by Carys Davies
There were no words for the prickling feeling he had that the giant animals were important somehow, only the tingling that was almost like nausea and the knowledge that it was impossible for him, now, to stay where he was.
Before the summer was over he was standing in his sister’s house.
“All I can say, Julie, is that they feel very real to me. All I can say is that the only thing in the world I want to do now, is to go out there, into the west, and find them.”
From Lewistown, Bellman proceeded through small towns and settlements along roads, which, though rough and broken for long stretches, brought him slowly further and further west. When he could, he bought himself a bed and dinner and sometimes a bath, but mostly he fished and hunted and picked fruit and slept out under his blanket. Arriving at the steep up-and-down of the Alleghenies, he did his best with his compass and his eye on the sun, and while he lost himself many times on the pathless slopes and along narrow tracks that led into the trees and then nowhere, here he was now, crossing from the east to the west side of the Mississippi on the ferry, which was a narrow canoe called a pirogue. His horse and his gear made the crossing on two pirogues lashed together with a wooden plank on top. The whole thing bumped twice against the landing and then it was still.
He was a little afraid.
The reason he’d decided to buy the black stovepipe hat at Carter’s in Lewistown instead of staying with his old brown felt one was that he thought he would cut a more imposing figure in front of the natives here, beyond the frontier; that they would think of him, if not as a king or some kind of god, then at least as someone powerful who was capable of doing them harm.
And as the months passed and he followed the Missouri River while it meandered north and west, and he encountered various bands of Indians, traded with them and had no trouble, he came to think that the hat had been a good choice and to consider it a kind of talisman against danger.
In St. Louis he’d stopped for half a day and bought two kettles, one for his own use and one to trade; more handkerchiefs and cloth and buckles and beads—all these to trade too, and with each new group, he exchanged his bits and pieces for things to eat. Then he drew a picture on the ground of how he imagined the great beasts might look, trying to convey the animals’ enormous size by pointing to the tops of available trees, pine or spruce or cottonwood or whatever happened to be nearby, but always the natives pulled a face that gave him to understand, no, they had seen nothing like the things he was looking for.
Bellman nodded. It was what he’d expected: that he had not yet come far enough; that he would need to go much deeper into the unorganized territories.
Slowly he traveled overland, not so far from the river as to get lost, but far enough that he had an opportunity to scour the occasional spinney of trees or forest or look out across the open ground or wander up and along some of the smaller streams and creeks.
Sometimes, in the thickest parts of the forest, he left the horse tethered and proceeded on foot for a day at a time, clambering over rocks and up and down gullies, splashing through mud and water, and returning exhausted in the evenings.
Every few weeks he looped back to the river in the hope of hitching a ride on one of the bateaux or mackinaws the traders used, making their slow and arduous journey upstream, and once or twice, he was lucky.
True to his word, Bellman wrote to Bess as he rode along, dipping his pen into the pool of ink in the metal container speared through the lapel of his coat. He also wrote to her standing aboard the low, flat rivercraft on which he occasionally managed to hitch a ride, or in the evenings in front of his fire before he wrapped himself in his big brown coat and his blanket and pulled his black hat over his eyes and went to sleep.
Over the course of the first twelve hundred miles of his journey he wrote some thirty letters to his daughter and gave them, in four small packages, into the hands of people he met who were heading in the opposite direction: a soldier; a Spanish friar; a Dutch land agent and his wife; the pilot of a mackinaw he passed as it made its way downstream.
The weeks passed and he shot plover and duck and squirrel and quail.
He fished and he picked fruit and he ate quite well.
He was full of hope and high spirits, and there were times while he was going along when he couldn’t help calling out over the water or up into the trees, “Well this is fine!”
Then winter came, and it was harder than he’d thought possible.
Long stretches of the river froze and Bellman waited, hoping to see one of the low, flat boats heading upstream, breaking apart the ice with poles, but there were none.
He met a small party of Indians, four men and a woman and a girl, who swapped some dried fish and a bag of corn mixed with sugar for one of his small metal files, but that was all. The large bands of natives he’d come upon earlier seemed to have vanished.
The days were very dark. He was cold and wet to the skin; the freezing rain ran down inside his soaking garments. His big squelchy coat was heavy as a body and there were times when he wondered if he’d be better off without it. Every few hours he wrung it out and water gushed onto the ground as it did from the pump at home, in surges.
Snow, then, cast itself over everything in deep drifts and an icy, unbroken crust formed on top of it. Bellman pressed on like a drunk, plunging and sometimes falling, the horse doing no better, both of them trembling and weak.
He had a little jerked pork and some of the Indians’ dried fish, the bag of corn that he eked out a pinch at a time. Occasionally he trapped a bony rabbit, but mostly even the animals seemed to have disappeared. Soon his dinner was only a paste of leaves or a stew of sour grass dug out of the snow. He gnawed on frozen plant buds and bark and small twigs, and his horse did the same. His gut tightened with shooting pains, his gums were soft and bleeding. He slept in caves and hollow trees and under piled-up branches. Every day he expected his horse to die.
Once, he was sure he saw a band of figures in the distance, fifty or sixty strong, on horseback, moving through the falling snow. They seemed to be traveling quickly, at a loose, rapid trot, as if they knew some secret way of passing across the landscape that he didn’t.
“Wait!” he called to them, but his voice came out like a rattle, a thin rasp that died on the cold wind, and the riders went on through the dusky whiteness until it covered them like a veil and they disappeared.
For a week he lay beneath his shelter and didn’t move. Everything was frozen, and when he couldn’t get his fire going he burned the last of the fish because it seemed better to be starving than to be cold.
And then one night he heard the ice booming and cracking in the river, and in the morning bright jewels of melting snow dripped from the feathery branches of the pines onto his cracked and blistered face, his blackened nose.
Later that day he caught a small fish.
Berries began to appear on the trees and bushes.
Winter ended and spring came and he continued west.
Through the thick cloth of the curtain in front of her bed, Bess had not been able to watch as her father described to Elmer Jackson and her aunt Julie the route he planned to take into the wilderness.
She had lain with her eyes open though, listening to him speak on the other side of the coarse, half-illuminated weave of the curtain, trying to picture for herself the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles and all the difficulties and dangers and thrilling, exciting discoveries and new things he would come across between where she was now and where he was going.
After a month she asked her aunt Julie if they could go to the library so she could look at the big journals of the President’s expedition and see the path her father had taken into the west, but Aunt Julie only looked at her in a kind of irritated amazement.
“And when, child,” Bellman’s sister demanded to know, “do you suppose I have time to sit in a library?”
On the banks of the Missouri River, Bellman made camp. The trees were thick with leaves, a
nd there were tall grasses and flowers everywhere, purple, yellow, and white. One morning when he woke, a tall, sharp-featured man in a beaver hat stood over him and asked, “What brings you so far from home? Business or pleasure?”
From a pocket in his brown wool coat Bellman retrieved the folded and, by now, much worn newspaper cutting, and told the man in the beaver hat about the colossal bones that had been dug up in Kentucky. Bones, he explained, that were bleached and pale and vast, like a wrecked fleet or the parched ribs of a church roof. Bones that belonged to mammoth creatures that very possibly still existed beyond the United States and to this day roamed the prairies or the forests or the foothills of the great mountains in the west.
The man, whose name was Devereux, raised his dark and pointed eyebrows in amusement.
“Is that right?” he said, smiling.
“Yes, sir,” said Bellman, “I think it might be.” Devereux could not keep himself from laughing. He shook his head, chuckling, because he’d been trading furs in these parts for twenty-nine years, and in all that time, he said, he’d never seen anything bigger than a buffalo.
Bellman nodded cordially and observed that even the largest creatures are inclined to be shy, and almost all wild things consider it more sensible to remain concealed in the trees or bushes than to go parading themselves in the open.
Devereux laughed at that too—a picture in his head of the big monsters trying to hide behind a rock or a skinny pine tree.
He tapped Bellman on the knee with the end of his pipe. “Believe me, sir, you are on a hiding to nothing. A fool’s errand. I would recommend at this point you turn yourself around and go home.”
They were seated now on two logs outside the fur trader’s shack. From a store of supplies arranged along two rough shelves inside, Bellman had purchased tobacco and a new pair of boots, a box of powder and ammunition, a bag of flour.
Bellman knew that the fur trader thought he was an idiot and a half-wit. He didn’t mind. He’d met plenty of people since leaving Pennsylvania who thought the same thing.
The fur trader was chuckling again and talking now about the President’s expedition, which had passed through this very spot not more than a dozen years ago. He was chuckling and saying that, if the big monsters were out there, you’d have thought the two intrepid captains and their men might have seen them. “All that way—you’d think they’d of got at least one tiny glimpse. The beasts being so large and all and difficult to miss.”
Bellman shook his head. He smiled warmly and pulled the collar of his coat up around his big red beard and rubbed his large hands together in the chill morning air. He could not account for what the President’s men had or hadn’t seen. Nor could he explain why he himself felt so sure the monsters were out there. He could only say that what he’d read in the newspaper had produced a fierce beating of his heart, a prickling at the edge of his being, and there was nothing he wanted more now than to see the enormous creatures with his own two eyes.
Devereux tilted his head. He regarded Bellman’s face in the dawn and seemed to regret having teased him. He punched him softly in the chest with his fist to show that he’d only been messing with him.
“You carry on, sir!” he said loudly with a large smile and a sweeping, encouraging gesture towards the western horizon. “What do I know? Who am I to say what might or might not be out there?”
He gave Bellman another soft punch and suggested a pirogue would be a good idea, and his own Indian, to take him up over the cataracts and generally help him through the river, which was a horrible stretch of water for at least the next three hundred miles. If it wasn’t sluggish and shallow and strewn with timber and sandbars, it was boisterous and rough and would tip you out of the pirogue as soon as it would scoot you along a single yard in the direction you wanted to go. For a price, said the fur trader, he could procure him an Indian, and a second horse.
Indeed, he had the very person, he said. An ill-favored, narrow-shouldered Shawnee boy who bore the unpromising name of Old Woman From A Distance.
Winter came, then spring.
For a long time there was nothing but snow and then a greening began in the bare trees and the birds started to return. Elmer Jackson mended the fence on the south side of the yard and repaired the hen coop. He replaced four rotten planks on the porch and cleared a new area of pasture beyond the house, felling timber and removing stones from the ground. Aunt Julie washed all four of the small, square windows with vinegar, scrubbed and polished the pine table, and moved it to a new place on the opposite side of the room.
Bess waited for her father’s letters but none came.
She helped her aunt with the mules and on Sundays she walked the hour and a half it took to get to church with her friend Sidney Lott, the two of them dawdling and talking behind Sidney’s parents and sisters and Bess’s aunt Julie. Bess spoke often of her father’s absence, his long journey into the unknown.
There was a pleasure and a comfort in telling Sidney the same things over and over, and Sidney didn’t seem to mind. He seemed happy to ask the same questions again and again and to listen to Bess give the same answers.
How many guns did he take?
Two.
How many knives?
One, I think.
Did he have any other weapons?
Yes, as far as I know, a hatchet.
Did he have any sort of map?
No. But he looked at some in the subscription library in Lewistown before he left.
She told Sidney about the huge distances her father would now be covering along rivers and no doubt across prairies and probably over mountains. She also told him about all the haberdashery, decorative oddments, and assorted objects he had taken with him, which would be alluring to the Indians he’d be running into on his travels. With his bits and pieces, said Bess importantly, her father would be able to procure what he needed as he moved through the territory.
“He has taken my mother’s blouse,” she said, “because it is a beautiful item and he will be able to exchange it for a lot of stuff. Also her thimble, which is made of copper and has a pattern of flowers around it and is very pretty, and her knitting needles, which are long and sharp and made of steel and might therefore be considered very valuable and worth having.”
The two children had this conversation many times, pretty much every Sunday over the course of several months.
Bess talked and Sidney nodded and contributed one of his occasional questions, until one Sunday morning Sidney expressed the opinion that Bess’s father was an idiot and a half-wit and would never find what he was looking for.
Sidney said he didn’t know a single person in Mifflin County who believed John Bellman would be successful in his mission, or that they would ever see him again.
From what he’d heard, said Sidney, Bess’s father would be lucky to have got past St. Louis before being scalped and murdered by angry Indians, who would take a particular delight in getting their hands on his unusual bright hair and in carrying it, dripping blood, back to their rickety tents.
Bess’s eyes smarted. She shouted at Sidney Lott. “You know nothing. You have no idea. You wait. You will see.”
After that Bess did not talk to Sidney again and walked by herself on Sunday mornings to church, a long way behind the Lotts and her aunt Julie.
Rumors about Cy Bellman had begun to circulate soon after he started visiting the library and hinting at his plans to the new librarian there. When it became known that he’d actually left, everyone talked about his unusual quest and all agreed that it was insane, most people sharing the minister’s opinion that very likely the bones in Kentucky would turn out not to be bones at all but ancient tree trunks and lumps of rock, others voicing the opinion that, even if the monsters were out there, it was surely not worth risking your life to find out.
Had Julie seen it coming? Helen Lott wanted to know. Had it been a surprise? Had she thought he’d do such a thing?
Cy, said Julie, had been acting stra
nge for months before he left—either silent and morose and lost in thought, or jittery, endlessly talkative, practically giddy. But even then, she had not expected it. She’d heard about his rootling in the library, had picked up scraps of rumor and gossip, but Cy himself had not raised the subject with her and she’d kept herself quiet, thinking in time the whole thing would go away and come to nothing. You could have knocked her down with a feather that day in her kitchen when he’d finally told her outright what he was up to.
Helen Lott nodded. She’d seen similar behavior, she said, in other men of Cy’s age.
“There’s a childish dissatisfaction with everything they have, Julie, that reveals itself as they approach forty. It makes them think they deserve more than what life has served up to them. Mostly in my experience they take up with other women or buy themselves a new horse or a fancy hat.”
