The Snake River

by Win Blevins

  “Did he know you were on the way?” Flare hadn’t known. He wondered why Pinyon didn’t speak up. Had she not known herself, before he left? Or had she understood, all along, that he was footloose and fancy free?

  “I don’t know. Grandmother said she never knew whether Mother told him or not.” Silence.

  “So maybe he didn’t know.”

  “But he didn’t care enough to find out, did he? He didn’t care what happened to me. Or my mother. He abandoned us. Her.”

  Aye, lad. I didn’t see, those days.

  One tear came now, drifting crookedly down Sima’s cheek. The lad brushed it away. Weak, with his broken leg, or he wouldn’t have let it flow. Flare was glad for the weakness.

  “Man are stupid animals, sometimes,” Flare said bitterly.

  Sima said nothing.

  “When you find your father, what will you say to him?”

  Sima’s voiced crawled with feeling. “I’ll spit in his face.”

  Why ought I tell the lad anyway? Flare asked himself. It was a moment of pleasure for me, and the gift of a lifetime for him. Enough, a man would think.

  He thought on the lad behind him. The lad who’d said he wanted to be alone for a while and nap. To be alone, at least, thought Flare. And why do you care that he doesn’t want you there? Hasn’t the lad a right to forty winks?

  Flare crossed his legs, sitting Indian fashion by the squaw fire. He got out his white clay pipe and stuffed it with kinnikinnick. A pipe would make him think clearer.

  Aren’t you ashamed, man? Better sleep with your moccasins on, and never wash your feet, lest your son find you out.

  The lad touches my heart. He’s making a passage, a difficult and dangerous passage. He needs me.

  Then help him out and keep your bloody mouth shut. No reason to make him feel obligated.

  He tweezered up a hot coal with a pair of sticks and lit the pipe.

  Aye, you bet, tell him you’re his father, you fool, and he’ll spit in your bloody face and be gone.

  Why should it matter, a moment of pleasure for me, a life for him? The bull mounts the cow only for the sake of his urge.

  I have no right. I gave up my right.

  “Well, Mr. O’Flaherty, did you tell him?”

  Flare was surprised. Dr. Full studied and prayed all day when they rested, and sometimes preached to the brethren and sistren, as he called them. Maybe Flare should feel flattered that he’d drawn the doctor from his holy silence.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “No, you can’t, can you? You gave up your paternal rights at the start.”

  “Watch yourself, Dr. Full.”

  Full gave a big, self-conscious smile and spread his arms, indicating he meant no offense. The two of them had jousted verbally before, and enjoyed it in a prickly sort of way.

  “You said you’re a sporting man, did you not, Mr. O’Flaherty?”

  Flare looked at the bugger hard. “Aye. You bet.”

  “Will you play at chance with me then?”

  Flare just stared at him.

  “You dare not tell Sima his paternity. Yet in your confused way, you want to act a father to him. To set his feet on the right path.

  “I want to set him on the path that’s truly right. So I propose a contest, one to be strictly fair.”

  Full waited, evidently much amused. “Go on,” said Flare. He felt a hint of an urge to go for his knife and cut the man’s throat. But there was no cause for that.

  “My path is the word of God. Faith. Thus obedience. Thus certainty of salvation.”

  “Mystic mumblings, and a lack of common sense, more like.”

  Full ignored this amiably. “Your path is the arrogance of relying on your own fallible observation and judgment above all else.”

  “Using me brain, more like.”

  “The results of our paths show in our lives. I am a minister of the Gospel and a doctor. You are a vagrant in the wilderness. I build self, family, church, community. You wander, the slave of your impulses, building nothing, abandoning all, even your own children.”

  “You’re pissing into the wind,” Flare said with a growl.

  “I prepare the way for the next world, and you merely shuttle back and forth on the face of the earth, aimlessly.”

  “You offer delusion, I choose reality, I’d say,” Flare put in caustically. Mad exchanges were entertaining, but this was nigh too bleedin’ much.

  “I offer God and heaven. You offer bleached bones on the desert.”

  Flare snorted.

  “So let us put it to the test, which way is better. Your son will be the judge. You and he will come with us to Mission Bottom. Each of you may stay as long as you like, and may leave together or separately. We will let Sima see what God’s civilization has to offer. He will attend the mission school under Miss Jewel, and I will instruct him in the Gospel. You may teach him whatever you like—hunting, trapping, your cunning ways with brute nature, whatever you like—even your libertine pleasures.

  “I am willing to wager that Sima, in a fair contest, will respond more to the enlightenment of mind and soul than to the appetites of the body.

  “At any rate, I so propose. Sing your song to him—your base melodies of this vile earth. And Miss Jewel and I will sing celestial melodies. Then you may ask him freely: What does he choose? Your way or mine? Man’s way or God’s?”

  “It’s a bet,” declared Flare. That was all he said.

  A thrill ran through Dr. Full. I’ve won—Mr. O’Flaherty is playing my game.

  “I make you a promise,” said Dr. Full with a look meant to seem cunning. “I will not cheat by telling him of his paternity, and setting off his fury at you.”

  “Each man will hold his tongue,” Flare agreed shortly.

  Dr. Full smiled hugely and offered his hand. Flare shook it. “I’m supremely confident,” said the doctor. He felt exhilarated. He’d already won.

  “I’ll hold me own,” said Mr. O’Flaherty. A confession of weakness.

  Dr. Full considered, men spoke. “You rutted like a beast, Mr. O’Flaherty, and then ran off.”

  “I’m a man, for all that,” said Flare.

  “Beasts have no higher feelings. You abandoned your son, Mr. O’Flaherty.”

  Flare said nothing.

  “Do all the men in your family have the web?”

  Flare nodded. “On my father’s side,” he mumbled. “And the women on my father’s side.”

  “Always so high, almost to the nails?”

  “Some more, some less.”

  Dr. Full snorted. Smiled. They are such simpletons, people, he thought. Shook his head. “I will enjoy our competition, Mr. O’Flaherty, and look forward to the prize.”

  Full spun and walked away, swinging high the hand with the Bible in it.

  The man is a son of a bitch, thought Flare. But he’s right.

  And the question is, laddie, if you didn’t care twenty years ago, why do you care now? All of a sudden like?

  Explain that, Mr. O’Flaherty. Explain it to your son.

  Well, Sima is right about one thing. The boyo went looking for his father a thousand miles away. He went through a little death. And he woke up in his father’s arms. It’s a bloody miracle.

  Flare tapped his pipe out on a moccasin.

  My son despises me, he thought.

  Part Three

  A MAD NEW WORLD

  Chapter Twelve

  Dr. Full set his foot onshore, looked back at his small band of Christians, lifted a hand toward the fort, and said ceremoniously, “Through His grace, safe in Oregon.”

  Flare ignored the slight to the real guide, himself, who’d kept the Pawnee from running the horses off, found water when they needed it desperately, figured out the safe places to cross the rivers, judged when to trade the horses and take canoes, stood guard through the dangerous nights, and, of course, spotted Sima before the lad died. Full better not be thinking of giving the good Lord Flare’s thousand-dollar fee.<
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  Flare turned his back to Dr. Full and strode briskly up toward the stockade. Flare was feeling grand.

  What Flare liked about Fort Vancouver was the mad new world. He stopped to look.

  For a couple of thousand miles crossing the continent you saw almost no one. A few Indians here and there, though they mostly stayed away, and seeing them usually meant trouble. A few traders and mountain men at the posts, Laramie, Hall, Boise, Walla Walla. Otherwise no one. A vast continent of solitude.

  And now, before his eyes, a whole world. The stockade, with eight substantial buildings inside. Outside, clumps of huts here and there. Everywhere people strutting about, comings and goings, things happening. Perhaps a hundred white men lived here permanently, French-Canadians, Métis, English and Scottish artisans, Scotsmen in charge for the Honorable Company. Plus visiting sailors, British and American and sometimes Russian. The fort had in addition probably three hundred Indians, Delawares, Iroquois, Chinooks with high-caste, misshapen skulls and their slaves. Plus visiting chiefs. Plus Kanakas, natives from the Sandwich Islands. Fort Vancouver all in all was a fine little piece of the world, and in Flare’s view, it was very cosmopolitan.

  Flare whirled and looked back. His son was standing beside the canoes uncertainly, about to start helping the men unload. “Sima!” cried Flare. He grinned and jerked his head and waved up the hill. Sima smiled and came running. Dr. Full got into gear behind him.

  Flare stood and looked at it all. Men of every color. Men who spoke many tongues, had many ways, worshiped many gods. They bore studying, these men, and Flare liked that. They were as various as mankind itself.

  The women were of only one color. Saving those they’d brought with them, and they were aberrations, no offense to Miss Jewel. White women didn’t shine in the wilderness, they wouldn’t last, they didn’t belong. It was a big wildness, from Taos to Hudson’s Bay to Russian America. Flare had traveled it for a quarter century and seen the whole kit and caboodle, as the Americans said, from Esqimaux to Spaniards. There wasn’t a place for white women in the whole vast lostness. Praise be. The way he saw it, without the oppression of white women, maybe civilization would have a chance.

  Flare would take a woman tonight—he’d not touched one save in imagination for months. An Indian woman, naturally. Strange land, where a white man takes only heathen women, and gets a heathen son.

  Sima limped up alongside, and Flare put a comradely arm around his shoulders. At least he hoped Sima would think it was comradely. Dr. Full gave them an odd eye. “We’d best be seeing the doctor right off,” Flare told Dr. Full. “Around here the doctor is Dr. John McLoughlin, chief thumb-up-the-ass factor. He’ll want us for dinner tonight.”

  Flare jerked his head, gave them his best Irishman-at-your-throat grin, and they set off uphill toward the stockade.

  Dinner. Flare thought on it greedily. He loved to eat Dr. John-be-damned McLoughlin’s food and drink his fine brandy. For the emp got a sour stomach from every rich quaff Flare got in life. Tonight he would spoil Dr. John’s digestion for a week. If only he could prick Dr. John’s pomposity as well. Flare and Skye called him the emp, very short for emperor, because he was the most pompous man they’d ever known.

  Flare looked at Sima. “It’ll be fine doings tonight, lad.”

  “Surely you wouldn’t corrupt the boy, Mr. O’Flaherty?” asked Dr. Full with light mockery.

  Flare eyed him hard. Does the prude read my mind?

  “Either with spirits or with the flesh?” Dr. Full went on.

  Oh, bugger off, thought Flare.

  “Aye, and see the devil!” came a bellow.

  Sima felt himself jump. It was a voice fit for a wicked giant, the roar of a cavern-mouthed monster accompanied by the cracks of bullwhips. Where did it come from?

  “Up here, dunderheads!”

  Sima looked up as ordered and saw a man the size of a grizzly on the rampart above the stockade.

  “You’ve changed, Skye,” said Flare. “For once I heard you before I smelled you.”

  The man named Skye laughed, a sound like a boulder crashing downhill. “I smell of Satan, as always,” he roared. “Like you.”

  Silhouetted against the sky, he looked like the biggest man Sima had ever seen, tall and wide and not a bit fat. Sima felt his chest tighten and his breath run hard through his throat.

  Skye put a hand on the top of the stockade and vaulted down. The distance must have been ten feet, and he looked like he weighed as much as a buffalo bull, but he landed lightly on his feet, rumbled forward, and shook both of Flare’s hands with both of his own. Maybe he wasn’t as tall as he seemed at first, but he was bulk enough for two of Flare. His eyes were small, obscure, and blue.

  “Skye,” said Flare, “this is my friend Sima, a Shoshone. Sima, Mr. Barnaby Skye.”

  Skye stuck out a huge paw and Sima shook it. “Come to eye the white-man doings, have ye?”

  “Yes, Mr. Skye,” said Sima. “It seems a fine place.”

  “It’s a grand place,” the giant roared. “Here ye can broaden your horizons. So broad ye’ll get the clap in six languages, and it pains equally in all.”

  “He comes seeking his father,” put in Dr. Full severely. Skye turned his attention slowly, searchingly on the preacher. “It is my hope to persuade him the one he needs is his heavenly father. I’m pleased to meet you, Skye.”

  The giant touched Dr. Full’s hand like he was brushing it off. “Mr. Skye,” he said. He eyed Full’s black ministerial clothing balefully. “Especially to those who corrupt the young.”

  “Dr. Full is headed to the mission on the Willamette,” said Flare.

  “And good riddance,” he said to Flare. “It’s Mr. Skye,” the giant reminded Full, and turned his back on the parson magisterially.

  “What brings ye Vancouver way, Skye?” Flare was damned curious. Skye stayed away from this fort like the smallpox. As a lad he’d been press-ganged into the British Navy—press-ganged was a fancy word for kidnapped—and after several years jumped ship in Vancouver. He always spoke with hatred of the Navy, and feared being abducted back onto one of the ships that visited the fort—if the giant was afraid of anything now.

  He carried a pair of special weapons in memory of his years of sea slavery—belaying pins, which he used with wonderful savagery to break heads by throwing or clubbing. He’d carved them with death’s heads.

  “Mr. Skye goes where he pleases,” said Skye. “The report at rendezvous was that the Honorable Company would pay more for plews. Which was a damnable lie.” The giant shrugged.

  “And how about you, my friend?” Flare steered clear of Vancouver, too. He was a trusted man, a brigade leader, and then got himself into trouble with the emp. Flare and Skye skipped Vancouver one summer together, went over to the Americans. What put the spice into their defection was that they took nine thousand dollars of prime beaver plews with them. The squared it with the emp later, giving up their salaries and performing some services.

  “I escorted the missionaries. They paid me handsomely to do it. What with the price of beaver…” For two decades the trappers of the Far West had lived as cocks of the walk. Flare and Skye despised fashion anyway, but to lose your livelihood to a silk hat…at thirty-five or forty to find yourself useless.

  Skye regarded Dr. Full with imperious disdain, looked at Flare, shook his head ruefully. Then he laughed, a warm, rumbling laugh.

  “Let’s have a private word, mate. I’ve got a bit of a deal afoot, and you’re just the man for it.”

  “Sima’s in, too,” Flare said firmly.

  “All right, mate,” Skye said, patting Sima on the back and almost knocking him down. “The three of us.”

  “The problem,” said Flare, “will be Full.”

  “Any why would Full-of-Himself give a bloody damn?” asked Skye. “McLoughlin will see he gets where he’s going with the legbone connected to the hipbone.”

  Flare nodded toward Sima.

  “Aye, the young chap.
Why?” Skye put a huge arm around the boy’s shoulders.

  Skye had put the proposition to the two of them, and it was a good one.

  A Russian ship had broken up at the southern shore of Puget Sound, a week’s ride to the north. Some of the sailors and fur hunters had drowned, others had been killed by Chickeele Indians, and the cargo of otter and seal furs was gone.

  It was a delicate matter. The Honorable Company did not tolerate depredations by Indians, even against the company’s competitors. Its policy was strict fairness. The company would be here for centuries, and nothing shortsighted would do. The Indians must be punished and the furs returned to their rightful owners. So McLoughlin had explained to Skye.

  On the other hand, McLoughlin at present had no men to execute his policy. Rather, he had men but no leader reliable against Indians who might still be bloody-minded. And the matter must be taken care of immediately. The Chickeeles, McLoughlin said knowingly, must be made to feel the wrath of the Honorable Company as soon as possible after their unacceptable acts.

  So McLoughlin was prepared to hire Sky and Flare to get the job done. The three negotiated. The ultimate price was what Flare and Skye wanted. They got the fur themselves, which they would sell to HBC at fine prices. The market for beaver might have gone to hell, but not the market for otter. Skye boasted afterwards that they’d make a couple of thousand dollars each, two years’ wages per man. A boon, even after Flare shared with Sima.

  It always surprised Flare that Skye was invariably eager to make money. All he ever did with it was go on sprees of epic proportions. But then Flare had nary a dime to show for a quarter century’s labor either.

  Skye repeated himself. “Why would Full-of-Himself be concerned about this young chap?”

  Flare shrugged. He couldn’t tell his friend the truth in front of Sima. “He wants to make Sima an example. What a fine Christian an Indian can become. He won’t think our influence will help the boy.”

  “Sima, let me handle this.”

  “Yes, Skye,” said the boy.

  “Mr. Skye,” the big man corrected him.

  John McLoughlin set the best table west of St. Louis. And presided in a manner that softened his formality and austerity. Flare had to admit, in fact, that McLoughlin had become gracious. He was much taller than even Skye, and of a huge voice like Skye’s, but he knew how to comport himself to guests.