Bendigo Shafter (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures)

by Louis L'Amour

  “Do you think there is a connection?”

  “Probably not. But I believe that if I was there, if I was alone on that spot, I might grasp something intuitively that evades me now.”

  “You’re a mystic, Bendigo.”

  “No…just an interested man. I never liked the term mystic as applied to someone or a way of thought. It covers something very profound and an awful lot of nonsense passes as profound thought.

  “It is just that I have an idea that people who live long in a place leave an imprint upon it. Perhaps if I am there, where they were, I may catch some of their thinking. And maybe all of this is just an excuse to go wandering again.

  “I like the wild, far country. There’s a lot of Ethan in me, and Stacy, too. Do you think they were really hunting furs out here? Don’t you believe it. They were seeing new country.

  “Think what it means to top out on a ridge and look over a vast land beyond, which perhaps no other white man has seen? Or even an Indian? There were areas where they rarely, if ever, went. Much of Tennessee was hunted over only occasionally.”

  We walked back into the other room. “Trouble is,” Ethan was saying, “an Indian an’ a white man just don’t think alike, so there’s got to be misunderstanding. It’s what Ben here calls ‘the Christian-Jewish ethic.’ We’re all brought up according to it until we figure that’s human nature, and it ain’t no such thing. The Indian, he has his own way of thinking, and it’s nothing like that at all. Each of us gets mighty upset that the other doesn’t react the way we figure he ought to. Trouble is, there’s no common standard.”

  CHAPTER 44

  * * *

  LEAN UPON THE hillside the old cow stood, watching as we passed, tall were the pines among the barren rocks, white the streamers of snow reaching ghostly fingers from their protecting shadows. I saw a deceptive spring being born upon the mountains, deceptive because the time was early and the danger of snow lingered.

  We rode a narrow trail along the mountain’s lumpy face, weaving among the trees, our horses walking with feet alert for shifting rock or snow, each step delicate, poised for a leap.

  Five men we were, reining in upon a bare shoulder to catch a glimpse of the Big Horn Basin, far away. Meadows showed green at this distance and the forest was laced with a silver of mountain streams. We studied all we could see, our eyes searching for any hint of movement, any suggestion of enemies awaiting us there.

  “I saw a smoke when the sun went down,” Stacy commented, “a thin smoke, afar off. Injuns,” Stacy spoke around his pipe, “movin’ out to get a start on the grass. There’ll be a stirring in the lodges now, and the braves will be painting themselves for war.”

  “We’ll not be hunting trouble,” I said, “only the Medicine Wheel.”

  “When you tell them that,” Stacy said, “be looking down the barrel of your Henry.”

  There was dampness in the air, a dampness from earth turned black from the melting snow and from a trickle of snow water running off. We ducked our heads under low pine boughs, skirted mossy boulders, and sometimes turned deep into the forest where no sound was.

  Saddles creaked when the horses climbed, and when we stopped to let them catch their wind their breath showed at their nostrils. Today the icy peaks showed three dimensional in the deep blue of the sky.

  Uruwishi sat beside me when our horses rested. “My heart is young again, as when I rode the war trail.”

  “Do the Sioux ride this far to the west?”

  “A Sioux rides where he will. They are a bold people.”

  “Red Cloud is their chief.”

  “Huh!” Uruwishi was silent, then he said, “His words are spoken. The young men’s eyes follow others now. Have you heard of Gall? He is fierce in battle. I think the young men will follow him…or Crazy Horse.”

  “Have you no wish to return to your own land?”

  “My land is where the wind blows. Should I claim a land I cannot keep? Once my people roamed from the Yakima River to the Blue Mountains, from the Cascades to the Rockies. We were one with the Nez Perce and the Klickitat. Our war parties raided the Blackfeet and the Gros Ventres.”

  “You knew of the Medicine Wheel?”

  “We have always known. Sometimes our wise men went there to dream…as I did.”

  We talked no more then, for voices carry in the canyons. Once we saw an elk move away, slowly as if aware we hunted no meat, and again there was an old brown bear, thin from a winter’s sleep, who stood up on his hind legs and studied us.

  “It’s a long way to ride just to see a ring of rocks,” Stacy said, skeptically. “Maybe there’s a treasure buried there.”

  “They had no treasure other than treasures of the mind. If you go there looking for gold or silver you’re wasting your time, for the people who built it knew nothing of metals. They were building a shrine, or maybe a calendar to measure the equinoxes. Men always had reason to measure time, for ceremonies and the like, but sometimes I think we’d all be better off if we had no clocks or calendars. Then we might never get old, for we wouldn’t know the passing of time.”

  “Man’s bones would tell him,” Stacy said, dryly. “A time comes for sitting by the fire.”

  “Like Uruwishi?”

  “Ben, you know as well as I that if you hadn’t come along the old boy would have been dead by now. You took him along, you asked his advice, and suddenly he had a reason for living, he was riding the trail again.”

  “It goes to show you. People don’t wear out, they give up. And as far as trails go, there’s always an open trail for the mind if you keep the doors open and give it a chance.”

  Uruwishi turned suddenly and lifted a hand. Ethan moved toward him.

  I rode closer to Short Bull. “What is it?”

  “Shoshone.”

  “How many?”

  He shook his head, his eyes busy. We had stopped under a stand of aspen, the leaves dappling our bodies with the pale sunlight that fell through the slight overcast that held the sky. We were bunched there because it offered what we hoped was concealment, and because the view was good.

  On our left was the high, bare range of the Wind Rivers above timberline. On our right was another bald mountain and to the right front still another bare ridge. Below and northwest of us, not too far away, a dozen small lakes were clustered…one was of fair size…amid parklike meadows and forest. Through an opening between the two bald mountains on our right we could see the beginnings of the basin.

  Miles away across the basin thunderheads clustered over the Big Horns, and I saw a couple of distant rainstorms walking the hills. I remembered something Ruth Macken had said long ago when we first settled our town, that I was a man who loved to look upon distance, and it was true. There is no majesty like the grand sweep of miles upon miles of mountains and peaks with only the sky above and the silent canyons and timberline slopes below.

  Uruwishi spoke, talking to Short Bull. “Five,” he said, then to us, “Five men riding, since the first sun.”

  Five braves…not too far ahead of us and no way off the mountain here. It was a steep slide among rocks and deadfalls into the canyon hundreds of feet below, and the mountain reared up, openfaced and without concealment, on our left.

  Stacy turned around to look at me. “Shafter, if’n it was me I’d turn off down Crooked Crick…she’s a mite ahead…an’ git shut of the mountains. Git down off this mountain.”

  “Stace,” Ethan spoke quietly, “if we skirt Moccasin Lake I know a way to cross the fork of the Little Wind River an’ we can hold west of Bear Peak an’ down into Sage Creek Basin.”

  “All right, Stacy?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Never tried that way. All right with me.”

  Neither of the Indians knew the way, so with Ethan to guide we started once more.

  We were in high country, ten thousand feet or so above sea level. There was some good timber here and there, a lot of aspen, wild flowers already in bloom; and just above it the green played out
suddenly against the slide rock. Most of the peaks were still covered with snow, and we saw several shadowed canyons where the snow remained, still eight to twelve feet of it. But there was runoff from all the drifts.

  Here and there were vast slopes, gray with the dead trunks of fallen trees lying among other dead trees still standing in place. All had been killed with mighty winds that flattened whole slopes, laying the trees down like mown wheat.

  Ethan led off, and within a few hundred yards suddenly turned from the trail we had followed, and the one taken by the Shoshone, into a notch where the dull gray of huge boulders, polished smooth by wind and ice, poked their ancient brows above the green of the new grass.

  We skirted the boulders and went up through the notch. Ethan advanced slowly at the last until only his eyes looked through the notch. After a minute he motioned us on, and we all followed him down into Sage Creek Basin. There among some aspens and willows, we made camp on Sage Creek. “Over yonder,” Ethan said, pointing northeast, “there’s a cave. Never looked into it much, but she’s there. Maybe three, four miles from here.”

  Soon we had a small fire going and coffee on. Moving out from camp, I found a nesting place among some fallen trees that offered a good view around and settled down to watch. There’s always a lot to see in such places, but it never pays to get to watching one animal too closely…a man might lose his hair.

  Yet I saw nothing. Nor did Short Bull, who took my place, nothing but a camp robber jay who hopped about from limb to twig to rock, watching for something he might steal.

  We moved out before daybreak, riding down by the trail Ethan had suggested, then striking out across the basin toward Wind River.

  Light was just showing when we topped out on the last ridge and started down into the valley of the Wind. Off to our right and far off we could see a lake. “Ethan,” Stacy said, “ain’t that Bull Lake?”

  “Uh-huh. The Lake That Roars, so the Indians call it. The Shoshone say that some hunters once chased a white buffalo, a medicine buffalo, out on the ice, trying to kill him for his robe. The bull went through the ice and drowned, and the Shoshone say the wind sometimes gets under the ice, lifts it, and makes a groaning, roaring sound, but they claim it’s the buffalo’s anger that lifts the ice and makes the sound.”

  We lost some time working ourselves out of a tangle of deadfalls, boulders, and brush at the foot of the mountains, so it was coming up to sundown before we watered our horses in the Wind River. We pushed on while it was still light and camped close to Crowheart Butte.

  “Big Injun fight here,” Stacy commented. “Cheyennes, Gros Ventres, and Arapahos fightin’ Shoshone. Story is the Shoshone chief ate the Crow chief’s heart.”

  “When was that?” I asked.

  “Twelve years ago, the way I figure. Washakie did sure enough have himself a fight here.”

  “Did he eat the heart?” I wanted to know.

  “I wasn’t there. They done such things. Figured it gave them all the bravery of their enemy.”

  “We’ll sleep tonight in the Owl Creeks,” Ethan said, “if we’ve still got our hair. This here is techy country.”

  “The mountains to the north? Aren’t those the Absarokes?”

  “Prime country!” Stacy commented. “I wintered there one time. John Colter come in there long before, him and two of his compadres. Mighty purty…rough country, too. Ain’t no purtier country nowhere than the Absarokes.”

  We rode through the sagebrush bottoms, our eyes searching the country. Twice we picked up sign, all of it old, of unshod ponies. Several times we saw buffalo, but they were few and scattered. There had always been buffalo here, but not in the great herds of those further east. Yet toward night we saw one herd, afar off, that looked to be several hundred…maybe a thousand head.

  The mountains hung low on the northern horizon, then seemed suddenly to loom large. The Owl Creeks were not high as mountains went, but there were some impressive spires here and there. Actually, although some referred to where we rode as the basin, the Big Horn Basin as such was north of the Owl Creeks, and where we rode was the Wind River Valley, or a part of it.

  We were heading toward a pass Ethan knew, but suddenly he slowed up. “Stace? What d’you think?”

  “Don’t like it, Ethan. I surely don’t. I never cared much for no pass, nohow. A pass is too easy.”

  “That’s a purty deep canyon, the South Fork is, but I still don’t hold no briefs for the pass.”

  Uruwishi spoke. “West from the pass, in the mountains nearer Owl Creek, there is a way. It is a lonely way, but it is there.”

  “I’ll cast my vote for it,” I said. “I trust the Old One. He didn’t live this long without having a lot of savvy.”

  Uruwishi rode into the lead again and headed toward the mountains. There were a couple of creeks coming down from the slope that I could pick up afar off. Ethan was at my elbow. “That pass comes down about, well, maybe a mite east of the east fork of Bargee Creek. Looks like he’s ridin’ right for it.”

  “If they are up there, could they see us?” I believed they might, for the air was clear and the distance not that great.

  “Sure. An Indian would see you. They’ve eyes that have been searchin’ country like this since they were babies. A mite of dust you or I wouldn’t see, they’ll pick up right quick.”

  Suddenly, we dipped down into a wide hollow that was scattered with sagebrush and cedar. Riding straight ahead, Uruwishi headed into the thickest stand of cedar just like he’d done it a thousand times. A sandy ridge lay ahead of us, and we should turn right to skirt it; instead, he turned abruptly left.

  This was behind the ridge and the cedar where our direction change could not be seen. “Sagwup Draw,” Short Bull muttered, half to himself, half in explanation.

  Now we rode more swiftly, our direction due west and away from the pass. The ridge grew higher, rockier, covered with scattered fragments of sandstone. Ethan pointed ahead and to our left. “That there’s Red Basin, I think. I’ve heard about this country from Ed Rose an’ Colter. I don’t know where the Old One ever heard of it.”

  Suddenly, Uruwishi drew up to let the horses have a moment. He was scanning the ridge on our right, looking up toward the two highest points, two long ovals of rock. When he started again he rode right up the ridge on an angle across the face toward the narrow gap between the high points. If a trail existed we could not see it, but Uruwishi led on, holding to a good pace.

  We made no dust, for the trail was among rocks, and when he turned again it was at right angles and a steep scramble into the gap. He was through the opening like a ghost, and we followed, through the rock-walled space in a matter of minutes and down the slope toward the valley on the other side.

  The pass we had intended to cross was three miles east now, out of sight among the trees and shoulders of rock. Uruwishi led us, trusting to some ancient memory of a tale told by a campfire.

  We found no tracks but those of deer and bighorn sheep. Off to our left now and less than a mile away, glimpsed occasionally through the trees, was Owl Creek Canyon. When we dipped toward the creek we were headed toward a crossing on the floor of the valley.

  Stacy Follett pulled up. “Ethan, would you look at that now.”

  Behind us, to the east and south, several miles away, a thin finger of smoke pointed to the sky.

  “I never did like passes,” Ethan said.

  CHAPTER 45

  * * *

  IT IS MY great gift to live with awareness. I do not know to what I owe this gift, nor do I seek an answer. I am content that it be so. Few of us ever live in the present, we are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone, and this I do also. Yet it is my good fortune to feel, to see, to hear, to be aware.

  As much as I have read it has not turned me into one who lives only with the intellect, for most of life is not a life of the mind, nor is that the only good life. As I rode now I was aware, as we all were, of that finger of smoke behind us.r />
  It was a signal, as we well knew, that we had not appeared where we were expected. It meant that they would be seeking out our trail, and of course, they would find it. Knowing Indians a little, I knew they would find it soon.

  Yet that was the smallest part of my awareness, for my heart beat with the steady throbbing of hoofs beneath us. I was aware of the smell of trampled sage, and crushed cedar, the taste of dust, the glare of the sun, and the coolness of a wind from down a canyon.

  The splendid arch of the blue sky above, the distant purple haze of mountains, the majestic strength in the face of old Uruwishi, the proud way Short Bull carried himself, the way my foot felt in a stirrup, the way a gun butt felt in my hand. Each, in its way, was a thing of beauty.

  To live is not only to exist. It is not to wait for supper of an evening or for bedtime or for a drink at a saloon. It is all of these things and every marvelous moment that comes between. To live is to feel, and the senses have more to teach than the mind. More, at least, for the immediate moment. It is better, sometimes, to simply feel, to simply be.

  We crossed the North Fork of Owl Creek and headed out across the flat toward Wagonhound Bench and rode toward an ancient shrine, a place of long ago. I suspect each of us rode toward a different shrine, the same only in name. For the destination men name is only the destination of surface: For each there is another, a different destination.

  I rode toward a turning point in my life. I do not know why I knew this, and yet I did know it. Why had the Medicine Wheel such an attraction for me? Was it some ancient atavistic memory? Had some incarnation of me from a far distant time known this place? Or was there some recollection, deep hidden in my very blood and fiber, that called me to this place rather than to some other such place in some other land?