Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher

by Vardis Fisher

  Sam hadn’t even seen Rose or Beckwourth, or a dozen other free trappers haloed by legends; but he had met Kit Carson, the most famous man of them all. Kit had served as scout for an explorer, and so many pages had been written about him back east that the greenhoms had made him a national idol. Sam had seen this Scot and Kentuckian twice and had looked hard at him. In an average group of mountain men Kit looked more like a boy; he stood in his moccasins only about five feet eight inches in height, and weighed, Sam guessed, no more than a hundred and fifty pounds. He had sandy hair, bowed legs, freckles, and steady steely-blue eyes. It was said that he had killed a lot of men and lain with a lot of women and been in a lot of fights. When only a lad his family had taken the trail of Daniel Boone, and when only nine Kit had seen his father killed by a falling tree. At sixteen he headed west. When in an accident a man’s arm was crushed, all the men with him said they didn’t have the nerve to saw it off. Kit, only a youngster, said he would saw it off if they would hold him, and with a dull old saw he went through the bone of the upper arm, cauterized the wound with a red-hot kingbolt, and said he guessed the man would be all right.

  Such tales about him had made Sam look at him hard. It was also said that Kit was a romantic cuss who didn’t think that woman, white or red, was something to embrace and then kick into the nearest river. Kit’s taste ran to the blackeyed Spanish and Mexican lasses, in the Taos area, for whom kissing a man or stabbing him was all the same thing. Sam had seen some of the senoritas and had thought them bundles of vanity and violence. He preferred his Lotus, and by the end of a week it would have taken a lot of big spacious words to express the full scope of his feeling for her. She was mother, wife, daughter, trail mate, and angel, and the soul of his medicine bag. He had been teaching her to handle both rifle and revolver and to throw the knife. She was an apt pupil with all weapons, and English. In the vacuum where for seven years he had known only eating and killing and dodging his enemies he now enthroned her and she began to fill him; and his emotions enfolded her as she enfolded him, until on awaking she would be the first thing he would think of, and the last before falling asleep. Heaven help the man, white or red, who ever dared touch her.

  Possibly he was afraid that man would, for during these blissful golden autumn weeks with her he never let her out of his sight for more than a few minutes. He found to his astonishment and delight that the sexual embrace had endeared him to her. Before that, she had stood off, as though to measure the depths of his villainy; after that she would come up to him, shyly, and look up at his eyes. At night he would lie, naked, on his robe and hold her, naked against him. He would let her lie on her back down his chest, belly, and thighs, the top of her head just under his chin, her toes barely reaching his ankles. Sometimes they would fall asleep that way, with a robe over them. He called her his golden bottom, his twin apples, the house of his son, and a score of other foolish endearments, while his big hands moved tenderly over her. Sometimes he would sit with Lotus on his lap and look for a full minute into her wonderful eyes, and she would look into his blue-gray eyes, her gaze moving from one to the other, back and forth. Sam would look and never say a word, as a man might try to look through an opaque pane into heaven. Sometimes she would tickle him in his beard or over his chest; and though her face was sober he could see laughter in her eyes.

  “Love me?” she would say.

  “You doggone right I love you.”

  “Supper?”

  “Loin steaks and strawberries.”

  Looking into her eyes, he would think of Loretto, who had come west a few years before Sam—a hot impetuous Spaniard who had ransomed from her enemies and captors, the Crows, and taken as his wife, a beautiful Blackfeet girl. A year later he and his wife and their baby were with Jim Bridger and his men when they came on a band of Blackfeet; and the girl, recognizing a brother, handed the babe to Loretto and fled to his arms. Then the Indians moved swiftly away, taking the protesting and weeping girl with them; and Loretto, the babe in his arms, went crying after them, begging his wife to come back. A Blackfeet chief then advanced to meet him and said his life would be spared if he would shut up and go away. That was the price of his life but not of his love. He lived and waited for the moment when he would see her again; and the truth of his abiding love for her became a lovely legend all over the West. Most whitemen found it strange that a whiteman could love an Indian girl, and made the matter agreeable to their prejudice by saying that a Spaniard, after all, was not white, but a cousin of the red people. Did Loretto ever see her again? The legend said he did not. Sam hadn’t thought much about the story before he held his Lotus close to him and felt the living wonder of her; after that he thought about it every time he looked into the lights and the melting liquid—black of her eyes.

  In a high mountain meadow they found ripe wild strawberries, and on a hillside a young fat barren elk cow. The supper tonight would be a feast. There wouldn’t be cream for the berries or sourdough bread and wild honey or hump fat for butter but it would be a feast just the same. Taking her in his arms, he said, “Drink to me only with thine eyes and I will pledge with mine.” Yes, she said, and then did something that surprised him. From the berries she chose one of the largest and ripest, and this she crushed across his lips. She then crushed a berry over her lips, and standing tiptoe, looked up at him and said, “You drink?”

  “I’l1 be doggone,” he said, and looked across her hair at the sky. Then he kissed her.

  “Mmmm!” he said, loving the scent of the berries and the taste of the kiss. He kissed her again. He had tried to teach her the meaning of the word “what” by taking an object, saying, “What?” and naming it. She now looked up at him after the second kiss and said, “Lotus. What?”

  He pulled his bronzed forehead down in thought. A fruit, he said. It was the fruit the lotus people ate that made them drunk. He turned to the berries. “Lotus. What? This.”

  “Ohhh,” she said, sucking the meaning into her. She thought the lotus was the wild strawberry. She stood looking at the berries; he supposed she was telling herself he had named her for this delicious fruit. She seemed deeply pleased.

  Knowing that he could not always be present to protect her, he spent many hours teaching her to shoot and throw the knife. Most Indians did not have rifles, and the few who had rifles never allowed their women to touch them. The recoil and the sound of the explosion frightened her at first but she was determined and apt; after fifty rounds she could hit an object the size of a man’s head at fifty yards. The heavy revolver she could never master, but she practiced daily with the knife. It was James Black who began making the knives—who hardened and tempered the steel with a method he never divulged to any man. After James Bowie with a knife made by Black ripped open three assassins who had been hired to kill him the knife became known as the Bowie; and it became so well-known and widely used that schools sprang up in which fighting with the Bowie was taught. Sam on his way west had spent time in one of these schools. The real Bowie had a guard, and a razor edge on top of the blade from the point back about two and a half inches. For throwing, a knife was machined and balanced to turn over once, twice, or three times in a certain distance. Sam had had his knife balanced to turn twice in thirty feet; at that distance he could drive it through a man’s heart. He taught his wife to throw it, because in his opinion it was the best weapon in close fighting; you could throw it faster than you could get your rifle up, and you could rip open three men while trying to shoot one. He said he would get her a Bowie at Bridger’s post and a lot of other things. They would be in debt but the next winter he hoped to get four, perhaps five, packs of beaver. Did she know how many pelts were in a pack?

  A pack, he tried tell her, in words and signs, had ten buffalo robes, fourteen bear, sixty otter pelts, eighty beaver, a hundred and twenty fox, or six hundred muskrat. Four packs of beaver would be three hundred and twenty and that should be seven hundred dollars at a post or rendezvous. She knew the word, “rendezvous” and she a
sked if it would be six moons.

  “More than that.” He pulled all her fingers and thumbs out straight, and starting with a thumb, said, “This thumb is October; forefinger November, big one December—except it isn’t very big,” he said, and kissed it. “This is January; the little one is February, as it should be. This other thumb is March and the forefinger is April. About seven and a half moons.” He turned his thumbs in and held up his eight fingers.

  From the Bitterroots they had gone southeast to the continental divide and had crossed it just north of Henry’s Lake. From there they went to Pierre’s Hole and climbed the backbone of the Teton range and looked east across what would be known as Jackson Hole country. On the eastern Banks of this range, high against the spine, were more wild flowers than Sam had ever seen in one spot-whole acres, whole hillsides, with such a wealth of color and scents that he could only stand and stare. He knew only a few of them—the asters, paintbrushes, pentstemons, gilias, mallows; none of them for him was as lovely as the marsh marigold, which he called alpine lily, or the alp-lily, with their yellow centers and six creamy white petals; and the columbine. But he loved them all and marveled at the beauty of this mountainside. Among the flowers, as if to set them off, were the ferns, the leathery leaves of myrtle, the mountain laurel, and various berry plants, including the huckleberry. And the huckleberries were ripe.

  Sam gathered a few of the loveliest flowers and intertwined the stems in her black hair. Someday, he said, he would make her a mantle of the mariposa lily, white, lilac, yellow, and red. While she gathered berries he went down the mountain to a spring, to fill the coffeepot, for they would have their supper on the summit, with the A1mighty’s magnificent sculpturing all around them. This, he said, was the greatest elk country in the world, and yonder only a hundred miles the buffalo were so thick they turned the prairies black. He stood a few moments looking into the northeast; up there a long way was a sad and lonely woman and he guessed they ought to go see her.

  It was dark by the time he came in with the loin, liver, and a hindquarter of an elk. In a natural room, high and fragrant, formed by dense evergreen tangles, he made a fire and set on the coffee and steaks. Lotus had gathered two quarts of berries. The huckleberry, Hank Cady said, was the finest in the world; every autumn he gathered gallons and decocted his delicious jam, using wild honey and a little sugar to help inspissate the fruit. Remembering how Hank used berry juice and hot marrow, Sam now fed his wife as though she were a bird: he opened a hot biscuit, poured melted marrow over it, sopped it then in huckleberry juice, and presented it at her lips. He would then take one, and shutting his eyes tight so that he would have no sensation but that of taste and smell, he made murmuring sounds of pure joy. The warmth brought out the full marvelous scent and flavor of the berry. Other delicacies Sam prepared for her, in the warm scented room under the fir boughs. Over a morsel of raw liver, well-heated, he sprinkled a very little pepper, then poured hot marrow over it and plopped it into her mouth. Imitating him, she would close her eyes when she chewed. He would kiss her lips when they were moist with marrow fat or berry juice.

  They spent two nights and a day here, feasting on wild game and wild fruits, and then descended to a beautiful lake and went past the majestic blue-gray granite towers of the Tetons. Two days later they were at the southern edge of what would be known as Yellowstone Park. That was the area of John Colter’s hellhole and hot bilins, steaming vents and spoutings and mudpots. In a geyser basin they could be safe all fall and winter; the red people seldom ventured close to the huge vomitings of hot water or to that part of the lake where hot springs boiled in the cold depths. The journey north to see if the woman was still there would be an extra eight hundred miles but a mountain man thought little of that. There wasn’t much to do before the snows of winter. Besides, he thought the woman might come to her senses if she were to see another woman. As they entered Crow lands they both steeped themselves and their garments in the smoke of woods with a strong incense, such as cedar, sage, and buffalo bush; and Sam put his music and his songs away and no longer talked above a whisper. As his manner changed, so did hers; she became as noiseless as the weasel.

  After they had gone north past the Bighorns and come close to Blackfeet country, Sam put away his pipe and built no more fires. They would now eat jerked elk, roots, and dried berries. Lotus’s people, like the Shoshonis, had long been preyed on by the Blackfeet and lived in chronic fear of them. Sam had told himself a thousand times that he must never fall into their hands. The Crows, the Cheyennes, even the Sioux might ransom him, but the Blackfeet squaws would dance round and round him like shrieking things out of hell, and piece by piece hack the flesh off his bones. He knew with what hellish glee Blackfeet warriors would make off with his wife, if they ever got hands on her. So he became as wary as. the wolf, and Lotus became more hunted animal than human being.

  Smell of the Blackfeet always made Sam think of John Colter. Had there ever been another such race with death as his? Surprised with a companion by five hundred warriors in the Three Forks area, when trapping, John had not resisted. The fool companion had been shot full of arrows. John was given a chance. It was a mighty slim chance but it was a chance of a kind, and Sam could imagine with what eagerness the man had seized it. There he was, stripped naked, defenseless, five hundred howling savages around him, his companion lying dead in his blood. Even his moccasins were taken off. He was told that he could run for his life, with the five hundred at his heels. Colter had not only to run barefooted; he had to cross a wide area that was densely studded with cactus, whose thorns were as sharp and stout as needles. Sam had crossed the area over which John ran, and had examined the thorns. He supposed that a man running not only for his life but to escape torture would hardly be aware of the spines driven into his naked feet. What had the soles of Colter’s feet been like after three hundred yards?

  After three miles Colter had glanced back and seen a gloating buck only a hundred yards behind him. Calling on what had seemed to Colter to be the last of his strength, he had tried to run faster, and soon began to hemorrhage, the blood bursting from his nostrils and spilling down over him. At the end of another mile a backward glance appalled him: now the red warrior was only forty or fifty feet behind him and was in the act of hurling his lance. In that instant Colter made his decision. He stopped short and turned. Possibly his body, red with blood, unnerved the Indian, for he seemed to make only a feeble effort, then stumbled and fell; and in the next moment Colter was on him and with the lance spiked him to the earth. At least two hundred of the howling savages were still swiftly advancing, spears flashing in the sun. Blood still spilled over him but Colter now ran with the energy of despair and came at last to a river. He plunged in. His life was saved by the fact that he came to the river at a large eddy, covered over with driftwood. He dived and swam; came up a moment to gulp air, and dived and swam again; and so kept swimming under and coming up until he was a hundred yards from the shore. He then found above him a huge cottonwood trunk with a lightning wound in the underside of it. By lying on his back he could put his face up in the cavity of the wound and breathe. For hours he lay under that tree, while above him went the baffled and shrieking warriors, leaping from driftwood to driftwood, and insane with rage because they had lost their fleetest runner and their prey. After Colter was convinced that they had gone he cautiously left his hiding place and looked round him. He did not leave the eddy until the blackest part of the night; he then swam quietly downriver several miles and sat on the bank to consider his plight. The soles of his feet were filled with thorns. He had no clothes, no weapons, no food, and he was at least a week’s journey from the nearest whiteman, on the Roche Jaune River. But because he was John Colter and a mountain man he made it, with nothing to eat in seven days and nights of torture but a few roots.

  It made a mountain man proud just to think of him. It made him proud to think of Hugh Glass, who, torn open front and back by a grizzly and left to die, had crawled a hundre
d miles on his hands and knees, with maggots swarming in his wounds. There were so many to be proud of. There was Jedediah Smith, as intrepid an explorer as Meriwether Lewis; Jed, who carried a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other; who prayed in one moment and blew his foe’s head off in the next. In an encounter with a grizzly his head had been seized by the monster’s mouth and huge chisel-teeth had raked furrows in flesh and bone and torn one ear almost off. Jed had had the ear sewed to his skull with a crude needle and buckskin thread.