AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Then she stifled a scream when she saw the blood on his arm, and his torn buffalo robe revealing a rip in his flesh. His wounds must have rendered him too helpless to reload and fire a third shot against the remaining wolf.
Mariah watched the wolf snarl and draw back when he turned his silver eyes to her. Trembling, she raised her rifle and fired one shot and downed the last surviving wolf. Dropping her rifle to the ground, she ran to Echohawk and lifted his head onto her lap, cradling him, as she rained kisses on his face.
“A healthy wolf does not stalk a human,” Echohawk said, leaning away from Mariah as he looked at the slain animals. “The wolf is brother to the Indian.”
He paused, then said, “It was not I the wolves hungered for, but the dead rabbit I had just taken from one of my snares.”
Echohawk reached his good arm to Mariah and circled it around her neck, drawing her lips to his mouth, and kissed her softly, then whispered against her mouth, “My No-din, again I am in your debt.”
Mariah looked down into his dark eyes. “Ay-uh, you are in my debt,” she murmured. “And your debt to me is to stay alive!”
Echohawk chuckled, then groaned as he tried to lift his injured arm.
“Echohawk, I had thought that perhaps White Wolf had . . . had stalked and killed you,” Mariah said softly.
“Do not fill your thoughts with that snake!” Echohawk grumbled. “Never will he be the cause of my death.”
Mariah’s eyes wavered; then she helped him from the ground. “I’ve brought the toboggan,” she said softly. She spied his horse tethered close by to a low tree limb. “This time you will ride much more comfortably on the toboggan than on Blaze.”
“But you can’t pull the toboggan with my weight on it,” Echohawk fussed, cringing again when a sharp pain shot through his injured arm. “No-din, you are with child.”
“I am strong,” Mariah argued. “So is the child that grows within my womb.”
Echohawk struggled free from her grip and went to Blaze. He uncoiled the reins from the tree, then managed to get himself into the saddle. “Get the toboggan. Attach it to the horse. We will ride together on Blaze into the village.”
“You are a very stubborn man,” Mariah said, sighing. She shuddered when she stepped around the dead animals, then went to the toboggan and did as Echohawk asked. When she climbed into the saddle behind him, and clung to his waist, a sudden fear gripped her. In his eyes she could already see signs of a fever, surely caused by the wound.
Chapter 32
Under the arch of life . . . I saw
Beauty enthroned; and tho her gaze struck awe,
I drew it in as simply as my breath....
—Rossetti
This was so familiar to Mariah, as though it were only yesterday that she had sat beside Echohawk in his wigwam, he in a fevered state and she bathing his heated brow. She had managed to get a medicinal drink made of dogwood bark between his lips, a concoction used against fevers.
She had learned many more ways of healing since Nee-kah’s earlier teaching. When Echohawk had a minor wound, she knew how to use sumac leaves to stop the bleeding and sphagnum moss to bind it up. If medicine was necessary, she knew how to prick the skin with a sharp bone tool so that it could enter the patient’s body.
The fire’s glow the only light in the wigwam, Mariah gazed down at Echohawk, who lay beneath many blankets, asleep by the fire. Her eyes saddened as she bathed her husband’s fevered brow again, as she had all through the long, weary night.
Before, when he had not known her identity, only that she had cared for him with compassion, he had recovered. And she kept praying to her Lord that this time would be no different. She had cleansed and wrapped his wounds. She had forced medicinal herbal liquids through his parched lips. She had allowed a Mide priest to come and speak over him. She had bathed him with cool compresses all night.
Now all that was left was the waiting, and her continued silent prayers....
She looked beyond Echohawk at the crib where their young son lay sleeping. She was filled with pride and love as she listened to his steady breathing, recalling that first night after he had been born and how strange it had been to have another person breathing in their wigwam.
But, ah, how she had cherished the sound!
Their son!
Oh, how he filled their lives, even more than she had ever expected. For many months her life had been centered only around Echohawk. Now she had two people who relied on her, and this was wonderful, for while she had been growing up, it had been only herself, fending for herself.
She had been so very alone as a child and young woman.
She looked up at the smokehole, seeing shadows softening into a light orange glow. “It’s morning,” she whispered. “It’s another Chippewa sunrise.”
