Edge of the Wilderness

One


For he saith to the snow, Be thou on the earth.

—Job 37:6

“You sure it’s there?” Robert Lawrence leaned toward Daniel, screaming above the wind.

“It’s there.” Daniel hunkered down in the saddle, dipping his nose beneath his upturned collar, trying to protect his frost-bitten ears.

They were half ashamed, this handful of Dakota scouts sent out earlier that day to reconnoiter from the camp down by Rice Creek. They had grown up in this land, knew it as well as anyone. Should have known when the wind shifted. Should have seen the wall of dark clouds and headed back to camp. But Brady Jensen thought he had picked up a fresh trail. He cursed their cowardice. Said he wouldn’t quit because of a little snow. So they followed him past the old mission and around the edge of the lake.

When the wall of snow first slammed into them they weren’t all that concerned. Late spring snows weren’t anything unusual in Minnesota. No one wanted to give up on the first good trail they had located since being sent up here a few weeks ago. They wanted prisoners to hand over to General Sibley in the spring. And no one had proof that Little Crow had actually left the area. It might be Little Crow himself they were trailing. And so they had kept on until the wind began to freeze their noses and their horses floundered in blizzard-deep drifts.

Once Jensen relented, once they realized they needed to find shelter, someone mentioned old Fort LaCroix. The trader had been dead awhile. No one knew if it was even still standing. Hostiles might have burned it on their way north. But if even one of the buildings still, stood, it might save their toes—maybe even their lives.

Their leader, a man named Daniel Two Stars who spoke in grunts and stayed to himself, had been to Fort LaCroix more than once in the old days before the war. He said they were close. Since he was the best tracker among them, they followed him blindly through the snow.

Dumb luck or answered prayer. Take your pick. Either way Daniel slid off his bay gelding and, after feeling his way a moment, shouted for help. He and Robert worked feverishly, clearing away a drift and then pulling a rickety gate toward them. The men stumbled into a deserted compound that had once been the best-stocked trading post in Minnesota. Presently they were shaking the snow off inside a barn with stalls enough for each of the six horses and even a few piles of old hay in the loft above. By nightfall, with the storm still raging, they had knocked apart old LaCroix’s table and started a fire in the stone fireplace inside the trader’s own cabin.

Empty tin cans scattered across the floor told them others had taken shelter inside the compound in the past. When they heard something skitter across the ceiling, one of them charged up the stairs to the loft and returned with a huge raccoon, which they promptly killed, skinned, gutted, and roasted over the fire.

As night fell they stretched out atop their bedrolls around the fire. It had been known to snow for days when one of these storms stalled over Lac Qui Parle. There would be plenty of time to see what else old trader LaCroix might have left behind.

After everyone else was asleep, Daniel crept away from the fire. When none of the other men moved, he crouched low and made his way to the room at the back of the cabin. He sat down on the straw cot eschewed by the men as the probable residence of a few thousand fleas. Glancing behind him to make sure no one was watching, he leaned toward the wall and pulled the mattress up, disturbing a field mouse. As the mouse scampered across the floor, Daniel withdrew the book he had left there in the ancient past. He stroked the smooth leather cover, remembering the day he and Otter had come here seeking Etienne LaCroix to give him news of his daughter down at the mission school. They had found him dead and buried him on the hillside outside the stockade next to his Dakota wife, Good Song Woman. And then they had returned south to the mission school where Daniel told the young woman with the huge blue eyes that her father was dead. It was the first time he had held her in his arms. Even now he could remember how right it had felt.

He opened the book and turned the pages, finally concentrating on one illustration, a sketch of Blue Eyes as a girl. Her father had drawn a tangle of dark brown hair falling across one shoulder. His sketch captured the slight dimple in her chin, the featherlight eyebrows arching over those unforgettable eyes. Her expression in the drawing was defiant. Daniel had seen that look more than once. He knew just how she looked when she was afraid too.

A cold draft blew through the room, and he reached up and rubbed his left shoulder. It always seemed to ache worse when the weather changed. He looked down at the scar running from his elbow to his wrist, remembering when, half-crazed with pain from a gunshot wound to his shoulder and the ensuing fever, he had awakened in a missionary’s barn. When a girl came in to milk a cow, he had grabbed her ankle in a desperate, wordless plea for help. That was when the missionary’s white dog slashed his arm open. He remembered little else of that day until he woke beneath a warm blanket beside the fireplace in the missionary’s cabin. Drifting in and out of consciousness, he had begun to call the girl Blue Eyes. He had continued to do so even when he realized she was Genevieve LaCroix, the daughter of the trader up north.

As he sat on the edge of the now dead trader’s cot staring down at Genevieve LaCroix’s face, Daniel closed, his eyes, relishing the emotion that welled up inside him. The longing was so intense it was almost physically painful, and yet it was the first thing that had sliced through the dullness that had overtaken him in the recent weeks. Perhaps, he thought, he could come alive again, after all.

Looking down at the drawing he reminded himself, You are dead to her now. Sacred Lodge had told him his name was on the list of the men to be hanged. Blue Eyes would probably have heard that. She would think him dead. It was probably for the best, he told himself. The children they had protected during the uprising would give her life new meaning. The missionary Simon Dane would want her. His wife was dead. His children loved Blue Eyes.

Daniel turned his thoughts away from the idea of a union between Reverend Dane and his Blue Eyes. He thought about the white baby they had rescued from a deserted cabin during the uprising. If no one claimed the child, her presence would provide a link between them that would transcend everything that kept them apart. Even if Blue Eyes thought him dead, she would look at the child and remember him. That would have to be enough.

She has friends and children who love her. She is safe somewhere far away from all this trouble. You have no home and no future beyond tomorrow. You are dead to her . . . and that is good.

Still, when he got up to return to his pallet by the fire, Daniel tucked the book that held her image into the wide blue sash wrapped around his waist.