Venom by David Thompson

raised his face to the vault of sky, then gazed at the lake. “I have no complaints. I’ve had a good life.”
    “Now you’re being ridiculous. You act as if you have one foot in the grave when you’ve just admitted that you are as healthy as can be.”
    “Why doesn’t anyone listen anymore?” Shakespeare said sadly. “My wife is denying my age just like you.”
    “I’ll have Blue Water Woman and you over for supper tomorrow night and we’ll talk some more.”
    “We’ll be happy to come over, but I’ll be damned if I’ll be the topic. What I’ve just said to you goes no further than right here.”
    Nate grinned. “You just don’t want Blue Water Woman upset with you.”
    “No. I don’t want her upset, period. I love that woman, and talking about me dying would hurt her.”
    “You have my word,” Nate said.
    Winona looked up and saw her husband and McNair talking. “I thought we were hunting for snakes. Look at those two.”
    Blue Water Woman was using the butt of her rifle to move a large rock. “I hope it is not what I think it is.”
    Winona arched an eyebrow in a silent question.
    “Shakespeare has been going on again about how no one lives forever,” Blue Water Woman revealed. “He says he has a feeling, a premonition, that he isn’t long for this world.”
    “Men can be so silly,” Winona said. When her friend didn’t respond, she said softly, “Blue Water Woman?”
    Blue Water Woman turned. Her eyes were misting. “I am worried, Winona. It is all he talks about anymore. At first I thought it was his age. His joints hurt and he cannot get around as well.”
    “He gets around better than men half his age.”
    “You know that and I know that, but he says he is not the man he used to be. The other day he talked about how when he was younger he could swim a lake this size. Now he says he would be lucky to make it halfway across.”
    “Everyone grows old. It is part of life.”
    “It is part of dying,” Blue Water Woman said. She walked to a boulder and sat. She rested the stock of her rifle on the ground and gripped the barrel in both hands and leaned on it. “In all the winters we have been together, I have never seen Carcajou like this.”
    Carcajou, as Winona knew, was a nickname given to Shakespeare in his younger days, before he discovered the Bard. It was French for “wolverine.” Shakespeare never talked about how he got the name, not even to his wife.
    “I tease him about it and he doesn’t tease back,” Blue Water Woman was saying. “That in itselfworries me. It is as if a part of him has given up on living.”
    “Aren’t you exaggerating a little?”
    “No.”
    Winona sat on another boulder and placed her Hawken across her lap. “I have good ears if you want to talk about it.”
    “I know you do,” Blue Water Woman said. “You are the best friend I have ever had.” She bit her lower lip. “What I am afraid of is that Shakespeare is right. I could not live without him.”
    “We are getting ahead of ourselves,” Winona cautioned. “When he shows more signs of his age than he has, then we should be concerned.”
    Blue Water Woman nodded bleakly.
    “My people have a medicine we use in old age. We learned it from the Nez Percé. It is the seed of what the whites call the wild peony plant. You can chew it or drink it in a tea.” Winona grinned. “Shakespeare need not know what the tea is for.”
    “You are a devious woman.”
    “Women have to be devious dealing with men. Men do not think as we do. They do not listen when we give them advice. They can be stubborn. And they have their pride.”
    “You do not need to tell me about pride. Shakespeare has enough for ten men.”
    “Men are like foals,” Winona said. “They must be led. If we have to, we must trick them into thinking an idea is theirs when it is ours. When they balk, we must be patient, as we would with a foal, and coax and flatter them.”
    “Shakespeare does not take well to flattery,” Blue