Wilderness Double Edition 28 by David Robbins

Author:David Robbins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: rocky mountains, mountain men, frontiersmen, piccadilly publishing, david l robbins, the american wilderness, nate king stories
Publisher: Piccadilly

WILDERNESS 56

IN DARKEST DEPTHS

Dedicated to Judy, Shane, Josh and Kyndra.

First Incident

To the bald eagle flying high in the Rocky Mountain sky, the lake was a great blue egg in the center of the lush green nest of the valley floor.

To the girl standing on the lake’s western shore, it was a constant source of entertainment and wonderment. She loved to gaze out over its watery expanse and watch the ducks and geese swim and dive for fish. She fished herself, now and then, and this was one of those occasions.

Evelyn King had not yet seen her seventeenth birthday. The daughter of mountain man Nate King and Nate’s Shoshone wife, Winona, Evelyn had more of her father in her than her mother. Sparkling green eyes and lustrous black hair testified to her blossoming beauty, of which she was wholly unconscious. She still thought of herself as a girl, not a woman. She still liked to take her father’s fishing pole and spend an idle hour fishing and thinking.

On this particular bright sunny day, Evelyn was perched on a small boulder, humming to herself as she watched the bald eagle soar with outstretched pinions. She wore a beige dress she had sewn herself, patterning it after the latest St. Louis fashion.

Evelyn was watching the eagle, but she was thinking of Degamawaku. She thought of him a lot. He and his family were Nansusequa, a tribe from east of the Mississippi River. Forced to flee when whites wiped out their village, the family had settled in King Valley, as it was called, with her father’s consent. She had been spending a lot of time in Dega’s company of late. He was her age and fun to be with and strikingly handsome.

As Evelyn sat humming and wondering about the intent looks Dega gave her from time to time, she heard the tread of approaching footsteps. Thinking he was coming to pay her another visit, she swiveled and smiled her warmest smile, only to have it die stillborn and be replaced by a frown. “Oh. It is only you.”

The white-haired man in buckskins, a Hawken rifle cradled in the crook of his left elbow, blinked eyes the same color as the lake and puffed out his full cheeks. “I dare say, that was as warm a greeting as I have ever received. How now, girl? Dost thou jeer and flout me in the teeth?” he said.

“Hello, Uncle Shakespeare,” Evelyn said. “I am glad to see you.”

“So you claim,” Shakespeare McNair responded. “But I was not born yesterday. Nor ten thousand yesterdays ago.” Again he quoted his namesake, “‘Let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp.’“

Evelyn grinned and asked, “What does that mean, exactly? Or is my pa right in saying that when you quote the Bard, you have no notion of what the Bard is saying?”

A pink tinge of indignation spread from Shakespeare’s neck to his brow. He was sensitive about his namesake. “Horatio said that?” he sputtered. “Why, he hath more hair than wit and more faults than hair.

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