On The High Plains Ch. 03

We made it back home without any major incidents, as long as you call seeing a party of moving Indians on the horizon minor. I'm sure they saw us because there is no way a wagon could move across that dry country without raising a dust cloud and Indians were nothing if not alert for movement around them. I swear they could spot a baby rabbit two miles away!

Oh, yes. There were two other incidents along the way. Major? Yep, in my book. Life threatening? Nope. It was just Moxie's way of getting to know me. Every second night when we rolled into our bedrolls, she let me get settled in and then got me aroused and mounted me. It sure was a hell of a way to travel!

At one point, I irreverently thought that it might be a rather dangerous activity though. For protection from any unexpected downpours as well as the morning dew and as some protection against a possible attack from either Indians or raiders, we always laid our bedrolls under the bed of the wagon. Now that old wagon was tall enough that Moxie could sit on me and not bump her head, 'though it might have been a different story if I had been on top.

Anyway, she took the initiative so I didn't have to find out. One night I did take charge but that was after she had done her thing and emptied my balls once. We lay spooned together for a long time and I didn't seem sleepy that night. Snuggling up to her soft curvy bottom made me hard again and before long my prod was poking around between her legs looking for a place to hide. She reached back and lifted her top leg, giving me easy access to the wet slick entrance to her pussy and my throbbing pole found it quickly. I held her cuddled in both arms while my bottom rocked back and forth for some minutes until I shot another hot load into her depths.

This time, I went to sleep before my slowly deflating spear slid out of her tight confines.

One of the great things about the high plains of west Texas is that, at least in our area, we could often get two crops from the ground in a year's time. That was almost always true of pasture that I cut for hay, unless it was a really dry year. In the ground where I planted our earlier harvested vegetables, once the spring crop was in, I prepared the soil again and planted winter wheat. As long as we didn't have a freak storm -- which had only happened once since I'd been there -- I got a nice crop of wheat to add to our stores.

By the time we got back home, the wheat was up and showing nicely in the gently westerly breezes that usually kept things livable in that area. It was a few weeks away from heading out so that it could be harvested, so I had time away from crops to tend to the animals and see to any repairs or changes that needed to be made around the buildings.

One of the first things I wanted to do was raise a new barn. My first one was nothing more than a pole barn, which was much better than the open ground but not by a lot. It was only about 18 feet tall, the sides were covered with saplings of whatever small trees I could readily cut at one of the rivers, woven into place with strips of leather or their own branches. It had done a good job -- but it was never intended to be a long term solution. This new one would not be artistic but it would be sturdy.

The two rivers near my place were both sources of logs, with several good sized stands of white pine that grew upwards of 80 to 90 feet tall. More prevalent were elms, cottonwood, scattered hickory, and a miscellaneous blend of smaller trees. There were a scattering of nut trees -- pecans and walnuts mostly -- but I wanted to be sure to avoid cutting any of those; they were too valuable for their annual harvest.

To make this a worthwhile endeavor would be a huge undertaking for me. I would have to take the horses to the site, use a combination of axe and saw to cut the trees down, remove the limbs, and then use a chain around the logs so the team could drag them back home. Then the real work began.

It would take the team of horses, the mule, and all the ingenuity I had to put together a tripod shaped lift to hold a set of pulleys that could be used to raise the logs into place. It would have been nice if I had a sawmill like I'd seen back east but the closest one I knew of was on the banks of the Mississippi. No fucking way could I afford to buy lumber milled over there and ship it to my place to build a barn -- or anything else for that matter. So I'd make do with what I had.

For the barn, the building didn't need to be weatherproof, just as much protection as I could make. That meant that I'd use the straightest logs I could find, shape them where necessary, and fill in the gaps with mud and/or smaller saplings. I worked out a design in my head, marked off the spot of land where I wanted to put it. Then I went to work on my crane; it would be primitive at best but essential to my building, since I had to do the work myself.

I had cut and dragged down the three midsized logs for the crane when I was presented with another problem. For the last week, it seemed like Moxie was not herself. She was even less talkative than usual and sometimes she seemed to have a strange coloring to her skin. Several times I asked her what was wrong but she just waved me off.

One morning when I awoke before dawn and went to get up, I realized that she was not in bed with me. A quick look in the small house showed that she was not there. I went outside and found her on the other side of the big pin oak in the yard, bent over retching. I grabbed a cool wet washcloth and ran to see if I could help her but, although she let me hold the cloth to her forehead, she didn't want to talk.

On the third consecutive day that happened, I kept at her to try to find out what was wrong. She kept patting her stomach and rattled off a long something in her native tongue, none of which I understood. I thought she was saying that she had probably eaten something that didn't agree with her.

I kept a close eye on her for the next several days and noticed that her appetite was lagging. Food seemed to make her gag, no matter when it was. She drank plenty of water and peed frequently so I knew her kidneys were still working well. However I was eating the same food she was and it didn't make me sick, so I was at a loss about what was causing her problem.

Every morning it was the same thing. I'd wake up to find her out in the yard throwing up, mostly the dry heaves because she hadn't eaten that much. On the seventh day, I asked if she thought it would help if I made her some stew. She looked at me like I had lost my mind. Then, as if she had lost her's, she threw back her head and began to laugh wildly -- something she had never done in my presence thus far.

She began to pat her stomach again. Then she made half-moon shaped images with her moving hands, as if she was going to add a bundle and carry it in front of her. I was completely puzzled -- until she circled her thumb and forefinger of her left hand and started stabbing her right forefinger in and out of the circle, pointed to me and herself, then to her stomach. Suddenly the light dawned. She was saying she was pregnant! Damn! How dumb could I be?

I grabbed her in my arms and went to kiss her but she turned her face away. However she returned the hug. We went inside where she could get a drink of cool water and then I got my kiss -- well, maybe a hundred times over. I was going to be a daddy!

In the next few weeks, I started work a little later than I had planned, staying at the house to help Moxie get started with her day before I headed off to the river to work. I started off felling four tall pines to use for center poles. Working by myself, it took a while to cut down each tree, trim off its branches and then hook it up to my chain drag. I had made a small four-by-six foot skid of sturdy split logs with the bottom formed into two wide but relatively smooth runners with rounded front ends so that I could tie the butt end of the log on the skid and make it easier for the team to move. That way the butt of the log wouldn't dig into the ground as we dragged it home.

Although Moxie's appetite had all but disappeared for a period of time, the morning sickness faded away into nothing after a relatively short time and, with it, her appetite returned with a vengeance. She seemed to be eating for two -- I guess she was! Her overall demeanor seemed much better then too. Is it any wonder?

Even at that it was slow hot work. I had plenty of time to think while I walked along with the team or while I was swinging my axe. I thought a lot about Moxie and what she meant to me. It didn't take me long to ponder out that, if I was ever going to love a woman, she was it. I had never been in love before and wasn't sure what it felt like but I certainly had some special feelings for her. And it was more than just sex.

I came to believe that what I felt for Moxie was love. I wondered if I were to ask her whether or not she would marry me. I knew marriage, as the white man knew it, was not in the Indians scheme of things but they did have an arrangement whereby the men and women became permanent partners. Of course we might live out our natural lives in this sparsely settled area and never see a preacher or a judge who had the authority to perform a marriage ceremony.

I decided to try to let her know that I loved her and, successful or not, I would treat her as a loving wife and mother. That didn't necessarily make her life much easier, but it wasn't because I didn't try. I'm not sure that Moxie understood the concept of love but I'm sure that she knew I had special feelings for her and she never seemed to mind my displays of affection, when I hugged her every day after another trip to the river or just a day of working in the barn area.

By the time I got the four center poles and eight outer wall support poles cut and back to the site, it was early December. So far it had been a rather mild winter, as is often the case and I had not needed any sort of coat or extra layers of clothing to work in. I set about digging the holes for the support poles. It was still more hard work, but of a different kind, to dig four six-foot deep holes big enough to sink those logs into but they would need that much support.

I had topped off the center poles at 56 feet. Setting up the first one with my homemade crane and the team of horses for power, we got the butt placed at the hole, cranked the upper part with a winch arrangement using the crane and I gleefully watched it slam into the pre-dug hole. It wasn't perfectly straight but by the time I had tamped as much of the excess dirt around the pole to tighten up the hole it was as straight as I was going to be able to make it.

Each time I got a pole in place and packed so that it stood firmly in place, I felt a real sense of accomplishment. I had a long way to go but each step completed made it just a little easier to go on. The center poles were also useful in helping to raise the side supports. By then it was Christmas, and time for a little celebration.

Moxie didn't understand what Christmas was all about but her face lit up when I gave her a few little trinkets that I had managed to squirrel away during our trip to Fort Worth. They weren't much but they were all I could afford and she seemed to appreciate them. With her culture, I didn't expect anything in return but she went to her workbag -- where she kept her leather working and sewing items -- and came back with a beautiful pair of new moccasins for me. They had been decorated with a sort of geometric sun on the toe and were much too precious for everyday wear. I decided to keep them solely for wearing at home, sort of like shoes for the house.

It was about that time that Moxie's interest in sex seemed to take an upward turn. We had been limiting our activity to me on top, her on top, or me spooning behind her and only once every three or four days. Something piqued her interest and we began to experiment with new ways of connecting. The number of times we tried increased too until it became and every second night occurrence and sometimes two out of three nights.

One of the first we tried was with Moxie on hands and knees and me behind her like a stallion mounting a mare or a dog pumping a bitch in heat. I found out why most of the species in the world used that position: it was fantastic! I loved the feeling of extra depth my prong got into her wet heated center and the sensations of her soft round bottom molding themselves to my crotch were just priceless. This arrangement seemed to accentuate Moxie's curves and made my hands itchy so that I couldn't keep them in one place; they roamed all over her back, her ass, her stomach, her tits, and even back between her legs occasionally. That turned out to be probably the favorite position for both of us but we still liked many others that we tried too.

We experimented with a scissors position were our bodies lay in a sort of X and our legs were intertwined. She seemed particularly interested in my upper leg pressing on her abdomen because she put both hands on my leg and worked it this way and that, always putting pressure on it to mash into herself. She'd start muttering the words of sex that I had taught her -- fuck, pussy, cunt, cock, ass, and a few others -- and some of her own language that I didn't understand. However her squirming bottom and use of my leg against herself made me convinced that she liked it. I don't think the words meant that I should stop pumping into her.

In late January we had a couple of small snowfalls, probably not more than two inches each, but the temperature had dropped enough to force me into wearing long johns and sometimes a coat while I worked. I had harvested a number of logs of such girth that it would have been impossible to support them whole on the barn so I set to work splitting them. At least that let me cover more of the walls with fewer logs but it was tough work splitting twenty foot sections of fresh cut trees.

I had begun to have my doubts about being able to finish the barn satisfactorily during that season, because it was taking so long to do the cutting, trimming, dragging, raising and fitting. With the planting season coming early on the plains, there was not a lot of time left, some of which might be lost to weather.

But at least I had made a good start. The center poles and side supports were all in place and stabilized. I had installed logs for joists to support a loft floor. Then I had started building the sides, at first with twenty foot sections harvested from some medium sized trees, and later with the splits from some of the bigger logs. All of them had to be carefully notched to fit together with some shorter lengths which would form walls for interior stalls or specific use storage areas.

In February, we got socked in by a blizzard that dumped eleven inches of snow in a little over 24 hours. That is when work became a real pain. The packed snow had blown up against the door of the dugout, making it a big job just to dig my way outside. It wasn't too bad getting out to the old pole barn but getting into it was, since there was another drift up several feet high around everything large enough to stop the blowing snow.

I finally managed to get inside the pole barn. The horses and mule had sought shelter from the snow by coming in the opening in the backside. I made sure they had plenty of fresh water and tossed down some hay from one of the big stacks. The goats were still outside, at their preference, but I gave them some fresh hay too. Each of the animals required care except for the longhorns; they would, as usual, fend for themselves, except for the two cows that we were milking.

Working on the barn, or anything else, became impossible for a few days. Of course it wasn't long before we had a west wind blow in and much of the snow melted fairly quickly. It left the ground too muddy to be able to drag any more logs from the rivers but I had several laying at the barn that needed to be split so I set to work getting them ready to lift into place. By then I had partial walls up about 10 to 12 feet high everywhere except where the front and back openings would be so I had some protection from the wind.

Moxie's tummy began to round out a little, showing the beginnings of our child. I found myself taking pleasure in rubbing that growing mound as we lay together in bed at night. One night she seemed to be in some discomfort and tried to rub her feet. Seemed to me I had heard that pregnant women often had unusual problems with foot and leg pain so I got her to lie down and took over the job of massaging her feet, later moving up to her calves, around her knees and even her lower thighs. She began to make sounds like the purring of a cat, so I put that in my list of things to do every evening after dinner. Moxie showed me her appreciation by offering herself to me to fuck even more than we had been.

When I first settled on the land, I had dug a well about 30 feet from the house and between it and the barn. I didn't have to go too deep before I hit the water table with a goodly stream of fresh sweet water. Thus far it had provided plenty of water for our needs, although I was frequently concerned in the summer that the water table might recede. I'd built a small stone wall around the well opening, erected a small shed over the top tall enough I could stand under it to crank the bucket up and down, and put a moveable cover over it to keep varmints and dirt out.

Going out to the well to draw a bucket of water had never bothered me. In fact I usually enjoyed it, because there was a bit of cool damp air that escaped when I moved the cover back, so in summer it was a bit of a treat. Even in winter it didn't bother me too much; it wasn't that far that it was so bad, even in cold weather.

Now I was rethinking that decision. With Moxie pregnant, I didn't like that she sometimes had to go out in this kind of weather to draw water if I was out working. Yeah, sure, she had to go out to the outhouse to take care of her daily toilet but drawing water was a little different; she was in the open and having to pull up a heavy bucket.

I tried to tell her that I'd come to the house and draw water for her anytime she needed it but she looked at me like I'd lost my mind. It took a while, fumbling and bumbling through our variety of communication methods, but she finally told me in no uncertain terms that she'd lived her life doing things much harder than drawing a bucket of water and she wasn't about to change now. I was taken aback and let the subject drop. However I had already put on my mental to-do list checking out the purchase of a hand-pump and some piping on our next trip to Fort Worth.

Thinking about that trip to town, I had been tending a couple of runs of traps, as I had been doing every winter. The beaver and rabbit pelts were full and furry with the heavy winter we were having. The beaver especially seemed to be thriving on some of the little creeks that fed the rivers and I managed a pretty good harvest. When I'd take the pelts back to the house, Moxie delighted in stringing them on frames and scraping them to remove the last of the flesh, then hanging them up to dry in the old pole barn. It looked like I might have a nice stash of pelts from trading when the trip came around.

As soon as enough of the snow had cleared, I put my old saddle on one of the horses and rode out to check on the longhorn herd. As I knew they would, they had managed to scrounge for themselves well enough, pawing through the snow to get to dried grass for food and finding plenty of water that hadn't frozen over. If we'd had a big sleet on top of that snow, it might have been a different story, since getting through solid ice to food can be a problem for any creature but fortunately that was not the case.