Текст книги "Mountain Man"

Автор книги: Vardis Fisher

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

The guard made no move that Sam’s lidded eyes did not see. During the first hour he had turned to look out at least once every ten minutes; he was then looking out every five minutes; and at the end of an hour and a half he was looking out every minute or less, and the way he moved showed that he was itching with resentment and suspicion and that his thirst was like hell’s own. Nothing, Sam told himself, was more likely to make a guard think his prisoner secure than a boiling passion that took his mind olf him and returned it and took it off again. Alcohol could do it; a female could do it. Alcohol, it now seemed to Sam, was the redman’s curse, and woman the whiteman’s ....

Just itch all over, Sam thought, his bound hands in plain view on his lap, his head sunk as though he were half gone in fatigue and sleep. Just itch, you bastard, and keep looking. Sam had never felt more brilliantly alert, as though all his senses and mind and emotions shone in the full blaze of noon sunlight. Never had his eyes been sharper. Just git yourself a thirst like that in hell, Sam was saying inside; and over and over calculated the risks and his chances. He figured that he had been sitting with the guard about two hours. For nearly an hour he had smelled the roasting flesh. He knew that tripods of green trees had been set up and that hanging from them were the carcasses, slowly roasting in flames and smoke. Redmen when hungry never waited for flesh to cook but almost at once began to hack off bloody gobbets; and by the time their hunger was appeased there wasn’t much left but bone and gristle. Before long now these Indians would be drinking. Sam had hoped they would drink before they ate. Once they started drinking they would have pictures of mountain men bringing them whole rivers and lakes of rum, to ransom the Crow-killer, so that a second time they could capture him, for more lakes and rivers. What dreams children dreamed!

There now came to the door of the tent a face whose war paint had been smeared over with fresh blood. In this brave’s hands was a piece of pine bark, on which rested a pound or two of hot elk meat. The guard set the meat by him and began to gesticulate, and to talk in a high shrill voice ill-becoming a bold brave warrior; Sam knew that he was asking why he had not been fetched a cup of spirit water. The two braves gestured and yelled at one another, and the one who had brought the meat then went away. Sam did not move or lift the lids on his eyes, for he knew that his moment was drawing near. Very gently he tried to ease his cramps and relax his muscles.

In only a few moments the Indian returned with a tin cup in his hand. Sam knew that in the cup was rum. The guard eagerly took the cup and sniffed, and he was so enchanted that he laid the knife on his lap, and seizing the cup with both hands, put the rim to his lips. Sam’s gaze was on the other Indian; he was praying that the fellow would go away. He had hoped that the guard would be alone with him when he drank and that his first gulp would be so large it would strangle him. Sam was to say later that both his prayers were answered. The Indian in the tepee doorway, eager to get back to the drinking and feasting, did vanish; and the blockhead with the cup of rum did take such a huge mouthful that the fiery spirits choked him. He suddenly tightened all over and was fumbling to set the cup down when Sam moved with the swiftness that had become legendary. In an instant his powerful hands were on the redman’s throat. Everything that he did now had been thought through, over and over, so that there would be no false move or wasted moment. As hands seized the throat a knee came with terrific force into the man’s diaphragm, paralyzing his whole torso. In the next instant Sam released the throat and his right hand seized the knife. He twisted his right hand around until he could put the blade to the leather and sever it, and the moment that was done, the left hand was back to the throat to be sure it made no sounds, and the right hand was gathering the robe, tomahawk, and piece of elk meat. He then slipped under the back of the tent into the gray—white night.

In a flash he was gone across the pale snow and into the trees.

24

IT WAS SNOWING hard. During the hours when he sat waiting for his chance Sam had known that he would need the Almighty’s help if he were to outrun the pursuit of fifty-eight hell-fiends, and the bitter cold and deep snows of winter. His instincts told him that he was going east but he was not sure. of it. During this day’s march he had seen a range of mountains west of him, another north, and another east, and he had thought the range on the east was the Continental Divide. If it was, the Missouri River was only forty or fifty miles east of it, and from there across the desolation to Kate was a hundred and fifty or two

hundred miles.

During his many hours of thinking and planning he had recognized that it would be folly to go south, over the trail up which they had come, or west to the Flatheads. His captors would expect him to take one of these routes. They would not expect him to go north into Blood and Piegan land, or to be fool enough to try to cross the Divide after heavy snows had come. Earlier in the day the war party had crossed a river but he did not know what river it was. He had never been through this country. He had heard that there were several rivers in this area, all of which came down from the Divide and flowed west. Up one of these rivers looked to him like the only possible way to freedom.

After he had trotted swiftly for four or five miles he stopped to listen. He could hear no sounds. He put the piece of meat to his nostrils, for he was as famished as a wolf. While sitting and waiting he had wondered if he ought to take one of the guard’s thighs, but he was a sentimental man and he thought he would rather starve than eat human flesh. He had calculated all the risks and had decided that in starvation lay his greatest danger. He could hope to get his hands on little except roots along streams, berries still clinging to bushes, a fool hen possibly, a fish now and then in a shallow pool, rose hips, marrow in old bones; or, if very lucky, a deer or an antelope stuck in deep snow.

He was glad that it was snowing hard. He was singing inside at the thought of being free. He thanked God for both and he thanked Him for rum. He hoped that rum and rage would make fifty-seven warriors so drunk that they would fall down and freeze to death. He thought he had heard bones snap in the guard’s neck. If they found him dead all hell would break loose; they would run round and round and the dogs would be baying at their heels. But Sam doubted that they would take his trail before morning. They would think he had gone back down the path to the Three Forks and that they could catch him in a day or two; or they would think he had headed for his in-laws and would get stuck in deep snow. If it were to snow all night they might not be able to tell by morning which way he had taken. But the dogs would know.

There was a cold wind down from the mountains. He listened again and thought he heard faint shrieks, and dogs barking, but he could not be sure. His direction now was due north and two hours before daylight he came to a river. Taking off his moccasins and leather leggins he waded into the shallow stream and turned up it, to the east, walking as rapidly as he could, in water only ankle-deep or sometimes to his crotch. It was cold but for a while it did not seem cold; his blood was hot from exertion, his soul singing, his hopes high. He had yanked off the guard’s medicine bag and was amazed to find in it his mouth harp. It was as if a brother had joined him, or Beethoven’s ugly face up in the sky had smiled. When first captured he would not have given a buckskin whang for his life; but now, with God’s help, he was a free man again, and he would remain free and alive, even if he had to live on tree bark. The redmen might follow his path to the river but there they would lose it, and two or three of them might go upriver but most of them would go downriver. He could not, like John Colter, find an acre of driftwood and lie under it for half a day and most of a night; he could only hoard his strength and keep going. Some of the river stones cut his feet but he remembered that John’s feet had been filled with cactus thorns; he was starved but he told himself that Colter had lived on hips and roots; Hugh Glass with maggots swarming in his wounds had crawled for a hundred miles; and a man named Scott, starved it and sick unto death, had dragged himself forward for sixty miles. And yonder Kate sat in the cold and sang. A man could do it if he had to. He recalled other tales of heroism and if fortitude, to warm and cheer him as he struggled up the river.

Sam was not feeling sorry for himself. He was not that kind. He was not telling himself that he would perish. He was only warming himself with the feats of brave free men, his kind of men. Afraid that he was moving only about three miles an hour in his tortuous journey up the river, he looked round him but there was no other way. Until daylight he would keep moving and perhaps for an hour after daylight, for he thought it would take the redmen half the morning to find his path and follow it to the river. He would find some snuggery back under the bank—an old beaver house or a wash under an overhanging earth ledge or a pile of driftwood; and he would hole up until night came again. He could catch a few hours’ sleep, if he lay on his belly, for in that position his snoring, Lotus had told him, was light. He would eat half the elk meat and all the rose hips he could find; and when darkness came he would be gone

again.

What he found was a high-water eddy underwash, under a grove of large aspen; the spring torrents had raised the river four or five feet above its present level, and the high waters swirling round and round in the eddy had cut away the earth back under the trees. Sam crawled for thirty feet and after putting on his leggins and moccasins and wrapping the robe around him he cut off morsels of flesh and chewed them thoroughly. Never had elk tasted so good. Looking out the way he had come, he could see only a hint of daylight. If Indians were to wade up the river, as he had done, it was possible that they would spot his hideaway and crouch low to look back under. But they would never wade far in a river. They would think he had made a raft and gone downriver, toward his in-laws, and by the time they discovered their error he would be over the Divide.

All day until dusk he rested and slept a little and heard no Indians and saw nothing alive but one hawk. All day the snow fell. All night he took his slow way up the river. By midnight he had reached the foothills; by morning he was fighting white water. An hour after daylight he had found no hiding place, but in shallow pools he had caught a few small trout, a part of which he ate for breakfast, with a handful of rose pods. He was still struggling upward on bruised and bleeding feet when about noon he saw a cavern back in a ledge of stone. Its mouth was close to the river, with a wide shelf of spilled stones at the entrance. Leaving the river, he climbed up across talus to look in. The cavern was far deeper than he had expected, so deep in fact that his gaze went blind back in the gloom. He smelled wild-beast odors, and the odors of dove, bat, and swallow. After entering the cave he stood under a ceiling thirty feet high and looked round him. At one side he saw a smaller cave that also ran back into gloom; this he explored to find a spot where he could lie down. The animal smells in the smaller cave were overpowering. They were so heavy and so saturated with mustiness and dusts that he could feel them in his nostrils.

Returning to the mouth of the cavern, he stood by a brown stone wall to give him protective coloring and looked back down the river. The falling snow was only a thin mist now, the kind that makes way for freezing cold; he could see far down the river’s meandering course and across the valley. There was no smoke from Indian fires anywhere. He went down to the river for a water-washed stone on which to lay his meat and fish. Then, sitting in the cavern mouth, he cut off about three ounces of meat and ate it, and two fish no larger than his finger. Along the riverbanks he had gathered about a quart of rose hips. How a man could live and walk for a week on nothing but these, as some men were said to have done, he could not imagine.

While looking round him he sneezed. The echoes of it startled him, for they were remarkably loud and clear. Impressed by the cavern’s acoustics, he spoke, saying, "Hot biscuits ," and sang a few bars of an old ballad. The echoing astonished and then alarmed him. It was somewhat like music from a great organ, rolling through vaulted chambers, with ceilings high and low. He burst into a Mozart theme, and the echoes rolling away from him into the far dark recesses sounded to him like an orchestra playing. He wondered if he was losing his mind. After he had found a spot where he could lie and try to sleep he thought of the Rocky Mountains caverns he had explored, and of the strange sculpturing that water, wind, and time had made underground. "Almighty God—" he said, and liked so well the amplified and golden-toned echo that he uttered other words. "Dear Lotus, dear son—Lotus!" he said more  loudly, and from all around him back in the stone mountains the word came back to him like an organ tone.

Sam was not a man who usually felt gooseflesh in moments of danger but he had been enfeebled by hunger and want of sleep. Gooseflesh spread over him in the moment when he smelled the danger; turning swiftly to a sitting position, tomahawk in one hand and knife in the other, he saw ambling toward him not more than fifty feet away a grizzly so large that it seemed almost to fill the cavern. In a flash Sam knew that the reverberating echoes had disturbed the monster’s slumber, somewhere back in the gloom, and it had come to give battle to its enemy. That it intended to give battle Sam knew the instant he saw it. The next moment he was on his feet, advancing, the hatchet ready to strike and the knife to plunge. He marched right up to the beast and smote the prow of the nose a crushing blow with the head of the axe. In an instant his arm came back and he struck again, and this time the blow fell across the sensitive nostrils. The big furry fellow said woof-woof and began to back off, with Sam after him, hoping for grizzly steaks; but almost at once the beast vanished, and there was only the whimpering plaintive sound of a frightened child, as the shuffling fur ball hastened back to its winter bed.

Pale from fright and weakness and breathing hard, Sam watched it disappear. He felt for a moment that he was being tested with more than he could bear. Hungry, weary to the depths of his marrow, and numbed through with cold, he would now have to leave the cavern and go. There might be a whole pack of grizzlies back in the dark; and even if there were not, the whimpering one would nurse his injuries and come forth again. Over by the entrance Sam stood a few moments, looking out. He knew by the nimbus around the winter sun that the weather was going to change. After seven days of deep storm the temperature would fall; sometimes in this area it went to thirty, forty, even to fifty below. Sometimes there were blizzards that not even the wolves and hawks could endure. There was cold that split trees open with the sound of gunfire; that froze broad rivers from bank to bank and almost to their bottoms; and the snow so hard that even the giant moose with its sharp hoofs could walk on it. It was cold that welded a man’s hand to the steel of gun or knife, if he was fool enough to touch it.

After searching the valley for sign of Indians and seeing none Sam looked up the river gorge to the continental backbone. After he had crossed the Divide the rivers would be flowing east instead of west, and he would be going down instead of climbing. With the robe flung across his left shoulder the food enfolded by a piece of it and tucked up under an armpit, the hatchet in his left hand and the knife in his right, he scrambled down to the water’s edge; sat and took off moccasins and leggins and trousers; and thrust wounded feet into the icy waters. Then he waded upstream. He guessed he might as well eat the remainder of the elk and the three small fish, and keep going and keep going. After he had gone a mile or two he peeled the outer bark off a spruce and licked the juice of the cambium. It was resinous and bitter. Hank Cady had said that lessen a man has something better he kin live on it if he hafta. The cambium itself Sam found unchewable, and so peeled off strips of it and licked the juice, as he had licked fruit juices off his hands as a child. While licking the juice he looked round him, wondering if there was anything else on this mountain that a man could eat. During the long miles up this river he had seen no birds, except a hawk or two and one duck; no sign of grouse or sage hen, no sign of deer or elk trail. On the mountain slopes above him he could see no snowpaths. The untramped, unmarked snow on either side of the river was about three feet deep. He wondered if it would be less exhausting to plow through it than to fight his way up over slippery boulders, in water from a foot to three feet deep. Wading in river waters up a mountain canyon was the most fatiguing toil he had ever known; he was sure he was not covering more than two miles an hour but he kept at it, doggedly, all day long, pausing only when night closed round him.

He then searched both banks, hoping to find a shelter in which he could sleep. But he found only an arbor, under a dense tangle of berry vines and mountain laurel, over which the snow had formed a roof; he crawled back under it, out of sight. After putting on his clothes he wrapped the robe around him, and lying on his left side facing the river, he put two fish on leaves a few inches from his face, hatchet and knife within reach, and in a few minutes was sound asleep. His first dream was of his wife; they were somewhere in buffalo land, and while she gathered berries and mushrooms he cooked steaks and made hot biscuits. It was a cold night and he slept cold, but for eight hours he did not awaken. It was the first solid rest he had had in a week.

When at daylight he stirred it took him a few moments to understand where he was. Then, like Jedediah Smith, he gave thanks to God; dwelt for a few minutes on the bones of his wife and child, yonder in the winter, and on a mother sitting in a pile of bedding looking out at an empty white world; and then ate the two fish. Yes, it had turned colder. On the eastern side of the Divide would be the wild storm winds down from Canada; there he would need more than a mouthful of frozen fish to keep him going. But he felt cheerful this morning and he told himself that he was as strong as a bull moose. He thought he was safe from the Blackfeet now. Ahead of him lay an ordeal that might be the most difficult he would ever endure, but he would struggle through it, day after day, all the way across the white winter loneliness, until he came at last to Kate’s door.

"Keep a fare for me, and a light," he said, and faced into the sharp winds from the north.

25

HE HAD NO food, not even a seed pod or a root, when he reached the continent’s spine and looked across a frozen white world to the thin faint tree line of a river, fifteen or twenty miles distant. Beyond the river was the wintry desolation that lay all the way to Kate’s shack. The Missouri came down from the Three Forks area, and passing through the Gates of the Mountains, swung to the northeast. That was buffalo land, yonder. It was also Blackfeet land. It would be Blackfeet land all the way to the Musselshell. He could think of nothing to eat down there that a man could get hold of—even the rancid marrow in the bones of dead things would be lost under the snows. Breaking off evergreen boughs, he laid a pile on the frozen snow and sat on the pile. Taking the left moccasin off, he drew the foot up across his thigh. The trouble with foot wounds was that they never got a chance to heal; in this foot he had a dozen wounds; during his hours of rest or sleep they tried to scab over but when he walked again the scabs softened and came off. Both feet had wounds but it would do no good to worry about them. A mountain man did not worry about small wounds, nor much about big ones. He could keep going for years with arrowheads in his flesh, or for months with open thigh or belly wounds.

Sam’s problem was food. It would be a bitter irony to escape from torture and death only to fall exhausted on the prairie and be eaten by wolves. A lot of wolves and coyotes were down there and they were all hungry. They were all over that vast frozen whiteness as far as a man could see and a thousand miles beyond that; they would follow him, hoping to chew the buckskin off him, and to eat him alive when at last he fell to rise no more. The greenhorns back east told tales of ferocious man-eating wolves that in lonely winter wastes of northern nights trailed helpless voyagers and pulled them down; but Sam knew of no attack of man by wolves, and the mountain men knew of none. The wolves would follow him and trot around him all night and all day; and when he slept they would steal up close to see if he had anything a wolf could eat. Hunger, if strong enough, might force them to attack a man. Hunger had made more heroes than courage.

Sam was not worried about wolves or any other beast in the area before him. He was worried about food, and the woman yonder in the bitter cold. Male and female created He them, the book said; and there sat the female, a scrawny gray creature whose whole soul and being was fixed on her dead children; and here sat the male, starving to death. His hunger pains were about what he thought he might have if two rough hands inside him were stretching his guts and tying them in knots. While examining his feet he ate snow or searched the distant riverline up and down for sign of smoke. In the southeast he saw what he took to be the Big Belt Mountains. He didn’t think any mountain men were trapping there this winter. The Bear Paw Mountains were somewhere ahead of him but he didn’t think anyone was trapping there either.

He found it strange that in a land where the Creator had put such an abundance of things to eat there was nothing he could get his hands on. Even if he had a gun he had seen nothing to shoot, except the bear. He thought there were buffalo along the river, and possibly deer and elk; he might find a sick or wounded old bull or cow that he could outrun and he might find some marrowbones along the banks. He had heard of men who made rabbit and bird snares but he had nothing to make one with. Peeling off spruce bark, he rubbed the sap into his wounds and put the moccasins on. The outside pair of the three pairs was frayed in spots and in spots worn through, and the second pair was frayed. If he made it he guessed he would show up somewhere in leather rags and tatters, fifty pounds lighter and ten years wiser.

He was on the point of rising when he decided to wash his beard. Glancing down across it, he had seen stains, and though he was not a fastidious man he tried to be a clean one. With both hands he reached into snow under the surface crust and then roughed the snow up and down through the hair and over his brows and forehead and over his head and around his neck. After a while he pulled the beard out from his chin and looked over it and could see no bloodstains from the dead Indian. He guessed blood must have gushed from the guard’s nose but he had not been aware of it at the time. With the knife he sawed the beard in two close to his chin. The hair he cut off he left in a pile for the Blackfeet to find.

He rose and started down the mountain toward the Missouri. His feet hurt and the hands in his belly were tying knots but otherwise he felt pretty good. He thought he could make it to the river before midnight. Down steep ravines where there was little timber he tobogganed on the robe, using knife and hatchet to pull him along or to brake his speed. He thought snow was one of the Creator’s finest works of genius and he pitied people in hot climates who had never seen it. He had heard Windy Bill say that if there had been plenty of snow in Africa there would be no blackmen with thick lips and flat noses. Bill was full of such fancies. Sam loved snow as he loved rain, winds, thunder, tempests; people who said, "I don’t see how you can like snow," or, "I don’t see how you can like a wind," he thought unworthy to be alive. Yonder, far south of him, were the Wind River and the Wind River Mountains, and endless miles of eroded colorful formations that winds had made. Kit Carson said that somewhere down the Colorado was an immense area of natural bridges, monuments, and stone formations that looked like old castles. For centuries, for ages, ever since the beginning, the winds had been blowing there and they certainly were a better sculptor than Phidias. No matter where a man went, from the marvels in the Black Hills to the granite faces of the Tetons, from the Yellowstone’s canyon to that of the Snake and the Green and the Colorado, a man saw the wonderful parthenons that winds and water had made. "Ya doan like it?" Bear Paws Meek had said to a greenhorn sneering at the Tetons. "Wall now, I doan spect the Almighty cares too much fer ye either, so why doan ya go back to yer ma?"

Down from the mountains Sam stood on the white plains, looking through cold winter haze at the line of the river. Then he began to walk on long strides in snow above his knees all his senses alert, for he knew that moving against the white background he was as conspicuous as a black mole on the nose of a lovely woman. If there were Indians on the river they would see him coming but he had seen no sign of smoke. Dusk was filtering down from the wintry sky when the river, it seemed to him, was still ten miles away; it was two hours after dark when he reached it. There were trails in the snow but he saw no living thing and heard no sounds.

Here and there along the water’s edge he found bones, and choosing a couple of thighbones and pieces from a neck, he sat hidden near river brush, while with sharpened green stick he dug marrow out. With tongue and lips he sucked the marrow off the stick. It was worse than rancid; it tasted like extreme old age, decay, and death. But it was food of a kind, it would help him to keep moving. After eating marrow until he was sickened he searched in river brush for wild rose, and gooseberry, serviceberry, and currant. He found hips and a few berries still clinging, and with a handful of them he returned to the bones. The pulpy rose pods had always tasted to him like old wood. He mixed them and a few withered currants and serviceberries with a marrow paste and devoured the nauseous mess, cheering himself with stories of men who had lived for days on such fare as this. He also chewed and swallowed some bone splinters, after he had shattered a thighbone to get at the marrow. The bones were tough to chew and had no flavor at all.

He spent about two hours making his supper. It wasn’t loin steaks and hot biscuits in hump fat, or roasted grouse basted with kidney butter, but it would do till morning. After eating he bound together pieces of driftwood with tough berry vines. With his weapons wrapped in the robe, and a long pole in his grasp, he shoved the raft out into the current, and on reaching mid-channel lay on his belly, chin on his forearms, to survey the moving scene before him. Though he knew that he might starve or freeze to death, or again be captured, he could not put away his insatiable delight in the astonishing world, from the majestic cordilleras to the smallest pouting mudpot. Under him was a marvelous panorama of color and light. The water on the bottom all the way across the river had been freezing, and the ice formations down in the depths were catching the light of a full moon and making patterns like some he had seen in caverns in the Black Hills. Because the current was bearing him north at about half a mile an hour the scenes under him, though similar, were never the same. When with the pole he moved his craft toward the eastern bank and came to a deep and gently swirling eddy he saw three or four feet under him a multitude of what mountain men called suckers, a species of whitefish, with absurd little round mouths that puckered and pouted as they breathed. If only he had a dozen of them, and his steel and flint to make a tire, what a feast he would have!

An hour later he stood on the east bank and looked east. Judith River and mountains were somewhere ahead of him but he could see no sign of them in the prairie night. For a hundred and fifty miles there might be nothing, except the wolves trailing him. A well-armed man, well-provisioned, with a couple of warm robes, might not have hesitated to undertake such a journey, even in below-zero temperatures, but one thinly clad, with one robe and no food and no way to get food, would surely die on the way. The mountain men would have said that, for even if he could walk thirty miles a day without food it would take him at least five days to reach the Musselshell.

These were Sam’s thoughts as he crawled under a snow-laden shelter of willows to wait for the morning. He did not dare fall asleep. When daylight came at last, gray and bitter cold, he searched up and down the riverbank. There was nothing to eat but the sickening old marrow, a few rose hips, shriveled currants on their vine. He drank a quart of river water and he looked into the southeast. "Sam," he said, speaking aloud, "here’s where we find out if you’re man or boy." He knew the words were pure bravado. He had no reason to think he could cross that vast white distance but there was no choice, except to float down the river and be captured again. After he had walked a mile he stood on a hilltop in the white waste, a hairy giant in tawny buckskin, a robe over his left shoulder, a useless knife in one hand and a, useless hatchet in the other. Gesturing at the heavens, with the knife flashing in pale cold sunlight, he cried out, "Almighty Father, You have helped me this far, now help Your son a little longer!" That was all he said; but he was thinking of the words in Crow language: Old wornan’s man her children their ghosts, there, in the blackest nights they are, in the sagebrush they are crying. Yonder she was, without a fire, huddled in her blankets in ten-below-zero cold, talking to her children there in the sagebrush crying. If a woman could endure such winters, for love, could a man endure less for a dead wife and son?