Sundance 17, p.9
Sundance 17, page 9
She stared at it, eyes wide. “Jim, it’s so beautiful. I almost wish—”
“So do I,” Sundance said. And he went through an Indian ceremony of atonement, plucking a few hairs, offering them to the wind, apologizing to the fox for killing it, assuring it that it would be put to good use. If, he thought, you could call adorning a fat woman’s neck good use. But it would pay for Laughing Woman’s training, and that overrode everything else. And he felt, too, a certain pride in outwitting it.
He had, after bending the frames to make it possible, buried the traps upside down beneath the campfire. Then, when the fox had dug under them to turn them over, he had sprung one and been taken.
“That’s the only silver fox we’ll try for,” Sundance said. “We’ll leave the she to bear some pups. One, maybe two, out of the litter, will be black like her, even if she mates with a red.”
“She’ll mourn him, though,” Laughing Woman said, a little sadly.
“No. Wolves mate for life. So do Canada geese. No other animals that I know of, and not foxes. She’d have had to hunt for her pups by herself, and he might even have eaten a couple of them if he got hungry enough, but he wouldn’t have helped her. Now, it’s getting dark. Let’s go on back to the cabin.”
The dogs went willingly, knowing they were homeward bound. Sundance snowshoed ahead, gun up. Laughing Woman came behind the sled, handling the team. A cold wind rolled up the valley, bringing the taint of snow. They were within a mile of the cabin when, borne on that wind, it came—the double thunder of a shotgun.
“Whoa!” Sundance snapped to the dogs, and the big Malemutes halted at the voiced command.
“Jim.” Laughing Woman’s voice was a whisper. “That shot came from the cabin.”
“You wait here,” Sundance said. “I’ll be back in an hour. If I’m not, head up the valley, hide in that grove of trees near the beaver pond, and when it’s past midnight, mush out with the dogs through the Notch. Don’t forget to unset the gun before you go through. Make it back to Storm River as fast as you can.”
“No! I’m going down there with you! You may need my gun, too!”
Sundance looked at her a moment, nodded. “All right. Come on.”
They moved ahead, keeping to cover, webs soundless on the snow. Presently, lying on their bellies, they looked down a gentle slope at the cabin. The door was wide-swung, gaping open. Before it lay two huddled figures, dark blots against the white.
“Your trap worked,” Laughing Woman whispered.
Sundance searched the area around the cabin with his eyes; nothing moved. After a few minutes, he said, “Cover me. I’m going down.” Gun ready, he eased down the slope, tense, expecting a shot from ambush at any minute. But none came, and presently he was, looking down at corpses in the snow.
The two men must have been standing side by side when the outswung door yanked the cords to the triggers on the shotgun. The spreading double charge of eighteen buckshot had caught the tall one in the belly, the shorter one squarely in the heart. The tall one had died hard, the short one instantaneously. They were both white men, bearded, with weathered skin, obviously men of the North. Rifles lay beside them in the red-dyed snow.
Sundance turned, beckoned to Laughing Woman to come on down. When, after going back for the dogs, she arrived, she looked at the bodies coldly, with less emotion than she had shown for the silver fox. “The bastards. They were going to be there waiting for us. Cut us down when we came in.” Then she and Sundance went through their pockets. There was money, waterproof match cases, tobacco, but no identification, no clue as to who had sent them, and Laughing Woman had never seen them before. Nor, when Sundance found their outfit, a lightly loaded sled with a small team of dogs, hidden a mile away in the woods, was there any clue in it. With dogs, he dragged the corpses deep into the jack pine timber, left them for the wolves and other predators and scavengers. Then he returned to the cabin, where Laughing Woman was coolly preparing supper.
“That’s two away,” Sundance said. “When they don’t come back, the Carcajou will send more. And if we take care of them, maybe finally he’ll have to come himself.” His eyes went hard. “We’ll let the animals go. From now on, we have to concentrate on trapping men.”
Chapter Seven
Warily, a week later, leaving Laughing Woman hidden in the woods above, Sundance approached the first in the chain of beaver ponds. With the layout of the valley firsthand in his mind, now, he had rearranged some of his man traps, added more set-guns,—rifles this time,—and he checked them every day, to see if they had taken quarry and to make sure they did not freeze up. With each passing day, as the cold deepened and fresh snow came, he was more alert. It was time now for the Carcajou to understand that his first two men were not coming back and to send in another team. Endlessly, he and the girl patrolled the valley, determined not to be taken by surprise.
But everything was quiet here. The pond was frozen over with inches of ice, the water that trickled over the dam transmuted to a weird baroque display of glittering jewelry, and the beavers rarely went abroad in this kind of weather. When they did, they swam beneath the ice until they reached the bank, where, in summer, they had dug trenches leading out to shore, and they used these to come and go on land, as well as a few exits in the center of the pond which they kept free of ice by breaking open holes with their chisel-like teeth or hand-like front paws several times a day. Beavers were large animals, weighing full grown over thirty pounds sometimes, and the trenches they had made were big enough to accommodate the body of a man. Sundance had located all of them, and if fur had been his interest now, he’d have had traps set in every trench.
Instead, he was surveying the pond to see if anyone had crossed the ice. It was early in the morning, and man tracks would show up on the fresh snow. He found no sign of any passage, went back to where Laughing Woman waited. “That does it, except for the mantrap up at the Slot.” He had removed the set-gun from that narrow passage and placed one of the huge Newhouse grizzly traps there instead. “Let’s go take a look at that.”
It was a good four miles away, up a steep slope, that notch between high rock walls. Further exploration had convinced him that a trap would be more effective than a gun; the floor of the Slot was so littered with jagged boulders that anyone coming in would have to take off his snowshoes. And there was one spot, in particular, where the Slot pinched in the most, where a man traversing it would almost have to put his foot.
They left their dog team behind when they were a mile from the Slot, working their way through rocks and timber on their snowshoes. Presently Sundance paused in the cover of a clump of brush, took out a pocket telescope, unfolded it, and put it to his eye. Through it he could see, five hundred yards away, the place where he had set the trap in the defile.
And suddenly he tensed and made a sound of satisfaction in his throat.
The man lay sprawled in the snow, his face a contorted mask of agony clearly visible through the glass. Sundance had spiked the great trap to a huge log buried beneath the snow, and the man whose leg was held by the massive steel jaws which had clamped above his ankle had only been able to drag it a few yards before collapsing from cold and shock and pain. “We’ve got one,” Sundance snapped. “And this time, alive. And this time he’ll talk!” He swung the glass, saw no sign that the man had a companion, and rasped: “Come on!” Quickly he and Laughing Woman worked their way forward.
Only a few yards from the trapped man, they stopped, sheltered by an outcrop of rock. Then Sundance stepped around it, rifle leveled. “If you ain’t alone, you’d better tell me quick.”
The face jerked up to the sound of his voice was crusted with ice, and partly frozen tears, and a patch of cheek had turned dead white from frostbite. The mouth was twisted in a grimace of pain. The man was in his late thirties, with a beaked nose and a lantern jaw. “Mister,” he whispered. “For God’s sake! Get this iron off me!”
“Not until you do some talking. You alone?”
“No. No, I ain’t. There’s more!”
“How many more?”
“My leg …”
“Talk, or you’ll lie there and freeze! How many more?”
Blistered lips peeled back from yellow teeth. “Lots more. Ten, fifteen, big crowd from up in the Yukon. A man named Galt hired us. They’re comin’ in here from every openin’. Galt said our job was easy. Wipe out one half-breed Injun. Then spread out, take over all the traplines in this district. Mister, I’m gonna lose my leg if you don’t hurry, open up this trap.”
“Keep on talkin’,” Sundance rasped. “Where are the others?”
“I told you. All spread out! Comin’ in from north and south and … Galt had a map, all the entrances to this valley marked. We was to close in from ever’ direction, like Injuns drivin’ deer, and when we had you penned up, rub you out. Only Galt said, if we could help it, not to hurt the woman. Please. In the name of God, please ...”
Before Sundance could move or answer, it came, the explosion of a shotgun from up the valley. One of his set-guns! That meant the man had not lied, they were coming in. And if there were that many? He’d not counted on such a massive assault. The set-guns and the man traps couldn’t stop them all!
“All right,” Sundance said. He turned. “Laughing Woman! Come on! We’ve got to go out through the Slot! Clear the valley or they’ll pen us up!”
The girl dodged around the rock. “Our team!”
“No time for that! We’ll have to snowshoe, take our chances. Now, come on! They’re pourin’ in from all the other openin’s. But this one’s clear, and we can get out.”
“Mister, what about me?” the trapped man wailed.
“Tough,” Sundance rasped. “You took your chances. We’ll let your friends worry about you, we’ve got no time to.” He seized Laughing Woman’s arm. “Up the Slot.”
“God damn you!” the trapped man shrilled as Sundance and the girl ran past him up the rocky defile.
A hundred yards long, it was hemmed on either side by towering walls of rock. Once in it, they had to pull off their snowshoes to get over the rubble-strewn floor. If they could make its far end, though, they could vanish into timber, and Galt’s trap would spring on emptiness. Then, somehow, they could mush out, even without blankets, dog team, or food, to safety. One thing was sure, they could not go back into the valley.
They reached the Slot’s outer end, and wooded hillside sloped away before them. “Put those webs back on!” Sundance snapped, and he and Laughing Woman began to strap their snowshoes back on. Then it came.
Sundance heard the bullet slap past his head, sing off the rock wall before the sound of the shot reached him from the timber below. More shots rang out, and lead now was like a swarm of hornets buzzing past them, ricocheting. Sundance stared for one frozen second. The bastard back there in the trap had lied! He had not been alone, only a scout out front!
“Back!” Sundance yelled. “Down!” He and Laughing Woman dodged into the Slot, dropped behind ice-crusted upthrust boulders. Three guns, four, firing down there. And there was no way to get out of the Slot now without being chopped to bits by lead.
Behind the boulder, Sundance turned. The trapped man, whose rifle he had kicked well out of reach, was desperately trying to reach it, hauling himself across the snow inch by inch, using all his strength against the weight of the great log at the trap chain’s end. Sundance’s mouth thinned. And the bastard had lied about something else. There were more than any fifteen men! More like thirty, judging from the size of that party down there! “You!” Sundance yelled.
The man rolled over, sat up. The white patch on his cheek stood out against his blistered skin. His eyes were wide, fear-filled.
Sundance had no time to worry about mercy now. He lined the rifle, pulled the trigger, and the trapped man fell back. “Come on!” Sundance rasped. “We can’t get out this way! Have to take our chances in the valley!”
“If we can make the cabin!” Laughing Woman panted as they scrabbled back over the rocks in the Slot, bullets whining off the stone walls above their heads.
“No use. Soon as we got in, they’d circle us and burn us out! No, we got to hole up in the timber, hope they miss us, maybe we can sneak through tonight and get outside. Leave the team! It’d only slow us down, give us away!”
Back inside the valley, now, they put on their snowshoes quickly. Sundance pulled the girl down behind some rocks. From this height high up on the valley wall, they could see most of the valley floor, the chain of beaver ponds, the patches of woods, and, far, far away, the cabin. And men would be pouring in from every direction, spreading out, working toward the center, like beaters driving game. Sundance tensed. Even now, over there on the far wall, a half dozen dots came into view, dark against the snow, moving, spreading out. And now the firing outside the Slot had ceased, which meant the men out there were coming in, too, and there was not one second more to lose! “Let’s go!” Sundance snapped, jerking Laughing Woman to her feet. “Head for the timber! I’ll cover you!”
Without protest, she mushed on ahead, expert on snowshoes, making good time for anyone wearing webs like those, but still traveling with agonizing slowness, it seemed to Sundance. He whirled, facing the entrance of the Slot, rifle ready. Then he caught a flicker of motion: a head appeared around the corner of the rock wall, a gun barrel glinted. Sundance fired the Winchester from the hip, levered in another shell before the sound had died. The head jerked back.
Sundance snowshoed after Laughing Woman, body twisted, hosing rounds from the Winchester at the slot. It. pinned down the men in there, bought them time. Laughing Woman made the cover of the woods, Sundance right behind her. He dodged behind a tree, “Gimme that rifle. Reload this one.”
Passing her loaded rifle, she stuffed cartridges in his long gun. Sundance waited one minute, two. Then, like a gopher popping from a hole, a man jumped around the corner of the Slot. Sundance let him come, one pace, two, a third one. Then he fired, and the man’s face vanished in a strange red Spray and he flopped limply on his back and never moved.
That would hold them for a while. “Back to the sled!” Sundance snapped, and they headed down the slope through the timber.
When they reached the dog team, Sundance worked swiftly, unloading it of its extra weight. “Get on there!” He shoved Laughing Woman aboard, popped the dog whip. “Mush!” he bellowed, and the team moved out, running, and Sundance rode the back of it as it rushed smoothly down the hill. Behind them a voice shouted, “Spread out! Move in! If you git a shot at that damned half-breed, burn him down!”
The sled careened dangerously as the team dodged downhill through the timber. Sundance turned it northward. His hope was that if they made time enough, they could reach the far end of the valley before the net around them tightened, slip through a gap, shoot their way out if necessary through another pass a few miles away. If. If Galt’s men weren’t already closing in, screening that pass.
Galt! Who the hell was he? The Carcajou?
Well, it was a name to go on, anyhow, if he and Laughing Woman got out alive. He popped the whip again, urging the dogs to greater speed. The dogs stretched themselves. The sled was rocketing through the woods now.
Then the lead Malemute howled strangely, leaped into the air, landed threshing. Gun thunder drowned out its cries, as firing came from their flank, up the slope. Other dogs went down, tangled in the harness, and Laughing Woman screamed as the sled overturned and she sprawled out into the snow.
Sundance cursed. They must have been infiltrating the valley all night long, the ones from the farthest end coming in first. Anyhow, that was the end of the team now, and there were men working down the slope, through the jack pines, firing as they came, while the men from the Slot closed in from behind. Sundance helped Laughing Woman to her feet.
“On down the hill! Head for the beaver pond. Maybe we can hide out in the willow brush down there! It’s our only chance.” Laughing Woman struggled to her feet, panting. Then, as she put weight on her snow-shoes, she cried out. “Jim, my ankle!”
“Broken?”
“No, sprained, I think. But I can’t walk!”
“I’ll carry you. Up behind.”
“No! You’ll never get away like that. Go on, leave me!”
“Goddammit, I can’t.”
“Didn’t you hear what the trapped man said? They were to kill you, but not hurt me. Go, Jim, please. I’ll take my chance, but you’ve got none at all if they catch you! If you can get away, maybe you can help me, but—”
Lead snapped through the jack pines, chopped bark by Sundance’s head. She was right, there was no other way. As long as he lived, he might be able to save her, but if he were killed, she had no chance at all.
“Yell! Tell ’em you surrender.”
“Yes. Jim, good luck.” Her lips brushed his. Then, limping, she turned, hands up, as Sundance raced on down the hill, bent low, dodging through the trees like a running rabbit. Behind him her voice rose high and shrill. “Don’t shoot! This is Laughing Woman! I give up! Please! Please don’t shoot!”
For a moment the gunfire slackened. Laughing Woman yelled something else, but her voice faded with the distance now. Sundance was deep in the timber and now he had a chance, a small one, anyhow, to make the concealment of the thick brush that edged this end of the beaver pond. Once in there, they would have to beat him out the way Indians hunted jaguars in heavy jungle down in Mexico. He would hurt them before they took him. Anyhow, if he could give them the slip till dark, he had a chance.
Then there it was ahead of him, the great thicket of willow and other shrub along the pond’s edge. Like a briar patch to a rabbit, it seemed to beckon, welcome him. But to reach it, he had to leave the woods, cross an open space of a hundred yards.
