The Shirt On His Back - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,85

unable to sleep for as much as a minute between caution and cold. He was dead wrong about that and through the rest of the night, turn and turn about with Hannibal, had to fight not to drop off on guard duty, digging the sharpened end of a stick into the heel of his hand or the calf of his leg to remain awake. Even the gnawing hunger that swept him wasn't sufficient to keep him alert. Morning found him cramped, aching and weak from weariness. Even during the season of sugar harvest, old Michie Simon had fed his cane hands to keep them prime for work. He would have sold Hannibal to the Arabs for a bowl of rice and beans and thrown in Morning Star for lagniappe.

'Shall we cross the river?' asked the fiddler, when the first stains of dawn whitened the freezing air. By the roar of the current on the rocks it hadn't gone down much. 'What are you doing?' Hannibal protested a moment later as January scattered the fire, used the remainder of the dampish wood as a makeshift shovel to bury the coals.

'Trying to avoid sending up a smoke signal,' January returned regretfully, since his clothes were still damp and the morning chill cut like a razor. 'It's light enough to see one now.'

Hannibal made a face and coughed. His body was racked with shivers, and he looked like a dying man. 'I suppose the next thing you're going to tell me is that you forgot to put a haunch of buffalo in your pocket before we fled.'

'Sorry.'

They made their way through the trees to the river, but as January had suspected, it had risen higher in the night.

'We were in that?' Hannibal stared, aghast, at the churning brown torrent, the white teeth of foam and the leaping snags of uprooted trees.

'He'll be hanged yet; Though every drop of water swear against it.' January considered the flood, then the foothills behind them. 'It may be for the best,' he added. 'If the Omaha do come after us, they'll look along the river. There's less cover on that side. From here, we're not far from the foothills, where we can stay in the timber. All we need to do is follow the river north—'

'And not meet the Blackfeet. Or starve.'

'We're going to starve either way,' said January firmly. 'Let's do it on the move.'

According to everyone in the camp, from the youngest engages on up to Jim Bridger, nobody - even set afoot without weapons would starve in the mountains in summer. Any number of the mountaineers could tell of surviving such situations even if they were being chased by Indians. By noon, January had come to the conclusion that these men were either lying, or had arrived at some more favorable deal with God than he had despite years of going to confession. 'I think the trick is, that you have to not mind eating bugs and carrion,' offered Hannibal as they made a careful - and rather fruitless - search around the feet of every lodgepole pine at the timberline, when they reached it, and found no cone that had not been thoroughly looted of its minuscule nourishment by squirrels.

'As long as we don't end up carrion ourselves,' said January, 'I'll be happy.'

Where the trees began, high up the tumbled land around the feet of the true mountains, the river was visible for miles upstream. January could see no sign of habitation. A few miles to the north of them the river bent eastward around a knee of hills; water spread by last night's rise glistened in a wide bottomland where a multitude of streams came together.

'If the Omaha are following us down the river,' he said after a time, 'we've got a head start on them today, anyway. We should be able to get some fish, there where the river's spread.'

'At the moment,' sighed Hannibal as he climbed stiffly to his feet, 'bugs and carrion sound very good.'

During the course of the afternoon, January had cause to be grateful for his own interest in how other men made their livings, and for the loquacity of the mountaineers in sharing the tales of their survival. As they came down to the pools left by the flood, he recognized both cattails and camas, which had edible - if not particularly appetizing - roots, and, though it was early in the year, several varieties of berry. He cut a sapling and sharpened it to a