I felt as if I were slipping into someone else’s dream. The atmosphere thickened and smelt of things longlost. Into the void between wind and hoofbeat, there was sound.Once, the prairie was quiet and I was alone.I rubbed Whistlejacket’s neck, his legs blurring silver and smoke through the goldenrod. The mirage faded, the varnished gloss withering to muted tones. Into the quiet, buried deep within the earth, something clicked into place—a bullet guttered into the chamber.
Whistlejacket skidded on a deteriorating edge of the slope, and I jerked his reins, avoiding the bramble. I shook my head, irritated with my lack of focus. I was fatigued, just daydreaming old, forgotten tales. I shoved away fanciful notions and considered the autumn landscape before me—
Beyond the burn, tawny sideoats and yellow melilots trembled in the wind, and alongside the creek the blackjack oaks warmed toward autumn, brown crinkling the leaves, color and life seeping away. It seemed, all of a sudden, autumn had begun. And I knew, too swiftly, winter would be here. There was absolutely no time for nonsense and horsefeathers. I wiped mist from my cheeks and continued. We rounded the curve before my homestead, and within my tent, a long shadow moved.
I yanked my pistol from my holster, held it between both hands, cantered closer, the thud of Whistlejacket’s hooves rattling and stormclouds gathering beyond the rise.
Chapter Eight
Within the stretched, gauzy light of my tent, the profile of a Native woman tilted skyward. Waist-length hair tucked behind her ears, her fingers brushing a copper pot I’d looped over a nail.
I slumped back in my saddle and lowered my Peacemaker, relief easing the tension knotted across my shoulders. Not a bandit but another woman. She wore a burgundy and ochre floral blouse with a navy skirt and ornately beaded moccasins, the cut of her shoes distinct from the Kiowa people I knew from home. The Kiowa lived a handful of miles westward from my parents. Through the years, I’d come to know the Kiowa tribe and learned they were curious about how we lived, just as we were curious about them.
The woman nickered low in her throat and caressed Cricket’s nose. I vaulted from Whistlejacket and walked over. “Good morning,” I said through the gap in my tent.
“I came to say hello,” she said. “I thought you might be lonesome. It seems quiet out here on the prairie.”
Though I knew it was common for Natives to wander onto homesteads, her curiosity seemed netted with compassion. “It is quiet,” I said, “but I have the wind, the birds, the creaking trees.”
She bit her lip and studied my face, surely assessing whether I was a threat. She must have attended one of the mission boarding schools, with her English diction and Western clothing. I relaxed my shoulders, adopting a welcoming posture. “My name is Minnie.”
She considered the crates I’d stacked in a corner. “I’m curious about how you make your home.”
I gestured toward my supplies. “You’re welcome to look at anything.”
She bent and riffled through the potatoes tossed in a wooden box, her brow furrowing at the cuts I’d made. Last night I’d flipped through Pa’sOld Farmer’s Almanacand supposed that was how to cut potatoes. I pushed up the flap of my tent and joined her below the canopy, the light dimming further. “I’m not practiced with planting,” I said.
Her gaze sparked over my mud-splattered riding skirt and gun belt. Rain crackled against the tent. She said, “I don’t enjoy household chores neither.”
We grinned at each other, and I could tell this was a woman I’d once have chosen as a friend. There was a vitality to her that seemed plain fun. But, of course, with everything last spring, I shouldn’t allow others close to me.
She shared that she was Osage but visiting her sister, who’d married into the Kanza tribe, just east over the rise several miles. She gestured to the tree line, where I now noted a few women in the shadows, wringing their knuckles. One had the same thick eyelashes and softly rounded shoulders. That was surely her sister.
The woman stood, hands pressed against her thighs, the black rays of a tattoo peeking from her sleeve. She brushed the foxglove sprigs I’d hung from a rope slung across my tent. “You’re a healer?”
“No.” I knelt and opened a polished wooden box with tonics and salves. I held it out to her. “Just everyday remedies, things my ma makes.”
A breeze squeaked through the doorway, thinning the humid air beneath the canopy. After a moment she came closer and crouched, brushing the collection of amber and turquoise bottles, the strips of gauze and crushed herbs. Ma mixed elixirs and visited neighbors afflicted with one fever or another. I’d stuffed a box with her supplies, expecting there would be plenty of blood and illness in the wildlands. I hadn’t been wrong. On my scrapes from the last week, I’d smearedcrystalized honey and one of Ma’s homemade salves. The pot was almost depleted, and I didn’t know how to make more.
The woman sifted through my bottles, the glass tinkling a melodic chime, and held a vial of Peruna, the amber oil slanting toward the cork stopper. She placed it back with the others, her thumb brushing the thread across the neck of the bottle.
“Would you like it?” I handed her the bottle of Peruna, wanting to share a simple gift. “It’s an elixir. For women.”
She scrunched her nose, her finger bumping over the ornate lettering. “It’s supposed to invigorate your body,” I explained, “soothe any particularly feminine ailments.”
She nodded and slipped the bottle into her bag, curiosity reflected on her face. She closed the medicine box and stood, exiting out into the drizzling rain. I followed and thanked her for visiting. She said she was headed homeward to her family in the Osage Hills on the morrow, but that she would come round when she visited her sister in another month.
“My name is Niabi,” she said and walked away.
I placed one seed potato into the clay, then another, moving down the trench. Wiping my palms on my apron, I studied the furrows. They seemed deep, just as the almanac suggested. Magnolia and Ma had planted the vegetables, as I had such an awful time with mundane tasks. Instead, Pa had taught me how to be silent in the woods, how to soothe a spooked filly, how to lead a team into town. But now every responsibility on the homestead was my own.
I slapped away a horsefly, kept planting. Last spring, with the horseflies buzzing and the redbud trees bleeding fuchsia along the valley, Magnolia and I had foraged for morels in the wildwoods. I’d dug at the base of a decaying elm, my palms caked in mud and wrists scratched up by briars. I pressed back my hair, furious that Magnolia wouldn’t stake claim with me. “I just don’t understand the issue,” I said.
Magnolia linked her hands before her apron, a floral linsey with rosebud embroidery, her basket hanging off the crook of her arm. “I’m marrying and staying home.” Her posture was still, as if she’d dissolve away into that wet, overturned-earth scent of early spring. “It’s the life I choose.”
I scoffed, yanked a mushroom from the undergrowth. “You’ve never been brave enough.”
She flinched, as if I’d slapped her. I lifted my chin, resolute.
