Far as the Eye Can See Read Free

eat. All I have is a sack of dried beans, a little raw sowbelly, a bag of coffee and sugar cubes, a few strips of beef jerky, and some hardtack. I go back to where her pouch is and find some leather leggings, some more dried beans, and a piece of sowbelly that looks to be at least a half a year old. It stinks to high heaven, but it will cook up just fine. I take it all back and set it down at her feet.
    In a little while, Cricket comes back, looking lame as ever and disappointed.
    “What’s the matter, old girl? Nothing much to eat around here, is there.” The Indian girl thinks I was talking to her. She opens her eyes a little and frowns. “Not you,” I say.
    I think she might start crying again, but she reaches for my hand and tries to pull herself up. It’s just too much pain.
    “You’re all bruised up down there,” I say. “You won’t be able to use them muscles for a spell.”
    She takes a deep breath, then looks at me like a hungry puppy. “Help me up,” she says.
    I try to be gentle but it hurts her to bend like that. I set her up against the saddle with her feet splayed out in front of her. She points to the blood on her moccasins.
    “Dripped on them while we was walking,” I say. “But you ain’t bleeding no more.”
    It looks like the saddle is causing her sizable pain. “You want me to lay you back down again?”
    “No.”
    “Looks like it’s hard to get air. You having trouble breathing?”
    “No.”
    “It must just be the pain, then.” I set there looking at her, wondering what I might do next.
    After a while she seems to settle down. I get up and put the bridle back on Cricket and tether her to the trunk of a pretty thick juniper. I get some of the sugar out of my pack and feed it to her. “There’ll be plenty of grass up ahead, old girl,” I whisper.
    The sky above us is absolutely white. Not a cloud nowhere and no depth to it. The sun is behind us now, so it does no good to crouch in the lee of the boulder. The only place that looks like a sky is the deep blue distance where it rumbles and sparks.
    “Somebody’s getting wet,” I say, taking a place next to my wounded companion. “March thunderstorms can be pretty bad. You feel up to a little talk?”
    She seems to nod, but she looks at me like she hopes I’ll change things somehow.
    “What’s your name?”
    “Ink,” she says. She don’t look away from me.
    “That a Indian name?”
    “I am called Stand Alone Woman by the Sioux.”
    “What kind of name is Ink?”
    “It is what my father called me when I was little. I am so dark. My real name is Diana.”
    “Your daddy a white man?”
    “My mother was Indian.”
    “But he was white.”
    “Yes.”
    “So what the hell you doing out here?”
    She grimaces a bit, seems to take in a little more air. “I am running away from my husband.”
    “You married?”
    “To a Miniconjou brave.”
    “Really.”
    “I did not want to be. I was taken when I was sixteen. They killed my father. My mother . . .” She stops.
    “What about your mother?”
    “I don’t know what happened to her. I never saw her after I got taken.”
    “They took her too?”
    “She was Nez Perce, but she was living with the Crow when she took up with my father.”
    “Miniconjous don’t like the Crow.”
    “Only white men like the Crow.”
    “And you been with the Miniconjous how long?”
    “I lost track of years. Seven or eight. I do not know. I was sixteen when they got me.”
    “You don’t look much older than sixteen now,” I say.
    She falls silent for a while. Maybe she wants to cry a little, but she don’t.
    “Diana,” I say.
    “I am Ink,” she says. She’s studied me all through this conversation, but now she looks away. She’s made up her mind that I ain’t gonna hurt her no more.
    “You’re a pretty tough little thing, ain’t you,” I say.
    “I have never seen hair as red as yours,” she says.
    “Not even among the scalps your tribe taken?”
    “Who are you?”
    “I