Project Purple

34 - The Buckskinner

The first cold rain of the season came that night. It was refreshing in the early evening, but grew biting in a steady, unwelcome barrage.

"Pull!" Grant yelled up the chimney of the chapel, and Free Man Clark gave the string that ran down the chimney a yank; the iron skillets rattled in response.

His huddling female audience-the Sayer, the Herbalist, the Matron-rolled their eyes at one another.

Grant, with his obsidian eyes and nappy beard, puffed his chest, ignoring the poor reception to his skillet alarm. "They won't hurt us-I won't let them."

He had arranged sentries in four-hour shifts. But at night, and with no clocks, judging elapsed time would be guesswork. Nevertheless, the Governor and Free Man Pilgrim were out there now, in the cold rain, pacing the colony on their rounds.

"If we see 'em, well shout 'Got 'ya!'" Free Man Pilgrim had joked earlier, "And then they'll stand up and say, 'Ah, you got me!'-but in their language-and they gotta go back to camp and try again."

Grant sat on the floor, cross-legged, wishing these colonists would take the Indian threat more seriously. "We're reliving history here," he said, reaching for his bow, "and we all know about the westward flow-it passed like a tidal wave over Indian lands. We can't change that; it's one of the greatest conflicts of America-a mighty force, up against another, unmoving body..."

"You think you know something about the tribes, do you?" the Herbalist contested, her eyes jousting with his like wrangling light sabers.

Grant liked her spunk.

"I'll tell you this..." he lowered his voice for effect, "when they came, they didn't spare the women - they ripped the fetus from the pregnant womb and elevated the damned thing on a stick as some sick trophy of victory ... That's your Indian for you-not exactly playing by the rules."

He smiled up the Herbalist, waiting for her parry.

"Somebody do us all a favor," she snarled, "put this man out of his misery ... Or I'll have to do it."

The Herbalist stormed outside into the wet darkness, easing the bad vibrations in the room.

Grant shrugged, hiding a smile, "We're not trading any of our animals, like slabs of salted flatfish, that's for damned sure." Then he began re-stringing his bow with a thin piece of rawhide.

The Sayer sat next to him, "Every colony suffered massacres, we know that."

The Matron nodded, "They are unkennell'd wolves, and they're at our door."

The men were, by and large, on his side-The colony needed to defend itself. The women-with the exception of the Herbalist, and perhaps the near-camatose Goatwench-were with him, too.

Their adversaries, these dangerous misfits, no strangers to the indise of a jail, wanted a fight. There would be no more bartering, no tactfull concessions.

They were coming for the animals, Grant just knew it, and they were coming soon.

***

He was right. The violence started the following misty, pre-dawn morning.

The keen-eyed Buckskinner couldn't see everywhere at once, so he'd positioned Free Man Pilgrim on the roof of the chapel, figuring the incursion would come from the north; one sentry was fixed, the other would be rootless.

The rain was coming in solid sheets-perfect cover-and Grant encircled the colony in a twisting figure eight, with his bow, Junior, and a quiver of twelve feather-tipped arrows. He had made fifteen, though ... Why had someone nicked three arrows?

But there was no time to worry about the theft-They were coming; his hunter sense told him as much. The predators were coming for the prey.

Down south, between huts #4 and #5, he grunted softly when he saw the tips of the grass sway in front of the ash trees. He eased up againt the wall of hut #4, strung an arrow, and raised Junior-the more reliable of the two bows he had crafted.

Grant was the only one of them that had proved his skills with the bow. But would he shoot at them? Would he cross that line? ...

He knew this culminating contest with the indigenous was a natural, obligatory episode in the great history of their Manifest Destiny. So, yeah, he'd cross that line in a heart beat...

Two men, coming in low, using the high grass as cover... He tracked the incoming party with confidence.

They were camouflaged by the increasing force of the rain, but if they broke for the clearing between the grass and hut #5 he'd call out, wait a second, or two, for them to halt, and then shoot...

He waited, frozen under the eave of hut #4, but they didn't come. Then he heard a shot, like a handgun, and someone screaming up by the chapel.

A sinking feeling in his guts... He'd been suckered by a diversion, fleeced by his adversaries-The action was happening behind him!

More screaming, and he ran back through the colony, splashing through the puddles, past the empty quad table, to the animal pens.

"Woody Pilgrim's hurt!" screamed the Badger, standing under the eave of the chapel.

One man lay still on the ground halfway between the pens and the chapel. Grant inched forward, but there was no need-The 'Indian' was dead with an arrow through his neck, entering one side and going out the other, the blood gushing into the chocolaty mud.

"Well, goddamned!" he said to the rainy night.

Somone had put one of his arrows to good use, all right.

Then she stepped away from the masking planks of the goat pen, poised like a policeman with a drawn gun, holding his Babe, the smaller bow, which he had rejected as too shaky-He had made no kills with the smaller bow, while Junior had brought down birds and muskrats with regularity.

This mere servant, at first headstrong and cheeky, but after the whipping-cowering, cocooning, giving up, useless-now standing there with a steely expression of what Grant considered compelling authority.

He grinned in the rain: the Goatwench, a woman who moved in and out of some unobtainable dimension, holding herself now with a strength of mind that overawed him.

She was back-mended, hell-bent.

One horrific upgrade.