by Jim Harrison
LEGENDS
OF THE FALL
CHAPTER
I
Late in October in 1914 three brothers rode from Choteau, Montana, to Calgary in Alberta to enlist in the Great War (the U.S. did not enter until 1917). An old Cheyenne named One Stab rode with them to return with the horses in tow because the horses were blooded and their father did not think it fitting for his sons to ride off to war on nags. One Stab knew all the shortcuts in the northern Rockies so their ride traversed wild country, much of it far from roads and settlements. They left before dawn with their father holding an oil lamp in the stable dressed in his buffalo robe, all of them silent, and the farewell breath he embraced them with rose in a small white cloud to the rafters.
By first light the wind blew hard against the yellowed aspens, the leaves skittering across the high pasture and burying themselves in a draw. When they forded their first river the leaves of the cottonwoods stripped by the wind caught in the eddies, pasting themselves against the rocks. They paused to watch a bald eagle, forced down by the first snow in the mountains, fruitlessly chase a flock of mallards in the brakes. Even in this valley they could hear the high clean roar of wind against cold rock above the timberline.
By noon they crossed a divide, a cordillera, and turned to take a last view of the ranch. That is, the brothers took in the view not the less breathtaking in the raw wind which blew the air so clean the ranch looked impossibly close and beautiful though already twenty miles distant. Not One Stab, though, who feared sentiment and who stared straight up in disdain when they crossed the railroad tracks of the Northern Pacific. And a little further on when they all heard the doleful cry of a wolf at midday, they pretended that they had not heard it for the cry at midday was the worst of omens. They took lunch as they rode as if to escape the mournful sound and not wanting to sit at the edge of a glade where the sound might descend on them again. Alfred, the oldest brother, said a prayer while Tristan, the middle brother, cursed and spurred his mount past Alfred and One Stab. Samuel, the youngest, dallied along with his eyes sharp on the flora and fauna. He was the apple of the family’s eye, and at eighteen already had one year in at Harvard studying in the tradition of Agassiz at the Peabody Museum. When One Stab paused at the far edge of a great meadow to wait for Samuel to catch up, his heart froze on seeing the roan horse emerge from the woods with its rider carrying half a bleached buffalo skull against his face and his laughter carrying across the meadow to the old Indian.
On the third day of their trip the wind let up and the air warmed, the sun dulled by an autumnal haze. Tristan shot a deer to the disgust of Samuel who only ate the deer out of instinctive politeness. Alfred, as usual, was ruminative and noncommittal, wondering how One Stab and Tristan could eat so much meat. He preferred beef. When Tristan and One Stab ate the liver first Samuel laughed and said he himself was an omnivore who would end up as a herbivore, but Tristan was a true carnivore who could store up and either ride or sleep or drink and whore for days. Tristan gave the rest of the carcass to a honyocker, a homesteader, whose pitiful barn they slept in that night preferring the barn to the dense ammoniac smell of the cabin full of children. Typically the honyocker did not know there was a war going on in Europe, much less owning any firm notion where Europe was. Untypically Samuel took a liking at dinner to the oldest daughter and quoted a verse of Heinrich Heine to her in German, her native language. The father laughed, the mother and daughter left the table in embarrassment. At dawn when they left the daughter gave Samuel a scarf she had spent the night knitting. Samuel kissed her hand, said he would write, and gave her a gold pocket watch for safekeeping. One Stab watched this from the corral when he saddled the horses. He picked up Samuel’s saddle as if he were picking up doom herself, doom always owning the furthest, darkest reaches of the feminine gender. Pandora, Medusa, the Bacchantes, the Furies, are female though small goddesses beyond sexual notions. Who reasons death anymore than they can weigh the earth or the heart of beauty?
They rode the rest of the way into Calgary in the full flower of a brief Indian summer. There was a bad incident at a roadside tavern where they tethered their horses to have a beer to cut their dusty mouths. The owner refused to let One Stab inside. Samuel and Alfred reasoned with the owner, then Tristan entered after watering the horses, sized up the situation and pummeled the beefy tavern owner senseless. He flipped a gold piece to the porter who nervously held a pistol, took a bottle of whiskey and a pail of beer and they had a picnic under a tree outside. Alfred and Samuel shrugged, long accustomed to their brother’s behavior. One Stab liked the taste of beer and whiskey but would only rinse his mouth with it before spitting it on the ground. He was a Cheyenne, but had spent his last thirty years in Cree and Blackfoot territory and had decided he would only get drunk if he ever returned to Lame Deer before he died. His spitting brought laughter from Samuel and Alfred but not Tristan who understood and had been close to One Stab since the age of three while Samuel and Alfred tended to ignore the Cheyenne.
In Calgary they were given an uncommon welcome for enlistees. The major forming the local cavalry came from the same area of Cornwall as their father, in fact, he shipped out of Falmouth on a schooner the same year, but for Halifax rather than Baltimore. The major was baffled by the refusal of the United States to enter the war, which he accurately saw as more monstrous and enduring than reflected in the easy optimism of those Canadians who envisioned the Kaiser and his Huns in flight the moment the locals landed on the Continent. But then such simpleminded braggadocio is appreciated in soldiers, who are largely cannon fodder for international economic and political machinations. In the month of training before shipping by train to the troopships in Quebec, Alfred quickly became an officer, Samuel an aide-de-camp due to his scholarly German and ability to read topographical maps. Tristan, however, brawled and drank and was demoted to wrangling the horses, where he in fact felt quite comfortable. Uniforms embarrassed him and the drills bored him to tears. Were it not for his fealty to his father and his notion that Samuel needed looking after he would have escaped the barracks and headed back south on a stolen horse on the track of One Stab.
Back near Choteau, William Ludlow (Colonel, Engineers U, Army. Ret.) spent sleepless nights. He had taken a chill the morning the boys left and spent a week in bed staring out the north window waiting for One Stab to return with some news however feeble and scanty the news would be. He wrote long letters to his wife who wintered in Prides Crossing north of Boston, also keeping a house on Louisburg Square for her evenings at the opera or symphony. She loved Montana from May through September, but equally loved to board the train back to the civilities of Boston, not an uncommon thing for rich landholders in those days. Against the popular misconception, cowboys never did own ranches. They were not much more than the expert, wandering hippies of their day, cossacks of the range who knew animals much better than each other. Some of the grandest ranches in north central Montana were actually owned by largely absentee Scottish and English noblemen. (A loutish Irishman, Sir George Gore, of suspicious noble birth had enraged the Indians by killing a thousand elk and an equal number of buffalo on a “sporting” trip.)
But Ludlow wrote his wife in a state of grief. She had insisted that Samuel be kept from the war. The year before she had cherished their Saturday lunches in Boston, talking of his always exciting past week at Harvard. She had babied her last born while Alfred had been stodgy and methodical from youth and Tristan uncontrollable. In September, a month after Sarajevo, she had quarreled with her husband then left after the three days it took to pack. Now Ludlow knew he should have kept Samuel and sent him back to Harvard if only to please his mother. The young second cousin, Susannah, she had brought from the East in hopes that Alfred would make a good marriage, had instead become engaged to Tristan. This amused Ludlow who secretly favored Tristan’s misbehavior even though after the engagement dinner Tristan inexcusably disappeared with One Stab for a week on the track of a grizzly that had taken two cattle.
Ludlow lay under the comforter looking at the scrapbooks of his life, his mind enlivened by a mild fever. He had reached the age where his habitually romantic frame of mind had turned to the ironies; the past had become a dense puddle out of which he could draw no conclusions. Though he was sixty-four his health and vigor had not diminished and his parents, both in their mid-eighties, were alive in Cornwall, which meant barring an accident, he was likely to live longer than he cared to. In his scrapbooks he read a sappy poem he had written in his Vera Cruz days and noted with amusement it was pasted next to a newspaper clipping about “The Fecundity of Codfish.” As a mining engineer he had ranged from Maine, to Vera Cruz, to Tombstone in Arizona and Mariposa, California, to the copper country in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He had not married until thirty-five and then the choice had been mutually unlikely—the daughter of a vastly wealthy investment banker from Massachusetts. And not that wealth was a part in this absurd nesting influence—he still drew some five hundred pounds a month from a Vera Cruz silver mine, nearly four thousand dollars in the exchange of the time. But it gathered in a bank in Helena where he traveled several times a year to look after his investments and carry on at the Cattleman’s Club. His marriage had burned out, had gradually transmogrified from its previously Keatsian fire into a remote and cranky elegance. Their extended honeymoon voyage to Europe had civilized them to the point that he did not greatly care if she took a winter lover in Boston, usually far younger than herself. Her most recent discreetly scandalous affair would be a Harvard student, John Reed, who would become a famed Bolshevik and die in Moscow of typhus. Like many wealthy feminists of the time her interests were ardent and captious. After the first son had been properly named after the grandfather, the second caught the brunt of her few impulses, being named “Tristan,” gleaned from medieval lore in her years at Wellesley. Somewhat typically she was the first woman to play polo with anything equal to the capabilities of those male horse sybarites who take the world as their stable. But she was a grand one, even in her fifties, a preposterous beauty with her once thin body verging on lushness. She had tried to make poor Samuel an artist but he owned his father’s scientific bent and wandered around the ranch with his nature guidebooks studiously correcting their Victorian inaccuracies.
For the first time since the boys left Ludlow came down for dinner and noted with despair the single place set at the head of the dining room table, the coolness of which the roaring fireplace did not allay. Roscoe Decker, his foreman, sat drinking coffee with his wife, nicknamed Pet, a Cree noted for her beauty whom Ludlow’s wife had taught to cook well over the past few years from an antique French cookbook known as the Ali Bab. Decker (for no one called him Roscoe, a name he disliked) was about forty with the slender legs of a horseman but with a bullish chest and arms, got from a youth full of digging fence-post holes.
Ludlow said he was lonely and wondered aloud if they all might eat together in the dining room. Pet poured him a cup of coffee and shook her head no. Decker looked away. Ludlow felt his face redden thinking he might have to order them to eat with him no matter the ten years they had spent in each other’s distant good graces. So Ludlow and Decker drank their afternoon coffee under strain, disarming the odor of a Normandy venison stew Pet was cooking in cider in the wood range. Decker attempted to talk about the cattle but Ludlow stared into the distance unhearing in his anger. He watched Isabel, Decker’s nine-year-old daughter, named after Ludlow’s wife, make her way across the barnyard carrying something. She came through the pump shed and in the kitchen door and the something turned out to be a little badger a few weeks old that Tristan had given her. Pet told her to take the beast outside but Ludlow interrupted out of curiosity. The badger seemed ill and Ludlow said the milk must be warm and it might take meat ground into paste. Pet shrugged and began rolling biscuit dough while Ludlow warmed some milk and Decker examined the creature. They found a cache of old nursing bottles and nipples in the pantry and Isabel fed and rocked the badger which ate hungrily. Now Ludlow was happy and took out a bottle of Armagnac and poured himself and Decker glasses to add to their coffee. Isabel refused to go to school because of a certain half-breed onus, so Ludlow said he would finally undertake to tutor her starting the next morning at eight sharp.
The mood lightened so markedly that Ludlow went into the cellar for a good bottle of claret to go with the meal. For years he had been indifferent to his wife’s taste for good wine, then having become a gradual convert, he read a vinology book and went on a binge to the point his cellar was chocked, partly from a derailed Northern Pacific bound for San Francisco that he cagily bought from a railroad official. And in the cellar he solved the problem; they would all eat in the kitchen including One Stab when he returned. That way he hoped that his sons’ absence would not be so raw and glaring. He construed it back in the kitchen as a natural winter fuel measure. The dining room would be closed off. Decker’s family would move to the guest room and the three ranch hands could have Decker’s cabin. They all knew One Stab would not move from his hut which only he entered short of Isabel when she was sick at three and One Stab asked to perform some private ceremony. Ludlow knew, though, that One Stab owned a coup bag full of scalps, not a few Caucasian, but he privately approved.
After dinner they played pinochle all evening with Pet and Isabel winning owing to the wine and brandy Ludlow and Decker had consumed. Ludlow announced that Decker must take tomorrow off and they would take the setters and go grouse hunting. Decker said he expected that One Stab would be back in a few days. Pet served a pudding made from ripe plums from the orchard and Isabel fell asleep in her chair with the badger staring from his blanket on her lap. At midnight Ludlow went to bed with a warm steady feeling that the world indeed was a good place, that the war would be quickly over, and that he and Decker would have a good hunt the next day. He said his nightly prayers, adding for a change One Stab, who as a pagan was no doubt impervious to their influence.
At a little after three A.M. he awoke in a night sweat after a dream so crisply actual that he was still shuddering a half hour later. In his dream he had seen his sons die in a battle while he stood helplessly on the outcrop of a butte; then he had looked down and noted that he wore elkskin leggings, and was, in fact, One Stab. He wondered as he lit his pipe watching the shadows of the kerosene lamp flicker against the wall where he himself had been in the dream all the more poignant because in 1874 he had been encamped at Short-Pine Hills and One Stab had arrived and rather casually said that Sitting Bull with five thousand braves was coming south toward them from the Tongue River. So they rode hard day and night for three days to escape the trap with some men tying themselves to their saddles in exhaustion. Ludlow drew his robe close and left his room, walking down the hall and peeking first into Alfred’s room with all its sentimental bric-a-brac, dumbbells, self-help books, and then Samuel’s, littered with microscopes, stuffed animals including a snarling wolverine, botanical specimens, a piece of driftwood drawn from the river in his youth that owned a startling resemblance to a hawk. Tristan’s room which Ludlow had not entered in recent memory was stark and bare; a mule deer skin on the floor, a badger skin covering the pillow on the bed, and a small trunk in the corner. Ludlow grimaced, knowing the skin on the pillow was from Tristan’s pet when he was ten years old that Ludlow had shot after it had killed his wife’s lapdog and she had gone into hysterics. Normally a most truculent animal, Tristan’s pet would ride horseback with him, perched rotundly across the pommel of the saddle and hissing gutturally at anyone who came near except One Stab. Ludlow stooped holding the lantern over the trunk. He felt a bit like an old snoop but could not resist his curiosity. Inside the trunk the lamplight caught the glitter from the sterling rowels of a pair of Spanish spurs Ludlow had given Tristan on his twelfth birthday. There were some cartridges for a Sharps buffalo rifle, a rusty handgun of unknown origin, a jar of flint arrowheads, and a bear claw necklace, no doubt a gift from One Stab whom Ludlow often felt was more the b
oy’s father than he himself. On the bottom of the trunk wrapped in antelope hide Ludlow found with surprise his own book printed in 1875 by the Government Printing Office with “my father wrote this book” in a childish scrawl inside the cover.
He stood abruptly with the lantern teetering dangerously in his hand. He had not opened the book in three decades mostly out of grief that his recommendations on the Sioux had been not taken, even scorned, after which he resigned his commission and left for Vera Cruz. He noted that Tristan had underlined and notated the pages and was curious about what so unlearned and obdurate a lad would make of what he considered a technical work. He took the book back to his room and poured a glass from a demijohn of Canadian whiskey kept under the bed for insomnia.
The title itself was bland if one neglected certain historical ironies: “Report of a Reconnaissance of the Black Hills of Dakota, made in the Summer of 1874 by William Ludlow, Captain of Engineers, Bvt. Lieut. Colonel U.S. Army, Chief Engineer Department of Dakota.” As a scientist, or what passed for one at the time, he had been attached to the Seventh Cavalry under the command of an officer of his own rank, Lieut. Colonel George Armstrong Custer. Ludlow with his Cornish reticence loathed Custer and kept the company of his scientific group which included George Bird Grinnell of Yale College, a boon companion. When Custer became especially worried or angry he would mimic Ludlow’s English accent, an inexcusable frivolity in a fellow officer. Ludlow privately celebrated when he heard of Custer’s demise at Little Bighorn three years later in ’77. His own recommendations in the conclusion of his report had been terse and direct. After enumerating the obvious advantages of the region, including the protection it afforded against the torrid heat and arctic storms of the neighboring prairies, Ludlow advised:
