Текст книги "Mountain Man"

Автор книги: Vardis Fisher

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

Laramie had become an expanding assemblage of log huts and tents, surrounded by piles of buffalo hides as large as haystacks. By July 5 in only one season, 37,171 men, 803 women, 1,094 children, 7,474 mules, 30,615 oxen, 22,742 horses, 8,998 wagons, and 5,720 cows had passed this fort on their way west. In the past two years scores or hundreds of people and beasts had drowned while trying to cross the North Platte in their shrunken and rickety wagon beds used as boats. He hoped the Almighty knew what He was doing. It was not for a mere man to say that a thing was good or bad, which lay farther than he could see; but men like Sam would have preferred to join an Indian tribe and move north than live where neighbors made life a hell all around them.

Leading two packhorses, he crossed the trail and rode south, but turned time and again to stare curiously at the creeping wagons, tongue to tailgate and looking like hideous monster-bugs. In fancy he imagined their sucking mouths, like a locust’s; their legs like cactus spines for seizing and holding; their round unblinking opaque-looking eyes that sought in life only what the mouth could devour; and their long sandpaper feelers that nervously twitched and flicked and shook with eagerness when the creature sensed that it had touched an object that could be eaten. During the past hour he had built such a loathsome image of the immigrants and all that they seemed to hunger for that he felt a twinge of shame and was glad when the day lowered and opened its belly to spill out the big white flakes. He began to hum a Haydn theme.

A hundred and thirty miles and three days later snow was still falling when Sam sat in its lovely gloom and looked at the cabin. It seemed to him that many years had passed since he had slipped up to it to find what was left of his wife and child. His were not the kind of wounds that time could heal.

Dismounting, he went over and stood by the door; and when he looked at the spot where she had been murdered he felt, with almost no loss of intensity, the deep hurt, the anger, the injustice, the idiocy in the divine arrangement and the loneliness of bereavement that he had felt when he set her skull on his palm. He had looked at the stark white of the teeth, remembering the soft ripe lips that had covered them; at the empty caves, thinking of the marvelous eyes that had had their home there. He recalled now all the lights and living things that had been in those eyes; the gorgeous mane of her hair; the whole face and the whole delightful body; and all the living wonder of her that somehow, by a will stronger than his own, had become no more than a few bones and his memory of her. It was this kind of thing that wrenched a man’s heart loose and blotted the soul out of him: if only something could survive that was more than the least of what a thing had been! If, of a flower, there could be more than the dry dead petals; of man, more than bones bleaching after the wolves were done with them; of his child, some part somewhere of the brave mountain man that he would have been. Far north (it was eight hundred miles or more) he had three times removed stones so that he could reach in and thrust in an armful of flowers. Three times his hand had softly moved over the pitiable and absurd remains; and crushed petals and rubbed their essence over the two skulls. How utterly death separated the lover from the things he loved! Here by the cabin door he kicked the snow away, and sitting where she had fallen, he played a few of the melodies he had played during those few immortal weeks when they were man and wife.

33

ALL THE MOUNTAIN MEN men had known what kind of winter it would be; it was the second most paralyzing in the memory of the oldest Indians of the north country. It set in early and deepened fast. By mid-December the Missouri was frozen across at the Big Bend, and the Yellowstone at the mouth of the Bighorn. August was feeling the chills of September when Kate saw the first blight on her flowers. She did not know that it was frost; she thought her plants needed water, and daylong for a week she trudged up the hill. By October even the late bloomers were stricken, the primroses, asters, and gold stars. The nights were cold and clear, and when the moon was up Kate sat with her children until it went down.

During her years on the Musselshell she had not been conscious of a lost husband. She no longer saw Sam striding along the spine of high mountains, or heard him filling the heavens with deep organ tones. Her life had steadily drawn in to the heart of it, until it encompassed only her children and their flowers. Except in moments of fitful sleep or when chewing at food that was old and stale and tough she gave all her time to her children and their garden, watering and weeding all day, even when there were no weeds, and reading noble verses or singing old hymns half the night. She had been thirty-five when her family was massacred: she was not an old woman now but she looked as old as the hills around her. Bill had come by after the killing of the Indians and had been startled on finding her hair completely white. It was not gray but white, with the look of cotton. Her face was deeply seamed and the skin over it looked like leather. Her body had shrunk until she was barely five feet tall; and it was bent and misshapen, like aspens on northern hillsides after the deep snows of winter. It was not labor that had prematurely aged her but want of food and sleep: she had been so completely devoted to her children that for days on end she had not eaten, and she had slept only when too exhausted to read or sing. During these years she had not once lain down to sleep but had sat by the door. She had so little grasp of the realities and was so far gone to heaven that she did not understand that the moon was not capricious in its appearances but came at certain hours. She got the habit of sitting by the door because she thought the moon might appear at any moment, day or night. One dream she had dreamed so many times that she had only to doze and it came again. She was in heaven with her children and everything there was inexpressibly tender and beautiful. The river of life lay clean and holy and nourishing, and away from it in all directions were gentle hillsides, abloom with flowers and redolent of orchards; and over all of it was a blue sky as impeccable as God. All the people around her were mothers with their laughing and loving children, gathering flowers, eating berries, drinking from the river, and singing glad little songs of love and thanksgiving. Kate was so happy that she gave off little laughs and cries in her sleep; and on awaking she was so filled with the glory of it that it seemed to her that all her life she had fed on the light and love of the other world. Her world, the lonely hills around her, empty but for her garden, she was only dimly aware of, if at all; for she had been approaching heaven dream by prayer and was at last on its threshold, even when awake, and was ready to enter and be with her angels.

Because she was so other-worldly in her moods eating had become wholly perfunctory; she would go to the pile of stuff by the wall and without looking at it would feel into it and around her; and if she felt something that she thought she could eat she would begin to gnaw at it, if it was old meat or hard old biscuit, or she would push it into her mouth, if it was dried fruit. The mice had worked all through her food and had spilled and eaten most of her sugar and flour. If her searching hand came to spilled sugar she would eat a little of it, or of the raw flour; or she would chew a coffee bean if she found one. Her hunger for food was on the level of her need to void and for her had no more significance. In the dead of winter when the cold was deepest and all her food was frozen and she was unable to gnaw at it, because her teeth were bad, she would suck at it. Sitting by the door with all the bedding around her and over her, she would put to her mouth a piece of old hard deer or elk flesh, and suck at it and watch for the moon.

In this terrible winter she went in December to the river for a pail of water. The river was frozen over from bank to bank. A week ago she had chopped a hole in the ice but had forgotten it; she now climbed the hill over her snowpath, to fetch the axe. She chopped until she was exhausted and found no water. This deeply troubled her, for she felt that her children’s plants needed watering. The next morning she went down and chopped again. She had at last a hole eighteen inches deep, but peering down, she saw that there was no water in it. Trembling with weakness and anxiety, she enlarged it. Because most of the ice chips fell into it as she chopped she now and then had to lie on her belly and reach down for them. Then, on her knees, she would chop again. With the kind of dauntless perseverance that had put Sam across the cold white prairies she kept at the task until she could see black water, two feet down. Her hole across the top was two and a half feet wide; around it all the way down it was jutting and jagged, like a talus slope, and lying face down, she tried to smooth the wall by chipping at it. Reaching down too far, she slipped and went headfirst into the hole. At the bottom it was too small to allow her to go through, and so she stood head downward, like a cotton-wrapped stopper in a huge ice jug. But at once she began to struggle and with almost the last of her strength pushed herself up and out.

Her axe was gone.

If the mountain men could have watched her now they would have spun another legend around her name. She got to her feet. Almost frozen, she rubbed her hands over each other as her strange eyes peered into the hole. She moved back to see if she had been standing over the axe, and when convinced that it had vanished into the river she did not hesitate but lay by the hole and reached into it with her right arm, and let her head and shoulders slip down little by little until her hand was in the water. She did not know that she was above an eddy whose  black waters were six or eight feet deep. If she could have gone through the hole she would have entered the water to search for the axe.

After she had struggled back from the hole she was almost rigid, and hand and arm were numbed and senseless. They never recovered from the exposure. The loss of the axe was for her a bitter loss. Day and night she grieved over it and went again and again to the river to look for it, and in desperation she tried to build a fire to melt snow. Failing in this, and convinced that her plants would die, she sat, trembling and half weeping, bundled against the cold, her attention divided between the sky and the garden.

She did not know and during these years had not known the month, much less the week or day. Such things as Thanksgiving Day and Christmas she had forgotten. It was two days before Christmas in this bitter year that the second heaviest snow of the season began to fall. The first three days it was a quiet storm of the kind Sam loved, and day and night Kate sat by the door, looking up through a dusk of whirling flakes. Her path to the river was lost and all trails were lost. An hour or two each day with bare hands she pulled the snow back from her doorway and the bedding, and back from the sages where her children knelt; but she was so starved and cold and enfeebled that she had forgotten her flowers. Her consciousness was closing like a shutter but it would never close on her children before she died, or on the moon in whose light they came. On three sides of the cabin the snow at the end of the third day was over five feet deep and it was that deep on the roof. Time and again she tried to follow her old path to the river but always turned back, exhausted and weeping. Time and again she searched through the cabin for the axe. Then memory of it was gone too, and of the water pail, a d the path, the river. But for hunger pangs she would have lost all memory of food.

After three days of heavy snowfall the weather turned colder and for a week the cold steadily deepened, The northern winds came down. Sam would have said that at first they came in the opening phrases of an overture, or in a prodigal pouring of a dozen overtures out of the great northern ice caverns. They would take their time about it, these winds, for they had Beethoven’s patience, and his skill in devising variations on main themes and in building crescendo on crescendo. If Sam had been in the Wind River country, or here with Kate, where the winds were flinging their wild music headlong, he would have thought that the Creator was about to use all His instruments in a major symphony. Kate was barely aware of it. After the snow was up to her roof and her path was lost and the world all around her was winter white she was hardly conscious of the winds sculpturing magnificent snow dunes. At first they gave her only a little trouble. She daily pawed snow back from the sages, so that her children could kneel there if the moon came; and the first gentle winds played around the clearing she had made and sprayed it with snow gems but did not till it. After the opening chords of the first movement there were cold clear announcements from the horns, far in the north, and by morning of the third day of winds the first movement was in full flow. By noon the clearing round the plants had been blown level full, but neither in volume nor intensity was the wind more than a token of what it would be. It was a kind of molto adagio. The second movement would be of such percussive violence, with crescendo piled on crescendo, that her cabin would tremble and hum in the furious winter music, and her efforts to clear~the snow away from the plants would be only pathetic flurries in the cyclones of white that enveloped her.

But she persevered and waited for the moon. It rose, round and frozen and wintry wan, and appeared and disappeared as the winds hurled curtains of snow across its face. The next morning the temperature had fallen to ten below zero, and in the next few days it fell fast, as the second movement came in. The first had been a vast playful statement of themes, as the winds rearranged the snowface of the earth; and if Kate had had any interest in the marvels of a northern winter she could have looked in any direction and seen the buxom contoured sculpturing of the drifts, the great massifs and mesas of winter white, as Canada hurled its insane genius over the scene. It was a world of superlative purity and loveliness, but Kate could only sit, mute, shivering, half dead; or struggle desperately with the immense drifts that had been flung against the north wall and around the corners; or kneel and dig down to try to find her old snowpath. After the cold became more intense the snow surface was frozen in jewels, and diamond-ice hurled against her face stung like flame. The winds, now denied the joy of sculpturing, seemed to put aside the softer instruments, such as cello, viola, and flute, and to bring in the horns and trumpets and kettledrums. The second movement was allegro mounting swiftly to presto: though for Kate it was only wild winter shrieking, a sharp ear could have heard delightful variations on several themes, as the winter’s instruments poured their marvelous harmonies down the valleys and across the prairies and over the high white mountains. Everything in their path the winds played upon; and when they found an object such as Kate’s hut, or a naked stone ledge, or a flock of tall shuddering cottonwood trees, the voices would change in both intensity and pitch, and sometimes leap up and down an octave or two, as they modeled the themes to fit the curves and contours of the world. Or when wild and high, and climbing with shrill nerve-shattering energy to the highest notes, they struck the dimples of dells and ravines, the cellos and violas would take over, the harps and flutes, and small soft melodies were played in wind eddies under overhanging snow-laden plants and in the blind stone-walled canyons. Sam would have loved it; shouting with all his being to make himself heard, he would have played one of the themes over and over in different keys, as in the third overture to Leonore, and imagined that his melodies were small vocal pockets riding the winds. He would have gone singing and dancing over the earth, and returned, when weary, to eat four elk steaks and sit by the fire with his pipe and praise the Lord.

The fiercer harmonies and wilder movements, even the major themes, were not for the female, whose nest-budded instincts compelled her to seek the tranquil. By the end of the second movement, when the temperature had sunk to more than thirty below, Kate was so numbed and lifeless that she could barely move. Hunger pains would force her, perhaps once but never twice in twenty-four hours, to crawl out of the pile of bedding and over to the north wall, where in the gloom her cold hands would feel around and over and through the things there. There was nothing she could chew, except sugar or flour, and the mice and insects had destroyed most of those. There was dried elk and deer flesh. There were raisins in skin bags, frozen as hard as stones. She would take back to the bed a little fruit and a chunk of meat; she would lay them on the hard frozen earth and after crawling into the pile of bedding try to wrap it evenly all around her; and she would then feel over the ground until her hand came to the food. She would put three or four raisins into her mouth and for ten or fifteen minutes suck at them; the meat she could neither bite nor break, and so had to put her teeth and lips over an edge of it and try to warm and soften it and suck nourishment out of it. There was no hurry; she had all day and night for this one simple task.

When dark came and the moon was there, a wan candlelight in the winds, she would again crawl out of her bedding and feel around in the pile for the Bible. She could not walk out over or through the snow, for the wind with one thrust would have put her down; and so on hands and knees she crawled until she was about where she used to sit; and there she sat, almost  blown away, and stared hopefully for sight of her children. But they never came any more; the snow was deeper than the sages and there was no place for them. When her frozen body and numbed mind understood that they were not there she would turn over to hands and knees and crawl back to the bedding, and there she would sit, her ears and nose frozen, her eyes looking at the moon or down at the garden spot—back and forth through the long night, or as long as the moon was up.

Before the divine orchestra brought in its third movement Kate's right hand and both feet were so frozen that blood no longer flowed through them; and before that movement gave way to the fourth her legs were frozen to the knees. She semed not to know it. It was the seventh day of the winds and she no longer crawled over to the north wall. The temperature had fallen to more than forty below, and the instruments were now all percussive and in high keys. There was nothing the winds could do with the earth; the streams were frozen almost to their bottoms, the trees to their hearts; and in the white seulptured landscapes there was no change, no matter with what force the winds struck them. The winds were now in high piercing tones, thin and wild, and seemed to be preparing for the coda; and then, in a black evening, all the instruments built steadily to the 'drst fortissimo, and in deafening apotheosis came roaring past Kate’s door in such cyclones of sound that the sky literally was filled; and on top of it all, in frenzied explications, came the first crescendo, and on top of it the second, in such thunderous frozen magnificence that Kate was lost within the soul of it.

The next morning there was utter silence. Kate Bowden was dead. She sat there in her wraps by the door, frozen almost solid, her face toward the garden, her frozen left hand on the Bible, her frozen eyes looking up for the moon, in a temperature of fifty-two below. Two weeks later snow fell again, and for the next two months she was gently and softly buried. Snow drifted in over her and half filled the shack, until there was no sign of her, and no sign of garden or graves. Over the whole scene was spread the purest winter white.

34

ALMOST A THOUSAND miles south, where Sam had a tiny cabin back under a stone ledge, the temperature never fell to more than twenty below but he knew that it was much colder up north. He worried about Kate but told himself that she had been inured to the cold of northern winters and would be all right. He did not suspect that on the Musselshell it was so arctic that trees split open half their length, old deer, elk, and antelope frozen as hard as stone dotted the white foothills, old buffalo bulls had been blown down and covered over, and the feeblest of the coyotes and wolves had succumbed to the northern winds. It had been a good winter for Sam; the extreme cold had produced thicker fur and when spring came he had three packs of beaver, otter, fox, and mink. On arriving at his chosen spot he had moved fast to lay in a pile of wood by a ledge, and several hundred pounds of elk flesh; and each evening after supper he had honed his skinning knives, filled his pipe, warmed a spot for his bed, and slept as cozily as the grizzly in its depth of fat and fur.

It was May before he could beat a path out of the mountains. It was the twentieth of May before he reached the Laramie post. Charley was in from the Powder, Cy from Lightning Creek, Bill from the Tetons, George from the Hoback, Hank from the Bighorns, and McNees from the upper Sweetwater. They had no news except a rumor that Abe Jackson had died of his wounds, and that the nation seemed to be moving toward a war over slavery. As for the past winter, it was the worst, Bill said, since Adam was kicked naked out of Eden and went off alone in the cold. He had wished he had a squaw, for he still loved the wimmins, he shorely did. He guessed he was getting old, for he sometimes felt queersome and had more pains than a politician had tricks. Looking in the mirror of a pool, he had seen gray in his hair and beard; and one day he had tired at an elk standing broadside at two hundred yards and hadn’t even scairt the beast. "I didden even raise a hair, I shorely didden." George said he spected they should all be gittin a fambly and settlin down. Nice Californy weather and kids in the dooryard.

George couldn’t have a child without help, Bill said. "He muss be as old as I am." Bill was thirty-seven and George was forty-two.

Jist the same, George said, a winter like the last one put cricks in a man’s jints. Why, up in them mountains the wind like to blowed theirselves offen the earth.

"Reckon the woman on the Mussel is all right?" Bill asked.

"Hope so," Sam said. He aimed to git up there soon.

Sam bought generously for Kate. There was a lot more to buy than there had been when he came west: besides raisins there now were dried apples and peaches, as well as peanuts and hard candy, plenty of salt bacon, dried fish, rice, navy beans, prunes, honey. He bought a few pounds of each, and thread and needles and cloth, moccasins, blankets, flower seeds, a short shovel, and then looked round him to see what else he could take to her.

On leaving the post he did not for the first time in his years out west head north through Crow country. He was not running from trouble but he was not looking for it. He did not want to kill any more young damn fools bent on taking his scalp. After a hundred and fifty miles he had no doubt that he had been seen by Crows but none had taken his trail. Had they been cowed by the destruction of Elk Horns and his band, or had the dreadful winter subdued them? Whatever the reason, not a single warrior tried to ambush him or creep up on him during the long ride through the western part of their lands. Near the junction of the Bighorn with the Little Bighorn, not far from the spot where a general named Custer would make his last stand, he saw the fires of a war party that had passed; but when he stood on the bank of the Yellowstone, only fifty miles from the Musselshell, he could say that he had not seen a redman in five hundred miles.

He knew that there was a meaning in this and he felt that it boded no good. Had the Crows made a pact with the Blackfeet that would allow them to capture him again? This thought so enraged him that, sitting on a hilltop, he filled his pipe and looked south and east at Crowland, and north and northwest to the Blackfeet. He guessed that Elk Horns, his skull healed over and as bald and white as Dan’s, would be looking for him. As a gesture of contempt, both for himself and for the chief, Sam decided to headlong north across the Musselshell and right into Blackfeet land. He would then approach Kate from the west, over the death trail where, early dead and deaf and blind, he had staggered on and on. It was in the foothills that he saw something that stopped him: a skin tepee in an aspen grove. Retreating, he hid his horses and then warily approached, rifle cocked. On reaching the tent he saw that its door flap had been sewed together with buckskin thread and that the hems of the skin had been staked to the earth all the way around. After a few moments of trying to look inside he came to himself with a violent start, and quickly looking round him, said aloud, "Sam Minard, this is jist the way ye were when Elk Horns took you!" Leaving the grove, he scouted the area in all directions but found no human prints, new or old.

Though he felt that he was desecrating a holiness he pulled three stakes and on his belly crawled under the loosened skin, rifle in hand, Unable to see anything inside, he propped the edge of the tent up, to let daylight in, and then stood and stared for a full minute. On a bed of lodgepoles two feet above the earth lay a dead warrior in full regalia, his shield of buffalo hide across his loins, his tobacco pipe, adorned with eagle feathers, across his right arm, and his medicine bag on his chest over his heart. At the head of the bed, kneeling, was a woman in what looked like an attitude of prayer. Sam knew that she was the man’s wife. After carefully studying her position he guessed that she had knelt there and frozen to death. He sensed that the man was Elk Horns and he guessed that he had killed himself because his people had cast him out. Sam was deeply moved by the scene. He did not want to touch anything here, but because he had to know whether this man was the chief he gently moved her heavy hair back until he could see a part of the skull. What beautiful devotion in a wife! What a poem, what a symphony this picture before him was! The chief had been his deadly enemy but he must have had remarkable virtues to have won from a woman such love as this. Softly he-put the hair back over the skull and the face. The odor of human decay had turned him sick; dropping to hands and knees and grasping his rifle, he crawled under the tent and looked around him before rising to his feet.

He guessed he had better be going. As he rode east it occurred to him that he and the mountain men had avenged not only his own humiliation but also the massacre of Kate’s family, if it could be said, in earth or heaven, that a wrong so monstrous could be avenged. If Lotus had lived would she have loved him with such holiness that she would have covered his shame with her hair, and have knelt by him and died in the bitter cold? All the mountain men had been impressed by the loyalty of red women to their husbands. They were wildcats in their jealous furies, and they often killed, when they could, the adulterous husband; but they would accept floggings and brutalities that would drive white wives from the door. Covering the unspeakable shame of a scalped head with their own hair, they would freeze to death by the man they loved.

After crossing the Musselshell, Sam observed that winter had been in no hurry to depart. It was June, but on the north flank of every hill was a snowbank, molded to the hill’s contours and dappled with wind dust. No river flowers were yet in bloom; he wondered if Kate’s would be. He had with him twenty different kinds of wild-flower seed—enough, he expected, to sow an acre of prairie. Kate might not use them but she would be happy to have them: when building a nest, a woman, like a bird, was happiest when she had more materials than she could use. Except for the willows and shrubs the plant life hadn’t put on its spring dress yet; and the river grasses were barely looking out of the earth. Everywhere were signs that the Canadian winds had been here. Cottonwood trees riven by frost now stood with their bellies open; and aspens had been snapped off by the winds or torn from the earth.

When he came to the hill where he had always paused to look at the shack and the garden he cried aloud, "My God!" and some part of him died. He saw it instantly and knew it all. He saw the second cairn of stones, standing close by the one he had built, and he knew that Kate was dead. The grief that choked and blinded him would have been no more intense if he had looked at the grave of his mother. The sky had darkened, the earth had taken on a deeper quiet. It was all desolation now: there were no flowers—there was only an old shack with a part of its roof fallen in, and two mounds of stones. Dismounting, he dropped the reins, and rifle in hand, approached on foot.

The sage plants still lived and for a few moments he looked at them. Then he looked at the second cairn, observing how the stones had been laid, for his first thought was that a mountain man had passed this way. He had found Kate frozen to death. But he knew it was not that. Something had caught his gaze and he now circled the two cairns and looked down at the sage, most of which had been trampled and broken, and went to the shack to peer in. The pile of filthy bedding was still by the door. By the north wall with earth from the roof spilled on it was the heap of utensils and food. Stepping across the bedding, he went over and knelt to examine it. He found an old knife but no axe. Under the bedding was the rifle.