Free Into the Savage Country by Shannon Burke

much of the work there.
    I rolled the barrel through the front room and into the sunny courtyard as she’d directed and saw the willow hoops were already stretched with pelts, and the children, eager to help her, were setting the furs in the sun to dry after the soaking.
    Two weeks later I came back and the pelts were stacked and wrapped and somehow compressed. The pelts, which had been stiff and rigid, were now pliable and scraped thin and smoked so they would not return to rawhide after they got wet. I paid her what she asked and no more and with no swaggering, though I admit, this was more by calculation than by lack of feeling. When I held the coins out she snatched them up and stashed them in a deerskin pouch around her neck.
    “Thank you,” she said.
    “Thank you for doubling the worth of my pelts,” I said.
    Over the next week I brought her more skins and there was the usual conversation of commerce: payments, numbers of pelts, and supplies.
    The next week I ventured to loan her a book. I offered
The Scottish Chiefs
, but she did not seem to think much of Porter.
    “Do you have any Richardson? Radcliffe?” she asked.
    “The general’s wife has a copy of
Clarissa
and all of Radcliffe. I’ll get them for you, if you like.”
    Alene tried to hide her eagerness, but said, “That would be kind, William.”
    Two days later I brought her a copy of
The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne
and
The Italian
, with promises to bring others later.
    She devoured these books eagerly. She was a great reader and despite her long hours of labor kept each volume for less than a week.
    This exchange of books and of pelts went on all that fall, and then one day in early November she told me to stop by the infirmary. I waited several hours, then rode by when I thought the classroom had let out. It had not. She only had a moment, and came hurrying out to meet me so I hardly had time to get off my horse.
    “Bend down,” she said.
    “What?”
    “Oh, you ignorant savage. Bend your head.”
    I bent my head so it was near hers and she slipped a hat over my ears. It was a round hat made from a processed beaver pelt, simple but expertly made and very warm. She must have gotten the pelt from Gadaira because it was not one of mine.
    “That should keep your big head warm this winter,” she said.
    I did my best not to smile foolishly, at least not until I was out of sight of the infirmary.
    I suppose everyone knew I courted Alene with this commerce. I’m sure she knew it herself. Yet I thought little of my chances. I told myself that she was in mourning for a very rich man and that she was the heir to one of the largest fortunes in St. Louis. Despite her present conditions, I thought there was little reason for her to consider me. I imagined she found me diverting and harmless, and yet, with every interaction my feeling for her grew and my disdain for my own faint heart increased. At the time I thought another man would have at least attempted to penetrate her defenses and it was only my shrinking nature that made me delay, though I think now that this is not true. There are men who are persuasive with women, but I think these men make love to women who are ready to have that effect put on them. Alenewas not ready to be courted, so my shyness was fortunate and maybe even persuasive in its own way. But just because I did not woo her does not mean I did not want to. All that time I was awash in a mixed haze of self-deception and longing, terrified that I would show my heart too openly but equally terrified that another might sweep in and conquer her while I stood back being cordial. I suppose there may have been some basis in that second fear.
    A few days before Thanksgiving I noticed an expensive black thoroughbred in Smitts’s stables. I dismounted and walked past the stables and on up the boardwalk and into what we called the tavern but was really just an open area with rough-hewn tables and high stools at a plank-wood bar and a few