Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher

by Vardis Fisher

  North of her only twenty miles would be the wide Missouri. Steamboats would chug through its waters as far as the Great Falls but she would never see or hear them. South of her farther than she could see, even if she were to stand a thousand feet above the graves, was rolling hill land covered with scrub pine and cedar. East of her was the same lonely waste clear to the junction of the Missouri and the Yellowstone—and west of her to the Judith Mountains, and Wolf Creek, Arrow Creek, and Dog Creek. Unless she climbed a tall hill she would never see the Big Belt or Crazy Mountains, much less such magnificent massifs of divine sculpturing as the Tetons, the Bitterroots, the Big Horns, and the Blue. There would be plenty of wild game all around her—a few buffalo, many deer and antelope; fifty or more kinds of duck and goose; squirrels and prairie chickens and fish in the river; and fruits and roots of several kinds, but no such luscious wild orchards as she might have if she were in the Madison or Gallatin valley ….

  Sam was turning these things over as he puffed his pipe and thought of her problems. He wished he could stop thinking about her; after all, the vast wonderful earth the Almighty had made was filled with the dying and the about-to-die. He tried to force his thoughts to his plan to take a wife, to trap in the Uintahs this coming winter, to send for a trumpet—to these, or to speculation on what other mountain men were doing at this moment—in what deep impenetrable thicket tall skinny Bill Williams had hidden from the red warriors, his high squeaky voice silenced for the night; by what fire with its cedar and coffee aroma Wind River Bill was spinning his yarns and saying, “I love the wimmins, I shorely do”; in what Spanish village short blond Kit Carson was dancing the soup dance with blackeyed senoritas; what tall tales Jim Bridger was telling to bug-eyed greenhorns from a wagon train that had stopped this day at his post to get horses shod and tires set—Jim, spitting tobacco juice and saying, “Waugh! This here critter is wore plum down to his quick—I reckon I’ll hafta put moccasins on him”; and in what quiet shelter Lost—Skelp Dan was moving a calloused palm over the hideless bone of his skull, as if hoping to find hair growing there. Then Sam’s mind turned to Dick Wooton, who in mountain-man talk was some for his inches: six feet six and as straight as the long barrel of his rifle, he had once stood shoulder to shoulder with Rube Herring, and “Thar warn’t a hair’s-breadth differns in tall or wide betwixt them.” Even Marcelline, though a Mexican, could easily look down on the top hair of a man standing six feet—Marcelline, with a temper ranging from red-hot to white-hot, who despised his people and abjured his blood, and cast his lot with the white mountain men. Marcelline was a picture all right, with his mass of hair half as long as his arm and as black as wet coal, spilling out from his slouched beaver, to cover the shoulders of his buckskin hunting jacket like a wide mane ….

  But again and again Sam’s thoughts returned to the woman on the hill. He then laid his pipe aside, took a fat dripping roast off the green tripod above the glowing embers, thrust a green stick through it, picked up his rifle and a small robe, and took the path. Slippered with moccasins and as soundless as the wolf or the mouse, he approached the woman until he stood only a few feet from her, and looked down at her bowed head. For two hours or more she had been silent. In her own way she had wept until she could weep no more. She still sat where she had sat when he left her, chin sunk to her breast. One hand touched the daughter’s grave, the other that of the sons. The thing that fixed his attention was the heartsick quavering moan she made, when the long deep shudder of grief and horror ran through her. He was not a man in whom pity had a large home but compassion ran deep in him now. For perhaps ten minutes he looked down at her and listened, until the utter bitterness of it, the quivering of her flesh and soul in the loss, was more than he chose to endure. Laying his rifle down and holding the roast with his left hand, with his right he draped the robe across her shoulders and over her lap. He then set the green stick in the earth at her side, with the spitted roast on it. She gave no sign that she was aware of him. After looking at her a full minute he was convinced that she was not. Our Father in heaven, could grief be deeper than that!

  Shaken, he turned away and went down the hill. At the fire he put a robe over him like a collapsed tent and took a mouth organ from his medicine bag. His father played the clavichord with dash and clarity, though his hands, almost as large as his son’s, easily spanned an octave and a half and sometimes hit the wrong key. Sam had learned to play several instruments, including the horn and flute. When he headed west he had taken only two mouth organs, and he had played them through seven long lonely winters. Tonight, with the robe over him, he played softly, so that he would not start up the night birds, the tree toads and the wolves. Beethoven had imitated the nightingale’s song with the flute, the quail’s with the oboe, and the cuckoo’s with a clarinet. Sam had tried to imitate bird songs—the phoebe’s plaintive little voice of a tiny bird-child lost in a thicket, telling its name over and over; the chickadee’s and bunting’s and horned lark’s. Tonight he softly played a few sad old things and a hymn or two, for he was filled with homesickness; or with the yearning that Schubert had felt, who had never found the love he hungered for.

  It was the woman on the hill. He flung the robe back, for he didn’t want to play down in the depths of fur. He wanted to stand up and shake a clenched fist at that malevolent fate that knocked on the door in the opening bars of Beethoven’s C-minor symphony and proclaimed to the world its power over Beethoven’s hearing. It was the same unpitying ruthless fate, knocking there in the grand arrogant manner, that had brought savages to this spot, to hack three children to death and take a father away to torture. What was it there, he wondered, looking up at the home of the stars, a divine benevolence or a mindless malevolence? He rolled into a robe but was not able to sleep; he looked up through treetops at the constellations and thought the time was about midnight. Sniffing the odors in the night breeze, he listened; tried to sleep and again listened; and rose at last to sit by the dead fire and smoke his pipe and think. There was something he ought to do. Maybe the woman up there would like a drink of water. Among her things he found a coffee pot and this he rinsed at the river and filled. When a few yards from her he paused to look round him, for the moon was still up. The four skulls looked quite comfortable on their stakes. Out in the moon dusk in the northeast a beast was slinking, perhaps a wolf. She was still there, between the graves, the robe around her, the roast on the green stick at her side. For a moment he thought she might be dead, simply, eternally, of grief. It might be best so. Going softly over to her, he saw that rats or mice had been feeding at the roast. No, she was not dead; the same long shudders were running through her, on every third or fourth breath, and the same unearthly sound of loss and woe followed each shudder.

  He sank quietly to the earth and sat by her. Softly he said, “I thought you might want a drink.” He had expected no response. All his life he had heard of the riddle called woman, but if she was a riddle it was in man-woman love, not in grief. In grief she was as stark and plain as the face of death itself. Windy Bill might have said that she made a man feel like gone beaver; like what he had once called a stillborn child in a putrefied forest. She made Sam feel homesick for sight of his mother and father, and Christmas around the fireplace.

  Bending low and moving forward, he looked around to see if her eyes were closed. They were wide open. Once more, somewhere in the years ahead, he would see eyes like hers, and they would alter the course of his life. Now he could only feel a stupid and exasperating helplessness. Would she go with him, and take a boat or a wagon train back to her people? He knew that she never would, unless he bound her. She would fight like the bitch wolf when the grizzly approached her lair. If he were to take her a thousand miles away, like the cat she would find her way back—she would return, slinking through the forests and over the mountains, even if it took her ten years. His deepest insights told him that. They told him that all that this woman had in the world was here, under her left hand and under her right.


  “You know,” he said gently, “I think you’re going to need a little house here and went back to his camp.

  3

  AT THE BOLE of a cottonwood he untied the end of a long leather rope, and down the tree from twenty feet up came the remainder of the deer. He would eat a big breakfast, for he knew that he would work hard all day. In loin and kidney fat he fried the entire tenderloin, as well as two thick steaks from a ham; and he ate nearly all of it and drank a quart of coffee. Then, while indulging himself with a pipeful, he looked round him at the trees. Either aspen or cottonwood would do. The wood of both was soft and rotted easily but a cabin built of them would stand as long as the woman stood. If he made it about ten by ten it ought to house her all right. He was not a mason, and so would not undertake a chimney, but he would gather stones and lay a foundation, so that the logs would not rot right away; and he would leave a hole at the apex of the roof, as Indians did, to let the smoke out. He had no glass or oiled paper for a window, no planks for a door, unless he were to tear the wagon bed apart. He supposed she would freeze to death when the wild winds of Canada came baying down the skies and the river froze white and solid from bank to bank. But maybe not, for he and other mountain men would bring her blankets and robes. They would take care of her, in their way.

  Going up the hill, he looked round him. Where had he left the axe? Among her things did she have a hammer, a saw, nails, a pair of old shoes that he could use for door hinges? Standing at her side, he told her that he was going to build a house for her: did she want it here by the graves or down by the river, where she would be closer to water and firewood, and sheltered from the winds? Did she understand him? he asked, kneeling by her. Was it all right to look among her camp things? She had not touched the water; insects were crawling over the roast.

  He found the axe and observed again that it was a good one, though he would have preferred a six-pounder with a blade a good five inches wide. His rifle across his left arm and the axe in his grasp, he went to her camp and thoroughly searched it. He found a few tools in a tall pail; a few nails and bolts and nuts in a small wooden box; some flour, salt, sugar, dried fruits, coffee, tea, and a piece of uncooked flesh that was smelling. He threw it out. He found no tobacco: the woman’s husband, he guessed, was not a tobacco man. Well, what kind of man was he anyway?—to bring a wife and children a thousand miles into Indian land, with no weapons but an axe and an old rifle, and a butcher knife with the wood broken off its handle. Rummaging, he found a pair of boy’s shoes that would make hinges. Inspection of the wagon told him that there would be enough weathered and cracked boards for a door, if he could tear them away from their bolts without making kindling of them. It looked as if she would have enough bedding for a while, but not enough when winter cold split trees open and froze wolves as hard as river ice. In such cold there wasn’t enough bedding in the world to keep a person warm. He had a picture of her, crawling, after the cold came, into her pile of quilts and blankets, taking with her the rifle and axe, wild fruits, a hunk of meat, and maybe some biscuits. She looked robust and able. Out there under the flies and ants were four headless savages, and up north was a horde of them, who had a new notion of what one white woman could do. She didn’t seem to have more than a few rags of clothing; he would bring her bolts of cloth and needles and thread, and tanned skins. The Almighty up there in the blue would surely watch over the poor soul and protect her, until she had learned the ways of mountain men and mountain country, and had become part of this vast beautiful land, which to know was to love, was to dig your way into, like the badger and prairie dog, was to sing your soul upon, as millions of birds were doing all over the valleys and hills, and the wolves in their mating song, the elk bulls in their bugling, the moose bulls in their honking. She would learn and would love all the wonderful wild calls of geese and loons and grebes, willets and hawks and prairie chickens. And she would see Sam Minard someday on a mountain summit, shaking his glad powerful fosts at the skies and calling on the Lord Jehovah to look down from a heavenly window and see what a fantastic world he had made. A man was a fool who wanted to leave this country, once he had found it. A woman could learn to love its ways. Like the red women, she might learn to trap beaver (he would bring her two or three traps) and break a deer’s neck (he would be sure that she always had plenty of powder and ball); and she might grow a small garden, even have wild flowers round her house and over the graves, though it would be a long way to carry water. Doggone it, she might even become the woman of some mountain man—have another child or two, and learn to make buckskin clothing as fancy as a hickory wiping stick, or the finest beadwork of the Crows. That is, if her husband didn’t come back. But he would never come back. By this time his agonies were ended and his bones stripped.

  So ran his thoughts as for three days, from daybreak till dark, he toiled in the woods and on the hill, building a log shack for a woman who in these seventy-two hours never, so far as he knew, took a drink of water or a morsel of food, though he kept both at her side. Never once had she risen from where she sat, the right hand on her sons, the left hand on her daughter. He had not known that grief could so paralyze the human mind and will. After felling the trees and cutting them in lengths he dragged them to the site with his powerful stallion, one end of a leather rope tied round a log, the other round the tree of his saddle. The logs were about eight inches thick at their larger end. He laid them ten logs high, with a door in the west side, facing the river. The door was an ungainly heavy thing of warped and cracked wagon boards, held together with three slats nailed across them. To the door and to two logs he spiked the soles of a pair of boy’s shoes, to serve as hinges. It was, he told himself, the darnedest door ever attached to a house in Indian land; but if you were careful with it you could bring it shut. On the side opposite to the hinges he nailed` a strap of leather, to be pulled inside the cabin and looped over a spike, to make the door secure. Through an unchinked crack on the right of the door she could peer out, if anyone were to knock, or shove the barrel of her rifle through and shoot the red bastard, if he was an enemy. Winds and rain and snow would drive in through this and other cracks, in spite of his chinking; but he hoped that she would calk them with rags after he was gone. He had no trowel, nothing with which to plaster with river mud. It was an ugly shack, all right, and it would be a cold one, even with a fire in its center; but until he could buy materials and come again it would have to do. The roof was poles laid side by side across the roof beams, with a pitch of about thirty degrees on either side. Onto the poles he shoveled earth to a depth of six inches. In the exact center of the roof he left an opening fourteen inches across, framed with pieces of wagon board, for the smoke to escape through. It was no mansion but not five mountain men in the whole country had a better house. He had a winter shack a thousand miles south of this spot, on the Little Snake, and it was no better and its door was no better. But his Flathead bride would probably think it a wonderful thing. In warm weather no mountain rnan worth his buckskin ever crawled under a roof, except the spreading branches of a fir, or a juniper arbor, or a buffalo robe draped across a couple of poles. If you loved the world the Creator had made for you, you did not shut out the blue heaven and its lights, or lie in foul air in a stuffy room, when in a bed outside you could smell the morning and watch its mother-of-pearl light softly touch the hills.

  Hoping to shake the woman out of her grief, when close to her during his labor he sang Robert Burns songs, whistled bird and opera arias, and in his deep baritone exploded Bach and Beethoven phrases, all the while watching her to see if he was breaking through; or he talked to her about this and that, saying in one moment, “If you play any small instrument I’ll send for it and when I come along here we can sit and play duets”; saying in the next, “When I get my woman over in the Bitterroots we’ll come by here and mebbe you’ll like to go hunting with us.” But she never gave a sign that she heard. When the shack was finished he carried up the hill all her possessions, except the wagon
. Without its box it was a lopsided thing on its sun-baked and wind-dried wheels, the spokes loose in their sockets and the tires half off the fellies. Thinking that she might like to have it by her house, he looped a rope over the end of the tongue and with his stud dragged the squealing and howling thing up the hill. Lifting first one end of it and then the other, he flung it this way and that until he had it snugly against the north wall, with the tongue ended up and back across the bolster. Her largest vessel, a tin pail, he filled with water and set inside the hut by the door. All her things were in there now, including the axe and rifle. From his own supplies he gave her flour, salt, sugar, coffee; two tanned elkskins as soft as velvet; powder and ball; a couple of large needles and a roll of buckskin thread; a skin pouch half filled with dried wild berries and plums; a couple of fishhooks and a line; and a flat obsidian stone weighing half a pound that she could use as a whet stone. He sharpened her butcher knife. He then went into the hills and returned with two fat deer. Did she know how to jerk meat? Well, he would show her how. He laid a fire about fifteen feet in front of her and built a drying rack above it; and during the hours it took him to jerk most of the flesh he would have sworn that she never once looked at him or the fire. He would have thought she was dead, sitting up, but for the movement of her breathing. Thinking that possibly she heard and understood, even though she refused to see, he told her how to set up the rack, to cut the flesh in thin ribbons, to turn the meat, to care for it and store it. He told her he would leave all this with her, as well as some boiled or roasted hind and front quarters. If she would nod her head just once he would stir up a batch of biscuits. She could believe it or not but he was about the best biscuit maker in the West, except Hank Cady—but Hank, if still alive, was to hell and gone beyond the Yellowstone.