Chapter 10

Connie

Ricky and I have been inseparable since we were toddlers. Our families lived in the same bunkhouse and we were born three days apart. Any time the families get together to relax, someone will inevitably tell a story about something cute we did when we were growing up and the rest of the time will be taken up with everyone else adding their stories. If you asked anyone on the ranch, including us, it was practically destined that Ricky and I would be together as mates.

That all changed a couple of days ago.

One of the stories is about me crawling over to my father's store of arrows and taking one to bite down on when I started teething. A couple of weeks later, when Ricky's first tooth started coming in, I offered him my chewed up arrow. We shared it until all our teeth had broken through.

That developed into play and then to practice with toy bows and soon we were tagging along any time a hunting party went out. We had plenty of livestock and produce on the ranch but hunting and gathering have always played a major role in maintaining and varying our food supply.

We soon became expert at spotting hard to find roots, herbs and of course, animals. Long before Alfie and his sisters came along, we were the ones who would flush out birds and then retrieve them after they were felled by someone's arrow.

Our fathers took us to The Town shortly after we turned five. We marveled at all the wonderful sights; things we had never seen or even imagined before. One of the places we stopped was run by a woman and several children a few years older than us. The children were each doing a different task with the end result being finished arrows. I saw one making points out of stone, another two continually turning a piece of wood while a third shaved it until it was a perfectly round shaft. Another took the shafts and smoothed them while others attached feathers and points. Each of our fathers traded a freshly killed bird for a bunch of arrows and then the woman measured us. She made each of us stand, hold our arms out in front of us and to the sides, each time running a piece of string from one part of our bodies to another, then cutting it to fit that measurement. She had a dozen pieces of string for each of us, side by side on a table, when she shooed us away and told our fathers to bring us back in a week.

A week later, the four of us went deer hunting. This was unusual since we normally went out in a larger group and we didn't look for anything specific, taking whatever we came across.

We got an old doe and field dressed her. When that was done, we fashioned a travois out of a couple of branches and the skin. Once again, we went to The Town, but this time we went straight to the arrow lady.

My fathers gave her our cargo and she had two of the children drag the travois away. She went through some curtains into another room, then came back with two bows. She held them in front of us, one for each. They were slightly taller than us. That made Ricky's bow seven inches longer than mine since the top of my head only reached to the middle of his throat.

We each took our bows and a quiver of custom arrows and proceeded down the road to another set of buildings. There, a man with a big beard and a big belly scrutinized our left hands, then went into another room, returning with wrist guards, which he took great care in fitting to our wrists. He wasn't satisfied with Ricky's until went back and traded it for another.

We were told by our fathers that we wouldn't be able to use our new bows until we reached home and set up a range. The arrows were too valuable to waste and we would not hunt until we had both proven we could hit a target at distance. That ride home was one of the longest I've ever experienced.

Ricky and I took our lessons to heart and by our next birthdays, when we went back to get longer bows, longer arrows and bigger wrist guards, we were each averaging one and a half times as many kills as any of the adults with the exception of our fathers. This time we were able to pay for our own weapons.

That year we were allowed to split off from the hunting parties and work as a pair, provided we stayed within shouting distance of the others in case of trouble. Knowing how to kill a grazing deer and protecting yourself from a hunting cougar are two different things and a six year old just isn't equipped for the latter. Neither are many adults, but the choice between two six year olds and two six year olds plus several adults is no choice at all.

At seven, we would go out with a group of other children, several years older than us. They would find and gather produce for side dishes, stews and the like and would provide the labor to carry the game we would kill. We were able to provide enough going out a couple of times a week that months would go by without another hunting party leaving the ranch.

Now we were both fifteen, almost sixteen, and hunting had lost its allure. We were still good at it, each of us surpassing the ability of everyone on the ranch except my father, but there was no passion. We were fast, we were accurate, but we were at the top of our games and there was no place to go. Killing more wasn't the answer. We didn't want to kill for the sake of killing, wasting good food just to prove something. We didn't mind getting food to supply The Town once in a while but neither of us was interested in taking on the task of feeding that group as well as our own.

About three years ago we came back from a hunt and I was bored. One of my aunts was removing the skin of an elk we had bagged a few days before from the curing rack. She cut off the legs and tossed them on a pile of odd pieces.

"What are you going to do with those?" I asked her.

"I don't know, Mija. They go in the pile and if anybody needs them, they take them."

"Can I have one?"

"Chica, you have brought back enough meat to feed the whole ranch for several years. I'm sure no one will miss it. Are you sure you don't want the whole thing?"

"No, this will be fine."

I grabbed one of the legs and kissed my aunt on the cheek.

That's when I started working with leather. That leg was the first piece of many in months of trial and error in the craft of leather working. A similar piece of leather was transformed into a new quiver for me about six months later.

It didn't take long until Ricky noticed my new quiver and it wasn't long after that before he was working with his own piece of leather.

We rediscovered the feeling of excitement we'd experienced when we first started hunting. Now, three years later, the possibilities seemed limitless, restricted only by our skill, training and creativity. A year ago, we were promised the next two apprentice slots by the master saddle maker in The Town. With the return of the Patrón, there would be a need for more saddles and that meant more apprentices. We were both expecting the call any day now.

Only now I wasn't so sure I wanted to leave. An apprenticeship would mean living in The Town with limited visits back home to the ranch. And I had discovered a reason to want to stay at the ranch.

We've always been told that there's a biological instinct to bear a child fathered by one of the patróns. It was something I'd heard over and over but had never really thought about.

I actually experienced it when Ricky and I were assigned as combination bodyguards and guides for the Patrón and his son. It was like having sex with the Patrón was something I wanted to do but there wasn't any urgency.

After the first night, when he'd been with Amanda, the feeling had intensified to the point where it felt as if my body was trying to force my mind to relinquish any control. I literally felt like knocking him off his horse and having my way with him when we were riding to meet with the rest of the group. It got worse as the day went on. Ricky and I have fooled around for a couple of years so I wasn't a virgin, by any means. That night, the Patrón touched me in places I never knew I had. I felt things I'd never felt before, both physically and emotionally. I felt bound to the Patrón and I would no sooner leave him than cut off my right arm.

I was able to operate; don't get me wrong. When I was chosen as one of the few to take the first shots and kill one of the two outlaws talking with the leader, it was like a sacred trust. But there was more to it than putting an arrow through the target I'd been given. The Patrón wanted those three plus the two over near the prisoners killed instantly, before the rest of our group started their attack. My senses were more alert than they've ever been on a hunt and somehow I knew without a doubt that one of the two targets near the prisoner wasn't taken out. What's strange is I knew it before any of us let fly. I was already planning my second shot to fix that situation while aiming at my assigned target.