Tworivers
Copyright© 2025 by Harry Carton
Chapter 31: Journey’s End
The thaw came late that year. Wind Rider watched the ice break apart on the Mississippi from the palisades of River Junction, Winona’s swollen belly pressed against his back as she laced her fingers over his. Below them, children shrieked as they chased chunks of floating ice with hooked poles—some game that involved steering the largest floes toward a marked stretch of shore.
“Yellow Hair arrives soon,” Winona murmured into his shoulder blade. Her breath warmed the faded green fabric of his army shirt – one of the last remnants of his old life. “Grandmother Flint saw it in the fish entrails this morning.”
The decision settled into Wind Rider’s bones like river silt—slow, inevitable. He watched a heron spear a fish in the shallows, its patience rewarded after hours of stillness. This is where the current takes us. The realization felt less like surrender and more like recognizing a path that had been there all along.
Yellow Hair arrived with the first thunderstorm of summer, his silver-shot ponytail plastered to his back by rain. Behind him, Baya rode a piebald mare, her twin sons balanced on either side of her saddle like small, fierce bookends. Dawson – no, Yellow Hair now – dismounted with the creaking stiffness of a man who’d ridden too far too fast. His grin flashed white against his sun-darkened skin as he clasped Wind Rider’s forearm. “Heard you’ve been building something that isn’t a war.”
Baya slid from the mare with her sons tumbling after her. The boys – maybe six months old, but precocious with the time-diluted genes of a father from the 21st century – immediately tottered toward the riverbank where the badger-tooth girl was teaching a gaggle of children to skip stones. Winona laughed as one twin snatched up a flat rock with deadly seriousness, his tiny tongue poking between his lips in concentration.
Wind Rider never gave the order to stay – it simply happened, like the Mississippi finding its course after spring floods. By midsummer, his bow had gathered dust while his hands learned to shape iron alongside Missouria blacksmiths. Winona’s belly swelled beneath the elk-hide dresses Grandmother Flint insisted would “strengthen the child’s bones,” and Wind Rider found himself bartering Apache silver-working techniques for cradleboard designs that blended Chiricahua and Ojibwe traditions.
Dawson had arrived with the first peaches from New Orleans, their fuzzy skins wrapped in Spanish linen. He tossed one to Wind Rider with a smirk. “Tastes like home,” he lied. The fruit was mealy and tart, nothing like Georgia peaches. But when Baya’s twins bit into their shares, juice running down their chins, Yellow Hair’s expression softened in a way Wind Rider had never seen during their sniper days.
River Junction grew in strange harmonies that summer. The deaf mapmaker from Mackinac etched copper plates with watersheds only Graves recognized, while Winona taught Quapaw women to alloy Spanish silver with lead for bullets that could pierce French breastplates at 300 yards. At night, Wind Rider and Yellow Hair would sit on the palisades, watching fireflies blink along the riverbank as Graves lectured Missouria elders about germ theory—using a rotting peach to demonstrate.