River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(21)
Author: Patricia Briggs

Adam glanced from me to him–and then bolted. In that brief glance, he told me to stay put while he went for help. Wolves communicate much more clearly than humans do in an emergency.

Adam would run all out, but we were probably five miles or more from the campsite. It would take him ten minutes to get there, maybe ten more to change back to human if he pushed it. I had no idea where the nearest hospital was or how long it would take for them to get the man there. Adam would figure it out.

With the sun down, the air was chilly, the river cold, and both the wounded man and I were wet and freezing. But there was nothing I could do about that at the moment.

I pulled him back down in the boat and propped up the damaged foot on the wooden cross member that doubled as a seat. The wound was just oozing blood, which seemed odd to me. Maybe the cold was useful, even if it was dangerous.

I was debating the benefits of shifting into coyote and sharing what warmth my wet fur would gain us both against trying to figure out how to get his wet shirt off and use it to bandage his foot without a knife. Both moves were likely to be useless or worse … when I heard the hum of an engine out in the water.

Lights tracked over the shore and stopped on the white boat I was standing in. I waved my arms to call them in to shore. There were excited voices, but I couldn’t tell what they were saying because the sound of their engine drowned out the meaning. A small but much sleeker and more modern boat complete with lights approached us at speed.

Help was here. Unless these were the guys who’d sliced off the man’s foot. And me wearing nothing but Adam’s dog tags. Ah, well, it couldn’t be helped; my modesty wasn’t worth a man’s life.

The boat hadn’t quite beached itself when three men hopped into the river. One of them grabbed the bowline, and as soon as he did, the fourth man, who’d been staying the boat, cut the engine and jumped in, too.

"Benny?" "Faith?" and "Who are you?" gradually resolved themselves into Hank and Fred Owens, Jim Alvin, and Calvin Seeker– introduced to me by Jim Alvin, easily the oldest of them though only Calvin qualified as young.

It was only after the Owens brothers pulled out a first-aid kit and started to work on the wounded man that I realized we were all–victim, me, and the four in the rescuing boat–Indian.

Jim Alvin was in his sixties and smelled of woodsmoke and old tobacco. Calvin was somewhere in his late teens or early twenties. Hank and Fred were around my age, I thought, and close enough in appearance that they might well have been twins, though Hank didn’t talk at all. I don’t know if I would have noticed their dog tags if I hadn’t just received Adam’s. But I would still have noticed that they had some sort of emergency training by the efficiency of their movements and their focus as soon as they saw Benny Jamison.

Benny was the hurt man.

Jim interrogated me–for all that his questions were softspoken and quiet–while the Owens brothers did their best to save Benny.

"No sign of anyone else?" he asked me, after I told him how Adam and I had found the boat–and how Adam had run back to camp to get help and left me to do what I could.

"No." I pulled the blanket they’d given me more securely around myself.

Benny woke up briefly when they started wrapping his foot with vet wrap. It sounded like it hurt.

Jim sighed. "Benny’s sister, Faith, was with him out fishing. They were supposed to be home for dinner. Julie, Benny’s wife, she called Fred tonight when Benny didn’t answer his phone. We were docking, but the Jamisons are good folk. We put the boat back in the water and started looking. What tribe did you say you were?"

I hadn’t, in spite of the fact that they had introduced themselves that way. All of them were from the Yakama (with three a’s, though the town was spelled Yakima) Nation. The Owens brothers were Yakama. Jim Alvin was Wish-ram and Yakama, as was Calvin Seeker. I didn’t think of myself that way. I was a walker and a mechanic, both of which served more often than not to make me separate from other people. I was Adam’s mate, which connected me to him and to the pack.

I was also cold and tired. It took me too long to remember.

"Blackfoot," I said, then corrected myself. "Blackfeet."

"You don’t know which?" asked Calvin, speaking for the first time–though he’d been watching me since they came ashore. I’d almost forgotten I was naked until I saw his face just before I’d been tossed a woolen blanket. I supposed polite disinterest was too much to ask from everyone. Three out of four wasn’t bad.

"I never knew my father–my mother is white. He told my mother he was from Browning, Montana," I told them. The wool was doing a good job of warming the skin it covered.

Naked wrapped in a blanket among strangers didn’t use to bother me. Maybe if Calvin would have quit staring at the various pieces of me that the blanket didn’t cover, it still wouldn’t have bothered me. As it was, I did my best to keep Jim between Calvin and me.

"So you were raised white," said Calvin in disapproving tones.

I should have told them I was Hispanic and any Indians in my bloodlines were South American and unknown. Half of my customers thought I was Hispanic. Telling them I was Hispanic felt like it would have been less of a lie than telling them I was Indian. As if I were claiming ties that weren’t there.

"Browning, Montana, makes him Blackfeet," Jim told me kindly. "Piegan. The Blood and the Siksika are Blackfoot."

I knew that. It just hadn’t tripped off my tongue.

"What were you doing out here? It’s an odd place to be running around at this time of night." Jim didn’t say naked. He didn’t have to. "Boy," he said abruptly to Calvin. "Don’t you make your mother ashamed of her son."

The young man’s mouth tightened, but he looked away from me. A few years ago his regard wouldn’t have bothered me the way it did now. But things had happened since that made me uncomfortable standing nearly naked with four strangers–five if I counted Benny, which I didn’t.

"I just got married," I told him, reminding my too-jittery self that Adam would be on his way back by now. If something happened, and I had no reason to think it would–especially as they had handed over a blanket to cover me without a word–Adam would be here before anything too bad happened. I wouldn’t be caught in the trap of assuming all men were bad–but I wouldn’t have been human if I weren’t wary. "We were swimming."

"Good thing for Benny," said Jim. "We’ve been by here twice. It would have been morning before we could have seen that boat under the trees. And morning would have been too late for him."

Fred (I could tell because he wore a red flannel shirt, and Hank wore a gray one) left Benny to his brother and came over.