Mountain Man

Kate turned not to stone but to female tiger. Her fury was such that her strength was multiplied tenfold as she rushed forward and raised her axe. She moved with such devastating speed and her blows were so unerring that four warriors fell before any of them realized that an avenger was on them. At the moment the tomahawk fell on the daughter she buried her axe three inches deep in a red spine at the base of the skull. The two blows were simultaneous. With almost no pause at all she flew to a warrior bent over a son, and she split his skull so deep that the two halves actually sank toward his shoulders. The third, and again the fourth, she also felled with a single blow. It was all over in a few seconds. In the moment when she was returning to her daughter two Indians slashed the thongs binding Bowden, flung him across a horse, and were in flight down the river before Kate could understand what they had done. A half dozen Indians and a scalped and dead or dying man vanished, and Kate Bowden stood, shuddering with rage and tremors and lunacy, her dead children and four dead Indians around her. Her mother-fury turning to nausea, her whole body shaking so terribly that she had the movements of a mechanical toy, she stood, Indian blood over her hair and face and clothes, and so fully sensed the immense and unspeakable horror of it that her conscious mind was blotted out. The only thing she did for half an hour was to drag the fallen Indian off her daughter.

She was still there, trembling, sick, numbed, and witless, when a man rode into view and sat on his horse forty yards away, looking at her. In the first instant he knew that a war party had passed him on its way down the river.

He had a clear view of the seven prone persons, all of whom seemed to be dead, and of the woman, with blood all over her and with a bloody axe in her hands. He had seen men kill men. He himself had slain and scalped eight Indians since he left St. Louis and headed west. In the world where he now lived the killing of the weak by the strong was the first law of life, all the way from the tiniest gnats and spiders up to the wolf, the elk bull, the grizzly. No day passed in which he did not see creatures killing other creatures. No day passed in which enemies did not look at him and covet his flesh. This was not a country for persons dedicated to the prevention of cruelty by the living on the living.

Sam was not a man who could be easily moved by death and loss but he was moved by the scene before him. It was not the dead warriors; he cared nothing about them. Possibly it was not the sons and the daughter. It must have been the way a mother stood, looking round her and back and forth; the way she bent a little forward and peered at a son, and slowly turned to look at the daughter; the way she knelt and searched the dead faces and bright bloody skulls of the sons, who only a little while ago had thick mops of brown hair; or the way she knelt and looked at her daughter, with the deep tomahawk cleft in the upper face and forehead. So absorbed was she by the grim facts that had desolated her life and soul, so darkened and blotted out was her conscious mind, so depressed was her pulse and her breathing, that she had almost no sense of being left alone in the world, God only knew where.

Sam had at least a faint notion of it all. He supposed that this woman had killed four Blackfeet braves with nothing but an axe, who now was completely helpless before her enemies. Would she kneel there all day and all night, before her dead children? Was she praying? She had dropped the axe and now crawled back and forth, back and forth, between the children. Twenty minutes after Sam came in view she was kneeling by the girl and she seemed to be trying to clothe her; she stripped a thin shawl from her shoulders and laid it over the girl’s flanks. In one moment she glanced at the cottonwood tree where her husband had fallen forward. In that moment she understood what they had done to him, but she would understand that only in fleeting moments of insight, and only for a week or two. There would be a few brief flashes in the gathering darkness, when she would know that nothing was left to her but the dead, an old wagon, some bedding, a few utensils, an axe, a rifle ....

Turning from her daughter, she saw the big man on the horse. She leapt to her feet, recovered the axe, and began to run. Because he was in the path down which she had come she made a wide detour across river bottom, ru

"Woman," he said sternly, "I’m your friend. It looks like you need one." When she gave no sign of friendliness he again advanced, slowly, trying to look into her eyes; and when twenty feet from her he unbuckled his revolvers and let them fall. He put his arms out wide, his fingers spread. "I’m Sam Minard, New York State. Like I said, you need a friend. We have graves to dig. You have a shovel?"

Holding her rifle with both hands, its muzzle pointed at him, she did not speak. She had so much redman’s blood on her face that he couldn’t tell what kind of face it was, except that it looked strong, like his mother’s. She had blood over one upper eyelid, and when she blinked the red spot flashed in the high sun. Sam was looking at her with wonder and admiration; he would never have believed that a woman with no weapon but an axe could kill four warriors, without herself being touched.

For two or three minutes he looked at her and waited. Knowing that her will had faltered and that he was no longer in danger, he buckled the guns round his waist and went back to his horses. Leading the stud and with the packhorse trailing, he went up the trail to the woman’s camp, observing along the way the spots where her husband or children had uprooted firewood. He wanted to ask what in hell they were doing away up here in Crow and Blackfeet land, and where they thought they were going, but he doubted that he would ever get a word out of her. She was wary, like a wild thing; she was lost in blood and horror. What would she do when her dead were buried? Would she let him take her north to the Missouri, to wait for a river boat, or far south to the trail?

He found a shovel in the camp, and thinking one spot as good as another, he was about to dig when she came ru