Morning Star as the young woman emerged from the woods, her small hands held in the air.
'Behold a mighty warrior,' she said, without so much as a smile.
January stepped from cover, gun lowered but ready to come up again in an instant. After a moment Shaw emerged from a hemlock thicket a considerable distance from where he'd gone to ground.
'Well,' said January, going to pick up the reins of the startled horses, 'think how foolish we'd have felt if you'd been a mighty warrior, and we'd only shrugged and said: That noise is only Hannibal's clever and beautiful wife . . .'
'The wife of Sun Mouse is clever and beautiful,' agreed Morning Star, helping herself to two parfleches of Manitou's pemmican, which she slung over her shoulders. 'And her eyesight is good enough for her to find the tracks of white men who passed along the other side of these hills going west the night before last in the rain . . . and who this morning passed the same way, going east. When they traveled west on the night of the rain, all of them - trappers and camp-setters and one Cree woman - wore moccasins. Now this morning, traveling east, one of them wears boots.'
Chapter 13
The trail swung south through the broken jumble of gullies and hills: five men, a woman - Shaw pointed out where she'd squatted to urinate - and twice that many beasts. As Morning Star had observed, one of the men was definitely wearing boots.
'That'll be the Beauty,' remarked Shaw after a mile or two. 'He gets Fingers Woman to rawhide his moccasin soles, like they do in Mexico. I ain't yet seen that track.'
'Staying off their horses until they get clear of the valley.' January shaded his eyes to squint east, where a long, dry draw led toward the distant river. 'Cute.' As much to keep their own dust down, as to better read the ground-sign, Shaw, January, and Morning Star were afoot as well.
'This far south of the camps, white company might not be all they're lookin' to fight shy of.'
Again and again the trail disappeared, eradicated by the dragging of blankets, the use of old stream beds or rocks: the Dutchman had been in the mountains a long time and knew all the tricks. 'I'm beginning to feel we're not wanted,' said January.
'They really got a secret valley, where beaver's plentiful?' Shaw asked Morning Star in his painful French, coming back down what had turned out to be a false trail back toward camp.
'If you had a lovely lady,' replied the young woman, 'and hid her away in a secret place, would you thank one who spoke of that place to a stranger? The whole of this land was once a secret,' she went on gravely. 'Every valley had a stream where the beaver were plentiful and big. Now those streams run silent. And the Beauty and the Dutchman don't want to keep their valley a secret out of respect for the beaver or care for the spirits of the valley: it is only that they do not wish to share their furs with another man. When the beaver are all gone - not a single one of them left - what will you do then? What next will you want?'
She broke away from them and walked on ahead, leading her spotted Nez Perce horse, and her short, slightly bowed legs outdistanced even the men's long stride in her anger. For a time January had nothing to say. They were far beyond sight of the camps here, alone in a world of larks, buffalo grass and yellow-brown sagebrush on the hill slopes above. The stillness was enormous. The world as it had been, thought January, before the Americans came . . . Americans wanting beaver skins to sell for hats so they could make money. Americans wanting slaves brought in from Africa so they could grow cotton to sell to make money. Americans wanting land that the Sioux and Shoshone and Cherokee had since time immemorial lived on as hunters and as farmers ... not so that they could farm themselves, but so they could sell it to other whites for farms, so that they - the sellers - could make money.
He'd been poor too long to have turned down a partnership in the American Fur Company had someone offered it to him ... or a hundred acres of Arkansas land baldly stolen from the Cherokee, for that matter. But last