The chief bored into him with his rheumy eyes, wondering if he could believe him—or should—or if it even mattered. Even if Colter was the fastest man alive, how could he hope to outrun a hundred or more hopped-up spear-flinging braves, each of them vying to be the one to avenge the death of their tribesman, their friend, their relative, their father or son or brother? After a minute or two of this—enough to make Colter feel the extra weight of paranoia, wondering if the chief had been there for the fight with the Crows and was just now beginning to place him—the chief turned his back on him and returned to the circle of elders. Things got quiet. Children stared at him out of wide unblinking eyes. A dog came up to sniff him and raise its hackles before slinking away. The elders were talking in low voices now, as if they’d reached consensus, and he strained to hear what they were saying but couldn’t catch a word of it.
Another eternity went by, every minute of it precious, however fraught, because he was alive still and thinking and breathing and pumping blood on planet earth. He just stood there, staring straight ahead, as if he didn’t care one way or the other what they did with him. It was cool still, the temperature just above freezing despite the sun that had come up over the horizon now, but he didn’t feel it—if anything, he felt overheated, as if he were wrapped in furs and lying in front of a bonfire. Maybe he had an itch on the back of his neck or under his arm—people had itches all the time—but he didn’t dare scratch it or even move a fraction of an inch. Finally, the first chief, joined now by a younger, angrier-looking one, strolled across the beaten dirt to him, taking his sweet time. He was nodding, nodding assent, and when he was right there in front of Colter again, nose-to-nose, he said, “You go out there on the plain and then”—he gestured to the young braves, who’d begun to remove their leggings and line up for the chase—“we see how fast you run.”
So Colter, taking his sweet time too, ambled out across the plain, expecting at any moment to hear the shout go up behind him but forcing himself to walk so as to get as much distance between himself and his pursuers as he could before he broke into a run and set them off. Most people wouldn’t have had the presence of mind Colter had—they would have taken off sprinting and the Indians would have been on them quicker than flies on shit—but it served him well. He must have gotten a hundred yards out before the shout went up, but it wasn’t so much a shout as a mad blood-crazed shriek of three hundred voices, the women ululating all over again and the braves howling like beasts. Colter didn’t let it distract him and he didn’t look back. He knew right where he was—it was six miles straight across the plain to the forks of the Missouri, the big river, and if he could somehow reach that and maybe get in the water ahead of them and flail his way downstream he had a chance, the smallest, tiniest, infinitesimal chance, of surviving.
Colter ran. He kept his head down, watching his feet, trying to avoid the spines of the cholla and prickly pear and whatever else was out there. His legs felt strong, though he’d spent the better part of the past month sitting in a canoe, and he never slowed his pace, sprinting the first mile as if this wasn’t about endurance but speed, only that. The braves—and what had they been doing all their lives except letting their ponies do the running for them?—began to drop out, one by one. Those closest to him flung their spears at the pale retreating wedge of his back but they weren’t near enough to be accurate and he could hear the spears clatter on the stones behind him. Encouraged, he kept running, and if anything, increased his speed.