Ethan woke up with a raging thirst, not at all sure that he was glad to be alive. His eyes were blurry and his head ached, which he attributed to the lingering effects of the poison arrow. He crawled to a nearby stream, which could only wash off some of the effects from the night before. Then he stepped over the pieces that used to be his friends and ransacked their tents for supplies.
He was unable to think of last night's paralysis as something caused by another. He was the traitor who had done nothing to help his friends while they were being slaughtered, and who was now stealing their effects for himself.
Ethan had no idea what to think about being the sole survivor, but some dark instinct reminded him of what his comrades used to do to steal some of his luck with the ladies. He avoided all of his own belongings and emerged into the cold day with a combination of other men's clothes, water jugs, blankets and knapsacks that might not have a scent the wolves could trace to him.
He also collected as many letters from home as he could find, hoping to write to these wives and mothers and tell them something gentler than the truth about these men's demise.
He saddled up one of the horses that hadn't broken free when the beasts descended and lashed himself to the animal so his weak limbs didn't have to strain to hang on. Another horse with supplies was hooked to his.
The survivor lay their with his arms around the horse's neck and cried with gratitude that at least one thing had seen how badly he behaved and didn't reject him for it.
They started towards the town they'd left behind in their search for the Choctaw. Ethan tried to eat some of the corn bread in his sack, but he got very sick from just a few mouthfuls—no doubt because he was eating a dead man's rations. The woods should have been clearing after walking for four hours steady, but Ethan was sure the poison arrow must have addled his senses. He was lost. It seemed wiser to stop than to go farther in the wrong direction, and the tracker dismounted to make a nest with some blankets. The lone man fell asleep with the two horses casting their large eyes back at his huddled form.
When he woke up, the horses were gone. Damnation, Ethan said to himself.
"Horses there." The voice came from startlingly close. "Water." He then heard the sound of trickling water, which he hadn't noticed before he fell sleep. He must have some sort of fever, Ethan considered. Flashes of last night's slaughter came to him and he grimaced.
Finally, he connected the warm voice with the beautiful Indian girl looking at him with wide, dark eyes framed by a long curtain of black hair. "Hurt?" she asked with a note of concern looking at the bite mark, which was healing better than he would have expected for only splashing it with creek water. It was scarcely even throbbing anymore. Rubbing his finger revealed a faint oily sheen. He sniffed it.
"Did you put one of those medicine bags on me?" he asked suspiciously, brandishing the finger at her. He'd heard stories of the kind of ill effects white men had suffered after such "help."
The girl took a moment to consider his utterance with her head cocked, and then the lovely voice responded with several words in an Indian tongue. Ethan's fuzzy head fell back, not able to decipher more than a word or two in a couple of the major native languages when he was at his best.
They stared at each other across the great divide of language and culture. Then she smiled and wiped his brow. "Help," she said, pointing at herself.
He allowed her to help him stand. Together, they retrieved the horses and filled a skin of water at the stream. He followed her deeper into the woods because he had nothing else to do.
The small pot hanging over the embers of a fire looked very welcoming. The more than a dozen Indian tents, less so.
"There," she said, and spread out a mantle for him. It was late afternoon and the air was already starting to chill, but he hesitated. "I wouldn't mind a meal and maybe a little company, miss, but I'm not in the mood to fight off all of your brothers, or whoever those tents belong to," he indicated the shelters betraying the influence of different tribes, from the plains Indians to much further east. It's not like the tracker group had never seen a mixed band, but it was unusual.
"You safe," she said, embracing herself several times for emphasis, and then set to reviving the fire. When she was through she saw his still-watchful glance.
She rolled up the sleeve of her coat and then her tunic and pointed to a scar. "I safe," she said and then pointed to the other tents. "Safe."
"You mean you all survived whatever those things were last night?" He tried to focus on the girl but he was starting to feel light-headed again. He focused on the designs embroidered on her clothing and heard her voice once more.
"I safe. Many things." The Indian intonation was so soothing he almost missed the dark rebellion in the last two words. Was he supposed to feel alluded to, as white man, part of the vast machine set to dominate her people? Was this all some elaborate plot to slit an Indian hunter's throat when he least expected it?
You could never tell with those folk, was his thought while he sipped some water. When Ethan first hit the trail, he had been excited to see what one of these exotic women would be like. But his experience had been much like that of the other men.
"They won't stop you from doing whatever you please," was how one man put it. "But they won't help you, either. And no matter what you do, those squaws have a way of looking at you, of holding you in their eyes and then giving you back smaller than you were. And I heard tell of more than one fella who never had it work right after that. Some kind of spell or something. Or a pox. Not worth the bother, in my opinion."
Ethan had told himself that Indian maidens weren't averse to being with him, but since they only said a word here and there, it was hard to tell. After those few early encounters, he came to see them all as Indians, ciphers wrapped up in blankets scarcely possessing a gender.
Usually when he had a few natives tied up and in transit to collect the bounty, Ethan was too busy with trying to keep them from running off.
This girl was wonderfully different for the sick man. Her eyes were playful and challenging. She didn't look right through him while she softened some torn up jerky in a pot of hot water and then ladled out the thin stew.
Ethan grabbed up the tin bowl and a spoon from the hearth. "Why are you helping me?" he asked, too hungry to care for the moment. Thankfully, the food was going down all right.
She watched him eat as if it were the most fascinating thing she'd ever seen.
The white man laughed as he put aside the bowl. After all his troubles, his old charm was miraculously back in place. There was no mistaking his savior's look of desire. "I think you're real pretty, too, young lady. Not like any Indian women I've ever known." Their hot glance lasted a long time.
She straddled him and he instantly stopped feeling the gathering cold. And though he knew it to be a stupid idea with tragedy right at his back, the tracker allowed himself to be drawn into the girl's embrace. He quickly stopped caring about being surprised by the other natives.
There was something overwhelmingly exciting about this girl: the way she smelled, the firmness of her flesh, which sprang back at him (unlike the other red girls, who had made him feel like he was drowning in some unnaturally yielding substance), her jangling earrings and bracelets. Though they were both clothed for cold mountain terrain, he could feel her flesh burning through all the layers of cloth and skins.
They tussled and he was lost from the first kiss. Lost in her long hair, feeling like this was what it was like to finally possess a red woman. His illness and his night of horror were forgotten. This is love, Ethan thought with a shock, and then with another shock that he had never known it before. All of those girls from his past were easy. But he needed this Indian maid more than anything, and she knew it. Ethan was grinding against her, both still too eager to bother to unfasten anything. His throat made sounds he'd never heard before, and her velvet cries answered him. One slim hand burrowed until it reached his hardness. He shot off without being able to stop it.
"Sorry, my beauty, you got me all excited. It'll only take me a second to be ready again. Anything I can do for you in the meanwhile?"
She must understand English better than she could speak it, because the maiden gave a wide smile and pushed his head down, down. Ethan was not usually averse to doing this for a gal, but this time he was beside himself with desire as he tried to wrestle himself into her clothing with its unfamiliar fastenings. His heart pounding, Ethan ducked under the buckskin coat and tunic. He closed his eyes and felt the warm skin responding to his mouth, a cry, the moisture.
Then he understood it was far too much moisture.
He fell backwards. "You, but you." He struggled to say the words. "Stars above! You're a man!" he exclaimed stupidly, seeing the penis that had just ejaculated on him poking out of the leggings. "I should have known. Your voice." It was a woman's voice as long as you did not consider it might be something else.
The Indian was watching him closely. That tone that was still far from disagreeable said, "One," indicating the face of a beautiful woman no matter what else was connected to it. "Two," the finger pointed lower. "Two spirit," the creature said to him.
Ethan's fragile mind couldn't understand what he'd stumbled into. "Are they?" he gazed at the other camps, imagining deformities worthy of a circus. Maybe that's what these assorted Indians were—freaks not welcome in any society.
"Two spirit." The Indian nodded while pulling down her clothes at the neck to show a scar. She pointed to the long wound at her shoulder. "Silver Bow," the woman said (or so his mind thought of her when her leggings were closed). Then she pointed towards him inquiringly.
"Ethan," he whispered.
"Ethan," she said reverently. Her fingers almost caressed his cheek and the voice said invitingly, "Two spirit." Her large dark eyes cast downward, with what he thought was belated shyness.
He then saw what the Indian was looking at. Though Ethan could claim ignorance about the first time, there was no explaining away his arousal now. The native traced the outline of the visitor's excitement, which was, if anything, getting more painful by the second.
Ethan was horrified. A few times he'd indulged an overly attentive man with a playful embrace, but that was it. He felt sorry for these men—sometimes friends in a drunken moment—and chalked it up to his involuntary charm affecting the wrong target from time to time.
Night was falling rapidly and his head had begun to spin once more, faster and faster. The worn-out, feverish tracker fell into Silver Bow's arms because he was frightened. The next several minutes were a blur of darkening sky and a rough yet comforting feeling that he finally identified as the Indian's tongue licking his face.
There was a cracking of bones.
Ethan tasted death. And then many other new savors that were anything but unpleasant.
He opened his eyes and the darkness sprang back at him with untold textures and scents. He delved into them nose-first. Ethan suddenly had no more ill will towards this other penis that he now sniffed thoroughly with his new snout, which gleaned oceans of meaning from this simple act. The wolf in front of him gave an encouraging yelp that made him feel as though it were all right to linger as long as he needed on this new topography of fur and musk. Then the other wolf approached the pack that he could now make out hovering in the background.
Ethan watched the other wolves bow their heads and paw the dirt, which he understood to mean servility. He could discern Silver Bow from all the rest by the curving patch of silver fur on her left shoulder, and he did not wish to be parted from her. She was safety. When he finally walked on wobbly legs to sit by the leader's side, she bounded ahead, never looking to see if he'd decided to run with her, but slowing the pack until he accommodated their stride.
During that first night of letting out his, Ethan only knew he was happier than he had ever been while letting out his new dual nature. When he was in his human form, it only troubled him slightly that he was two hunted creatures—a wolf/human combination that varied with the phases of the moon, and a man who was endlessly excited by this Indian who could seemingly change sex at will.
Sometimes he would watch Silver Bow chopping wood or squatting with the other men by the fire, and the Indian was completely a man in feature and gesture. Other times, even while doing the same activities, she was the enticing girl with the playful eyes whom he bedded every night as a woman, and who wore the same unisex clothes and jewelry every day.
In their language of broken words and gestures, Ethan tried to understand his mysterious mate, who was so different from their companions—already far from any white society.
One day he made Silver Bow dress up in his own clothes, which were proper to a white frontiersman. The result was exciting, but it probably wasn't the clothes so much as the imperious look he received while enacting his fantasies. "You're being very foolish, and I'll have you later," the indulgent expression said. No woman had ever looked at Ethan that way. It made his knees buckle.
Ethan launched his mouth at the suddenly male lips and the two wrestled onto the floor, the paler man assuming a different place in this new order. For how could he resist when the pack leader gave one of his grunting instructions?
The white man fell into this pleasurable new role underneath his mate and didn't look back. The voice from his father was still with him, however, and Ethan Chandler couldn't tell whether his father objected more to him being an animal or a degenerate. He was sure that his life as an outcast was probably exactly the sort of thing Josiah would have predicted for him. Only now the son had stopped feeling sorry for the angry man who had tried so hard to teach him self-loathing. Ethan was part of nature now, and nature never apologizes.
From the first night with the group, Ethan felt like he was finally who he was meant to be. He had always thought himself to be basically content, but now the world was full of a magic he might have had once in his earliest childhood. What he felt in the forest, on two legs or four, was harmony. This was what his charm gave to everyone else, but being an animal gave the changeling all that contentment and more.
This white man had given up nothing by throwing himself in with the band of outlaws. He needed Silver Bow so desperately that he only felt grateful when he found out his forced conversion into a werewolf had been carefully planned by his mate. The Indian had tracked Ethan for two weeks after catching Ethan's scent upon the wind and then having a vision that this was his long-awaited mate. His charm had caught Silver Bow's notice. Then the leader waited a few more days until the full moon to transform and show Ethan all the wonders of their shared life.
The other Pinkerton men's lives seemed a fair trade.
It took the newest member of their tribe some time to understand that "two spirit" could mean changelings as well as homosexuals. The other men and women in the pack varied in their sexual interests, with only two of the men qualifying as two spirit both senses. Almost all of them were in established couples with some contact with the white world. But his Silver Bow was the accepted leader, having gone off on his own earlier than the rest and lived exclusively with a wolf pack, early enough that his sense of nature was completely instinctual.
This Ethan learned from Snake, an Ojibwe who spoke the best English and had put the most effort into understanding their situation astride the man/beast divide.
"Silver Bow couldn't have been more than 9 or 10 when he was claimed by a wolf clan," Snake told him. Like most of the band, he called her both a "she" and a "he." "She doesn't say much in her mother tongue, Muscogee, and you know she speaks less English."
"But how does she tell us all what to do?" Ethan asked. The band was more organized than any group of soldiers he'd ever seen.
Snake shook his head. "She learned it from the wolves. I know when she wants us to crouch down and wait for an enemy to pass by, and when she wants us to attack." Snake smiled. "In the same way, we know Silver Bow is very happy."
Ethan never felt unwelcome or threatened for a moment with the other pack members. In his old life he would have hunted and feared them, but now they were clearly overjoyed that their beloved leader had finally found a mate.
And so had Ethan.
The former white man's flesh hungered so for Silver Bow that he felt intoxicated even a half a mile away. And the newcomer ached when they were further apart than that. But if he and his mate were well—if they had a satisfying hunt when they were human or animal, a roll on the ground and enough in their bellies—the world was perfect. If some part of him was aware that he used to order his world differently, he felt little connection to that person.
There was so much to learn. The pack was teaching him their native ways of tracking and hunting. They granted him the deference of the second taste of the kill because he was the leader's consort.
The other Indians shared their myths of the two-natured, explaining that they had each received the mark of the wolf as children, often presaged by dreams among their tribe. The bitten had only been encouraged to set out on their own when they stopped seeing humans as kin and began attacking them. When their wanderings had them cross paths with other Indians, Ethan saw the band's true nature register like a shot. The Indians might hold their children close, but they gave a polite nod, as if to say, "We have no quarrel with you; please make no quarrel with us."
Both groups were, after all, the hunted.
The pack was also thankful to have this white man who could blend in with the crowd and steal anything they needed on trips into town. Ethan needed very few things, but once he began dressing Silver Bow in his own clothes, the white man loved putting his mate in different city folk attire to accentuate one of his two natures. The occasional dress was nice, but in a fashionable suit with his hair pulled up into a hat, Silver Bow looked entirely a man, and this was no longer something to be feared.
The voice became deeper when it sounded into Ethan's ear from behind, and the newest changeling mated eagerly in this way, with the voice scratchy from lust and the always hairless cheek rubbing against his. He even brought back a shard of mirror and together they watched this love that had made Silver Bow more himself but had made Ethan different.
Their close bond could be dangerous. Ethan became friends with Snake, in part because he wanted to learn everything he could about his one-of-a-kind lover. He also desired to pick up a few words to add to their limited vocabulary and to hear about the exploits Silver Bow would never brag about. But their leader was equally in the thrall of his mate's attraction and fiercely protective of Ethan.
One day, Ethan and Snake were making arrows and talking about something insignificant. They must have been smiling too much.
A tomahawk whizzed through the air, cutting off a slice of Snake's ear.
Since Silver Bow had an inhuman aim, there was no doubt that she could have done worse to the Ojibwe if she'd wanted to. But Ethan was the one trembling.
The leader strode up to Ethan and threw him to the ground. As in the privacy of their tent on the nights when he was male, Silver Bow made it clear with a grunt and a gesture what his lover was expected to do.
Consuming this sacrament in front of the others changed Ethan forever. The public homage Ethan was made to show there on his knees cemented their relationship. He was his. He was hers. And the world was theirs.
