More and more he began to use his bum leg. The swelling around the cracked bone was almost gone. Tight splint fixed firmly in springy willow slape, he could bear part of his weight on it on occasions. He was beginning to crawl more on his hands than on his elbows, and more on his awkward slape and good knee both than just on the good knee.
What amazed him was the way his body had taken to going on all fours like any four-legged creature of the wild. Even with the leg in the slape he got around very handily, could even run a little if he wanted to. The run, when he tried it, wasn’t just an awkward one either, but a run that coursed, a run that lifted him off the ground a little, that gave his carcass a coasting motion all its own, like some rowboat with four oars flailing water.
It gave Hugh a peculiar insight into how the four-legged animals felt as four-legged beings, an insight so sharp that his first impulse was to sniff at the thought of it instead of smile at it.
It also gave him a peculiar insight into the curse God had put on Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon. God had changed Nebuchadnezzar’s heart from that of a man to that of a beast and had him driven from among men and made it his portion to eat of the grass of the earth like an ox. And God caused Nebuchadnezzar’s body to be made wet with the dew of heaven till his hairs grew out like eagle feathers and his nails grew out like bird claws.
All that night Child Hugh crawled hard, and at dawn found himself at the foot of Rattlesnake Butte.
Time to sleep again. Also time to have a look back at Thunder Butte to see if at last it hadn’t shrunk a little in the distance.
But it hadn’t. When he looked back it loomed as holy, solemn, and high as ever. Looking to either side Hugh could see that he had crossed the crest of flat Fox Ridge. Crawling the last had been easier going too; so he knew the land was tipping down and away from the red rock altar, knew the horizon should have risen enough to have hidden it from view. But it hadn’t.
Mirage, that was it.
Or else he’d gone loco at last. Maggots in the head as well as in the back.
“This child can’t cipher it nohow. Maybe if he slept on it some, maybe it’d turn out to be just a bad dream.”
Thunder Butte.
“Well, howsomever, first we’ll have us some meat afore we go to sleep.”
But the wild dog was gone. Sometime during the night it had drifted off, sometime during the interval when he’d resisted looking back at Thunder Butte, it had left him. Hugh missed the dog; could almost taste it as roasted meat on his tongue.
“Tarnation! Just when I needed him most.”
Hugh looked around at the countryside. Nothing but dry bunch grass. No cactus beds, no berry bushes, no twig tips of any kind. And no water.
“Fresh roast dog. I swear. Nebuchadnezzar had green grass, he had, but not Old Hugh. Well, I guess there’s nothin’ for it but to bite in and hold on until I hit water below.”
In the flooding light of a red-clover dawn, Hugh studied the fall of land below to the south. Once again he could make out far valleys angling from west to east, with the near one shallower than the far one, with a low hogback between them. The first was a big creek, he decided; the second was the Cheyenne River itself. The first valley had smooth grassy hills, with a few trees and shrubs that looked like chokecherries, with here and there a poplar. The big creek doubled around like the contorted flow of a stepped-on snake and finally joined the Cheyenne far in the southeast. The far valley had rugged stony hills, jagged horizons, and its flow was wide and deep and much more direct.
Hugh nodded to himself. The second valley was the Cheyenne all right. Get there and a man could float in to Ft. Kiowa.
To the left of Rattlesnake Butte a gullyhead began its cut in the grassy slopes. Hugh saw where it eventually ran into a dry creek. Here and there brush fuzzed out in its slow turns.
Hugh went on all fours to the gullyhead and burrowed out a flat place in sand and clay and snuggled under the bearskin and curled up to go to sleep.
It worried him that the wild dog had disappeared. He hoped it didn’t mean red devils around. The dog might have sensed Rees before he did. Maybe a pair of daring young Rees were right now watching him curl up for the day’s rest. Well, if they were, he would soon know it. He’d wake to shrill warwhoops and the crunch of a stone club on his noggin. And thinking about it, and his stomach rumbling with hunger, and the open wound in his back itching—whether from healing or from wriggling maggots he couldn’t make out—Hugh drifted off to sleep.
A cold nose woke him.
For a second, lying on his belly with head to one side, as he rose out of the motherwort magma of the unconscious, Hugh was back on the forks of the Grand, thinking the cold-nosed wolf was back again. He screwged his eyes around at the blue sky expecting to see wheeling wrinklenecked turkey buzzards overhead too.
But the sky was clean. There was neither gaggling greennecked buzzard nor laughing red-tongued wolf. Instead there was a looming silvertip, a huge Ursus horribilis, a he-grizzly with a black piglike snout snuffling him over.
The shock came so quick he had no time to show fear. He just lay. And hoped he’d stay scared enough not to show it. A man lying down was medicine to the grizzly bear.
Old Ephraim stood huge over Hugh. One of his forepaws rested on the ground not three inches from Hugh’s eyes. Hugh could see sunlight glinting on the silvertipped hairs over the great gray hooked claws. Hugh could also see, so close was the forepaw, skin dust and powdery dandruff in the deeper dark fur.
The huge creature snuffled at Hugh slowly, warm breaths pouring over Hugh regularly. The breaths had the faint decayed odor of dog’s breath.
Old Ephraim snuffled at Hugh’s grizzly hair, at his crooked hairy arm, at his grizzly neck, at the grizzly bearskin over his back.
Hugh understood it. Old Ephe had, at first sight, mistaken him for a dead companyero grizzly. But then it had got a sniff of man in the bearskin and had come over for a closer look.
Hugh smiled. The gray beard over his cheeks moved.
Old Ephe spotted the movement; quick sent a cold nose to explore it. The bull-huge beast shifted its weight to smell the better. It’s forefeet moved with a soft heaviness. The ground under Hugh’s ear resounded dully with the sound of it.
Hugh held the smile until his face ached.
Old Ephe cocked his great dog’s head from side to side, watching.
It made Hugh laugh, a laugh he was careful to keep inside, and a laugh that was in part both a laugh of fear and a laugh at himself.
The idea of Old Ephe giving him a going-over, trying to make out whether he was a dead she-grizzly or a man in bearskin clothes reminded him of blind Isaac in the Old Testament feeling Jacob over, a Jacob in sheepskin pretending he was an Esau.
The thought of himself as a Jacob, Old Hugh didn’t fancy too well. He wasn’t a Jacob. The Jacobs were the Rebekah favorites, the mama boys, the she-rip sissies who stayed behind in the settlements to do squaw’s work, the smooth men back home who ran shops and worked gardens and ran factories. No, if anything he was an Esau, a hairy man and a man’s man and a cunning hunter, a man of the prairie and the mountains. It was the other, the man who’d probably married his old she-rip of a Mabel back in Lancaster County, who was the smooth man dwelling in a shingled tent. Ae, Old Hugh was Esau, the first, who’d come out red all over like an hairy garment. He was no Jacob coming out second and taking hold of an Esau’s heel. Like an Esau he too had sold his birthright in Lancaster land to another, to the Jacob who probably right that minute was enjoying a ripping up and down his back by a she-rip Mabel.
Old Ephe apparently knew Hugh for what he was at last. For suddenly, with a single deft swipe of forepaw, the grizzly tore the grizzly skin off Hugh’s back.
Hugh sucked in a breath of fear. Ripped up again?
But Old Ephe wasn’t a she-rip ripper. Old Ephe was only a male curious about an odd smell coming out of Hugh’s back. The next instant Old Ephe was licking Hugh’s open wound.
&n
bsp; The licking tickled Hugh, tickled him horribly. He wanted to burst out laughing. The terribly funny tickling almost drove him crazy. With all his will power, he held back hysterical laughter.
As abruptly as he began, Old Ephe left off licking, and with a tumbler’s tremendous heave of body, turned to one side and ran off, hump high and rolling, small Indian-ball-sized ears flicking back and forth nonchalantly, grampa rear waddling along.
When he was sure Old Ephe was gone from the gullyhead, Hugh rolled over on his side and sat up. He felt around behind his back. And feeling, he found the last crusts gone around the wound and the center of it slick and clean. The grizzly had cleaned out the maggots just when their work was done.
Then Hugh did laugh hysterically. The grizzly, like all grizzlies with a sweet tooth, apparently had been fond of maggots and by God, dead she-grizzly skin with a man’s smell in it or no, was going to have some.
An hour later, when he himself began to wonder where his next meal was coming from, let alone treats like sweet maggots, Hugh pulled an Old Ephraim himself. He’d often seen bears stick a forepaw in an anthill, wait until the angered scrambling ants covered it, then lick them off, obviously considering them a delicacy as well as good food. Hugh found an anthill, stuck his paw in it, held it in the hill even though the ants stung him a little, and then, paw and forearm covered, withdrew it and forced himself to eat ants. Surprisingly they tasted very good. Tart, sharpish, but curiously like salted sugar.
He was about to set off for the night’s run down the hill, when, looking over his shoulder, he saw Thunder Butte was gone.
Gone. But not as if it’d never been.
8
WILD GEESE were flying south in great trailing wavering V’s by the time he reached Cherry Creek valley. It was October, the Moon of Leaves Falling.
The wild bullberries had pretty well dried up and gone. But the wild root crop was plentiful and the green glades abounded with squirrels and gophers. Old Hugh fed right well on them.
When he reached the deep stony valley of the Cheyenne, Old Hugh greeted the sight of the swift-flowing yellow river glinting in the morning sun with a shout of joy.
“Hurray, lads! Old Hugh’s made it at last. As good as. It’s all over but the shouting now. Best get yoursel’s set, because Old Hugh’s on the warpath. If the red devils ain’t got your topknot by now, Old Hugh soon will.”
He unbound the willow slape from his bad leg, took off the splints, and gave himself a thorough scrubbing in the slightly alkaline Cheyenne River. He rinsed the bum leg gently, rinsed out his scalp, rinsed as best as he could the torn corrugations across his back.
He splashed in the shallow waters along the sandy shore, singing, shouting, for a little while heedless of lurking red devil and she-rip grizzly.
Flowing water meant life. It meant fish. It meant drink. It meant cleansing. It meant travel. Yes, land was important. Ae. But land was the given. Like a mother, it was there to begin with. It was water men craved, not land. Men loved land for the water it had just as children loved a mother for the milk she had.
He soaked his calluses, those along the bottoms of his forearms from the heel of the hand to the point of the elbow, and the broad warty one on his good knee. With handfuls of gritty golden sand for soap he scoured out the dirt.
Cottonwood leaves as yellow as buttercups fluttered high overhead. The morning sky was a deep gentian blue, was clean and serene. The stony bluffs to either side bulked up sharply. Here and there the bluff cheeks were bearded out with spine cactus. Far down the slowly twisting river valley perspective faded off into a hazy aven-blue.
He was dizzy with the joy of being alive. Dizzy with it. He rested beside the rippling, wrinkling, flowing yellow waters of the Cheyenne. He lay down on a grassy sward beneath a huge towering cottonwood. The smell of fresh waters and falling autumn leaves and green grass restored his soul. His cup ran over.
The spot beneath and around the great cottonwood tree was like a park, Hugh thought. Buffalo and antelope had kept the grass close-cropped. Buffalo and antelope had trimmed the lower portions of all the trees and bushes to an even height. Sitting under his tree Hugh guessed he could see more than a mile in any direction under the level line of trimmed-off leaves. Approaching friend or enemy would have been spotted on the instant. Late fall flowers bloomed in the short deep green grass. Yellow poplar leaves and pink willow leaves fell in showers.
God’s park, he called it. And he Adam without an Eve.
One day he found an old Indian middenheap on a knoll. The moment he saw the low mound he got an idea. He found himself a sharp-pointed ash stick from amongst the driftwood along the Cheyenne’s banks and began to dig through the heap. He found a few broken water bowls with angular black and white designs, a few broken potsherds, a few clay pans. He found a handmade bone fishhook. He found a broken stone hatchet. He found a small piece of flint. He found a smudged flat cookrock.
With the bone fishhook and his ash stick and a slender grapevine, he fished the Cheyenne. He caught channel cat almost as fast as he could throw in the hook.
With Old Mother’s much worn flint and steel, and milkweed down for tinder, he built himself a small fire and fried the catfish on the cookrock.
He fished. He ate. He slept. He restored his soul.
He swam and it refreshed his torn corrugated body. His bad leg floated gently and easily and without pain in the swift-flowing yellow waters.
He fished. He ate. He slept. He healed.
It wasn’t long before he tried standing on both legs. Holding onto the huge cottonwood to steady himself, he got up on his good leg and slowly shifted his weight onto the other. The bad leg hurt but it bore up. The knitted crack in the bone stung, yes, but it didn’t buckle. Ae, in a month he’d be going around on two legs regular again.
He found a small ash sapling with a V-shaped fork. With his broken stone ax he cut it down, shaped himself a crude crutch out of it. From then on, taking his time, between frequent rests, he went about upright once more. He was a human critter again, not just a four-legged varmint.
Exploring the poplar-shaded valley to all sides, he one day came across a down cottonwood beside the river. It had a trunk three feet through.
The big tree trunk gave him another idea. He had been thinking of making raft out of driftwood and grapevines. But why not make a dugout instead? He had a crude hatchet, a knife, and the firemakings to do it with.
No sooner thought than done. He set to work. Firing carefully, he burnt out the insides. A couple of times the fire threatened to eat in too deeply, and he had to quickly roll the trunk over into the stream to put it out.
When the insides were too wet from the soaking, he chipped and chopped away on the outside. The chopping was the hardest. It went very slowly. A day’s work at it hardly showed results.
After two weeks of steady firing and chopping he at last had himself a crude dugout some fifteen feet long, two feet wide, and a good foot deep. It wasn’t a beauty, but it floated.
He loaded in his grizzly skin, his necklace of grizzly claws, the red-striped blanket he’d taken from the old Indian crone and which he now used to cover his back, his bone fishhook, his flint and steel, his crude stone ax, a supply of gutted half-dried channel cat, and a long poling stick.
He made a trial run the first day and found only one thing to complain about. And it was bad enough. The dugout was somewhat unstable. In swift rough water he had trouble balancing it.
He muttered, fussed about it some. “Must’ve dug it out on the wrong side of the log. A child has to sit exactly in the middle and breathe out of the middle of his mouth if he don’t want to capsize the dummed thing.”
It was early November, the Moon of Deer Rutting, when he set out for the fort. It was evening and the sun had just set in the gorge to the west in pale jewelweed pallor. The wind was in the west too, a swift lifting wind that made a man breathe deep to get enough of it.
Hugh sat exactly amidships with the long pole ba
lanced across his lap, ready to dip in on either side to keep the crude prow headed straight downstream.
The Cheyenne ran swift, steady, with a sound at times as of a low hissing skink and at other times as of boiling water. The Cheyenne swung right, swung left, playing through the stony yellowgray valley like a manipulated yellow hemp rope. Within the banks the main current followed a swinging course too, often a course of its own contrary to the bed, zigging when the bed zagged, sometimes hugging the shore on the left when the bed indicated right, sometimes agreeing with the bed to a point where it overswung it and undercut the bank.
In the falling rusty dusk Hugh watched the land go by: cotton-wood-studded points, rock-cropped headlands, flat green vales, thick groves of willows, shallow sandy banks coming down to streaming fords.
“This child’s never had it so good,” Old Hugh murmured to himself. “After what me and my bum leg went through, this is paradise at last. I’ve been a keelboatman off and on all my life and I’ve floated down many a river I first pushed up, but never as sweet a river as this one. Never.”
The water flowed along and he floated down. He swung to the left. He swung to the right. He rode the swift main current. He watched the country go by, the stony land and the swampy land, the clearings and the canebrakes, the parklike pastures and the jungle groves, the dry gullies and the swift straight creeks. He floated down.
“Don’t mind if I never see ee again,” Hugh said. “It’s good-by for now and I hope for good. You may be home to some critters but not for this one. I’ll be glad to get back to Reed and her pot.”
The Cheyenne churned through its winding channel. It boiled whirlpools. It spread calms.
“It’s like I always said. Best to have a little grief first and much joy afters than the other way around.”
He watched the bluffs turn by.
“Lads, Ol’ Hugh is comin’. He’s on his way. Best prime your pans and set the flint. Ol’ Hugh’s a-boilin’ along. It won’t be long afore ye’ll feel mighty queersome in your lights. It’s six feet and under for the both of ee.”
Lord Grizzly, Second Edition Page 21
