It sounded, at first, like the wind. High and long and wavering. Caroline had tugged the quilt over her shoulders before she woke enough to realize the chill that made her shiver was not from cold.
She sat up in bed. Charles stood at the door in his nightshirt, lifting his rifle from its pegs. A feeble gray light fringed the curtains. An hour or so remained until dawn.
“Is it wolves?” she whispered.
Charles shook his head. It was too early in the day for wolves.
Caroline drew her knees to her belly, gathered two fistfuls of quilt under her chin, and listened again.
The sound traveled on the wind, but it was not the wind. It was shrill, and arrow-sharp, as if it had been aimed at them. At intervals it was punctuated with bursts of speed and volume that made Caroline’s shoulders jerk.
It was human, she realized, and female. Women. The pitch told her that, though she had heard bull elk reach notes as high.
“How far is the Indian camp?” she asked.
“Two, three miles northeast.”
Two or three miles. How could they hold their throats open so wide that they could be heard at that distance, even with the wind to carry their voices? Caroline could not imagine what it would take to make her turn loose such sounds—what immensity of grief, or rage. Ma had not made sounds like that when Pa had drowned, nor when Joseph was killed. Yet it was not unbridled wailing. Each tone had been honed into a particular shape. Though Caroline could grasp neither rhythm nor meaning, she perceived that there must be notes and words. A song?
If it were a song, it bore no resemblance to anything Caroline could call music. It had no beat. They did not seem to pause for breath. Now and again Caroline thought she caught a semblance of melody, but it followed no pattern she was familiar with. This was continual, and alien. All she could be certain of was that the sounds did not signal fear. The women were not being savaged, at least.
Mary and Laura woke, saw Charles standing guard in his bare feet, and soundlessly crawled into the big bed. Caroline tried to hum to them, but it only accentuated the strangeness of the Indian song. She held them and was thankful for the firm press of their bodies, which kept her from shivering. When it was time for Carrie to feed, they shifted to make room. Otherwise they stayed still and quiet.
At sunup, the sound stopped.
“What was it?” she asked.
Charles propped the rifle barrel against the wall and wiped a sweaty palm across his nightshirt. “Never heard anything like it,” he said. “Never even heard a story of anything like it.”
It began earlier the next morning. Caroline felt it before she fully heard it. Her nerves quivering at the same high pitch, Caroline pulled the quilt from the bed and took Carrie with her to the rocking chair. Charles sat with the nose of his rifle resting on the lip of the east windowsill. They said nothing. There was nothing to say. Caroline put the baby’s head under her chin, so she could feel the rhythm of the small fast heart against her own, and cupped her hand over Carrie’s ear. When Mary and Laura woke, she motioned for them. They came with their quilt and hunched against her knees to hide their faces in her lap. The harder she tried to be still, the more her body trembled.
Her throat ached with inarticulate frustration. If the sound was a warning, a threat, they did not know how to heed it. It was not screaming or singing or yowling or wailing. And yet it was all of those things. It rose and rose, dipped for a merciful instant and then rose again so sharply that Caroline flinched. Even weeping had a cadence. This had none. Caroline closed her eyes and rocked, counting a deliberate tempo for each gentle sweep of the rockers across the floorboards.
One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three.
She dozed without any awareness of being asleep, for the sound penetrated her dreams. When she woke the sound had ceased. The vague fragments of her dreams evaporated as she blinked into the silence, but the count of the waltz, and the hot stricture in her throat, remained. One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. As she braided Mary’s and Laura’s hair, stirred milk into the cornmeal, walked from the table to the fireplace. The rhythm circled her every movement until she was half-dizzy with it.
All day, her mind replicated the Indians’ strange high notes at the slightest provocation. She heard them in the whinnying horses and the squeaking of the windlass and the ring of Charles’s ax at the woodpile. Anything pitched above a whine snatched her entire focus, leaving her feeling foolish and lightheaded when she realized its source. Yet when Jack broke into a deep rolling growl, Caroline went absolutely still. She knew down to her bones that this sound—the opposite of everything her senses had been attuned to—signaled something actual.
Her eyes darted to the latch string, then to the girls. They had seen her look. If Mary and Laura had not guessed already they knew now that she was afraid.
But they shall not see the depth of it, Caroline silently declared, and resisted the impulse to take the pistol down from its shelf before going to the window. With her shoulder to the wall she peered out sidelong, so as not to move the curtains. Jack was up on his back feet, straining on tiptoe against the chain on his collar, snapping at the air. Charles had put down his ax and stood with his rifle pointing east. He was not squinting down the barrel yet, but his thumb was poised to cock the hammer. Caroline’s breath fogged the glass in quick bursts as she watched and waited.
A voice called out. Male. Then another.
“Eng! Gulls!”
“Eng! Gulls!”
Charles lowered the gun as two men came into view. Caroline’s long exhale blanked an entire pane as she fit the syllables together: Ingalls. Both held rifles, the barrels propped against their shoulders.
“It’s Mr. Edwards,” Caroline said, “and Mr. Scott.” Mary and Laura came to peep out. It could not be so bad, Caroline reasoned to herself, if Mr. Scott had left his wife and children at home. They lived to the east, nearer the Indian camps.
Scott and Edwards did not come into the house. Nor did they rest the butts of their rifles on the ground. They stood together outside the stable, talking. Their talk was at once intense and distracted. Caroline saw each of them survey the eastern horizon in turn. Jack had returned his attention to that direction, too. Edwards caught sight of her and the girls, pressed up against the window glass, and favored the children with a nod. Mary and Laura waved, but Caroline had seen the look on Edwards’s face. It was more wince than smile.
When they had gone Charles called to her through the latched door. “Caroline, will you come give me a hand with the milking?”