Free The Frontiersman’s Daughter by Laura Frantz Page A

night song was a death token in disguise?

11

    With autumn waning, Ma Horn moved to the fort for the winter and Pa brought Lael home. She stood in the cabin door, a linsey shawl about her shoulders but still barefoot as if to protest the coming cold. Wordlessly, she watched her father prepare to leave on a long hunt, stung by his calm deliberation. Somehow she’d thought he wouldn’t go with the threat of the Shawnee still about them, yet she reckoned even she couldn’t come between him and his love of the woods.
    Since she was small and he’d taken to the woods for months on end, it was she who helped him pack what he needed for the long weeks away. She’d always hated leave-takings, and this day was proving especially difficult. Hanging her shawl on a peg by the door, she bit her lip to keep her composure and reached for his weapons.
    Her fingers traced the familiar initials scrawled across his powder horn before she hung it from the strip just above his shot pouch. Fashioned by her own hands when she was ten, the leather was worn but sturdy enough to hold a chunk of lead for bullets, a brass mold for casting them, and flint and steel to start a fire.
    Before her on the table, laid out like a surgeon’s tools, were the items she now took stock of. A bit of jerky. A twist of tobacco and ginseng root. Mittens. Patch leather and an awl for mending moccasins. A tomahawk, his father’s before him, shone sharp and smooth beside a sheathed hunting knife.
    Quickly she caught up the new linsey-woolsey shirt, which Ma had woven and she herself had washed, and pressed it to her nose. The smell of linen, earthy yet so clean it smelled sweet, made her eyes water. Rolling it up, she reached for a wad of unspun tow with which to clean his rifle.
    Done , she decided, wiping a hand across her eyes. Partings were painful as lancing a boil, and she was simply no good at them. Was it any wonder Ma and Ransom were nowhere to be seen? If she’d been a boy, she’d be packing up a tote of her own things beside his.
    Passing onto the porch, she studied him as he readied his packhorses by the barn. When he returned come spring, the two animals would be heavily laden with furs and he himself nearly unrecognizable with a full beard, his long hair crying for a comb and a cutting. Once, when she was but five, he’d returned after half a year away and she’d hid in Ma’s skirts to escape his strangeness. But the familiar smell of him, and his voice, deep as a well, eventually brought her around.
    Always he brought her something back. A lace handkerchief. A biscuit mold. Flower seeds. A two-tined fork and jelly spoon. A painted paper fan. A metal tea caddie with a tiny lock. This time what would it be?
    What if he never came back?
    He stepped up onto the porch. What did one say upon parting, she wondered, perhaps once and for all?
    Pa, watch your back.
    Stay warm and dry.
    Don’t dally.
    Already he looked strange to her, dressed as he was for the woods. Turning, she led him to the table and watched as he examined his weapons. The danger of his task, not understood by her before, now seemed fathomless. Yet his demeanor befuddled her; he might have been going on a simple Sunday stroll. She swallowed down her fears and went back out onto the porch.
    In time he followed. Though he said not a word, he took her hand and pressed something into her palm, then folded her fingers tight around it. When he’d gone she opened her hand and saw a blur of blue beads.

    With Pa away, they moved to the fort. In years past they’d simply stayed put at their own cabin and awaited his return, wrapped in a cocoon of snow. But this time, with no explanation given and none needed, he’d ordered them within Fort Click’s picketed walls. There, Lael felt safe but strangled by the smallness of life.
    Here, their cabin door did not need stout bars, and the leather latchstring could be left out in welcome. There was little to do but stand by the shuttered window and