by Win
“You are always welcome at my lodge,” called Walkara. “The coffee is always hot for you.”
When they were well out of hearing, Sam said, “What do you think?”
“The ass wanted to come and be introduced at rendezvous by someone well known, and he used us,” said Tomás.
“Yeah,” said Sam.
“But any of it might be true,” said Baptiste.
“Yeah.”
They trod along in disgruntlement.
“Here’s something else,” offered Sam. “Pegleg ran into the same Blackfeet village I did and got captured.” He didn’t have to add, The men are dead and the women are captives.
Each man padded along on this thought for a while.
“What do we do?” asked Tomás.
“Wait,” said Baptiste.
More steps.
“Yes,” said Sam, “wait. Maybe they’ll show up.”
“Waiting makes my belly boil,” said Tomás.
“Sounds to me like one horse is pulling you east and one pulling you west,” said Flat Dog.
“Eat,” said Julia. She put a bowl into Sam’s hand. The pot was already hanging over the fire, filled with the same meat and roots and onions he’d gobbled up last night.
“East and west?” said Tomás.
Julia gave him food in place of an answer, and handed the same to Baptiste.
“One is, he needs to find your sisters,” said Flat Dog. He said nothing about the other.
Tomás gave his father a querying look.
“We’ll talk about it later. Where’s Joaquin?”
“Wherever he fell down drunk.”
“Chasing poontang,” added Baptiste.
“You know,” said Tomás, “that son of a bitch Walkara pushed us like hell getting here. Now he goes around like a king. If he gets his way, he’ll be the Emperor of the Southwest.”
“I said eat.” She put a second bowl into Sam’s hand. “You’re gaunt.”
Sam ate three full bowls.
“You walk around rendezvous,” said Baptiste. “Tomás and I will start the trading. We’ll sell out today. Good prices. Money is flowing like whiskey.”
Sam cocked an eye at his friend. Baptiste grinned. “You’ll see why.”
Sam wandered through the Rocky Mountain Fur camp. Sam and Flat Dog had worked as trappers for this outfit for most of a decade. Until recently it was the only sizable company in the mountains. Now they had competition from the American Fur Company. Draconian competition, Grumble would have called it.
Sam had gone to the first rendezvous in 1825 and every one since. This one, he soon found out, was the most peculiar.
Sam meandered among the tipis, tents, and brush huts dotting the bottomland along the creek. Men were either sleeping off their drunks or rousing themselves to morning coffee. Tonight would approach riot, but now all were stuporous. Four dozen or so employees of Rocky Mountain Fur, those who brought the pack train, were organized into messes. Here groggy men had fires going, perking the coffee and reheating whatever they had for dinner. Sleeping figures were scattered everywhere in blankets, the chance of rain in mid July being next to nothing. Last night’s women were gone back to their own camps, mostly the Shoshone circle. Through the trees Sam could see their lodges, tipis poles like spears against the sky.
Three big camps elbowed each other along the river, above and below where the creek came in—Rocky Mountain Fur, American Fur, and the Shoshones. Maybe three hundred trappers altogether had arrived, some with wives and children. Some weren’t white men but Delawares, Iroquois, and French-Canadians, yet they were thought of as “us.” The Indians were a big lot of Shoshones, plus some Crows, Flatheads, Nez Perces, and others. Somewhere up and down the creek they all herded horses and mules along the creek or river, and kept an eye on them. Rendezvous was a gigantic truce, but it was also a show-off and a king-sized competition. Some of the Indians thought stealing horses was fine sport.
“You risked your life foolishly,” said a voice. The accent reminded Sam of Grumble’s when he was doing his fake Englishman.
“Do that near every day,” said a soft, Virginia tongue. “Hey, Ol’ Sam,” Joe Meek went on, “set with us.”
Joe and a stranger sat before a low fire and big coffee pot. Sam joined them.
“The captain here is trying to reform my ways. My drinking habits, I mean.”
“I say,” said the stranger, “William Drummond Stewart here, Captain, Fifteenth Kings Hussars.”
Sam shook the outthrust hand and said his own name, which seemed bare naked next to Stewart’s. But at least a plain American knew better than to stand between Joe Meek and whiskey at rendezvous.
Sam liked Meek a lot. He was a Virginian with sweet, slow speech and an easy manner that fooled you, because he was the devil’s own fool. Joe Meek would do anything—ride straight at Indians and dare them to shoot him, or leap off a galloping horse’s back, grab a tree limb, and do a flip over the limb and back to the ground—Sam had seen Joe do more wild stunts than any man in the mountains, and have more fun doing them.
“You hear about the crazy wolf?” asked Joe.
Sam shook his head.
“Rabid, definitely,” said Stewart.
Sam had trouble keeping a smile off his face. These Brits’ accent always tickled him.
“Coupla nights ago, mebbe three, a white wolf come into camp. Drooling it was, real gaunt, it comes right here and bites three men. So Cap’n Stewart here, he rides on into camp that same night and finds me passed out right next to the path with the wolf’s tracks. I might have had a few too many, or maybe a whole lot too many. It was a long winter.”
“So I have asked my friend Joe here, ‘Why must you get so drunk? Or if you do, then put yourself somewhere safe. Had that wolf noticed you—it must have passed directly by your prostrate form—it could easily have mauled you as well as others.’”
Joe grinned and shrugged.
“Those bites are usually fatal.”
“Well, Cap’n, I allow as how that wolf might have killed me. Blackfeet couldn’t do it, nor starving till I ate my moccasins—them things didn’t do it, but that wolf, he might have got the job done.
“On the other hand—I’m showing I can learn to talk the way you do—have you considered this? I was so full of whiskey, my blood so brim full with the juice of fire, I might have cured the wolf!”
Stewart snorted and shook his head. Then he turned a proper smile to Sam. “Morgan, where are you in from?” That lingo showed that the Brit was picking up a normal way of talking, not like however he conversed over tea in some castle. The man’s swaddling clothes were probably silk.
They told their stories. Then Sam wandered on and soon found Tom Fitzpatrick and his boy Friday preparing the day’s trading.
“Mornin’, White Hair.”
Sam liked to tease Fitz about his hair. A year ago, on the way to rendezvous, Fitz endured an adventure like the one that Sam just went through, and arrived in worse shape—was found unconscious on the river bank, in fact. That harrowing episode turned his hair from red to white overnight.
“Mornin’ back to you. Glad to see your white hair. Heard you’d joined the immortals.”
“They let me pass by,” said Sam—“this time.”
Fitz turned back to setting items out, a cornucopia of the products of industrial enterprise, hauled to the far Rocky Mountains.
“Sublette and Campbell brought a hundred twenty mules this year, loaded with 250 to 300 pounds apiece,” Fitz said. “Wonder if there’s anything left in St. Louis.”
“Manufactured goods,” said Sam with a hint of irony in his voice. He’d always been uneasy about factories.
“Indians have their medicine,” said Fitz, “we have ours.”
They were the oldest of mountain friends. When they were taking the furs down the Platte River the spring of ’24, each of them got separated from the main outfit and ended up walking the same seven hundred miles to Fort Atkinson to g
et saved, neither knowing about the other.
“So you and me, we’ve run the gauntlet again,” Fitz said.
“Seems crazy,” said Sam.
“Mountain luck.”
Men who risked their lives together, got attacked by the same enemy, nearly lost their lives to the same winter winds and the same starving times—only those men were welded together like Sam and Fitz.
“Things are getting damned hard,” said Fitz. He was one of the owners of Rocky Mountain Fur, and the brains of the operation.
“Baptiste and Tomás said goods are selling highest ever.”
“Shinin’ times,” said Fitz ironically. “We’ve marked them up several hundred percent. But there’s a rub, lad. Hell, enough rubs to take a man’s hide off. I’ve paid as much as $9 a pound for beaver.”
The usual price was $4.
Sam grinned. “Sort of balances out.”
“Balances to losses,” said Fitz. “It’s the damned monopoly.” He meant American Fur. “They aim to hound us into the grave.” Last year American Fur Company had followed Rocky Mountain Fur all over the trapping country, obliging Rocky Mountain Fur to teach them every creek and beaver dam.
“Their new devilment,” Fitz went on, “is to pay high for beaver and give unbelievable wages. They’ve got John Jacob Astor’s cash to spend forever, we don’t. Sad lot the fur men will be, when it’s only Astor calling the tune.”
“And here I thought the mountain life was supposed to be fun,” said Sam.
“Way things are going, more fun for the trappers than the owners. Well, top trappers like you.”
Sam looked at him.
“I need you, Sam. I want to hire you before they do. I can offer a year’s contract at $125 a month.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
$1500 a year. Sam had signed on a decade ago for $15 a month.
“The best men can get that. I’ll hire your boy, too. Tell Baptiste I can pay him until my brains run out my nose.”
Sam had to chuckle. “The privileges of owning your own business,” he said.
Fitzpatrick shrugged. “Are you in?”
“I’ll talk it over with Tomás and Baptiste,” Sam said. “We’ve got something going.”
“Just don’t go to work for Astor,” said Fitz.
“No.”
Sam stood up to wander on.
“You know Beckwourth did it, just that?”
Sam turned back to Fitz. “He wouldn’t.”
“He’s with the Crows up on the Big Horn, cajoling them to take their trade to American Fur.”
Beckwourth, the mulatto, had also stood shoulder to shoulder with Sam and Fitz and Gideon Poorboy in the early days.
“I guess a man’s got to look out for himself,” said Sam.
“Some do only that,” Fitz said in a sour tone.
“Where’s Milton?” Meaning one of Fitz’s partners in Rocky Mountain Fur.
“Tent right over there. Campbell’s talking to him, no doubt scragging at him for money. Bill’s on the upper Missouri building trading posts.” Though Milton and Bill Sublette were brothers, they were owners of different outfits, Rocky Mountain Fur, which hunted, and Sublette and Campbell, which freighted the hides to St. Louis.
“Posts?” A new way of doing business.
“That’s the word. You going to see them, I’ll stroll along. Bow and scrape and play the peasant.”
“They’re our friends.”
“Milton is my friend. Campbell is a bloody Scot.”
“He’s Irish.”
Fitz gave a Sam an odd look. “His family comes from Ulster. Campbell is a Scottish name, and he’s a Prot.” Sam looked so puzzled that Fitz added, “Protestant. No Irishman.”
Fitz extended a ruined hand, and Sam helped him up. “All this and a jug will get a man drunk.” The hand got crippled when a gun blew up.
“What has it come to, when a friend and a Prot own an Irishman’s arse?”
Robert Campbell, Milton Sublette, and Milton’s wife Mountain Lamb, as it happened, were playing host to Walkara. The big chief sat cross-legged in front of the low fire, stirring heaping spoonfuls of sugar into his black brew. Though all the men should have been preoccupied with sneaking glances at Mountain Lamb, considered the most beautiful woman in the mountains, the smell of the scene was greed. When Sam sat down, he felt like he was sitting with vultures hovering close to get the most meat off a corpse.
“Greetings, my friend Sam,” said Walkara in English, like nothing had happened between them. “I present to these men to bring trade to me like rendezvous.”
“We trade with this man,” said Sublette, nodding at Fitz. “Him only. Monopoly.”
“Mo-no-po-ly?”
“He’s the only one we sell to.”
“And he sells to all the trappers.”
“That’s the way the world works,” said Fitz.
“Monopoly,” repeated Walkara. Sam could see him figuring it out. We share the carcass and keep you away.
Walkara shrugged. “Then I trade in Taos.”
“I’ll buy your furs,” said Fitz.
Walkara shook his head. He didn’t know the words, but he understood the difference between wholesale and retail. “Taos.” Now he looked craftily at Sublette. “Maybe I trade you slaves.”
“Slaves?”
Walkara nodded. “Navajo, maybe Apache, maybe Mexican slaves. Women, good-looking women, and children.”
Sam glared at Walkara, and the chief threw back a lecherous smile.
“We ain’t in that business,” said Milton.
Walkara laughed. He seemed to think everything in life was a joke, maybe a wicked joke. He shrugged and said, “Business is business.” He got up and gave a big grin. “We all of us do business some day. We all get rich together.” He walked off.
Mountain Lamb brought the coffee pot. Sam, Fitz, Milton, and Campbell eyed each other over their cups. For Sam the fair-haired Irishman—well, the Scot Prot—always seemed hard to get next to.
Sam didn’t know Milton as well as he knew his brother Bill. In Sam’s first year in the mountains he, Bill, and Jim Clyman had got caught out overnight and damn near froze to death. In the morning Clyman saved them by finding a live coal the size of a kernel of corn in last night’s fire.
Now Campbell told Fitz, “I was asking Milton if you have funds to pay your notes.”
Fitz threw Sam a sardonic glance. “Don’t know how many packs we’ll get.” Or what he’d have to pay for them in trade goods.
“We are your freighters with pleasure,” said Campbell, “but your bankers only with reluctance.”
Sam knew that Sublette and Campbell charged fifty cents a pound for freighting the year’s furs from rendezvous to St. Louis.
As Campbell pressed Fitz and Milton about the debt, Sam got up and left. He hunted beaver when he liked and where he pleased and did a little trading on the side. A businessman had worries—a free trapper didn’t. Except for those horses pulling him east and west.
27
Dusk. High mountains to the west, their summit ridges sharp and dark against a sky fading away from bright blue. Higher mountains to the east, realms of eternal cold. Cool air washing down the alpine slopes into the valley of the Siskadee. Sam sat with his feet in the river, and even in mid-summer the cold water brought to him the first hint of the coming of autumn, and beyond that, winter.
The air was changing color, sliding from the gold of twilight to the blue-gray of evening. An hour ago he watched the yellow sunlight flickering on aspen leaves—now the light was silver, and soon the leaves would hang dark and still. He thought how the aspens in a few weeks would turn golden, or even flame-colored, and how the dwarf oak, higher up, would go from green to scarlet. Autumn in high places.
Paladin flabbered her lips in the edge of the river. Sam looked at her affectionately, and thought of the companion who wasn’t here, Coy. He wondered about Lupe and Rosalita, torn away from their worlds. He pon
dered Tomás and his relentless anger.
He shook his head to chase away the mood. He lifted his kaleidoscope to his right eye. Some of his personal belongings had been packed up on the mules and didn’t end up on the bottom of the river. He was glad about the kaleidoscope. Looking at them was a trip into a special world.
He turned the cylinder, entranced. Now, in the twilight, they seemed different, less dazzling and more velvety. He could look into the kaleidoscope for a long time.
He chuckled to himself. The meaning of life, the old Mexican told Hannibal. Odd, the interior of the kaleidoscope did feel like a church. But damned if I find any meaning.
Now the light in the valley took on a lavender sheen. The pine forest on the mountainsides threw deeper shadows. Not even the moon or stars were out yet, in a sky crumbling from blue to black. An inner door opened to emptiness and solitude.
Suddenly Sam made a conscious decision—not now. Rendezvous was his big annual party. Instead of feeling melancholy, this was the time to wrap the camaraderie of the summer get-together around himself like a warm cloak. He put on his moccasins, led Paladin to the tipi of Flat Dog and Julia, and sat a few minutes with Julia and Esperanza. His daughter scratched in the dust with a stick and then put big pony beads into the little rut. Sam saw that she was making a face in the dirt and wondered whose it was. Probably Old Woman’s Grandchild or other Crow heroes from the mists of time, ones she’d heard stories about.
“I’m going to the dance,” he said.
Julia gave him a big smile. “Bring my husband home before he gets into trouble.”
By chance Flat Dog was the first person Sam recognized at the big circle. They smiled at each other. Flat Dog was as good a man as he knew, solid, dependable, lots of times funny, always a fellow to ride the river with. They’d trekked from the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean and back together, and from Flathead Lake in the far north to Mexico’s Gila River. Now the two of them started wandering around the circle, looking at all the beaver men and Indians dressed up for the dance.
Everyone was decked out handsomely, the Shoshone men especially fine. They wore their buffalo robes, painted with colorful depictions of battles they’d fought and other great events of their lives. Their leggings showed thongs of beaded buckskin so long they trailed the ground a foot behind. In their right hands they bore fans made from the entire wings of golden eagles. In the crooks of their left arms they carried muskets in sleeves of blanket, fringed. Their hair, glossy black, fell to their shoulders. Their faces were painted according to the medicine they had seen on their quests for visions.
