Sweet Sarah Ross

She lay down on her back, sure she would never move again. It was a merciful torture to be lying there with every muscle in her body throbbing and quivering. She was only vaguely aware when Powell left the campsite, but she was acutely aware when he returned, for he seemed to be moving about far too busily for a man who had just trudged God knew how many miles on wounded feet.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Gathering wood to build a fire.”

She felt a faint stirring of hope. “You have meat to cook?”

“I wish,” he said. “No, it’s rather that we have company.”

She groaned when she rose up on an elbow. “Company?” she echoed weakly.

“The prairie wolf. The one with the cropped ear.”

She groaned again when she sank back down onto her bed of leaves. “Let’s kill it and eat it.”

“That might not be so easy. Nor so wise.”

“I know it might not be easy, but why might it not be wise?”

He began to stack the wood to build his fire about five feet away from her. He paused at length before answering, “I don’t know. Just a feeling.”

Her only feeling at the moment was of bare-boned existence. Breathing in. Breathing out. Body stinging with pain top to toe. Stinging, too, with the will to live. She worked sluggishly through the implications of his statement. “So, if it wouldn’t be wise to kill it, you must think it’s useful to us somehow.”

“Wolves have been known to stalk a man or an animal for miles, so I’m not saying he’s not out for our blood. It’s just that…” He trailed off.

“Did you know it was following us all night?”

“No. I sensed at different times that we weren’t alone, but he’s a clever one and didn’t show himself. He could have easily made a move on us at almost any point, but he’s kept his distance. Even now it was only by chance that I happened to catch a glimpse of the silhouette of his ear in the fading moonlight before he ducked into the bushes on the ridge opposite the hollow.”

“What’s the fire for, then?”

“To keep him at bay.”

“Just in case he was thinking of us as dinner, as I was happy to consider him?”

“Let’s just say that he might be waiting until we’re in a worse way than we are now before going in for the kill. After all, he has to rustle his grub as easily as he can with the least risk to himself.”

“If he has to wait until we’re in worse shape than we are now,” she said wearily, “then he must be in a pretty bad way himself.”

Powell brought the fire to life. “Exactly what I was thinking, Miss Harris.”

That revived her a bit. She raised herself back up on one elbow and saw that he sat squatted, balanced on his heels, and was tending the fire with a stick. She said, “That’s my fourth good idea. The first and second were for the trousers, the third for the razor.”

He looked up and met her glance. “Keeping score?”

“With a hungry prairie wolf stalking us, Mr. Powell, I’d like you to think that I’m more useful alive than as wolf bait.” She smiled faintly. “Not that I want to give you any bad ideas.”

The flickering light from the flames licked the sharpedged planes of his face and blued the unkempt black curls that spun around his head. Something about the way his eyes narrowed as they rested on her suggested that he was enjoying a private joke. His expression riled her enough to shake off her tiredness.

“Although,” she said, rising laboriously to her feet, “it seems you already arrived at that idea on your own.”

She moved toward the fire, plopped down across from him so that she was looking at him through the flames. Her bonnet was still tied around her neck, but hanging down her back. She picked apart the knot in the ties and pulled the bonnet off. After folding it in her lap, she attempted to finger-groom the tangles of her hair, which felt as wild and untended to her as the surrounding landscape. Her scalp was beginning to itch. She had a vision of paradise, and it was a hot, scented bath and a luxurious shampoo.

“So how do you do it?” she asked, nodding toward the flames. “Make a fire, that is.”

His lips curved up in the barest suggestion of a smile. “So that you’ll know how to make one after you’ve thrown me to the wolf?”

The suggestion took her aback. “You think I’m capable of that?”

Noting her surprise, he replied, “Well now, it seems I’ve given you a bad idea. But it might have been one that would have come to you eventually, given the right set of circumstances.”

She wasn’t a bit tired now. She didn’t know which danger had alerted her senses more, the one stalking them outside the campsite or the one she felt hovering above the circle of the fire.

“You have experience with Sioux women,” she said, hugging her knees to her chin and arranging her skirts around her feet, “which gives you an idea how a white woman might behave outside the conventions.” She rested one cheek on a knee. “Does that mean you won’t tell me how to make a fire, so that I have to depend on you for food and warmth?”

He shook his head slightly as if to dismiss this absurd, yet not so absurd, discussion. Then he slipped his hand inside his trouser pocket and tossed something over to her. The sparkle of the small objects in the firelight brought her head up. She sat back reflexively so that she was cross-legged Indian-style, and two stones fell in the trough created by her skirts spread across her knees. She picked up the chunks and looked at him in question.

“Iron pyrites,” he explained. He withdrew several more pieces from his pocket and showed her how to strike them to achieve the desired result. “Starting fires from sticks is a tedious business, so I was happy to have found these rocks as we walked along the riverbed this past evening. Keep them. You never know when you’ll need them.”

While she untied the strings of the reticule at her waist in order to slip the rocks inside, she considered the unpleasant possibility that they might be separated. She was about to ask which one of them should carry her valuable scissors, but before she had a chance to pose the question, he tossed another object over to her. The next thing to land in her lap was one of the strips from her petticoat, bundled into a ball, which, she discovered upon opening it, contained a bunch of berries.

“Dinner,” he said.

She was catching on to his ways. “So that’s what you were doing all the time we were walking next to those bushes. I thought you had chosen the route to offer us protection from attack.”

“That was part of it.”

“You were harvesting the berries as we walked,” she said, recalling that she had glimpsed in his hand an occasional flash of metal in the moonlight. The razor’s tilted blade would not have been exposed enough for the task, so he must have used the scissors. “I hardly noticed what you were doing, just as I hardly noticed you gathering the bits of iron pyrite as we walked along the riverbed. You were able to bend down and pick them up without breaking stride.”

“Which is why I’m still alive.”

She decided that he had more useful ideas for her scissors than she did. Instead of asking for them back, she inquired, “What kind of berries are these?”

“The bitter kind,” he warned her. Then he opened the bundle he had prepared for himself and began eating.

She did the same. Having been forewarned of the taste helped cut the effect of the bitterness. “Not so bad,” she said, munching slowly, fighting the ravenous impulse to gobble, savoring every sour flavor.

“Tell me,” he said, “what else you have in your bag.”

She sighed. “Pins and needles and thread. A few coins. How I regret not having equipped myself more completely! When I think of all that I left behind in the wagon—”

“Better not to think of it.”

“Yes, well, the needle and thread can still be useful. I was thinking that I should repair the rent in your shirt so that it doesn’t look as if it was robbed from a dead man—in the event anyone should notice the tear and care about it. I could embroider something over it, you see, to disguise it.”

“You like to embroider?”

“Not at all! It drives me to distraction, but I can do a respectable bird or two, and I even have the right colors for an oriole.”