“Go Slow… It Hurts,” She Moaned—He Whispered, “I’ll Die Before I Hurt You” | Wild West Stories

Chapter 4

The first weeks were brutal.

Sarah’s body, accustomed to the confined labor of a settler household — scrubbing floors, hauling water, mending clothes in dim firelight — was not prepared for the demands of camp life. She learned to scrape hides until her hands bled. To dig roots without destroying the plant. To carry water from the river without spilling more than she delivered. Her muscles screamed. Her back ached. Her feet, newly healed, complained with every step.

But she did not stop.

Morning Star — Joseph’s sister, who had welcomed her with an enthusiasm that bordered on aggressive — became her teacher.

“No,” Morning Star said, laughing as Sarah struggled with a deer hide. “Too much pressure and you tear. Too little and the fur remains. Here. Feel.”

She guided Sarah’s hands, showing her the angle and motion. Her palms were callused. Her grip was firm but patient.

“You learn fast for a white woman,” Morning Star said.

“I’m trying.”

“Trying is good. Trying is how you become not useless.”

Despite the bluntness, there was warmth in her voice. Sarah found herself smiling — the first real smile in longer than she could remember.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to a pattern Morning Star was beading onto a moccasin.

“Mountains. Where my mother was born. Before she came to us.”

“Your mother was Lakota?”

Morning Star’s hands paused. She looked up, her dark eyes unreadable.

“Our mother is the same woman,” she said. “Joseph’s mother. The white woman.”

Sarah blinked. “But you said — ”

“I said where she was born. I did not say she was always Lakota.”

She resumed her beading.

“She came to us frozen and bleeding. My father found her in the snow, half-dead, running from something she would never speak of. He brought her to camp. The women healed her body. The children healed her heart. By spring, she was speaking our language. By summer, she was wearing our clothes. By winter, she had chosen to stay.”

Morning Star looked up, her eyes holding Sarah’s.

“The women in this camp, we are what we choose to become. Not what we were born.”

—

It was on a cool afternoon, three weeks into her stay, that Sarah found herself walking beside Joseph Running Elk. They had been tracking deer — a lesson in reading the earth’s language — and the sun was beginning its slow descent toward the horizon.

“You learn quickly,” he said.

“You’ve said that before.”

“Because it continues to be true.”

They walked in silence for a while. The prairie grass whispered around them. A hawk circled overhead, patient and watchful.

“Joseph,” she said, and the name felt strange on her tongue. She had never spoken a man’s name so directly. In her world, men were addressed by title — Mr. Brennan, Pa, sir. To speak a man’s name was to claim some kind of equality. “Can I ask you something?”

He stopped walking. Turned to face her.

“You may always ask.”

“Why did you stop? When you found me. Why didn’t you just — ”

She couldn’t finish. Didn’t know how to say what she meant. *Take what you wanted. Treat me like all the others.*

Joseph’s gaze was steady. “Because you were not prey.”

“But you didn’t know that. I could have been a trap. A decoy.”

“Then I would have died clean. Better than living as a man who hunts women.”

His words hit her like a physical blow. She felt the truth of them settle into her chest, into a place that had been hollow for so long she had forgotten it existed.

“My mother told me once,” he continued, “that the greatest gift a warrior can give is not his strength, but his restraint. Any man can take. Only a man of honor chooses not to.”

Sarah’s vision blurred. She looked away, blinking rapidly.

“Your mother sounds like she was remarkable.”

“She was. She is what I remember when I forget how to be human.”

He began walking again, and Sarah fell into step beside him, her heart full of something she didn’t dare name.