make Evelyn proud.

“I wonder what it is about you,” Evelyn said. Secretly, she had begun to suspect and the suspicion troubled her. She told herself she was too young. She told herself she had no interest in growing attached to someone. She told herself she was just being silly. Then she would look at him and something stirred deep down inside, something that never stirred before. She shook her head in annoyance.

“You all right?” Dega had found that her face often gave away her moods much better than her words did.

“I couldn’t be happier.” The devil of it was, Evelyn truly couldn’t. She liked being with him more than she liked just about anything. Yet more reason for her to be troubled.

Evelyn took a few slow breaths to compose herself and saw that the rest of the family had stopped. She brought her mare to a halt and wondered why Teni and Miki were grinning.

Waku said, “We find buffalo soon, you think, Evelyn King?”

“There’s no predicting,” Evelyn replied. “At this time of year most are to the south, but there’s always some that stick around. I’m surprised we haven’t come across a few by now.” She paused. “There’s no need to be so formal. Just call me Evelyn. I get to call you Waku, don’t I?” She liked the custom they had of allowing those who were near and dear to them to use a short version of their name. Their full names were a mouthful.

“I hope we find buffalo soon.” The hunt had been Waku’s idea. His wife had seen a buffalo robe that belonged to the wife of Zach King and mentioned that she would like to have a robe of her own one day. He’d taken that as a hint, and here they were.

A gust of wind against Evelyn’s back prompted her to swivel in the saddle. To the west, dark clouds coiled and writhed like so many snakes. A thunderhead was moving in. It might pass north of them and it might not. She pointed and said, “We need to find shelter before that hits.”

“You do not like rain?” Waku asked.

“I like it just fine. It’s the storm I can do without. I’ve been caught in one or two prairie storms, and believe you me, it’s like being caught in the end of the world. The rain falls in buckets, the wind is fit to blow you over, and then there’s all that lightning.”

Waku thought she exaggerated, but he used his heels and tugged on the lead rope to the packhorse.

Dega studied the dark clouds. They didn’t appear particularly ominous, but he had learned to trust Evelyn’s judgment. If she was worried, they should be worried. In his own tongue he said, “We would be wise to do as she advises, Father.”

Motioning at the expanse of green that stretched to the eastern horizon, Waku said, “Show me where.”

For as far as the eye could see there was flat, flat and more flat. Not so much as a single tree to the east, north or south.

Ahead, dirt mounds sprouted out of the earth.

A prairie dog town, Evelyn realized, and was about to say they should give it a wide berth when Waku reined to the right to go around. She did the same. Out of the corner of her eye she admired Dega’s handsome profile. He glanced at her, and she quickly averted her gaze and hoped she wasn’t blushing.

Evelyn couldn’t say exactly when, but a change had come over her. She was different somehow. She’d asked her mother about it, and her mother smiled knowingly and said she was on the cusp of womanhood, and that all women went through it. Which didn’t make the changes any less disturbing.

A sound filled the air, a rattle like that of dry seeds in a gourd.

Alarm spiked through Evelyn. She had forgotten. Prairie dog towns were home to more than prairie dogs. They were also home to creatures that fed on the prairie dogs. Creatures like ferrets—and rattlesnakes. Even as she realized what the sound signified, her mare whinnied and reared. Evelyn grabbed at the saddle, but she was too slow. She was unhorsed.

The jolt of hitting the ground jarred Evelyn hard. She heard Dega and the others cry out, and she went to roll over so she could push to her feet.

The next instant a reptilian head reared, its mouth spread wide, its fangs bared.