Chapter Ten Oklahoma Territory—November 27, 1893
Chapter Ten
six weeks later
My black boots crunched chestnut-brown leaves. “Damnation.”
I wouldn’t flush out turkeys if I stomped through the forest. It was deranged to infiltrate the Wild Bunch’s hunting grounds, but I hadn’t found game by my stream in a moon.
The seasons were changing, autumn tipping into winter.
These past months had been backbreaking work preparing for the cold: churning butter and washing laundry, digging a cellar and hammering together a tar paper shack.
During long autumn nights, the wind slipped between my shack’s wooden planks, the gusts whistling and groaning.
So I’d stuffed newsprint and fabric scraps into the gaps.
This past age had been me with the wind and the meadows and my horses.
I’d barely spoken to another. Quick, curt information exchanged with my brothers every few weeks while I did their laundry.
Them, asking for fresh butter and promising to come back on the morrow to help dig my well.
Olive and her girls had dropped by a handful of times, and I’d met her serious husband, Asa, and their son, Thad.
Asa, hands resting in his trouser pockets, watching silvery vines of vetch tremble in the wind, not one muscle in his expression changing.
He was still but not melancholic—more like he’d speak when he had something to say.
Through the wildwood, I’d studied the Lawman.
As a renegade, he must wander the territory causing havoc, but every time I glimpsed him, he’d been almost reverentially tending his land.
Once, I’d dutifully attended a barn raising, working silently. Folks were unsmiling. Desperate. Water and resources scarce, much of the grass burnt from the wildfires those first days. A mood of lawlessness snapped across the frontier, like an old rawhide lasso.
I stepped over a hollow and crouched, touched a V-shaped indentation in the leaves—a recent turkey scratch.
I yelped and stalked toward the stream, Winchester raised.
Turkeys were social varmints. If I was close, they’d come running straight for my gun.
I pulled a branch aside and continued deeper into the woods.
With the back of my palm, I brushed away a strand of splitbeard bluestem.
The silvered, feathery stalks spiky and soft, the white seed heads shadowing as winter approached.
I glimpsed a longlost moment of standing beside Pa building a new barn.
I wasn’t sure whether it was one memory or many, the edges of the recollection smoky and tarnished.
Silvered, like bluestem or an old daguerreotype image.
It had been summer, the air glistening with sunshine. “You gotta make sure you look before you swing,” Pa said.
I lined up my nail on the beam, tongue pressed against my teeth, Pa holding the plank for me. I slammed the hammer against nail, the reverberation shaking down my narrow arm.
I glanced over my shoulder, brows raised. “Like that?”
He gnawed his lip below his black handlebar mustache, as if trying not to laugh. “Sure enough, sweetheart, that’s how you build. Just one board after another until you’re done.”
There must’ve been a time when he’d pushed me back into the house, hoping I’d learn to darn hems or bake a cobbler with my ma, but I only remembered those long afternoons on the farm with him, learning how to survive—how to hunt and clean a gun, how to break a wild mustang, how to speak so that my ideas were clear.
In the thicket, with the cinnamony scent of cedar and the damp autumn leaves, the turkey returned my cry.
This was it—the end of the hunt. I must head home soon or be stuck to freeze overnight on outlaw land.
I chambered a round in my gun, steadied my arm, mimicked his yelps.
Course it was foolhardy to hunt on outlaw land, but I needed these birds.
And I was bored, desperate for something.
Once, with a rumble, the Wild Bunch had swept through my woods.
An azure bandanna covering the pallid face of unhinged Bitter Creek.
The square jaw of a handsome Black man, Quiet Bill; the thick, curved mustache of Tulsa Jack; and a few others cloaked in their leather dusters.
There was the clamor of hoofbeats, the eerie silence of their wordlessness.
An exhilarating moment, and then they were gone.
After not recognizing the Lawman, I’d studied the outlaw posters something fierce when I’d rode to town for supplies.
Though tales went that the outlaws’ hideout was still in Payne County down south aways, rumor had it they’d also staked a new haunt mere miles from me by the Salt Flats, an uncanny stretch of colorless wasteland.
I held my breath, Winchester at the ready.
But the birds didn’t burst from the brush—so I continued on.
The angle of filtered sunlight reminded me of another afternoon pressing through buckbrush.
I’d led Smallhopes along the ravine, showing her how to step over bramble and thorn, a basket of hazelnuts looped over her saddle.
The autumn air had been thick with summer’s moisture, the wildwood humming with forest sounds—when I’d chanced upon Niabi.
She strode between some evergreens, a foraging basket of woven cattail rushes pressed to her side. “Minnie?”
I stepped deeper into the emerald and gold shadows and said hello.
Smallhopes nipped at her basket, and Niabi offered her a handful of blackberries. “You have a buckskin?” Niabi grinned as Smallhopes nosed her palm.
“I do.” I crouched, pulled a twig from the white feathering around Smallhopes’s fetlock. “Wondering why I’m towing a draft horse through the underbrush?”
She knelt, removed a dried seedpod from Smallhopes’s fringe. Raised a brow at me. “It is an odd choice.”
“Just training on various terrains,” I said.
“Ah.” Niabi lifted her basket, her hands graceful and tapered, a smudge of blackberry on her fingertips. She tapped the woven white oak, her expression good-natured. “Why?”
I unlooped my bonnet from the saddle horn, wiped sweat from my collarbone. Deep in the thicket, a few doves sang a quaint, mournful song. “Readying for whatever may come.”
“Would you show me how you train horses?” Niabi asked.
We trekked back to my homestead, and I explained how I worked with my draft horses. I brought out Cricket and performed a few complicated maneuvers as Niabi sat in the grass, drinking sweet tea. “What’s your fanciest trick?” she asked.
I resettled my Stetson above my loose braid. Cricket and I had been practicing a handless swing mount. In case I ever needed to flee in a hurry, pistol trained—my other arm indisposed. One thing I’d learned in outlaw country: Prepare for anything and everything.
“Watch this.” I lifted a pail heavy with whortleberries, the steel bucket ungainly, berries rolling about.
I gave Cricket the mount’s signal, and he rested his knees against the ground, held steady, his black mane fluttering in the breeze.
I swung up, my arms full of whortleberries.
Niabi let out a surprised laugh. “By thunder.”
Cricket rose, my hips aligning in the saddle. I patted his withers. “Steady,” I told him and dismounted.
I offered him an apple slice, then held the pail of inky-blue berries out toward Niabi. We ate a few handfuls, the tart flavor bursting, the air full of the crispness of autumn.
“Well, come on,” I said, gesturing Niabi forward. “You try.”
Her posture was unsure, but I glimpsed yearning plain on her face. She wanted to try. Like me, Niabi rustled with curiosity and passion.
I shared a few tips. “Just be confident,” I told her. “If you’re at ease, he’ll be calm too.”
I rubbed Cricket’s fawn-brown jaw. “Easy.”
Niabi gave Cricket the command, and he knelt, his barrel at a slope. She vaulted—and her stomach slammed into his saddle, forehead slapping against the pommel. She was sliding off, moccasins peeking from her plum-pink skirt.
“Can I?” I asked, my hands hovering over her hip.
“For all the sky above, please.” Her voice was muffled, amusement threaded through her tone.
I shoved her into the saddle, her posture adjusting until she was stable.
Cricket stood, and Niabi grinned, laugh lines wrinkled beside her eyes—and a longing for friendship clicked open in my chest. I remembered long ago, splayed in the high grass of a downward slope, the tawny color of the wheat the same sheen as my leather saddle—watching clouds hasten on by, my sister on one side, Lark on the other.
How many seasons had we lain and watched the sky, how many moments planning our future, my heart thumping my chest, myself too full of wonder?
A while later, after Niabi and I ate turnips and deer jerky, she perused my weapons, her fingers brushing the glossy wooden handle of my scattergun. “I don’t know much of your tribe.” I handed her my father’s 1873 Peacemaker. “Do Osage women learn about guns?”
Niabi rubbed the buffalo horn, spun open the chamber.
“Yes, women know how to shoot.” She wrinkled her nose.
Knocked her head back and forth, as if working through how to explain.
“My husband—” She tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear.
A faint red line inked down her center part. “Did I tell you I’m married?”
I shook my head.
“We wed last spring,” Niabi said. “It’s something new but my husband: He’s a good man. We are two halves. Moon and sun, night and day. But—” Fondness edged the corner of her mouth. “My husband doesn’t like me wandering among the homesteaders. He worries.”
I handed her some bullets. “So why do you?”