Chapter 28: Revolution

A week passed and the group followed the stream northeast. It branched as the hills increased. A day later the trail passed through a narrow gorge. On the other side of the hill the land began flowing sharply down. The lands ahead broadened into the flatter plains typical of what Wind Rider recognized — with his 21st century memory — as typical northern Arkansas / southern Missouri lands.

The first frost came not as a whisper but as a thief. Wind Rider woke to find his canteen’s leather strap stiff as bone. Wind Rider exhaled sharply through his nose, watching his breath hang like gun smoke in the air. It was a little colder as they moved across the Ozark range on their way to the lands of the Kickapoo and the Missouria.

By midday, Winona’s rifle mechanisms clicked slower – the lubricant thickening in the cold. She cursed in Apache, then Spanish, then a hybrid of both that made the badger-tooth girl giggle. “Science goddess forget winter?” the girl taunted, gnawing on a strip of jerky that now required two hands to bend.

Winona flicked a fleck of ice from the rifle’s breech. “No. She expects us to learn.” She demonstrated by rubbing the metal between her palms – body heat restoring the action’s smoothness. The Quapaw women clustered close, replicating the motion on their own weapons until steam rose from the warming steel.

Crowfoot rode slumped in his saddle, his breath shallow. The old man’s milky eyes tracked the tree line where frost-limned branches clicked together like antlers. “Missouria lands,” he rasped, pointing northeast where the hills flattened into icy floodplains. “Their winter camps hug the river bends – smoke holes crusted with beaver grease to trap warmth.”

Eagle Eyes dismounted suddenly, knee-deep in a snowdrift, joined by Wind Rider, who carefully avoided the snowdrift. His modern combat boots – worn thin from years of time-displaced travel – had finally split at the seams. He stared at his exposed toes, wiggling them numbly. “Christ. Forgot what cold feels like below the Mason-Dixon.”

The badger-tooth girl giggled, kicking up a spray of powder. “French toes freeze first!” She darted forward, pressing a mittenful of snow against Wind Rider’s neck. He yelped – the sound startling a flock of ravens from a dead oak. Their wings beat the frozen air like musket volleys.

Winona scanned the horizon through the French telescope she’d liberated earlier, her breath fogging the lens. “Movement. Three miles northeast.” She adjusted the focus – revealing distant shapes hauling sledges across a frozen river flowing down from the hills. “Buffalo hides on travois. Heavy loads.”

Crowfoot wheezed, his voice brittle as the ice cracking underfoot. “Missouria winter hunt. They’ll be thin.” His gnarled fingers tightened around his medicine pouch. “Hungry people bite faster.”