Follow the Free Wind

by Leigh Brackett

  Rich banged Roan Horse in the ribs to make him blow out the air he was holding, and pulled the cinch strap tight. “Last night you loved me so much you wanted to knock my teeth out.”

  “That’s me,” Jim said. “Contrary.”

  Rich swore. “Here on I’ll stick to making enemies. They’re easier to get along with.” He looked out under Roan Horse’s jaw. “Here comes Sits Alone.”

  Sits Alone was chief of this particular band of Snakes. He was quite old now, but he had been a great warrior in his time. Four of his principal men including his son Rainbow were with him. They rode into the center of the trappers’ camp. Bill Sublette met them. Jim and Rich, along with most of the other men, drifted in closer to see what happened. Jim saw the General standing well in the background, leaning against a tree with his arms folded. This was no longer any business of his and he seemed content to let Sublette handle things. Jackson and the tall, somber Smith stood by.

  Sits Alone talked. He told what the Blackfeet had done. He said that the long guns of the trappers had spoken well, but that it was one thing for a man to shoot a gun from cover and another thing entirely to engage the enemy in person. He said he had heard that the white men were brave warriors. He said that he would like now to see this proven.

  Sublette answered properly in Shoshoni, and then shouted to the trappers in English.

  “He wants to see if we can fight Blackfeet!”

  The fierce clamor that went up seemed to satisfy the old man, who nodded and rode away. But the trappers did not need the Snakes to urge them on. The Blackfeet were mean Indians. They hated all white men, except the British traders north of the border. They hated all other Indians. They were constantly at war. On top of that they were brave, far-ranging, and damnation clever. There wasn’t a man there, except the greenhorns, who had not been hunted for his life by the Blackfeet. There wasn’t a man who had not lost a friend to them.

  A long thin bearded man leaped high in the air, howling. “This child is for h’ar!” There was a rush for the horses. Jim could hear Sublette yelling out names, picking men to stay behind and guard the camp. Rich ducked aside behind a tipi which would cover him from Sublette’s sight as he ran. “I don’t dast let him call my name,” he said. “And if he does call it, I don’t dast to hear it. You back me up, Jim.”

  “Sure. But why are you so hell-fired up to fight Indians this morning?”

  “It’s Grass,” said Rich sadly. “I’d as soon stay here, where it’s comfortable. I don’t hanker for a long ride and maybe an arrow through my guts this early in the morning. But if I don’t go I’ll never hear the end of it from Grass.”

  “You’re a poor put-upon soul,” said Jim, grinning. He loosed Roan Horse’s picket rope and mounted. He yelled Hi-yah! and Roan Horse leaped away running between the trees, out onto the open plain. Rich’s paint was close behind him.

  A quarter of a mile away the Blackfeet stood and watched them.

  Jim looked over his shoulder. The mounted trappers were bursting out of the dappled green-gold shade into sunlight, brown men with long browned rifles glinting and long hair flying. American, Frenchman, Spaniard, breed, going to lift hair if they could catch it. They came out white from the settlements, but this was not white man’s country, and pretty soon it was hard to tell them from the red men they lived and died among. Out of the Snake camp came more than a hundred braves, stripped for war, their bodies a clean copper splashed with red and yellow, black and white. Shield and quiver flashed back color in the sun. Feathers blew in the wind. Jim fired and then lifted the empty rifle over his head and shook it high, screaming like an eagle. Roan Horse stretched himself and flew, biting the wind. There was a drum roll of pounding hoofs, and the guns began to talk.

  The Blackfeet fired back. Balls went whistling past Jim’s ears. And now from among the Blackfeet a single brave came riding. He wore a fine war shirt and his gray horse had splendid trappings. At first he rode alone toward the Snakes and the trappers. Then four or five young men followed him, their naked bodies weaving back and forth in the saddle to give as little target as possible. The leading brave did not look back to see if anyone was with him. He was obviously a famous warrior, and this was how a man got glory in war, and why other men who wanted glory followed him. He came straight toward Jim.

  The Blackfoot carried a round bull hide shield on his left arm and he had both bow and war club, but he was not using the bow. He did not wish to kill Jim at long range. The highest war honor was not the mere killing of an enemy but the act of striking his body or taking his weapons from him, because there was more danger in this. The war club was headed with stone, skin-covered, short-hafted, and deadly. Jim looked at it, feeling the powerful thrust of Roan Horse under him bearing him swiftly into combat. The gray Blackfoot horse raced toward him. Red symbols were painted on its hips and shoulders, red feathers fluttered from its knotted tail. The face of the rider became quite plain, the curved nose, the straight mouth and broad chin, dark bronze, with two deep lines cut from the nostrils to the comers of the mouth. Jim had never fought like this before. He was used to the horse raid and the sniping attack, used to shooting at half-seen targets beyond the campfire or across a narrow valley or in a clump of trees and being shot at in return, but you never saw your enemy close up until after he was dead, and maybe not even then. He flinched somehow from looking at the man’s eyes, but when he did he saw that they were impersonal as the eyes of a butcher, measuring him for death. Jim’s belly muscles pulled in tight. He watched the course of the oncoming gray. The horse was racing and yet it seemed to come on very slowly. Jim saw the foam flying from where the war bridle was knotted around its lower jaw. On Jim’s head and shoulders the sun burned hot, but inside he was strangely cold. In his right hand he held his rifle delicately, balancing it.

  The Blackfoot would go past him on the left, striking at him over the protection of the shield, or under it. All Jim had to counter with was his rifle and he wished to be very careful with it. He did not want it damaged if he could possibly help it. He had run buffalo on Roan Horse many times and he knew what he could do. At the last moment he checked and turned him squarely in front of the gray. The gray was a good horse, too. He squatted down and then jumped sideways like a cat. The flat pad saddle had neither horn nor cantle, but the Blackfoot stayed on it. He even managed to swing the club as Jim shot past him on the right, but he did not hit anything but air. The long barrel of the rifle, held sights-on like a spear, caught him in the navel and bore him back over the gray’s rump. He fell hard onto the ground. Jim was out of the saddle and on him. He rammed his heel hard in the man’s throat and reached for the club. He found it a very useful weapon.

  There was no time to lift the scalp. The five young men were almost on top of him. Jim stuck the club in his belt and jumped for the saddle. Rich and Bridger came pounding up. Bridger fired and one of the young men went pitching to the ground, his arms flung wildly in the air. His pony ran away, the long war bridle unreeling behind from where it was folded under the warrior’s belt. When it came to the final knot the pony stopped and stood shivering, anchored to the corpse but too well trained to drag it.

  The others fired their fusees. Rich’s paint horse went down but Rich himself fell free. He got onto one knee and took very careful aim. Jim was busy unslinging his bow. He heard Rich’s rifle crack and saw one of the warriors fall forward over his pony’s neck. The pony ran away with the wounded man hanging to him. Bridger had dismounted and was reloading behind the shelter of his horse. Jim sent his arrows flying. He shot one man through the thigh but it didn’t seem to discourage him. The three rode erratically, making poor targets, firing off their own arrows as they wished. They were using their bows now. Jim lay flat on Roan Horse as much as he could, making him jump back and forth.

  The gray horse had backed off from his dead master, but not far. He was a good horse and well trained. His eyes rolled wildly. He stamped and shook froth from his jaw. Rich caught the trailing brid
le and cut it free. The horse watched him. Rich tried to mount, Indian-fashion, from the right, but the gray laid his ears back and danced away. Jim shoved Roan Horse in against the gray to hold him and Rich sprang up agile as a monkey. Bridger fired from the ground. One of the Indian ponies fell. The unhorsed rider picked himself up and ran toward one of his comrades. Jim shot at him. The man stumbled but did not fall and the mounted man took him up behind. The pony galloped off carrying double. The man with the arrow in his thigh loosed off one more arrow and followed them. Jim let out a startled yell and squirmed his head around to see the back of his shoulder, where the buckskin shirt had been slit open as neatly as with a knife blade. Blood was already running down his arm.

  Rich came up beside him, swearing at the gray horse in four Indian languages. He looked at Jim’s shoulder. “Ain’t much,” he said. He handed Jim his rifle. “Load her for me. I want to keep both hands on this critter yet awhile.”

  He fought it out with the gray horse while Jim rammed home powder and ball, wiping his left hand dry on his shirt from time to time. Bridger had mounted again. Half a dozen Snakes came up and jumped off their horses by the dead Blackfoot. They struck the body, counting coup, and then stripped it. They looked at Jim with great respect. “You will make a big song tonight,” said one of them, fastening the scalp to his belt.

  The Snakes rode away again. Bridger grinned at Jim. “You’re an honor man now.”

  Jim looked down at the body. This had been a famous man, a great warrior. He had come to kill and plunder, to add to his long list of honors by doing to Jim what Jim had done to him instead. White men in the settlements prayed for a long life and a peaceful death, but an Indian prayed to die young, in battle. Jim felt that other, eastern world fading far behind him, with its fat tame cattle and tame green fields and the little rivers yoked with milldams. The plain spread around him shimmering in the sun, and on all sides were the mountains, high and hard and shining, making no difference between man, hawk, bear, or beaver, playing no favorites, taking no sides. The dry air smelled of crushed grasses, sun heat and blood and the sweat of horses. Some of the blood was his. It seemed right. The plain was covered with swirling knots of battle. There was a howling and a harsh screaming, men speaking with the voices of wolves and eagles. Jim took the captured war club out of his belt. He stood up in his stirrups and yelled, and Roan Horse, who loved war as much as he loved to run buffalo, neighed and ran.

  ELEVEN

  Jim lost track of Rich and Bridger. The fighting was broken and confused, hand-to-hand with friend and foe all mixed together and no clear lines drawn. But after a while something happened. The Blackfeet began to pull out. Pretty soon they were running, whipping their horses. The Snakes chased them fiercely. The trappers followed more leisurely, glad of a chance to smoke and clean their guns. Jim fell in with them and presently he found Rich again, still fighting the gray horse.

  “I’ve lived with Indians so long I thought I smelled like one,” Rich said, “but I reckon I don’t. Or else there’s a difference between tribes.”

  The gray horse crowhopped and swung his head around to bite at Rich’s moccasined foot, temptingly barred in the narrow stirrup. Rich kicked him in the nose and grinned. “Ain’t he a caution?”

  “He’s some,” Jim said. He looked ahead at the flying Blackfeet. “They’re in more of a hurry than they were this morning.”

  “Sun was on our side today. Their medicine was weak. Some of the young men went ahead of the war bundle, or else somebody did something to spoil the leader’s personal medicine, rode on the wrong side of him or killed his spirit animal.”

  “You believe that?”

  “They believe it.” There was a fresh scalp at Jim’s belt now and Rich looked at it. “Making quite a name for yourself today.”

  “They came looking for trouble,” Jim said. “I’m just trying to see that they get it.” He would have been content to quit now. He was dirty and hungry and tired and even Roan Horse was beginning to play out. But the Snakes were furies. This day their medicine was strong. It wasn’t often that they had Blackfeet running from them. Generally it was the other way round, and there were many Snake scalps hanging from the lodgepoles beyond the Marias. They had a lot of vengeance coming.

  All of a sudden Rich said, “Now watch.”

  The Blackfeet had been making for Bear Lake. Now Jim saw that there was a deep hollow at the edge of the lake, thickly grown with willows. The Blackfeet vanished into it. Almost immediately puffs of white smoke and the sound of shots came from among the trees. One Snake fell, and was picked up and borne away by comrades. Two or three others and some horses were wounded. The Snakes turned around and rode away. Rich grinned.

  “Those Blackfeet,” he said, “they’re some.”

  The retreating Snakes merged with the trappers. Sublette was shouting, telling his men to spread out and pour rifle fire into the willows from long range, out of reach of the fusees. Jim and Rich picked a spot and dismounted. Bridger joined them. He looked at the willows, his head first on one side and then on the other.

  “What do you think, Rich?”

  “Waste of powder and lead. They’re down inside that hollow like a breastwork, and the trees cover ’em.”

  “Bill knows that too,” said Bridger. “I reckon he’s just wanting to look good for our friends. Well, I don’t mind wasting a little powder. Might even get lucky and hit something.”

  They fired one by one into the willows. The sun was hot and there was no shade. The blood on Jim’s arm had caked hard and the gash on his shoulder pulled and stung.

  He looked up to see Rainbow and three others coming toward them.

  Their horses were all rimed with sweat. Rainbow’s fine white war shirt with the brilliant quillwork on it was stained and dulled. On the bare bodies of the other men the painted designs had run together, mingled with dust and blood. They stopped, and Rainbow looked down at Jim.

  “A Snake has been killed,” he said. “Steps-from-the-water is dead.”

  Jim did not know Steps-from-the-water but he must have been the man the Blackfeet shot when they took to the willows.

  “We wish to have revenge,” said Rainbow.

  In fairly good Shoshoni Jim said, “Many scalps have already been taken.” He pointed over the plain. “Look, the Blackfeet could not carry all their dead. The Snakes have fought like men today. Their women will dance tonight.”

  “The women of Steps-from-the-water’s lodge will not dance. They will gash themselves and go about crying continually unless there is Blackfoot hair to dry their eyes.”

  Other Snakes had died today, but apparently they had been paid for. Jim contemplated the willows, the deep protected hollow beside the lake. Rich and Bridger stood by, politely silent.

  “You’re a war chief, Rainbow. You have so many honors it takes a day to tell them. Why do you come to me?”

  “You have a name now. Formerly you do not have a name, but now you are named Bloody Arm. You struck the first coup. Your medicine is good, that is why.”

  Rainbow was a handsome man, tall and well-made. He wore a little stuffed hawk tied in his forelock, his personal war medicine. Sitting on his red horse he looked as though Sun had made him out of the red rock and then set him free. He watched Jim with dark, proud eyes. He did not speak again.

  After a moment Jim said, “Thanks. I’ll come.”

  He nodded to Rich and Bridger and mounted. He rode off with Rainbow and the three braves. He felt hot and flushed with pride. Part of his mind stood aside and laughed, and he couldn’t blame it. He was prancing out on a fool’s errand with a bunch of savages and he was more than likely to get himself killed, all because he wanted to show off. You could put it that way, he knew, and you might be right. But you could put it another way, too. “Formerly you did not have a name,” Rainbow had said, “but now you are named.” Better than any white man Jim understood the importance of a name. Formerly, he thought, I did not really have a name, even though I claim
ed one, even though I am my father’s son. Formerly I had an earmark, a stamp of ownership. Now I am named, with a name I earned.

  He rode tall beside Rainbow in the sun and forgot that he was tired.

  “How shall we do this?” he asked.

  Rainbow said, “We will ride over behind that little rise of land where they can’t see us. Small Belly will stay there and hold the horses. There’s a fold in the land where the water runs down in the spring. It comes close to the hollow where our enemies are. If we crawl carefully like snakes they won’t notice us.”

  “Maybe,” thought Jim cynically. But when they were over the rise that hid them from the Blackfeet he handed Roan Horse’s rein to Small Belly and slid down flat after Rainbow.

  The fold in the land, of which the little rise was the head, was simply a natural drainage channel that carried the runoff of melting snow and spring rain to the lake. It was dry now, grown up with tall grass. Jim hugged the bottom, his forward horizon filled by the soles of Rainbow’s moccasins and the muscular working humps of his buttocks. It was excessively hot down there below the wind and the rifle had to be watched constantly to keep it from clinking against the rocks that hid treacherously in the grass. In the outside world the rifles cracked steadily. Jim hoped the Blackfeet would be too busy watching the visible enemy to pay attention to anything else.

  A very long time later, Rainbow stopped and Jim saw the waters of the lake beyond him. They lay still. Close by Jim could hear the Blackfeet talking. His mouth was dry. His heart pounded against the ground, shaking him.