Текст книги "Mountain Man"

Автор книги: Vardis Fisher

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For two or three minutes he looked at her and waited. Knowing that her will had faltered and that he was no longer in danger, he buckled the guns round his waist and went back to his horses. Leading the stud and with the packhorse trailing, he went up the trail to the woman’s camp, observing along the way the spots where her husband or children had uprooted firewood. He wanted to ask what in hell they were doing away up here in Crow and Blackfeet land, and where they thought they were going, but he doubted that he would ever get a word out of her. She was wary, like a wild thing; she was lost in blood and horror. What would she do when her dead were buried? Would she let him take her north to the Missouri, to wait for a river boat, or far south to the trail?

He found a shovel in the camp, and thinking one spot as good as another, he was about to dig when she came running toward him, gesturing, like a mute. He followed her and she climbed to a tableland that was high enough to overlook the river and its bottoms, both north and south. She took the shovel from him and marked off three spots. Then, convulsed, it seemed to Sam, by frustration or anguish, she fell to her knees and with a stick made a small rectangle, and close to it another, twice as wide. He understood that she wanted her two sons in one grave. He had seen no tears in her eyes, no sign of the hysterical grief that he associated with women. Now that he was used to her bloody face he saw that it was rugged, with strong jawbones and chin and a line forehead. He thought her eyes were gray but could not tell, for they were alive with eerie apparitions of light. She had strong hands.

Up here, he thought, was no place for graves, where the soil was meager and the wild winds of wintertime would sweep across in forty-below-zero cold. Still, the soil was drier and rich in lime. So he began to dig, and after a few minutes his face was moist with sweat. She brought blankets from the camp. When the graves were dug he took a blanket and with his ride across his left arm went to the scene of the massacre, followed by the woman, who had put her rifle away somewhere. Sam spread the blanket at the dead girl’s side and gently laid her on it, the mother intently watching him all the while. He folded the blanket over her nakedness and at the same moment drew the shawl away. He then handed his rifle to the woman, and with the girl cradled in his two arms he carried her to the grave. So much blood had gushed from her horrible wound and down over her face that he could not tell what she had looked like, but he could tell that she had a full womanly form and he liked to think of her as one who had been superlatively lovely. He knelt and very gently lowered her three feet, to the bottom. In the next instant the mother was across the grave from him, kneeling, and though he could hear no words and see no movements in her lips he thought she was praying; and bowing his head, he prayed with her. Surely the Almighty was listening now. She still knelt, while he placed shovels of earth on the blanket, till the tomb was filled. The two lads he buried with the same gentleness as the daughter, laying them on a blanket side by side and covering them with elkskins that he took from his pack. Again, as before, he knelt across from her and prayed.

He then left her by the graves and went to the dead Indians. With skill learned from older mountain men he scalped the four, and while tying the scalps together he wondered if the woman would go away with him, to rejoin her people, or if this spot would be her home. In any case he intended to consecrate the graves as well as he could with four outposts; so now he cut off the four heads, with no more emotion than he would have felt in cutting off the heads of four deer, and took them, and four strong chokecherry stakes, to the grave area. The woman was sitting by the graves, bowed almost to her knees. Studying the scene, Sam decided to set the four stakes equidistant from the graves, at a distance of about forty yards; but while digging a hole it occurred to him that the tough dwarf cedar would last a lot longer, as posts, than the chokecherry; and so with the axe he went up the hill. It was almost sunset when he had the four cedar posts set, and with both hands was bringing the heads down with terrific force, so that the stakes were rammed up the throats and against the skulls. These four heads would be a warning to the Blackfeet, the sons of bitches, and to the Crows, if they came skulking around. These would tell them to leave this woman alone. The ravens would come and pick the skulls clean—the shrikes and magpies and buzzards, the beetles and all the insects; and before long they would be four white grinning skulls, facing the four corners of the world.

John Bowden had set up a crude brush lean-to at his campsite. Looking in, Sam had seen bedding, utensils, a few tools, and some food. Nearby was the rickety wagon. Did she want him to take these things up to the graves tonight? He stood in night dusk, looking up the hill toward her; he supposed she would want to be alone with her grief and loss. Poor thing, poor thing! She was sitting between the two graves, her rifle across her lap, her right hand laid on the mound that covered her sons, her left hand on the mound above her daughter. Never had he seen woe as deep as this, or known man or woman who in one blow from heaven or hell had suffered such overwhelming loss.

Wondering if she would sit there all night, he took his horses to the river for water. Somewhere north of him the Blackfeet war party was still racing toward a village of lodges where—it was always this way—the whole hideous screaming pack of them, squaws, children, and dogs, would torture and mutilate this woman’s husband, killing him horribly and very slowly, with the fiendish skills in producing agony of which the Blackfeet were masters. Sam Minard hated the Blackfeet. There was no mountain man from the Rio to the Athabasca, from the Ohio to the Pacific Ocean, who did not detest this red people. The hatred in some of the men was such a fierce wild passion that it boiled in their emotions and flamed in their talk, and kept them busy whetting their hatchets and knives. The Bloods and Piegans of the  Blackfeet nation were the most savage tribes in the West; but most of the mountain men hated all Indians, and placed high among their mountain-man laws the axiom that the only good Indian was a dead Indian—and not only dead but picked clean by the ravens and wolves.

Securing his horses for the night, Sam went to the woman’s camp to see what she had. A dark night had come. His ear detected a sound above the sound of tree toads. He listened. Yes, there was a sound, blood-chilling-a wild insane keening, up there by the graves. Again he felt goosetlesh, as he stood, facing her, listening: in his mind he saw her there, month after month, year after year, fighting off eagles and wolves and making her heartbroken jeremiads to God, until at last she withered and shrank and died, of cold and loss and loneliness. He was afraid she would forget her camp, her bedding and food, and sinking into stuporous woe, fold over on her lap and die.

He was to learn that he did not know her.

After going halfway up the hill to listen, and coming back down, he thought of supper. Ordinarily when journeying through enemy lands he made fireless camps, even in wintertime; he would eat a chunk of jerked buffalo and roll into his buffalo robes. But he had labored hard this day and was as famished as a winter wolf. He decided to make a fire but first he would wait for the moon to come up, for he thought he could slip out to the hills and get a mule deer. Two hours later he came in with a fat buck over his shoulder. Opening it from throat to rump, he cut away the choicer portions, including the liver, loin, kidney fat, and the upper parts of the hams. He built a fire and brought water from the river. All the while he was thinking that it would be son-like to take hot steaks or a fine roast to the mother.

After eating four pounds of venison, a pint of dried serviceberries, and a quart of black coffee he filled his cob pipe and sucked flame into it. It was a nice night. He could hear the wings of night birds and the river’s flowing waters. Above him he could see a thousand stars. Around him he could smell tobacco smoke, the fertile loam of river bottom, magpie and crow nests in the cottonwoods, mole runs, moss pads, hot lime hills cooling in the night, and the embers of aspen and willow in the fire. He wondered if he should have used two of his robes as burial shrouds. He was not a very sentimental man; he knew that in no time at all the dead person or the dead beast was only a few bones but he knew also that people liked to lay their loved ones down in the best they could aiford. He had two large robes and several small ones. He guessed he would give one of them to the woman. Tomorrow if she refused to go north with him and wait for a river boat, or south to the trail, he would give her more powder and ball and anything else he had that she could use. If she was determined to stay here he doubted that she could long survive in a land where the strongest went down one by one. She would be all alone with four skulls and two graves. She would never see a human being, never in God’s world, except a redman on a distant hill, or a mountain man going up or down the river.

North of her only twenty miles would be the wide Missouri. Steamboats would chug through its waters as far as the Great Falls but she would never see or hear them. South of her farther than she could see, even if she were to stand a thousand feet above the graves, was rolling hill land covered with scrub pine and cedar. East of her was the same lonely waste clear to the junction of the Missouri and the Yellowstone—and west of her to the Judith Mountains, and Wolf Creek, Arrow Creek, and Dog Creek. Unless she climbed a tall hill she would never see the Big Belt or Crazy Mountains, much less such magnificent massifs of divine sculpturing as the Tetons, the Bitterroots, the Big Horns, and the Blue. There would be plenty of wild game all around her—a few buffalo, many deer and antelope; fifty or more kinds of duck and goose; squirrels and prairie chickens and fish in the river; and fruits and roots of several kinds, but no such luscious wild orchards as she might have if she were in the Madison or Gallatin valley ....

Sam was turning these things over as he puffed his pipe and thought of her problems. He wished he could stop thinking about her; after all, the vast wonderful earth the Almighty had made was filled with the dying and the about-to-die. He tried to force his thoughts to his plan to take a wife, to trap in the Uintahs this coming winter, to send for a trumpet—to these, or to speculation on what other mountain men were doing at this moment—in what deep impenetrable thicket tall skinny Bill Williams had hidden from the red warriors, his high squeaky voice silenced for the night; by what fire with its cedar and coffee aroma Wind River Bill was spinning his yarns and saying, "I love the wimmins, I shorely do"; in what Spanish village short blond Kit Carson was dancing the soup dance with black-eyed senoritas; what tall tales Jim Bridger was telling to bug-eyed greenhorns from a wagon train that had stopped this day at his post to get horses shod and tires set—Jim, spitting tobacco juice and saying, "Waugh! This here critter is wore plum down to his quick—I reckon I’ll hafta put moccasins on him"; and in what quiet shelter Lost—Skelp Dan was moving a calloused palm over the hideless bone of his skull, as if hoping to find hair growing there. Then Sam’s mind turned to Dick Wooton, who in mountain-man talk was some for his inches: six feet six and as straight as the long barrel of his rifle, he had once stood shoulder to shoulder with Rube Herring, and "Thar warn’t a hair’s-breadth differns in tall or wide betwixt them." Even Marcelline, though a Mexican, could easily look down on the top hair of a man standing six feet—Marcelline, with a temper ranging from red-hot to white-hot, who despised his people and abjured his blood, and cast his lot with the white mountain men. Marcelline was a picture all right, with his mass of hair half as long as his arm and as black as wet coal, spilling out from his slouched beaver, to cover the shoulders of his buckskin hunting jacket like a wide mane ....

But again and again Sam’s thoughts returned to the woman on the hill. He then laid his pipe aside, took a fat dripping roast off the green tripod above the glowing embers, thrust a green stick through it, picked up his rifle and a small robe, and took the path. Slippered with moccasins and as soundless as the wolf or the mouse, he approached the woman until he stood only a few feet from her, and looked down at her bowed head. For two hours or more she had been silent. In her own way she had wept until she could weep no more. She still sat where she had sat when he left her, chin sunk to her breast. One hand touched the daughter’s grave, the other that of the sons. The thing that fixed his attention was the heartsick quavering moan she made, when the long deep shudder of grief and horror ran through her. He was not a man in whom pity had a large home but compassion ran deep in him now. For perhaps ten minutes he looked down at her and listened, until the utter bitterness of it, the quivering of her flesh and soul in the loss, was more than he chose to endure. Laying his rifle down and holding the roast with his left hand, with his right he draped the robe across her shoulders and over her lap. He then set the green stick in the earth at her side, with the spitted roast on it. She gave no sign that she was aware of him. After looking at her a full minute he was convinced that she was not. Our Father in heaven, could grief be deeper than that!

Shaken, he turned away and went down the hill. At the fire he put a robe over him like a collapsed tent and took a mouth organ from his medicine bag. His father played the clavichord with dash and clarity, though his hands, almost as large as his son’s, easily spanned an octave and a half and sometimes hit the wrong key. Sam had learned to play several instruments, including the horn and flute. When he headed west he had taken only two mouth organs, and he had played them through seven long lonely winters. Tonight, with the robe over him, he played softly, so that he would not start up the night birds, the tree toads and the wolves. Beethoven had imitated the nightingale’s song with the flute, the quail’s with the oboe, and the cuckoo’s with a clarinet. Sam had tried to imitate bird songs—the phoebe’s plaintive little voice of a tiny bird-child lost in a thicket, telling its name over and over; the chickadee’s and bunting’s and horned lark’s. Tonight he softly played a few sad old things and a hymn or two, for he was filled with homesickness; or with the yearning that Schubert had felt, who had never found the love he hungered for.

It was the woman on the hill. He flung the robe back, for he didn’t want to play down in the depths of fur. He wanted to stand up and shake a clenched fist at that malevolent fate that knocked on the door in the opening bars of Beethoven’s C-minor symphony and proclaimed to the world its power over Beethoven’s hearing. It was the same unpitying ruthless fate, knocking there in the grand arrogant manner, that had brought savages to this spot, to hack three children to death and take a father away to torture. What was it there, he wondered, looking up at the home of the stars, a divine benevolence or a mindless malevolence? He rolled into a robe but was not able to sleep; he looked up through treetops at the constellations and thought  the time was about midnight. Sniffing the odors in the night breeze, he listened; tried to sleep and again listened; and rose at last to sit by the dead fire and smoke his pipe and think. There was something he ought to do. Maybe the woman up there would like a drink of water. Among her things he found a coffee pot and this he rinsed at the river and filled. When a few yards from her he paused to look round him, for the moon was still up. The four skulls looked quite comfortable on their stakes. Out in the moon dusk in the northeast a beast was slinking, perhaps a wolf. She was still there, between the graves, the robe around her, the roast on the green stick at her side. For a moment he thought she might be dead, simply, eternally, of grief. It might be best so. Going softly over to her, he saw that rats or mice had been feeding at the roast. No, she was not dead; the same long shudders were running through her, on every third or fourth breath, and the same unearthly sound of loss and woe followed each shudder.

He sank quietly to the earth and sat by her. Softly he said, "I thought you might want a drink." He had expected no response. All his life he had heard of the riddle called woman, but if she was a riddle it was in man-woman love, not in grief. In grief she was as stark and plain as the face of death itself. Windy Bill might have said that she made a man feel like gone beaver; like what he had once called a stillborn child in a putrefied forest. She made Sam feel homesick for sight of his mother and father, and Christmas around the fireplace.

Bending low and moving forward, he looked around to see if her eyes were closed. They were wide open. Once more, somewhere in the years ahead, he would see eyes like hers, and they would alter the course of his life. Now he could only feel a stupid and exasperating helplessness. Would she go with him, and take a boat or a wagon train back to her people? He knew that she never would, unless he bound her. She would fight like the bitch wolf when the grizzly approached her lair. If he were to take her a thousand miles away, like the cat she would find her way back—she would return, slinking through the forests and over the mountains, even if it took her ten years. His deepest insights told him that. They told him that all that this woman had in the world was here, under her left hand and under her right.

"You know," he said gently, "I think you’re going to need a little house here and went back to his camp.

3

AT THE BOLE of a cottonwood he untied the end of a long leather rope, and down the tree from twenty feet up came the remainder of the deer. He would eat a big breakfast, for he knew that he would work hard all day. In loin and kidney fat he fried the entire tenderloin, as well as two thick steaks from a ham; and he ate nearly all of it and drank a quart of coffee. Then, while indulging himself with a pipeful, he looked round him at the trees. Either aspen or cottonwood would do. The wood of both was soft and rotted easily but a cabin built of them would stand as long as the woman stood. If he made it about ten by ten it ought to house her all right. He was not a mason, and so would not undertake a chimney, but he would gather stones and lay a foundation, so that the logs would not rot right away; and he would leave a hole at the apex of the roof, as Indians did, to let the smoke out. He had no glass or oiled paper for a window, no planks for a door, unless he were to tear the wagon bed apart. He supposed she would freeze to death when the wild winds of Canada came baying down the skies and the river froze white and solid from bank to bank. But maybe not, for he and other mountain men would bring her blankets and robes. They would take care of her, in their way.

Going up the hill, he looked round him. Where had he left the axe? Among her things did she have a hammer, a saw, nails, a pair of old shoes that he could use for door hinges? Standing at her side, he told her that he was going to build a house for her: did she want it here by the graves or down by the river, where she would be closer to water and firewood, and sheltered from the winds? Did she understand him? he asked, kneeling by her. Was it all right to look among her camp things? She had not touched the water; insects were crawling over the roast.

He found the axe and observed again that it was a good one, though he would have preferred a six-pounder with a blade a good five inches wide. His rifle across his left arm and the axe in his grasp, he went to her camp and thoroughly searched it. He found a few tools in a tall pail; a few nails and bolts and nuts in a small wooden box; some flour, salt, sugar, dried fruits, coffee, tea, and a piece of uncooked flesh that was smelling. He threw it out. He found no tobacco: the woman’s husband, he guessed, was not a tobacco man. Well, what kind of man was he anyway?—to bring a wife and children a thousand miles into Indian land, with no weapons but an axe and an old rifle, and a butcher knife with the wood broken off its handle. Rummaging, he found a pair of boy’s shoes that would make hinges. Inspection of the wagon told him that there would be enough weathered and cracked boards for a door, if he could tear them away from their bolts without making kindling of them. It looked as if she would have enough bedding for a while, but not enough when winter cold split trees open and froze wolves as hard as river ice. In such cold there wasn’t enough bedding in the world to keep a person warm. He had a picture of her, crawling, after the cold came, into her pile of quilts and blankets, taking with her the rifle and axe, wild fruits, a hunk of meat, and maybe some biscuits. She looked robust and able. Out there under the flies and ants were four headless savages, and up north was a horde of them, who had a new notion of what one white woman could do. She didn’t seem to have more than a few rags of clothing; he would bring her bolts of cloth and needles and thread, and tanned skins. The Almighty up there in the blue would surely watch over the poor soul and protect her, until she had learned the ways of mountain men and mountain country, and had become part of this vast beautiful land, which to know was to love, was to dig your way into, like the badger and prairie dog, was to sing your soul upon, as millions of birds were doing all over the valleys and hills, and the wolves in their mating song, the elk bulls in their bugling, the moose bulls in their honking. She would learn and would love all the wonderful wild calls of geese and loons and grebes, willets and hawks and prairie chickens. And she would see Sam Minard someday on a mountain summit, shaking his glad powerful fosts at the skies and calling on the Lord Jehovah to look down from a heavenly window and see what a fantastic world he had made. A man was a fool who wanted to leave this country, once he had found it. A woman could learn to love its ways. Like the red women, she might learn to trap beaver (he would bring her two or three traps) and break a deer’s neck (he would be sure that she always had plenty of powder and ball); and she might grow a small garden, even have wild flowers round her house and over the graves, though it would be a long way to carry water. Doggone it, she might even become the woman of some mountain man—have another child or two, and learn to make buckskin clothing as fancy as a hickory wiping stick, or the finest beadwork of the Crows. That is, if her husband didn’t come back. But he would never come back. By this time his agonies were ended and his bones stripped.

So ran his thoughts as for three days, from daybreak till dark, he toiled in the woods and on the hill, building a log shack for a woman who in these seventy-two hours never, so far as he knew, took a drink of water or a morsel of food, though he kept both at her side. Never once had she risen from where she sat, the right hand on her sons, the left hand on her daughter. He had not known that grief could so paralyze the human mind and will. After felling the trees and cutting them in lengths he dragged them to the site with his powerful stallion, one end of a leather rope tied round a log, the other round the tree of his saddle. The logs were about eight inches thick at their larger end. He laid them ten logs high, with a door in the west side, facing the river. The door was an ungainly heavy thing of warped and cracked wagon boards, held together with three slats nailed across them. To the door and to two logs he spiked the soles of a pair of boy’s shoes, to serve as hinges. It was, he told himself, the darnedest door ever attached to a house in Indian land; but if you were careful with it you could bring it shut. On the side opposite to the hinges he nailed` a strap of leather, to be pulled inside the cabin and looped over a spike, to make the door secure. Through an unchinked crack on the right of the door she could peer out, if anyone were to knock, or shove the barrel of her rifle through and shoot the red bastard, if he was an enemy. Winds and rain and snow would drive in through this and other cracks, in spite of his chinking; but he hoped that she would calk them with rags after he was gone. He had no trowel, nothing with which to plaster with river mud. It was an ugly shack, all right, and it would be a cold one, even with a fire in its center; but until he could buy materials and come again it would have to do. The roof was poles laid side by side across the roof beams, with a pitch of about thirty degrees on either side. Onto the poles he shoveled earth to a depth of six inches. In the exact center of the roof he left an opening fourteen inches across, framed with pieces of wagon board, for the smoke to escape through. It was no mansion but not five mountain men in the whole country had a better house. He had a winter shack a thousand miles south of this spot, on the Little Snake, and it was no better and its door was no better. But his Flathead bride would probably think it a wonderful thing. In warm weather no mountain rnan worth his buckskin ever crawled under a roof, except the spreading branches of a fir, or a juniper arbor, or a buffalo robe draped across a couple of poles. If you loved the world the Creator had made for you, you did not shut out the blue heaven and its lights, or lie in foul air in a stuffy room, when in a bed outside you could smell the morning and watch its mother-of-pearl light softly touch the hills.

Hoping to shake the woman out of her grief, when close to her during his labor he sang Robert Burns songs, whistled bird and opera arias, and in his deep baritone exploded Bach and Beethoven phrases, all the while watching her to see if he was breaking through; or he talked to her about this and that, saying in one moment, "If you play any small instrument I’ll send for it and when I come along here we can sit and play duets"; saying in the next, "When I get my woman over in the Bitterroots we’ll come by here and mebbe you’ll like to go hunting with us." But she never gave a sign that she heard. When the shack was finished he carried up the hill all her possessions, except the wagon. Without its box it was a lopsided thing on its sun-baked and wind-dried wheels, the spokes loose in their sockets and the tires half off the fellies. Thinking that she might like to have it by her house, he looped a rope over the end of the tongue and with his stud dragged the squealing and howling thing up the hill. Lifting first one end of it and then the other, he flung it this way and that until he had it snugly against the north wall, with the tongue ended up and back across the bolster. Her largest vessel, a tin pail, he filled with water and set inside the hut by the door. All her things were in there now, including the axe and rifle. From his own supplies he gave her flour, salt, sugar, coffee; two tanned elkskins as soft as velvet; powder and ball; a couple of large needles and a roll of buckskin thread; a skin pouch half filled with dried wild berries and plums; a couple of fishhooks and a line; and a flat obsidian stone weighing half a pound that she could use as a whet stone. He sharpened her butcher knife. He then went into the hills and returned with two fat deer. Did she know how to jerk meat? Well, he would show her how. He laid a fire about fifteen feet in front of her and built a drying rack above it; and during the hours it took him to jerk most of the flesh he would have sworn that she never once looked at him or the fire. He would have thought she was dead, sitting up, but for the movement of her breathing. Thinking that possibly she heard and understood, even though she refused to see, he told her how to set up the rack, to cut the flesh in thin ribbons, to turn the meat, to care for it and store it. He told her he would leave all this with her, as well as some boiled or roasted hind and front quarters. If she would nod her head just once he would stir up a batch of biscuits. She could believe it or not but he was about the best biscuit maker in the West, except Hank Cady—but Hank, if still alive, was to hell and gone beyond the Yellowstone.

Now and then when toiling and talking to her Sam would straighten and his keen eyes would search the hills around him. He had no doubt that Blackfeet, and possibly Crow, scouts had been spying on him and wondering what he was doing. What brave men they were! Ten, fifty, or a hundred of them could have come here to take him, for he had no friend, no help, within two or three hundred miles; and they would have come to take him, not one of them, or two or six, but ten possibly, or twenty or forty, but for the fact that they wouldn’t pay the price. Mountain men had taught them that at least two of them would die, perhaps three, in the assault, and it took a lot of rum, the smell of a lot of loot, including good rifles and plenty of ammunition, to lure them to the risk.

Having scanned the horizon, he told the woman about Hank’s breakfasts, for thought of them had made his mouth water. If Hank was expecting an overnight guest he was sure to have on hand a pint or so of the wonderful wild-bee honey, a quart of rendered hump fat, or, better, marrow fat, to use as butter; a dozen wild geese or duck or sage hen eggs, if these were in season; and the finest elk in a thousand miles. His breakfasts of elk steaks dripping in their sizzling hot juices, a gallon pot of coffee, browned biscuits sopping wet with marrow fat, golden honey, huckleberry jam, or an electuary of mixed wild fruits, no mountain man ever forgot. Someday maybe she would go with him and they would have breakfast with Hank. Hank wouldn’t run off at the mouth, as Windy Bill did, or Powder River Charley; if he said ten words in twenty-four hours he felt exhausted.