Julie Tetel - Sweet Sarah Ross

It was less embarrassing being next to him in the gathering darkness, so she knelt beside him and noted that he didn’t gulp the water down. Rather he restrained himself to take it in measured sips. When he paused at some length, she asked, “Can I go over the slope now?”

He took another spare sip, shuddered with relief. He cleared his throat, then uttered his first full sentence. “It’s best to go before the moon and stars come out.” His voice was deeper and more resonant than she had expected. She moved away from him, and he said, “Crawl, don’t walk.” When she was at the edge of their hiding place, he added, “Watch out for rattlesnakes.”

She squeaked in horror and got down on her hands and knees to crawl through the cover of the grasses and the shifting twilight. The afternoon’s wait had been unbearable, but this last crawl up and over the slope was excruciating. She was hoping against hope that when she judged herself close enough to the scene and lifted her head above the grasses, she would find that—

All was well.

Her heart leapt with joy. The spot where her family’s wagon had been was empty. Meaning that they, and most of the others, had had time to flee. Her joy turned to sorrow as she recognized the one who had not been so lucky.

She had been traveling with her family in a train of ten wagons. Only one was left at the site, broken beyond repair, and the Widower Reynolds lay facedown on the ground next to the wagon, an arrow in his back. She went over to the dead man, bit her lip to stifle her sob, then did what she had to do.

She crawled back down the slope to the shelter of the trees. She made her way over to the man-beast, who had not moved from his seated position, and announced, “I’ve brought you some trousers.”

Powell woke from fitful dreams of being chased by white-skinned women and red-skinned women around drawing rooms in Washington, D.C., and over the open prairie.

He cracked his eyes, his chest heaving from dream effort. His bone-dry eyes were soothed to perceive cool, blue moonlight after days of red-seared sunlight. He swallowed once over a painful knot in his throat, but he knew he had had water in the past few hours, and the pain in his throat this night was not as bad as it had been the night before. He figured he was ready for more water now without putting his battered body into shock. He needed a prolonged watering. Mmm. A thorough soaking would be nice.

In a hazy sort of way, he was sorry he wasn’t some kind of plant. He might choose to be a vine, and he imagined his legs, stretched out before him, turning into long tendrils. Then he would have only to wait for it to rain, and the backs of his legs could take root in the earth, and he could drink and drink and drink his fill without having to move an inch.

He breathed in. He breathed out. He came to the conclusion that he wasn’t a plant but an animal, and animals had to move around in order to find food and water. It was a pity. Especially since he had a fuzzy recollection that a source of water ran behind him quite a few yards away, and his feet were burning as if on fire and swollen to the size of huge squash. He couldn’t use his feet to get there, not a chance, but maybe he could slither over to the water. On that thought, he entertained feelings of deep envy for snakes who had no feet to plague them. Fish, too, who moved suspended in gallons and gallons of lovely water. And birds, who could get off their ridiculous unfleshly feet anytime they wanted—

Birds, fish, snakes, vines. He must be thirst-crazed to be having such thoughts, and the only way to restore his sanity was to get himself over to the water. He shifted from his seated position so that he could slide on his belly, and when he moved, he became aware of the lump of coarse material in his lap.

He fingered the lump and determined that it was some sort of clothing. Shirt. No. Trousers, maybe. Yes, trousers. He was reminded of something, and in order to discover what, he had a notion to look around the dark glade where he had taken refuge.

Moonlight dappled the dark and dotted a human form lying a few feet away from him. It was a woman, a white woman, to judge from the outlines of the clothing draped around her reclining body. Her head was pillowed on another piece of cloth—must be her bonnet—and long strands of golden hair turned silver in the moonlight had escaped whatever pins might have been holding them. As pretty as her hair was to contemplate, he was more interested in her skirts and underskirts. Not carnally but practically. He mentally cut up the superfluous yards of cotton she must be wearing and made snares and slingshots and bags and bandages.

He was so cheered by thoughts of all that good material that he began his slithery sliding toward the river. He thought of the woman and couldn’t for the life of him figure out what she was doing in the glade with him.

Then he remembered. She was the woman who had been wearing a shawl. Two things about her stood out in his mind. She was an idiot, and she was beautiful. A beautiful idiot. When he had first seen her, she had been bobbing around a tree, and if he hadn’t known better, he would have thought that she was trying to attract his attention rather than conceal herself. The tree she had chosen couldn’t have been much more than a foot wide, and with her skirts sprouting out on either side of the base, he wasn’t likely to miss her once he had come ashore. That is, if he hadn’t already spotted her when he had rounded the bend in the river.

The river. It was all coming back to him. He winced at the flood of memories of capture and escape, of the brutal bruising his body had endured during his two days of flight. He had come to the riverbank, fearing at first it was a mirage. He had been heading for the Platte River, knowing it was ahead of him as he ran, thinking it would save him if he could just get there before the Sioux got their hands on him again.

He held a pretty good map of the territory in his head, but his hobbling had prevented him from making an accurate estimate of the ground he had paced out on foot. He had had an even better map of the territory on paper, but that map was in the ashes of a sacrificial fire, and he didn’t want to think yet about what had happened to all his surveying equipment. Probably offered to the Teton Sioux god of Wandering Souls, for all he knew. Why hadn’t he had the good fortune to run across the Mandans or the Pawnees, instead of the Tetons? He wasn’t a fur trader or a bison hunter or even a settler. It was just his luck to have run into the Tetons on a bad day in a bad mood.

And it was just his luck to have run into a beautiful idiot who didn’t understand the first thing about life on the frontier. He might even have said as much to her. But she had a pair of scissors in her bag and was wearing yards and yards of useful cloth, and now he had dragged himself over the twigs and the rocks and the sand and was at river’s edge and didn’t have a thing to worry about anymore.

He put his face in the water and drank. It was cold and bracing and provided as exquisite a pleasure-pain as he had ever experienced. He drank some more and then some more. The more he drank the thirstier he became, and he doubted that he could ever drink enough to have enough excess to piss ever again.

When he needed air more than he needed water, he lifted his head, turned his entire body. He picked the absurd flower-printed bandages off his feet, rinsed them out. Then he flopped over so that he could immerse his blazing members in the cold. The sizzling sting of the water on the open sores of his soles nearly killed him, but almost as quickly numbed his wretched feet, so that the overall effect was mercifully, outrageously sensual. He lay on his back in the sand, his feet in the water, his eyes on the clouds drifting across the diamond dust in the night sky, and thought, It’s good to be alive.