Текст книги "Mountain Man"

Автор книги: Vardis Fisher

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To impress his wife with the way thousands of immigrants were pushing into the Western lands, to overrun the homes of the red people, Sam had wanted to show a few landmarks, such as Independence Rock in the lovely valley of the Sweetwater, a river that at first was not Eau Douce but Eau Sucrée, because a packload of sugar had been lost in it. The great granite table was two thousand feet long and almost two hundred feet high, and would eventually have, Sam supposed, at least a hundred thousand Mormon names chiseled on its top, eighty thousand of whom would be polygamous wives. But he had decided to go far west of the Rock, for he was on his way to Bridger’s post. He had wanted to show her Scotts Bluff, after telling her the story of another brave man.

A party of trappers coming down the Platte had capsized their canoe and lost practically all their supplies, including their powder. Defenseless in enemy land, they had given way to panic. One of them, a man named Scott, had become too ill to walk, and the others,  retending they were only going over the hills to find food for him, abandoned him on the river bank. What had been his thoughts after he realized the cowards had deserted him? Even after the fleeing party had overtaken an armed group of whitemen they did not mention the sick man they had left to die, but said that Scott had died and they had buried him. The next year some of the men in that armed group came back up the river and found the skeleton. It was plain to them that Scott had crawled on his hands and knees for more than forty miles, in a pathetic and desperate effort to overtake the cowards who had left him. Hugh Glass had crawled farther than that, with maggots swarming in his wounds—digging in the earth for roots, chewing on old bones, all the way to Fort Kiowa on the Missouri, his soul burning on the one thought of vengeance. Would Sam Minard ever dedicate his life to vengeance? He could see no likelihood of that, but he was not looking very clearly into the future.

When they came to the Oregon Trail Sam halted for an hour and looked east and west. Most of the Indian tribes now believed that before long swarming masses of humanity would overflow this magnificent land and drive the red people from their homes. Did they also foresee that hundreds of beautiful rivers and creeks would be polluted? Now a man could lie on his belly and drink the pure waters of any of them, except those in alkali wastes, like the Humboldt; but there were no pure waters where man pushed up his cities and scattered his filth. What an unsightly country it would all be someday!—with its unplanned mushrooming cities, the stink and belching dark of thousands of smokestacks, the paralyzing poisons of sewers and clutter of vast junkyards. He guessed the few men who needed space and freedom as they needed air would move north to Canada; and again north, until on the whole earth there would be no broad clean land to go to, but only the litter and stench and ugliness that the swarming billions would make of the earth.

Going over to the Trail, he looked curiously at the wheel ruts. Within the past week a wagon train had squealed and churned along these ruts, with dusty unclean women clutching their whimpering children under the canvas tops, their eyes staring past the bent backs of the drivers at the country ahead. Week after week and mile after mile they pushed on and on. Arriving at Bridger’s post on Black’s Fork of Green River, Sam learned that the Mormons hadn’t come, and was feeling relief when Bridger said, "They kallate next spring. They’re on the Meesouri now, ole Brigham and his thousan wives, holed up fer the winter."

"All the Mormons?"

"The hull shittaree, thousans and thousans."

"Going where?"

"Only God and Brigham knows.”

"And all with more than one wife?"

Look alive, said Jim; had any but the bosses had more than one, in the Bible or anywhere? Brigham, they said, had fifty mebbe; the one next to him mebbe forty-five, and the next forty, and so on down to the corporal, who mebbe had two. A man could never tell when Jim Bridger was serious.

That was a fine filly Sam had, he said, his strange eyes (they looked gray but flecked with tiny pieces of bright steel) sizing up Lotus. At this post Sam bought on credit, against next spring’s beaver packs. He bought a fast horse for his wife; and a good rifle and a Bowie, and plenty of powder and ball, as well as cooking utensils, a half dozen three-point blankets, awls, needles, and thread; for he would be away trapping and she would be making leather clothing for the three of them.

"Ya mean ya intend ta leave her alone?" asked Jim, narrowing his eyes at Sam.

"In the cabin on the Little Snake," Sam said.

"All winter?"

"She’ll have a fast horse," Sam said. "She shoots well. Besides, no red varmints ever go away down there.”

How did Sam know he hadn’t been watched in his journey all the way south? How did he know how many red devils had smelled along his tracks? By God, he would think it over, Jim said; you never could tell where the red varmints would show up, or when. After Sam was ready to go, and Jim had told him to watch his topknot, Jim said again, "You better think it over." The words troubled Sam, for he knew that in all the West there was no man more Indian-wise than Jim Bridger. But he looked at his wife and thought, she’ll be all right.

With Lotus on her new pony, a strong spirited sorrel with a blazed face, and with two laden packhorses, Sam headed into the southeast. It was desolate country, with mountains in the far distance. It was yonder on a branch of the Yampah, that Henry Fraeb and Jim Bridger had built a post; and it had been there only five or six years ago that Henry and four of his men had been killed in a battle with the Sioux. Possibly Jim had this battle in mind when he told Sam to think it over. Sam had been twice to the Uintahs to trap; so far as he knew, no Indians ever came as far south as the Little Snake in the wintertime.

When they came close to the mountains Sam and Lotus killed four deer, jerked the flesh and rode on. He had seen his wife looking back now and then, back into the long misty distance out of which they had come. Was she homesick for her people? Did she wonder why her man came so far to find trapping? He had tried to explain it to her: there was good trapping in areas up north but it was staked out by the older men. There was a cabin away down there, plenty of game within rifle reach, and an abundance of food for her horse. In the cabin she could be warm and safe and busy with her needles. Little Snake country was almost a no man’s land: west beyond the mountains were the friendly Eutaws; northwest were the Snakes, but far away. The Blackfeet were to hell and gone a thousand miles up north, the Crows, Cheyennes, Comanches, and Arapahoes all far away. A war party from any of these tribes might kill her for her horse and weapons but he was sure that none would come away down south after the heavy snows fell. And he was sure that no scouts had seen them on their long ride down. Trapping in the Uintahs would be very good and fast; he might come out with five packs, even six. Back in there he’d not have to watch for enemies day and night, and so could get a lot done. Lotus had said she wanted to go with him and help him but he felt that he ought to be firm; as a husband he’d be no better than a Digger if he took a pregnant wife to the high mountain meadows and subzero cold, with no place for a bed but the earth under a fir tree. He was deep in debt now; he had a wife and would soon have a child. It was time to strap on his medicine bag and go.

The cabin to which he took Lotus was about like the one he had built on the Musselshell. On the wind side of it he now put up a small corral and a storm shelter for her pony; with her help he gathered a lot of meadow grass for the horse and this he piled against the cabin where the coldest winds would strike. He dragged in a lot of firewood. Every day he gave her lessons in firing her gun, and before long she could ride into the hills and within two hours bring back a deer. They jerked enough meat to feed her until the following May. He told her, over and over, never to go far from the cabin after the deep snows came. A piece of chinking in a wall he shaped so that she could remove it in an instant, and thrust her rilfe barrel hrough. Again and again he pointed to the mountains in the west and said he would be there. working hard in every daylight hour and until long after dark. He would be thinking of her all day and dreaming of her all night.

After a week or two at the cabin he learned that she was pregnant; he put her right cheek against his beating heart and held her close. God Almighty, now he would have a son, to ride the swiftest and shoot the straightest of any man in the mountains! When would it be born? He counted off the months: in May perhaps, or June: somewhere along there. This night he held her nightlong and the next day he looked round him for other things to do, to make her cozy and safe. Possibly in sunny weather she would like to sit by the doorway and look into the west where he would be: so he brought a piece of thick log for her to sit on. They were sitting on it one evening when, abruptly, she rose and sat on his lap and looked steadily and gravely into his eyes. Her gaze was so searching that he was troubled. Did she think he intended to abandon her? Surrendering to a great gush of tenderness that poured through him and warmed him all over, he drew her close and murmured promises and endearments in her ear. "I will never leave you," he said. "Not in all the years of my life—never, never. I will come back," he said over and over. He would return with many packs of fine pelts, so that next summer they could pay their debt and have money to buy things for the following winter, and for their son. In all the languages he knew he told her that rather than doubt his return she should doubt that the sun would rise or the snows fall. He framed her face and kissed her forehead, eyelids, cheeks, lips, and the leather jacket over her breasts. Looking into her eyes, he said, "I love you, I need you, I will never leave you." With a quick impulsive movement she touched her lips to the point of his nose and said, "I love you." His heart leapt. Had he, then, after all, won this strange girl from a strange people? He said he wanted to take with him a lock of her hair, and from the back of her head, above the nape, he took a lock, and kissed it and held it to his lips. He stretched it out and thought it two feet long; her hair when down hung below her waist. Round and round a foreiinger he wound the hair, and kissed it, and pressed it to her lips; and then tucked it away under his leather shirt. She had watched him as though a little astonished. Had an Indian husband anywhere in the world ever taken a lock of his woman’s hair, to cherish through a long lonely winter?

He told himself a thousand times that she would be all right while he was away. Indian women, unlike the white, did not have to have doctors and nurses and a ton of medicines. The child would not be born before his return. She would be all right. He would come riding in from the mountains with both packhorses loaded with pelts from their manes to their tails. The cabin had no windows; he had fixed the door so that she could bar it; and he told her over and over, a dozen times, always to carry the knife in her belt, a revolver at her waist, and keep her rifle within reach. He had told her what the woman on the Musselshell had done with an axe. Lotus had a good axe and she must keep it always just inside her door. He thought it would be safe for her to fire her gun any time the wind was from the north; but she had plenty of jerked meat, and flour, dried fruits, roots, coffee, sugar; she had plenty of wood, plenty of bedding, and more than enough skins to keep her busy. The nearest Indian was two hundred miles away. She would be all right.

Nevertheless, during his last days and nights with her he did not act like a husband who thought his wife would be all right. Her courage had deeply touched him: hardly more than a child, and a long way from her people, she had given him no sign at all that she was afraid. He had also been moved when, seeing her at last for the remarkable person she was, he understood what an ordeal it must have been for her to go with him. He would then take her to his lap and hold her, and debate with himself whether she should go with him or stay here. But then he would see her seven or eight months pregnant in the high cold mountains, and riding a horse out not long before her child would come; he would see her with no roof over her, alone all day while he walked miles and miles on his traplines; and he would convince himself again that it would be best for her to remain here. Trying to follow him from trap to trap, she would wear herself out. It would be bad for the child. She might become sick .... He was still debating the matter back and forth when the November morning came that he had set for his departure. It was snowing, a deep quiet storm, in which nothing was visible but the millions of swirling flakes as big as dollars. He saddled his stud and the packhorses and hitched them to the corral. He then went to his wife, who had been standing in the doorway, looking at him and at the storm into which he would disappear. There was no sign of mountains and river now.

He shook snow off his leather coat, slapped across his belly and thighs, and said the Almighty had more ways of making the earth lovely than mortal man could have thought of. He was trying to be cheerful but he felt the loneliest he had ever felt since saying good-bye to his people. He stood by her and together they looked up at the marvelous dusk of flakes. Then he took her in his arms and kissed over her hair and face; bent to kiss the leather over her belly; and held her close for a full five minutes.

Then suddenly in an instant he took his farewell, as he had taken it from his people, and was gone. He was on his stallion, with the packline in hand, riding away into the snows. Lotus stood looking after him as long as he was in sight, and long after he was gone. For more than an hour she stood there, looking into the gloom. Was she thinking that he had abandoned her, in this strange lonely land almost a thousand miles from her people—that she ought to leap on her pony and head north, to the Bitterroots and home? Whatever she was thinking or feeling, there was little sign of it in her lovely face. A white girl of her age might have broken down and run crying after her man; this girl, after looking for an hour at the gloom into which her husband had vanished, went to the corral to hear the breathing of her pony. She glanced down at the knife in her belt, the revolver at her waist; and then with a start thought of her rifle and hastened into the cabin to get it. She carefully examined the priming. She looked up the river, the direction from which her enemies would come, if they came. She then crawled between two poles and went over to her horse, and leaning the rifle against her with the stock between her feet, she looked at the pony’s quiet eyes. She put her right hand under its jaw and to its right cheek, and her right cheek to its left cheek, and stood there while the storm turned her and the pony and the cabin and everything a pure mountain-winter white.

PART TWO

KATE

11

IT WAS LATE April in 1847 when Sam Minard came down from the mountains. Peltwise, he had had a full winter; he had found more top-quality beaver in one group of streams than he had ever found before. From the first week of his arrival he had trapped but his finest pelts had been taken in February and March. He had trapped all day long, every day of the month, and even in nighttime when the moon was full. Of first-class pelts, called a plus. and pronounced by the mountain men plew, he had two and a half packs; of inferior pelts he had almost three packs: and be had about fifty otter.

A typical day for him had run like this. At daylight he had stirred in his blankets and robes. back under the low branches of a pine, and had crawled out until he could stand. He came out of bed fully clothed. He had had no such feasts as he had had on the journey with his wife; his meat was jerked venison, lean elk, beaver tail. muskrat together with flour and coffee.  Sometimes a whole week passed with no fire. He was simply too busy. Working over the graining blocks and stretching frames took a lot of time. Every day he had to move his horses to spots where they could find forage—either along streams or in mountain meadows, where they could paw down through three or four feet of snow to old grasses. He spent hundreds of hours at the tiresome and painstaking task of dubbing—that is, of removing with pieces. of sharpened elkhorn or obsidian the fat, flesh, and blood from the pelts. He walked hundreds of miles back and forth on the streams. setting his traps and bringing the pelts in. Once in a while he made a fire and roasted a couple of beaver tails and made a pot of coffee. He took time to fill his pipe now and then. He had thought a great deal about his wife and had worried about her: he had had dreams about her that troubled him. As spring drew near his worry became so chronic that he almost burst from the mountains to learn if she was all right.

When at last he fought his way out, along streams, over elk snowpaths, or over paths which he had to break for his beasts, he tried to think of something at the posts which he could buy for her. If she was like most Indian women she would want brightly colored cloths, beads, ornaments, and ribbons for her hair; he hoped she would prefer a handsome saddle, with bridle and trimmings to match. He had a picture of her dressed like a Crow warrior in the finest embroidered buckskin, with long tassels and fringes, and a gorgeous headdress, with its mass of feathers floating behind her in the wind. Their son would be in a saddle on her back, standing up, his bright fearless eyes fixed with astonishment on everything he passed. By the time he was four or five he would have his own pony and would learn to ride like a Crow; and he would have his own saddle, the finest, and his own buckskin clothing, with the prettiest beadwork the squaws could make. Sam liked to think of his son riding like a Crow not only because the Crows were the best horsemen in the world; they made excellent weapons and were the most formidable fighters on the plains. At leatherwork and embroidery there were no women to match the Absaroka—that is what the stupid French called them, the gens des corbeaux, the Absaroka, the Sparrowhawk people. The Crow warriors were so brave that they went boldly against any people who invaded their lands, including their ancient enemies, the Blackfeet; and they seemed to feel friendly toward the whitemen because the whitemen also loved to slaughter the ferocious Bloods and Piegans. The Crow nation boasted that it had never killed a white person or a friend of the white people; Sam was thinking of this boast as he followed the windbreaks down the canyons.

He was to think afterward that he had had a sense of it miles before he reached the cabin. He called it his enemy-sense. His enemy-sense would have prompted him in any case to make a wary approach. As mountain man and fatalist he had known all winter that his wife might be killed while he was away; that she could be killed—and indeed that he might be killed, by man or beast. Riding toward her, he told himself that he might be ambushed for the pelts he carried; there developed in him a feeling that Indians had been through this country since he rode away. His guard was up, his senses were alert, and a nausea of loss and loneliness was sinking from his mind down through him, when a mile from the cabin he drew on the reins and then sat, feeling. He didn’t like it at all. He secured his beasts in an aspen thicket and went softly forward on moccasined feet, the rifle barrel across his left arm. On a hill above the river he came within sight of the cabin. There, well-hidden, he peered out, and held his breath. He could see the corral but no sign of the pony; the cabin, with its door wide open, but no sign of his wife. He was beginning to feel desperately ill. He felt that she was not there, and if she was not there he prayed to God that she had gone back to her people. If she was a red warrior’s captive she was now a slave in some village, beaten and cursed by the old shrews of the tribe. If she was a prisoner he would find her, if it took all the years of his life....

His gaze searched the aspen hillside that sloped down to the cabin from the east; and the river bottomlands to the south and the north. He looked everywhere for a snowtrail. Convinced at last that his wife was not there, and with grief and rage rising in a hot flood all through him, he went forward, but instead of approaching directly from the west he flanked the cabin and came in from the east, a soundless stalker among the trees. When a hundred yards from the cabin he paused and tried to feel the situation. He prayed that she was in the cabin and alive but logic told him that Indians were more likely to be there, waiting for him. He went forward again, until he came to the rear wall, and put an ear to a seam between logs and listened. Then, his rifle cocked, his finger on the trigger, his knife loosened in its sheath, he slipped around a corner and along the north wall. He was peering round the northwest corner, for a glimpse of the doorway, when with a start that shook him clear to his feet he saw the objects before him.

In an instant of recognition that convulsed him worse than illness or nightmare could have done Sam knew what had happened. He was holding his breath. He felt faint. There before the open door and scattered roundabout were the bones of his wife. Without moving, and without feeling now, for he had been completely numbed, he looked at them and all. around them for perhaps five long minutes. He saw bones that had been picked clean by crows and magpies; and when he advanced, at last, he saw, a hundred feet distant, the skull. The scalp had been so completely taken that there was only a little hair across the nape. He went forward until he could look down, and then stared at the eye sockets, at the holes that were  the ears, at the marks of hatchet or knife in the bone of the skull. Then swiftly he entered the cabin. There was nothing in it. The murderers had taken everything.

Still drawing only half breaths and still feeling faint, he knelt among the bones and saw what until this moment he had missed. As gently as if reaching for a butterfly he picked up an  object, set his rifle by the wall, and laid the object across a palm. It was the skull of a baby. He now saw, on looking round, that scattered among his wife’s bones were the bones of his child. He took up one after another to look at them. His first glance had told him that his wife had been dead no more than ten days or two weeks. Sick with grief and remorse, he was telling himself, over and over, that if he had come in two weeks ago she would now be alive: she had been sitting there, on the log he had placed for her; the dear faithful thing had been looking across the river and into the west, for sign of his coming; she had been sewing leather clothing, looking and sewing, sewing and looking. Her rifle had stood by the wall at her left; her knife was in its sheath and the revolver at her waist; and the pony staked on the river bottom had surely been out of sight, or it would have given an alarm. She had been so intent on trying to see him, or on pushing the needle through leather, that she had not heard the soft footfalls; and around the corner had come a red killer and he had been above her before she sensed his presence. With one blow he had almost severed her head low on the neck. He had scalped her and stripped her of everything she had on; and she had lain there, dead, with the baby. his son, kicking and dying inside her.

Lord God Almighty, this vengeance would be his! His deeply tanned face drained to a sickly gray, he looked north and northeast, knowing that the killer had had to come in that way. In a few minutes he would find a sign of him and he would know from what tribe he had come.

Sam gathered every bone he could find—a few had been dragged fifty yards or more from the cabin; and he then sat on the earth, and putting them all in his lap, looked down at them. After a few minutes he knew that his eyes had blurred. He had not known that tears were so hot. He could recall no moment from all his years when he had wept. He pressed the skull of Lotus to one cheek, his son’s to the other, and sat, trying to think of what he should do. But he knew what he would do.

When at last he gently put the bones aside and rose to his feet he was dizzy with rage so blindly murderous that he reached for his rifle and failed to find it. He struck at his eyes but they were clogged with grief. Never before in his life had he felt such dreadful pain and loss and loneliness. He stood, trying to see, and began to wipe at his eyes; and when he could see, and had the rifle in his grasp, he stood still, letting his fury grow, until it filled his whole frame and made him ache to be on his way. As he sensed more deeply his loss and the fantastic cowardice of the killer he could think only of vengeance. The years before him became as clear as they would have been if he had had a time-map; but frst he had to gather what remained of his wife and child, and then search the area to determine which tribe was guilty.

While walking here and there, around the cabin, over to the river and back, he realized that there had been a light snowfall since his family was slain. Seeing a mark like a shadow, he would reach into the snow and bring up another bone. From the thicket he brought his beasts and took from a packhorse a blanket; within this he put the bones, and wrapped and tied the bundle, and made it secure behind his saddle. He found a needle that Lotus had dropped. Had she been making a jacket for him, a shirt, or moccasins, or something for the child, at the moment the tomahawk fell across her neck?

From what tribe had the killer come? Sam thought he must be from the Comanches, the ferocious varmints who had cut Jed Smith down with knives and hatchets. Round and round the cabin he went, inside and out, sniffing, but he could detect no Indian odor; nor could he find any sign in the cabin or around it. So he took their snowtrail up the river, and at the junction of the Little Snake with the Yampah he sat on his horse and looked round him. From this point the path went up the Snake. He hardly knew what to make of it: if it had been the Comanches they would have struck off to the east, south of Battle Mountain. He kallated it was not the Comanches after all.

He knew it was not when, after a journey of two days up the river, he came to an Indian campsite that had been protected by heavy trees from the recent storm. It was on a U-bend of the stream, and on three sides it had such dense windbreak and snowbreak that the ashes of their tire had been undisturbed by wind and storm. A few moccasin tracks were in the clay under a high bank. Sam did not know the moccasin print of the Comanche but he knew that of the Crow as well as he knew his own. These prints seemed to have been made by Crows but this he found so incredible that he studied them with extreme care and searched round them for corroborating evidence. There could be no doubt of it: the redmen who had camped here had been Crows!—the Crows, who boasted that they had never harmed a whiteman, or his friend!—the Crows, who with the mountain men waged war against the Blackfeet. Sam was remembering now that for two or three hundred miles he had ridden with Lotus through Crow country; perhaps the one who had tried to steal his Bowie had trailed him; or perhaps it had been a war party of foolhardy youngsters, eager to count a coup and kill. Because there had been no trace of his snowpath of last November and no sign of him anywhere they had not known where to look for him, and so had slain his wife and fled with her horse, weapons, bedding, and food. One of them had her scalp, and would have it, until Sam Minard found him and cut him wide open, and flung his cowardly liver to the wolves. He would find that killer before he died, so help him, God!

Over on his right, as he took his way up the river, were mountains, with peaks that rose eleven thousand feet above the sea. As he approached the mountains Sam studied their snowy summits and the forests blanketed with white, wondering how high up those flanks he could climb; for he wanted to swear an oath of vengeance, somewhere high above the earth. The snow up there in the pale sky haze might be fifteen feet deep but on the north side it ought to hold him. He would hide his beasts and fur packs in the foothills, and with his rifle and a little food he would climb as high as he could.

From the base of the peaks it was only a few thousand feet to their summits but it might take a man a week to get there. While wondering if he should be so romantic and foolish Sam thought of the lovely flowers that would now be blooming on the southern slopes, below the snowline. He would climb at least that far. And when at last he stood far up, in a night world, silent but for the winds, with the scent of flowers around him, he held fragrant bloom to his face, remembering the hours when he had put lupine and columbines and roses in her hair, and hung a mantle of flowers from her shoulders. What a lovely thing she had been when her eyes looked out from the wreath that framed her face and her lips smiled!

Half the night he waited for the golden lamp to rise out of the gray murk of the east. He was ready when his moment came. Standing on a crag of wind-swept precipice, his rifle at his left side, he looked up at the stars and the blue-gray of the first morning. When half the golden lamp was in sight he spoke. He asked the Almighty Father to look down on him in his trouble and his grief. Never in his life had he raised a hand against the Crow people, but had been their friend, yet when he was gone they came like wolves in the night to kill his wife and child.