Текст книги "Mountain Man"

Автор книги: Vardis Fisher

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

They moved forward in a drizzle of rain. After a mile Dan came in from darkness and joined them. When about three hundreds yards from the camp the party halted; the men would now creep forward as silently as the wolf, for each of them wore three pairs of moccasins. Each had a revolver in his belt and a long Bowie. After fifty yards Dave Black rose as if out of the earth and slipped forward with them. When Sam and the dozen men abreast of him were about a hundred and fifty feet from the first tents they stopped, resting on one knee and a palm; and Sam looked round him at the men behind. Not even the breathing of a single man could have been heard but in any moment they expected to hear the dogs explode in alarm and fury. For another fifty feet they all slunk soundlessly forward, and then Sam straightened, a knife flashing in his hand. This was the signal. In the next moment the camp and the mountains behind it and the whole earth roundabout were shattered by a war cry that stiffened every sleeping Indian. In almost the same instant the men rushed forward at full speed and the camp’s dogs came awake. For a few fatal moments the redmen were drugged by sleep and shocked by terror, and during those moments it was all over for most of them. Not one Indian in live knew what struck him.

Elk Horns knew. Sam took care of that. While the horrible cries were still echoing in the mountain night Sam in a flash was between two of the sentinel tents and over to the chief. The redman came up fast and met Sam at the flap door. While racing forward Sam had returned the knife to his belt because at close quarters he preferred to light with his hands. At the tent door he seized the man by his two arms and wrenched him with such force that the hatchet fell from his hand. In the same moment Sam spat in his face and then flung him headlong backward across his shoulder. He swung then to a guard who had rushed out of the tent and drove his knife through him; and the next instant he seized the chief, brought him to his feet with a jolt that almost fractured his leg bones, again spat in his face, and slapped a red cheek so hard with the flat of his hand that the chief almost fell. "It’s me!" Sam roared in the helpless man’s face, and again uttering the dreadful war cry, he seized the chief with both hands just under his ribs and heaved him up and straight over his head. He was then on top of him, bloody knife in his hand, and while the stunned chief lay helpless Sam took his scalp.

Scalp in one hand and knife in the other, he leapt back and in morning gloom surveyed the scene. On his left he heard the footfalls of men chasing men. He heard a cry choked off in blood. Looking the other way, he saw a white man taking a scalp, and a bloody Indian rushing at him with raised tomahawk. Sam leapt, felled the man, and saved the life of Hank Cady. Hank had always been a little careless in battle. What Sam was looking for was a live Indian to send as a messenger, and when he saw a redskin leap up from a half dozen prone bodies and make a desperate spurt for freedom Sam was after him like a cougar. He overtook him in about a hundred yards and flung him down. He felt over him for weapons but this brave had none. Sam turned the Indian onto his belly, knelt on his back, and cut leather strings out of the Indian’s elkskin jacket. With these he bound the man’s hands behind him and was securing him to a tree when he heard his name called.

"Here I am!" Sam cried.

It was all over by then. A few wounded Indians had fled with mountain men after them, who one by one returned with their scalps. No one yet knew if any had escaped. No one knew if McNees had been right in his count. Sam and Bill and Mick walked among the dead, trying to count them; and George came up with his habitual smile and said one was dead over yonder, and another over there. Had any of the varmints got away? They didn’t know, Sam said. Dan and McNees were out of sight, probably chasing someone. Had any mountain man got hurt? Well, there was Cy Gregg over there, limping like a man with a broken leg; and Tomahawk Jack, who in his eagerness at scalping had sliced most of the meat off two of his fingers; and Abe Jackson, whose collarbone had been cut in two by a tomahawk. So far as Sam knew, no white man had been  killed. As for the dogs, they had all vanished into thin air, and Bill thought that some of the red devils might have taken to wings too. They’d never know until they had counted them. In full daylight Sam and Bill and a few others tried to count the dead bodies scattered over the area but could not agree on the number. Sam then turned to the wounded. Abe had a nasty cut all right, through his collarbone and the two ribs next to it, but like all mountain men he pretended that it was nothing at all. It was because of his doggone awkwardness, he said. Some of the men chewed tobacco and gave him the quids, and Abe pushed them into the wound. Jack had made a small fire and with a hot knife point was trying to cauterize and cicatrize his wounds; and Abe, watching him, said he could use some of that medicine. Even Three-Finger had a wound, a knife-thrust in his shoulder, and into it moistened tobacco was stuffed. Zeke had slashed himself across a palm; another man while chasing an Indian in the dark had struck a tree and knocked five or six of his front teeth out. Mick Boone had torn a thumbnail off. Sam said they would examine the booty to see if there was anything any of them wanted and then they would bend the barrels and burn the stocks off the guns. He told Hank to choose five or six men and ride Indian ponies back to their horses and then go out and find elk for breakfast.

There wasn’t much in the booty that any man wanted. Some of them chose pieces of leather clothing, or a tomahawk or a headdress. The rifles, furnished by the British so that the Blackfeet could wage war on Americans, were piled on a fire, and after their wood was burned off and their barrels were hot the barrels were laid across stones and a huge stone was dropped in the center of each to bend it. It was while bending a barrel that Sam was first startled and then astounded. He was busy a hundred feet from where he had scalped the chief when, glancing that way, he saw what he would never have thought could be. Elk Horns in spite of the awful drubbing he had taken was still alive. He was conscious. In fact, he was slowly and stealthily crawling toward Sam, a knife in his hand. Sam advanced on the Indian and when fifty feet away stopped and looked at him. It was the eyes that held his attention only in the eyes of falcon, wolf, or Wolverine, or of the young man in the river, had he seen such deadly hate. "I’ll be doggone!" he cried, and other men came over to stand with him and look.

George said, "Sam, I thought ya kilt the varmint."

Charley said, "Is thissen the one we send to the Bloods?"

"He’s tied to a tree," George said.

"Hain’t no reason to send two," said Charley. "Which one do we kill?"

Bill had come over. He looked at the bloody Indian, now lying flat and staring at the men. The redman had the exact look of a wounded beast that knew all the advantages lay with the enemy yet was determined to fight for its life. He looked like a thing waiting and planning. The men saw the knife in his hand and expected him at any moment to leap up and charge. Bill said, "Wall now, anyway he knows who done it. I figger Sam intends to send this chief and jist caught the other in case the chief doan feel up to it. Sam, be that it?"

"Might be," Sam said.

George said, "Wooden it be more insultin ta send the chief?"

"Ten times more, it shorely would," Bill said.

"Then who gits the other one?"

"He’s Sam’s," Bill said.

Sam was staring at the chief. He was remembering how this varmint had degraded and humiliated him and how for days he had been close to death in winter desolation; but there was something in this situation that distressed him. Perhaps it was the eyes of all the trapped and helpless or wounded creatures that had looked at him, during his years in the West, and looked at him now, out of this man’s eyes. There was the blue heron. In target practice he had once shot a heron on the bank of a river, only breaking a wing. The bird, tall and stately, had come walking down the bank and right past him, with what he had taken to be contempt for him. He could never forget that experience. The bird, walking with superb dignity, had looked at him steadily with one eye as it approached and passed him and went on down the bank, its blue wing hanging.

And there was Kate Bowden.

Sam might have said, after trying to think his way through it, that in the eyes of all wounded or helpless things there was something that laid a hand on his heart. He was still looking at Elk Horns when Tomahawk Jack went over to the chief, and pressing the muzzle of a revolver against the bloody skull, reached down and took the knife from the hand. It was then that Sam saw with greater poignancy the look in the eyes that he did not want to see and was weary of seeing. Dan had been standing back, listening and watching. He now came over to Sam and said that if the chief was to be the messenger he ought to be skelped roperly—halfway down his foreheadand right across the middle of his ears. Dan was eager to show how it should be done, but Sam said no, the chief had been scalped and that was good enough. If Dan wanted to scalp the other one that way and turn him loose that was all right. A bald head was a better warning than a dead Indian. They could tell them to tell their people that two messengers had been sent for the reason that it was figgered that one would be killed by the Crows on the way. Fine, Bill said; that would heap insult on two bald heads.

After thinking about it Dan said it made sense. Did he get to scalp the other one?

"Shore," said Bill, "an git it over with. We want breakfast."

As Dan approached, the Indian bound to the tree began the death song. Then the song fell silent, and so far as the men watching could tell the redman did not flinch while his scalp was taken. Half of each ear clung to the topknot. The two Indians were placed side by side before Sam, with the points of knives held against their backs. Sam studied their faces. Then Bill said, "Sam, the chief’s shoulder is outta joint, it shorely is." They could all see that it was, when they looked at the position of the arm. From behind, Bill felt over the chief’s torso and said that several ribs seemed to be broken. Sam must have handled him a little rough, Bill said. Both Indians were trembling with hate and outrage; all around them they could see the dead bodies of their comrades, and the pile of useless rifles. The chief was so shaken, so horribly humiliated, and so little in control of himself, that his lips were drooling saliva and blood and he was making water. George might have said that he was enough to draw tears from the eyes of a dead wolf; but Dan, McNees, Jack and a few others were looking at him as if they would have liked to skin him alive. They were thinking of the unspeakable tortures and agonies they would be put to if they were in the power of this savage. Dan would have cut his head off and hung it from a tree.

Someone asked why the varmints were not taken to camp and tied up until after breakfast. Let the red niggers think about it awhile. Sam said all right, they would do that and then send them on their way; and he turned them over to Cy and Charley, who spoke a smattering of Indian tongues. The men then mounted Indian ponies and rode to their camp; and behind them on horses, their feet tied together with leather ropes under the horses’ bellies, and their hands bound, came the two prisoners. Hunters returned from the hills with the choicest portions of elk and buffalo; fires were built; and great roasts were hung from tripods, and thick steaks were laid on chokecherry limbs over red embers. Sam, Hank, and Bill were making hot biscuits. A dozen of the men were out in the vales nd over the hills, gathering roots and wild fruits.

After they had eaten over a hundred pounds of flesh, with biscuits and berries, and each had drunk a quart of strong coffee, they sat back, chewing tobacco or puffing pipes. Bill took the pipestem from his teeth and, like an Indian, made a sign with the pipe at the earth and the sky. It was a cardinal's wonder, he said, that Sam didden bust the chief wide open, though as it was he done him plenty bad. He doubted the varmint would ever make it to his people; some of his innards might be split open inside. Sangre de Cristo! Jack said, and turned red with anger. Did they pet the pisened wolf because they felt sorry for him? Thar warn’t no mercy in these red critters and for his own part he’d feel oneasy if this chief was turned loose. He would arouse the hull nation against them. Would the varmints figger the chief had been freed because he was a greater chief than any white chief? And Sam dotta know that if Elk Horns was turned loose he would be on his trail night and day till the last river ran dry. Why didn’t they sell him to him the Crows?

The proposal caught the fancy of a few of the men: Elk Horns captured Sam to sell him to the Crows and Sam had turned the tables on him. Waugh! That would larn them to stay on their own range.

For a full minute Sam puffed his pipe and considered the matter. He didn’t want to offend these men who had come a long way and risked their lives for him: but he didn’t want the  Crows to put a wounded man to fiendish torture and death. Whether if he turned the chief loose there would be any gratitude in him he did not know. This Indian might pursue him night and day as long as he lived but Sam was thinking of the eyes of the youngster dying in the river.

"No, I guess not," he said at last. "We'll send him back and if he wants to come after me I’ll be ready for him." He looked over at the two men bound to a tree. "Bring them over here."

The moment men moved toward the two Indians they began their death song. Dan was looking at the Indian horses; he wanted the chief’s horse and all the men knew it. Most of them felt that Dan should have the horse, and the chief too, because for years he had roamed the mountains and prairies with his skinned head blistering or freezing in sun and winds. The  chief’s horse was a handsome spirited black. Knowing how the men felt, Sam said Dan could have the beast, and at once Dan saddled and mounted him and sat proud and bone-bald and ready for war.

As the two Indians were brought to him Sam called Cy and Charley over. He told them to tell these two redmen that they would be sent back to their people; and they would tell their people that if ever again they captured or tried to capture a mountain man the mountain men would make war on them till there wouldn’t be left as much as a sick old woman in all their lands. "Be sure they understand you." While Cy and Charley spoke, by turns, in signs and Indian words, Sam studied the two Indian faces. In the face of the young buck he saw only what seemed to be amazement; in the face of the chief only sick sullen smoldering contempt and hatred. Maybe he should have given him to Dan after all. Sam had been thinking that as a gesture of kindness he would put the man’s shoulder bone back in its socket before sending him on his way but he now said to hell with it. A face as ferocious and evil as that deserved nothing. They were now to tell this chief that if he wanted to fight Sam anywhere any time he was not to skulk around like a cowardly coyote; he was to come out like a warrior and a brave man, into the open, where they would fight it out. Be sure that he understood it. "Tell him he’s to come any day and the sooner the better." Again Sam studied the chief’s bloody face. The expression now was not all sullen hate; Sam thought he saw fear, and he told himself that he would never see this chief again. The man’s fighting will had been broken. What an abject pitiable thing he would be, enduring for the remainder of his life the jeers and contempt of his people. Sam guessed it would have been more merciful to have killed him.

Without knife, gun, or parcel of food the two Indians headed north, afoot, and twenty-three whitemen stood in a group and watched them go, as long as their red skulls were in sight. By noon the wolves and buzzards would be stripping the corpses. By tomorrow or the day after the largest Blackfeet village would be like an overturned wasp nest.

The men rode together to the Three Forks area and from there, singly or in pairs or threes, they went southwest, south, southeast, or east, with a wave of the hand and the words, "Watch yer topknot!" or "I’ll see ye at the next rondyvoo!" Come another spring they would not all be alive, but it was that way with mountain men, it was their way of life and they would have willingly lived no other. Hank and Bill rode into the east with Sam. Bill said Mick Boone was brokenhearted because his bay had not been among the horses. Sam said he was awfully sorry about that. Maybe he should have kept the chief and traded him for the horse, and for his guns and knife, and for the lock of hair from his wife. He guessed he was getting old and foolish.

After they had ridden east a day’s journey and spent a night in a thicket Sam said to Hank and Bill he would be leaving them now. They thought he intended to enter Crow country but what Sam had in mind was Colter’s bilins and peace and rest.

When Sam was out of sight Bill said to Hank, "I’m awful oneasy about Sam. He jist didden act natural at all.” Hank’s marvelous gray eyes were looking in the direction Sam had taken and his mind was remembering that the big man had saved his life. He spat a stream of brown juice and said nothing.

32

SAM HADN’T FELT natural since the death of the youngun in the river. He was a fighting man and fighting had been his way of life for years but he felt pretty doggone weary now as he doubled back to the southwest and headed up the beautiful valley of the Gallatin. For the moment anyway he had a bellyful of it; he had had his fill, like old Bill. Barely entering his thirties, he wondered if he was getting old. Well, he would stretch out in hot water a few days and sweat the pisens out of him; and play and sing some arias and the songs he and Lotus had sung, even the songs he and Kate had sung. It would be nice to be alone and safe for a little while. He guessed he ought to go over to his father-in-law and see if he had a marriageable daughter, for in making him for the solitary life the Creator had left something out. In his mind he now and then had a picture of red devils swarming out of the northern lands like huge infuriated wasps, their stingers hanging long and sharp. They had made the boast that the Crows were too cowardly to take him but they could take him, and they would now do their infernal best. So for a while he would live with the birds and the beasts and take stock of his resources and reduce all of living to the simplicity of bird song and hawk wing and wolf call. He had three months before the next trapping season; perhaps he should go home to visit his people. He could go by steamboat down the river but if he returned this year it would have to be overland; contemplation of a journey of thousands of miles did not fill him with joy. He wanted to see his people but he didn’t want to see the kind of life they lived, He would never want to live in what was called the civilized life: "Here where men sit and hear each other groan; where palsy shakes a few last sad gray hairs, and youth grows pale and specter-thin and dies." It was something like that the poet had written.

Neighbors and their children that were all energy and shrieks; debts and mortgages and policemen and funerals and taxes; out here, thank God, there were no funerals: a man died, the wolves and buzzards cleaned his bones, and that was the end of him.

Bill had brought news from Bridger’s post and it had depressed all the mountain men. This magnificent untamed country was rapidly filling with people. The immigrant trains came all summer now, headed for Oregon and California; the valleys would be poisoned by smoke-belching cities, and a man wouldn’t dare lie on his belly and drink from a stream. East of the Great Salt Lake were thousands of Mormons now; Bill said they professed to want only to get away from their persecutors and take as many wives as a man could use, but the basin would fill with them and overflow, and there would be only Mormon wives where today there were beaver, wild fruits, and peace. The polygamous dames would tramp down all the berry bushes and hack down all the trees; and at last all the Indians and all the elk and buffalo would be gone. There would be, Bridger said, only what was called civilization and the thought of it made him sick in his innards. How many wives did Brigham have now? Fifty at least, and five hundred children, Jim said.

The truth was that Sam Minard had been born too late and had come west too late. He had been here only a few years when Brigham came creaking and crawling across the prairies with his Mormon hordes; and now after him came people by the thousands, itching all over to find gold or tear up the country with plows; and to build jails, impose taxes, vote politicians into office, and play like children at being elegant and civilized. Good God, he guessed he ought to push north.

In Colter’s hell with its clean sharp odors of sulphur pot and steaming geyser, of vast black forests of spruce and pine and fir, Sam looked round him and wondered what it would be like after men with gold pans, axes, and plows were done with it. He tried to imagine it fifty or a hundred years hence. Why was the Creator putting so many people on the earth, anyway? Doggone it, there were hundreds of millions now; Sam thought a few hundred thousand would be enough. There were too many red people, so many that the sites of their old villages gave off foul odors for years and were stains of death on the earth. Let the red people settle for a year or two in a spot and everything under them and around them began to die and smell bad, like flowers soaked with wolf urine, until you could say, there on the Rosebud, there on the Bighorn, there on the Belle Fourche, the Chugwater, the Teton, the Snake, the Colorado, the Green—there and everywhere are the death stains where people blighted what they touched, and Nature no longer could do its housekeeping and replace stink with fragrance. There was something about people, Sam decided, and sniffed his hands. There were millions of buffalo, whole seas and oceans of them, and in twenty-four hours they dropped millions of their dung piles; but in no time at all the dung became odorless chips that were much like a handful of dried prairie grass. But a site on which people, white or red, camped for a few weeks stunk a man out of the area and over the tallest peaks. Man was, for a fact, such an ill-smelling critter that every beast and bird on earth was afraid of him because of his stink. This fancy made Sam chuckle. The Creator was slipping somewhere. To Sam it seemed that the time would come when all over the earth there wouldn’t be an unpolluted stream or a fragrant dell left; or a scented thicket where a man needn’t look round him before he sat; or a valley not littered and stricken with human ugliness. Sam would have been grimly amused if told that in another hundred years there would be agitation for wilderness areas, in these very lands around him, where persons from the swarming and overcrowded masses could for an hour or two fill their lungs with clean air, hear a bird sing, sense the meaning of peace.

In the primitive edens and gardens where deer looked at him with their soft eyes, where birds peered through spruce foliage and talked to him, and the highest peaks wore on their shoulders cloaks of white that the sun never drew away; or where on the south flanks he could lie in berry thickets and spill luscious juices down his throat—where he could gather the orange radiance of thimbleberries by the double handful and feed on them while the exquisite soul-scents of mountain fruits filled his nostrils and senses; where he could gather the gold-and-bronze gum of the big fir trees and chew its wood-and-l peak flavors while studhugging the tree to him, to saturate his leather clothing with its smell of mountains and eternity, drawn up from the deep earth and down from the tall skies; where he could climb with the aid of leather halters sixty feet up the golden wall of a yellow pine, taking only his rifle and harp, and find, high up, two or three big branches across which he could lie, and look up through a lacework of loveliness at pools of blue and piles of cotton, and play the waltz of the vineyard to the marvelous handiwork of God; where in a deep forest a hundred thousand or a million years old he could dig round him like a bear or badger, in the leaf-and-cone depths down through a foot or maybe two feet of it, feeling the clean earth-wonder of it in his hands and getting it all over him and breathing into his soul the earth-smells and infinite time of it, until he was filled with all the good unspoiled ancientness of the earth, forest, sky, mountains, and snows; and where he could stretch out full length in the hole he had made and cover himself over with the centuries-old accumulation of humus mold made of needles and cones and twigs, old bark, bird nests, snows, and rains, with only his face and arms out, his being enfolded by the ancientness and the peace, until at last he dozed and slept; and where with hot biscuits, an elk roast garnished with wild onions, a pot of coffee, a quart of blue-purple huckleberries he could feast not only on food that was free and divine but on the image of eternal beauty in everything around him, and then fill his pipe and smoke, and hum a few bars from Handel’s "Messiah," and strain to hear a few faint notes from the infinite orchestras that he thought must be playing in the infinite blue capsule that enveloped the earth; and where at last when the day was done he could lie on the fur-soft of a buffalo robe, under the jewels that men called stars, with a cover of tanned elkskin over him, drawn up to his chin so that its scent would mingle with that of fir, red osier, mountain laurel, wild grape, and juniper smoke, and with the odors wafted in from the hot mineral pots, geyser steam, and the sky and the night ....

He would have remained in the haven until October if he had not seen signs of an abnormally deep winter. After years in the mountains whitemen knew almost as well as the red, or the wolf, beaver, and mourning dove, Nature’s moods and auguries. Snow began to fall in the geyser basin in early September. That, for Sam, was warning enough. When a foot of snow fell in thirty-six hours he climbed the nearest peak to have a look around him, examining for omens all the things of the forest on his way up. He could not see across to the Bighorns east of him, or the Gallatin Mountains north. Where, he wondered, would he trap this winter? The Uintahs were still good but far away, and Bill Williams had been killed down there. There were spots on Bear River, the Snake, the Teton, but soon there would be ranches everywhere, and men building fences to keep their neighbors out. When there were no more open areas to go to, a man who loved freedom more than life would have to settle down, with a neighbor within twenty feet on the left, and on the right, and a whole row of them facing him across the street. Yonder, away down there, late immigrant trains were crawling along.

The next morning he packed and was off. Ten days later he again stood on a summit and looked round him; what he saw . was not black forests but the plains of the upper Sweetwater where it left the mountains. He was looking at the Oregon Trail about eighty miles west of Independence Rock, and at a wagon train creaking and squealing in six inches of snow. Another batch of greenhorns would be caught in the mountains, as the Donner party and others had been caught; or they would be if the sky suddenly opened and dropped a couple of feet of winter. Was it more Mormons down there? He wondered why any man was fool  enough to want more than one wife. These people were still two or three hundred miles from the polygamous saints, and a thousand from the Dalles or Sacramento. They might have to eat their leather caps and their harness before they got through.

He felt an impulse to ride down and ask these people why they hadn’t stayed back east where they belonged. Did they believe, as so many had, that out west there were gold nuggets as big as melons lying up and down the canyons and streams? And soil so rich that cabbages would grow as large as kitchen stoves? What tales the jokers had told, who had been out west and gone back east! Two years ago Sam had ridden over to a train, and a woman, sitting in a covered wagon, had wiped at her eyes with a wrist gray with alkali dust, peered at him over red eyelids, and asked if all the men out here wore skins and married squaws. None of the immigrants seemed to have the slightest sense of the kind of world this was. What they sought was not the scented valleys, the clean sky the majesties and grandeurs, but a spot where they could all huddle together as neighbors and poison the earth. They made him think of the marching army ants and the seven-year locusts. There they had been, three hundred of them, with their beds and tables and crying children and bawling cattle, and their foolish notion that they would soon be rich and well on their way to heaven. Astride his horse, Sam looked at the long wavering line, like pencil markings against the white. Now and then he would turn his gaze from the half-frozen beasts, the cold wagon tires, the stiff dust-saturated canvas flapping. in the wind, and look north and west at the immense world of valleys, mountains, rivers, and sky. Soon there would be no trails left, no forests with berry gardens in their cool depths, no water ouzels dipping and diving at the feet of cascades, no larks singing their arias, no prairie movements that from a distance looked like dark flowing waters but were herds of buffalo, no wolf song, no cougar cry, no horn call of the loons. Over on the Big Snake not many hundreds of years ago there had been stupendous eruptions of boiling lava that flowed over the plains south and west for more than a hundred miles—a red-hot hissing and steaming death flow that had killed everything it touched, and made utter desolation, black and grotesque and dead, of hundreds of square miles. For Sam and men like him the immigrant trains were another kind of death How: looking east, he saw in fancy a thousand miles of them, as broad as a buffalo emigration, dust-gray and plodding and exsanguine and inexorable, coming in from the east to cover the earth. He recalled what old Bill had said: "Shore as shootin they’ll shove us up the peaks and offen the peaks into the ocean, and cover this whole land with their privies."