A ravening gut worming its way across a tan wilderness.
“My bowels boiled, and rested not: the days of affliction prevented me. I went mourning without the sun: I stood up, and cried in the wilderness. I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls. My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat.”
He looked back over his shoulder. Thunder Butte loomed high, flat top first wavering close, then far, then close.
Up. Up. And the crest in the low pass gained at last. And dawn a lovely wildrose blossom.
“Meat. Meat. Gotta have—”
Ho-ah. What was that circling wheeling in the dawn-pinkened valley below? beside the twinkling Moreau? Not turkey buzzards?
He peered down the falling tan slopes.
Yes, buzzards. And this time it wasn’t his meat they were celebrating. It was some downed critter’s meat.
A surge of final ultimate energy sent him skedaddling down toward the meandering silvering Moreau River.
He scrabbled downhill until he came to the last drop-off. Cautiously, head raised like a grizzly predator, he peered past a final rock.
A dozen greennecked buzzards circled and squawked just out of reach of a dozen white wolves. The white wolves were working on a red four-legged critter down on a sand bar, their tails whisking about lively as they struggled with each other for the spoils. Around them in a ring, waiting their turn, sat a dozen impatient howling dun-gray coyotes.
“Buffler! A down young bull calf! Maybe the one I missed back in the hills!” Hugh cried. “Meat.”
With a roar and a rush, silvertip grizzly bearskin lifting a little from the speed of his rush, dried grizzly paws bangling from his neck, willow slape careening on stones and loose gravel, gravel avalanches rushing ahead of his running elbows, Hugh charged through the ring of coyotes and into the boiling mass of snarling white wolves. “Whaugh!” he roared. “Whaugh! Hrrrach! Get! Getouttahere!”
At the roar and rush the bloody-mouthed white wolves leaped back. One look at Old Hugh’s grizzly head and grizzly covering and they fled the sand bar, the coyotes slinking away with them. But fear a grizzly as they might, they didn’t run far. They turned at the edge of the sand bar and sat down on their haunches. They watched him. They whined and got up and sat down. They licked blood off their snouts and paws, licked them slick and clean. They howled outraged at the intrusion. The vultures overhead retreated too, raising their wavering crying circles a rung or two.
With bared teeth and clawing fingers, Hugh tore at the raw red partly mutilated flesh, pulling fleece away from the underbelly, ripping off strips of soft veal from the hindquarters, sucking up dripping still-warm blood. With a gnawed-off leg bone he broke out a few ribs. With a stone chisel he jammed off a slice of fatty hump. He also had himself a couple of coils of boudin.
He’d become so thin, his teeth hurt at the least bite. Bits of raw flesh got caught between his incisors deep in the sunken gums.
He ate until he couldn’t any more. He drank deep of the shimmering silvering Moreau, drank until his guts ached.
He ate and drank and slept all through the day. He ate and drank and slept all through the night. He slept on the sand bar, one arm laid protectively over the half-eaten red bull calf. When the wolves and coyotes and the vultures threatened, he fought them off, roaring and gesticulating wildly. Sometimes hunger woke him. Sometimes slavering snarling wolves woke him. A full belly always put him back to sleep.
6
HUGH NEVER did remember how long he slept and ate and slept and ate beside the down buffalo-bull calf on the sand bar. Time was measured solely and only by how often his stomach needed refilling and by how often the wolves and vultures dared to approach him.
Perhaps it was the third day, or the fifth day, or the seventh day—he never did know which—when one morning he noticed the circling prowling wolves and coyotes and the wheeling wrinklenecked vultures were suddenly gone.
It made him sit up. Besides his own mangled hulk there was still some buffalo-calf meat left. The meat was getting to be a little on the strong side, but for that reason it should have been all the more appetizing to them. Something was wrong. It was sign red devils were about.
Quickly Hugh packed what he could of the bull-calf meat, buried the rest of the carcass in the sand so that Indian dogs wouldn’t give him away, and backing off, erased his tracks with a willow switch. He scurried into a thick fringe of yellow-leaved cottonwood saplings along the east shore of the Moreau.
And just in time. He had just comfortably stretched out his bum leg and was adjusting the grizzly skin over his back, when he heard a pony nicker across and down the river. Two other ponies whinnied in answer.
Hugh lifted his matted grizzly head for a cautious look. Ho-ah. Coming up across the Moreau were red devils with hawkbone headdress like horse ears. Rees then. Some forty braves, all armed with rifles and all riding ponies, rode ahead of a whole village on the move, squaws, children, dogs burdened with travois, ponies weighted down with slapes of supplies. Pale clay dust rose in swirling clouds above and behind them. Sometimes one or another of the dogs sat down to howl at his lot in life, at his sore feet or sore back. Immediately one of the squaws, either afoot or riding, laid on with a stick, cursing, to get the dog up and on the move again. Small babies in tight bundles rode atop pony packs, little berry eyes alert and bugged at all the bustling show. Skin pennants hung slack and torn; skin panniers hung empty and bedraggled. The whole tribe looked beaten and hungry.
Ae, the very Rees he’d helped Ashley fight on the Missouri back in early June. Hugh guessed they’d probably been on the move and scavengering off the dry countryside ever since Leavenworth had let them escape from their fortified villages on the Grand.
At the head of the motley procession and a little off to the side, as a general might hold himself apart, Hugh spotted gnarled old Chief Elk Tongue on a black stallion. Bronze arrowhead nose pointed ahead, the old chief rode along calmly and arrogantly, a couple of flashy eagle feathers pluming and dipping in the slow wind, skin pennants dangling from an upright spear.
Hugh shivered. He remembered the chief as the most ferocious paleface-hater of them all. Looking at him, Hugh could see that the chief had aged, that he seemed more embittered than ever by the endless uprootings of his tribe. Dark savage eyes flicking from side to side, seeing everything, Chief Elk Tongue was truly the old-style arrogant tribal patriarch.
Chief Elk Tongue and his wandering raveling Rees were the first humans Hugh had seen since he broke away from Major Henry’s party to go off hunting by himself. Old Hugh hungered with tears in his eyes for the friendly sound of a human voice. But he knew that to call out now for help was suicide. Any other tribe and he might have chanced it. Hugh bit back his tongue, clamped down on his lips, for fear some sound might escape him.
Ae, one little squeak from his hideout and the Ree braves’d come raging and whooping across the river and he’d be made a riddle of before he could say his name. And if not a riddle of, then a torture-stake victim. Hugh wished with a terrible wish that he had pistol or rifle with at least one ball left so he could make an end of it should the Rees suddenly discover him anyway. In his broken state he knew he didn’t have it in him to stand the elaborately horrible tortures Plains Indians performed on hated captives.
Hugh hoped old Elk Tongue hadn’t put flankers out across the river on his side. If he had, he was wolfmeat sartain sure.
One thing Hugh was glad for. Every dog in the tribe had been put to work, and they were too busy dodging squaw blows and howling over their sore feet to sniff him in his hideout or to sniff out what remained of the calf carcass in the sand bar.
Hugh waited. The yellow leaves of the cottonwood saplings claddered softly overhead.
He skulked down as low as he could. He took breath in little shallow soundless sucks. His heart beat loud and shook his chest. Hugh steadied his hands in the soft drifted sand under the saplings to keep from trembling.
Lean em
aciated squaws continued to belabor lean emaciated dogs. Lean starved babies stared bug-eyed at the passing barren land. Ribhard ponies cantered along head down and snorting. Surly thin-bellied braves looked from left to right.
Slowly, noisily, the pennyskinned tribe crossed before Hugh not forty feet away and trotted out of sight around a bend in the river bottom.
“Whaugh! that was a striker of a close one, that was. One sight of this child and they’d a known him like they’d a knowed their old dead chief Grey Eyes. The day I watchdogged when General Ashley’s boys diddled their squaws they’d never forget. Let alone seein’ me be the last to run for the keelboats.”
Old Hugh watched the dust settle around the bend.
When Old Hugh’s thoughts returned to himself, he found fear’s sweat had broken out all over him. “A close one, that was. Too clost for this old hoss. Whaugh!”
From his hiding place he studied the sky, and all the tipping rims of the horizon, and all the angling river bottoms, and a clump of tall cottonwoods up the river.
“Ae, a striker. And this old hoss is caching right here until night comes around again. Best to get some sleep anyways. And from now on, keep an eye peeled and an ear picked for sign. Dummed friend stomach almost got me in a sad fix that time.”
He slept fitfully. And dreamt of having been caught by the vengeful Rees. The braves had tied him to a stake and with pine splinters were puncturing him full of holes; the squaws had torn out his privates by the roots and were roasting them over a fire; the berry-eyed children like dogs had fouled his legs and were tugging at his beard. Then the flames leaped high around him and he saw his old companyero Clint crying over his sad fate and pleading with the Pawnee chief to let him go free. The roaring, searing flames leaped high and Hugh screamed.
The scream woke him.
He lay awake awhile, thinking, shivering, as he passed the dream before his mind again. The wind tossed the fall-yellowed cottonwood leaves in lifting flutters. Sunlight twinkled over his face. He heard the waters of the Moreau sliding softly over the sand bars.
He slept fitfully.
He woke after dark.
A bullying wind was out. It whipped the sapling cottonwoods about and moaned sadly through the gullies and ruffled the streaming Moreau.
In the dark he fed on the calf meat he’d quick grabbed up when the Rees broke in on his feasting on the sand bar. He drank from the wind-whacked waters of the Moreau.
He checked the splint on his leg. The tie-straps over the thigh were loose, and he tightened them. He felt of the swelling around the cracked bone. The flesh of it seemed to be softening some.
He checked his back and seat. He was surprised to find that the scabs had fallen off at last. Baby-tender skin had replaced them. Ho-ah. He was healing then, he was. Ae. There was only the hole in his back left to heal.
He set out, following the banks of the Moreau, heading slowly southeast. In the moon-lit dust-riding night Thunder Butte loomed over him almost directly north. The butte wasn’t getting any smaller with the distance, but it was moving back.
The dark bullying night wind wouldn’t let him alone. It got stronger every minute. Once it made a sail of his bearskin and almost carried him off a high bank into the river. Only by quickly grabbing a willow sapling did he save himself from a dousing. Another time a particularly savage blast scooped up what seemed like a flying sand bar hitting him with a million billion drilling stingers. Hugh had to duck under the grizzly skin to keep from choking. It took him a good ten minutes of careful prying with a finger to get the sand particles out of his eyes.
After a couple of miles of it, with the wind continuing to blow mean and vicious, and at last turning cold too, Hugh gave up.
“Burnin’ up too much of that good meat fightin’ it,” Hugh muttered in his old beard. “Best to save it for a good day and better goin’.”
Ahead in the varying dust-riding moonlight, Hugh spotted a big creek coming out of a valley on his right. A heavy grove of cottonwood and willow and wild fruit fringed it where it joined the Moreau. The sight of all the growth waving back and forth in the raging night wind gladdened Old Hugh’s heart.
“Now that begins to look like somethin’. Cover for both man and beast.” Hugh studied it for sign. “Yessiree, cover. An’ this child’s cachin’ in it for the day, he is.” Hugh cocked his head to one side as if listening to something, someone in his head. “Do ee hear now, lads? Cover ahead an’ the old carcass mendin’ as slick as a peeled onion. My deal is comin’ soon now. Best set yourself for bad doin’s, lads.”
He had another drink of water, this time from the big creek, and had another cautious look around for sign, and then, without eating, turned in behind a thick slash of dry canebrake.
A cold nose woke him.
Two pairs of furred slanted yellow eyes glittered down at him out of a very bright blue sky. One pair of narrowed eyes glittered very close. Dogs. Indian dogs gone wild. Strays from the Rees who’d passed by the day before. Or the advance guard dogs of a second Ree village on the move.
Hugh snapped up both hands; caught the dog around the furred neck; choked it with a frantic fanatic grip. The other yellowgray dog leaped back. The caught dog struggled, and doubled its neck around to snap at his hands, and dug its claws into his leathers trying to get away, and rasped piteously for breath.
“You devil! So you and your companyero thought you’d make a meal of me, did ee? Well, you’ve another think a comin’ on that. It’s me who’s gonna eat, not you.”
Hugh hung on. Gradually the dog’s struggles weakened; ceased altogether; and at last the wild cur fell slack across his belly.
“Fresh meat is good meat,” Hugh grunted. “Even if it ain’t prime calf meat.”
He sat up slowly. His limbs and back cracked like dried rawhide.
In the midst of the dry canebrake he found a heavy white stone the size of a bowling ball. With a quick stroke he crushed in the wild dog’s head. He found another stone, this time a flat one with a rough cutting edge, and jammed at the dog’s tough furry neck until the jugular began to spout blood. “Nothin’ like a bucket a blood to start the day.”
He skinned two of the dog’s legs and gnawed them down to the bone. The meat was tough and flat. He chewed until the roots of his old teeth hurt him again.
He noticed after a while that the other dog had disappeared. That Hugh didn’t like. It meant the two dogs probably hadn’t been wild after all, that they belonged somewhere.
Grizzly predator head rising slowly out of the canebrake, bright afternoon sunlight silvering his matted gray hair, Hugh surveyed the river valley all around, east, west, north, south. As he’d noted the night before, he had nested down in the midst of a considerable grove of cottonwoods and willows and a few wild fruit trees. The heavy yellow cottonwood leaves clattered briskly in a wind coming out of the west. Some of the cottonwood leaves let go and spun around and around until they hit water or sandy ground. The pink willows were tougher and less noisy. The red plum leaves fluttered softly. From where he crouched Hugh had trouble telling the leaves apart from the drying wrinkled plums.
Less than a dozen yards away the waters of the big creek joined the fanning washing Moreau. Both streams ran clear and clean over gold-sand deltas and occasional beds of pebbles, beds dull orange and speckled with bits of black and flecks of white.
Up from both sides of the Moreau the land rose in thrown slopes of grassed-over clay and gravel. To the north still loomed omnipresent dull-red Thunder Butte. To the south rose the first smooth slopes of the Fox Ridge bluffs. While out of the west and into the east the bottoms of the Moreau swung and angled along.
Hugh was about to settle back in the canebrake when his quick eye spotted the other wild dog. Pink tongue out and puffing, it was sitting on its haunches in front of an old ragged patched-up tepee, exactly across from him on the other side of the river and up on a low bench of gravel.
Hugh ducked down and began to sweat. He swore softly to hims
elf. “Right in my eye practically and I missed it. That dummed stomach of mine is gonna get me in trouble yet.”
Hugh puffed. “Red devils, no doubt. Ae. And they’ve probably spotted me too.”
He sat crouched and very quiet for a long time. He listened for the sounds of approaching stealth in the whistling tossing canebrake.
When nothing happened, he cautiously and noiselessly wormed his way to the edge of the canebrake and parted the last few stalks and looked out from a spot low near the ground.
A tepee all right. And the wild dog too.
But it was only one tepee, and an odd one at that. It looked Sioux but it wasn’t Sioux exactly. It looked like a tepee made by a Sioux and then traded to a Ree who’d made it over to fit his ways of staking and decoration.
For a half hour Hugh studied the tepee and the dog, never once moving from his prone position at the edge of the canebrake. During all that time he saw nothing moving in and out or around the strange tepee. And in all that time too the wild dog sat in front of the tepee doorflap, pink tongue out and calmly puffing.
Hugh couldn’t understand it. Had the Rees left some old crone or brave behind to die? They sometimes did when on the move. In hard times, when the old became too weak to travel, tribal custom sometimes said they had to be left behind. In fact, the old often asked for the privilege themselves. Bending Reed had once told him that her own old brave of a father had made such a request. “My children,” the old wrinkled pennyskinned sack of bones had said, “my children, our nation is poor and we need meat. Think not of me, but go to the country where there is meat. Go, and leave me to what lies in store for me. My eyes are dim, my legs no longer can carry my body, my arms can no longer bend my bow. I wish to die. Go, my children, go make your hearts brave and forget me. Go, I am good for nothing and my days are done.” With a catch in his throat Hugh remembered Bending Reed’s telling of it. After his desertion by the boys such memories were like searing heartburns.
That was it, all right. An old brave left to die. With a few provisions to last out his days. And his favorite dogs left to watch over him, and maybe, gone wild, to eat him if the wolves didn’t get him first.
Lord Grizzly, Second Edition Page 19
