Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher

by Vardis Fisher

  In Sam’s opinion there were no handsomer Indians than the Crows. They were a dashing colorful people with above average intelligence; a few whitemen, like Rose and Beckwourth, had become chiefs in the Crow nation and had lived with this people a long time. Though the braves had saddles they always rode without saddles when hunting wild game, and no other men in the world could match them on a horse. As Windy Bill said, it made a man plain oneasy to see with what fantastic skill they could ride on a dead run, the left heel on top of a ham, the left wrist through a loop of mane, and shoot arrows or guns under the horse’s neck; or on a dead run pick up the fallen arrows. But they were a notoriously adulterous people. Bill, who had lived among them, said the men never seemed to be jealous; if they found a wife with a lover they gave her to a brute who was likely to beat the hell out of her. A Crow warrior’s highest ambition in life was to lift twenty scalps and to show such skill and valor that he would be allowed to wear in his hair the feathers of the golden eagle, as a badge of courage and rank. One who wore even a single quill was entitled to and received profound deference; one with a half dozen quills was regarded with awe.

  On Sam’s first visit to the Crows he was smoking a pipe and for some reason laid his Bowie at his side. He became aware of a Crow standing by him and of what the brave was doing. The sly thief was standing over the knife and had got it between two of his toes, with the robe from his shoulders almost concealing it. He stood immobile perhaps a minute; then, the foot clutching the knife, moved slowly upward into the folds of the robe and a noiseless hand reached down. At this moment Sam rose swiftly to his feet, and seizing the Indian by his throat and bottom, literally pitched him end over end, with the knife spilling from the robe as he sailed through the air. Three years later, when the Crows would change the course of his life, Sam was to wonder if it had all begun in that moment.

  After leaving Kate he rode up the Musselshell to the big bend, and then westward nearly a hundred miles before turning south to the Yellowstone. He rode up the Yellowstone until in hazy distance he could see the mark of its deep gorges, and left it to follow a tributary, for Windy Bill had said he would spend the summer here, hidden from his enemies. Sam was still five miles from Bill’s camp when he sensed that a horseman was aproaching. Sam halted, his rifle across his left arm, and waited. He was not at all surprised when he heard a bullet whistle past his ear. It was a way mountain men had with one another.

  In a few moments Bill came in sight, and he was loud with mock apologies and welcome.

  “Wall, wall now, ole-timer!” he said. “I heerd ye wuz under, I shorley did. I heerd a Blackfoot varmint cut ye loose from yore possibles and ye wuz plum gone beaver.” This was merely the kind of banter that most of the free trappers flung at one another. They all expected to die violent deaths, and so pretended to be amazed on finding a friend still alive. Sam was grinning in his golden beard.

  But Bill did not grin when by the supper fire he heard Sam’s tale of the woman up the river. She was gone beaver, he said; god-in-whirlwinds, the wolves would drag the skulls away and the first Blackfoot to come along would lift her topknot. “I feel awful oneasy about thet woman. Why didn’t ya bring her along?”

  Sam said she wouldn’t come; it would break her heart to take her away from the graves. Besides, he had thought he would do a little chirking up and get a papoose for his medicine bag. With mock gravity. Bill looked all around him, as though to see this Indian tribe and that one, and decide toward which Sam was taking his romantic interest. “I don’t see no Burnt-Thighs,” he said, “ner any Broken-Arrers, no Yankataus, no Pian-Kashas, no Cut-Throats.” These were all names for members of the Sioux nation. “It wooden be a Digger, I doan expect. Ner a Snake. Jist which one air ye headin torst nohow’?”

  “The Flatheads,” Sam said, refilling his tin plate with boiled elk.

  “Wall now,” said Bill, “I think ye be actin real plum smart, I shorely do. The Flatheads, they ain’t no better varmints. They’s the only red people ain’t killed a whiteman yit. But one thing, Sam, I allus figgered, the furder a man is from his in-laws the longer his marriage will last. The hull doggone tribe will expect ya to feed them if ye live within five hundred miles.”

  “I had thought of that,” Sam said.

  The Flatheads were good honey, said Bill, filling his pipe. They were scairt to death of the Blackfeet, so would never come to visit him because they would never dare leave home. Did he have his sugar plum picked out?

  “I saw her last spring.”

  “She might be some other man’s filly now.”

  “Might be,” Sam said.

  “Chief’s gal?”

  “Tall Mountain.”

  “Waugh! A princess!” said Bill. He fixed his large, rather bulging pale-blue eyes on Sam’s face. He reckoned he had seen the critter a year or two ago when he was pulling leather for Pare’s Hole. He knocked his pipe out, filled it, listened to the night sounds, sniffed the breeze coming up the creek, put the glowing end of an ember to his pipe bowl, puffed a few times, his bearded cheeks caving in with each puff, and said, “Wall now, I wish ye luck, I shorely do. As fer me, twenty-six winters has snowed on me in these here mountains and even a nigger or a greaser would larn a few things in all that time. I otta could tell bull from cow. I know deer is deer and grizzly paws ain’t a woman’s soft belly and a cactus ain’t her lips but I never could find the tracks in a woman’s heart.”

  He was having trouble with his pipe. He put another ember to the bowl and puffed hard; and at last he said, “Sam, let me tell ye. Fer ten year I packed me a squaw, a Cheyenne she war, and the meanest bitch ever bawled fer beads. I lodgepoled her on Dead Wolf Crick and traded her fer a Hawken gun. My next night-love, she war a Crow, and come hell or come high water thar warn’t enough beads and red paint in all of Sublette’s packs ta keep that squaw from cryin. I traded that-air bitch fer a packhorse. Doan git me wrong, I love the wimmins, but nigh on three years I put up with that Wolverine and she scratched me till I run blood from a hundred holes. Then I got me a buffler grass with dew on it—but lemme see—seems like as how the next was Bird Singin, a Pawnee. And she warn’t no better.

  “I tell ye, Sam, if she be female, no matter if redskin, blackskin, or whiteskin, she will torment the life outta ye fer foofarraw. Day and night she wi1l. I know mountain men as has tried them all, even the Diggers, even the Snakes, even the niggers; and I been tole the nigger she is as sweet as Hank Cady’s honey. But I swear by the ole hoss that carried me safe twenty mile with fifty Blackfeet runnin outta their skins to lift my hair that wolf is wolf and female is female, and this ole coon can’t stand no more. But a young feller like you, he needs a dozen or so. A woman’s breasts it’s the hardest rock the Almighty made on this ole earth, and I can see no sign on it. I could track even a piece of thistledown but I never could see no tracks in a woman’s heart. Ye plan to come back this way?”

  Sam said he ought to. He wanted to see the woman before going south to the Uintahs to trap. Bill said he might amble up the river to see if she was all right: it made him powerful oneasy to think of a white woman only a wide river from Blackfeet country and not a friend in three hundred miles. What was her name?

  “Don’t know,” Sam said. “She wouldn’t talk.”

  “Then she ain’t a woman. What should I take her?”

  Jerked buffalo or elk; a big warm robe, if he had an extra; sugar, salt, Hour, and wild flower seeds, if he found any ripe along the way. He would take her a hull pile of stuff, Bill said.

  “What’s the name yore sugar plum?”

  Sam stared at his pipe. He had decided that his woman’s unpronounceable Flathead name would never do but he had not settled on a new name. Some wild flower, maybe—Lily, Daisy, Rose—there weren’t many flower names given to women. He might call her Lotus.

  Bill did nothing to hide his skepticism. After looking at Sam a long moment he said, “I didden like the names my squaws so I give them all the same name. Lucy, it was. There war a
gal named Lucy I liked when I was a kid. Sam and Lotus. Wall now, ye expect ta have some little Sams and Lotuses?”

  “Sure,” Sam said with a genial grin. “Two mebbe, one of each.”

  “Jist right,” said Bill. “Wood ticks on my johnny. Ye know, Sam, I must have as many kids as a Mormon bishop. And did ye know them Mormons is all comin out here?”

  Sam turned to look at him.

  “That’s what I heerd, Sam. The hull doggone pligamus shittaree, Brigham Young and all. In a few years we’ll be pushed right outta our homes. The Injuns have knowed it all along. Twenty year, thirty, there won’t be a butfler left—nothin from hell to breakfast but damn fools plowin ground and plantin cabbages. I ar a trapper an a mountain man but there ain’t no future fer my kind. They’ll push us inta Canada and then inta the ocean.” Bill knocked his pipe out. He looked around him. “Ten thousan, twenty thousan, the hull pligamus mess is headed fer this country and if I wuzzn’t a Christian I’d hope they all starve to death. It makes me sick in my boudins jist ta think about it.”

  “Me too,” said Sam, looking round him and wondering where he could sleep. Most of the mountain men whom he knew flung themselves flat on their backs, arms outflung like a babe’s, and snored with a violence that put a quiet sleeper out of his mind. Bill began with low rumblings and whistlings and wheezings that climbed steadily to a crescendo of gulping and roaring, and then to a shattering fortissimo. After a few bars that a man could have heard a mile away the wild clamor of frog music in Bill’s throat seemed to collapse among his tonsils and adenoids, and he gasped and gurgled and seemed about to die. But like a bullfrog with a bad cold, working out sonata variations on a theme, he would then blow out a few tremendous snorts, strangle until his whole body quivered in the torment, and begin again with the rumblings and whistlings, in another key.

  Knowing that he couldn’t sleep within fifty yards of Bill, Sam said. “Reckon I’ll take a little stroll.”

  Bill turned on him the knowing grin of a man who had had more than his share of women. “Ye act restless,” he said. “Yer lotus gal will take that outta you.”

  “I reckon,” Sam said. With his rifle he moved away into the woods. When Bill was asleep he would slip back for his bedroll and go down the creek a hundred yards. He looked up at the stars. The constellations said the time was about midnight.

  6

  IT TURNED out to be less of an ordeal than Sam had expected. Tall Mountain pretended that fifteen or twenty other trappers would be along any day to make offers for his daughter, each with ten packhorses laden with gifts. Sam smiled at that. The chief feigned astonishment that his brother Sam Minard, Chief Long Talons, had been able to spend so many moons away from this girl, who was lovelier than wild flowers, the sky, the clouds, and trees in their spring dress; for did the bull elk eager to mate with the cow hide in a thicket and sulk in his bull-powers? Sam explained in sign language that he had had to catch a lot of beaver, to trade for a lot of gifts, including the fine copper kettle he had brought for Tall Mountain, bravest and noblest of all warriors, to cook his elk in. Would he have dared to come with empty packhorse to the greatest chief on earth and offer for his most beautiful daughter a handful of cloudberries and a broken knife? The chief conceded the reasonableness of all that, and probed another spot. He said, with words and signs and interpreters, that he had had more trouble than a rabbit in a wolf’s den keeping this girl virginal for so long, denying her to other palefaces, who came snorting like studs and with mountains of gifts; turning away immense fortunes that included the fastest horses from the Crow nation, enough rifles to exterminate the Blackfeet, enough kettles to cook all the buffalo on the prairies, all because he so deeply loved his brother Chief Long Talons. His grief had been inconsolable. He had become very ill. For such devotion, patience, forbearance, did he not deserve some special gifts? Brother Long Talons said he surely did, and from his luggage drew forth a two-gallon keg of rum. When Tall Mountain’s black eyes saw what it was there came into them the joy seen in the eyes of small children. His bronzed face smiled. He was ready to get drunk.

  Sam Minard never drank. In such frontier towns as St. Louis and Independence, and at trading posts, he had seen men full of rum and slow on the draw go staggering off with blood gushing from their wounds. Now, with every amenity and duty fulfilled, he traded ammunition for a tough fleet pony and a buckskin bridle, handed its reins to his blackeyed child-wife, hung a revolver and a knife from her slender waist, and rode off into the south. She had no saddle but she had a robe under her. “Squawhorse,” he had said, slapping the beast she sat on. He would teach her English, for he wanted his children to speak English. “Squaw hitch.” He touched a packer’s knot on the packhorse. “Saddletree—stirrup—horn—latigo.” He had decided that blood from a Lewis and Clark man was running in her veins, and he hoped that man was John Colter. While he studied her complexion she had looked at him with sober it childlike interest. Like all Indian girls, she heard that the pale men were cruel to their women; perhaps she was wondering how far from her people she would be when he knocked her senseless and tossed her out. But she responded to his words with open lips and a flash of her teeth.

  “Lotus,” he said, tapping her gently. “Mrs. Lotus Minard.”

  Her open lips said, “Lo—”

  “—tus. Lo-tus. My golden-brown biscuit.”

  “Bis-kit?”

  “Biscuit. My Injun filly. My wife.”

  Around them had stood hundreds of Indians, their black eyes staring. Cocking her head at her sisters in the manner of a bird, she had said, pointing to Sam, “Lawng Tallongs.”

  “Chief Long Talons and Princess Samson Minard. It’ll be a hell of a day for both of us if you turn out to be Delilah. Delilah Lotus, that’s you.”

  “Sam,” she said. She knew his white name.“Tall.” Her people on his first visit had asked him what he was; he had held his hand about six feet four inches above the earth and had said. “Tall.”

  As he rode south from the village, with Lotus trailing him, he was thinking that for a few days they would be safe in Flathead land. These Indians not only had never killed a whiteman, or robbed or deceived one, so far as whitemen knew; they were noted for their courage, prudence, candor, and piety. Their children were taught never to fight, except in self-defense—or, as the Indians put it, never to go hunting for their own graves. A tenet of their faith forbade them to seek vengeance.

  How, Sam wondered, riding along the eastern flanks of the Bitterroots, would Lotus want to train their children? Most Indian fathers were sentimental fellows who doted on their sons, crooning to them and telling them tales of valor; but they had little patience with one who showed cowardice or rebelled against tribal disciplines. Sam had seen a six-year-old Crow son in a screaming tantrum, in midwinter, and had looked on with amazement as the father poured pail after pail of ice water over the shrieking and shivering lad. He had seen mothers set naked babes only a few months old outside in the snow, and leave them for ten or fifteen minutes; when the infants were brought into the warmth of the lodge they had waved their arms and howled with delight. Hank Cady had once said, in one of the rare evenings when he uttered more than ten words, that he could forsee the time when white children wouldn’t be worth knocking on the head. Well, Sam Minard’s would be wonderful, a boy and a girl, and he would love them like the old dickens.

  He gave his Lotus the first of many surprises when he dismounted, took a Don Giovanni stance, and burst into baritone song. Pretending that she was Donna Elvira’s maid and that the horse she sat on was a window ledge, he serenaded her, giving to the aria all the soul he had. If she had a voice he would teach her to sing. He again astonished her when they stopped to make camp. She had supposed that her lord would smoke his pipe while she gathered wood for a lire, fetched water, and prepared supper for him; but Long Talons lifted her off her pony, held her to him a few moments with her feet ten inches off the earth, his lips kissing in her black hair; and then made a fire and set
out a supper of dried buffalo, stale biscuits, and a pot of coffee—a hell of a marriage feast, he told her, but there would be better tomorrow. He opened a tin of sugar, and touching a fingertip to his tongue to moisten it, touched the sugar and again his tongue. He then took her hand, touched her finger to his tongue and to the sugar and kissed the sugar off her finger. When he looked at her eyes there was such childlike wonder in them that he had to smile. While he was setting the food out and she was wondering what kind of man this could be who did the labor of women, she looked round her and saw bushes black with berries. Seizing a cup, she hastened away and returned with the cup brimming. Sam poured half the berries into her tin plate and half into his own and sprinkled sugar over both.

  “I see you’l1 make a good wife,” he said; and again astonished her when, bending low, he turned her face up and kissed her berry-stained lips.

  Blessed Eros, it was good to have a bride in your arms and be riding away over the world. It was good to be for a few days in friendly country where a man could sleep. He was more than two hundred miles from the Blackfeet, four hundred from the Crows, six hundred from the Eutaws. After they had eaten she stared at him, fascinated, as he washed the dishes in a cool mountain stream. For most Indians the only dishcloth was a dog’s tongue. He hobbled the beasts, piled bedding against a tree, leaned against the bedding, filled and fired his pipe; and then, looking over at Lotus, said gently, “Come to your man.” She must have understood his eyes, if not his words, for she moved over until he could take her arm and draw her down at his side. He snuggled her comfortably against the robes, put his strong left arm around her, and looking up at the sky, said, “Look down, Almighty One, and see your Adam and Eve here in the garden. She fed me the berry-apples but I don’t kallate we will sin till she gets used to me.” Looking round at her face, he said softly, “Poor little Lotus—Lilah, left all your people to go with me. I’ll be a good husband.” That was not what he wanted to say; he guessed he was not much of a gallant. She would look up to meet his eyes but he could read nothing in the black depths. His left arm drew her a little closer, his left cheek sank to the lustrous warmth of her hair. His temple moved down till it touched her temple. Then he held his breath, for he could feel her pulse beating against him, at a hundred throbs a minute. Putting his pipe aside, he sat up straight, and taking her hands, laid them, backs down, across his big left palm’. He then studied the lines. As a youngster he had known what some of the lines were supposed to mean. It looked to him as if the lifeline had been chopped off at the shoulders, but in another line there were two children, and that was good. He brought her hands to his bearded mouth and kissed both palms. Then he turned toward her, and framing her face, tried to look deep into her black eyes but it was like looking into a bottle of black ink with a light under it. He patted her knees, again put his left arm round her, and taking up his pipe, filled it from a deerskin pouch. It was while he was tamping the tobacco that she moved swiftly away from him and returned with a glowing ember.