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  RIVER OF PORCUPINES

  RIVER OF PORCUPINES

  G. K. AALBORG

  FIVE STAR

  A part of Gale, a Cengage Company

  Copyright © 2018 by Gordon Aalborg

  Five Star Publishing, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  The publisher bears no responsibility for the quality of information provided through author or third-party Web sites and does not have any control over, nor assume any responsibility for, information contained in these sites. Providing these sites should not be construed as an endorsement or approval by the publisher of these organizations or of the positions they may take on various issues.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Aalborg, Gordon, author.

  Title: River of porcupines / G.K. Aalborg.

  Description: First edition. | Farmington Hills, Mich. : Five Star, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018014288 (print) | LCCN 2018016648 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432838126 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432838119 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432838157 (hardcover)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3812-6

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Romantic suspense fiction. | Western stories.

  Classification: LCC PR9619.3.A22 (ebook) | LCC PR9619.3.A22 R58 2018 (print) | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014288

  First Edition. First Printing: November 2018

  This title is available as an e-book.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3812-6

  Find us on Facebook—https://www.facebook.com/FiveStarCengage

  Visit our website—http://www.gale.cengage.com/fivestar/

  Contact Five Star Publishing at [email protected]

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 22 21 20 19 18

  For Dana—who was there at the beginning of this novel . . .

  And for Deni—who was there at the end.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the invaluable assistance given by my wonderful editor, Hazel Rumney. She is the type and quality of editor I want to be when I grow up . . . and I’ve had any number during a long career to allow comparisons.

  Thank you, Hazel. It has been a privilege working with you, and learning.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Spring came to the Kootenay Plains in a blinding swirl of wind-lashed rain and hail. It drove the gaunt Blackfoot ponies to shelter in the pine thickets and their owners to huddle coughing in the winter-thickened stench of their lodges.

  A few of the braver Indians, with cautious glances at the shattering sky, took blankets to their favored buffalo ponies, but most cowered before the anger of the storm, terrified by Nature’s sudden mood change.

  No blanket was brought to the shaggy young white man chained to a tree at the edge of the camp, nearly naked and with no protection from the storm. He also looked to the sky, but Garth Cameron had no fear of the lightning serpents; he was surprised and thankful merely to be alive, and whether death came from God’s lance or that of an Indian wouldn’t make much difference.

  The antics of his captors both amused and enraged him, and he lunged to the limits of the thirty-foot chain around his naked waist, roaring with abusive laughter. He combined the few contemptuous Blackfoot words he knew with an extensive vocabulary of English, French, and Gaelic obscenities in a barrage that would have brought him applause from his companions at Rocky Mountain House.

  The sodden, scurrying Indians ignored him.

  “Lousy, stinking varmints,” he muttered, shaking his huge fists. “Ah, well, at least I can get clean, long’s I don’t freeze in the process.”

  He retreated to the dubious shelter of the tall jack pine to which his chain was riven with a massive, rusty spike, then stripped off what remained of his buckskin breeches and threw them to the tiny remaining bit of grass that had survived his four months of pacing. It might have been nice, he considered, to have a handy anthill so he could remove at least some of the vermin that infested his tattered clothing and winter-grown hair and bedraggled, reddish beard.

  At one point he had believed the vermin might carry him off chain and all; now he was beyond any concerns about modesty or a few louse bites. Water streaming over his winter-white body, he bent to slip off his moccasins, the once beautifully-beaded remembrance of a brief dalliance with the daughter of a rum-craving Cree sub-chief. After throwing them, too, to the cleansing rain and hail, along with the scabrous buffalo robe that was his only other protection from the weather, he moved around and around within the limits of his chain, trying to stay warm.

  He’d often thought his anger at himself should have been enough to warm him. He was a damned fool and worse and would doubtless be told so at length if he ever returned to Rocky Mountain House.

  It had been a childish desire to mark his twenty-first birthday as he had the several before it—with feminine company—that had landed him at the end of this Blackfoot slave chain, and it was little satisfaction that he would never forget it . . . not now.

  Older and wiser members of David Thompson’s trading party had many times warned him against slipping off to the bushes with tasty young squaws while their fathers or husbands were being supplied with cheap trade rum to separate them from their furs.

  “One of these days, some big chief he’s going to make a capon out of you. Then maybe you will listen,” little René Giroux had cautioned during one of the wizened voyageur’s infrequent moments of seriousness. Garth had laughed; it was like getting culinary advice from a wolverine.

  It was said of René that he had the mind of a horse trader, the strength of an ox, and the instincts of a rutting bull elk. He’d been forty years on the rivers and had left Métis children among every tribe from Montreal to the shining Rockies.

  Even David Thompson, who frequently spent more time doodling with his maps than worrying about the habits of his men—or, more important, the competition from the Hudson’s Bay Company at neighboring Acton House—also had mentioned the matter to young Garth Cameron. But it was a waste of words; Garth was already fully into the pattern described by his cohorts as “a short life but a merry one . . . if you keep your hair.” And he was enjoying every day of it along with many of the nights.

  A full six-foot-four in his moccasins, he was still reaching for the 260 pounds that would someday grace his massive frame. Whether the occasion called for heaving up a 400-pound pack, carrying a canoe that most men couldn’t handle as a pair, or chasing a succulent young squaw, he considered himself fully able and even more willing. A gaunt and gangling youth of sixteen when he’d made his first trip to the mountains, he was counted a man grown by the brawling, hard-slaving voyageurs before they’d reached the forks of the Saskatchewan. His red-gold hair and beard had earned him the pet name of Sun Buffalo beneath many a native trade blanket during his trips west, and fear talk from the monkey-like René or his sober patron had been ignored by Garth. At least until this incident.

  He had been lying in the slender arms of Meadowlark, the third and obviously little-used wife of old Three Bears of the mountain Blackfoot, when the old warrior and two of his sons—both substantially older than Meadowlark—disrupted the scene. Believing the old sub-chief and his headmen were out of commission after liberal draughts of trade rum, Garth ha
d enticed the girl into walking with him to a dense pine thicket upstream from the post. She hadn’t understood most of what he said, but the throbbing bulge at his groin needed little interpretation. Within minutes, they were snugly ensconced on a soft bed of pine needles, and all need for words was past.

  His passions temporarily drained, Garth had been idly toying with the girl’s young breasts when a whistling war club exploded something in his head. He’d awakened to the jarring trot of a scrawny pony whose greatest desire and accomplishment seemed to involve stumbling over its own feet to the discomfort of its unwilling passenger.

  Twisting his throbbing head, Garth had been able to see the hunched and welted back of Meadowlark on the pony ahead. She had been beaten until her back was a blood-sodden mess of tattered flesh and buckskin.

  The sight stirred young Garth to rage, and despite his head wound he began to struggle against the rawhide thongs that bound him hand-to-foot beneath the pony’s belly. A futile gesture; one of the young Blackfoot outriders reined up long enough to smack Garth across the head a second time, and he didn’t stir again, even when the Indians stopped for the night and he was brutally kicked from the pony’s back into a convenient snow bank.

  Hunger and thirst were gnawing fires in his gut when Garth woke the next time. Lying quietly, bound so securely he had little other choice, he watched through half-closed eyes as his captors settled into a temporary camp at the mouth of a stream he thought was probably the Ram River, for all the good that knowledge might do him.

  The chief’s eldest son, Walking Dog, noticed Garth’s return to consciousness and strode over to where the captive was trying to sit upright. Garth was still trying to remember his rudimentary Blackfoot vocabulary when Walking Dog paused before him, spat in his face, then kicked him in the mouth. The kick slammed Garth back into the bole of a tree, blood frothing from his crushed lips to feed the anger rising to growls in his throat.

  He struggled against his bonds as the chief’s son strode back to the central fire, thumbing an obscene gesture over his shoulder and laughing to his fellows. Meadowlark also received her share of kicking, but Garth was ignored until the Indians had finished their evening meal. Then Walking Dog returned, carrying a bowl of stinking gruel into which he shoved Garth’s face until suffocation seemed not only imminent but preferable.

  The savages laughed as Garth was repeatedly half-drowned in the slop while being forced to eat like a dog. The old man, especially, seemed to enjoy the sport, although his nearly toothless grin seemed less one of enjoyment than of anticipation. The crude gestures that accompanied his harsh, guttural commentary, and the cruel satisfaction the band seemed to take in tormenting Meadowlark, made it obvious Garth had suffering yet to come.

  He had heard, as had all voyageurs, of “Baldy” St. Jean, who’d been castrated and scalped—but, significantly, allowed to survive—after being caught diddling a Cree woman near Paint Creek House on the Vermilion.

  St. Jean’s companions had found him the next day, hogtied and unconscious in a pool of his own blood outside the gates of the stockade. The flirtatious squaw had coyly eyed him again some months later when her band returned for more trade, but his mind was going by then, and he had returned her sly glances with blank stares. Later that winter, he had fled screaming from the encampment one night and fallen, in his erratic flight, through a hole in the lifting ice.

  Visions of such a fate, combined with Garth’s injuries, brought the vile stew spewing from his stomach, to the pleasure of his greasy captors. Walking Dog strutted over to kick him once more, and then the entire band rolled into their robes, leaving Garth as he had fallen.

  It was more than an hour before he managed to squirm into the carpet of pine needles and gain a measure of protection against the quickening wind and blowing snow. Sleep was impossible; he spent that first night alternating between fitful, shivering naps and painful waking spells in which he could not escape the stinging cold. By morning there was six inches of fresh snow and Garth was kicked awake by Walking Dog and made to grovel into another bowl of stinking gruel, but the band was clearly in a hurry. Garth was slung hastily across the harsh-ribbed spine of another pony, and they were back on the trail by full light.

  A week later, they reached the tribal wintering grounds on the Kootenay Plains, where Garth was dumped from his pony and chained to the jack pine where he would become the winter’s entertainment for at least some of the Blackfoot.

  Not that he had to provide much, nor was much provided for him. Full winter arrived the next day, and Garth was often as not ignored in the band’s simple struggle for survival. An aged squaw occasionally fed him while taunting him about Meadowlark’s sufferings, which apparently were worse than his own, and he was thrown the mangy buffalo robe to protect him from freezing to death. But at least the torments from Walking Dog and his father were limited to the occasional passing kick.

  The children and camp dogs spent a few days teasing him, but the children soon tired of the game and the dogs quickly learned the lessons he taught them via vicious kicks and sweeps of slackened chain. By the night of the lightning storm, there wasn’t a dog left in camp, anyway; during the final months of that harsh winter they had contributed heavily to the thin soup in the camp cooking pots.

  Garth also had suffered. By pulling boughs from the jack pine and arranging the mangy buffalo robe, he’d managed to avoid freezing. But the lack of sufficient food and the inactivity had taken their toll. Stripped now of his tattered buckskins, he looked in worse condition than the gaunt native ponies. The massiveness of his frame was accentuated by his lack of flesh, and rib bones threatened to puncture his frost-burned and louse-ridden hide.

  The ground inside the circle of his chain was paced to mush, which the driving rain was now splattering upon what remained of his clothes. So Garth wrung the water from them and put them on again. The old robe he beat against the tree trunk, then draped over a low branch in hopes the rain might drive off or wash off the remaining vermin.

  Squatting against the tree, he shivered with the chill and idly conjectured if the storm would mean another day without food. Many such days had spent themselves during his captivity, and with meat so scarce during the past month in particular, the little he’d been given was enough to maintain life, but only a semblance of his old strength and endurance.

  He ended up, as usual, sitting up for most of the night beneath the mountain jack pine while his thoughts raced with the forks of the sky-serpent lightning around him. Spring was here—or near as, damn it! Soon the ponies would begin to fatten on the new grass, and his Indian captors would be moving on . . . but to where? And would he live to see their summering grounds among the buffalo?

  The main Blackfoot bands, he knew, ranged throughout the prairie country of the buffalo, down along the Red Deer and the Bow Rivers, out along the mighty forked Saskatchewan. But where the North Saskatchewan swung further north below Rocky Mountain House, the tribes and the trade changed with it. Blackfoot tribesmen still traded at the posts of Quagmire Hall, Forts Edmonton and Augustus, and the island post of Fort de L’Isle, but the furs of the northern Cree were finding their way in growing numbers into the hands of the North-West Company. The older Hudson’s Bay Company continually moved further into the wilderness in attempts to thwart the “pedlars,” while Alexander Mackenzie and his much younger XY Company proved a nuisance to both major trading companies.

  The chill grew, and Garth Cameron shrugged closer into the soaking buffalo robe, gradually drifting into a fitful doze that was punctuated by the spears and arrows of lightning in the darkening mountain sky.

  He was alive tonight, he thought, and would manage somehow to be the same tomorrow. What he needed was food and some luck.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Blackfoot later called it “the place where the sky kills,” and never again would they pitch their buffalo-hide lodges within a mile of there. Three times, the spears of lightning stabbed into the camp of old Three Bears, and wi
thin moments the band was leaderless and four people fewer in number.

  The aging chief was first. When the first lightning bolt smashed into the rocks of his fire-pit, he dived headlong through the teepee flap into a second crackling lance that split him from scalp lock to moccasins. On the other side of the encampment, the widow Moose Calf Crying and her two small children died seconds later, when their lodge was savaged by the lightning, leaving only the fire stones and three charred bodies to the hammers of the rain.

  Garth’s tree became a gargantuan torch from yet another assault by the lightning gods, and when Walking Dog slunk from his teepee to look about the storm-lashed camp, he saw clearly the body of his prisoner sprawled beneath the flare. Drawn by the screams from his father’s lodge, he stepped over the patriarch’s remains, clubbed Meadowlark and her two senior wives until they ceased their wailing, then ordered them to begin the requisite funeral preparations while he tried to restore order to what would now be his inheritance.

  The camp was in chaos. Women and children were hopping about like screaming grasshoppers, and most of the men were engaged in trying to calm the thrashing, nervous ponies tied inside the circle of lodges. Walking Dog’s own prized buffalo hunter was tethered near the blazing tree, but as he rushed to calm it, he gave no thought to his captive.

  He was severing the pony’s rawhide tether when Garth smashed his skull like a melon with a slackened loop of rusty chain. Then Garth sank to his knees in the mud, exhausted from swinging the ten-foot length of warm iron links.

  It took all his concentration to struggle to his feet, pick up the fallen knife, and begin whispering calm into the skittish horse. Alarmed at the rich odor of blood and brains from its dead owner, the pony reared to the end of the tether, but once Garth got his hands on it, the animal quieted enough that he could lead it from the thicket and out onto the steep river trail.