“But they can’t really talk?” he asked Rich. “Not the way we do?”
“I dunno,” Rich said. “But I can tell you this much. Once you let one beaver get up to trap, you might as well pack up and move on. I can’t just say how the word gets around, but it does. You’ll find no beaver in your traps, and that ain’t all. Every trap’ll be sprung, and maybe hauled out aid buried.”
“How do they spring ’em?”
“With a stick,” Rich said, “with a stick. How else would they do it?”
Jim learned a lot and he learned fast, partly because he had a good teacher and was willing to listen to him, but also because he had a natural talent for these things and understood them instinctively. Some of the greenhorns were hopeless from the first. The old trappers could tell them something a hundred times and they couldn’t grasp it. Their muscles didn’t function right, their eyes could not be trained to see, and if they remembered one thing they forgot a dozen more. These men were soon relegated to holding the horses and doing the bulk of the skinning and curing. Jim looked at them with pity, and his own pride was great.
He was beginning to think that life in the mountains was a pretty fine thing, and he couldn’t understand why Rich began to get uneasy and nervous, always peering about and sniffing the wind and working his shoulder blades up and down as though he had an itch between them.
He was unwise enough to josh Rich about it.
“That’s ’cause you’re still a greenhorn,” Rich snapped. “You don’t know no more’n a baby. When things go best is the time to worry, and when you don’t see any Indian sign at all is the time to be scared.”
Jim shut up, but privately he thought Rich was up to his old trick of enjoying himself being miserable. They reached the main branch of the North Fork of the Platte, and went on to claw their way over the Divide and then on northward through a great basin where the waters drained neither to west nor east. There was no sign of the Siskadee, but nothing happened except the familiar things of running into bad weather and out of grass for the horses. Jim was prepared to laugh at Rich’s old-womanly gloom.
They camped near a huge rough butte, to rest and let the horses graze on the first grass they had found for some days. Jim was off watch and sleeping peacefully in the deep night. A sudden scatter of shots and yells brought him up standing. There was a wild shrill crying out in the darkness, Ough! Ough! Ough! like the laughter of wolves, and under it a rush of hoofbeats, and it was all over and done in a space of minutes. Men were springing up out of their robes. The horse guards were still shooting a little and shouting a lot. Rich came up.
“There’s the best part of our horses gone. Still feel like laughing?”
Jim shook his head. He was really not thinking about the horses yet. He was excited, the blood stinging in his veins and something strange going on in his middle, something that was partly fear and partly a queer eagerness. This was the first time he had heard the sound of an enemy.
Rich said, “Where’s your rifle?”
It was still in Jim’s bed, under the buffalo robe where it would keep warm and dry for instant use. Rich swore in anger and despair.
“Your hair’ll be drying in somebody’s lodge before summer. I’m ashamed to know you.”
He stamped away. Jim picked up his rifle and went to see what he could do.
There wasn’t much. Fitz and the General rode off after the raiders as soon as it was light enough to track, but the rest of them became beasts of burden alongside the few remaining horses, carrying on their own backs the loads of the stolen animals. The General returned that night with three that had been left behind by the Indians, but he and Fitz had not caught up to the main party, which was moving fast over familiar terrain.
“Crows,” said Fitz, pointing east, and the old hands nodded.
“Slickest horse thieves on the Plains,” Mose said, honestly admiring them in spite of his sore back. But then Mose liked walking better than most.
“What were they doing way up here?” Jim asked.
“Raiding,” Rich said. “Young men after Shoshoni horses. The Snakes and the Crows are friendly, but—” He shrugged. “Young men got to make their fortune somehow.”
“But not with our horses.”
“Ours, anybody’s. Horses are where you find ’em, to an Indian.”
“Crows,” said Jim, savoring the name.
“It’s more rightly Sparrowhawk,” Rich said. “Absaroka is their own word.”
“You’re such an expert,” Fitz said, “you can be one of the party. We’re going after them hard tomorrow.”
“Thanks. You’ll never catch ’em, but I’ll go. Take Jim too—he needs to learn.”
Jim rode out with eight other men at the first light. He rode for five days. It was hard but exhilarating work, and he learned several things, chiefest of which was that Indians had the power to make themselves and their stolen horses disappear like the morning mist when the wind blows.
“Absaroka,” Jim said. The word had a magic sound. “Someday I’m going to find out who stole those horses, and I’m going to make every mother’s son of ’em wish they hadn’t.”
Rich laughed.
They rejoined the party and moved on over rolling prairie, high and cold, and now the General’s luck was out, out and gone. Men and horses labored under their heavy loads, and the men cursed the beaver skins they had piled up to ride on their backs. It came on to snow and it was all they could do to travel six or seven miles a day. There was no game. And still there was no sign of the river.
“We ain’t going to make it,” Rich moaned. “Come all this long hard way and we ain’t going to make it.”
“We’ll make it,” Jim said, and nodded toward the General. “Look at his jaw, sticking out undershot as a bulldog.”
“He can’t do anything about it if we die on him.”
“Oh, yes he can. He can kick us on our feet again and make us go.” Jim managed a frozen, lopsided smile. “The son of a bitch, he’s some!”
But finally even Jim began to wonder. The miles got longer, the camps colder and the bellies emptier. The pack on Jim’s back weighed like the whole main chain of the Rockies. He began to hate the men for whom he helped to carry all this mass of lead and powder and merchandise. He had never seen them but he knew some of their names— Smith, Sublette, Provot, Bridger—and now he began to put faces to the names. They were fiend-faces, bleared and hideous. They wanted to kill him. He told Rich about this and they both laughed, but the laughter was a little edgy.
There came a day of raw wind and drifting snow, when the clouds lay gray and leaden on the mountains and the sun was only a memory, and the men could not go any farther without food. The General made camp and sent his hunters out. And it was as it had been before on the low prairie along the Platte, with Jim and Rich and the others staggering away in the last stages of starvation to search for food. It seemed to Jim that in this life it was always either fat cow or poor bull, and sometimes not even that, but never a happy medium.
Rich snarled wordlessly and went off. The men spread out, as they always did, going singly in order to cover as much ground as possible. Jim walked alone. The land was a gray blur, merging into cloud, into nothingness and nowhere. If you kept on you could climb right out of the world. You could catch a big gray dragon and ride him and make the clouds boil. You could kick the mountaintops and make them boom like thunder, and shake the big rockslides down. You could—
But you couldn’t because you couldn’t climb that high. You couldn’t even climb the ridge in front of you and that wasn’t much higher than the fences you used to shinny over when you were ten.
But you had to climb it.
Why?
Because you’re curious. You’re curious like a cat. You have to kill yourself like a damn fool cat just to see what’s on the other side.
Climb.
And now you can’t think anything, not even foolishness. There’s nothing but breathing and that hurts and m
akes you cough, and your legs have to go and they don’t want to.
Climb.
The top of the ridge and gray space beyond. Cloud above, pale grass below frosted over with snow. Dark belts of cottonwood, box elder, and willow, and a big wide gray-green river running, running fast. And buffalo, many buffalo. Fat buffalo, grazing.
Grazing in the valley of the Siskadee.
YELLOW GRASS
NINE
It was 1826 and the summer rendezvous was in full whoop and holler.
Jim Beckwourth lifted a coal out of the fire with a pair of green willow twigs and held it to his pipe bowl. He blew smoke luxuriously, letting his audience wait. There were three French-Canadians around the fire, one of the several Iroquois who had deserted last year from the Hudson Bay Company, a couple of loose-jointed cotton-haired farm boys who had been in the mountains no longer than it took to cross them, and Dave Richards, in front of whose lodge the fire burned. When he was ready, Jim went on.
“That night we camped beside the river. When everybody was sleeping the General came to me and said, ‘Jim, I have come to depend on you. I don’t want the others to know how desperate bad off we are, but I am at my wits’ end. I have all these supplies for my brave trappers in the mountains, but the Indians have stolen my horses and my men can’t go any farther. Jim, what am I to do?’ ” Jim paused. “Boys, it would have made your hearts break to the General right then.”
Rich made a choking sound. Jim ignored him. One of the French-Canadians was a youngster about sixteen. His name was Baptiste and he watched Jim with worshipful shiny black eyes the way Jim had wanted to be watched ever since he left St. Louis. The farm boys, who had themselves just finished crossing the country with General Ashley on his second—and, it appeared now, his last—trip, were not worshipful but annoyed. From Jim’s account it seemed that their journey, undertaken in the spring when the weather was good and grass and game were plentiful, had been no more than an unusually long stroll in the country. Jim gestured widely at an imaginary Siskadee.
“ ‘General,’ I told him, ‘there is your answer.’ And I pointed to the river. ‘Let the river carry your burdens,’ I said. The General, he shook his head. ‘That’s a fine idea, Jim,’ he said, ‘but how?’ And I told him, ‘General, there’s a plenty of buffalo about. We can make a bullboat and float the supplies downriver to some place of rendezvous, and meanwhile some of us can be busy trapping and looking for your other men.’ The General wrung my hand. ‘Jim,’ he said, ‘Jim, my friend, I think you have hit it.’ ”
“Fact is,” said Rich, “hadn’t Jim here been along to tell him how, I reckon General Ashley couldn’t hardly have got himself out of St. Louis.”
“Oh,” said Jim largely, “I wouldn’t say that. Anyway, it turned out that piece of advice I gave him about the bullboat was a bad one.”
Rich sat up straight, astonished. “But he did build the bullboats, he did float the stuff down to Henry’s Fork and cache it, and then he went on down Green River clear beyond the Tewinty just to see what he could see.”
One of the farm boys said, sneering, “Mose Harris was with you that time, and I never heard him say—”
“Boy,” said Jim, “didn’t I just tell you Mose was sleeping, along with the others? How’s he going to know what I said to the General?”
A tall young man came catfooted out of the shadows. “Evenin’,” he said, squatting down by the fire. He was hardly more than a boy himself, but there was nothing childish about the broad strong jaw and the quiet blue eyes. His name was Jim Bridger, and he had been in the mountains breaking new trails and seeing wonders while Jim Beckwourth was still hammering out horseshoes in Carson’s forge. Bridger was another one like Fitz and Clyman for whom Jim had an enormous and envious respect.
“Boy,” said Bridger, fixing the cotton-haired youth with a cold stare, “you got a lot to learn about manners.” He turned to Rich. “And you ain’t setting him much of an example. Where I was raised, one man didn’t tread on another man’s story.”
“But—” said Rich.
Bridger said, straight-faced, “Why don’t you wait your turn polite-like, and then you can tell us how you tried to warn the General about Grey Eyes at the Rickaree towns, and how you went in alone to parley with Bear, and how you took fifty men off the shore singlehanded after the fight started though there weren’t no more than forty there to begin with as I ever heard.”
The two older French-Canadians laughed. So did the farm boys. Baptiste just stared, and the Iroquois thought his own thoughts, whatever they were, behind a mask of fine weathered bronze. His name was Joseph. He was a Christian and spoke good English, but not often. Rich looked aggrievedly at Bridger.
“If you wasn’t twice as big as me I might take it that you called me a liar and get mad.” He waved at Jim. “Go on, go on.”
“Yes,” said the boy Baptiste. His English was broken and barbarous. “Go on, please. How was the advice bad?”
Jim glanced at Bridger, then solemnly shook his head. “Why,” said Jim, “it almost got the General killed twice.”
Rich’s eyes opened wide, but he did not speak.
“How was that?” asked Bridger.
“Well,” said Jim, “first time was when we were hunting buffalo for the hides. General’s a fine shot, mind you. He’d just killed his animal when a bull somebody else had wounded started to charge him. His gun was empty and there he was with this great shaggy beast rushing down on him, snorting fire and fury—”
Baptiste was leaning so far forward now his elbows were almost in the coals. “What ’appen then?”
Jim said with quiet modesty, “Fortunately I turned and saw this in time. I dropped that bull with one shot, so close to the General that the bull’s nose was almost touching his boots.”
Baptiste exhaled a long shivering breath. He looked at Jim’s rifle leaning against a tree. Rich shut his eyes. In a grave voice Bridger asked, “When was the second time?”
“After we built the first boat. The General stepped into it to test it, and the little rawhide line snapped. The boat went drifting away with the General in it, right into the Green River Suck.”
“Suck?” said Rich under his breath. “Suck? We weren’t nowheres near the Suck!”
Bridger kicked him.
“The General was thrown into the water,” Jim said, “and I knew he couldn’t swim. There was only one thing to do. I plunged in—”
Rich sat stonily listening, while Jim described his terrible battle with the waters of the Suck while saving Ashley’s life. Rich’s expression changed gradually. Admiration crept in, much against his will. When Jim finished Rich shook his head. He looked at Bridger and muttered, “I got to admit it. He’s going to be the greatest liar west of the Mississippi.”
“Likely,” Bridger agreed, “but there’s them as’ll give him a hard run.”
“Meaning me?”
Bridger didn’t answer that directly. He called out, “Harris! Mose Harris!”
Harris joined them. He had been back to St. Louis and then out again with the pack train of a hundred or more mules and horses that had come into Cache Valley two days ago. The General had led the train with Diah Smith and Bill Sublette. Diah had been his partner since last year’s rendezvous, and now there were still greater changes afoot.
“Any news?” asked Rich.
“I guess it’s all settled,” Mose said, glancing toward a distant lodge. “The Old Man’s been in there jawing with Bill and Diah for hours, and I seen Dave Jackson there too. Last time I looked in they were shaking hands all round.”
Bridger shook his head. “First Major Henry and now the General. All these changes—it makes a man feel old.”
Mose stifled a grin and turned to Rich. “That squaw of yours got something on the fire for a hungry man?”
Rich hollered out in Shoshoni and a minute later his wife Grass came with food from the cook-fire. She was a tall, strong, handsome woman, clean and a good housekeeper. Rich had t
aken her last winter, after a successful fall hunt. Now he always had good moccasins and fine-tanned skins for his clothing. His best shirt, which he was wearing now in honor of the rendezvous, was embroidered with dyed porcupine quills. Jim watched Grass as she moved around serving the men. In private she was smiling and cheerful with Rich, always there when he wanted her, content to recede into the background when he did not. Rich was more contented himself these days, a little less wasp-tongued and carping. Maybe I need a wife, Jim thought. Maybe that would take the restlessness out of me.
The men were talking about Ashley selling out to Smith, Jackson, and Sublette.
“Two years ago,” Rich was saying irritably, as though the whole thing was a personal affront, “I could’a seen the sense of it if he’d give it away. But now we’ve got the Rocky Mountain Fur Company going like a house afire. Last year the General hauled enough prime beaver back to St. Louis to pay off all his debts and some left over. This year’s catch’ll make him rich. Why’s he want to sell out now?”
“You just said it,” Jim told him. “He’s rich. Why would he want to stay? He’s no mountain man, never pretended to be. He did what he had to do and he got what he wanted.” The General and me, Jim thought, we both did what we had to do, and he got what he wanted. Will I? Because I haven’t yet. What I want isn’t as easy to get as money. “He’s got no more reason to stay.”
“He just got married again, too,” Mose said. “A right pretty woman. Why would he want to squat out here, staring at your ugly faces?” He grinned at them around the fire. “Anyway, talk has it he’ll stay in the business this much—he’s going to supply the new company.”
One of the old French-Canadians made a rude gesture and said something in his own tongue.
Jim said, “What was that?”
The boy Baptiste translated. “He says, ‘Now the prices will go up more.’ ”
“How’s he know?” Rich demanded.
“Long time he traps. The Northwest Company, the HBC. He leave the HBC because never can he get out of debt. Last year at General Ashley’s rendezvous he get good exchange for his furs. This year, not quite so good. Next year—” He finished with a shrug.
Follow the Free Wind Page 7
