Follow the Free Wind

by Leigh Brackett

  All his troubles had started when Henry lost that keel-boat, sunk in the Missouri with ten thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise aboard. It wasn’t Henry’s fault, it was the same old treacherous river at work, but Ashley had had to borrow more money to replace that which was lost, and then take the new keelboat upriver himself after Henry, who had continued on to the Yellowstone. Ashley had not made it past the Arikara towns.

  The memories leaped sharp and clear into his mind, memories he hated. Edward Rose, the interpreter, another dark bastard, black, white, and red, had warned him that the Indians were hatching treachery. The Arikara Little Soldier had warned him too. But the other chiefs had been full of assurances and persuasion, begging him to stay and trade, and Henry had sent word that he was in urgent need of horses, asking him to buy all he could. So he stayed and traded for horses, and in the night the Arikaras attacked the men who had been left ashore with the herd, killing all the horses and fifteen of the men including two who died later. Even so, he could have brought off all or most of his men safely except that his boatmen mutinied and refused to approach the shore. So he had had no choice but to drop back down the river, doing his best to save those who managed to get off the shore alive.

  Or had he?

  He could smell the powder and hear the rattling of shots, the howling and screaming, the sounds of death. He could see the faces of his boat crew, indomitable with the determination that comes to cowardly men in the avoidance of danger. And the moment came back to him clearly, the moment when he could have stopped the mutiny with one well-aimed pistol ball—and did not. Why?

  And why had he been so stupid, after all the warnings, as to leave forty men ashore in a hopelessly exposed position with the river at their backs and the fortified towns in front?

  Why indeed? So that a mulatto blacksmith could look him in the eye and mock him?

  Ashley shivered between his anger and the cold wind at his back. Since that unlucky night everything had gone wrong. Colonel Leavenworth, sent to punish the Arikaras, had only succeeded in convincing them that the white men were afraid to fight. This word spread through all the Missouri tribes, and even the Mandan began shooting at trappers. The river was closed. North on the Yellowstone the implacable Blackfeet forced Henry to abandon his fort and move south through the Rockies. His men opened up virgin country, incalculably rich in beaver, but Henry himself wearied of the struggle and quit—probably, Ashley thought, because he believed the whole project to be an irretrievable failure. And he was awfully close to being right. The whole of Ashley’s revolutionary concept of the white trapper, as opposed to the old system of trading forts where you tried to persuade the Indians to bring in furs for barter, depended on his ability to supply his men in the field. So far he had failed to do that. If he failed this time he was through. The men in the field would have to quit, the furs so far collected would be lost for lack of transport, and he would have to draggle home—if he managed to survive at all—to face his creditors.

  A case of have-to, and a man makes his own luck. The luck he had made so far had not been very good. He knew it. And he hated Jim Beckwourth for reminding him of it.

  It was not until he was in the act of filling his starving belly with the hot meat of Jim’s deer that he realized he hated Jim so much that he was actually thinking of him as a fellow man, a competitor. And this was beyond his power to forgive.

  FIVE

  The plain was black with buffalo.

  Rich put his hand on Jim’s knee. “Wait,” he whispered. “Wait for the signal.”

  The sun was brilliant in a blue sky. The herd threw up the dry snow like dust and it glittered in the air, streaming out where the wind blew it. There was a warm wild smell in the coldness. The pony snuffed it and quivered. Jim settled himself on the pad saddle, his own thigh muscles twitching with eagerness. He watched the herd, a plunging shaggy mass that bellowed and snorted steam. Then he looked where the Pawnees were strung out in a great ragged circle, waiting, and he wondered how long they were going to wait, now that the buffalo had started to move.

  “Give the pony his head,” Rich was saying. “He knows his job.” It was Old Raven’s buffalo horse, and Jim was sure he did know his job. He hitched the bridle rope under his belt where it wouldn’t trail and devoted both hands to his rifle. Amid the Pawnee circle he could see Fitz and Jim Clyman and some others who had been invited to join the surround. Only he himself and a few of the white men carried guns. The others, including Rich, preferred the bow and arrow.

  Two Axe, the chief, was so far away that Jim did not see the signal when he gave it. But suddenly the Indians began to rush in upon the herd from all sides, yelling, and the beginning stampede became a mill as the leaders turned. Rich let go a shrill screeching and kicked his pony.

  It jumped away like a rabbit with Jim’s pony after it, stretching out into a flat run. Almost before he knew it Jim was on the edge of the herd and it changed from a single mass into individual animals, into massive heads and forequarters, into sharp curving horns that could disembowel a horse, and heavy hoofs that could trample it under, rider and all. Rich fled around the edges of the herd, notching arrows and shooting as accurately and as fast as the Indians. Jim lost track of him. He found himself ranged up alongside a young cow and he fired, aiming behind the shoulder. The cow dropped. Jim began to reload, letting the pony run, and now he understood why the experienced hunters preferred the bow. Jim was better than most at loading the long rifle on horseback, but even so a bowman could knock down half a dozen buffalo while he was getting ready for his next one. He would know better next time. The wind hammered at him cold and strong. The snow dust flew, the world was thunderous with hoofbeats, the faces of the Pawnees he rode with were as wild and as natural as the faces of the buffalo. Jim filled his lungs and yelled with sheer exultance.

  Buffalo were dropping everywhere. There was blood on the snow, and a great bellowing. The rifle was part of Jim, an extension of hand and eye. He looked at the buffalo and made them come. He did not feel like a butcher. He did not feel like a sportsman, either. He had seen the gentry riding out to hunt, but this was nothing like that. This was food and shelter, survival, life. This was triumph over the bleak, cruel, beautiful land that had tried so hard to put him under.

  Those providential deer had not lasted long. Neither had the relatively open weather. Presently the Pawnee Trace was under two feet of snow and the horses were dying. The men ate them as they fell and stayed alive, barely. But they watched the rapidly shrinking herd with alarm and Mose Harris muttered over the fire of nights that if they didn’t catch up with the Pawnees pretty quick they would see some hard doin’s. Freezing, starving, and exhausted as he was, Jim would shake the snow off his hatbrim and figure that the doin’s he had right now were hard enough to suit him.

  They caught up finally with the Pawnees, only to find that they were in about as bad case as the white men, having been through the same weather. They were about to cross the Platte and head south to the Arkansas where they wintered, and they had nothing in the line of food or horses to spare. But their cousins the Skidi, the Pawnee Loups, they said, had a permanent town at the Forks of the Platte where they wintered, and it might be that Tirawa had smiled more brightly upon them. So the General marched on westward, praying. And then, incredible as a vision of paradise, there were the big earth lodges, warm and diy, and steaming pots of food, and nothing to do but eat and sleep, hunt, and bargain for buffalo robes and new moccasins. The General wrote up his journal, conferred with the Skidi chiefs, and pondered. As of today, the twenty-second of December, they had been in the village for two weeks.

  Jim Beckwourth, on Old Raven’s buffalo horse, fired and reloaded until his arm was tired from pushing the ramrod home. The frenzy cooled. The survivors of the herd streamed away across the plain. Rich came up beside Jim. He was grinning, his long hair flying, his eyes wild and bright. “We made ’em come,” he said. “Wagh! We made ’em come!” He and Jim rode with the brav
es, yelping their triumph.

  These tribal hunts had officers to see that every family got its fair share, so that even if a man was sick or unlucky or away somewhere his lodge would not be empty of food. Jim and Rich had done well for their host, Old Raven, who was past his best days as a provider. Jim liked Raven, and Raven’s quiet wife, who set enormous dinners before them but did not eat of them herself. They had been unlucky in that they had only one daughter to provide them with a son-in-law. Of their three sons, two had died in battle and the third was living where custom required him to, with his wife’s family.

  Raven talked a great deal. Jim couldn’t understand a word he said but Rich jabbered Pawnee pretty well and he acted as interpreter. The son-in-law was a lean, hard man verging on middle age, a respectable warrior and a good hunter, but a reserved and sour-looking individual made more forbidding by the Pawnee scalp lock, stiffened with grease and pigment to resemble a horn. Rich said that Pawnee meant homed and was a name that other tribes had given them. Their own name for themselves was Chahiksahiks, Men of Men. By the third day of their stay in Raven’s lodge, the son-in-law had gotten used to them and amazed Jim by turning as merry as his own children. Jim had always thought of Indians as remote and stony in their habits, and here they were as full of laughter and liveliness as anybody. The young ones, as numerous as puppies, tumbled and scuffled about the big round room, their bright eyes shining in the light of the central fire that burned all day and all night. Mother took loving care of them, and so did Big Sister, except when she was making wide shy glances at the two strangers. Big Sister was pretty enough, too, once you got used to her red facepaint and the red parting that divided her two black glossy braids.

  That night, over the smoking hump ribs, there seemed to be an unusual amount of talk from Old Raven, seconded by grunts from the son-in-law. Jim saw that Rich was smiling to himself and he asked why.

  “Well,” said Rich, “we was some today, way we made the butter come, and Old Raven’s hinting around that his granddaughter is ready to take a husband.”

  “H’m,” said Jim, gnawing a rib. “What’s her father say?”

  “He thinks they could use another man around the lodge.”

  “Which one?”

  Rich looked at him. “Feeling tempted?”

  Jim didn’t answer immediately. The lodge was big and comfortable, dug partly into the ground and finished solidly with timbers and thick sod that turned the weather, hot or cold, rain or snow. A better house than many a one that stood in St. Louis. There were things in it to please the eye, beautiful shields and quivers, and bow cases bright with color. There were furs and buffalo robes for the comfort of the body, and there was food, and all these things were hard-won and uncertain, but they were between you and nature, not between you and other men.

  “These people don’t bow and scrape,” Jim said. “They don’t suck up to each other, not even to the chiefs.”

  “I reckon,” said Rich dryly, “that if any Indian went to set himself up for one of these kings or emperors, the others’d give him reasons why he ought to change his mind. They’ll follow a good chief in war, or they’ll listen to one in council, but they won’t put up with a bad chief, and no warrior will take any foolishness from anyone. Proud as eagles and independent as hogs on ice. Like you, Jim, only there ain’t anybody to say they shouldn’t. Kind of like it here, don’t you?”

  “I’ve seen worse.”

  He looked at Big Sister, with her long braids down her back like two black horsetails, and he thought of Francie. He thought of her quite often, and with a certain amount of regret. She was a handsome girl and loving enough, but she had never understood his hankering to go follow a free wind that blew somewhere beyond the horizon. To her there was only one possible future, marriage, a neat little house, nice respectable children, hard work, and a thrifty old age. She had often, and furiously, demanded to know what was wrong with this and Jim honestly couldn’t tell her except that it made him feel like being buried alive.

  Big Sister probably wanted exactly the same things. Women seemed to, for some reason. They liked everything small and tidy and pulled in where they could manage it. But Big Sister was an Indian and so what spelled respectability to her was a long way off from Francie’s Sunday-go-to-meeting starch and picket fences. Jim thought it might work out just fine.

  “—about an Indian wife,” Rich was saying. “They don’t mouth and tromp all over a man. They keep your lodge warm and your moccasins dry, they cook your food and tan your leather and make your clothes, and if you go off and leave ’em for a year or two, why they’re right there waiting and smiling when you come back. Fact is, a man just near-about can’t do without one.”

  “Why don’t you have one, then?” asked Jim, smiling.

  “I did,” said Rich, quite unexpectedly. He shook his head, his eyes faraway and tender. “Never had to lodgepole her but once. She was some. She was a Crow woman. Blackfeet killed her, up on the Rosebud.” He remained sunk in reverie, chewing absently on his hump ribs. Slowly his gaze focused again, on Big Sister. “Tell you what, Jim. You go find your own wife. I don’t know what I’ve been doing so long without one.”

  “Suppose the General decides to move on. You’ll hardly have time to kiss the bride.”

  “Move on?” said Rich, and snorted. “The General ain’t going to tackle the mountains this time of year.”

  “That’s what I hear,” Jim said.

  “Hear! Hear!” Rich snorted. “You listen to everything you hear you’ll never know where you are. Every camp’s full of—”

  He broke off as Tom Fitzpatrick came stooping in through the entry tunnel. Old Raven motioned him to the visitor’s place of honor on the right side of the fire. Fitz squatted down crosslegged and let his red blanket fall. Jim envied him, with his restless eyes and his Indian ways, and it pricked his pride that Fitz was two or three years younger than he and had already done so much more. He had been clear up to where the Missouri headed, and he had been through the northern passes and the inner valleys of the mountains, with Jed Smith and Clyman and Sublette and some others, looking for a way to make the General’s crackbrain scheme come true. It was Fitz coming back down the Sweetwater and the North Platte with news of the South Pass and a route to it that had started Ashley and his expedition out of Fort Atkinson in the lunatic month of November. Someday, Jim thought, people will say my name the way they say his, when they talk about men who know the mountains.

  In the meantime, Jim sat silent while Fitz talked.

  Fitz scooped up a lump of fat out of the pot with his thumb and two fingers. Everybody sat decorously quiet while he ate it. Then Old Raven said something and Fitz answered him, and Raven and his son-in-law put their hands over their mouths in the gesture of surprise.

  Rich sat up straight and said, “What the hell—”

  “What’s wrong?” Jim said.

  “We’re moving on,” Fitz told him. “When?”

  “First daylight.”

  Rich stared at Fitz as though he were waiting for him to laugh and admit it was all a joke.

  “The Pawnees told him to wait till spring. I heard ’em. Two Axe told him there wasn’t any wood on the North Fork betwixt here and the mountains. I heard you tell him that, Fitz. So did Jim Clyman, and you ought to know you’ve both been that way.” Clyman had got lost from the party and had to walk all the way back to Atkinson from the Sweetwater by himself. “How’s the General expect us to live without fire? How’s he expect the horses to live without even cottonwood bark to eat? Summer, now, when there’s grass and buffalo chips without three feet of snow on top of ’em—”

  Fitz said, “He’s going up the South Fork.”

  “Oh,” said Rich. “He is. And what’s he know about the South Fork?”

  “Nothing,” Fitz said, “except Two Axe says there’s some wood on it. So pack your possibles and get your horses in.” He rose and added, “Merry Christmas.” He went out. “There goes your wedding,” Jim sa
id.

  Rich shook his head. “The man’s clean out of his mind, that’s what he is. He nearly put us all under getting us here, and now he ain’t content to stay where there’s food and shelter, he’s got to go on where he don’t know where he’s going, and in December—!”

  “Almost January.”

  “Clean out of his mind,” Rich muttered.

  “Clean out of money,” Jim said. This was no secret to anybody, here or at home. “I’m just a blacksmith yet, but you’re a trapper, Rich. Suppose he waits here till the weather breaks. Suppose he isn’t on the ground. What happens?”

  “We miss the spring hunt.”

  “And he’s paid thirty-three men for a nice long walk. All those beaver are still sitting there snug with their coats on their backs, and it’s a long time till fall.”

  “Reckon you’re right,” said Rich bitterly. “Reckon his fortune is worth more to him than our necks.”

  “Sure it is,” Jim said. “Wouldn’t it be if it was yours?”

  “I’d cut all your throats for a pack of beaver plews. All right, I’ll show him. I’ll go with him to the goddam Rockies in January, and I won’t go under, just to spite him.” He began to shove his belongings into his war bag, grumbling.

  Jim laughed. He pulled on his capote and went outside to bring in the horses. The air was still and at first it did not feel cold, but in a few minutes Jim was shivering. Beyond the clustered smokes of the village the west was dark and empty, the jumping-off place of the world.

  SIX

  The weather was steady, the men well rested, the horses fat. Ashley wrote in his journal that he anticipated a quick and easy passage to the mountains, and that happy frame of mind endured for two full days. On the morning of the third Dave Richards rose grumbling and shivering and sniffing the air.

  Mose Harris, the large man with the powder-burned face and the longest, strongest legs west of the Mississippi, stood beside Rich wrapped in a shaggy buffalo robe and looking much like a bull with a hat on.