Nate inched forward. The rank smell of blood and urine washed over him. The figure on the ground reached out, and moaned.
Discarding caution, Nate stepped to the man’s side and sank onto a knee. “Do you speak the white man’s tongue?” When he didn’t get an answer, he switched to his wife’s. “Do you speak Shoshone?”
A hand clutched at his, the skin hot to the touch.
“You are a Blackfoot, aren’t you?” Nate reverted to English again, knowing full well he wouldn’t get a reply. He looked for sign of the others, but the warrior was alone.
Coming to a sudden decision, Nate slipped both arms under the man. It was awkward, carrying the warrior and his rifle, both, but he managed. He worked the latch with his eblows and pushed the door open with his foot. Candlelight splashed over his burden and he nearly recoiled in revulsion.
The warrior was a ruin. His left eye was gone, ripped from the socket, a black cavity all that remained. The right eye was so bloodshot, the white of the eye was red. Scratch or claw marks criss-crossed his face and there were bite marks on his throat. One of those bites had severed a vein, soaking his buckskins with blood. It was a miracle the man was alive.
Peter, Erleen and Aunt Aggie were still at the table. Astonishment had rendered them mute, but not for long. Erleen threw herself out of her chair, crying in dismay, “Where did that heathen come from?”
Nate carefully laid the warrior on the floor. Each breath the man took threatened to be his last. “Question?” Nate asked in sign language. “Enemy wound you?”
The warrior tried to reply, but couldn’t make his fingers work. He tried to speak, but all that came out of his mouth was a trickle of fresh blood.
“Someone get a glass of water for him,” Nate said.
The warrior’s red eye swept the room and stopped on Fitch and Harper. Mewing, he thrust his hand at them, then looked at Nate, trying to convey some meaning.
Nate didn’t understand, and said so in sign language.
Whatever the warrior was struggling to get across died with him; he arched his body, convulsed, and exhaled his final breath.
Peter, Erleen and Aggie had come over, and Peter asked, “Is he dead?”
“Where did you find that savage?” was Erleen’s question.
Aunt Aggie had one, too. “What was he trying to tell you?”
Nate wished to God he knew.
The Smell of Madness
The search commenced an hour after sunrise.
Nate was the first one up. He quietly slipped out to bury the Blackfoot and covered the mound of earth with rocks to discourage scavengers.
Erleen insisted on a big breakfast. Her daughters and Agatha helped cook and bake. They made flap-jacks and oatmeal and toast and corn cakes. Peter remarked that it was too bad they didn’t have eggs and bacon, his usual morning fare back home.
Nate wasn’t going to eat, but the smells were too tantalizing to resist. Especially when he learned they had maple syrup to put on the flapjacks. Once he started eating, he found he was hungrier than he thought. Four flapjacks, a bowl of oatmeal, and two corn cakes later he was full.
It was decided that Aunt Aggie would stay at the cabin with the girls and Philberta.
“Erleen and I will work as a pair,” Peter announced. “Fitch and Harper will hunt together, too. That leaves you, Mr. King, to search by yourself, if you are agreeable.”
Nate was more than willing. He could cover more ground alone.
Fitch and Harper brought the horses from the corral. Nate saddled his bay while they threw saddle blankets and saddles on theirs. Everyone had a rifle except Erleen, who was armed with two pistols. It was decided that she and Peter would search on the right side of the stream, Fitch and Harper would take the other side. That left Nate free to roam as he pleased.
The day started off promising enough. A clear sky and the bright sun dispelled some of the gloom that perpetually shrouded the valley floor.
Nate was the last to leave. “Keep the door closed and barred at all times,” he cautioned Agatha.
“Don’t fret. I won’t let anything happen to the girls or Philberta.”
“If you need me, fire a shot out the window and I’ll come at a gallop. But whatever you do, don’t step foot out of the cabin.”
“We’ll be fine,” Aunt Aggie insisted.
Tyne smiled and waved as Nate rode off and he returned the gesture. He stuck to the trail until it brought him to the cow elk with its belly torn open. Bent low, he rode in ever widening circles. He was thirty feet out when he spied a few indistinct prints. Dismounting, he gave them a closer scrutiny. They weren’t mountain lion tracks or wolf tracks. They might be bear tracks, though no claws were evident. Or they might have been made by something else.
Nate rode in the direction the prints pointed. For half an hour he threaded through some of the thickest forest he had ever seen. He was constantly ducking to avoid low limbs and skirting logs. Many were covered with moss. It reminded him of the forests along the Pacific coast, which he visited once years ago.
As Nate neared the high cliffs, the shadows deepened. It wasn’t even noon, yet he would swear it was twilight. The green of the trees and the grass became a ghostly gray. It lent the illusion he was in a spectral realm. It didn’t help that the woods were so still. Wildlife was completely absent.
At last the trees thinned. Ahead reared the rock ramparts. Nate could see the top by craning his head back. He shuddered to think of his fate should the cliff unexpectedly collapse. Tons of rock and dirt would smash down on top of him, crushing him to a pulp.
The vegetation ended short of the cliff, leaving an open space between the trees and the rock face. Nate debated which way to go and reined up the valley toward the junction of the cliffs beyond the cabin.
Nate was acting on a hunch. He didn’t have all the particulars worked out in his head yet, but he had enough confidence in his judgment to put his hunch to the test. He hadn’t gone twenty yards when a spot of pink and white caused him to draw rein. Curious, he hung by an elbow and one leg, Comanche fashion, and nearly lost his grip and his breakfast when shock hit him like a physical blow. He was used to violence. He had witnessed more than a few atrocities. But this was unthinkable.
The pink and white was a human finger, or what was left of it. Chewed pink flesh from the nail to the knuckle and gnawed white bone below. Judging by the fresh condition of the flesh, it hadn’t been there long. Since early that morning, Nate surmised. He left it there. Showing it to the others would only sicken them. And they would still insist on continuing the search. They had proven blind to the danger they were in.
The chink of the bay’s hooves was unnaturally loud. The wind was stronger here at the base of the cliffs, and every now and again a gust would stir the trees and brush.
Nate looked for tracks, but the ground was too hard. Smudges and a few vague prints were all he found. Anything might have made them. But the finger practically confirmed his hunch. The bite marks weren’t those of the sharp shearing teeth of a bear or mountain lion or any other meat-eater. They were made by something with strong but blunt teeth, the same as the bite marks on the cow elk, and on the Blackfoot.
Nate didn’t have all the pieces of the puzzle worked out yet. The what, he thought he knew. The why, he had an idea. And if he was right, the horror of it all was beyond imagining. He must get the proof he needed to convince the others quickly, before anyone else fell prey to the creatures responsible.
Creatures was the right word. They were no longer what they had been. They were like beasts, and yet worse than beasts, in that where wild animals killed to fill their bellies, these things killed for the sheer cruel joy of killing. The cow elk proved that. They only ate part of her. A mountain lion or wolves would have eaten her down to the bone.