by Win Blevins
Praise for the Rendezvous Series
“An entertaining, vivid portrait of frontier America as seen through the eyes of an impressionable youth”
—Booklist on So Wild a Dream
“Blevins’s sweeping vision of the American frontier is just plain irresistible.”
—W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O’Neal Gear,
authors of People of the Thunder, on So Wild a Dream
“Win Blevins is my hero. . . . So Wild a Dream reads like spare prose poetry, limning vulnerable, yet heroic human characters against the untrammeled frontier of the early nineteenth century.”
—Loren D. Estleman, author of The Branch and the Scaffold
“Blevins possesses a rare skill in masterfully telling a story to paper. He is a true storyteller in the tradition of Native people.”
—Lee Francis, associate professor of Native American Studies,
University of New Mexico, on So Wild a Dream
“So Wild a Dream is a fabulous beginning of what promises to become a classic series that will be on college reading lists in history classes studying the fur-trade era.”
—Roundup Magazine
“The glory years of frontier life, fresh and rich.”
—Kirkus Reviews on Beauty for Ashes
“A rousing installment in a fine epic of the American frontier.”
—Publishers Weekly on Beauty for Ashes
“Loaded with action, drama, vivid descriptions, and colorful historical characters, this is a whopper of a Western yarn.”
—Publishers Weekly on A Long and Winding Road
“Blevins has done his research and knows the mountain men as well as anyone could—to read this tale is to get a true sense of what their ordeal and adventures must have been like.”
—Library Journal on Dancing with the Golden Bear
Also by Win Blevins
Stone Song
The Rock Child
ravenShadow
Give Your Heart to the Hawks
RENDEZVOUS SERIES
So Wild a Dream
Beauty for Ashes
Dancing with the Golden Bear
Heaven Is a Long Way Off
A Long and Winding Road
Dreams Beneath Your Feet
Dreams Beneath
Your Feet
A Novel of the Mountain Men
* * *
WIN BLEVINS
A Tom Doherty Associates Book
New York
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
DREAMS BENEATH YOUR FEET
Copyright © 2008 by Win Blevins
All rights reserved.
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN 978-0-7653-4486-1
First Edition: December 2008
First Mass Market Edition: December 2009
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Meredith,
who is my California home
wherever we go
Acknowledgments
A series of six historical novels requires a lot of expertise, and I got it from good colleagues and knowledgeable friends. Dale Walker, my editor, has been as wise and helpful as always. He has been an enormous source of support for more than a decade. The Honorable Clyde Hall of the Fort Hall Reservation has been my guide, both professionally and personally, in matters of the culture and spirituality of Native peoples. Dick James has shared his encyclopedic knowledge about mountain men. Many Native friends and fellow writers have helped me along the way. Thanks—I’m indebted to you all.
Thanks to Dean Koontz for permission to quote from his excellent novel Life Expectancy.
Every day throughout this writing, my wife, Meredith, helped as only the best of mates can. My love, respect, and gratitude for her are boundless.
Ours is a story mad with the impossible, it is by
chaos out of dream, it began as dream and it has
continued as dream to the last headlines you read in
a newspaper. And of our dreams there are two things
above all others to be said, that only madmen could
have dreamed them or would have dared to—and
that we have shown a considerable faculty
for making them come true.
—BERNARD DE VOTO
Synopses of the Previous
Volumes, 1822–1834
In So Wild a Dream, challenged by the half-breed Hannibal, Sam follows his heart west. After traveling to St. Louis with the con man Grumble and the madam Abby, Sam goes to the Rocky Mountains with a fur brigade and begins to learn ways of the trappers and the Indians. At the end he is forced to walk seven hundred miles alone, lost and starving, to the nearest fort.
In Beauty for Ashes, Sam courts the Crow girl Meadowlark. Helping Sam attempt a daring feat to win her hand, her brother is killed. Seeking reconciliation, Sam goes through the rigors of a sun dance, and Meadowlark elopes with him. Her family takes her back by force and kicks Sam out of the village. But Meadowlark runs away to join Sam, and at the trapper rendezvous they are married.
Dancing with the Golden Bear launches Sam and Meadowlark to California with a fur brigade. After terrible hardships crossing the desert, they reach the Golden Clime and the ocean. But Meadowlark dies in childbirth. On a harrowing journey across the Sierra Nevada and the deserts beyond, Sam passes through the dark night of the soul.
In Heaven Is a Long Way Off, Sam returns to California for his daughter, only to discover that she, her uncle Flat Dog, and her aunt Julia have been kidnapped. Sam brings off harrowing rescues and makes a wild escape on a river in flood. On the way back to the Crows, he becomes deeply involved in rescuing teenagers from slavery. Finally he returns his daughter to her village and finds his rival waiting to kill him.
At the beginning of A Long and Winding Road, the sisters of Tomás, Sam’s adopted son, are married and shortly afterward kidnapped by Indians. Father and son swear to rescue the women. The search takes them deep into Navajo country, then far north to the trappers’ rendezvous on the Green River, to Bent’s Fort, and at last back to Taos, New Mexico, and a surprising confrontation.
Contents
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Part Two
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
>
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Part Four
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Part Five
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Part Six
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Author’s Note The Next Decade
History and This Book
Personal Note
Part One
One
SAM MORGAN HEARD his partner, Hannibal, get up and step to the dead fire. Morning by morning, they took turns rising first, using cold fingers to get a little flame going and start some coffee.
First light would come along within a few minutes. They both had an instinct for first light, and it would arrive with the first sip of coffee.
Sam savored the warmth of his buffalo robes and the pad of his folded blanket coat under his head. In the aspens the mare Paladin and the other horses chuffed from time to time, clomped, and dreamed of a country free of horseflies.
Sam inventoried these familiar camp sounds. He could tell his mare from Hannibal’s gelding Brownie and from the packhorses by her step alone. In the other direction he heard the Henry’s Fork River. He listened to the pouring of the coffee water and the ping of the pot hung on the rod above the flames. He reached out and touched the cold barrel of the Celt, the flintlock rifle he inherited from his father.
One familiar part of Sam’s world was missing. This past winter his pet coyote, Coy, aged sixteen, walked out in the snows and never came back. Walking was difficult for the old coyote, and Sam was sure that he had gone deliberately, knowing that his time had come.
Sam missed him. As a pup Coy saved Sam from a prairie fire, and they had been together day and night for a coyote lifetime.
Making the coffee, Hannibal MacKye chuckled at himself. He and Sam had traded for a few beans before they left Fort Hall on this hunt, but they’d been making brew from the same grounds for two weeks now.
Toasty in his bedroll, Sam waited for the first two words of every morning, “Coffee’s hot.” Then the men would squat across the fire from each other and sip the flavored water without a word. Since they had ridden together for nearly two decades—trapped beaver, lived with Indians, rambled from the plains to the peaks to the Pacific—they had their routines. Their way was a little silence on waking, a span of time untouched by talk.
Suddenly Sam knew something. It just popped up, like a bubble from the mud bottom of a pool. He wiggled his back and bottom against the ground, and the thought was still there.
“Coffee’s hot,” said Hannibal.
Sam shifted around, scrambled to the fire, and held his cup out for the pale brew. The silence was amiable, as always, but Sam was holding back.
He waited until they’d finished the first cup of coffee, his tongue dissatisfied with the taste, his belly grateful for the warmth. He looked at his partner and had thoughts that hadn’t occurred to him in years. They were a truly strange pair, an Indian and a white man partnered. Who would guess, looking at them, that Sam, the white man with white hair and blue eyes, had been taught to read by the Indian? And that Hannibal, half Delaware and educated by his classics professor father, was fluent in Greek, Latin, and the philosophies of the world? Who would guess, really, what they had in common?
Sam couldn’t have named it, himself, and Hannibal wouldn’t. They loved the myriad and intricate ways of these mountains, here a spring, lower down a beaver pond, beyond that a wide meadow with a solitary bull elk feeding at its edge. Above the meadow a green reach of lodgepole pine, leading to a low divide, which framed the intense blue unique to the mountain West. From there a sighting of a hundred miles of lava plains, ending in a horizon of sawtooth peaks. They also loved the exhilaration of running buffalo and the heart-in-throat glimpse of a huge salmon leaping up a waterfall.
They were intrigued by Indian people and all the subtle byways of meeting them with proper ceremony, trading with them, being guests in their villages for days or weeks. Avoiding another tribe, even fighting against some. Sam had married into the Crow tribe and lived the tangle of having a red family.
Maybe the biggest attraction, the single, great, mind-blinding opiate, was the way that beauty and danger teeter-tottered. Every mile ridden, every trap set, every buffalo hunted, every stretch of desert crossed, every river forded was a dazzling diamond—and the facets of these jewels were wonder, hazard, miracle, excitement, and death. However hot, cold, or tired a mountain man felt, no matter how full-bellied, well-loved, or ready to hoot and holler, no matter how hungry, thirsty, or bowel-running scared, he always felt alive.
As Sam and Hannibal sipped their coffee, they knew such stuff, but they didn’t talk about it. They were too busy living it.
Sam looked at his friend and his mount—his hunting trail family. He pushed his eyes over to the single pack of beaver they had, a pitiful taking for their entire spring hunt. Up and down the west side of the Yellowstone Mountains they’d trekked, up and down the valley of the Henry’s Fork. Other trappers stayed away from this country, because of the danger of coming face-to-face with Blackfeet. After so many years Sam and Hannibal would have missed the danger if they didn’t smell it, and they were glad to have this country to trap alone. Once it was prime. Now it was paltry, but the best of what was left.
The irony was that the scarcity of beaver didn’t matter. They started hunting the creature for its fur, which made the best hats. Except that over the last few years, silk hats became the style. A way of life done in by a whim of fashion.
Sam swallowed the dregs and chewed the grounds. Even that way, the coffee had no taste.
The way Hannibal was grinning at him, Sam knew his friend had the same experience.
It was time. “I got a thought,” said Sam.
This thought of his would change their plans. Last night they’d agreed that today was the time to start downriver toward Fort Hall.
“I want to go to the Smokes,” he said.
They went to the Smokes each year, but at the end of the fall hunt, not the spring hunt.
Hannibal said, “Why not?”
So the Smokes it was. Just that easy.
Two
THEY UNSADDLED IN the Smokes late that afternoon, with all the long twilight of a spring day before them. They hobbled the horses and munched on dried meat. Sam checked the ties of red cotton that held last autumn’s sweat lodge together, and the footings of the limbs. He pursed his mouth, uneasy. “They’re good,” he told Hannibal, “but I want to build a new one.”
“I’ll hunt.”
Sam cut a baker’s dozen of green willow branches, tore new strips of red cloth, and constructed the lodge in the shape of an upside-down bowl. He gathered a couple of dozen lava rocks for tomorrow’s ceremony.
Dusk came the way water darkens white paper. Hannibal slipped into camp with an elk on a packhorse, and they hung it high. A low fire and soft talk held off the dark until they got into their bedrolls.
The last thing Sam remembered was the smell of the Smokes. It was named for a handful of sulfurous springs that g
ushed from the seam where the mountain met the meadow. The first fifty paces or so of each creek ran hot, and the narrow valley was soupy with steam. Doing a sweat lodge here at the end of each trapping year was one of Sam’s rituals.
The next morning he didn’t eat, just downed plenty of water. He and Hannibal built the fire and set the lava rocks on to heat. They covered the lodge with their blankets and buffalo robes. Sam built an altar, filled his pipe with tobacco, and set it facing the lodge.
Hannibal helped with this much and then started cutting the elk into over-sized strips to dry. The sacred pipe and the sweat lodge were Sam’s red road, not Hannibal’s. This understanding between them was as comfortable as everything else, and Sam found satisfaction in performing the ceremony alone.
When everything was ready, he carried a dozen rocks into the lodge with a shovel, stripped, and entered.
He performed the ceremony as the Crow medicine man Bell Rock had taught him years before. He burned cedar on the rocks. In the darkness of this womb of the Earth he prayed, pouring four dippers of water slowly onto the lava, pinpricking the black air of the lodge with fiery moisture, the breath of the rocks. He uttered the traditional prayer of the first round and then chanted a song in the Crow language.
Hannibal stopped cutting and listened to the song, for music was one of Sam’s gifts.
Between rounds Sam smoked the sacred pipe and with the smoke sent prayers to Father Sky. He carried in more rocks, to roil up the heat. He poured a round of seven dippers, another of ten, and the last round without counting. He prayed.
All sweats were good—he felt a rightness in them. But this time he was searching for something. He didn’t know what, and it didn’t come to him.
Sam performed another sweat that afternoon, again good, again with something missing.
When a valley opened toward mountains to the west, as this one did, twilight came early and lingered long. Sam helped Hannibal finish butchering the elk. They performed other tasks, ate their supper of dried meat, and talked of this and that. Sam’s last words before sleep were, “I’ll sweat again tomorrow.”
