Yelloweye
2 Wild Indians
The Family
I HAVE A BAD FEELING about this, Miranda whispered in Ramie’s mind as they went about their business the next day. Jason didn’t want to be there when you opened the box last night. He’s been holding something back. Maybe hiding something.
“Yeah, but don’t push him. Kyle and Jason have their own demons, sweetheart. Knowing our little brother and sister were growing up in an Indian village must be hard on them. Like us remembering being kidnapped,” Ramie sighed. She finished feeding the stabled horses. With the number of pleasure riders who now boarded their horses at LK Stables, they were building another horse barn and Kyle had gone to check the day’s progress on the construction. The new barn would house the breeding and foaling facility so the old barn would be strictly boarding.
All day, Ramie fought the desire to simply run to the box and read the rest—or, alternatively, to burn it all so she wouldn’t have to find out. But she had a business to run. She had to go to the bank to make the monthly deposits. She had to pay the loans for building and expanding the ranch. She needed to ride out on the northern trail where one of the boarders had reported a tree down across the trail. Work had to be done. Laying the cat to rest had to wait.
Kyle joined Ramie on the way back to the ranch house for dinner and took her hand. They walked quietly. Aubrey met them at the door with a kiss. After they’d scrubbed up they each cuddled a baby and then sat down to a dinner of liver and onions.
“It just floors me,” Cole said. “How can they live with their consciousness split between two times? It defies the laws of physics.”
“Pa, what part of time travel doesn’t defy the laws of physics?” Aubrey asked sweetly. They were all thinking the same thing, but Cole had a definite soft spot for the mother of his grandchildren.
“Well, sweetie, when it was just me traveling, and as much as I can tell the same was true of Phile and Geneive and Joe Teini, everything was one-way. We could go back in time. We affected the present by leaving treasure where we could find it in the future. We got plenty tangled up in the lives we led in that other world, but we didn’t communicate with our present self while we were back in the past,” Cole said. “When we were gone from here, our bodies more or less kept up appearances, but memories of those times were muted and dreamlike. Sometimes it appeared we were sick, like you were after the wolf attack, Ramie. And when our hosts died, that was it.”
“Except you were trapped there for a long time, just like I was,” Ramie said. “Then you went back. Twice. You went when Arthur Alexander summoned you and he gave you his body. You took me with you to meet my great great great grandmother. But for Kyle and me, our hosts communicated with us just like we do with them now. We worked as partners.”
“Still, I never would have guessed that you could bring your hosts with you into our present. And Miranda and Jason, we love you and welcome you here,” Cole added. “I never mean to be disrespectful to our grandparents.”
“We’ve only ever known you as Pa,” Miranda said through Ramie’s voice. “I wish I could connect all those dots, but we’re no older than Ramie and Kyle.”
“I love learning from your experience, though,” Mary Beth said. “Your pie dough is the best ever.”
“Excuse me,” Ashley said. “The love-fest is nice, but back to the subject at hand. I think you just captured the difference, Cole. You had Kyle Redtail as a host. Geneive had Caitlin. Ramie had Miranda and Kyle had Jason. When you were there, two consciousnesses inhabited the body and one took control. Ramie and Miranda talked about it and were companions. You just jerked control away from Kyle and made him sit quietly. But the difference is that Caitlin and Phile aren’t inhabiting someone else’s body. They’ve never once mentioned a host.”
They sat quietly at the table as what Ashley said sank in. If it was true, Caitlin and Phile were the same people in both timeframes. They didn’t have hosts. They each had two bodies.
They finished their meal and cleaned up. Ramie and Aubrey got the children bathed and ready for bed. Theresa cuddled up in Kyle’s lap again while Aubrey nursed Katherine. Mary Beth and Ashley curled together in Cole’s lap as Ramie extracted the pages from the box and began reading again.
Phile: The People
I have to write about growing up Cheyenne and how we found out that was what we were. Yelloweye had provided a powerful wise woman in our village to teach us, but he found someone to teach us in now-time as well.
There are certain things you never think about. Like earth. The name of our planet is Earth. We call the dirt on the ground ‘earth’. Earth isn’t a name for a planet. It’s the same as calling it ‘world’. We name the things that are other than us. Mars and Venus. They aren’t Earth.
We knew we weren’t Crow or Lakota. They were other than us. We wouldn’t even have looked for a name if we didn’t exist in both times. We were the People. They were Pawnee. Those others were whiteman. We didn’t need to name ourselves.
It was the same with Phile and me. People in the tribe called us like they called all the kids. Little boy and little girl. Or now, they often called us Hestȧhkeho, Twins. When we became adults, the Great Spirit, or perhaps Yelloweye, would give us a name because we were other to him.
Merv Longsteer caught us. We always loved that shop. It smelled like leather. We’d saved up all our birthday money and planned to get ourselves good knives. Among the people we learned how to use a knife before we were six summers. Of course, our knives weren’t steel. The whole knife was made of elk bone. The handle was wrapped with rawhide and the blade shaped down to be sort of sharp. It’s a lot easier to make a point than an edge, but points aren’t good for slicing meat.
We got carried away in his shop and it was one of those occasions that we were talking the same both lives. In before-time, we were holding our knives in front of us while in now-time, we were looking at the knives in the case and talking about them.
“Those knives are good for skinning,” Merv said as he leaned over the counter to talk to us. We were surprised, but also kind of flattered that the old medicine man would talk to us children.
“We need something like this so we can learn how to use it to make something like this,” I said pointing at a longer blade. He nodded.
“What will you make it out of?”
“The first one is bone. But it’s hard to get it real sharp. I want to make the next one out of flint or obsidian. I’m learning to identify the right stones,” Phile said. He was enthusiastic. Merv nodded again.
“Don’t use your bone knife to try to chip the obsidian,” he said. He pulled the two short knives we’d been looking at out and took them out his back door. We followed. He bent down and picked up a couple stones. “First, you can make a better edge on your bone knife by using one of these stones to scrape along it.” He demonstrated the proper way to scrape the stone against the steel blades, always going the same direction. “Now when you get a piece of obsidian or flint, you need to chip it by striking it lightly with a harder stone.” He demonstrated again. “Many of our ancestors became experts at chipping the flint to a fine edge. But you can use the sanding stone to hone it even finer. Do that and your arrowheads and your knife will pierce the hide quickly and smoothly.”
Phile and I looked at each other. When Merv said ‘arrowheads’ the word clicked in our minds. Mo'xȯhtse—the Cheyenne word for arrowhead. I caught my breath and looked at Merv. All this time, we’d been speaking to him in the Cheyenne language.
“Listen to your teachers,” Merv said, changing to English. “They are teaching you well. When you share these tricks with them, show them respectfully and not as though you are better than they are. Your spirit walks among the Cheyenne people. When you need more help, come and visit with me.”
We thanked him and paid for our purchases. Pa examined what we’d bought and decided it was best not to tell the moms that we were running around with sharp knives. He swore that if we hurt anyone with our knives he’d use them to take the skin off our backs. We sort of believed him.
We tried not to speak Cheyenne in now-time again, but sometimes we got mixed up. Merv was the only person who didn’t think we were just making up gibberish.
In two more years of now-time, we’d aged five years in before-time. We were eleven-year-old wild Indians in now-time, doing all kinds of crazy stuff. We were trying to assimilate seven years of learning in two years. In before-time we were ten.
And in before-time, the learning was intense. The village wise woman and the elders were all teaching us. And they seemed to do it with a sense of fear—sort of like they were afraid they’d forget to teach us something vital. We soaked it all up the best we could and might not have had as much trouble except that Yelloweye was teaching us in both before-time and now-time. You all thought we were out chasing the horses when we were running along riding in their heads as they raced around the pasture.
Yelloweye explained that he couldn’t open us to our gift of joining minds with other animals until we had joined our minds across time, but it was important for the children we were in before-time to grow up being recognized from infancy as touched by the owl. He taught us about natural order and that some animals were meant to be food and to supply other needs for the People. We also learned about animals who were outside our food chain and would dine on us, given the opportunity.
We could summon animals for our use, including rabbits, squirrels, some birds, and even deer, elk, and buffalo. But when we summoned them to their deaths, we needed to respect their sacrifice, be mercifully quick in our kills, and take part in the animal’s… the best word we ever came up with was Karma. We did this by immediately eating the liver and letting the animal become one with our lives. After all, they sacrificed themselves for our nourishment.
Caitlin: Soldiers
We’re trying to split up the writing, but Phile gets too emotional to write about this part, so he’s working on the story of the wolves.
Among the animals that would dine on us, at least figuratively, were ho'evȯtse, whiteman. They didn’t care about food. They wanted the land to be theirs. We knew in now-time what whiteman would eventually do to the land. Farming and raising animals were understandable. But the men with rifles would kill hundreds of buffalo and leave them to rot on the prairie. Carrion birds flocked behind the white hunters who just rode on.
We were scavengers as well. When the white riders passed, we would rush to the killing field with a travois and bring a buffalo carcass or two back to the village. We would not hunt after the white killers had been through. Some in our village would not eat the meat of the buffalo killed by bullets.
We never knew our fathers. They had gone to fight the blue suits before we were born and never returned. Like the buffalo, they were left on the prairie and scavengers took their bodies. So even when we were very small, we set snares and scavenged buffalo for our mother so we would not starve or freeze in winter.
In our tenth summer, Phile and I each killed a whitetail deer. We paused over the dead bodies and thanked our brothers for giving us the food we would need and their fine skins for our clothes. We opened their bodies with our short bone knives and ate the livers fresh and warm from their guts.
We were triumphant as we loaded the carcasses on our travois and headed back to our village. The hunting men of the village had gone farther to seek prey, but we were able to call our food to us and returned long before the men would be back.
That was the last time we were ever happy. Yelloweye was sitting on our tipi.
“Children, go to the flagpole in the center of camp and stand with your mother,” Tsévéhonevėstse Elder said. He was an old man, but he was our leader. We carried a flag of the United States with our village that was given to us by a soldier when they wrote a paper that would keep us safe. “Soldiers are coming and we must show them that we are peaceful people who abide by our word.”
We stood with our mother, excited but a little frightened, too.
And the soldiers came.
We were just standing there waiting to greet them and they came over the hill with their horses galloping toward us and their long guns belching death all around us. They drew their short guns and kept firing as they closed in on us. We stared in the eyes of a yellow-haired ho'evȯtse charging with his gun pointed at us.
“Run, children, run!” Mother cried pushing us to obey. Death stared at us and we turned to run as Mother crumpled to the ground. Our mother! Our mother was dead!
We ran. At the edge of the village where Grandfather had met us, our horses and the fresh deer stood waiting. We cut the travois loose from them and leapt to their backs to ride away. Screams. Smoke from the guns. Terrified people running away. Soldiers knocking them down with their horses. Our village was gone. Our mother was dead. And we fled. We rode our ponies as far into the mountains as they could take us before we rested. And then we collapsed together and wept.
This did not happen while we slept in now-time. Phile and I were out near the woodlot where the old cabin was and the fireplace still stands. We were celebrating having killed our first deer. We considered catching a rabbit and roasting it, but Moms would have had a fit if they knew we started a fire in the woods. We were excited about the soldiers coming to our village in the past and stood in front of the fireplace as if we were among them.
But just as Yelloweye—our friend—sat on our tipi, he sat beside us on the old chimney.
We saw it all as we stood there and when we ran in before-time, we ran in now-time as well. We caught our horses and rode toward the mountain. We rode in panic. We rode hard, our horses understanding the urgency. We had always managed to keep some separation between the two halves of our lives, but we lost it that day. We rode and wept with our other selves, unable to differentiate which of us was which. We rode until it was dark and we were far up in the mountains.
It took us two days to separate our present selves from our past selves. We had horses with no bridles or even a lead rope. Yet they stayed near to us and came when we called them. We snared a rabbit and cooked it over a fire that we started ourselves. We had no weapons or tools other than the knives we always carried. Our before-time selves had their bows and arrows that had been left slung over their horses. In now-time, we didn’t even have that. We began working to make ourselves bows and cut straight saplings to cure for arrows.
At night, we held each other for warmth.
That is where Yelloweye found us. We’d seen him with us in before-time and at the ranch in now-time. For the first time, we were frightened of him. He was, indeed, the harbinger of death. Our mommy was dead. Maybe our whole village. We’d seen them ride the People down and kill them.
I sorrow for you, my children.
He called us his children.
“I wish you could have learned this lesson another way,” he said. No. He didn’t say anything. He never said anything. We just got this wave of sadness from him. This is what will happen to the Ho'e, the land. The ho'evȯtse will kill all that is before him.
“What do they want, Yelloweye? Why do they do this?” Phile asked.
They wish Ho'e-momóonáotaovóho, dominion, to rule over all. They wish the earth and all the creatures to bow down to them and yield their treasures, whether they will or no.
“What must we do?” I asked.
You must learn and survive. You must be who you are and talk to your brothers and sisters of the earth. The day will come when only you stand between destruction of the land and its survival.
Pa laced our butts with his belt when we got home. We’d been gone three days and one of the riders from the upper pasture found us and took us to camp. The next day Pa showed up at the trailhead with a trailer and loaded our horses. He wasn’t going to even let us ride down to the ranch.
When he’d laid one across each of our butts, he sank down on his knees and hugged us and cried.
“We thought we’d lost you,” he said. “We’d never be the same without you. Don’t ever scare us like that again. You can’t possibly understand how much your moms and I love you.”
I think that was the first time I did understand.
Phile: Wolves
Life didn’t get any easier. I mean this life, here in now-time. It wasn’t easy in before-time, either. This gets so damned complicated. We were alone and isolated in before-time. In now-time, we isolated ourselves and were even more antisocial than we’d been.
We went wild. I know we’d been difficult ever since we first met Yelloweye. But more and more of our life in the present was in sync with the past. And we couldn’t be in sync while we were around other people. When excuses failed to work, we just made it so nobody wanted to be around us.
It was easy to hate everybody.
In the wintertime, we had to go to school. Oh, we learned stuff. Sixth grade was better than our other school, mostly because we got to go to Laramie and rode the bus with Kyle and Ramie. They never said much, but we knew they were always on the lookout for us.
“Move, dweeb. I wanna sit by your sister.” Daniel Watson from the Bar Double-D was two years older than us. We’d had three years with him out of Centennial Elementary School and forgot what an asshat he was. I didn’t want him anywhere near Caitlin and she told me in before-time that she didn’t want to be near him.
“No.”
“Don’t ever tell me no, you little turd. I’ll put your head through the back window,” he said.
“Maybe you’d like to try putting my head through the back window,” Kyle said. Kyle was only fifteen, but he was already six feet tall. He’d be real tall and thin like Pa. I didn’t think I’d ever be that tall. I was used to thinking of myself among the People. Kyle had Daniel by the back of his neck. I thought the kid was going to swing at Kyle, but he just shrugged.
“Hey, I was just trying to be friendly,” Daniel said.
“I distinctly heard you say you wanted to sit by Phile’s sister,” Kyle said. “She said to bring the douchebag to her. So, you come here and sit right next to Ramie while she tells you about life. I’ll be right here across the aisle in case you need me.”
We couldn’t hear what Ramie said to Daniel Douchebag, whatever that was. We liked the sound of it. I never found out what Ramie told him, but we never heard anything from the eighth-grader again, even though the junior high was in a different building than the senior high. He avoided us. It was cool.
Ramie and Kyle were cool. I wished a lot that I could be like them. They were different than Caitlin and me. I mean, they were best friends and all that. I often heard one say to the other, ‘I got your back.’ But Caitlin and me… She was the only person in the whole world who mattered to me.
If it hadn’t been for Kyle’s birthday in May, I think Caitlin and I would have run away that summer. We nearly did anyway. But we understood that in many ways, it would be harder to live alone in the wilderness in now-time than it was in before-time. There were too many people and they were always too close to us.
But on Kyle’s birthday he moved to the bunkhouse and had an apartment of his own. That meant I had a room to myself for the first time in my life. Ramie moved out to the bunkhouse that summer and it was easier for Caitlin and me to slip into each other’s room without being caught. We kept quiet about it, but when Moms and Pa went to bed, one of us would slip over to the other’s room. Didn’t seem to make any difference which. We always knew where we were going to sleep and that’s where we went.
Yeah, I’ve been sleeping holding my sister in my arms forever. We’d never been apart from each other in the tribe. I was supposed to go to the men’s tent if it hadn’t been for the attack on our village. But we never rejoined what remained of our village after the attack. It was just Caitlin and me in the wilderness together. Even if we felt someone had to be watchful at night, Caitlin would sleep leaning against me or me against her. We were all we had.
I’d protect her against the world.
We continued to grow and learn. We didn’t pay attention in school any more than it took to pass tests. There were some subjects that we liked, but they were just a little part of school. History of our people. Well that was a footnote in the chapter about winning the West. Most of the chapter was about the railroad and included a field trip to the museum in the old depot. Biology was just a couple chapters in the general science book, but we found out a lot about how animals were related to each other and how they were classified. Geography of the Rockies and the Midwest was interesting for a couple of weeks. But mostly, we still took turns sleeping and waking each other up when the teacher was about to call on us.
And out in the pastures, we continued to learn the ways of the animals. On Ramie’s sixteenth birthday, Phile and I both summoned pronghorns for our hunt. We wanted to use bows for the hunt, but part of the reason we all went hunting was learning gun safety and shooting. We took our shots carefully and then rushed down to field dress our kills. Mom Mar was a little disgusted when we each ate the liver fresh from their guts. We thanked the pronghorns for helping to feed our family for the winter.
The rest of the family was really upset. It seems they watched wolves take down a small herd of elk and because of the laws, they couldn’t do anything about it. Caitlin and I quested about trying to find the minds of the predators, but had no luck. The whole family developed a hatred for the ‘killing machines,’ as Mom Ash called them.
We got to see Merv sometimes. About once a month, Caitlin and I would skip out of school at lunch and go to his trading post. Without a village, a shaman, or a wise woman, our before-time selves had to discover everything on their own. Merv was patient with our questions and helped us in both lives.
We only got caught once. It almost killed us.
Our first period after lunch in seventh grade was study hall and Mr. Adams never took attendance. Lots of kids had passes for the library or the gym. We were in his Social Studies class the period before lunch, so we’d shoulder our packs and stop long enough to use the sign-out sheet before we left. That gave us nearly two hours and we could run to Merv’s in fifteen minutes.
“What’s the question today?” he asked in Cheyenne when he saw that the shop was empty except for us.
“Ma'heónėhetane, how can we honor our dead when we cannot claim their bodies from the murderers?” I asked. We’d fled from the scene of our village during the massacre. We returned in the spring and found nothing there. It was like we had never existed there at all. Merv did not ask who we wished to honor. We’d asked Yelloweye, but the concept was foreign to him.
“Ah. When we kill a buck to eat the meat and use the hide, how does the doe honor him?” he asked. “It is the same when a wolf kills a young one. How does the parent honor the child? And even if you found what remained when the spirit left, how would you honor the dead?”
“We would pray for their spirit to find comfort with the great ones,” I answered.
“That is good, but it is out of your hands. We let the body replenish the earth. We let the spirit fly to the sky. Indeed, there is nothing we can do to stop this cycle. Whiteman puts potions in the body, wraps it in cloths, puts it in a box, buries it deep, and places a stone cairn over it. But even that body will eventually return to the earth.”
“What should we do, then?” Caitlin asked.
“Live. The doe honors the buck by raising the young and keeping them safe. The parent honors the child by slaying the wolf so other children will be safe. We honor our dead by living a life that is worthy of them,” Merv ended our lesson and sent us running back to school so we wouldn’t get in trouble.
That worked except the time when there was a substitute teacher for Mr. Adams in the afternoon and she checked the library to see that those who had signed out were there. Mom Mar had to come to the school to meet with the principal about truancy and took us home after school. We got extra assignments and weren’t allowed to sign out to the library again for the rest of the month.
But we weren’t expecting how mad it would make Moms and Pa.
Mom Ash made us sit at the kitchen table as soon as we got home and do our homework.
“You finish that homework and then go to your rooms. There will be no running outside tonight. And I will be checking on you to see that you are in your own room. I know you don’t care about anything else. You don’t care that we are unhappy. You don’t care that your teacher got reprimanded for letting you out of school. You don’t care that even your friend could get in trouble. But you care about being together. So, you’ll live tonight apart. It’s the only thing I can think of that will get through to you.”
It did. We’d planned to hunt in before-time, but we depended on being together in this life to stay in touch while we split up in the past. We’d already headed out separately in before-time, intending to circle our prey while talking in now-time. If we couldn’t be together in now-time, we’d be apart in both lives. That had never happened before.
“No!” I screeched. Pa slid his belt out of his pants and laced me one across the back of my legs. I switched to Cheyenne and called out to Caitlin, “Go to the creek of two horses. I will go there.” She was crying and screaming back, but all I caught was ‘hurry’.
“And stop your gibberish!” Mom Mar yelled. Mom Ash pushed Caitlin into her room as Mom Mar came into mine. She snatched up my computer and left. I couldn’t even message Cait. I was frantic. It was at least three miles to the two horses creek from where I was in my past life. But it had been the only place I could think of while my legs were stinging.
I ran.
Yes, I had a horse, but in the deep woods, I can move more quickly on foot than on a horse. I told her where I was going and knew that she’d follow as quickly as she could. It seemed to take forever. I made the mistake of a child and forgot about the gorge that lay between me and the creek. Instead of going to where I knew a path lay, I tried to descend it where I encountered it. I fell and twisted my ankle.
But I couldn’t stop. I had to get to my sister. We were all we had in this world and the only thing that made it okay to go about our lives in now-time parting and coming back together was because we were always together in one life or the other. Being parted from her in both lives was like suddenly being blind and deaf. I beat at my past self, demanding that I ignore the pain in my ankle and continue up the other side of the gorge. I made so much noise that I could have been a white man stumbling through the brush. Animals that I could normally communicate with ran from me.
And then that big owl was right in front of me.
Not in the past, but in my room. While my feet still moved me forward in before-time, in now-time, Yelloweye stared me down.
His reprimand stung more than Pa’s belt. I had been given a gift, but in the moment when I needed it most, I ignored it and ran like a crazy man. If I did not regain my senses, my sister and I might both be in danger. Worse. The image Yelloweye gave me was ‘food’. We might be food.
I closed my eyes with Yelloweye’s warning burning in my head. In before-time I stopped running and crashing through the woods. I paused to listen. In the distance, toward the setting sun, I could hear wolves. That was the only sound. My crashing through the brush caused all the nearby animals to hide. They would emerge again soon. In the air, high above, a hawk circled.
I sent my spirit questing for the bird and felt the wind lift his wings as he sought an evening meal. I greeted him and he calmly welcomed me to his flight. I looked out at the ground far below. I found the creek and gently guided Hawk along it to look for Cait. What I saw chilled me. She sat by the creek waiting, trying to calm her nervous horse that was dancing around nearby. A few hundred yards away, the wolves had stopped their howling and were stalking closer to her.
I dropped back into my body to keep it moving along the path Aénohe had shown me. As I moved silently along, my mind quested out for the wolves. A hunting pair. They were hungry. The male’s thoughts were of gorging on warm flesh. The female thoughts were darker. Yes, she was hungry. Yes, she thought of the feast. But her brain was filled with the kill. She wanted to rip the life from her prey.
I tried to talk to them—to turn them away. But they were too filled with the scent of the prey to hear me or to care. I tried to send them fear, but this only made them more vicious. I kept trying to calm myself while wanting to scream out to Caitlin. I was closing in from one side, but the wolves were closing in from the other. My bow was ready with new flint arrowheads on my arrows. My view of Cait had shown that she did not have her bow ready to shoot as I had. She had her new long-blade knife.
After our first meeting with Merv Longsteer, we had honed our bone knives to a sharpened edge. But we had also set about making new obsidian hunting knives. Caitlin sat still, but her horse edged farther away. Its size and intelligence made it a formidable opponent for a wolf unless there was a full pack. A hunting pair would be a severe challenge for the animal who could very well die, even if it drove off the attackers.
I quested into the wolves again and saw Caitlin through their eyes. It was a strange sort of double vision as I caught glimpses of her through the trees with my human body and the pulsing meat that the wolves saw. They came into the clearing facing Caitlin, snarling at her. Caitlin was afraid, but I could tell she now sensed my approach from the other side. We were near the same size, but the wolves probably outweighed us by ten or twenty pounds each. She had tried looking through the wolves’ eyes, but seeing herself the way they saw her froze her.
There was no time for great strategy. I drew my bow as I entered the clearing and moved toward them. Wolves are much happier to track moving prey than still prey. They will circle a buffalo and yip at it, diving in to nip at its feet, but not attacking while the buffalo is still. If the buffalo gets tired of their goading and attacks or attempts to run, the pack will pounce on it and bring it to the ground.
Caitlin’s stillness and my action drew the attention of the wolves toward me. I was moving prey and they charged toward me as one. I loosed my arrow and caught the big male. I had drawn my second arrow, but could not track the female because Caitlin had dived for it. The male howled and continued coming for me. My second arrow stopped it, piercing its eye.
As the wolves changed direction and charged toward me, Cait snatched a handful of the bitch’s fur and swung onto her back, riding her into the ground. Her obsidian knife sliced through the bitch’s throat and Caitlin lay on the bloody mess.
“I knew you would get here in time,” she sobbed as I lifted her from the carcass. “If I had tried to fight them, they would have attacked. Even if I killed one, I knew I could not avoid the other. It was so hard to stay still and wait. Phile, from now on we don’t get separated!”
“We are a hunting pair like these,” I said. “I will eat the heart of this wolf before it cools.” Caitlin nodded and we fell to butchering our kills. We pulled the hearts out and held them before each other. And bit into them.
I could feel the power and fierceness of the wolf enter into me as I ate the organ. But I could also feel the lust for blood that filled me. I saw it reflected in Cait’s eyes as the blood dripped from her hands and chin while she ate the meat.
Wolf is not great-tasting meat. Any animal that eats other animals or carrion tastes foul. But we burned the meat well enough over our fire that we could tear strips off and choke them down. This was our kill and we would eat it. Even the vicious predator deserved the honor of knowing his meat nourished one of greater strength.
“I will wear this she-wolf,” Caitlin said. We’d skinned them and made a frame to stretch the hides as we cleaned them. “I will be Ho'néené'šeohtsévá'e. I am Wolf Riding Woman. I have ridden the wolf and lived.”
“That’s a mouthful, even in our language,” I laughed. “But you are a woman. And you have ridden the wolf.”
“I will save my name for when the bleeding starts. But now you know me.”
“Then as I wear the skin of this warrior wolf, I will be known as Ho'néemé'eōhtse, Wolf Rising, for I rose to meet him in battle.”
“You are my mate, Wolf Rising,” she responded.
We finished our work and headed for the creek. We did not have much in the way of clothes. We’d been on our own for a year and in all that time had avoided contact with anyone else. It was easy to make a loincloth. We had buffalo robes to keep us warm when the weather turned bad. We stripped off what we wore and went into the creek to wash.
While we washed, my horse ambled into the clearing and went to where the other horse grazed. They snuffled their greetings and we sent our warm thoughts to our two friends. We emerged from the creek and turned to embrace each other. It had been a hard day.
“Wolf Rising,” she giggled. “Your manhood is rising.”
“Wolf Riding Woman, it is your womanhood that is causing this attention,” I answered. “You know I love you. We’re way too young to deal with all that sex stuff. Someday when it is more than just an uncontrolled reaction, we’ll figure out what to do with it. But from this day, I never want to be parted from you again.”
The Family
“I don’t think I can listen to any more tonight,” Mary Beth said. “I was a terrible mother. My poor babies. My poor babies.”
“You weren’t a terrible mother,” Ashley snapped. “You aren’t a terrible mother. How could we know? We were trying to raise them right.”
“They were only twelve,” Cole said. “Even with other time travelers in the family, none of us started that young. Twelve? Hell, eight! None of us started until we were at least sixteen. And it was always related to becoming sexually active. Even Genieve said that’s how she started. If you want to be pissed at someone, yell at the old owl. He took away our children!” Cole was getting worked up and stood up to wave his arms around, nearly dumping his wives on the floor.
“I think Mom’s right, though,” Ramie said. “We need to take a break. My voice is getting hoarse. And I don’t think this is something we’re supposed to rush through. I’m exhausted. Miranda, drive.”
Miranda shifted easily into control of Ramie’s body and let her other self weep silently.
“I think I need to bake a pie before bed,” she said. “Mary Beth, why don’t we get our hands in some lard. We can make up a couple of those egg pies we read about for breakfast.”
“Quiche? Yes, Grandma,” Mary Beth smiled.
Evening chores got done. Kyle took the babies to the bunkhouse to put them to bed. He hadn’t said anything during the reading, nor afterward. He just held his children as tears streamed down his cheeks. Aubrey sat with Ashley and Cole for a few minutes before going to join her husband.
“Something’s wrong, baby,” Aubrey said as she joined Kyle looking down at the babies. “What is it? You know you can tell me anything.” Kyle held his love and wished Ramie would hurry up in the house.
“It was me,” he croaked. “‘…a yellow-haired ho'evȯtse charging with his gun pointed at us.’ I still remember it. All these years living as Kyle and living as Jason and all of both of our memories as we rode over that hill into the village believing we were riding into an ambush with our guns blazing. I killed their momma! It was me.”
“You didn’t know, honey. Your commander lied to you. You stopped others from being killed. You got that horrid private court-martialed. You’ve told us the story. You did the best you could,” Aubrey said pulling Kyle to the bed and holding him.
“That didn’t help my little brother and sister. We just thought they were being brats. Until the horses came. Everything changed then. But nothing could undo what I’d done.”
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
