Use love as a bridge
Word count: 2.4k
Summary: Y/N must learn to walk alone across the Kansas prairie after her horse gets lost... And not to trust just anyone she meets.
Warnings: None. Just not much of a Little Puma because I feel this has the potential to be a multi-part fic.
A/N: "Mari Mari" is a greeting. "Inche wenüy ngiñ" means I am a friend/friendly.
The morning in the prairie was still. Y/N opened her eyes and immediately wished she had not.
She lay on her side beneath a canopy of trees, knees drawn up, the soaked weight of her poncho plastered against her back like a second, colder skin. Every joint ached. Her hair had come loose in the night and now stuck to her cheeks and neck. When she tried to sit up, a cold trickle ran down between her shoulder blades and made her swear under her breath.
She peeled the poncho off with both hands, the heavy wool squelching as it left her shoulders, and began wringing it out, twisting the wool until dirty water streamed onto the ground. It had done its duty: the rest of her clothes were only damp rather than soaked through.
She sat for a long moment. The water ran clear again, though its banks showed the high-water marks of the sudden flood. A few yards away, the open grassland stretched under the sky. The sun had not yet finished rising. Only that endless, indifferent horizon that had already swallowed her horse, her bearings, and most of her dignity.
Last night her horse, her wild bay, bolt at the first serious crack of thunder. She had gone after him because a gaucha without a horse was little better than a corpse waiting to happen, and because pride would not let her admit, even to herself, that she might have chosen the wrong animal. By the time she realized the herd and the camp fires had vanished behind sheets of rain, she was already too far out to turn back safely.
The night had been a chaos of lightning, wind that tried to tear the breath from her lungs, and the constant fear that she would step into a prairie dog hole and snap an ankle. When the rain finally eased, she had found this thin line of trees and the stream, crawled under the lowest branches, and pulled the poncho over her head like a shroud.
She stood, joints popping, and shook out the poncho one last time before folding it into a damp rectangle and tucking it under her arm. The rest of her belongings sat in a small canvas sack that had somehow stayed mostly dry: a spare shirt, a few strips of jerky, a tin cup, the little leather pouch of tobacco she had traded for in some nameless town, and the facĂłn still sheathed at her waist. She checked the knife out of habit, the worn wooden handle familiar against her palm. Then she settled the wide-brimmed hat lower over her eyes and stepped out from the trees.
There was no cattle. No riders. No sign of the trail she had left the night before. Only the faint, fading tracks of a single horse leading away to the northwest, her bay, if the size of the prints was any guide, already half-washed out by the rain.
She muttered again, this time more to the grass than to herself. "Andá a saber dónde se metió ese pingo…" (Who knows where that horse went…)
She set off along the line of tracks, the poncho under one arm, the sack over the other shoulder. Her boots sank slightly with every step, the soft ground sucking at the heels. The cold had settled into her bones, but movement would drive it out. As she moved, the story of how she had come to be here unspooled itself behind her eyes, the way it always did when there was nothing else to look at but grass and sky.
The estancia where she had been born. Her father being drafted. The war, whatever war it was that year, she had stopped trying to keep the names straight. Then she run away and boarded the wrong ship; by the time she realized, the coast of her own country was already a memory and the language around her had shifted into something harder, flatter, full of consonants that sat wrong in her mouth.
Y/N stopped walking and scanned the horizon again. The tracks were growing fainter. The sun had begun to burn through the cloud cover in thin, watery shafts. Somewhere ahead, perhaps, the horse had stopped to graze. Or perhaps it had kept running until it found another herd, another outfit, another rider who would claim it. She could not afford to lose the animal. Without a mount she was finished on this prairie, and she knew it.
She shifted the poncho to her other arm and turned to continue walking, but stopped abruptly when she saw two people riding towards her. They had come up without sound, or at least without any sound that had reached her over the wet grass and her own muttering.
Both young, broad-shouldered and straight-backed in the saddle. One wore his hair long and loose, a few feathers tied near the crown. The other had braided his and added a small crest of feathers that caught the weak light. Their faces were still, their eyes dark and unreadable.
Native. That much she understood. Which nation, she had no idea. Here the tribes were a mystery she had never had time to learn. All she knew was that they were watching her with the careful, measuring look of men who had not yet decided whether she was a problem worth solving.
Y/N’s heart kicked hard against her ribs. She raised both hands, empty, the poncho still clutched in one of them like a soggy flag of surrender.
"Hello," she said, the English word coming out rough, not only because it was too early in the morning for her brain to be functioning in another language, but also because she didn't know if they knew english. "No fight. No… No trouble. Me look for horse. Only horse."
The two young men did not move. Their horses flicked their ears but otherwise stood quiet.
She tried again, louder, as if volume might bridge the gap.
"My horse run away. Storm. Thunder. Me follow. Get lost. You see horse? Bay horse? Brown?" She made a clumsy shape in the air with one hand, trying to sketch the animal’s size and color.
Still nothing. The one with the long hair tilted his head a fraction. The braided one watched her with an expression that might have been boredom or might have been the beginning of something else.
Desperation made her switch languages without thinking. The words that rose first were the scraps she had picked up years ago on the frontier back home, the half-remembered greetings used when the Mapuche traders came through or the vague memory of some phrase used by her mother.
"¿Mari mari? " The sounds felt absurd the moment they left her mouth. She knew it. These men were not Mapuche. Yet the panic kept pushing words out of her. " ¿Inche wenüy ngiñ?... No me entienden, no?" (You don't understand, do you?)
The last part she muttered in Spanish, because the situation had become too ridiculous to face in any other tongue. She was standing in the middle of the Kansas prairie, her clothes still damp, talking to two strangers in a language they could not possibly understand.
The one with the braid glanced sideways at his companion. A muscle jumped near the corner of his mouth, visibly fighting a smile. The other man’s face remained carved from stone, but something flickered behind his eyes that was not quite anger.
Y/N ran out of breath and words at the same time. She stood there with her hands still raised, the poncho dripping onto her boot, and waited for whatever came next.
The braided rider spoke first. His voice was serious, though tinged with a small touch of amusement.
"You are a long way from any place that speaks those words."
The sound of it hit her like cold water. Perfect English. Fluent. Her face went hot, the flush climbing from her neck all the way to the tips of her ears. She lowered her hands slowly and tried to reclaim whatever dignity a wet, muddy woman could still claim. She adjusted her hat with one deliberate motion, squared her shoulders, and answered in the best English she could force past the embarrassment.
"My horse… He run in the storm. I look for him. You see him? Bay. Strong."
The braided one studied her from boots to hat, taking in the way she stood as if the ground itself might shift under her. There was something in his look that might have been reluctant curiosity, and beneath it a quiet amusement he did not bother to hide completely.
"No horse," he said. "Only you."
The other rider spoke then, his voice flatter, colder.
"You are on Osage land."
She nodded once, accepting the information even though she had no clear idea what “Osage” meant beyond the fact that this land belong to it.
"No stay," she clarified. "I find horse, I go. Where is the nearest town?"
The colder one lifted his chin and pointed east, toward a low fold of the prairie that looked no different from any other fold.
"That way. Half a day, maybe more. Do not come back this way."
The braided rider turned his head and said something in a language Y/N did not know. The tone was quiet but edged. The other answered in the same tongue, sharper. They argued for half a minute while she stood there like a child waiting to be dismissed.
Finally the colder rider jerked his chin again in the same eastern direction.
"Go." He ordered roughly
She felt the old stubbornness rise at his tone of voice, the same pride that had kept her from begging for easier work or softer treatment on the drive to Kansas. She wanted to tell them exactly what she thought of their hospitality. Instead she settled for a short, formal nod that was pure fake courtesy, the kind given to a man who has just insulted you but still holds the higher ground.
"Gracias," she said sarcastically. Then, in English: "I go."
She turned and walked in the direction they had indicated, the poncho still under her arm, the sack bumping against her hip. She did not look back until the soft thud of hooves told her the two riders had wheeled and ridden away. Only then did she allow herself a long, heartfelt string of Spanish curses, soft enough that only the grass could hear them.
"¡Como si no tuviera bastante con el caballo perdido y la tormenta de mierda! Por lo menos no me limpiaron el cuero..." (As if the lost horse and the shitty storm weren't enough! At least they didn't clean my hide...)
Half an hour later the ground began to slope gently toward another narrow stream, this one lined with low brush and the kind of wild berry canes that grew wherever water was reliable. Y/N was still muttering when she heard the high, thin voices of children.
Two little girls, none older than ten or eleven, were moving along the bank with baskets, picking the dark berries that hung heavy after the rain. Their dresses were plain and already stained purple at the hems. The one who seemed the oldest was the first to notice Y/N and remained still, surprised by her presence there.
Y/N stopped a careful distance away and raised one hand, palm open, the same gesture she had used with the Osage.
"Hello," she said, a sweet smile on her face at the sight of the two girls. "I'm Y/N. Town. How far?"
The oldest girl, serious, with a braid of her own, studied Y/N’s for a long moment before answering. "You mean the settlement? Independence?"
Y/N nodded. The other girl, the one with two braids and that looked at her more with curiosity than caution, pointed west, almost the exact opposite direction from the one the Osage had given.
"That way. Just a few hours if you walk steady. But you was going the wrong way. Ain’t nothing that way but more grass and then the big river, eventually."
Y/N felt the heat climb her face again, this time slower and angrier. She closed her eyes for a single breath and then opened them again. The prairie stretched away in every direction, indifferent and vast. Somewhere out there her horse was either grazing or already claimed by someone else. Behind her, two young men were probably still laughing at the thought of her walking towards practically nowhere. Ahead of her, a settlement she had not intended to visit waited.
She looked at the girls, at their baskets of blackberries, at the simple fact that they had told her the truth without asking for anything in return.
"Thank you," she replied in the most careful and kind voice she could muster despite her anger.
"I'm Laura, and she's my sister Mary." The youngest girl introduced them while pointing to herself and her sister. "You look like you been through a hard night. Our house isn't that far from here, you could stop by and rest for a while, if you want."
"Laura." Her sister called her in a low voice, as if warning her about inviting strangers into her home.
Y/N managed a small, crooked smile, the first real one since the storm had broken. "Thank you, but is best I get to town as soon as possible."
She turned west, adjusted the damp poncho under her arm one last time, and started walking. And as she walked she began to compose, in the privacy of her own head, the exact speech she would give those two Osage the next time their paths crossed. It was a long speech, full of the kind of insults that would scandalize her mother. By the time she reached the first distant smudge of settlement smoke, she had almost decided she hoped she never saw them again.
Almost.