Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher

by Vardis Fisher

  The calf at which Kate looked was not dead but she knew it must die. Pulling the dead wolf away and kicking savagely at it, she examined the calf’s wounds. When she saw that a flank had been torn open and a part of the guts pulled out she smote the forehead a hard blow and put a compassionate hand on the shuddering flesh as it died.

  Kate’s new world was indeed a world of the hunters and the hunted. She saw hawks strike and kill ducks in mid-air. In the river bottom when looking for roots and berries she saw the nestlings of thrush and wren, bluebird, mourning dove, and lark impaled on thorns in a shrike’s old butcher shop. She came to imagine things which she never actually saw or heard, and after a while it became a habit with her to seize the axe and rush into the night, and tremble with outrage while listening and looking. She would hear, as time passed, other animal children crying under the rending teeth, and none more frequently than the rabbit. Her life would be haunted by the scream of the cottontail, seized by a falcon, or of the big hare, overtaken by a wolf.

  She would never fully understand that she lived in a world of wild things, many of which were killers—the weasel, mink, hawk, eagle, wolf, wolverine, cougar, grizzly, bobcat—these were ferocious and deadly; but the rabbit, deer, elk, buffalo, antelope, and many of the birds killed nothing, but themselves were slain and eaten by the thousands. In her life in a small Pennsylvania town Kate had barely known that there was this kind of world. She had known that there were creatures that killed other creatures, men who killed men, for either God or passion; but the world here was one in which to kill or to escape from the killer was the first law of life.

  Her female feelings about these things would have astonished most of the mountain men. Windy Bill might have said, “Well, cuss my coup! Does she think Chimbly Rock is a church steeple?” Bill Williams, looking sly and secretive in all the seams and hollows of his long lean face, might have tongued his quid a time or two, before saying, “Pore ole soul. I reckon that woman ain’t never figgered out the kind of world the Almighty made.” Three Finger McNees would have been laconic: “Why don’t she go home?”

  The mountain men rumbled with astonishment on learning that Kate sat in moonlight reading aloud from the Bible to her children. It was a very old Bible that had belonged to her mother’s mother; and because many verses had been emphasized in the margin with blue ink she had only to turn the pages and look for the signals. When she came to one that had been marked she would read it, her lips moving but making no sound; and if she thought it was something her smiling and nodding darlings would like she would read it to them: ” ‘I the Lord have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thine hand, and will keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people; to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house.’

  After reading such verses she would look at her children and smile and nod; and like long-stemmed flowers they would nod and smile. She did not have a cultivated voice but it was clear and strong; ever since they were old enough to understand she had read to her children from the holy book. Sometimes she closed the book and let it open where it would. It might be on a psalm: ” ‘O my God, I trust in thee, let not mine enemies triumph over me.’ ” Smiling at them, she would say, “Your father left us some things last night. He is very busy these days; he wants us to wait here, for he will come to us sometime.”

  In the dark of her senses she knew her husband was not dead, for if he were, he would be an angel here, with his children. She wondered why he rode up and down the river. She would have said he was not trapping, for he had never trapped; he had been a farmer for a while, then a small merchant. Why he never hitched his team to a wagon she did not know; he was doing his work in ways he thought best, and when all things were fulfilled he would come to them.

  She knew that, being angels, her children could give no answers, except the heavenly smiles and the gentle assents. In time of full moon, when she could see them most clearly, Kate did not go to bed until the moon was down. For how could she have left them there, kneeling in the sage and smiling at her? Sometimes the moon did not go down till morning, or did not go down at all but just faded away into the day sky; only after her children had slipped back to their blue home did she rise from the buffalo robe that had been left by her husband. If after her children had left her her loneliness was too bitter to bear she would not enter the shack but would stand by it. In such moments she came closest to a realization of where she was—no, not of where she was, for since leaving the Big Blue she had never known where she was; but of her aloneness and helplessness and enemies. She might then step over to look almost curiously at the spots where her children had knelt; it was then that she came closest to an impulse to search the earth for footprints.

  But in a few moments it all passed. She would then become conscious of the book in her hands, and there would come to her, infinitely sweet and tender, memory of her three angels, who would be there again after the moon had risen. During the long empty days she had this to look forward to and it sustained her. Her deeper emotions, of which she had no awareness, and which seldom looked out of her features, she revealed in curious ways. Instead of making her bed back in the cabin, away from the door, she made it right by the door, so that she had to step over it; so that, lying in it, she could put a hand out of the ugly little prison and touch the big world. Against a wall at either end of the bed were piled her food and utensils; and there her rifle stood. When she was not carrying water to her plants she might sit on the bed, with needle and skins, and sew on leather jackets or skirts or moccasins. She would look over innumerable times to see if her children had come, or up at the sky to see if the moon was there. Sometimes when coming from the river she would think she heard a son calling, and she would run like a wild woman, trembling in every nerve. Coming to the yard and finding that her children were not there, she would be a tragic picture of loss and hopelessness, too stricken to look or listen.

  Or if when reading to her darlings and answering their smiling angel-faces she heard the sound of an enemy—the snarling challenge of a wolf almost at her door or the shriek of a descending hawk—she was instantly transformed into a tigress; and seizing the axe, she would rush blind and screaming against the challenge. No beast was ever to withstand her charge.

  It was this sort of thing that spread in legends. In a moonlit night, a year or two after the massacre, Windy Bill was passing by when he heard wild screams and on a hill against the sky saw a woman rushing round and round, the blade of her axe flashing. “I took plum off fer the tall timber,” he said. “My hair it stood up like buffler grass and my blood was like the Yallerstun bilins John Colter saw.” He improved, or in any case embellished, his tale with each retelling, until what he saw was la witch riding a broom in the sky and shrieking into the winds. Other men were to see Kate, when passing her way, and to tell tales about her, and the legend of her would grow in an area of more than a million square miles; but while it was still in its innocent beginnings, other legends, to be still more awesome and incredible, were being born, and one of them would enfold the huge figure of Samson John Minard.

  It had its origin in his decision to take a wife.

  5

  THE FREE TRAPPERS were the most rugged and uncompromising individualists on earth. Only now and then did one think of an Indian mate as a wife, even after accepting her in the marriage ceremony of the red people; but Sam Minard had a sentimental attachment to his mother and to an older sister, and under his bluff and reticent surface were emotional channels in which feeling ran heavy and warm. His closest friends were never to know it. Hank Cady, Windy Bill, Jim Bridger, George Meek, Mick Boone, and others who knew him and were to know him best thought that a red woman was for Sam what she was for them, a member of a subhuman species that a man might wish one day to take to bed and the next day to tomahawk. Dadburn his possibles, one of them said; there warn’t no human critters except the white. The red ones and the black ones we
re what the Almighty had in leftovers after making the twelve tribes. Most of the white trappers thought nothing at all of the redman’s habit of kicking his old wife-squaws into the hills, to die of disease, starvation, old age, or to fall prey to the wolves.

  Sam had a different view of it but he kept it to himself. Last spring he had seen an Indian lass who took his fancy. Since then he had dreamed about her, and using some thrush and meadow-lark phrases, had tried to compose lyrics to her. The logical part of his mind saw objections to taking a wife. He wondered, for instance, if the physical mating of a girl weighing a hundred and fifteen pounds with a man of his size was the kind an all-wise Father would smile on. Sam was sensitive about his size. His mother had told him that at birth he was so huge that his father, after one appalled look, had said he guessed they’d have to name him Samson. It was no fun being so big and it was a lot of bother. A second objection was her age; she was only about fourteen or fifteen (he thought), and though he was only twenty-seven he seemed to himself middle-aged compared to her. A third objection, he had decided after much thought, was really no objection at all: he suspected that she was not all Indian; the Lewis and Clark men had left white blood running in Indian nations all the way from St. Louis to the ocean.

  Sam had been surprised to learn the origin of the Flathead name. Formerly (they had now abandoned the custom) they had hollowed out a chunk of cedar or cottonwood and spent hours dressing it, carving it, and making it buckskin fancy. This cradle or pig’s trough or anoe or canim they then lined with cattail down, the fluffy inner bark of old cedar trees, the wool of bighorn sheep; and when it was nicely lined and looked cozy they slapped it on the poor baby’s skull almost the instant it was born, and swaddled its head over with tanned deerskins as soft as the underflank of a baby antelope. Laid out on its back, its black eyes staring at the red wise men, the babe then had a feather or wool shawl drawn across its forehead and around. Finally a long flat board, attached at one end to the canim, was forced down on the shawl and the forehead and bound with leather strings, thus putting considerable pressure on the soft bone of the foreskull. The luckless babe was then so securely wrapped and bound that it was unable to move a hand or foot, and did well to wiggle a linger and blink its eyes. In such horrible confinement it remained a year or more, except in those moments when it was unbound and washed clean of its filth and bounced up and down for exercise. The steady pressure on the skull caused the head to expand and flatten, like a big toad stepped on by a grizzly paw, so that the aspect of the upper face became abnormally broad and the skull flat.

  The girl of whom Sam was enamored had not had her skull flattened; she was, he thought, the loveliest human female he had ever seen; she was lovelier, even, than the gorgeous alpine lilies, or the columbine with its five white petals in a cup framed by five deep-blue sepals. She was a golden brown all over, but for her hair, eyes, and lips. Her hair and eyes were raven-black, and her inner lips were of a luscious dark pink that he wanted to bite. Whether she was full-grown he had not been able to tell, but she had already had, at her early age, the womanly form, with the kind of full breasts, firm and sitting high; that a man saw on Indian girls only now and then. The quality of her that had most entranced him was what he might have called, had he found words for it, a vivacious surfacing of her emotions, like tossing water spindrift flashing with the jewels of sunlight; and she had a way of looking at a man as though she wished to tease and excite and bewitch him. It had been mighty good to look at and he was now on his way over to buy her.

  That would be the most unpleasant part. An Indian chief, whether Flathead, Crow or Sioux, or even the lowly Digger, began to itch all over with avarice the moment he sensed that a paleface coveted one of his females. If it were not for the redman’s fantastic love of trinkets and trifles which the Whiteman could buy for a song, the cost of a red wife would have been too much for the trapper’s purse. Sam had learned that those who said the redman was not a canny bargainer simply did not know him. This girl’s father, Chief Tall Mountain, had put her up for sale outside her tribe; this proclaimed to every person who knew Indian ways that the greedy rascal thought she was worth a hundred times an ordinary red lilly. The chief would expect handsome gifts for himself. Then there would be her mother, stepmothers, aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters, step-aunts and step-uncles, step-brothers and step-sisters, and so many cousins that she would appear to be related to every person in the tribe, all hoping for nothing less than a fast horse, a Hawken rifle with a hundred rounds, a brace of Colts, a Bowie, a barrel of rum, a keg of sugar and another of Hour, a bushel of beads, and a small mountain of tobacco. The dickering would take weeks if you could put up with it. You’d have to let it drag out for several days, for the reason that a part of the redman’s joy in life came from prolonging anticipation of what he knew he could never get.

  It would be fine if a man could read the price tag and pay it, and swoop. his golden-brown doll to his chest and ride away. But the redman, whose life was dull but for warpath and occasional feast, squeezed the last emotion out of everything that came his way. Sam well knew that after he had given presents and renewed the pledge of brotherhood he might have to indulge the old fraud in hours of mysterious silence, while the chief conferred with the more rapacious souls among his ancestors; or Sam might have to sit for so many hours smoking the spittle-saturated pipe of friendship that his stomach would turn, or for days he might have to wait, while the solemn-faced humbug pretended that a few thousand aunts and cousins were coming in from the distant hills.

  It would be the same ordeal, no matter what tribe he went to.

  Around the campfires with other trappers Sam had paid close attention to their talk about Indian women. Some of the stories he found incredible, such as that of Baptiste Brown, a Canadian, who gave almost two quarts of his blood as a part of the bride price; or of Moose Creek Harry, who was tomahawked by his bride on his wedding night. The misogynists among the trappers, such as Lost-Skelp Dan, thought all women the curse of the earth and would not listen to talk about them; but the gallants astonished Sam by the vehemence, sometimes the threats and violence, with which they defended their taste in red women. Solomon Silver swore by the Osages, Bill Williams by the Eutaws, Rose and Beckwourth by the Crows, Jim Bridger by the Snakes, William Bent by the Cheyennes, and Loretto by the Blackfeet. Sam had found different virtues to admire in different tribes. The Eutaws made the finest deerskin leather, and unlike the Crows, Arapahoes, and Blackfeet, they did not steal. On the other hand, they would beg until a man loathed the sight of them. A chief would bring forth all the children in the tribe and they would be crying their heads off and staggering as if with hunger, though there might be enough food stored to last all winter.

  The Arapahoes placed hospitality next to valor. They set before a guest the best they had and protected his life with their own. Among this people a man took as many wives as he could pay for, but Sam had decided that one wife for him would be enough. Having met William Bent at Bent’s Fort and heard him speak highly of the Cheyennes, Sam had ridden across Cheyenne country. He had been told that the first lodge he entered would be his home as long as he wished to remain, and that lodge had happened to belong to Vipponah, or Lean Chief, who had gravely shaken Sam’s big right hand and cried, “Hook-ah-hay! Num-whit?” (Welcome! How do you do?) Food and drink had been set before Sam, and after a night in this lodge he had been favorably impressed by the manners of these people. The lodge, in the form of a cone of poles eighteen feet long, set on end with their tops loosely bound so the smoke could pass through, and covered over with skins and buffalo robes, had the fire in its center. No Indian ever passed between the fire and the persons sitting around it. Sam thought it strange that so many of the children had streaks of gray in their black hair, and that the boys to the age of six or seven went completely naked, whereas the girls were clothed from infancy. Lean Chief, observing Sam’s appraisal of the marriageable girls around him, explained how it would be if Sam were
to bid for one. He would tie his favorite pony to the lodge of the girl’s father. If he was acceptable to the father and the girl, the next morning he would find his horse with his father-in-law’s horses. If not acceptable, he would find his horse where he had left it, with all the boys of the village around it, hooting and jeering.

  Sam had thought of taking a wife from the Crows, before learning that they were the world’s biggest liars and most industrious horse thieves. Just the same, they were such a handsome high-spirited people that he had twice returned to look at the girls. He had become amused at the way he was looking at the women in different tribes, and wondered if any whiteman seeking a wife had gone forth to look at French, German, English, Jewish, and other women.

  All in all he had found the Indian people to be of middle stature, with lean straight bodies and fine limbs, their black hair usually flowing loosely over their shoulders, their keen black eyes aglow with the joy of living. Some of them had hair so long that it reached the ground at their feet. Except for those who lived chiefly on fish, they had beautiful white teeth. Practically all the tribes ornamented their garments with porcupine quills, beads, colored stones, feathers, leather fringes, and human hair from the heads of their enemies, dyed various colors. They painted their faces with vermilion, ochre, coal dust, ashes, hump fat, and colorful fruit juices. They wore in their black hair beads, buttons, feathers, shells, stones, and just about anything that gleamed or glittered. It was not unusual to see a squaw with eight or ten pounds of glass beads attached to her skirt, leggins, and moccasins. All Indians liked to sing, but for whitemen the sounds they made were not melodic: their war song would begin on the highest note they could reach and fall note by note to a guttural grunt; but abruptly it was high and shrill again, and again falling, to rise and fall, until white people who listened felt numbed in their senses and chilled in their marrow.