“ ‘I see you,’ he is saying. ‘Already I am well,’ he is saying.”
Jim understood that this was a welcome, and relaxed a little. “Why,” he asked in Shoshoni, “have I been brought before Long Hair like a prisoner? When did I offend the Absaroka?”
The interpreter exchanged some talk with Long Hair and said, “ ‘We were afraid,’ he is saying. ‘You had lived so long in the lodges of the white man you might have forgotten you were a Crow. You might not have wished to return to your people,’ he is saying.”
Jim sat perfectly still, his mind racing. You’re not happy, Rich had said, I’m making you a present. Pity you weren’t born red instead of black-and-white.
Jim Beckwourth, the Crow?
Holding his voice steady, Jim asked, “You heard of this from my friend in the trappers’ camp?”
“Yes.”
“How much did he tell you?”
“Talks-all-the-time has told how as a little one still riding the travois, you were captured by the Cheyennes in the great battle more than twenty summers ago, when our men were killed and many of our women and children taken captive. Talks-all-the-time has told how the Cheyennes sold you to white men on the Big River and how ever since you have lived in their villages and learned their wisdom.”
Talks-all-the-time had done well, Jim thought, and was not surprised that Rich had never told him his Crow name.
“It is true,” Jim said cautiously, “I’ve been with the white man a long time.” Would they really believe this story? On nothing more than Rich’s word?
Long Hair was speaking through the interpreter. “But when you fought against the Blackfeet you fought like a Crow. You struck a first coup. You were wounded in battle. You killed three men. You took a weapon. You charged the enemy in a strong place and dragged him out. While the white men stood back you did this. Turn your back you did not. Run away you did not. Because of you the Snake women danced strongly. You fought like a Crow. Our hearts were made big when we heard of this. That’s why we took you and brought you here. Now we ask you to smoke.”
Long Hair lit the pipe and passed it, and Jim smoked. He had time to think while the pipe went round the circle. He could deny what Rich had told them but now he was sure that they would not believe him. They would think that he was denying his Crow blood because he was ashamed of it, and they might even get angry enough to kill him.
I’m making you a present, Rich had said. A present of a people who would accept him wholly and without question as one of their own.
Why shouldn’t he take it?
Long Hair raised his hand and spoke, and the door flaps were thrown open. Jim saw a line of women outside. They surged forward, and the interpreter beckoned to Jim.
“Stand in the light where they can see you clearly.”
Jim asked, “Who are these?”
“The Crow mothers who lost their sons that time. Perhaps one of them is yours.”
Jim looked at the women, the long line of them hoping for a miracle, and his heart failed him. The men he could deceive because he wasn’t cheating them of anything—he would simply be one brave among other braves, on his own feet, stand or fall. But this was too cruel. He started to protest, to tell the truth, but the interpreter was already speaking for the first woman. “ ‘If this is my son, he has a small scar on his left side beneath the rib.’ Take off your shirt and let her see.” Jim looked again at the women. It was too late, it had been too late when the news first came into the village. Their hopes had been roused and their disappointment would not be any the less now even if he was able to convince them that the whole thing was a fraud. He took off his shirt.
The woman examined his side, shook her head sadly, and passed on. One by one the others followed, looking for this or that mark they remembered or simply trying to see in the man the shadow of the lost child. One by one they passed. And then there came one who said, “If this is my son he has a little mole on his left eyelid.”
Jim broke out in sweat. He wanted desperately to run, but inexorably the woman’s work-hardened, gentle fingers touched his eyelid and pulled it down and he knew what she was going to find there. It wasn’t really much of a coincidence. Many people have moles and there are only a certain number of areas on a human being, so that give enough people some of them are bound to be roughly duplicated. And at a distance of more than twenty years, how could even a mother say whether or not the match was exact?
Especially a mother who wants with all her heart to believe that it is.
In a sort of daze Jim heard the cry go up and felt her arms flung around him, and then everybody was shouting together, and Jim thought, Oh Lord, what have I got myself into? He looked down into the face of his new-found “mother,” a broad honest squaw face with tears running down over the cheekbones, and he remembered his own mother and how small and pinched she had looked when the fever took her, and how he had cried because she was his only real friend in all that big house. He felt mean to be standing here lying to this Indian woman. And then he saw how happy she was, and it occurred to him that he hadn’t ever made any single soul that happy before in his whole life. She looked like a good woman. What the hell, he thought, let’s be happy together, and he put his arms around her and held her tight, and her hot tears went trickling down his chest.
There was a terrible lot of talking going on and he couldn’t understand any of it, but presently the whole population seemed to be carrying them along through the village, with a few running ahead. The interpreter had stayed close. He said to Jim in Shoshoni, “They are going ahead to tell Big Bowl to make ready his lodge to receive his son.”
Jim asked, “What is my mother’s name?”
“Captures-white-horses.”
“But isn’t that a man’s name?”
“She was named by her uncle,” the interpreter said, “for one of his own deeds. It is a custom.”
“I have a lot to learn,” Jim said. He looked at the young man and smiled. “Stay by me.”
“Gladly.” The young man smiled back. He had good features and fine intelligent eyes, but Jim noticed that he was poorly dressed, his shirt, leggings, and moccasins without ornament and his blanket very old and worn. “My name,” he said, “is Young Bear.”
The crowd swept on, bearing Jim and Captures-white-horses with it, and presently Jim found himself inside a good-sized and well-furnished tipi packed to the walls with people all trying to get hold of him at once, women crying and embracing him, men embracing him and making speeches, and one lean, middle-aged man in particular, whom Jim took to be Big Bowl, alternately weeping and addressing the crowd in what managed to be a strangely dignified and affecting way, between holding Jim’s arms and looking at him as his own father never had, with pride and love. Again Jim felt shabby and mean to be deceiving these people, but he thought, They’re better off with me than with no son at all.
With Young Bear’s help he got his immediate family sorted out, chiefly four pretty and still unmarried young sisters. The lost child, it seemed, had been the only son, though there were other “sons” who were actually nephews. There was a welter of uncles and aunts and clan connections among whom Jim got hopelessly lost, but there would be time for them later. Big Bowl invited everyone to a feast on the following night and the relatives began to thin out. Young Bear said tactfully, “You will not need me for a while.” He left, and in a little while Jim was alone with his family.
It was a strange experience.
He had had his mother for almost ten years, and he had loved her, but perversely, because he was unattainable, he had loved his father more. It was an unsatisfactory love and completely wasted. He had two sisters, but they were older than he and he hardly remembered them as children. They had been sent away early to begin their careers, and were now very proper lady’s maids, who hadn’t had much to say to him on the rare occasions when he’d looked them up. Now he sat in this skin tent under the Big Horns and felt himself regarded for the first time as a true
son and a true brother.
He understood that these people could not possibly know him or love him as himself and that he was only being given what belonged to their lost Antelope of unknown fate. But it was a good feeling even so. It was easy to let the true past slip away, to pretend and half believe that he really was the Antelope come home.
It was a strange present that Dave Richards had given him. Happily, contentedly, Jim began his life as an Indian.
The white man’s world receded, but it did not disappear. It could not. It was already too much a part of the Indian’s world. Jim still needed powder and shot, whatever else he might have done without, and so did all the Absaroka, and there was only one way to get it. When he was not taking the war road, winning his spurs in the Crow chivalry, Jim trapped beaver in company with Young Bear and such of the other men as could be talked into it. They had traps but buffalo robes were valuable too and they preferred hunting. They had a place to trade.
“After the first white men left the old fort it was very bad for us,” Young Bear said, referring to Henry. “But others came, and now there is a new fort and we have all we need.”
Back in the days when he was a white trapper, or a partly white trapper, and not an Indian, Jim had heard about an outfit called the American Fur Company that was supposed to be almighty big and powerful, with a lot of eastern money behind it, and he had also heard about a man named McKenzie, who first fought the company and then joined it, and was not loved by a lot of the trappers because it was rumored that he was too friendly with the Blackfeet. Actually, Jim found out, it was simply that McKenzie was a Canadian, so the Blackfeet hated him one notch less than they hated the American Henry, and McKenzie had a lot more men to hold the fort than Henry had had. So there was again a trading post at the mouth of the Yellowstone, and it was there that the Antelope went in time with his people.
The Antelope had been “home” for more than a year now. Every vestige of the white man’s world was gone. Dressed and painted as a Crow among Crows, he stood with Young Bear at Fort Union and watched the bargaining. The man in charge of the fort was named James Kipp, a leathery veteran of the trade, and he did not cheat the Indians, but he did not shower them with generosity, either. When it came Jim’s turn to barter his furs he let Kipp go on for a moment and then said quietly in English, “These are prime plews, and if you want ’em you’ll have to pay for ’em. Five dollars St. Louis, three dollars mountain. Or I take them back.”
Kipp stared at him with his mouth hanging open. “What the hell?” he said. “Who the hell... ?”
Jim told him.
“You don’t say,” said Kipp. He looked from Jim to the assembled Crows, who were watching the dialogue, tremendously impressed. Kipp drummed his fingers for a moment, thinking. “Mr. Beckwourth,” he said, “I think we might make an even better arrangement. Come inside.”
When Jim rode away from Fort Union he was on the company’s payroll as a resident trader among the Crow, and in addition to the liberal return Kipp had made him on his furs he had four pack horses loaded with trade goods advanced by the company. The Absaroka looked upon him with a new respect. The Antelope, the Bloody Arm, was not only a great warrior but he spoke to the white men on their own ground, in their own tongue, and the white men listened, and put wealth in his hands. Truly the Antelope was batse-tse, a great man, a chief.
Jim knew what Rich would say. “You ain’t content with just being an Indian, you got show ’em you’re a little smarter than what they are. You ain’t never content to be just as good as anything, you always got to be a little bit better.” Maybe. But in this case he had the advantage and he might as well use it. He could make himself look ten feet tall to the Crows, and help them while he was doing it.
The Ashley men had gone over the mountains. They were far away, and the land was so wide and the rivers so many that it only crossed Jim’s mind once that some day the Ashley men might come up hard against the giant company that had taken over the whole Missouri.
It didn’t seem worth worrying about, even when he realized that if it ever happened he would be caught squarely in the middle.
THIRTEEN
It was high summer, the time of yellow grass. The Crow counted four seasons, Green Grass, Yellow Grass, Leaf Falling, and Snow Falling, and the yellow grass time was the best of all. The land was open then under the hot winds, the rivers were fordable, the buffalo were fat and the ponies sturdy. Ambitious men went raiding all the year round, in rain and snow and bitter cold, but the yellow grass time was the bright season of the war road.
Jim looked over at Young Bear and smiled. They rode in a cloud of dust kicked up by the hoofs of fifty-odd horses which had lately belonged to the Cheyennes. They rode bareback. Horse raiders always went on foot, making it a point of honor to provide themselves with mounts for the journey home, so it was impossible to carry a saddle. They had ridden two nights and a day from the Cheyenne camp without stopping except to change mounts. After that they had driven the herd more slowly, but by then everybody was suffering from the inevitable wounds of the successful horse raid. Every once in a while Jim or Young Bear or one of the eight other warriors would get down stiffly and walk a while.
But if their backsides were blistered, their hearts were high. Young Bear and two others had won honors, cutting out picketed horses from the enemy camp. Jim had picked out a bunch, probably belonging to a single individual, that looked above average for loose stock, and run them off. By way of an added gift of fortune, they had encountered three members of a Cheyenne raiding party butchering a buffalo and killed them all. Most important, nobody had been hurt. Jim carried the pipe this time, which meant that all the responsibility was his, and the success would add very nicely to the Antelope’s honors and prestige.
The Antelope had done well. Jim was not more brave than most of the Crow warriors. Nobody could be. But he was not bound by their rigid traditions and habits of thought. By a simple application of the white man’s methods of fighting he gained great success on the war road. He struck the coups required to make him a chief, which meant that he had earned his spurs as a war captain. In addition to this, because of his association with Kipp, he was able to get his people better returns for their furs than they had ever had.
These things were his own doing, but part of his success was in the lucky accident of his “family.” It was large, and to an Indian relatives were power. The worst thing a Crow could be was an orphan without relations. That had been Young Bear’s curse, and because of it he remained poor and undistinguished until—after they had become firm friends anyway in the course of Jim’s education—Young Bear proposed that he and Jim become blood brothers. Jim was happy to agree, and by this simple but solemn ritual of adoption he gained a brother, Big Bowl a second son, and Young Bear a family, as firmly as though born into it. Now Young Bear was a distinguished warrior, owning many horses, and was one more in the powerful clique that Jim could call on to back him when he needed it.
There was one other thing as important as family in gaining influence, and that was generosity. Big Bowl had always had a name for it, and Jim added to that name as well as his own by the wealth he gained in these horse raids. A plains Indian counted his fortune in horses. With them he hunted his meat, moved his family, carried his sick, and transported his house with all its furniture and supplies. Most of what he purchased was paid for in horses—the bride price, the services of a doctor, special ceremonies, powerful medicines for the war road. Horses were gifts and largess to be distributed with an open hand, and they were as good for bribing as the white man’s gold. Without horses a man was destitute, and tribal memory was still strong of how it had been before the coming of the horse not so very long ago, when the Plains people went afoot with their meager belongings, starving and afraid. Jim was thoroughly indoctrinated in this point of view. He was as proud of his fifty Cheyenne horses and satisfied as though he had turned a fortune in the St. Louis fur market. The notion of stealing never entered
into it. This was not theft but war, unending and unregretted, by which a man won honor as well as spoils.
“If I ever get back to the white man’s world,” Jim thought, “I’m going to have to watch myself.”
He thought of Sam Carson and all the horses he had shod for him, and he laughed. The sun was hot, the wind was clean, he was happy, and the horizon stretched forever. If he ever got back to the white man’s world he would have worse things to worry about than horse stealing.
He had no intention of going back.
Suddenly Young Bear called to him. “Look! Muskrat is coming.”
Muskrat had been sent ahead to scout. They were well within Crow territory, but that was no guarantee of safety—a thing returning war parties often forgot, and sometimes to their sorrow. Muskrat was now racing back toward them, whipping his horse. He pulled up in a wild spurting of dust.
“I have seen some persons,” he cried. “Over there persons are riding.” He pointed to a rise of land ahead. He was sixteen and this was his first time out as a warrior. He was enjoying it. “They have mules with them.”
“White men?”
Muskrat nodded. “They’re very good mules,” he said gravely. He was Jim’s brother-in-law, and the laws of etiquette required them to be respectful and decorous in their behavior toward each other. Muskrat never quite broke the tabu. Jim scowled at him. “White men are our friends,” he said, and Muskrat grinned.
“We’ll see what the Antelope says when he looks at these persons.”
Jim signed to the others. Four of them remained to hold the herd. The other three rode with Jim, Young Bear, and Muskrat over the ridge.
The two white men rode at the head of a little string of mules. Two of the mules appeared to be loaded with supplies. The rest carried nothing but little wooden kegs. “Now,” said Muskrat, “what does the Antelope say?”
“The Antelope says that Muskrat is right. Those are truly very good mules.”
Follow the Free Wind Page 11
