Hot Cannons & Warm Lovers Ch. 01

Assiginack never preached war, but he wasn't afraid of it either.

Nehaseemo was working his way northward, having met a pair of Odawa warriors. He was in no hurry. The two had agreed to take him to Manitoulin Island, but had asked for a couple of days to settle a few things and spend a little time with their families at Shawanaga . So while that went on, Nehaseemo was out in one of their canoes, poking around a little to the north of Penetanguishene, and thinking about doing a little fishing. It was already pretty late for it, so he stopped paddling long enough to get his buckskin shirt off.

He'd been to Manitoulin Island before, but had never come up from the eastern side. It was a shorter journey to come from the west, but for the moment, Nehaseemo had enough of the rhetoric to be heard from both sides and had no desire to pass Michilimackinac to have to hear any more. He knew that there was war in the air. It was just a matter of time no matter how he saw it and it was plain that the British saw their starting position as lacking, to judge by the way that their few military resources were being stretched over impossible distances.

Another sure sign to his mind was the way that they were making overtures, seeking support from the indigenous tribes with the help of the Indian Affairs Department representatives, who advised the military commanders on which tribes tended to ally themselves easily based on common language, intertribal trade, and friendship.

He was a Shawnee from Ohio, as an example, and here he was to visit a branch of the Ojibwa, travelling with a pair of Odawa to do it.

He looked deeper into the reeds and watched a pair of dragonflies for a moment as they chased each other around. He thought at first that it was about the natural aggression between two competitors, since they were different sorts, but it turned into a dance before his eyes as they pursued one another through and around the stalks. One of them landed for a moment, perched on Nehaseemo's thigh, but then the other one flew past and the game was on again. They left him to his thoughts then, and he watched them go, flying off to his left.

His eyes followed them as they flew off and that led him to look out at the island off to his left. He considered a moment and then pointed the prow of the canoe that way.

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Part Three

On what is now known as Giant's Tomb Island, Georgian Bay, Ontario 1792

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It wasn't all that long before Lise felt a little drowsy. She warned herself over it and fought the feeling off a little. When she'd been a little girl, she'd fallen asleep in the sunshine for part of an afternoon and she never forgot the pain of that burn.

She raised her head a little and looked around. There was no one there and she saw only a pleasant shoreline and a few trees off to either side of her. The stands of trees that close to the edge, a matter of only some yards, were thin and she could clearly see right through them. There were a few gulls a long way off and they were squabbling over the remains of a dead fish. The trees on either side of her and behind her were home to other birds more used to a forest setting and it came to her that as long as those birds twittered and sang their calls to each other, there was little cause for alarm, since they'd fall silent at the approach of anyone.

Her thoughts went back to what Kiwidinok had said and her hands began to move over her own body only a moment later, seemingly of their own volition.

She cupped one of her breasts, thinking of all of the times when she'd had this slight want of a little pleasure. But being the mother of a little boy didn't allow for a lot of things like this. She reached to tease along the line of her lower lips, sighing a little in the sunshine as she allowed her legs to drift apart, since it was what they seemed to want to do as well.

This was so ... good.

She hadn't had a chance at anything like this since her father had taken ill during the last stages of his sickness. Then Jean-Luc had come and, ...

Well there just hadn't been much opportunity.

So she was making the best of it right now. Where she was, she was in a hidden little cove and there was another island out there, some four miles distant. She felt safe enough.

Her fingers slowly teased toward the core of her and by now, there wasn't even a need to lick them. She was as wet as anything, so she guessed that she must have been missing this even more than she knew. She raised her legs and spread them more, rocking her hips a little as her fingers slid inside as deeply as they'd go.

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He paddled around a sparse bunch of reeds to get to a sandy spot and he was out of the canoe before he heard the soft scrape of it against the sand. Nehaseemo pulled it far out of the water before he turned away to walk up the few stones which looked a little like huge steps to him. It brought him to the top of a very low rise of rock and he stepped slowly around the area in the middle, not wanting to upset the nesting birds there.

He didn't care all that much about upsetting them, but it felt a little wrong for one thing and he had no want in him to have to listen to their upset screams for another.

He saw a copse of trees off to his left and headed that way for a little shade from the sun.

It was at that point that he heard the soft sounds coming from further off down the slope.

He had to stop and listen carefully, not quite believing the nature of what he heard. He was certain after another minute of it and he eased himself forward through the trees.

At first, he'd thought that he'd stumbled across a pair of lovers, but he guessed that his impression had been incorrect after a little more time. He'd heard no male sounds.

The last part of his stalk took him to where he could step just out of the trees to still stand in the shade and he stared a little.

Out here?

Was he really seeing what he thought he was looking at?

There was a, ... a woman, ... a white woman without a thing on, lying on the warm sand, and by her actions, expression, and most of all her very soft sounds, she was enjoying the day even more than he was.

Nehaseemo smiled a little then, seeing nothing at all wrong before him. He was even with her in his thoughts, agreeing completely. A day such as this one, in a place as lovely and private as this, ...

He knew himself. He only wondered why the same thought hadn't already come to him.

He was a little puzzled, though. From what he knew, white women weren't given to this sort of thing very much, not out in the open and in daytime. He averted his eyes for just a moment, not wanting her to feel his gaze.

He'd seen many white women before, he'd just never found them to be as attractive to him as this one. Nehaseemo knew that to most any man, a woman was a woman, just a female at the root of things. And to his way of thinking, that wasn't taking anything away from them. It was only simplifying things.

But this one, with her golden hair splayed around her head, the long gentle waves of it spread with abandon, this wasn't even wantonness. This was just a fine woman enjoying herself.

He found himself grinning a little in spite of himself when he looked back.

Her little sounds were growing more urgent and he liked that, as he silently urged her on in his thoughts. He didn't know her, hadn't the slightest idea of who this pale beauty might be, but for these moments, he wished for her to find her joy in the best way for her.

Nehaseemo was a thinking man. He did have a heart in him. His recent thoughts about the whites notwithstanding, the little scene here before him pleased him to watch and not for the only the sensuality that this person embodied.

His brothers advocated killing the whites at worst and accepting the British as allies under the assumption that they'd treat his kind better than the Americans at best. But what he was watching here was having an effect on him.

He smirked to himself.

What he was watching here seemed to go a ways toward making just about everything else irrelevant.

He had no wish to harm her in any way. He didn't even want to take advantage of her present state for his own lust. He wasn't like that at all. But he did want to get closer to her, if for nothing other than a better look.

He told himself that he couldn't do that, knowing the results beforehand.

He told himself that he shouldn't do it, since if nothing else, it would be an unwelcome intrusion, and would only frighten her half to death over nothing.

But he found himself moving toward her anyway, drawn by her loveliness.

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Lise felt it coming to her. It was as if her body recognized it's own need, to be sure, but it felt to her that even her very bones were taken with this time in this place, trying to stretch out the inevitable.

She wasn't having any trouble getting there, she just, ... she was just loving this time so much.

A stray thought came to her that Kiwidinok would be coming back here with her son soon, so this couldn't go on for the whole afternoon -- as much as she now wanted it to.

Her left hand released her nipple for the moment and she licked her fingertips a little before she brought that hand down to her little nub, teasing even more in lazy little circular motions. She felt her head press back against her dress, bunched up there as a pillow.

She inhaled and it turned into a gasp of pleasure. This was it. This was the beginning. She shifted her right hand to get her thumb wet so that it could take on a little extra duty on her nub while her fingers still pumped in and out. This was coming quickly now. This was her own quickening, the fast uphill climb to the peak.

Lise raised her hips right off the sand, working herself hard in these last few moments. She mewled a little in spite of herself, and then her left hand flashed back to her nipple to squeeze and roll it as the sensations brought her to the very edge.

Oh, she wanted to cry out right then.

Oh, mon Dieu, the joy of this as her body gave in to it all. Her hips rocked and humped into the empty air before her and she just barely managed to keep her voice from the wail of pleasure that she felt. It seemed to be a little criminal not to let it out, but with her luck, her son would be near and come running to see what was the matter with his mother.

A little cry did escape her lips for just the briefest instant, but then she had it reined-in tightly, allowing only her quietest grunts to pass out of her through her teeth as she held this for as long as it lasted.

Then it was over and she allowed herself to sag back to the sand with a long sigh.

After her breathing began to settle down, the first thing, ...

The first wrong thing which came to her attention was the silence. There were only the sounds of the gentle waves as they washed up against the sand a few yards away from her feet, that, and the quiet puff of the breeze past her ears.

What had happened to the birds? She didn't even hear the gulls now.

Her eyes had been closed to block out the dappled sunlight which came to them in bright flashes through the branches above her. That was gone now, replaced by unchanging evenness in the darkness behind her eyelids. Something was wrong.

Lise's eyes snapped open and her heart slammed to a stop as she looked up, ...

Straight into the deep brown eyes of a man.

He was large to her; especially given that she was here flat on her back, as naked as the morning that she'd been born.

She must have seen eyes looking down at her then, she guessed, but being only a newborn infant screaming over the suddenness of the bright world around her through brand new eyes which likely hadn't seen her first look at that world all that clearly, well, ...

They took in this scene just fine, however, those bright blue eyes of hers and she was in terror, her body almost screaming at her to jump straight up as her adrenal glands opened wide.

He looked down at her in a rather serene way, his eyes opened a little wider than what she guessed they'd normally be. And why not, after all? He'd just been sitting there on one hip within two feet of her, watching her as she'd, ...

Mother of God and all of the Saints in Heaven!

He touched her shoulder very gently, opening his mouth to speak. He had full lips that she found rather attractive, but that wasn't the point.

Lise exhaled as she lunged forward, rolling to her feet and she ran as fast as she could go.

She could think about his lips later.

And his brown skin and his long braid of coal-black hair which ended near to his navel.

Even his wide bare chest and handsome face could be contemplated later. But first, she had to get away in order to survive this. Lise ran straight into the waves, turning to look back, needing to see if she'd been pursued.

She fell on her backside into the cold water.

Sitting there in terror, she watched as he slowly stood up and walked to the water's edge only twenty-five feet from where she sat. She crawled backward like a drunken crab until a wave slapped against the back of her head and drenched her, its coldness stopping her for the moment as the water poured over her shoulders and down over her breasts.

He was smiling.

Of all the luck, Lise thought. Where could she go? She couldn't just swim for it. She couldn't swim. Like this, he'd just wade in after her and drag her out onto the sand and then he's have his way with her, wouldn't he?

What she saw as she stared at him wide-eyed was, ...

Well, at about any other time, she'd, ...

At any other time, if she'd laid eyes on this man, she'd have probably glanced a couple of times, seeing that he was bare-chested and there wasn't a thing wrong with him to her eyes. But that would have been in a different setting, where things wouldn't have been so, ... very raw and shocking and, ...

Lise would have loved to have seen a man like this at any of those times.

But not now.

What was he going to do? She had a thought, but what about after? Would he kill her? Would he hurt her, not caring what she might be feeling? Would he callously hand her off to other men? Would he, ...

"I am sorry," she heard him say in English, only loud enough to be heard by her over the sounds of the water around her, "I should not have disturbed you."

Lise felt her mouth drop open as though her jaw had gone slack. He was smiling a little shyly for her feelings.

"Je ne parle pas d'Englais," she said, and then she shrugged in a small Gallic way, while still managing to look quite upset, "Un petit peu, seulement."

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He'd seen people with blue eyes before and always thought that they looked as though some demonic force had been at work, ... or play, perhaps. But he'd never seen blue eyes quite this, ... well, ... blue before.

They'd mesmerized him, holding him motionless to the point where the only thing that he could do -- the single only thing that he'd been able to do, and it likely wouldn't have ever come to him otherwise, was to touch her.

Her soft skin against his fingertips had only completed his imprisonment.

For the first time in his life, Nehaseemo suddenly felt that he'd met his match. Not in combat or in any contest of strength, not in powers of observation and reasoning, but in the way that a pair of eyes had been able to immobilize him so completely and worse, so helplessly.

It had been only logical to expect her to jump up and run, under the circumstances. But all that he'd been able to do was to sit and stare at her back and bottom as she'd run terrified into the waves.

He'd never seen a nicer bottom on a woman. He was sure of it.

He'd had to give his head a shake to find the pathways to the nerves which controlled his legs so that he could stand up. For the moment, he'd felt better, in control of himself once more.

But then she'd turned around and fallen to sit on the sandy bottom in the water and he'd seen those pert breasts and what looked to him to be the hardest nipples in the world -- at least on this side of the Great Water, surely.

What had he done, other than to frighten her anyway? It hadn't been his want, but it had happened all the same. He had to smile, not wanting to make this worse, and one of the reasons was the most absurd thought that he felt that he could have had then.

How to explain to her that he'd seen her and wanted nothing more than to be near to her, silently cheering for her as he watched the most natural of acts and admiring her for it?

He tried to apologize, but she replied in French. He spoke very little of it, unlike his brother Tecumseh, who had a gift for quickly learning the white man's ways of speech. He held up his palms, wanting her to see that he meant no harm.

As though that gesture was going to make it all better, he thought, feeling rather foolish.

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She saw him hold up his hands a little, and it looked to her that he was trying to calm her. Well how was that going to work? She was naked here and he was, ... a little disappointingly only half-naked.

Lise didn't know why, but his gesture and her naughty little unbidden thought seemed to help somehow. By now, she knew that he probably didn't understand French either. A bit of a shame, she thought. She'd never seen anyone quite like him and it brought out a little of her humor at the silly situation.

"Well, I think that you should either take those leggings and all the rest off or if not, then could you hand me my dress, please?" she smiled, "You have been standing there too long for one who would hurt me, I think."

He didn't seem to understand, but he also didn't charge into the water to pull her out either.

By far, most of it went over his head, but with her entertaining little pantomime as she sat in the waves, Nehaseemo understood and walked back, bringing her the dress and holding it up to make sure that it didn't get wet.

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Part Four

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Kiwidinok regarded the beached canoe with a great deal of alarm and she turned them back to the point that they'd just swung around. Étienne tried to look back at her to ask. She said only, "We must go back to the other beach for a moment, Étienne. Just pull hard now and I will guide us in."

When the prow of their canoe had only just touched the sand, Kiwidinok was over the side and into the water, standing with her hand on the boy's shoulder to restrain him. "I want you to get out and pull the canoe higher onto the shore for me. After that, Étienne, you must stay here until I come back for you. It is important, yes? Please do as I say."

Étienne was confused and concerned, "Is it Maman?" he asked, "What is wrong?"

She shook her head in a way that seemed to brush what he'd said away, "I only need to be sure of something, Étienne. Please, you must stay and wait."

He nodded, but plainly didn't like it and Kiwidinok also saw that he was actually doing his best not to become upset. Such a son -- such a fine boy, she said to herself as she ran up the beach and over the crest. She had to get to her friend to warn her at least.

But Étienne saw something which unsettled him even more as he watched Kiwidinok run. She was wearing a long buckskin shirt over leggings. As she crested the top, he saw it as she pulled up the shirt on her right side and drew a long knife as she ran. He did as he'd been told and pulled the canoe higher before he stood looking at that crest in the dunes in worry.

Kiwidinok pounded through the scant woods silently with her knife held in a death grip. She stopped to listen for a few seconds every so often, her nostrils flared wide when she closed her mouth to breathe as well, searching for any clue. Then she was off again in the direction of the little cove where she'd last seen Lise.