Blackfeather
18 Business
I NEVER TOOK that wolf-tooth necklace off. It wasn’t like it was on a chain with a clasp. Merv knotted the cord around my neck and it was just too short to pull over my head. Oh, I didn’t wear it outside my clothes or anything. But I always felt those teeth against my skin. I did, however, take to wearing a bandana around my neck. I had two ugly red scars that I didn’t want people staring at.
On Saturday the next weekend, Kyle, Aubrey, and I went up to the Bearclaw Café to get a burger. I saw Harold Watson from the Bar-Double-D with a bunch of other ranchers having coffee. That name always got us laughing as kids because we’d switch the ‘r’ and the ‘a’ around. The three of us were chowing down on the world’s best burgers when I looked up and the guys were standing around our table.
“Can we see it, Ramie?” he asked. “The teeth?” Whoa. News travels fast.
They were respectful, though, and it didn’t seem right to withhold something that was as important as killing wolves on rangeland. We’d all had problems and lost cattle to them. A hunting pair was unusual. We suspected there were more up on the mountain. I pulled the thong out from under my shirt and the guys all nodded their heads when they saw the size of those teeth.
“You two done good,” Harold said. “You’re good people. Thank you.” There was a moment of almost reverence as he looked at my bandana. Well, in for a penny… I pulled the bandana down and away from my neck and they all let out various curses and blessings when they saw the welts.
“My niece is looking for a place to board her trail horse for the winter,” Al Robertson said. “I saw a poster you put up about taking horses in. You still got room?”
“Yes,” I said. “We’re ready for boarders. Have her give me a call.”
By the end of the next week, L&K Stables had its first paying customer.
I’d put up little half-page notices that L&K Stables was open for boarding and would be offering stud services in the spring. Each one had half a dozen little tear-off strips with our phone number on them.
I guess advertising pays. Of course, a little notoriety about the kids who protected their stock and survived a wolf attack didn’t hurt either. Both Kurt and Merv told the story when they saw someone glancing at the flyers in their stores. I think Merv embellished the story somewhat with a tale about spirit walkers or some such. Whatever, it didn’t hurt our reputation.
The first of January, I read on EquineNews about an accident in Colorado where a driver lost control of his truck on ice and jackknifed his rig. He was pulling a horse trailer and while the driver wasn’t hurt, the horse had fallen and was pretty banged up. I called them right away and found out that the horse was going to live but had a lot of bruises and cuts. The owner had decided hauling horses wasn’t anything he was going to do again and I offered to buy the horse. Kyle and I drove down and, for a mere fifteen hundred dollars, came back with a registered American Saddlebred stud that stood close to sixteen hands. He needed rest and recovery, but he was a proud boy.
I hadn’t traveled back to Miranda since my birthday, but I wasn’t too worried about her. I’d left her in a pretty safe place as long as she didn’t blow her cover. She was doing what she knew how to do best. She was trading goods and building her stock. When that girl got her own store, she was going to be a terror. And I also knew now, that time had no relevance. I could wait five years of my life and return to the next day in her timeline.
Boarding horses and picking up a couple more rescues kept Kyle and me pretty busy after school. Aubrey continued to spend about every other weekend out at the ranch and on the off weekends one or both of us would go into town and take her on a date. We didn’t want her thinking that the only thing either of us wanted was sex. We even had a couple of weekends at the ranch when we didn’t have sex. One night we had an old-fashioned slumber party and the three of us sat up in the family room all night watching movies.
I wouldn’t say there was no kissy-face and touchy-feely going on, but we didn’t actually have sex.
“I’ve got some bad news,” Kyle said as we drove into school one Wednesday morning. It was an unusual day as the junior high had a day off, so we didn’t have the kids with us on the drive. I looked at him.
“What?”
“I went traveling last night,” he said. “I plunked into Jason’s body just in time to almost get him killed. He was having a tussle with a private in his troop. I hate those fuckers. They were ganging up on his friend, John—did you ever see the Indian he travels with?” I nodded. I remembered how startled I was the first time I saw the Indian shadowing him. “Well, Jason stepped in between them just as I showed up and almost got killed when he realized I was there. Private Randolph was coming at John with a knife. I barely knocked it aside in time to keep from being skewered.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound like bad news. Thank God you knocked it aside.”
“Yeah. The private is cooling his heels for thirty days in the brig at Fort Number 3. But in the meantime, the troop was sent on to Omaha. Riding across Missouri is no vacation.”
“Yeah, tell me about it.”
“Anyway, I remembered what you said about camping out in St. Joseph. When we got there, I looked high and low. There was no sign of Miss Miranda or any couple who were spending the winter trading. We were only there two nights and then pushed on toward Omaha. I got snatched back before we reached the city.”
“We weren’t there? Maybe we’ll meet in Omaha, then. We must have already left.”
“I’m so pissed that Jason lost you in Indiana. It was that same damned private that got the entire troop confined to quarters for that section of the trip.”
“Wait. Kyle, when were you in St. Joseph?” I asked.
“Near the end of October. They were pushing us to get on to Omaha before we were hit with bad weather.”
“What year?”
“Right after the train ride from Baltimore in ’65.”
“Damn it! It’s the damned time sequence being out of sync. You got there a year before we did, but here it was months afterward. How are we ever going to get together? We should be having this adventure with each other.”
We were getting through school. The end was in sight. Just another month. And our horse-ranch was beginning to take shape, too. We’d rescued three more horses, but it wasn’t just a rescue operation. Harley, our Saddlebred stallion, was gentle as a lamb. He had a good pedigree, and we already had three people come out to look at him for standing stud to their mares. He was strutting around the secondary paddock like he owned the place. We were keeping him and Pa’s Bolt way separate.
He was a big boy and Kyle and I were walking out to the pasture when we saw him covering Bows. We hadn’t intended to breed the two pinto mares yet, but they were healthy and their hooves were regrown so that they could enjoy life. It sure looked like Bows was enjoying it. And so was Harley. Kyle and I leaned against the fence to watch.
We’re ranch-raised, so it’s not like we’ve never seen animals breed. We’ve seen the bulls down in the pasture cover half a dozen cows in a couple hours. We’d had to get out there and separate out the rest of the estrous cows or the damned bull would just keep fucking till he keeled over. It looked like we’d have to bring Harley in, too. As soon as he was done with Bows, he started in on Bells. Kyle shifted back and forth a little and moved some closer to me. I knew what was going through his mind. Well, maybe it wasn’t his mind. I think those kinds of things just bypass the brain.
“Is Aubrey coming out this weekend?” I asked. We looked at each other and started to giggle. He edged away and blushed. I punched him in the shoulder and blushed myself. Poor Aubrey was going to have a sore pussy by the end of the weekend.
We started getting calls booking our studs. One buckskin AQHA stud and one dun American Saddlebred stud. We had modest stud fees for our first time out and over a dozen mares showed up in May and early June. Our boys were having a good time.
Between the time we spent taking care of horses, doing school work, and dating Aubrey, I was still busy looking at maps and plotting out where Miranda was. Our journey had taken us far away from the USGS maps that I had on the wall. I’d planned to go from Tennessee to St. Louis when I bought those maps and instead I cut west. All that planning for nothing. But I got some map software for my laptop and did my best to plot what our route had been.
Getting from St. Joseph to Omaha was a pretty direct and main route. I estimated that we’d make that trip fully loaded in less than three weeks if the roads weren’t too muddy. What would happen then?
Miranda’s stated goal was to rescue her stepsister and make sure her mother was cared for. But what if they’d already left Omaha by the time we got there? Kyle was there by the fall of ’65. The earliest Miranda could arrive was the spring of ’67. Where would they go next? Mister Jonathan was supposedly there to establish a supply line for building the railroad. I thought Omaha would be the base of operations while he ran up and down the railroad as it was built.
I started doing searches on the Union Pacific and found they began construction the first of January, 1866 and by that fall were already as far as Cozad, Nebraska, following the Platte River. If Kyle’s unit was moving with the railroad, he was probably wintering at Fort McPherson. I managed to project a huge map of Nebraska and Wyoming on my wall and draw out the route of the railroad and the stops. I even went down to the Railroad Museum in Laramie and looked at their maps and the schedule. Laramie would be founded overnight in April of 1868. The railroad would get there in May.
Kyle studied the map, too. He nodded and pointed out various forts along the way and where known Indian problems came from. There was nothing safe about the West. I gave him a blue Sharpie so he could mark his travels on the same map.
Kyle’s birthday was coming up, but it was on Monday. Aubrey visited the weekend before his birthday and spent Friday and Saturday with me. We teased Kyle something fierce but she didn’t ever go to his room until she woke him up with a blowjob on Sunday morning. The next twenty-four hours were his.
I, on the other hand, was fucked within an inch of my life.
I’m not a sexy girl or even particularly pretty. In my opinion, at least. Aubrey tells me different, but she’s as horny as I am. She’s also beautiful. I’m nearly six feet tall, skinny, and ruddy complected. I guess I should use more lotions on my skin or something. My tits not only aren’t a handful, they’re barely a mouthful. And the only mouth that’s ever been full of them is Aubrey’s.
She, on the other hand, has dark tan skin that is so clear you can almost see through it. She’s a perfect five-four and has an hourglass figure that singes eyebrows when she walks by. She’s got a real bikini butt and I could bury my face between her breasts and stay there all day. My idea of heaven is making love to Aubrey.
I spent a lot of time in heaven Friday and Saturday nights.
Aubrey had never watched horses breed. We had a mare each for Harley and Bolt on Saturday. She watched in fascination. Every time either Kyle or I walked by her, we petted her and kissed her. I’d keep whispering in her ear when I touched her—dumb little things like ‘Bet you want Kyle to mount you just like that, don’t you.’ Her first little gasp told me I was right.
“By midnight tonight, when Kyle finally gets into your pussy, you’ll already have come so many times you’ll pass out before he fills the first condom,” I told her as I scrubbed her in the shower before dinner. I pinched at her nipples, never quite squeezing them, but letting my soapy hands grip and slide off them. They kept sticking out farther and farther. “Kyle’s not going to be able to eat his dinner tonight. He’s going to be staring at your teats, drooling to get his lips on them.”
“Ramie, it’s Kyle we’re supposed to be teasing. Why are you teasing me like this? I want you!”
“Aubs, don’t you think he’s standing on the other side of this wall in his shower? I bet he’s got his ear plastered against the wall and his cock soaped up in his hand just waiting to hear you squeal.” I moved my fingers down and shampooed her pussy. I got everything very clean and she squealed twice in the process. If Kyle really was in the other shower, I hoped he was fast at his recovery.
We stepped out of the shower and I dried Aubrey off, taking time to suck on her nipples some more. I never got a chance to dry myself.
She pushed me out of the bathroom and I landed sprawled on the bed. Her mouth was glued to my pussy, pushing aside my sparse hair with her tongue. Watching the horses and teasing her had me on a hair-trigger, too. When she did that thing where she runs her tongue up one side of my hole, around my clit, and down the other side, it was me that was screaming.
We were late getting up to the house for dinner and both of us blushed all through dinner.
When Aubrey slipped out of my room at midnight and went to Kyle, I was exhausted but sexually energized. I knew what I’d be hearing soon and figured I wasn’t done for the night, but I had to give my pussy a rest for a little while.
I opened my window to get some of the fresh night air in and some of the sex smell out. I hadn’t seen the raven since November, so I was surprised when he flitted down immediately and landed on my sill.
“Well, if it ain’t old Blackfeather,” I drawled. “You came too late to see the sex and I’m too sore to rub one off for your entertainment, you pervert.” Of course, I was standing there in all my glory but I pretty much ignored him and went about studying the map, tracing the line from St. Joseph to Omaha and then along the railroad to Laramie. I wasn’t expecting the old bird to land on my shoulder. His claws were sharp but I froze so he didn’t get scared and gouge me with them.
He turned his good eye toward me and leaned down to look at my wolf’s teeth.
Awkawkawkawk!
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