Текст книги "Mountain Man"

Автор книги: Vardis Fisher

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Sam had then raced after his companions, who were pursuing the two Indians. They lost them and returned to the dead horses. Fifteen minutes passed before one of them looked over at the warrior with the broken leg. His cry of amazement had brought Sam to his feet. The man through whom Sam had twice driven his knife had managed to sit up—even had managed to find his knife; and there he sat, a hideous figure, his whole chest red with the gore that streamed down from his mouth. The thing that had held Sam’s attention was the Indian’s eyes, staring at him through a red mist; they were filled with the deadliest hatred Sam had ever seen. But even more terrible to look at than the eyes were the hands, washed with warm blood and trying feebly to close nerveless fingers around the handle of a dagger. After a few moments the Indian had made a chilling sound, as from agony, mixed with the choking gurgle of blood in the throat; and as blood burst in a red vomit from nose and mouth the head sank forward, and the body, and the warrior was still.

There was nothing in a man that Sam admired more than courage. More than once since that hour Sam had awakened from a dream about this man and had been too disturbed to sleep again; more than once he had been troubled, as now, by contemplation of man’s or beast’s helplessness before an enemy. Nothing else in life went into him so deep, or with such pain and pathos; nothing else drew from him such a cry of pity to the Creator. Man to man or beast to beast, when both were in lighting fettle, was one thing; to be helpless before a merciless enemy was another thing. He knew, he never for a moment forgot, that the Blackfeet tortured their captives with fiendish ferocities that few whitemen could have imagined. It was true that no one could believe, without having seen them, how savage the squaws could be. Were they mothers? Did they feel tenderness when cradling their babes? How was a man to reconcile such hellish cruelties with a courage, sometimes a valor, that brought cries of admiration from their enemies?

Around camplires during the long winters tales were told of the red people’s nature and doings—such as the wager between a Sioux and a Cheyenne, both from a war·loving people. They had met unexpectedly one day, at a time when their nations were not at war, and the Sioux had challenged the Cheyenne to a game of hands. In this simple game one of the two players took a small pebble, and putting both hands behind his back, clasped the stone in one of them. Bringing his hands into plain view of his opponent, knuckles up, he asked him to choose the hand that held the stone. This was a favorite game with Indians; they were such inveterate gamblers that they would wager everything they had, including their horses, weapons, women, and sometimes their lives.

The Cheyenne won everything the Sioux had, and that brave, sitting stark-naked and wondering what else he could wager, offered his coveted scalp. He wagered it against everything he had lost. It was the wily Cheyenne’s turn with the stone, and behind his back he took so much time changing his mind and moving the stone from hand to hand that his opponent cried out with impatience. Suspecting a trick, he demanded to see the stone, for sometimes a brave’s medicine was big. The Sioux took the stone and examined it. He could see no erosion caused by magic, but asked nevertheless that a bullet from his medicine bag be used instead. It was the Cheyenne’s turn to suspect a trick; he stared hard at the piece of lead as he turned it over and over in his hands. Though it looked all right he tested it with his teeth and he smelled of it. His sly mind was telling him that the Sioux was dull and unimaginative and could be deceived; and so he kept the piece of lead in his right hand as he examined it, and it was still in his right hand when he put his hands behind his back. It was still in the right hand when after five minutes of anguished searching of his wits and his magic the Sioux said it was in the left hand. The Cheyenne had guessed that the stupid fellow would get hooked by the notion that the bullet would be slipped over to the left hand.

Without the slightest trace of fear the Sioux had folded his arms across his naked chest and bowed his head. Without the slightest feeling of mercy or pity the Cheyenne had taken up his knife and stood above him. With his left hand he seized the long hair and pulled the scalp taut, while with his right he cut through hair and skin to the bone, all the way around the skull. If the Sioux flinched the Cheyenne did not see or feel it. The customary way of scalping, both red and white, was to put a foot on the prostrate enemy’s neck or face and with a powerful twisting jerk snap the scalp off. The Cheyenne, without benefit of foot on neck, had to snap the top-knot back and forth and at last with a swift movement jerk it off. The Sioux rose to his feet, blood streaming down over him. He had seen men scalped who lived; he knew that his skull would heal but that forevermore he would be a bald and disgraced one. He wanted vengeance.

So he demanded that they meet again for another game of hands, after two moons. Feeling immeasurably superior, the Cheyenne readily agreed. He foresaw another triumph. He stipulated that they should bring to the rendezvous their finest horse and their finest weapons. They would meet on Owl Creek, at its headwaters, in two moons. All the time the two were making their agreement the Sioux stood with blood streaming down his front and back, and the Cheyenne openly admired his bloody trophy, which he held by the long hair.

They met again in two moons, the Sioux’s skull as bright and smooth as sun-baked bone, the Cheyenne unable to keep the gloating out of his face. But either luck or cunning was against him this time; he began to feel after several losses that his opponent had stronger medicine; and with all the magic taught him by the wise men he prayed for and strove to summon, in moments of intense concentration, a power that could defeat the bald eager man who kept guessing right four times in five. But he lost his horse, his weapons, and every piece of leather on him; and he sat as his opponent had sat, two months earlier, stark-naked, with nothing left to wager but his scalp or his life. If he had wagered his scalp and lost the Sioux would have been satisfied, but the Cheyenne, like his people, was a proud haughty one. Besides, he now thought his magic was working, I and so resolved to wager his life against everything he had lost and everything the Sioux had brought with him. The impassive Sioux accepted the proposal. The Cheyenne lost. That moment, Sam had thought many times, must have been about as intense and electric as any moment had ever been between two enemies. How many whitemen would have run for their lives? The Cheyenne merely stood up and faced the Sioux. Had he begun to chant the Indian death song? The story said only that the bald Sioux faced the Cheyenne and drove his knife through the Cheyenne’s heart.

It was a man’s country out here, and not for tall boys called men. Sam had never known an Indian and had never heard of one who had begged for mercy. Mercy was not a word in their language. A white captive who begged for mercy—and most of them did—aroused in their captors such contempt that they could not devise tortures fiendish enough to degrade him. Every mountain man knew that if he were luckless enough to be captured the only way to face the red people was to hawk phlegm up his throat and spit it in their faces. They might then torture you and they certainly would kill you but they would admire you and they would treasure your scalp.

Sam looked squarely at the fact that he might be captured someday. Few whitemen in Indian lands had lived to be as old as Caleb Greenwood and Bill Williams. Twice captured by the Blackfeet and twice escaping from them, Jeremiah Flagg had said, "I spect it’s time fer this ole coon to git back to his tree." He said there had been a time when he could smell a cussed redskin ten miles toward nowhere but now couldn’t smell him unless he could see him.

It was terribly beautiful country covered with violent life. The beaver was a gentle fellow who lived on bark; the milk-givers ate leaves and grass; but the flesh-eaters were all killers, and man was a flesh-eater. Sam had observed that most of the flesh-eaters were savage in their love-making. A favorite with some of the red people was the soup dance, in which the men and women in two lines faced one another across a distance of thirty or forty feet. A girl would coyly advance with a spoon (of buffalo or mountain sheep horn) filled with soup. This she would offer to the man of her choice and quickly withdraw, with the man pursuing her until she reached her line. He would then retreat, dancing to music, and she would come again; and still again; and from those watching there would be laughter or hoots of derision. When whitemen participated they substituted kissing for the spoonful of soup; but the Arapahoes, with whom, it was said, the dance had originated, rubbed noses, though now and then a couple would try kissing and seem to like it. The girls sometimes but not always wore a hair-rope chastity belt, with the ends tied around their waist.

A story was told of Kit Carson in one of these dances. A huge French bully had proclaimed himself the favorite and guardian of all the more attractive girls. Half drunk and with his lusts boiling, he had chased a girl into an adjacent woods, and after catching her had been so eager that he had slashed with his knife back and forth at the chastity belt, opening deep wounds in the girl’s thighs and belly. She had then drawn a hidden knife and stabbed him and run away. According to the tale Sam had heard, Kit then challenged the bully to a duel, killed him, and took the girl, Singing Grass, as his mate, changing her name to Alice.

Sam had learned that most of the flesh-eating males were brutal to the females. Possibly the cats, big and little, were the most ferocious of all, though no more cruel than some of the men, red or white, when filled with passion and rum. The way his Lotus trembled under his touch during the first days had told him things he had never read in books. The red lover was  sometimes worse than the male bobcat: at one of the posts during trading time Sam had watched drunken braves mating with their women—had seen a Cheyenne cover one of his wives and then in a senseless fury stab her repeatedly with a long knife. He then embraced her a second time, after she was dead.

Weariness with killing had turned Sam’s thoughts to love, and to John Colter’s hell. Why not spend a winter there? He could go deep into that steaming and exploding area and no Indian would dare follow him, for they thought that evil spirits were working their magic there. They thought a geyser spouting its boiling breath fifty or a hundred feet into the sky was an especially large devil showing off his powers. All the tiny hot—mouth poutings were, Sam supposed, the puckered lips of little devil-babies. It was a fearful land tucked away in the basins among densely forested mountains. No buffalo were there, but deer and elk were, rabbits and grouse, and ducks and geese on the lake. He could build a fire without having to feel anxious; soak himself in hot pools; eat hot food, play or sing, and think of his wife. He could study the loveliness of coruscant glitters and winkings of light in a coppice when a breeze was on it; and the empyreal elemental fires in the sunsets; and the fugues as choirs of birds sang around him. If tax collector or policeman or political boss ventured in he would chuck him headfirst into a big boiling mudpot.

Yes, he would go there, to recover his poise and nourish his powers; but first he would go up to the woman to see if she was all right. He wished he could persuade her to come with him, for it chilled his bones to think of her alone in another winter, under the howling megalomania of the Canadian winds and the wild subzero blizzards. The mountain men might even move the graves down there, where she would always have heat and hot water and shelter, and lifelong security from her enemies.

17

HE RODE, by night, through Crow country, and four days later sat astride the bay on a hilltop, looking first at the cairn. Then he saw the woman sitting between the graves. God in heaven, would she spend all her life over the bones of her dead? Was this a typical mother? Before her tragedy imploded into his being he had never thought of the differences between the human male and female. While looking over at this lonely woman and thinking about her he recalled a dream about Lotus that he had dreamed many times. She had lain naked on his thighs and belly, as though on a big thick mattress of meat, her chignon of black hair snuggled against his throat, a slender bronzed hand reaching up to play with his beard. His beard had lain down over one side of her face like a covering of horse mane. She had liked to run lingers through his whiskers and yank gently at the hair over his chest, possibly, he had thought, because the redmen were so hairless. Then she had moved up through hair to his mouth and had kissed him.

Now, looking over at the woman, he felt a surge of tenderness; in memory emotion flowed in lightning heat all the way south over the path they had taken, and to the cabin, and to the pitiful armful of bones that was all that had been left of the vibrant thing he had loved. He was hungry for woman but he had no hunger for the woman with white hair sitting by the graves. If she was anything for him she was a mother image, or female-with-little-ones image, like the grouse with her lovely darlings, or the female mallard webfooting it across a lake, with seven or eight soft little balls of fluff and down in her wake. This was a large soft hour for Sam Minard, goose-downlined, geyser-warm, antelope-eye gentle, mountain-lily white and tender, as he looked at the woman. Sentimental softening of his will and senses had not moved in such a deep current since he last reached in to touch the immured bones, his soul enfolding all that remained of one who in his dream of her and his plans for her would have been wife and mate and straight-shooting warrior at his side.

Sam then rode off into the hills. Had this woman learned how to jerk flesh, catch fish from the river, dry wild fruits? Or did she sit there the whole time, except when bringing water to her small elysian garden? Suspecting that he knew little about the human female and her ways, he tried to summon a clear image of his mother and of other mothers he had known, in their pattern of living. His mother had worked hard for her children and work was about all she had had. This woman had time and that was about all she had. She would have years and years of time  and she would grow old there and die, and like his wife, be eaten to her bones by wolves and ravens.

He returned with two fine deer, gutted but with the hides still on, and went over to the shack. The woman had seen him coming, and now actually looked over at him as he drew near. Bill had learned her name and now all the mountain men knew her name; and so Sam said, cheerfully, "How are you, Mrs. Bowden? How have you been this long time?"

Dismounting, he untied the deer, and taking each by a hind and foreleg, laid them on their backs, open bellies up. Looking round for stones to prop them, he saw that the northwest skull was not the one he had put on the stake. He walked over to have a look at it. Some mountain man had killed and beheaded an Indian and had brought the skull here. "Looks like they’re watching over you," he said when he returned to the cabin. Because she had risen to her feet he went over to her. He simply stared at her and she stared at him; after a few moments his gaze moved over her face and he saw that it was starvation-thin; and down over her body, noting the details of her garb. On her feet she had the tatters of a pair of shoes; her ragged dress looked to him like the one she had worn the first day he saw her. Her hair hung in uncombed snarls; her face and hands looked as if they hadn’t been washed for years.

He went over to a pannier, saying, "The Crows don’t have feet as big as mine. Mebbe some of these will fit you." He offered them to her but she did not take them. Again he looked at her eyes. He had never seen such eyes. He had not known that in human eyes there could be such glittering and chilling lights. Something like. horror ran along his nerves as he looked into Kate’s eyes and saw that they had no memory of anything not fenced in by this river and its hills.

He went to the door of the shack and looked in. It was bleak with the first chill of autumn. He turned to look at her plants. She had quite a garden of sage and wild flowers, but the flowers were now withering in the freezing nights. Facing her again, he said he wished she would go with him to the region of bilings, where she could be warm in any kind of weather. He and Bill and some others could take up her loved ones and carry them down there and bury them by the hot waters of a pool; and she could have a much lovelier garden, almost the year round. But he knew after a few minutes that his words were not entering the small bleak world where she lived. He sensed that in strange ways that he would never understand it was a wonderful world, where a mother lived with her children, and the angels and God. He framed her thin tired face with his big hands and lightly kissed her forehead and her hair.

"I brought you some things," he said, speaking cheerfully, doubting that she would understand a word. From his packhorses he took sugar, flour, coffee, salt, raisins; a roll of buckskin inside of which were pepper, needles, thread, matches; a roll of cotton cloth, inside of which were pencils and a notebook; and a buffalo robe. Here were pencil and paper, he said, holding them in full view of her stare. He thought she might like to write letters back home. Every time a mountain man came by she could hand the letters to him, and he would give to her the mail that came in for her. Sam had had the notion that she could be won back to a sense of the realities if she were to write and receive letters; but he knew, good Lord, he knew that she was far below that, or above it.

He dressed out the meat, jerked most of it, roasted one tenderloin for himself and the other for her, and the next morning turned back up the river, He had not gone far when he stopped to think. Why would a woman, even a mad-woman, carry water all day long up a hill to water such a plant as the sage? Concluding that there must be a mystery in it, he decided to go back and spy on her. What did she think about all daylong, what did she dream about all night? The pile of wood he had laid by the south wall she had never touched; all around the cabin there was no sign that she had ever made a fire. She had never brought river mud to daub the hut—she must have almost frozen to death during the past winter, when temperatures dropped to thirty or forty below zero and winds colder than ice smote the walls. The more he thought about it the more incredible it seemed that she was still alive. On his way down the river he searched the bottoms but found no spot where she had dug for roots, no berry bush from which she had taken fruit.

Hiding his beasts in a thicket, he went up the hills and turned north. Approaching behind one juniper and another, he drew within sixty yards of her and sat to make himself comfortable, and to observe her and wait. Peering between cedar branches, he had a good view of her and her yard. She was sitting. It looked to him as if she was sitting between the graves, and she seemed to be talking but he could not be sure of that. The sun was sinking; it would be dusk soon, and then night, with a full moon two hours before midnight. How simple it would be for a Blackfoot from the west, a Big Belly from the east, or a Crow from the south to slip in here and take her scalp and everything she had! He knew that redskins must have been tempted to the verge of frenzy. He knew that only fear of mountain-man vengeance stayed their hands. It had become a law of this country that if the redmen of any tribe were contemptuous or brutal toward any mountain man, or any person whom mountain men were protecting, word of it would go forth all the way to the San Juans, the Big Blue, and to Oregon’s Blue Mountains and beyond; and a summons to a rendezvous and vengeance, The vengeance would be so dreadful that survivors would turn gray with fear and flee to the remotest hills. Sam thought it unlikely that any buck would ever be fool enough to take the scalp of this defenseless woman.

Because the wind was coming his way, down from the Bear Paw Mountains, he filled and kindled his pipe and breathed in the aroma of Kentucky tobacco. There was nothing much to see; she just sat there, and an hour passed, two hours, and she still sat, as though waiting for something or someone. When deeper dusk came he could barely see her. In the breeze moving over him he could smell her and the shack with its big pile of unclean bedding; he could smell the bleached-bone odor of the skulls and of all the deer bones mountain men had scattered roundabout. Putting his pipe away, he went on a wide detour and approached from the north. As she sat she faced the south by southwest. Taking his time, he slipped forward until he came to the shack on the north side; he then peered round the northwest corner. There she sat, between the bones of her children. He looked back to the hour when he had buried her loved ones; he saw the scene again and knew that her daughter’s grave was on her right, within reach of her hand; the grave of her sons on her left. The riddle was why she spent so much time there. For an hour Sam watched her and she did not move half an inch either way. He sensed that she was waiting for something but there was nothing before her that he could see, except a dozen sage plants that she had brought from the river bottom, and scrub juniper farther out, and the night dark of river trees.

About ten o’clock the moon came out of mountain dark; it looked like a round piece of cardboard with pale paint smudges on it. But it cast a lot of light. He saw that at once there was a change in the woman; she moved a little and seemed to sit a little higher; she took something up from her lap; and then to his utter amazement she began to speak. Like a man who now found himself in a strange eerie place, he glanced round him and up at the night, and listened. Her back was to him but by the way her arms moved he knew that she had something in her hands that she was looking at. Her voice was surprisingly strong and clear. He heard the words, "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them." Straining forward, he heard: "The Lord meant you, and you, John, and you, Robert—the wilderness and the solitary place, all around us here, it is for us. All this is glad for us, my darlings; you make it more pleasant in the sight of the Lord. John, my darling, Robert, my darling, and my darling daughter, do you all hear me? . . ."

Sam heard her. He was rigid with astonishment. The moon had risen the height of four tall men in the sky, and Lou and John and Robert in the cocoons of their moon-gray sages were nodding softly, like flowers, and smiling, with heavenly radiance like a silken halo around them.

Sam advanced from the corner, and stared and listened. In his wonderment he now realized that this woman had some education; he thought she had the accents of a schoolmarm. But he could see nothing to talk to. Soundlessly he advanced until he stood just behind her, and his amazement grew as he stared and listened.

"We’re in the wilderness and solitary," the woman’s voice said, clear and strong. "We don’t have much but we’ve always been poor people; all our people have been poor people as far back as anyone knows; but our Lord, he said to his disciples, 'Blessed be ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger, for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now, for ye shall laugh ..,. ’ "

"Almighty God!" Sam said under his breath.

On her right the image of her daughter, so delicate that it seemed to have come from subdued light and the softest kind of cloud silk, moved as the breeze moved, and nodded gently and bowed, like flowers, and smiled and listened to her mother; and on her left the two sons, looking like pure soul divested of all its dross, smiled and nodded. Sam stared until his eyes ached but could see only the sage and the withered flowers. After an hour he slipped back to the north side of the cabin and there he pinched himself to be sure that he was not asleep and  dreaming; looked out to the distant hills like piles of night dark; at the tree line of the river—at all these to see if they were still familiar, for he was feeling uneasy and queersorne. Everything looked as it had always looked, except this woman. He now returned to his position behind her and looked down over her head to see what was in her lap. Never would she know that this tall man stood almost touching her and stared at her gray hair and at the Bible in her hands. His eyes searched the earth before her and the plants, but except the plants and the woman and the cedars and the river trees he could see no sign of living image.

To her dear ones and her darlings she was now saying, "Repeat after me the words, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.’ ” She told them that most men seemed not to want peace, but mothers wanted peace, for the good of their children. Sam strained his ear; but could hear only her voice and the flow of the river and the cries of night birds. He saw that here and there in the book she had put slivers of paper; she would lift pages, fifty or a hundred at a time, and move from one slip of paper to another; and then  pause to read, " 'For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace; the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing.’ " A little later she was telling them that the Lord called on the heavens to sing and the earth to be filled with joy, and all the mountains to burst with song. She was saying, "Until he comes we will be solitary in the wilderness."

Sam slipped fifty yards out into the night, so that tobacco smoke would not reach her, and filled his pipe and smoked. There had been strange music in her words, strange soothing caress, as of a wild mother’s hand; he did not want to let this tenderness go from him. The mountains and the hills would break into singing? For him the earth had always been singing. Here in these mountains were fugues, arias, sonatas, the thousands and millions of them interweaving the harmonies of one another; and there was the other side of it, in Thomas Hood’s lines:

There is a silence where hath been no sound,

There is a silence where no sound may be.

  There was that kind of silence in the pathetic youngster hanging from the tree crotch. Suddenly there came to Sam an impulse to get his organ and at a distance from her, unseen and unknown, play soft music. So he went to his baggage and returned; and lying on his belly behind a mound of earth, with the night breeze moving across him and toward her, he made low musical tones, while wondering what he should play. His instrument was not generous enough for Bach’s organ music. The things that flooded his soul were the love songs he had sung and played for Lotus. "Have You Seen a Whyte Lily Grow?" He played that. He played a tender Mozart minuet, the soft notes floating away on the breeze to that dear mother’s ears. Almost at once she began to sing. The sound of her voice in mezzo-soprano song was so electrifying that for a few moments Sam was put off his music; he could only listen in astonishment and gaze up at the night sky, knowing that the Creator had a hand in this. The woman did not move or turn to look round her. He thought she was singing hymns; he began to improvise, mixing snatches from serenades, Corelli phrases, the themes of thrush, lark, and warbler, in a pleasing assonance all his own. After a while he understood that what he played did not matter at all, as long as it was in harmony with her mood, the moon, and the night. With her back to him she was singing to her children, and Sam was playing softly to the stars and his mother and Lotus. He kept the notes low, for he did not want to alarm her; the whole lovely thing would have been shattered if even a faint suspicion had broken through to her mind. He blew out just enough music from "The Mellow Horn," bird arias, the theme so often repeated in Beethoven’s violin concerto, and other musical tidbits, to keep her singing. For two hours or longer she sang in a fair soprano, with a marvelously clear bell-tone now and then ringing from her throat; and the moon rose to the zenith and a thousand stars came out.

When at last Sam slipped away into the night he wondered if his playing had been a kindness: if there was no music tomorrow night, the next night, and for weeks or months, how would she feel about it? Well, doggone it, he would return as often as he could, to play what she surely must think was heavenly music. She would hear it and she would sing to her children: deeper happiness than that there was none, for mothers anywhere.

18

BECAUSE IT WAS impossible to enter the geyser basins on horseback up the Yellowstone or over the Yellowstone Mountains Sam had to go south and up the South Fork and past Hawks Rest and down the Yellowstone to the lake. Across timbered mountains, black and beautiful with health, he followed the east side of the lake, going north, and then the north side, until he came to steaming springs. It was a marvel to all who had seen this coastline, for out in the cold lake were hot springs, some of them a hundred yards out; and there the hot and cold waters mingled, and steam rose from the surface. At the lake’s edge a man could find water of any temperature, between icy cold and almost boiling. Before going to the area on the west side of pouting and hissing paint and mud pots Sam stripped off and plunged in. He had known no experience more exhilarating than swimming back and forth through extremes of hot and cold. It was such a delightful and thrilling surrender of his senses to the caresses that, floating on his back and looking up at the blue, he said to the Creator, in Bill’s language, "No man alive ever made a bath pool like thissen!" What was it the woman had read from the holy book? "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them." How glad he was to be here, solitary, alone, and safe in the wilderness!