Lord Grizzly, Second Edition

by Frederick Manfred

  Glancing back over his shoulder Hugh could just make out, across a long narrow island in the river, a faint lessening of the nightdark all along the tumbled eastern horizon. The ripples and the floating bonebare tree skeletons in the main channel of the swift rousting Missouri, which ran on the west side of the island, had begun to gleam a little. And looking sharper, Hugh could just make out the low whorled silhouettes of the fur company’s keelboats, Rocky Mountains and Yellowstone Packet. The keelboats rode at anchor between the sand bar and the cottonwood-covered island, slowly dipping and rising some ninety feet from shore, each at a right angle to the horseshoe-shaped sandy beach.

  It was good to know the boats were there. Hugh felt sure of the forty or so men sleeping beside and behind him, always with loaded flintlock rifle in hand. They could probably hold off a small nation, if need be, but those fifty extra armed men on board the two keelboats, plus the two swivel guns and sure-handed General Ashley in command, were a comfort.

  Imperceptibly the darkness lessened. Imperceptibly. Looking ahead Hugh at last could begin to make out the toothlike ten-foot-high picket fence at the head of the sand bar behind which he was sure the Rees had been crawling all night. He was sure they were waiting for dawn, their usual hour of attack. The picket fence had been made of barked cottonwood set in a ridge of sand. A deep dry moat ran all around the fence on the outside, with inside still another trench, not so deep, through which the Ree braves could slither in and out without being seen from the sand bar even in daylight.

  “Doggone my skin, this old hoss sure wishes the lads would show up. They’ve already been with them Ree squaws long enough to sprout a half-dozen family trees. Let alone pushin’ their luck.” Hugh grumbled to himself. “Rollin helps clear the mind all right. But too much’ll take away what little a man has to begin with.” Hugh tried to make out the opening in the picket fence off to the right where the lads and all the others in the company had passed in and out during the previous day when it looked like the Rees were going to behave peacefully. “I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. The lads should’ve been back long ago.”

  Not a half hour before, right after he’d taken his turn at watch, he’d heard a short quick yell, the sort of yelp a man might make surprised in the act of love. It was so short a yelp, in fact, it sounded cut off.

  Hugh nodded. It could easily have been one of the lads caught in the arms of one of the Ree maidens. One of the braves might have at last had enough of renting out his woman for what little fofurraw he got for it: mirrors, ribbons, vermilion, and such.

  “Yesterday wasn’t enough for the lads,” Hugh grumbled on. “Oh, no. They had to go back and push their luck some more.”

  Hugh remembered the trouble General Ashley had keeping even a small watch on board. All the way up the Missouri the lads had heard how easy the pennyskinned Ree squaws were, so that when they at last got to the villages they were primed for a wild spree. From early in the forenoon on, the cherry-eyed chattering Ree women had entertained the boys in the tall bluejoint grass to either side of the villages and in the jungle growth of riverbank willows along the rolling Missouri.

  Some of the boys hadn’t even bothered to seek cover with their pennyskinned quick loves, had womaned where they found it, in the roundhouses with the husband brave standing guard in the doorway for them or in the shadow of the picket fence with Ree policemen trying to keep giggling chokecherry-eyed little girls and little boys from watching from behind the midden piles. Even more scandalous had been the behavior of the Ree women when they spotted Willis the Nigger. They’d fought for a touch and a chance at that black oak, like he might have been big medicine itself.

  Hugh had sensed animosity in the villages while the desperate coupling went on. With a surly Ree brave named Stabbed, he’d been assigned policeman for the day and so couldn’t participate himself. And as watchdog policeman with Stabbed, and looking with a different pair of eyes, Hugh had caught an undercurrent in the villages that meant danger to the mountain men.

  On the surface the Rees seemed willing enough to trade some twenty Indian-trained mustangs for powder and guns and vermilion, and they might palaver civilly enough about a treaty General Ashley wished to bring about between the Sioux and the Rees and between the Mandans up the river and the Rees, but underneath they were thinking secret council. For Hugh, the ripe-cherry eyes of both Stabbed and other Ree chiefs glittered a little too fiercely out of their oldpenny faces. The Rees weren’t holding out the open hand so fully and so far as they might. Any time an Indian refused liquor, even watered-down whisky, as both Stabbed and the Ree chiefs had done, it was sign, and time to keep one’s eyes peeled.

  Thinking about all this, Hugh cautiously reached down to rub his right thigh and knee. Then he exercised his right calf a little, the buckskin legging making a soft tussing sound on the grit sand. “Doggone that leg. Gettin’ stiffer by the day.” Hugh kneaded it with powerful stub fingers, all the while warily watching the picket fence ahead for the least movement of stealth. “Well, it was kill or cure then,” Hugh muttered under his breath, thinking of the time he had jumped off Pirate Lafitte’s good ship The Pride and escaped to the coasts of Texas and in so doing had severely wrenched and strained his right leg. “Kill or cure then, and dog me if it don’t look like we’re in for the same peedoodles again.”

  By mountain-man standards Hugh Glass was an old man—in his late fifties. Most of the recruits in General Ashley’s fur company were men in the bloom of life, ranging in age from the boy Jim Bridger’s seventeen to General Ashley’s own forty-five, with most of the men running middle twenties, fellows like Jim Clyman, Tom Fitzpatrick, Johnnie Gardner, John S. Fitzgerald, and Willis the Nigger.

  Yet Hugh was a well-preserved man. He couldn’t run as far or as fast as, say, Johnnie Gardner or the boy Jim Bridger maybe, but he was stronger, tougher, wiser. And around women he was still as much a green buck as any of the lads. If Bending Reed, who’d once been his young sweet squaw, could see him today, she’d see he was still some. Some, and shining with the best. He might have the miseries in his right leg now and again, yes, but his thoughts were young willow and his narrowed gray eyes could still spark like a hungry wolf’s with down buffalo calf in sight.

  Hugh was about six feet two in height, which, not counting the boat crews of pork-eating neds or the halfbreed voyageurs, was about the average of Ashley’s company. Hugh was bulky in the shoulders, round and slim as a young cottonwood bole through the middle, with ash limbs for arms and young forked oak for legs. For all his six two he didn’t look tall until someone of average height stood up to him, and then he not only towered but loomed.

  His hair was gray and thick. Even the hair over his arms and his brushlike brows and the matt over his chest and back was thick and gray. He didn’t shave like the other mountain men did, something both General Ashley and Major Henry requested of all their men. Major Henry had been in the mountains many years as an explorer and a leader of trappers, and it was his opinion that shaven palefaces got along better with the beardless Indians. Instead, Hugh clipped his beard, or rather sawed it off with his skinning knife, when it got more than a couple inches long. Hugh said he liked the comfort of the gray bush in winter blizzards and the shade of it in the summer. Major Henry also wanted his men shaved as a way of keeping the graybacks—the lice—under control, but Hugh said he wasn’t bothered much with graybacks, probably because there was bitter alkali in his sweat which gave them the spits.

  Since the days of his captivity with the Pawnees along the Platte River, Hugh had worn hide instead of cloth for clothes: a wolfskin cap, a fringed elkskin hunting shirt that came almost down to his knees, a soft clay-worked doeskin undershirt, soft doeskin breeches, tough buckskin leggings stagged at the knees, and double-soled moccasins fashioned out of the neck leather of tough old buffalo bull. His leathers were dark with sweat and dirt and the fat of many a feast of buffalo meat, and they smelled a little like an open crock of old rancid lard. He wore
a powder horn and bullet pouch slung over his left shoulder and under his right arm. In the pouch he carried such other possibles as flint and steel for fire-making and a small whetstone.

  He wore a belt around his middle with a long sheathed butcher or skinning knife stuck in it along with a loaded horse pistol. Hugh’s set of possibles, the knife, the gun, the flint, the steel, were prime. He knew the value of being prepared for the worst with the best. His rifle, which he affectionately called Old Bullthrower, and which he kept at his side night and day, was a Henry, made in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a flintlock of a simple though sturdy make with a thirty-six inch barrel and a .59 bore and a full stock of hard maple. With it Hugh had made many a spectacular shot, plumb center, well-aimed or snap shot.

  Unlike most mountain men, Hugh was not much for trapping. He didn’t like the bone-chilling icy water that a man had to wade in before dawn to set the beaver traps and again after dusk to pick up the beaver. Such cold doings were not for his game leg. From a long life with the Pawnees he had picked up the Indian brave’s scorn for trapping. That was squaw work, not work for braves. He liked hunting and scouting better, alone, at which he was the company’s acknowledged master. Making meat and scalping red devils was an honorable profession for a brave.

  Hugh didn’t take easily to other men, nor they to him. He had a look about him that kept others from confiding in him. His brushy brows shadowed haunted gray eyes, eyes that one moment could be fierce with battle, the next closed over with inward reverie. He had killed often, and well, and there was an air about him that suggested he could easily kill again, at any moment if there was need.

  There was about him too the lonesome aggrieved mien of the touchy old grizzly bear, the grizzly who would probably leave you alone if you left him alone, but if you didn’t—whaugh! mind your topknot. Even General Ashley was afraid of Old Hugh and had trouble controlling him. Hugh hated taking orders, and, taking them, acted as if maybe in youth he’d gotten his crop full of taking too many and still felt rebellious about it.

  But if Old Hugh once set his cap for an adventure, if he once agreed to undertake an order, nothing could deter him. Under fire he was a bold, daring man of great ingenuity. When the action became furious, he had a way of shouting as if he were taking part in a revolution.

  Every man flashes a little flag when aroused. With some it’s a widening or a whitening of the nostrils, with others it’s a narrowing or darkening of the eye. With Hugh it was little arteries that ran down either side of his nose, one on each side, a rivulet of red that vanished into the brush of his gray beard. When he got mad, or showed passion, or became involved in the action of battle, a pulse could be seen beating in the little red rivulets, a pulse so clear it was as if blood were trickling in spurts out of a wound.

  The old wind came up then, stirring the chiddering cottonwood leaves overhead, and the fluttering heart-shaped willow leaves down river. The dew quit and the air dried, though in the rising soughing wind there was the fine sweet smell of rain far off.

  The wind slipped in under Hugh’s buckskin hunting shirt and brushed the gray hairs over his back and gave him a sudden rash of itching goose-pimples. “This child don’t feel easy,” he muttered to himself. Looking up at the sky, he was surprised to see that the stars were gone, and that in the renewed darkness, a darkness even deeper than before, the trees and the Ree picket fence had disappeared. “In this country, if it ain’t mosquitoes it’s goose-pimples.”

  Even as he spoke a notched spear of blue flaming lightning stroked out of the southwest sky high up and near. The lightning stabbed into the close tumbled hills, then flat-handed them with a loud quick spank of thunder.

  “Storm,” Hugh said. “Now what?”

  The wind relieved the ponies of the terrible mosquitoes, only to fill them with fear of an onrushing storm. The ponies neighed shrilly, and stomped in the plaffing sand, and drew back tight on their tie-ropes, and tried to gallop about despite tight rawhide hobbles. In the pitch dark only the spotted ponies could be made out, though sometimes Hugh wasn’t sure whether it was ponies or spots before his eyes.

  Hugh reached back a hand and touched the shoulder of his comepanyero sleeping near, the lad Johnnie Gardner. Johnnie’s buckskin shirt was soft with sleep’s sweat and buffalo grease. “Johnnie. Wake up, lad. Johnnie.”

  “Huh?” Johnnie rose out of his rest with his flintlock already in hand, finger crooked around the trigger. “What? Where’s the varmints?”

  “Down, you wild rabbit you. You want a second part through your topknot?”

  “Oh. What’s up, Hugh, old hoss?”

  “Storm comin’ up. Slide along low now and wake up Dave Howard and George Flager and Wes Piper. And a couple more of the boys, Jim Clyman and Reed Gibson maybe, and make fast the ponies. They’ll sceer if it blows dust-devils. Or rains too much lightnin’. And stay down.”

  Johnnie was awake at last. “Boys back yet?”

  “No, consarn it. But I heard a bad yell about an hour ago. I’m feared they had trouble.”

  “Not gone under?” It was too dark to make out Johnnie’s lean face, dusky with its day-old beard, but the whites of his eyes almost glowed the way they owled up at Hugh.

  There was another jab of lightning; then a quick low blat of thunder.

  The wild ponies squealed.

  “I dunno.” Hugh motioned impatiently in the dark. “Get, now, and slide along like a good snake and get them ponies in hand. March!”

  Johnnie crawled away on hands and knees. Hugh could hear his young companyero gliding along quietly, could hear him gently waking the boys. Some of the boys woke with a start like Johnnie’s, sure the red devils were upon them at last and they about to go under.

  Two huge drops of rain the size of well-chewed wads of tobacco plakked onto Hugh, one hitting the buckskin over his back and the other on his game leg. Then huge drops by the hundreds, by the thousands, pelted down. And the pushing wind became loud and bold, and it whined in the cottonwoods overhead and then in among the men, blowing pluming veils of fine grit sand over them, blinding, and at last waking them all, lashing them up into quick hands-over-the-face protective gestures. Some jerked down old wool hats and wolfskin caps, some lifted up hunting shirts over neck and head.

  “Storm is right,” Hugh said, ducking flintlock and horse pistol and powder pouch around under his body.

  Wham! A great ball of eerie whiteblue fire slammed into the sand bars immediately in front of Hugh, igniting the sand into a momentary molten glow of redgold.

  In the thundering welter, in the intermittent lightning, Hugh’s quick eye caught sight of two forms sliding over the sand bar, coming across the gap between the Ree barricade and his cottonwood butt, coming directly toward him, crawling right over where the lightning had just hit. Indians? Red devils? Sneaking up under the cover of all the heavenly shooting? Quick as the thought itself, Hugh trained his flintlock on them, left hand capped protectively over flint and the powder in the frizen.

  He got ready to pull the hair trigger, when an urgent voice whuskered hoarsely across to him. “Hugh! Hugh! Don’t shoot! It’s us.”

  “‘Us’ who? Or sure’s you’re born you’re headed for wolfmeat.”

  “Hugh! It’s us! Jim and Augie! Companyeros!”

  “Whaugh! Climb in. And don’t be slow about it. And lucky you are too. Because I took as fine a bead on your noddle as I ever took on a squirrel’s eye.”

  Jim Anderson and August Neill hunched toward him, bumping Hugh with their elbows and rifle butts as they slithered past him on their bellies and forted up with him behind the cottonwood butt. They were puffing. Their eyes were wide with fright, so wide Hugh could make them out in the dark without the aid of lightning. There was an oily herb-aromatic boary smell about the slim wiry lads, a smell they’d no doubt picked up while womaning with the Ree maidens.

  Hugh asked, “Well, had enough of squaw meat now?”

  “Hugh,” Jim Anderson said.

  “You dum
b nuts, stickin’ behind so long. If a blackbird had your brains he’d fly backwards.”

  “Hugh,” Jim said.

  “Yeh?” Hugh grunted. “By the bye, where’s Aaron Stephens?”

  “That’s what I was tryin’ to tell you. Aaron’s gone under.”

  “What? Lost his hair?”

  “Stabbed in a lodge and skulped.”

  In a flash of lightning Hugh got a quick look at Jim Anderson’s drawn haggard face. Jim looked puke-sick. “Then I did hear that yelp then.”

  Augie Neill said, “They were like to get us too, only we saw them runnin’ the kids and the old women and the dogs to the far side of the villages. And the braves were puttin’ on red warpaint. Old Chief Grey Eyes too.”

  “So that’s why we ain’t heard the dogs all night. There’s trouble ahead all right. They mean war, or this child don’t know sign.”

  “That’s what we was thinkin’,” Augie said, his face showing that he too was shaken to the roots by what he had seen—a pounce and then a death. “So we pulled stakes pronto.”

  Old Hugh thought a moment. “We better let the general know about Aaron. And that the red devils mean trouble soon’s it’s light. Lead and arrers will be as thick as a blizzard afore long.” Hugh kept squinting past the cottonwood butt, shivering under the hitting rain. Hugh could feel water trickling along the skin under his beard. It made him think of biting graybacks. “Augie, while all this commotion is goin’ on, I want you to swim out to the gen’ral’s boat and warn him. Tell him I think we ought to get up all the men and pull out with the ponies to high ground. That’s my advice.”

  “Now?” Augie asked. “Swim over in the cold and dark now?”

  “We ain’t got a skiff here. So you’ll have to swim.”