Follow the Free Wind

by Leigh Brackett

  Carson made an emphatic gesture. “Let the Indians have him. Save us all a lot of trouble.”

  Beckwourth nodded. He did not look at Jim again. He went to the desk and took a sheet of paper and a pen and began to write.

  An hour later, with a full meal in him and a borrowed coat on his back, Jim mounted the old brown nag provided for him and rode out of the stableyard. Black clouds boiled and raced across the moon but it had not yet begun to rain. Jim rode out slowly past the house, knowing that this might very well be the last time he would see it.

  He saw Beckwourth standing on the terrace.

  “Jim!”

  He rode over. The lights were out in the study but the moon showed bright for a moment and Jim could see that Beckwourth stood with his legs braced wide apart and that he held a long dark object in his hand.

  “You’ll need this,” he said, and threw the object to Jim, who caught it. It was a rifle, cold and heavy, beautiful in his grasp.

  He started to say thanks, and Beckwourth spoke again, his voice thick and stumbling but with a sound in it that Jim had never heard before.

  “You’ll need more than that. Your skin won’t be any lighter or the men any kinder in the Rockies than they are here.”

  The moon went behind a cloud. Out of the pitch dark Beckwourth said, “Good luck, Jim.” Jim blinked and peered. The terrace was empty. A gust of wind blew the door of the study in and out on its hinges and behind it the room was black and still.

  Jim sat for a moment, stupidly, with the rifle weighing in his hands and a shaken feeling inside him. Softly, gently, it began to rain, and Jim laid the rifle across the saddle in front of him and covered it with the skirts of his coat.

  The hoofs of the old nag clip-clopped out of the drive and into the deepening mud of the road, pounding steadily, heading west.

  FOUR

  They walked together across the prairie, Jim Beckwourth and Dave Richards, somewhere west of the Loup Fork of the Platte. It had taken them a little over a year to get this far. Ashley had had his troubles and the Rockies were still far beyond the horizon. They walked in vast openness, in the flat treeless land with the wind blowing clear across it, a November wind that bit freezing into their flesh.

  “I still say the General’s a bad-fated man,” Jim muttered, “and mostly because he don’t know what he’s doing.”

  The sky, naked and enormous, flowed with a tremendous millrace of gray cloud. There was a thin skift of snow underfoot. The wind picked it up and tossed it in powdery whirls. Brittle grasses rattled together with a dry sound, and in that sound Jim could hear the rattling of his own bones.

  “You wanted to be free,” Rich said. “You are. Free to starve, free to get your tail froze off, free to die. It’s all of a piece. If you don’t like it, go back to your boss-man.”

  “Way I hear you bitching, you don’t like it much yourself.”

  “I like to bitch. I just don’t like to be bitched at.” The statement was not meant to be funny. Rich did not stand hardship well. The humor turned sour in him, making his tongue longer and sharper than ever. What was more, he hadn’t had to speak for Jim at all as it turned out. Ashley was in such need of a blacksmith he didn’t even ask Jim if he was a runaway. So not even that much of Rich’s debt had been paid off, and he didn’t like it. Sometimes he acted as though Jim had worked some kind of a plot against him just to make him unhappy, and the more he acted that way the more Jim took pleasure in having Rich in his debt.

  “You won’t get rid of me that easy,” Jim said.

  “I know,” said Rich in a tone of weary disgust. “You’re going to prove you’re as good a man as I am if it kills both of us.”

  “Better,” said Jim.

  Rich looked at him stonily. “General’s orders were to spread out. Go bring in a buffalo.”

  “I might do just that,” Jim said.

  He walked away from Rich, breasting one of those deceitful slopes that appeared level until you started to climb it. Rich did not look after him. It seemed to Jim that neither one of them was really moving, but after a while he noticed over his shoulder that the small figure in the tattered capote had dwindled by about half. The next time he looked it was gone.

  The slope was still ahead of him. So was the wind. The free wind, the prairie wind, bitter cold, bitter hot, the eternally lashing flail of the Lord, summer, winter, spring, and fall. The snow was like sand. It stung his eyeballs. He bent his head, watching his feet plod one after the other. They were wrapped in strips of blanket under the moccasins and the moccasins were leather rags tied together with whangs off the fringe of his hunting shirt. He was running out of fringe.

  At the top of the slope there was nothing but another slope going down, and beyond that a slope going up again. No sign of game. There was never a sign of game. The downslope at least was easier. Coming up, Jim had leaned forward with the weight of his rifle. Now he leaned back against it. His eyes were unnaturally bright, the eye sockets deep sunk, the cheeks hollow, the shoulders hunched, the belly tucked up tight under the ribs. For days he and Ashley and Dave Richards and thirty-one others had been marching west on half a pint of flour each a day, mixed with water to make a gummy gruel. The diet did not put fat on a man.

  “Does the General mess up one more time—” Jim muttered, reeling down the slope. In the trough there was a boulder and he sat on it. His head was ringing. “One more time and I will quit,” he said, “if they have to dig me up to do it.”

  The ringing in his head was a voice, thin and far off. His father’s voice? What are you doing, Jim? it asked, and he answered I am running after Pawnees. That’s the mainest thing you do for the General, that and starve.

  The voice asked Why? why? why?, trailing off thin like the whine of a ricochet ball.

  Why? said Jim. Well, that’s a funny thing. The General’s a big important man. He’s a gentleman, and he knows his position and he knows my place, but he don’t know how to plan things very well. Food and horses now, one or the other seems to always give out before he figured, and then he says It’s all right boys, the Pawnees have food and horses, we’ll buy from them. Only the Pawnees are never there. Seems every year they move from their summering ground to their wintering ground, and the General disremembers when. This time it’s food. Last year it was horses and Mose Harris and me walked three hundred miles in ten days to buy more from the Pawnees, and then walked back again.

  The boulder was icy. The cold was seeping up into his body, numbing his bowels, reaching for his heart. Jim stood up in sudden panic, shaking his head to drive away the distant voice. Let your mind wander too far and your friends would find you frozen stiff. If they bothered to find you at all. He started to climb the slope ahead.

  It was a thousand miles long and he knew he would never make it. He had been close to dying before, when he aid Harris walked the three hundred miles back from the deserted Pawnee village without food, through a country bare of game. He thought this time he was closer to it, perhaps because this time they had come farther and there was no going back. Winter was closing in and their only hope was to find help ahead. Meanwhile, the migrating Pawnees they were trying so desperately to catch up with had swept the country like a big broom, eating as they went, and leaving nothing for those who came after them.

  Jim dragged on, one step after another, and it occurred to him to wonder why.

  Well, a man didn’t want to die. But that wasn’t the only choice. The camp was hidden in a dip of the prairie but he knew it was there, with the warmth of a fire and the huddled companionship of other human beings. There was no reason he couldn’t go back to it and sit down and wait and let somebody else find game if they could. Plenty of the others were doing it.

  Except that, as he had just said to Rich, he had something to prove. Jim’s father was right, Jim’s skin was no lighter and the men no kinder than they had been at home, and it wasn’t enough to do just as well as the others, damn them, he had to do better. And why couldn’t I
have been all white, Jim thought, so I could quit if I wanted to?

  Well, he answered himself, you aren’t. And anyway maybe Rich is right and you bitch too much. Here you are right now with General Ashley and a whole passel of white men depending on you to save them because you’re one of the best hunters in the outfit and they know it and they have to admit it. The General was a fool to start west in November and you were a fool to come with him, but where else would you be? Like Rich says, back with the boss-man. So think of the hungry white men, with their lives riding on your back.

  Jim grinned, and then he lost his footing on the icy grass. He went the rest of the way on his hands and knees.

  On the other side of the crest the land sloped away to a little stream wandering on its way to the Platte. In the stream bed there was a wide place where the current had kept ice from forming.

  On the open water there were two dark objects.

  Jim lay on the frozen ground with just his head showing over the rise. He squinted hard at the two dark objects on the water. Rocks? Shadows? The grainy snow stung his eyes. He blinked and peered again.

  The two dark objects were still there. They moved on the water. They were not rocks or shadows. They were teal ducks.

  Jim’s mouth watered. His heart banged so hard he could hear it thump on the ground. He raised the rifle and it was like lifting a great tree, or a mountain. He squeezed the trigger.

  The noise and the recoil nearly stunned him. He saw one of the ducks get up and fly away with a desperate churning of stubby wings. He didn’t see the other one and he thought he had missed, and then he saw a dark blob floating on the water. The current was moving it, sliding it away. Jim ran down the slope. He splashed into black shallow water, the thin ice at its edges crackling under his moccasins. Instantly his feet seemed to freeze solid and he wanted to cry with the shock but the bird was slipping away from him and he chased it and caught it and stood with it dripping in his hands, the outer feathers oily cold, the inner body warm. He had shot the head away as clean as though he had cut it off with a knife.

  He got out of the water and stomped up and down holding the duck.

  There were four other men in his mess. Richards, Mose Harris, Tom Fitzpatrick, and a whiny young greenhorn. They were all hungry, just as hungry as he was. Camp law said he had to take this duck back and share it with them. Camp law said it was as much as a man’s life was worth to hold out food or water on his comrades.

  Jim looked at the duck, picturing it divided into five equal portions. The more he looked the smaller the duck got, until it seemed no bigger than a hummingbird.

  His feet were freezing. He had to have a fire now, and fast, before he did anything else. There was an elbow in the stream a little farther on, with a thick scrub growing in the little bay where the cut bank sheltered it. Jim stumbled in among the bushes and hunkered down with the wind whistling above his head. In the lee of the bank it seemed almost warm. He made a fire. When he had it going well he spread his footgear to dry and then crouched over the welcome heat, looking at the duck. He looked at the duck for a long time. Then he stood up and looked out over the bank. The prairie was as barren and empty as though man had never been invented.

  Jim whipped out his knife.

  All the time the duck was roasting Jim kept looking nervously over the cutbank, afraid that Rich or Fitz or another of the wandering hunters might see the smoke. He was far too hungry and afraid to wait until the bird was properly done. He ate it half scorched and half raw, tearing and gulping like a famished dog, and when he was through he thought for a dreadful moment that he was going to heave it up again. He remembered that when the Kansaws had found him and Mose Harris almost dead from starvation after that long walk, they had fed them nothing for several days but little mouthfuls of gruel. But his stomach decided to accept the unaccustomed luxury of meat. He sat a few minutes longer over the fire, glorying in the sensation of being warm and full. Then he scattered the embers among the feathers and the gnawed bones and stood up, ready to face the world.

  Remember the hungry white men, he thought, and grinned again. He set off along the edge of the stream.

  It was dusk when he approached the camp, weak from hunger all over again, and tired out. He came from the west. The clouds had broken in that quarter and there was a pale lemon-yellow sunset at his back. Everywhere else the sky, the low air, and the snow-dusted ground were shades of the same cold blue. The horse herd was close by, a sorry-looking lot with their rumps all hunched into the wind, but at least they could fill their bellies with the frosty grass. In the camp itself, which the General liked to run in military style, the loads—excepting of course the ones containing powder—were neatly stacked into breastworks. The fires looked bright and cheerful but the forms of the men were dejected, sagging lumps around them. Jim could distinguish his own group, with Fitzpatrick’s scarlet blanket between the faded capotes of Rich and Mose Harris. The greenhorn was warming the dreary pannikins of flour gruel, and it appeared to be the same at every fire. The hunters had found nothing.

  Jim shouted.

  The whole camp stirred but Fitz was the first one to his feet, red blanket brilliant in the sunset, and Jim saw but did not believe the snap of the rifle to his shoulder. It was almost too late when he dropped. The ball passed so close that the wind of it tweaked his hatbrim. Jim was astounded. He had never been shot at before. The astonishment passed into fright, and the fright into a shaking rage. He hugged the ground among little scattered rocks and grass clumps that would have been no shelter at all by day, but he was below the light now and he and the grass together were part of the shadow. He flung up his own rifle. If it had not been for the bad angle and the breastwork he would have killed Fitz on the spot. Instead he had to content himself with shouting furiously, “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  He knew what the matter was, what it had to be, but he had to ask anyway.

  Very distinctly Fitzpatrick said, “You dirty black son of a bitch.”

  And Rich said, “We found your fire, Jim.”

  “Oh.” All of a sudden Jim’s voice was quiet and sweet, almost singing. “You found my fire. All right. I admit it. This dirty black son of a bitch killed a duck and ate it, every little bit, all by himself.”

  A wolf snarl that was half a groan came from the camp.

  “One little teal duck,” said Jim. “How far would it go among thirty-two men? How far would it go among five?”

  Ashley said sternly, “That’s no excuse, Jim. Put down your rifle, stand up, and come in.”

  “Just a minute, General. I want to tell you all what more this dirty black son of a bitch did after he ate that duck. He had strength enough to go on hunting, when the rest of you had to come draggling your tails back to camp because you were too weak to stand up any longer. He shot a fine big fat buck and two fat does, enough to feed the whole lot of you, including you, General. And wouldn’t you have felt silly, Fitz, if you’d blown my head off?”

  He stood up, letting his rifle trail. “Now you tell me if I was wrong to eat that duck. And then some of you can build up the fires while the rest of us go and bring in those deer.”

  Twenty-odd men charged out at Jim and tried to pound him on the back all at the same time. Fitz stood apart, reloading. So did Rich and the General.

  “That’s a dangerous game to play, Jim,” the General said. “Suppose you hadn’t found any deer?”

  Fitz shot the ramrod home with a vicious thump.

  Rich said, “He has the devil’s own luck, this one.”

  “When it’s a case of have-to,” Jim said, “a man makes his own luck.” He looked straight at the General, the fine-looking dignified man who was a gentleman and almost governor of a state, who knew the exact tone in which to address his inferiors. “Your stick and mine float the same way, General. And this child ain’t fixing to go under.”

  He saw Ashley’s face start to redden and he laughed and turned away, leading a string of eager trotting me
n out across the prairie. The General returned to his fire and sat down.

  Fitz said, “Your friend is fixing for trouble.” Rich was doubled up laughing, and Fitz looked at him. “What’s pleasing you so?”

  “The General’s face,” Rich gasped.

  Fitz grunted. Maybe he was wanting to laugh too. It was hard to tell about Fitz, who could be poker-faced as any Indian when he wanted to.

  “Well,” said Rich, “you’re not over fond of Jim, I know, but are you too proud to eat his deer?”

  “No,” said Fitz, and now he grinned.

  “Neither am I,” said Rich. They followed after Jim.

  General Ashley sat by the fire, hanging on hard to his temper. His first impulse was to have Jim whipped, but this was not the time and he knew it. So he controlled himself. But it was not easy. Jim’s taunt was worse than insolent. It was true.

  All the failures, the losses and disasters of the past few years for which he was in some measure personally responsible, rose up to mock him. Bad judgment, bad planning, inexperience—he had never intended to lead this expedition in person, that was supposed to be Major Henry’s job, just as it had always been. Henry was one of Manuel Lisa’s veterans, in the trade since 1807, and he knew the wilds. Ashley did not, and did not pretend to. Politics was his real love, and he enjoyed all the things that went with it, the social affairs, the fine houses and handsome women, the conversation of important men. The fur trade was to him merely the means of acquiring enough money to support his ambitions.

  It hadn’t worked out that way. He reflected bitterly that somehow all his business ventures had come to nothing, and this fling at the fur trade was no exception. Instead of making him wealthy it had plunged him so far into debt that unless he succeeded in this, his last hope and chance, his only way out was bankruptcy, and of course that meant the end of his career.

  A case of have-to, that damned insolent bastard had said. Your stick and mine float the same way, and this child ain’t fixing to go under.

  Ashley’s face grew hot, and hotter still.