The High Missouri by Win Blevins

Author:Win Blevins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

Dylan looked at Spider Woman. Sensations ran through him—feelings of warmth, pictures of other people, the sense of companionship, and most of all a sense of satiation, a wonderful fullness of belly. He could get rid of these feelings simply by turning his back on Spider Woman in her web. But then he got more and more miserable, his hunger ravening his spirit, loneliness forming on him like frost and crusting to ice.

When he could stand it no longer, he turned back to Spider Woman, and she spoke to him of food cooking over a fire shared with other people. Yes, she spoke to him without words, with only pictures and feelings. But that was subtle, for pictures and feelings were stronger, more enticing. Her web for him was food, warmth, human companionship. He would watch her and let her talk of such things without words, and finally he would turn his back and make them go away. She was a temptress, Spider Woman. She helped him get through the night, but she was a temptress.

He wondered if she was sent by the witch.

Dylan knew some Spider Woman stories from Dru, and some from Bleu. Such tales, Dru claimed, were borrowed from every band of pagans on the continent, for she was a heroine to all. She was a great helper—among her boons to the people were teaching them to weave. But Dylan was not fooled. Behind whatever temptations she might offer lay her trap, the web.

The other great hero of Dru and Bleu’s stories was Coyote. But this evil spirit had made no appearance yet. Dylan chuckled to himself. Apparently a fire could keep away even a spirit.

Sometimes he talked to Spider Woman out loud. “What I want,” he would say, “is Yorkshire pudding. Not to mention the rib roast, plenty fat. Then for dessert, cherries. Nothing else for right now—I shouldn’t overeat. Cherries…”

Then he would drift back into semidelirium. He knew he was half mad these days, along the processional of his starvation. “‘I am but mad north-north-west,’” he would rant suddenly, quoting. “‘When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.’” He would be talking to Spider Woman or peering into the darkness for the eyes of Coyote or telling Mr. Stewart just how right he bloody well was or even playing an imaginary game of cards with Dru, and he would suddenly know he was mad, a bedlam, Hamlet north-north-west, or a small, pathetic Lear upon the heath.

Then he would turn his back to Spider Woman. He knew she wasn’t real anyway. Spiders didn’t live through the winter—or did they? He wasn’t sure. Dru said there were two kinds of spiders, those that made webs and waited, and those that crawled and pounced on their prey. He didn’t say whether they lived through the winter. This Spider Woman was a weaver of webs, but Dylan could turn his back and not get caught in her trap.

Which was going to the witch. Oh yes, that was the bait in her trap.

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