Текст книги "Mountain Man"

Автор книги: Vardis Fisher

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

In this moment, when convinced that he was looking at it, that it was no mirage or apparition, he was overwhelmed by sudden and awful weakness. In spite of all he could do he sank to the earth and began to weep. The mightiest of all the mountain men had reached the end of his strength but not of his grit. He began to crawl on hands and knees toward her door. His escape from the Blackfeet and his long journey without food through deep cold and blizzards was to become one of the legends of the mountain men, along with Tom Fitzpatrick’s, Colter’s, and Glass’s. "He done it, he shorely did,” Windy Bill would say a hundred times around the campfires. "He jist headed torst the crazy woman and clum the mountains and there he wuz .... "

By the time Sam reached Kate’s door his hands were so nearly frozen that he spent a few minutes blowing on them, sucking the fingers, washing them in snow, massaging them, and putting them inside his clothing against his ribs. He was so weak that he was sitting, and when he saw the snowpath to the graves, and then the cairn that looked like a mound of snow, he began to cry like a tortured child. He pounded on the door planks, for the door was closed, and he said, "It’s me! It’s Sam!" Grasping the door with both hands, he pulled it open and back. He was straining forward to peer into the gloom when with a low cry he saw that the woman was almost in his hands. She was right by the doorway and she seemed to be sitting in her pile of bedding, but only her gray hair and a part of her face were visible. Sam put a finger up and touched her face to see if it was alive.

"It’s me!" he whispered. "It’s your friend Sam." He crawled over the pile of bedding and turned and pulled the plank door shut. Then like an animal he wormed himself into the pile of bedding and put an arm up and around the woman and wept quietly till he fell asleep.

PART THREE

SAM

27

SAM SLEPT THROUGH the night and into the next afternoon and when he awoke he was alone. After realizing where he was he wondered if he had hogged the bedding, and then like a beast crawled over to the north wall to paw among the cold things there. One parcel, as hard as stone, he thought was jerked venison; with his knife he peeled back a part of the skin pouch, and chipping off a small piece, thrust it into his mouth. A moment after swallowing it he turned sick and was convulsed but like a famished wolf in midwinter at a carcass he chewed and swallowed other morsels. Then, suddenly, he was seized by shudderings so strong and uncontrollable that he shook all over and moaned. He crawled over to the bedding, dragging the sack of meat after him, and with some blankets around him he sat, shuddering and wondering what was wrong with him. He drew the sack of meat into the bedding and his shaking hands tried to whittle off another piece; but he was so utterly and infinitely tired that his deepest wish was to surrender to the warmth and sleep again. And so he sank back and piled bedding around and over him, and with his arms around the pouch of venison he slept again.

It was after dark when he stirred and sat up. This time it took him several minutes to come into wakefulness and realize where he was. He was still but half awake and more than half dead. At first he had thought he was in the hole back under the snow and he listened for the winds. Then he reached around him to examine the things. On seeing the open door, the bedding, the river bottom down the hill, he knew where he was and he wondered where Kate was. He sat a few minutes, feeling more than thinking, and trying to believe that he was still alive. After a while he became aware of the bag of meat and the knife, and of the indescribable sensations of emptiness and pain in his stomach and bowels. He began to tell himself in a dim feeble way that he would find matches and build a fire and cook a feast; but when he tried to rise he seemed unable to. And so he sat, trying to think. Realization came slowly, filling him with a kind of wonder and gladness; and at last with a cry he told himself over and over that he had escaped, like Job he had endured, and here he was, alive, whole, and ready for breakfast or supper. And for vengeance, but that didn’t seem so important now. What was important was that he seemed unable to move his legs, to bend his fingers, to focus his gaze; but he was alive, and with superhuman effort he struggled to his feet. Then he stood, trembling all over, and tried to imagine that he was Don Giovanni about to sing, with magnificent brio and power, to a lovely servant maid. What he did, while conjuring images of beautiful girls, was to topple and fall face downward on the pile of bedding. With both hands he reached round him and pulled bedding over him; and he was about to sink again into sleep when he began to shake with rage against himself, and again forced himself to rise.

He felt pretty weak and foolish as he steadied himself against a wall and looked out at the world. He could see or hear no sign of Kate; he hoped he had not put her to flight. By God, he had better stop acting like a sick old man, he had better get some breakfast on and be the man around the house. How long had he slept, anyway? He was not sure that he had not been asleep for a week. Where was Kate? "Kate!" he called in his weak voice. "Where are you?" He felt horrible weakness and nausea; what he wanted to do was to sink again into slumber but he forced himself to clasp the doorjamb with both hands and look out.

It was not morning, it was night, and there was Kate, the poor gray old thing, sitting between the graves with robes over her. Sam stepped outside, and moving like a feeble old man, he made his way over to her and around to face her; and in a voice that was not at all like his normal voice he told her that the Almighty had walked with him all the way from the Blackfeet camp to the Musselshell; and in more days than he could remember he had had nothing to eat; but now he was going to get up a breakfast, or supper or whatever it would be—venison steaks, roasted grouse, hot biscuits, wild honey, coffee—Did she have any baccy around?

Kate seemed to pay no attention to him. Unable to tell if she was unaware of him or was ignoring him, he told her that he would not be with her long; as soon as he got some rest and some food in his belly, and had brought in some good meat for her, he would be gone. Could she tell him where the matches were? Only a part of her face was showing; a wrinkled hand clasped the edge of the robe under her chin. Sam looked up at the sky and around at the lonely white world; and over at the cairn with its deep cloak of snow; and he wondered if he was alive after all, or if he and the woman were only ghosts, here in the winter. Turning away from her, he felt numbed with cold, half dead with fatigue, drowsy, nausea-sick, and rather mindless and weightless; but so abounding was his health and vitality that he made his way inside the shack, and sitting by the bag of venison, began to eat. Afraid that he would vomit, he put in his mouth only a thin shaving and he chewed it thoroughly before he dared swallow it; and then sat a few moments studying the sensations in his stomach before chewing again. The shavings tasted more of frost than of meat, but after he had swallowed seven or eight thin slices he felt a little better and believed he could keep them down. Looking round him in the gloom, he wondered where the matches were, the flour, the coffee. Of course she had no tobacco. When he thought of tobacco and the loss of the lock of hair, and his fine rifle and revolvers and pipes, his bitterness toward the Blackfeet came boiling up in him with such passion that he exploded and emptied his stomach. What a fool he was to act this way! But they had stolen Mick’s fine horse! Oh, they would pay for it, they would pay for it! He stood up, in a childish tantrum of rage—a man only feebly in possession of his senses; and glowered round him and then went outside to look with hate at the gray wintry Blackfeet wilderness out of which he had come. He looked south, thinking of the distance between him and his nearest friend. In a few days he would head up the Musselshell to find Bill or Hank or Abner but now he had work to do.

His stomach had puked forth its shavings of meat and frost and was now growling in its pain. He thought it would be best to get a fire going and make a pot of coffee. That might settle his stomach. It might shoot warmth and aroma all through him. At the pile of wood in the southeast corner he made shavings; he dug into the stuff by the north wall and found matches, coffee, and an old coffeepot; and with a tin pail he went to the river. There he stood a few moments, surveying the scene and looking for sign of duck, goose, or anything a man could eat. Going up the hill with the water, he told himself that Kate must have gone over this path two or three times every day since the first snows, for it was firmly packed. While the coffee was steaming he found the flour, and dipping a shaving of meat into cold flour, he thrust it into his mouth. He ground a coffee bean between his teeth. That seemed to allay his nausea; he ate a half dozen and then searched for tin cups; and when the coffee was hot and fragrant he took a cup to Kate, and knelt, offering it to her. It was hot coffee, he said; she ought to drink it. He wanted to clasp her shoulders to see how thin she was, for she looked like nothing but hide and bone. He did not know that he himself was thirty pounds lighter than he had been when he walked around the two bull elk. The past week seemed to be only nightmare: had he actually killed a man and waded up a river and fought with a grizzly and crossed a hundred and fifty miles of frozen desolation in wild winds? Had he actually lain on his belly in the night and paddled across the black cold waters? He was like a man coming out of ether; he moved more by beast instinct than by human will. But his belly was mellowing in the hot coffee and his wits were clearing. "Please drink it," he said. What were the words in Job at which his father’s finger had pointed so gravely? "Lo, all these things worketh God oftentimes with man, to bring back his soul from the pit, to be enlightened with the light of the living." The temperature, he thought, was still fifteen below zero; the winds were still shrieking up the river and Canada was getting ready to dump more cyclones upon its neighbor; but Sam was warmed with hot coffee and filled with the light of the living, and neither wind nor cold could faze him now.

"All right, if you won’t drink it I’ll drink it."

He was astonished, as he had been in previous visits, to see how little this woman had eaten. It looked as if she lived on flour and raisins. She had never touched the woodpile. Removing all the bedding from the doorway, Sam laid a part of the fire there, to warm the earth; but at once with a sharp rebuke to himself he took the fire away. How stupid it would be to warm the earth deep, so that her bed would be cozy, and then go away and leave her to freeze to death! There wasn’t much a man could do with such a woman, except leave her to God. He had learned in the past few minutes that fire wasn’t good for him either; he had become so inured to cold that fire heat on his flesh was like a scalding liniment, like sunburn on his forehead and eyes. The fire was not good for the shack’s cold timbers; in the heat they began to snap and complain, and moisture came out of the logs and out of the air, and stood in big drops. Smoke and heat went all through the cabin; and smoke poured out through the cracks in the walls and the doorway and the hole in the roof. With the axe he sliced off the venison and laid the meat by the fire. Finding no grease or salt, he decided not to make biscuits until he had fresh game. While the meat was thawing he took a second cup of coffee to Kate, hoping she would drink it, and with surprise saw that she had covered her head. Again he knelt before her and told her, briefly, of his capture, escape, and long flight, but he doubted that she listened or understood. Lifting the robe from her gray head, he saw that her face was ghastly thin, drawn, haggard, immobile. Her eyes seemed to see and yet not to see. What had God done with this woman or for this woman? During her long winters here she had never had a fire or hot food but had been only a she-beast that had crawled over to eat flour and raisins, and then into her pile of dirty bedding to wait for another morning. It was the moon she waited for but the men who knew her would never know that.

Bending low, he touched lips to her gray hair, saying, "That’s for my mother and you and all mothers." He had hoped she would open her eyes and look at him when she smelled the hot coffee, but maybe smell was not one of her senses any more. Returning to the shack, he mixed flour and water and cooked the batter and called it bread. He steamed raisins in hot water until they were swollen and soft, and he made another pot of coffee. What a feast it would be! If only after he had feasted he could sit back with his pipe and think of vengeance!

Out in the frozen wastes the eyes of man or beast could have seen the smoke rising—and wolves did see it and try to smell its odors. A few of them came within two hundred yards of the shack and trotted round it, smelling the hot odors; and Sam smelled the wolves and knew they were there. He took to Kate a tin plate of hot venison, raisins, bread, and coffee, but she refused to look at it or see it. Kneeling, he held it right under her face, so that the fragrance would enter her nostrils; and he said, as if to a child, "It’s hot food and you should eat it." He arranged her robes so that he could set the plate in her lap and the cup of hot coffee at her side, and returned to the shack. He had warmed a spot of earth for his own bed this night and he now sat on the spot and ate, but very slowly, because sensations of nausea filled his throat. The warmth had made him feel drowsy and ill; he guessed that in the morning he would go out to the hills and find a deer. Until midnight he kept the fire burning in the shack, and Kate sat out by the graves. He went out to tell her that if she would move he would make her bed for her but she gave no sign that she heard him. "It’s warm inside," he said. "Wouldn’t you like to go in?" Had she forgotten what a fire was? He seized the edges of the robes around her and pulled. He almost toppled her over but he managed at last totake the robes away. After holding one before the fire to warm it he went out and draped it over her, saying, "There now, you’ll feel better." He ought to have known that she would feel worse. To his amazement she began to cry. After staring at her a few moments he picked her up, bedding and all, and set her inside the cabin door. Her plate of food he put by the fire to keep warm; and while sitting by the fire, feeling ill himself and not far from tears, the thought came to him that this woman would eat nothing as long as he was with her. He could no longer doubt that she felt him to be an enemy. He fetched wood until he had a big pile in a corner, and then, with rifle and knife close by him, stretched out on his robe on the spot of warm earth and was soon asleep. When he awoke two or three hours later and looked over at Kate’s bedding she was not there. He went to the doorway and looked out. She was in the snowpath between the graves, with bedding under and over her; and she was talking, as if to her children. Sam looked up and saw a round frozen moon in the sky. He went over and stood behind her and saw that she was holding a Bible. She had her hands in a fold of blanket which she used as mittens but he thought her hands must be frozen, for it was a bitter night. A large robe inside the door he thoroughly warmed at the fire and then spread it over her and down across the book. Not once did she interrupt her talking or praying, or whatever it was she was doing.

Inside the cabin Sam laid wood on the fire and stretched out on his robe. When he next awakened he looked over and saw that Kate had come inside. But at daylight her pile of bedding was empty. Looking out, he saw her halfway to the river with the pail in her hands; and he knew now that all winter long she would carry water up the hill to plants that needed no water. Someday she would venture out on ice too thin and she would fall into the cold black waters and drown.

After a big breakfast he cleaned and loaded the rifle and went out to the hills for deer, elk, or buffalo. His first beast was an elk, and as soon as he had the belly open he pulled the liver out and ate most of it. This did for him what the old food in the cabin could never do: it dispelled the nausea and warmed him with vigor. He was still extremely weak; he took four journeys and six hours to carry the elk to the cabin, a chore he could normally have done in two. The hide he spread, fur side up, under Kate’s pile of bedding by the door. The next day he shot two deer and brought them in, and hung them from rafters in the cabin’s east end. He also ate their livers and hearts but he still felt so undernourished that he cooked one roast after another and ate them all.

The winds had gone south. The sky was frozen in gray-winter cold. After bringing in the elk Sam saw that during his absence Kate had been in the flour and raisins; he prepared plates of hot food for her but she would not touch them. To a cup of fragrant coffee under her nose she gave no response. When lying in his robe after supper, with hre snapping its flames through aspen and chokecherry and cedar, he would look over at her, sitting by the door, and he would think that she could have a little fire going all day and all night, if she would, and be cozy. He told her that he had to go south now but would be back next spring. Only God knew how many wolves had slipped up to the door to sniff at her, or whether after he had gone they would leap across her to get to the frozen deer hanging from the rafters. While making moccasins from skins he and other trappers had left here he wanted to talk to her, for he was lonely; and after the moccasins were made and laces for snowshoes he cooked roasts over two fires outside, and looked at the meat and at Kate, back and forth, and into the south and the west. He had intended to be gone before another night fell but when he looked at the cold empty world toward the Bighorns, and then into the cabin, smelling of roasted flesh and fire, he surrendered to weakness and decided to stay another night. At dusk he watched Kate move a part of her bedding outside, and a little later he looked out to see her sitting there, talking to her angels. Now and then she would incline her head, as though in assent; or seem to listen before speaking again. Down on the river was a hole where she had chopped through ice, with the impression of her knees in the frozen snow around it. He knew that she had knelt there to wash her underwear, for a piece of underwear was hanging from a tree limb, so ragged and patched that it looked as if it would fall in pieces at a touch. He would buy undergarments for her, and plenty of flour and dried fruits. If he were to lie on his belly back in the cabin and play soft music he wondered if it would frighten or please her. He would find out. He played a hymn and then another, very low and far away, and then heard her voice. It was a soprano and it sounded cold and cracked but it was singing the second of the hymns he had played; and he went outside and stood behind her and sang with her, in a lower and softer key than hers. It all seemed to him natural and right. After five days of silence and misunderstanding it seemed proper and fitting that she should be sitting deep in bedding in zero cold, more than a thousand miles from her people, and in a thin ghostly soprano sing old hymns of hope and faith; and that behind her there should be a tall lonely man who had lost wife and son, and who now looked down at her gray hair and sang softly with her. For two hours or more she sat and he stood in the cold and they sang together. He then picked her up, bedding and all, and set her inside; gently kissed and patted her gray head; and stretched out in his robe to sleep.

He felt like a thief the next morning when he took her rifle and most of her ammunition but he told her that he would return the gun as soon as he could, and he would bring her food and clothing and anything he could think of that she might want. When at last he turned away from her, the knife in his belt, thirty pounds of roasted elk slung over his shoulder, under the robe, and the rifle in his hand, he was unwilling to go. He felt that never again would he see this woman alive. Twice before passing out of sight he stopped to look back. There it stood, the little brown shack on the hill in a white winter; and there she sat, a woman about whom he knew almost nothing, yet whom for strange reasons he had learned to love. Leaving her there, so alone and defenseless, filled him with such pangs of remorse and pity that mile after mile he strode along thinking only of her. He wanted to go back but he knew it would be

senseless to go back.

A week later he skulked into a wilderness hiding place on the Greybull, twenty miles from its junction with the Bighorn, and stood at the rickety door of a cabin even smaller than Kate’s. He heard a movement inside and knew that the man there was reaching for a gun.

"It’s me, Sam!," he called. "Open her up and let’s have hot biscuits and huckleberry syrup."

The door opened an inch and gray eyes peered out and bearded lips said, "Sam, be it you?"

28

SOME OF THE mountain men thought Hank Cady had been baptized in the wrong vat. Sam Minard was a reticent man, but compared to him, Hank was dumb. Bill had calculated that in a year’s time Hank uttered no more than a hundred words, of which ninety were some form of yes and no. No man had ever heard him talk about his childhood and his people, but there was a rumor that he had hated his mother, who had made a nursemaid of him, the oldest, and forced him to care for a dozen brothers and sisters. Bill said the only thing some kids remembered from their childhood was diapers. Unlike most of the mountain men, Hank had never taken a squaw and seemed to have no interest in women. He had a fierce brooding love of freedom, and freedom was what he had had since he came west.

After asking for and receiving one of Hank’s old pipes and filling it with twist and sucking a cloud of smoke into his lungs, Sam said, "How’s trapping around here?"

Hank gave him a queer look; it was not yet the season for trapping, so what could the man mean? "Tolabul," Hank said, meaning tolerable. He looked at Sam’s ride. "Hain’t yourn," he said.

"Lost mine," Sam said. The strong tobacco was making him feel ill.

Hank waited a full minute. Then he said: "Crows?"

Blackfeet, Sam said.

Hank looked again at the ride. "Whose thissen?"

"Kate’s, the woman on the Musselshell."

"Yer handguns too?"

"Every damned thing but my life."

"Mick’s bay?"

"Yeh."

"Whereabouts?"

"Not far from Three Forks."

Hank gave the matter some thought. Musta been Elk Horns, he said. He’d been snooping around down this way. When would the ronnyvoo be?

"When they all want it," Sam said. He wondered could Hank lend him a little baccy and a pipe till he got to Jim’s? Hank rolled over to a pile of stuff by a wall and dug in. He fetched out ten inches of twist and gravely handed it to Sam.

"And a pipe?" Sam said.

Hank again dug and came up with a corncob with a broken stem. He was a chewing man himself and smoked only the quids after he had chewed the juice out. Now, making a clumsy effort to be sociable, he emptied his mouth through the cabin door and filled another pipe with a broken stem. With their pipes burning the two men sat in firelight, rifles across their

laps.

"How wuz she?" asked Hank.

Sam had been wondering if Hank could lend him a robe and if he had extra traps. Hank had been thinking of vengeance. He saw that Sam was a lot thinner and he suspected that he had endured many indignities and hardships. His handsome gray eyes, wonderfully bright and keen, had been studying Sam all the way up his frame.

"Still alive," Sam said at last.

"What Elk Horns do?"

Sam removed the stem from his teeth and seemed to be trying to remember. Well now, he had been slapped around, by both hands and tomahawk; his face had been smeared with the stuff they coughed up from their throats; and he had been starved and frozen and told what the Crows would do with him.

"They figgered ta sell ya?"

Sam nodded. On finishing his pipe he said, "Got steaks, I’m the feller can cook um." Jist roast, Hank said. After almost a full minute of silence he added, "Had supper afore ye come."

Sam glanced at the man. Henry Cady was one to have on your side in a fight but he didn’t spend much time wondering what he could do for you. A cold hunk of anything would do, Sam said; in the morning he would find something. Were they still fat around here? If he went fur enough, Hank said. He put his pipe aside and filled his mouth with twist. A part of the brown juice he spat into the fire before him and a part of it he swallowed, It was his private opinion that tobacco juice was good for a man’s stomach and digestion. Bill said tobacco in his stummick gave him a hull bellyful of heartburn, and Powder River Charley said it gave him the droppins; Hank could find no words to express his scorn for such idiotisms. He now moved his bearded cheeks a little to slop the quid around in his mouth, his gray eyes looking without change into the tire. It was his way to suppose that if a man wanted food and there was any around he would find it. Sam did not mind. The smoking had appeased his hunger and he was ready for bed.

"How you fixed for buffler robes?" he asked, looking round the shack.

Hank ejected a noisy stream into the flames and wiped his tobacco-stained mouth with the tobacco-stained back of his hand. "Guess we’ll hafta sleep together," he said. After warming a spot of earth and securing the door on the inside with a stout leather thong they lay side by side on their backs, the ride of each just under the bedding at his side. They faced the door so that on sitting up they would be ready to fire. They both snored but that did not bother them; they slept deep, without worries or bad dreams. Hank said he hadn’t seen an Injun since October, or an Indian trail as far as he had gone; and becoming almost garrulous, he said the winter would be cold and the pelts good.

They were up at daylight, and Sam with clumsy tactfulness had suggested a batch of biscuits to go with their roast and coffee. Hank had merely inclined his head toward the pile of stuff by the wall. He left the cabin and before breakfast was ready brought in a beaver, from the tail of which Sam rendered out a cup of hot fat to use as butter. They ate biscuits dunked in beaver fat, elk roast, and coffee, and then sat back with their pipes. From the moment of rising Hank had said nothing; nobody could have told by his face or manner whether he was pleased with Sam’s presence or wanted him to be on his way. The fact, unknown to all but him, was that Henry Cady was a very lonely man who turned warm and happy all over inside when another trapper came to visit him; but there was never any change in his gruff way. He had Sam’s affinity to all things in nature; like him, he loved the valleys and mountains, the  skyline’s backbones, the vast black forests, the pure water and clean air and wide spaces. With gun and knife he would vanish into a mountain mass and spend days or weeks there, living on grouse and deer and wild fruits. Sam would slip up to watch a water ouzel dive deep to explore a pool’s bottom, or the downy baby-heads thrusting out all around the mallard mother, or a warbling vireo hang its clever pensile nest from a tree’s limb, and he would proclaim his presence with an explosion of life joy; whereas Hank would make no sound, and he might sit by a stream and watch the fish in the cold dark waters or an elk feeding in a clearing for hours with hardly a shift in his gaze. Hank would have been happy to have Sam stay with him all winter but Sam had no way of knowing that. After bringing in a couple of deer he looked south and said it was a long way to Bridger’s post but he guessed he’d better be off. It was, he reckoned, a hundred miles and more to Bill on the Hoback, another hundred to Lost-Skelp on upper Green River, and still a long way from there to Bridger’s. He needed horses, traps, bedding, weapons, tobacco, and the fixens.

Hank said nothing. He figured that Sam Minard knew his own mind. But when Sam picked up only Kate’s old rifle and the one robe Hank said, "Hyar now." Sam would need more bedding than that, and some baccy and a pipe, some coffee and a pot, some salt and flour. Sam knew that Hank had only one pot. Did Sam have steel and flint, or matches? Sam said he had matches from Kate’s hoard. Hank hustled around in his slow way and came to Sam with a good robe, pipe and tobacco, a pound of coffee and the pot, and some flour. He tossed the robe across Sam’s shoulders and said, "Worse cold to come."

Sam looked over the bedding in the cabin to see if Hank would have enough. He thought he would not. So he dropped the robe to the bedding, saying, "Might be too much to carry if I get in deep snow." Hank knew that was not the reason but he said nothing. Sam also set the pot inside the shack. He would find something, he said; maybe Bill would have an extra pot.

"Watch your topknot," Hank said.

"Watch yours," said Sam, and with a wave of his hand was gone.

Hank entered the cabin and stood a few moments in its gloom, feeling the presence of one who had just been there. Then he turned to the doorway to look out. He looked down the river the way Sam had gone but there was no sign of him and no sign of a living thing.