Ancient Watchtowers

This has been a long while coming, mostly because I've been busy, got a new laptop - which failed right in the middle the first time through, and assorted other many factors.

The dog ate my homework, ok?

The dates in this -

You'll notice that the years move A LOT and not in the right order at first. Part of the reason is that the character's POV might not be accurate in either time or place. It has to do with where they are most of the time. That'll straighten itself out as the story goes and I hope that the reader can see why they might be wrong.

The beginning is based on an actual event, but after that bit I take you off into the weeds for the vast majority of it.

The characters move elsewhere later on, most of them and I keep the majority of the ones who are fun to write.

The style of speech shifts a little, and is in no way any attempt at accuracy, since some things, I wrote out of humor.

Later on in subsequent chapters, you'll come across some interesting types and before I spring a weird name on you, I'll post the pronunciation of it in my intro for that chapter.

Hope you like it.

0_o

*****

Wyoming, 1870AD

--------

It was a hot day and Nila was still wandering.

She wasn't hungry, though she knew that she'd need to give some thought to eating at some point later on. For now though, she was ambling alone just inside the woods side of the line which seemed to demarcate the boundary between those woods and the grassland.

It was better than being consumed by the fire that she felt in her heart.

Nila had once had a family.

She'd been a relatively content young woman of twenty-two winters, and she had a place in her tribe. It had been a slightly unusual place, but that didn't matter so much to her, though it did sometimes bother her parents when they'd been alive.

Twenty-two winters was rather far into the time when she ought to have been married. By now, she should have a man and a few little ones of her own. Well, maybe not even so little by now.

If she'd been like a lot of the other girls, she'd have been married at thirteen or fourteen and by now, she'd be getting to the age where her children would begin to have children themselves in another few years or so.

But though she was attractive enough to catch the eye of a brave quite easily if he came from elsewhere and didn't know her, it was often only minutes before he knew from being told by one of the men of the tribe in the area.

They spoke quietly of the way that her mother had raised her, teaching her what a girl needed to know. They spoke even more quietly of the way that her father had raised her to know of the spirit world, and perhaps more to the point, to know how to be a solitary hunter, gatherer and even warrior, since she was just left alone a lot of the time by the others her age. Most of what she learned wasn't something that was ever taught to girls.

Perhaps most quietly of all, the men would speak to the newcomer of Nila's tragedy along with their own. They'd all suffered, but they still had bands to be a part of.

Nila was the last of hers.

As many young men prepare to leave the last of the trappings of their time as boys behind and take their spirit-walk, the same time had come for Nila, though it came later, when she was about eighteen. It was a little unusual for a girl to take a spirit-walk, but it was not unheard of among them.

The spirit that she found might have been said to have found her at the same time.

When asked to tell of it, Nila had known that there was something very different indeed about the one whom she'd met and even communed with. It hadn't only been a time of quiet and spiritual observation and introspection as they'd joined their spirits.

Oh, there had been the joining of their spirits as they'd come to accept each other just as should have happened.

But really, otters and elk and eagles and the more usual sorts of creatures which helped young braves to become men didn't really do that by actually speaking.

Nila's had.

During the few times that she said much of it at all, Nila told of joining her spirit with that of a female wolf, since it had been the closest thing that anyone might have understood. But in reality, that female was something else entirely.

No matter, to Nila's mind. She'd been taught so much then.

She'd carried on, just a young woman of the Northern Shoshone or 'Snake' Indians. Her band was an off-shoot of the Snakes and were tied to them by familial bonds. She wasn't ostracized or anything like that since there was no reason for it. She was just allowed to go her way and that way was to be alone for most of the time unless someone had a need of her medicines.

Now and then over the next two and a half to three years, Nila went sometimes to seek out her spirit guide and she usually found her waiting far from anyone, knowing as she did that Nila would come. The last time had marked a change, as several things happened.

The 'wolf' mentioned that she was leaving, since Nila now knew all which could be taught and had been able to demonstrate the knowledge to the other's satisfaction.

She also spoke of dark times which lay before Nila and her people and not being known to them, she was choosing to get out of the way of the coming storm which she foresaw.

Last of all, she bit Nila - since the young woman had asked for it from almost the beginning.

Nila was gone for perhaps a fortnight overall that last time, parting with her guide forever after learning the last secrets of controlling what surged through her. She traveled back to her tribe and others in the dead of winter, 1863.

They were camped at what was then known to the Shoshone as Willow Valley; their winter range and traditional hunting ground at the confluence of Beaver Creek and the Bear River.

If Nila had been there only the night before her arrival, she'd have noticed the presence of United States Army troops not far off.

The past few years had seen rising tensions between the Shoshone of all sorts - and there were many as well as the Northern Pahutes, Utes, and Bannock against the white immigrants and settlers. Willow Valley now had to feed many more people and many kinds of the traditional game on which the Indians relied had disappeared and they were for the most part destitute and starving in the lands which had always fed them.

It led to incidents on both sides, made all the worse as most often happens by the usually-erroneous assumptions of the parties involved.

There had been livestock thefts attributable to starving Shoshone and a detachment of army troops was sent to recover the cattle. Four men were captured who did not appear to be related to the theft. That didn't matter. The commander ordered that the cattle be delivered by noon the next day or the men would be shot.

So they were shot and their bodies thrown into the Bear River.

And then there had been some very real and documented attacks in retribution afterwards and the rising tensions led up to the flash point.

Over what was likely the coldest night thus far that winter on January 28/29, 1863, the Indians and the Army faced temperatures of -20 Fahrenheit.

The Indians were armed with whatever firearms that had.

The army troops had been issued 40 rounds of rifle ammunition, plus 30 rounds of pistol ammunition per man, and there were two hundred rounds of shells available for the two Mountain Howitzers which were along on the trip.

The artillery pieces never made it, having gotten stuck in snow drifts miles away. Still, there were sixteen thousand rounds of ammunition on the army side alone.

It began about 6:00am, and the part which could be termed the battle lasted until about 8:00am or shortly after. That was when the Indians ran out of ammunition.

That was when the feeble command of some of the army units failed utterly to control them and it became the Bear River Massacre.

With nothing to return fire with anymore, tomahawks and bows came into play on the defender's side, and after that, many of the soldiers lost control completely. What followed was just murder. After killing the men and most of the children, the soldiers turned on the women.

The Army commander reported the death toll at 224 out of 300 braves, leaving 160-odd surviving women and children. He was made a brigadier General for it and received a brevet promotion to Major General.

The residents of the nearby town of Franklin reported far fewer living women and children. A Danish immigrant walked the field and counted 493 dead; both sexes, all ages.

Besides the cold temperatures, there was deep snow which had hampered the combatants and non-combatants alike. It was one of the reasons why Nila didn't arrive until the late during the next night.

Besides a corpse which might have been one of her sisters, Nila never saw or heard from her parents, brother, two other sisters, the small children of one of them - or any of the other members of her particular band ever again.

There were still United States Army troops in the area, a large part of that presence made up by the 2nd Regiment, California Volunteer Cavalry.

It was seen as a little mysterious at the time, but more than a few of those troops never left the area alive either.

And that was after the battle.

Pickets and sentries seemed to disappear in the dark, and at first there had been suppositions of desertion, since it was widely known that there were discipline problems in that unit and many of the men wanted a portion of their pay held back to pay for sea passage to the eastern coast so that they might do their duty in the civil war which had begun to rage then.

When that request was denied, there was almost open talk of desertion.

But the missing men - though they were never found or accounted for - hadn't deserted their posts.

They'd been hunted.

By the faint glow of dawn, a few of the Shoshone survivors who still huddled around small fires had seen - or thought that they'd seen - a running and gore-covered creature of vengeance. They said nothing of it to the troops.

By the time that dawn actually arrived, there was some wonder at all of the large wolf tracks, but then some 'wiser' heads prevailed and said that the animals had been attracted to the carnage to eat what they could, fading away before the sky lightened.

If there had been any Shoshone hunters left alive and in a mood to speak to the Army, they'd have likely noticed a few details.

There had been no carrion-eating, other than what could be attributed to a few dogs and, ...

All of the larger tracks had been left by the same single creature.

All of the tracks had been the impressions of only rear feet.

Over the next few years, Nila took an active part in other conflicts, and by then, the addition of a lean and battle-hardened woman warrior hardly even raised any eyebrows while the Snake War raged over four years from 1864 - 68. Nila still looked much the same however; a lovely, though fierce-eyed woman of about twenty-two whom no one knew much of anything about at all. She was left alone for the most part and that suited her.

She found eventually that it was an oversimplified view to hate the immigrants out of principle alone. Besides, it wasn't always easy to determine what sort they were or their intentions by only looking at them and what they wore.

She'd come across families in her travels. It would have been so easy to kill them all, but she didn't, and almost all of them had never known it when she'd been there and gone. The ones who had known it were the ones who wondered about the loss of an animal. It didn't happen often, but when it did, Nila tried to find people whose property told her that they'd likely not feel the loss all that much. None of the losses were attributable to any sort of human activity.

That much was plain from the remains which were found.

But soldiers, Nila thought as she smiled a little grimly to herself; that was another thing entirely. How convenient that they all dressed alike.

Whenever she'd found them, what happened then was a different sort of tale. In the annals and archives of the U.S. Army, there are records of platoon-sized elements who'd walked right off the earth it seemed, and were never seen or heard from again.

Nila's thoughts on the matter ended as she stopped in mid-stride and stood stone-still for a moment after her eyes registered a motion some yards ahead. Seeing that the motions of her walking hadn't been seen, she sank down a little to learn what she could.

She saw a horse up ahead, standing in the shade of the woods just out of the sunlight. The animal was large enough for it's size to make an impression on Nila and she'd known horses all of her life. A little thought told her that this wasn't perhaps the largest of the working types that she'd seen, but if it wasn't, then it was as near as dammit to her. The animal stood with it's head raised at a curious angle; one which was not natural for this type of beast when at rest or only standing.

She moved a little closer and was careful in even the way that she made her observations. Something was wrong, but she couldn't really determine what it was. Curious now, she made to get closer still - though she was still well over a hundred feet away by then. That was when most of this became clear to her.

This horse wore a bridle and no saddle. The bridle was tethered with a thick rope - one which was strong enough to withstand the way that the beast stood pulling back on it, snorting and breathing it's fear in and out.

Everything fell into place then. This horse had been elsewhere and for one reason or another had pulled it's stake and run off. Somehow, that stake had gotten wedged into a place among some trees or roots and the animal was trapped unless it moved in the other direction.

Nila noticed the cautious movement not far from the horse then as it whinnied and began to pull on it's tether frantically. Even from this distance, Nila could see those wide, fear-filled eyes.

Another look was all that she needed to see the rest of this drama as the pieces moved into place. Six, ... no, seven wolves, all slowly closing to where they'd soon take up their positions partially ringed around the trapped equine.

She thought about it quickly and decided as she sank a little lower into the cover of the tall grass.

Quite often, life was decided by chance and the opportunities which were presented.

Sometimes you got to eat when you saw the chance of it. She shifted and began to tense as she pressed her large toes into the ground to give herself the best starting traction.

Sometimes, you only got to watch as the chance was taken from you by another.

One against seven could be long odds, perhaps, but not if you were quick about it and they didn't see you coming.

The wolves found their strategy disrupted as two of the outlying members of the pack fell writhing and fighting to get clear of something which had assailed them and was no longer there. The air was filled with the alarmed and painful yelps and cries of the wounded.

The others snapped their heads around at the sounds, which was what Nila wanted in this - since it gave her the chance to come from behind them as well, now that she'd swung around them and was on her way back in.

In only heartbeats, she'd damaged four and the others grew frightened and drew together snarling in all directions, their noses finally getting into the game to tell them that there was more than a terrified horse here. The unconscious reaction of their hackles standing might have been engineered by nature to make them appear to be larger and more formidable in their appearance.

But Nila knew that they saw that their pack structure hadn't saved them and they were all just scared shitless. She rose to stand on her hind legs as her own snarls began at last, since the alpha male looked to be about stupid enough to want to push this.

His female and the other unharmed one moved to stand with him, but as their warnings to her began, so did she - and the pack was leaderless as the male lay dying seconds later.

The trick, she told herself, was to barrel in and go right on through, never even slowing as she went. They were fast, but as she was, she was much faster, and she'd let the idiot have all of her attention.

The remnants began to withdraw and the seven were down to four with only two of them untouched by her. She allowed it, choosing not to try to harry them.

She stepped over to the last pack member who was on his side, still struggling and trying to get his hind legs under him. With a severed spine just in front of his hips, that wasn't ever going to happen and she made sure that the rest heard his last yelping screams.

As she stepped back, she saw that they were alone, her and the horse.

Nila looked at the thick tree which stood just a little closer to the animal and with a bit of effort - since the horse wasn't helping things here, Nila wrenched the stake free and clutching the rope tightly, she jumped around to the other side of the trunk to use it as a crude pulley.

She began to speak to the animal in low tones as she pulled.

Nothing much happened, since the mare was still terrified, having smelled the blood and seen her. But whenever she had the chance of it, every time that the animal eased up just the slightest amount on the rope, Nila took up the slack.

It came to a point where they were almost side by side with the tree in between them and there was an almost palpable tension there and in more than only the rope. She was looking at the horse's wide eyes, deciding that this was close enough. To pull even more now, would only take one of those eyes out of her view, so she stood and only waited.

And then it happened; the moment when the animal regarded her and Nila held the beast's gaze as tightly as she held the rope.

It was a long moment, but at the end of it the animal relaxed rather slowly and cautiously and Nila eased up on her pull accordingly.

"You will still need me, large friend," she crooned softly, "The wolves will seek you again."

She wrapped the rope around the tree trunk twice more and then she dropped the end and held it with her foot. In the physics of this, Nila held the frictional advantage now and she reached over slowly to try to untie the other end of the rope.

"Have a little trust and wait. I seek to free you."

The horse stood stone-still and the end of the rope fell free two minutes later.

She was cautious about it, but Nila stepped over slowly and reached for the horse, and they stood together as she crooned at her and stroked her head, neck and shoulder for a long while.

In her own way, the horse came to understand things then, and looping the reins over past the ears to lay them on the horse's back, Nila stepped around and jumped up as gently as she could.

There was a bit of nervousness still in the horse, but Nila changed back and it was done.

They moved off together, the large mare and the naked woman riding her.

After half an hour, once she'd led her new friend to a field where there was some sweetgrass to eat, they headed off to the shore of the nearby lake that Nila had seen through the trees.

She wasn't familiar with the area, but to her mind, a lake was now what she wanted to see, and in only moments, they thundered along it, the animal knowing that she was not the prisoner of her new friend, but happy to have her along as she felt so alive to run and feel joy for it.

Nila felt joy as well and grinned as she held on with her legs clutching the sides of her large friend and no matter which way that she tried to hold herself, she was usually well-pleased by the pounding motions.

--------

She decided that they needed a home, since living where they were meant trying to survive through a cold winter most years. The answer to that came to her a little later as she rode along the shore of the lake a little slowly. She hadn't been thinking of it directly, but the thought came to her again as she found the opening to a cave.