Follow the Free Wind

by Leigh Brackett

  “Your nose ain’t as good as mine,” Rich said. “Nobody’s is. But anyway, tell me what you smell.”

  Mose grunted. “Snow.”

  “Wagh!” Rich turned to Jim. “Don’t know when she’ll hit. Maybe half a day yet, I’d guess, but when she does she’ll rip. So don’t draggle off too far behind.”

  “Tell that to my horses,” Jim said sourly. He went to load up, shivering with the raw cold and aware himself now of the snow smell in the air. He put the pack saddles on the four led animals assigned to him, getting madder by the minute. The General loved military neatness and discipline in his camps. Each man had his duties, and one of them was to be personally responsible for a certain number of pack horses and their loads. Jim couldn’t quarrel with the arrangement except for one thing. Among the four horses assigned to him was the sorriest worn-down nag of the whole lot, the one that would have been left behind if the General had bought twenty-four fresh horses from the Pawnees instead of twenty-three. For two days, at the tail end of the procession, Jim had had to hold his pace to the flagging steps of the weakest and on both days he had ended up half a mile behind the party. That was with good weather and easy footing. If things got really bad, Jim was going to have some problems.

  He took extra pains with his loads. He checked harness and gear and examined each separate hoof. He took so long about it that the rest of the party was mounted and ready to go before he was. The General looked at Fitz, who came over and spoke to Jim.

  “Trouble?”

  “Not yet,” Jim said. “I’m just making sure that when this critter gives out nobody can say it’s my fault.”

  “You’ll have to make do,” Fitz said. “Twenty-three is all the horses the Pawnees could spare, and we’ve got barely enough to carry the loads as it is.”

  He rode away back to the General without waiting for an answer. Jim glowered after him. Rich was nearby and had made it a point to listen. He said, “You spoilin’ for fight, Jim?”

  “No.” Jim swung into the saddle. “But I won’t run if it’s brought to me.”

  “You can generally run halfway to meet it. Figure the General give you that broke-down horse on purpose, don’t you?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Well, I got to admit the General don’t much like you. But you ain’t been at much pains to make him.”

  “I’ve shod his horses,” Jim said. “I’ve found him game when nobody else could. I do my full share. What’s he got to complain about?”

  “Well,” said Rich, and stopped.

  “Go on, tell me.”

  Rich scowled. “You go looking for it,” he said querulously. “I swear you do.”

  “I do, huh? Go on, then. Tell me why the General don’t like me.”

  “Same reason Fitz and some of the others don’t, and you know why.”

  “Because,” Jim said, “I ain’t been at much pains to make them like me.”

  Rich looked at him. He shook his head and rode on. Jim followed, pulling his reluctant pack animals into motion. The Ashley party moved on west along the South Fork of the Platte.

  There were buffalo moving west along the river too, shouldering massively against the wind. But the horses were naked where the buffalo were clothed and they didn’t like to face the wind. They kept trying to turn and drift with it. As the day wore on and the insistent cold worked closer to the bone, the weaker animals began to lag. Jim’s crow-bait was the weakest and lagged the most, and at the nooning he was so far behind that everybody was finished eating and ready to move on again by the time he caught up.

  The General was mounted on his long-legged bay. He looked fine and soldierly. He was forty-six years old, but he was always in the lead, always tireless, sturdy, and brave, heartening his men to endure as cheerfully as he did the messes he got them into, and his men stayed with him because he was brave and wouldn’t let anything stop him. The General looked down at Jim and said, “You know the rule against straggling.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Jim. “I do.” The whole company was looking on and listening.

  “Then remember it. We can’t afford to lose horses now. If you can’t manage yours—”

  “Oh, I can manage them,” Jim said, talking his best Virginian because it annoyed the General so. “Don’t worry, General. I can manage just about anything.”

  The General’s face reddened. Jim looked him hard in the eye, and he got redder, and his mouth opened, but before he could say anything Rich spoke up, pointing to the sky.

  “Them clouds look more troublesome all the time, General.”

  Ashley grunted angrily, but he glanced at the sky and muttered something about finding a sheltered place to camp. He gave the signal to move out. Jim looked at Rich and said, “I’d just as soon had it out.”

  “There’s a big blow coming,” Rich said. “Your temper can wait. What did you have to rile him for?”

  “Because he riles me.”

  “You don’t have to make it worse. You could pull in your horns a little bit.”

  “Why should I?” Jim demanded.

  Rich sighed. “Well, I know better’n to answer that.” He caught up his string and rode off.

  Jim dug some half-frozen dried meat out of his possible sack and gnawed it in the saddle, plodding at the tail of the party and looking hatefully at the backs of the men ahead. He was angry. He knew Rich was partly right and that made him angrier, because it made him unsure. He didn’t want any difference between him and the others and maybe just because of that he was making the difference, getting sore where another man wouldn’t and then being afraid to back down. It was true the Skidi couldn’t spare another horse. They were not a horse-rich people and they had had their own losses. And it might be only chance that he had wound up with this footsore wreck.

  He didn’t think so. And there wasn’t any doubt at all that the General was riding him. Pull in my horns a little bit, he thought, and wondered how Rich would act if the moccasin was on the other foot. He thought he knew. He chewed the hard cold meat and brooded, angry because he was angry, tired of being angry about the same old subject, bored with it, and wanting vaguely to kill somebody. He thought of Francie and hoped she had found somebody better suited to her than he was. Somebody who knew his place. Francie knew hers and took pride in it, and she had been used to lecturing him severely about his attitude. “Why do you want to make a lot of trouble?” she would ask him. “You can’t change the world, but you can live good in it, or you can live bad. I am what I am, and I’m going to be the best there is of it.” Maybe, Jim thought, that was the root of the difference between them. Francie knew what she was and he did not. He only knew what he wasn’t.

  The old horse pulled back harder on the lead rope and the gap between Jim and the rear of the party became imperceptibly wider.

  There was no time when it positively began to snow. The sky thickened, turning slowly from gray to white. The figures of the men and horses ahead, the low sand hills that bordered the river, a band of buffalo on the opposite bank, and finally the river itself became more blurred and indistinct, smudges of charcoal on a white sheet, gradually vanishing. The air was filled with little fine whirling flakes, and before he knew it Jim was all alone.

  For a while he could follow the tracks of the party, but then they began to sift in and disappear, and he had no way of telling how far behind them he was, or even whether he was still behind them. He kept the wind in his face, but even that was not a sure guide because the ground currents could eddy around a lot between the sand hills. The fine thick snow seemed to blot up all sound as well as sight. Deaf, blind, lost, he moved in a white cloud and the world was gone.

  Panic might have taken him then, but he was madder than he was scared. He laid on with the whip, working the horses into a staggering run. After a while he saw what he thought were tracks not yet quite filled, but before he could be sure of it the old horse missed his footing and went down.

  Jim’s mount was pulled back onto his h
aunches. There were flounderings and heavings as the other pack animals fought to keep from falling. Jim hung on, talking to them until they quieted. Then he set about trying to get the old nag on his feet again. It was obvious after a few minutes that he was not going to get up with the weight of the pack on him. Jim struggled with the wet, half-frozen lashings, and all the time the little snowflakes whirled into his eyes and his nostrils and his mouth and ears like a swarm of cold white midges. The pack came loose. He raised the horse’s head and heaved, lifting the animal’s forequarters. The horse got up. They stood panting and shaking and glaring at each other. When he got his breath, Jim began putting the load back on.

  He was about half finished when he heard shouts somewhere in the wind and the white smother. They sounded like his name. He shouted back. A couple of blurred shapes appeared, lumbering and monstrous. They resolved themselves into Rich and Mose Harris, pawing snow out of their eyes and cursing him.

  “Thought we’d never find you,” Rich said.

  “Am I lost?” Jim asked.

  Rich groaned. “Hark at him, Mose. That’s thanks for you. Is he lost? Why damn you, Jim, we’re probably all of us lost now. They’re making camp in the sand hills a half mile or more from here, and I doubt well ever find our way back to it.”

  Mose said, “Why don’t you shoot that old horse and put him out of his misery?”

  “General gave him to me,” Jim said, tightening the lashings. “General said not to lose him. I don’t aim to.”

  Mose said absently, “General’s in a tower of rage.”

  “Too bad about him,” Jim said.

  “Ain’t nothing to the tower he’ll be in when we get back,” Rich said. “If we get back. His orders were for everybody to stay in camp.” He clapped his arms around him and his voice rose to a petulant snarl. “You figuring to spend the night here, Jim?”

  “Don’t hurry me,” Jim said. “I hate to be hurried.” He could hear the old horse breathing in a kind of wind-broken roar. He lightened the load as much as he dared, distributing some sacks of powder and lead among the other horses. Then he mounted.

  “Lead on.”

  They moved slowly, their heads bent, their eyes seeing only whiteness until it became indistinguishable from blackness and total dark.

  The old horse fell again.

  “He’s played out,” Mose said. “Shoot him.”

  Jim shook his head. This time he cut the lashings of the pack saddle. The load fell free and when he got the horse on his feet again he left it on the ground. Barebacked, the horse was able to walk.

  They moved on. Their ears heard silence and the tiny hiss and tap of snowflakes around their hatbrims, and beyond that the vast dull voiceless roar of wind rolling between earth and sky with nothing to stop it. White men on white horses, they moved like ghosts.

  In their effort to stay away from the river and the treacherous ice, indistinguishable now from solid ground, they went too far the other way and floundered among the outlying humps of the sand hills. Rich and Mose Harris wrangled briefly over whose great pathfinding was responsible. Jim laughed.

  “Beats me why you came at all. I could have found my way.”

  “I wasn’t worried about you,” Rich said. “I was thinking of them horses and all the dried meat and ammunition they’re toting.”

  “I was worried about Rich,” Mose said, “is why I came. All right, Jim, find it.”

  “Find what?”

  “Your way.”

  “Ha,” said Rich. “That shut him up in a hurry.”

  “Give me time,” Jim said. He did not have any idea where they were, or where the camp might be, or whether they had come half a mile or ten miles or fifty yards. He only knew he had something to settle with the General, and he was bound to find him somehow. They wallowed back to more level ground. The snow was piling, getting deeper. The old horse would not be able to go much farther, even carrying nothing more than his own weight.

  Jim undid the rawhide cover of his rifle and fired it into the air. They stood still, straining their ears.

  Nothing.

  They moved on.

  “Wait,” said Rich. “Whoa.” There was a place where the wind curved out over the top of an unseen ridge, making a space of dead air where only a light sifting of snow dropped from the driven mass of it overhead. Rich climbed out of the saddle, stiff as a wooden man, and creaked to his knees. He took off his mittens and paddled with bare fingers in the snow. Suddenly he yipped.

  “Here she is, boys, here’s the trail.” His fingers scrabbled out the cupped tracks. “We’re all right now. Broad as a turnpike road and all we got to do is follow it.” He jumped up, grinning. “Just you leave things to Dave Richards, boys, and you’ll live long. Never been a trail yet I couldn’t find or follow.”

  “I mind one,” Mose Harris said. “Fact is, I mind a couple. Fact is, Rich, you’re a notable old liar.”

  “That’s no lie,” Rich retorted, pointing to the track. “What do you say, Jim Beckwourth? We’re even now, ain’t we?”

  “Why?” asked Jim.

  “Why? Why, because I just saved your life, is why.”

  “Well, now,” Jim said, “I didn’t know I was about to lose it.”

  Rich stared at him. “If it hadn’t been for me—”

  “Us,” said Mose.

  “—comin’ to find you, you wouldn’t never have—”

  “Thought it was the horses you were after.”

  “Well, of all the low-down ungrateful—! I never said no such thing. I’ll leave it to Mose if I did, and anyway, I still say—”

  Jim broke out laughing. So did Mose. “You did me a service,” said Jim, “you and Mose together. So just to show you I’m a gentleman at heart I’ll cancel half the debt.”

  Rich cried out as one in agony. “Half the debt! Half the debt! Did you hear that, Mose? I swear I never knew such a—"

  Jim and Mose looked at each other and nodded. They rode on together. “That long tongue will be the death of him yet,” Mose said. He shook his head and sighed. “Someday he’ll tramp on it and pull it out by the roots.” Behind them Rich swore and grumbled, outraged.

  The wind caught them again, beat and howled at them, drowned them in snow, but now they could hardly lose their way. The track was buried, but it led between high banks and Jim thought it was one of the paths the buffalo had worn through long ages, coming down to the river.

  It widened into an irregular bowl that offered some shelter from the wind, and suddenly the horses were walking among little low mounds that erupted human curses when trodden upon, and they were in camp. The horse herd appeared dimly, a mass of patient misery close-huddled for warmth, tails to the wind. There was shouting back and forth, the burden of it being that here was Harris and Richards and Beckwourth, they made it. There were cries of congratulation. Some of the men even crawled out of their warm robes to pound them on the back and help them unsaddle.

  Tom Fitzpatrick came up, his scarlet blanket all frosted white. “I’m glad you made it,” he said, and grinned. “But maybe you won’t be. General wants to see you—all three.”

  SEVEN

  The General was hunched under a low shelter improvised from a blanket stretched between two heaps of piled-up goods. Rich and Mose Harris had to squat down Indian-fashion in order to face him. The wind screamed and the snow eddied down and from time to time the General reached up and punched the blanket to knock the snow off it. Fitz hunkered down nearby. Some of the men, smelling trouble, drifted up to listen.

  “The order was to stay in camp,” the General said. “Why did you disobey it?”

  Mose grunted and occupied himself in wrapping his buffalo robe more tightly around him. Rich had a faraway look in his eye.

  “We didn’t rightly intend to,” Rich said. “But when I went to unsaddle my horse the critter just hopped away from me, and kept on hopping, and Mose tried to help me catch him, and before we knew it, General, we were clean out of camp—”

&
nbsp; “And you decided to go looking for Jim,” said the General, not bothering to take issue with Rich about his hopping horse.

  “He was a long ways behind,” Rich said, in a different tone.

  “Jim,” said the General, looking around. “Jim! Fitz, where is that black son of a bitch?”

  “I don’t know,” said Fitz. “I told him—”

  “He’s right here,” Jim said. He materialized out of the dancing snow veils, holding something in his hand. Rich saw the look in Jim’s eye. He glanced at Mose, who had seen it too. They waited.

  The General said, “Jim, you were warned about straggling. Now here you are risking not only four valuable horses, but the lives of two men who had to come and look for you—”

  Jim tossed the thing he held in his hand into the snow at the General’s feet. It was a headstall with a coiled rope attached.

  “You gave me a horse you knew couldn’t keep up,” Jim said, “and then you began to ride me about straggling. Well, there’s your horse back. You told me to bring him in, and I did, and if he isn’t dead by morning you can do what you want with him.” He looked at Rich and Mose. “As for them,” he added, straightfaced, “they were wandering around lost when I found them.”

  A subdued rumble of laughter went around the circle of watching men. The General leaned forward. He picked up the rope and headstall and threw them aside. He stood up, quite slowly and deliberately.

  “Jim,” he said, “I have had all the insolence from you that I choose to take. I—”

  Jim cut him short. “Don’t insolent me, General. I’m not your child, your slave, or your servant. And only my friends call me Jim. My name is Beckwourth.”

  The General’s eyes got slaty. He started to speak, and again Jim stopped him.

  “You can save the rest of your breath. I’m through. I won’t work with a man that tries to punish me because I won’t lick his boots. This isn’t St. Louis, General. I don’t have to.”

  He turned away. He was hot and shaking.