by Jon E. Lewis
We set out on foot for the Mexican settlement at Cottonwood River. There were five of us young men, and Nantai, who had agreed to come as our leader. The raid there was nothing. Most of the people had gone further east for a fiesta, so we simply took what horses we could find, a small amount of goods, and set the houses on fire. The few who were there ran away, and we did not bother hunting for them. There was really very little there, we each got a horse, that was about all. So Nantai took us to the north, to see what we could find.
The next day we came into sight of the road that runs from the far east to the big settlement at Muddy Flat. We rode to the westward, in sight of it. About noon we came up with a train of four wagons, heading west. Nantai took us around them in a circle, and showed us how to watch them.
These were Americans, and we young men were greatly interested in studying them. There were ten American men, several of their women, and two Mexicans. The wagons were drawn by oxen. We spent that day studying the party, while Nantai sent Comes Fighting to scout the back trail, and Crooked Nose ahead, to make sure that they were traveling alone, and no one would interfere with us. Sometimes we rode or walked just out of sight, watching them. Sometimes we hid in the sagebrush and let them travel by us.
They say that Americans are very great fighters. That may be so, but they are easy to scout. If one sits still and makes himself hard to see, the peaceful Indians may none-the-less see one, the Mexicans do sometimes, but the Americans almost never. It is the color of their eyes, I think. By nightfall we knew them pretty well, and after dark we came in close and enjoyed ourselves watching how they did.
Back when we were at peace with the Americans, before they tied up our chief and flogged him that time, Nantai used to go among them. Now he pointed things out to us. For instance, save for one man, they sat staring into the fire, blinding themselves. They built their fire large, here in enemy country, and they slept close to it. The one man who kept his back to the fire, there were things about his way of dressing that Nantai told us to notice. He said that that man was surely one of the Americans from Taos, the ones who go everywhere trapping beaver. Those men are dangerous, he said. It was because of the trapper that their night guard was well kept up, and it would not be easy to run off their stock. They had good saddle horses, and some mules.
When they had gone to sleep, and we had studied their way of placing their guards, we went back to a place where we could camp. There we talked over what we had seen. We were amused about a young man and woman we had watched. The woman seemed to be the daughter of an elderly man, rather fat, who rode mostly in one of the wagons. We thought he was a chief of some kind. The young man wished to court her, but her father did not like it. During the day they dropped back, behind the Mexicans who were herding the spare horses, but then the father mounted a horse, and they separated. In camp at night, they looked towards each other, and yet stayed apart. We joked about the young man’s chances, and wondered what the father’s objection was. The young man was well dressed, and he rode a good horse.
The next day, some of us wanted to make a quick rush for the spare horses, to see if we could drive some off. Nantai told us to be patient. We were no longer children, he said. It would be many days yet before the train came near to Muddy Flat, let us see what turned up. So we followed them again all that day, amusing ourselves with the courtship and other such matters.
The next night Crooked Nose and I were lying in wait where the young lover stood on guard, when the girl came out to see him. They whispered, hugged each other, and put their mouths together. They pushed their mouths against each other as a form of lovemaking. It seemed to us that here was a chance to take two prisoners. What sort of warrior was this who dealt with a woman while he was on war duty? His power would be destroyed, his eyes dimmed, his medicine would not protect him. It would have been easy to capture them both at those times when their faces were touching. I went off to find Nantai. He called the others, and we all crept back.
Crooked Nose came to meet us. The girl had gone back to the wagons, he said, and the young man was watchful once more. He had been so close to them that he could have touched them with his spear. They had had a long talk, and he thought that they had decided something, he said. We watched awhile longer, then went to our camp. There Crooked Nose and I described what we had seen, and we laughed about the lovemaking.
The next morning the train came to where a road branched off northwards, to the American settlement at the Silver Mine. The settlement was only a few hours’ ride away, beyond a range of hills, and we knew that there were soldiers there. We were afraid that the wagons might turn that way, but they went on by.
Very shortly after that I was sitting in a clump of oaks watching the wagons pass. I saw the young man riding a chestnut horse, even better than the one he had had the day before. He dropped back, behind the spare horses, then worked over to the right, the north side of the valley, near the cliffs. He had his gun across his saddle, and acted as if he were hunting.
Pretty soon the girl rode out to the right. She, too, was well mounted, on a buckskin. She idled, looking over the country, and by and by drifted behind the oak clump in which I was hiding. As soon as she was hidden from the wagons, she whipped up her horse and rode fast to the cliffs, meeting the man in the mouth of a little canyon. I signaled to the others, then I went ahead to where I could see these two. They spoke together for a moment, then they went north, up the canyon, riding hard.
We assembled on top of the cliffs, looking down into the canyon. Nantai was pleased.
“They are running away,” he said. “ This afternoon, they can reach the Silver Mine; there they will marry each other. This is fine. They are bait.”
He told Crooked Nose to follow well in the rear. Then he made us ride along the high ground, where the going was difficult. He had us take great care so that if anybody followed the couple, he could see no sign of an enemy on the trail.
We came to the head of the canyon, and climbed up to the flat country on top. Pretty soon we saw them. They were traveling at a steady trot now, well ahead of us. We made a wide circle around them. Then we reached a long valley, leading up to a sort of pass, a notch, where the pinõn and oak brush were thick. We went into that notch, and lay in wait there. Nantai gave us our instructions.
We could watch that couple coming towards us. It made one want to laugh. They were looking at each other much of the time while they rode; they were thinking only of each other and getting married. Then we saw Crooked Nose, slipping along behind them.
Nantai gave the mourning dove call, so Crooked Nose came up on a high place and signaled that no one was following. Then he hid himself. We lay there, thinking of the surprise we were about to cause.
They came along blindly, so close to where we lay that you could see their strange, colorless, American eyes. Then Nantai whooped and we opened fire. We put four arrows and a spear into the man, one arrow into the woman. The man came down dead. We pulled the woman off her horse. First she fought and screamed, then she stood still, then she tried to break away to get to the man, whom Nantai was scalping. Comes Fighting and Short Bow held her, the rest of us stood watching her.
We wanted to keep her until later, but Nantai said there was no time for that. He asked us, “Do you want fun or horses?” Then he put his spear through her, and Walks Slowly took the scalp. Just then Crooked Nose called like a hawk, so we knew others were coming. Nantai had us drive the two horses we had taken, and our own, on to the north through the notch, making a clear trail. Then we hid the animals, and came back to hide near the bodies.
Two men came along riding fast. One was the plump, chief man I mentioned, the woman’s father. The other was the trapper. The plump man just watched the tracks and sometimes looked ahead, the trapper kept looking all about him, watching everything. We could see that he was a scout, and that we should have to lie very still when he drew near. It was he who saw the bodies first, when he was about a hundred paces away. They were
partly hidden by the brush. He exclaimed, and reined in his horse.
The other man cried out. He did not stop, although the trapper called to him. He galloped right up to them, jumped off his horse, and knelt down by his daughter. We could have killed him easily then, but the trapper had dismounted, too, and was standing with his rifle ready. So we stayed quiet. How well Nantai had foreseen this, how wise he had been to make us ride in the hard going, away to one side, so that there was no sign of us, how wise to kill that girl so that we were not burdened.
When nothing had happened for a long time, the trapper came up slowly. The plump man was still kneeling, saying things in a low voice. The trapper still looked around, until he saw the tracks heading north. Then he said something to the father, and bent over, touching his shoulder.
That way, they both faced to the right, the side on which I was. We on the right lay still. Nantai, Short Bow, and Horse Frightener rose up on the other side and loosed their arrows. That was all there was to it, it was so simple.
Then we went over them for goods of value. While we were doing that, Crooked Nose came up. We were all much interested by the way the woman was dressed. Her skirt was really two skirts, one for each leg, and under it were many layers of clothing, mostly white. We examined them, wondering why anyone should make herself so uncomfortable, and joking about how hard she would be to undress. Then Nantai told us to stop fooling. We took our plunder and the captured horses, and swung back in a wide circle to the road.
We found the wagon train late in the afternoon. It had gone a few miles, and then stopped, to wait for its leader, we supposed. Now its leader and two more of its men were dead. We stayed quiet till after dark. They had fewer men to stand watch, and no one with real experience. A little before dawn two of us started shooting from one side, with the new rifles we had captured. The rest of us came along on the other side and ran off sixteen of their horses.
We met together on the south side of the valley, and rode all that day, making camp in comfort at sunset. Then we divided what we had taken.
On the back of her saddle, that woman had tied a bundle containing a dress of beautiful, smooth material. This new headband of mine – look – is a part of it. She also had more of those clothes for wearing underneath, of fine materials. Horse Frightener put on some of them, and we joked with him. I received that headband, this coat – it belonged to the father – this new rifle that loads from the back, and four horses. Then we came home at our leisure, talking over all that we had seen, and finding much to laugh at.
A. B. GUTHRIE
The Big Sky
ALFRED BERTRAM GUTHRIE, JR. (1901–1991) grew up in Montana and graduated from the University of Montana with a degree in journalism. After a number of odd jobs he joined the Lexingington Leader newspaper in Kentucky, where he rose to become executive editor. He published his first book, Murders at Moon Dance in 1936; next came the trilogy of novels that established him as a major Western author – The Big Sky (1947), the Pulitzerwinning The Way West (1949), and These Thousand Hills (1956). All of these books eschewed familiar cowboy heroics in favour of historically accurate portraits of settlers’ lives – especially those of mountain men – in the valleys of the Far West and Pacific Northwest. All three books were made into movies, none of which Guthrie liked. He spent a short time in Hollywood himself writing movie scripts, including Shane (1953). Afterwards he returned to Montana, where he blended the Western and detective genres in such books as Wild Pitch (1973). He also published The Big It (1960), a collection of short stories and an autobiography, The Blue Hen’s Chick (1965). The same landscape that inspired him to write also made him an unapologetic environmentalist. A collection of Guthrie’s environmental essays and writings was published in 1988 under the title, Big Sky, Fair Land.
Overleaf is an excerpt from Guthrie’s The Big Sky, which follows the westering adventures of young trapper Boone Caudhill, his friends Jim Deakins and Dick Summers, and Caudhill’s Blackfoot wife, Teal Eye.
THE FIRST SNOW had fallen before Jim came back. It was a wet and heavy snow that weighted the branches down and dropped from them onto a man’s shoulders and down his neck as he poked through the brush along the Musselshell looking for beaver-setting. The first flight of ducks from the north came with it, their wings whistling in the gray dusk. The water in the beaver ponds stood dark and still against the whitened banks. Deep down, the trout lay slow as suckers. In a day the snow slushed off. The sun came again and the wind swung back to the west and the ground dried, but the country wasn’t the same; it looked brown and tired, with no life in it, lying ready for winter, lying poor and quiet while the wind tore at it one day after another. A trapper making his lift heard the wind in the brush and the last stubborn leaves ticking dead against the limbs; he looked up and saw the sky deep and cold and a torn cloud in it, and when he sniffed he got the smell of winter in his nose the sharp and lonesome smell of winter, of cured grass and fallen leaves and blown grit and cold a-coming on. His legs cramped in the water and his fingers stiffened with his traps, and he felt good inside that his meat was made and berries gathered against the time ahead. Now was a time to hunt, and to think forward to lodge fires and long, fat days and a full stomach and talk like Jim knew how to make.
One beaver from six settings. A poor lift, but a man couldn’t expect better, not while he traveled with a parcel of other folks and trapped waters that trappers before him had worn paths along. A plew wouldn’t buy much from Chardon, the new bourgeois at McKenzie. A man could put one beaver of whisky in his eye and never wink, and a beaver of red cotton for Teal Eye wouldn’t much more than flag an antelope. It was good a man needed but a little of boughten things. The buffalo gave him meat and clothing and a bed and a roof over his head, and what the buffalo didn’t give him the deer or sheep did, except for tobacco and powder and lead and whisky, and cloth and fixings for his squaw.
Boone picked up the beaver by a leg and went to his horse and mounted and rode back toward camp. Teal Eye would skin out the beaver and cook the tail. Her hands worked fast and sure for all they were so small. And she hardly needed to look what they were doing. She could watch him or laugh or talk, and they never missed a lick and never lagged. His lodge was kept as well as anybody’s, no matter if they had half a dozen wives, and it didn’t crawl with lice, either, like some did. Maybe that was because of the winter she had spent in St. Louis with the whites; more likely it was just because she was Teal Eye and neat by nature and knew how to keep a lodge right and how to fix herself pretty, using red beads in her black hair, where they looked good, and blue or white beads against her brown skin, where they looked good, too.
Near his tepee Boone saw two horses standing gaunt and hip-shot and heard voices coming from inside. He checked his own horse and listened and knew that Jim had come home. Teal Eye’s laugh floated out to him. He jumped off and dropped the beaver by the door and stooped and went in.
Jim yelled, “How! How, Boone!” He scrambled to his feet, holding a joint of meat in one hand. He spoke through a mouthful of it. “Gimme your paw, Boone. I reckon I’m plumb glad to be back.”
Boone looked at the red hair and the face wrinkling into a smile and the white teeth showing and felt Jim’s hand hard and strong in his own. “Goddam you, Jim,” he said. “What kep’ you? Ought to hobble you or put you on a rope. And damn if you didn’t get your hair cut! Like an egg with a fuzz on it, your head looks.”
Jim ran a hand through the short crop on his skull. “ Done it to keep people from askin’ questions back in the States. Wisht I could grow it back as quick as I cut it off.”
In Blackfoot Teal Eye said, “We thought Red Hair had taken a white squaw.”
“Not me,” said Jim. “Too fofaraw, them bourgeways are. I got things to do besides waitin’ on a woman.” He changed to Blackfoot talk. “The white men in their big villages do not have squaws like you. The women are weak and lazy. They do not dress skins and cut wood and pitch and break camp. They are not like T
eal Eye.”
Boone could see Teal Eye was pleased. He sat down by the fire and put out his wet feet and lighted his pipe. Teal Eye came and took off his wet moccasins and brought dry ones. Jim sat down and lit up, too.
It was good, this was, this having Jim here and winter edging close and a pot of meat fretting and the fire coming out and warming a man’s feet and tobacco smoke sweet in his mouth. It made Boone feel snug inside and satified. He wished it could be that the Piegan men wouldn’t come visiting until he and Jim had had their own visit out. “You didn’t beat winter but by a hair, Jim.”
“I look for open weather for a while.”
“Red Horn says no. Says it’ll be cold as all hell.”
“Some thinks one way, some another; God Hisself only knows. I look for an easy winter.”
“How’d you travel – boat or horse or how?”
“Horse mostly. Steamboat to the Platte, and then traded two horses away from the Grand Pawnees and follered my nose to McKenzie. Chardon told me where you was.”
“Any Indian doin’s?”
“Cheyennes was all. A hunting party. I got one fair through my sights after he taken a shot at me, and give the others the slip. They pounded around a right smart, tryin’ to get wind of me, but it weren’t so much. Not like the old Blackfeet was. Not like them hornets.”
“Cheyennes?”
“That was it, now. A man wouldn’t expect it.”
Sitting there in the dark of the lodge with the fire warming his feet and Jim’s voice coming to his ears and reminding him of old things, Boone thought back to times he and Summers and Jim had had with the Blackfeet. They had killed more than a few, the three of them had, and come close to being killed more than once. There was no one fought like the old Blackfeet did, so fierce and unforgiving, until the smallpox came along and made good Indians of them. Put together all the Indians he and Summers and Jim had rubbed out, and it would make a fair village. “See Dick?” he asked.
