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Comes The Dark	By : IcarusComplex Category: G through L > Ginger Snaps Views: 2074 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own or reap any financial profit from GINGER SNAPS or any characters from the movies. Hannah/Louise and all new characters and situations are mine.

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To Zucchabar – Hans Zimmer

Chapter 5: One Held Breath


Hannah spent the morning checking off equipment for the upcoming trading trip against a list the quartermaster had left out. He habitually left it for his assistant to take care of things while he slept off a hangover from previous night’s festivities. On this grey morning, Hannah went about her duties holding her breath against a call to report quick-smart to Captain Rowlands’ office. It didn’t come.
    At midday, Mister Preachly poked a nose just barely redder than his eyes out of his bedchamber and dismissed her to get some lunch.
    “Before you do, Hank, fetch me a tray from the mess. There’s a lad,” he grumbled. Peering out the window, he made a wheezy grunt of approval at the dense cloud-cover. “Might rain tonight. Gawd above, I’m getting too old for this…”
    Hannah bobbed her head and snatched her jacket off a hook by the door. She never minded the days he lay abed until all hours. The stores were quiet and musty, rich with the smells of leather and rendered fat, smoked meat, vinegar from the pickling barrels and the dusty hot-grass smell of grain sacks. More and more Preachly left the stores in her hands; more and more he spent time with the enlistees, drinking his sorrows and memories and money away. This coming winter, he often said to Hannah in moments of absent philosophy, had a bad taste to it, like an apple rotting at the bottom of the barrel, hidden by its fellows but rotting all the same.
    The shift of woodcutters had come in for lunch around the same time Hannah ducked into the low-ceilinged barn and starting looking for Cook. One of them hailed her. Balancing two bowls of beef and barley stew and heels from a loaf of Cook’s pepper and oat bread on a tray, Hannah sat backwards on a bench to talk.
    “Heard you had an eventful night, Hank.” Cory was one of the younger men in the fort, educated in a fancy school but driven to the New World by some misplaced sense of adventure. Hannah liked him – more for the scar under his eye, the boyish grin, the missing chunk of his left ear, and his outrageous story of how a wolverine took it off him than anything else.
    “Aye, Woolsey was gettin’ right friendly with the lad absent his consent,” rejoined another with a wink. “I might have a mind to take offence if you was a lass,” he said, clapping her on the back. Hannah rocked forward with the force of it and almost jostled the tray into spilling. She swerved it back just in time, to the laughter of the woodcutters.
    “Boy, you ‘ave to get out of that storehouse long enough to build some real muscle,” teased a Frenchman across the table. “You’ve got to stand up to the ape-man there. Else-ways he’ll knock you clear across the room.” The woodcutters pounded the table with another round of laughter.
    “Are you all right, Hank?” Cory asked, addressing Hannah over the rattling of cutlery and fists.
    She nodded. “No harm done. I suppose he doesn’t even remember…?” She buried the hopefulness of the question under a mudslide of manufactured wry humour.
    Across the table, ‘the ape-man’ and Armande were getting riled up for a good-natured knockdown drag-out while the others egged them on, and Cory leant towards Hannah to make himself heard. “Nope. Not a bit. He was stomping about like a bear with a bellyache not too long ago, having a go at Larson for stealing his watch. Stupid sod can’t even remember losing it in the cards.” He shook his head with a trademark grin. “Pride of the Northern Legion Trading Company, hmm?”
    Hannah rolled her eyes and stood. “Between God and the mountains, perhaps he’ll fall into a wolf pit and save us all some trouble. I’d better get this back to Preachly before it’s colder than the north.”
    Cory laughed. “This is the north, Hank. How much colder do you want it to get?”

    All the rest of that day, she waited for a summons. It never came. As the sun dipped towards the horizon, Preachly sent her to grab some supper before Jensen’s watch.
    Tin clanked on wood just as she stoked the brazier in her quarters up to a gentle glow. Black Bear stood in the doorway holding a small pot, cloth wrapped around the handle to keep it from burning him. He held it out to her, blank-faced, as she rocked back on her heels: a peace offering. The meaty aroma of beef and barley informed Hannah he’d raided the mess and she wondered briefly if he’d made peace with Cook as well or simply stolen in when the man was absent to the cold room and ‘liberated’ some.
    She nodded to the bench across the brazier. “Enter.”
    Black Bear hooked two mugs off a shelf by the window on the way and poured out soup while Hannah washed soot off her hands in the washstand basin.
    “I went out to the village today,” he said unexpectedly. When Hannah looked around in puzzlement, he explained, “Horse thieves went through there last night. The captain wanted my opinion—as if white men ever listen.”
    He handed Hannah a mug. She hadn’t known; she’d heard the end of Rowlands’ briefing to a small party by the gate that morning, heard him leave Owens’ in charge, but she was too anxious over Woolsey and the hanging threat of discovery to risk drawing Owens’ liberal wrath by hanging about by the gate to find out more.
    “A runner came in the night,” Black Bear blew on his soup then sipped at it gingerly. “They took four horses. Went southeast. He’ll want men to go after them… Hannah.”
    The woman spat a mouthful of too-hot broth back into the cup, cursed, not paying attention in the slightest, and pressed a hand over her stinging lips. She subsided when Black Bear cleared his throat.
    Frowning at her, he continued, “Rowlands will send me with the hunting party, but you must stay here. Prepare.”
    “They are your dreams, Black Bear…”
    “If I go south with the trackers, someone must stay. Do not question me on this.”
    His tone was hard, and it was one Hannah knew well. Only rarely had she heard it from Black Bear, though. Her father turned one similar on her just once: when decreeing that Jonah had built his own snare and now he could hang from it.
    This was not Dεlzεn’sas the reluctant ally within the palisades of Fort Bailey. This was Black Bear the Warrior, the exiled Headman’s Son. The Voice of law. Hannah looked steadily across the brazier at him over her steaming mug of broth and wondered if that was an ill omen.
     Black Bear dropped his eyes and resumed eating only after she did.

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Yeah, so you may have gathered I'm not a Chipewyan native speaker. Sorry about that. If someone does know the correct form of Black Bear as a name and/or the correct name for the animal, please share.
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Comes The Dark

Chapter 5: One Held Breath