It is five miles across the Silver Run and there is no cover. After two miles the frontiersman looked back and saw specks coming over the ridge onto the rock shelf. He trotted on. They could not hit him and they could not catch him. A few minutes later there were more specks; the cavalrymen had led their mounts up through the forest and were also on the rock, but a mile east of the Cheyenne. Then he came to the crevasse. He had not been this high before; he did not know it was there.
It is steep and narrow, Lake Fork, with sides wooded with pine and a freezing stream at the bottom. Craig turned along its edge and looked for a place where the banks were shallow enough to cross. He found such a place in the shadow of Thunder Mountain, but he had lost half an hour.
Pushing himself and the horses to the limit, he led them down the ravine and up the other side to another and last sheet of rock, Hellroaring Plateau. As he emerged from the gulley a shot whistled over his head. From across the ravine one of the troopers had seen movement among the pines. His delay had not only let his pursuers catch up, he had shown them the way across.
Ahead of him was another three miles of flat running before the towering palisades of Mount Rearguard, among whose jumbled rocks and caves no man on earth would ever take him. In the thin air two humans and two animals gasped for oxygen but still he pressed on. Darkness would come soon, and he would disappear into the peaks and ravines between Rearguard and Sacred and Beartooth Mountains. No man could follow a trail up here. Beyond Sacred Mountain was the watershed divide and after that it was downhill all the way into Wyoming. They would lose the hostile world, be married, dwell in the wilderness and live for ever. As the daylight faded Ben Craig and Whispering Wind left their pursuers behind and headed for the slopes of Mount Rearguard.
In the dusk they climbed above the rock plain and met the snowline where the whiteness of the peaks is never melted. There they found a flat ledge, fifty yards by twenty, and at the back a deep cave. A few last pines shrouded the entrance.
Craig hobbled the horses as darkness fell and they cropped pine needles beneath the trees. The cold was intense, but they had their buffalo robe.
The scout hauled his saddle and remaining blanket into the cave, loaded his rifle and laid it by his side, then spread the buffalo skin by the mouth of the cave. Craig and Whispering Wind lay on it and he pulled the other half over them both. Inside the cocoon the natural warmth of human bodies returned. The girl began to move against him.
‘Ben,’ she whispered, ‘make me your woman. Now.’
He began to slip her buckskin tunic upwards over her eager body.
‘What you are doing is wrong.’
It was utterly silent this high on the mountain, and though the voice was old and frail the words, in the Cheyenne language, were quite clear.
Craig, his hide shirt gone and bare-chested in the freezing cold, was at the entrance to the cave, rifle in hand, in a moment.
He could not understand why he had not seen the man before. He sat cross-legged under the pines at the edge of the flat rock. Iron-grey hair hung to his naked waist, his face was wrinkled and lined as a burnt walnut. He was of immense age and piety, a tribal shaman, a vision-quester come to the lonely places to fast, meditate and seek guidance from the infinite.
‘You spoke, holy one?’ The scout gave him the honorific title reserved for those of great age and wisdom. Where he came from, he could not guess. How he had climbed to these altitudes, he did not know. How he could survive the cold with no covering was not imaginable. Craig only knew that some vision-questers could defy all the known laws.
He felt the presence of Whispering Wind join him in the mouth of the cave.
‘It is wrong in the eyes of Man, and of Mehy-yah, the Everywhere Spirit,’ said the old man.
The moon had not yet risen but the stars in the clean and bitter air were so bright that the wide rock ledge was bathed in a pale light. Craig could see the starlight glitter in the old eyes that fixed him from beneath the tree.
‘Why so, holy one?’
‘She is promised to another. Her intended fought bravely against the wasichu. He has much honour. He does not deserve to be treated like this.’
‘But now she is my woma
n.’
‘She will be your woman, man of the mountains. But not yet. The Everywhere Spirit speaks. She should go back to her people and her intended. If she does, you will one day be reunited and she will be your woman and you her man. For ever. So says Meh-y-yah.’
He took a stick from the ground beside him and used it to help him rise. His naked skin was dark and old, pinched by the cold, with only breechcloth and moccasins to protect him. He turned and slowly walked through the pines and down the track until he was gone from view.
Whispering Wind turned her face up to Craig. There were tears running down her cheeks but they did not fall, freezing before they touched her chin.
‘I must go back to my people. It is my fate.’
There was no arguing. It would have served nothing. He prepared her pony while she slipped on her moccasins and wrapped her blanket around her. He took her in his arms one last time and swung her onto the pony’s back, handing her the rein. Silently she directed the pinto to the start of the track downwards.
‘Wind That Talks Softly,’ he called. She turned and stared at him in the starlight.
‘We will be together. One day. It was spoken so. While the grass grows and the rivers run, I will wait for you.’
‘And I for you, Ben Craig.’
She was gone. Craig watched the sky until the cold bit too deep. He led Rosebud deep into the cave and prepared an armful of pine needles for her. Then he pulled the buffalo hide deeper into the darkness, rolled himself in its folds and fell asleep.