Free Lord Grizzly, Second Edition by Frederick Manfred Page A

his scolding, only made her run the faster. By the time she reached the edge of the village, all the Ree braves and squaws and children were out of their dirt-mound lodges listening and laughing, the squaws especially delighting in the show. When Bending Reed vanished beyond the picket barricade, out past the guards, out over the last hill and finally out of sight, they suddenly understood, too late, that she’d played a ruse on them. And had escaped.
    Old Hugh had to laugh. “That was some, Reed, that was. As good a peedoodle as any I ever heard of. But how come ye’re still playin’ this contrary fiddle, Reed? Now that Heyoka has helped ee get away, can’t ee lay him to one side, Reed?”
    Reed shut up.
    Old Hugh laughed aloud. “Ho-ah! I see. It’s a habit that’s took hold, has it? Well, well. That’s some, that is.”
    Abruptly Bending Reed seemed to remember something. She bustled around in the tepee like one possessed. She grabbed up a fire-blacked pot and filled it with water from a leather bag and set it on the cookstone at the edge of the twig fire. She pushed the twig ends up into the pyramid fire all around and added a few small logs. She grabbed up a stone club, and a piece of savory meat, and rushed out through the doorflap. She whistled up the fort dogs. A moment later there was a short yelp and the punking sound of stone hitting skull. Then she came back in dragging a dead yellow-haired puppy. She gutted it and prepared it and dropped it into the pot. Next she got out the skin of pemmican and with an old worndown butcher knife cut off a few slices and laid them on some fresh green cottonwood leaves at Hugh’s feet. She made some gruel out of hump fat and ground corn and berry pits. She dug out some buffalo marrow for butter.
    Slowly the water warmed; became uneasy with heat; began to boil.
    While the meat cooked, she slipped down the legging on Hugh’s bad leg. She shook her head when she saw how red and angry the bullet wound was. It had begun to look like a big red boil. She put a hand over open mouth a moment and her paired blackcherry eyes rolled big and shiny. Then she pitched in. She made a fine paste out of powdered cedar-tree needles and rattlesnake oil. She rubbed the fragrant ointment gently but firmly into his leg around and over the touchy wound. And last she got out a bag of grizzly-bear grease and gave his entire body a rubdown with it. The grizzly grease gave her brave husband great power.
    Old Hugh sighed. He lay back on the musky robe and enjoyed it all. It had been many a moon since he’d had a warm even urgent rubdown. He groaned both in pleasure and pain.
    Presently the puppy meat was ready and she motioned for him to dip in.
    And Hugh did. The meat was very tender. It fell off the bones at the least touch of his butcher knife. The pemmican, made of pounded buffalo-cow meat and tallow, was as sweet as fresh cheese. And the corn gruel went down like heated honey. It was a feast fit for the Great White Father himself.
    Finished, Hugh jabbed his knife in the ground a few times and then wiped it clean on his leather sleeve. He lay back on the buffalo robe. He groaned with both pleasure and pain again. It was a great life.
    He lit his pipe.
    He watched Bending Reed take her turn at the pot and the pemmican. She ate demurely, even delicately, like a bunny nibbling grasstips. Hugh had always liked the way she ate. She was a bunny one, she was. Ae. She didn’t chew with her mouth open like some squaws did.
    After a while, thoroughly relaxed, and moved by a need to talk to someone, he began to gossip a little about the old days.
    He told her a little of his adventures since he’d escaped from the Pawnees. She listened while she began to work on a new leather hunting shirt for him. Every now and then her wondering blackcherry eyes studied his old gray eyes and grizzled leathery face.
    On his second pipe, Hugh went back a little further,