Chapter Ten
Oklahoma Territory—November 27, 1893
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 stillbut 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.
