Then Bending Reed’s dark glittering eyes snapped and she got up.
It wasn’t long before Old Hugh was salved and greased from head to foot, and filled to the neck with fresh buffalo cow and pemmican.
It made Hugh laugh to see Reed gloat over the dried grizzly claws.
Part III • The Showdown
1
BENDING REED plied her flying awl and within a few days Old Hugh had a new skin suit. From the smoked top of an old tepee she made him leggings and moccasins. From freshly tanned antelope hide she made him hunting shirt and breeches and big halfmoon-curved mittens. And finally to complete it all, she made him a new cap from a well-cured wolfskin.
Next, from a private hoard of smoked skin and sinew she made an extra dozen pairs of moccasins and leggings, all of them marked with her characteristic backlash Heyoka stitch, and these Hugh sold to the river roughnecks who had come up on the keelboat Beaver. Cash in hand, Old Hugh went to hard-eyed Bonner the clerk and bought a used flintlock, powder horn, bullet pouch and mold, flint and steel, skinning knife, tobacco and pipe, and some salt. Hugh also bought a gray woolen capote—a blanket long enough to cover most of his body, with a hood to cover the head and face in case of a storm. The capote was expensive and Hugh had to charge part of it. Old eyes twinkling in comical gravity, Hugh told Bonner the clerk, “I’ll give you so much cash down and a slow note for the balance.”
With an old razor Hugh whacked off part of his beard, changing the appearance of his face from that of a shaggy poodle to that of a fierce tomcat. Hugh also whacked off some of his gray hair so he could get it decently under his new wolfskin cap.
Bending Reed thought her husband, Chief White Grizzly, a very handsome brave in his new get-up. His fresh yellow leathers were in pleasing harmony with his crisp gray whiskers and the mahogany parchmentlike color of what could be seen of his cheeks. His old gray eyes snapped like in the old days: Indianlike, wild yet watchful. The trembles in his fingers vanished.
A week of warm weather flooding in from the south helped too. When Hugh wasn’t exercising his knitting leg, he lay on a fur robe on the sunny side of the tepee, stretched to the full, soaking in the sun. The warmth and the leisure, the slow firm churning of his stomach, the healing itch in his back and leg and lopped-off lobe of his seat, the sound of Bending Reed’s humming and chatter as she filled his hairy ears with the latest fort gossip plus the latest from her tribe of Lakota, the spieling of some comrade mountain men happening by, the warm womblike safety within the tall cottonwood fort walls—all worked as medicine on him, medicine made sweet with old remembered aches and travails.
Occasionally the sap of returning health rose so sharply in him that he couldn’t sit still for doing; then he got to his old limbs and, flintlock in hand and powder horn and possible sack slung over a shoulder, stumped out through the fort gate and out across the plains, for all the world as if he were going to course a score of miles if need be to bring down meat for the fort.
He never got farther than the base of the first sleeping bluff to the west just two miles away. His just-knitted leg couldn’t take it. He came back each time limping and blowed, and as ugly as a soretail grizzly.
Bending Reed plied him with affection and food and happy squaw chatter. And at night, warm together under furs, she offered him her body.
Her body he didn’t care for. That part of him hadn’t come back.
“Has my husband forgotten?” she asked, teasing him, Siberian eyes slanted and mischievous in the low glow of the falling fire.
“This child ain’t forgotten,” Old Hugh growled, voice a deep monotonous bass. The new heaviness and slowness of his voice always startled him a little. “No, this child hain’t forgotten a-tall. And that’s the trouble.”
Bending Reed’s eyes opened wide. She clapped a hand over opened mouth. “Heyoka,” she whispered after a moment.
Old Hugh spoke as if he hadn’t heard. His voice continued to roll out in a slow monotonous bass tone. “If it’s the last thing this child does, he’s gonna catch them oily cowards and skin ‘em alive and feed ‘em to the dogs.”
Bending Reed nodded to herself. “Heyoka.”
“What?”
2
HEYOKA OR NOT, Old Hugh was soon hot on the trail of the deserters Fitz and Jim. It was December, the Moon of Deer Shedding Horns.
Patron Joe Bush, bourgeois of the keelboat Beaver, decided to make a run for Ft. Tilton higher on the Missouri before the river froze over. Hugh offered his services as hunter. The Beaver was already full up, and Patron Bush wasn’t too anxious to take on an extra mouth, let alone a trouble-making cripple, but Hugh’s fierce insistence and his reputation as a centershot finally persuaded Bush.
The Beaver made good time up the Missouri. Cordelling, sometimes sailing, most times pushing with poles, the river roughnecks prowed it through tan waters, past dirtbrown banks, up around the Grand Detour, up past the Bad and Cheyenne and Moreau Rivers, up past the Grand River where the ferocious Rees once thrived, up past the Cannonball and the Heart, and at last came within sight of the Knife where the friendly Mandans lived and where Ft. Tilton was located.
Because he felt himself in the way, and because not once all the way up from Ft. Kiowa had he brought down any meat to pay for his keep, Hugh offered to hunt across the bend and meet them at Ft. Tilton.
Hugh and Patron Bush stood in the prow of the boat, looking up river. Bleak gray blanket clouds drove at them from the northeast. It felt like snow.
Behind the two, burly sweating keelboatmen groaned as they humped the boat up the river. A walk or passe avant ran along both sides of the Beaver and a dozen men worked each side. At the leader’s cry of “raise poles” the men ran backward from aft to fore along the walks, and at the cry of “lower poles” the men jammed the poles into the river for a new purchase. Huge shoulder cupped around the knob-end of a pole, facing the rear, the men began shoving and walking toward the aft end of the boat again. Working in smooth unison, the keelboatmen literally walked the boat up the river.
Patron Bush was loath to let Hugh go off alone. Patron Bush was a heavy squat man with scowling features and a pessimistic air. Patron Bush hated frontier life and was going to get out as soon as he’d made a quick killing in the fur trade. “‘Tain’t safe, Hugh. There’s Rees about, I hear.”
“Who said?” Hugh watched the Beaver slowly gain on the dirtbrown shoreline.
“A runner told about it.”
“How kin that be when these old eyes saw them headin’ west along the Cheyenne.” Hugh noted how rubber-ice was beginning to edge the shoreline.
“‘Tain’t safe, Hugh. I don’t recommend it.”
Hugh stuck out his stubborn chin. “It’ll take your boys three days to get the Beaver around the bend. I can cut across in a day. Easy. Even with meat to weight me down.”
Patron Bush scowled up at Hugh. “What’s the hurry?”
“Booshway, I can use them two days.”
“But why?”
“Booshway, send me and there’ll be fresh meat waitin’ for you at the fort.”
“Hugh, what’s got into you? You out to make more trouble?”
“Booshway, it’s December already, and the way I’ll have to hump it to the mountains afore the big snows come will take the gristle off a painter’s tail.”
“Hugh, you ain’t ready for wear yet with that bum leg. Hugh, there’s somethin’ wrong with you. You act like you’re out to get even with somebody. Or somethin’. Like the boys back at Fort Kiowa said.”
Hugh hid his eyes. He watched the keelboat swerve around a bobbing sawyer in the moiling tan waters.
Patron Bush’s little brown pig eyes wrinkled up into two narrow slits. “If I had your excuse, you’d never catch me leavin’ a warm fire and a lovin’ squaw, let me tell you.”
Hugh hid his eyes. He recalled all too well the snug comfort of Bending Reed’s tepee, a round nest snug in the snows within the fort walls. Hugh stared down at the backlash He
yoka stitch in the seams of his moccasins. Ae, a well-built tepee had it all over frame houses in the winter. It wasn’t drafty; everything one needed lay close to hand; and it kept easy. It was truly, as Bending Reed believed, a world in itself, in itself a world in image. Ae, but what were all these advantages as long as certain white devils, two of them, were still loose in the world and their desertion of him unavenged? In Bible times vengeance might be the Lord’s but not in Free West times. In the free mountains vengeance belonged to him as had a right to it and could get it.
Hugh said, “Well, does this child take the shortcut and make meat for you, or don’t he?”
Patron Bush pointed to the low snow-dappled bench lying within the bend. “You’ll break a leg crossin’ that greasy stuff.”
Hugh abruptly stuck his gray bristle face into the patron’s. The red rivulets down the sides of Hugh’s big Scotch nose began to pulse a little. “Booshway, it’s my life. Get out the skiff.”
“All right, go then!” Patron Bush suddenly said, eyes quailing, spitting a great gob of tobacco juice over the side into the tan Missouri. “And be durned to ee, too! I know I won’t see ee alive again, that I won’t.”
Patron Bush ordered the anchor dropped and the skiff readied. And a quarter-hour later Hugh found himself on the west bank of the wild Missouri, alone, all his worldly possessions on his back.
The northeast wind whistled in the riverbank willows and snapped the ocher twigs of the cottonwood saplings. The wind was cold and wet and occasionally streaked with a flake of snow. Hugh drew the hood of his thick gray woolen capote close up around his head and face.
Swinging his powder horn and bullet pouch within easy reach, and waving his rifle at Patron Bush to show he was all set, Hugh started northwest across the low bench.
A thin blanket of snow lay on the gray frozen ground and it made the going greasy just as the patron had predicted. In some places, around anthill breather holes and fresh badger mounds, the snow had melted away. Grass tufts poked through every few steps.
Hugh limped along steadily, choosing his footing with care. His just-knitted limb felt surprisingly strong. He swept the white horizon with keen gray eyes. His big nose reddened in the mean wind.
He looked across to where the Missouri curved off to the northeast. Low sloping whitegray bluffs pushed back into the same horizontal crevice from which the low streaking gray white clouds came.
Except for the brush close along the Missouri’s bank, not a tree and not a bush was in sight. It was mounded monotonous country.
He limped across the highest part of the bench in the great bend without seeing so much as a field mouse. “A crow’d hafta carry grub to fly this godfersaken country,” Hugh growled to himself. “Howsomever, meat or no meat, walkin’ it to the fort will be that much time saved.”
Dusk had just begun to sift down through the gray blanket clouds when Hugh started down the west side of the bench. Ahead the Missouri came curving out of the east again, coming around in a grand looping sweep and heading directly toward the base of a cutbank plateau. The bluffs on the far side looked like a coil of puffed-out bowels.
Then he spotted smoke rising from the plateau. Looking closer he saw certain blisterlike mounds on the plateau and recognized the first of the Mandan villages. Ah, fire and a little food. Tarnation with making meat that probably wasn’t there in the first place.
He looked longingly toward the earthen lodges. Only a mile or so away, the sod-covered lodges had the appearance of huge kettles upsidedown. Above each lodge pricked spears dangling with skin pennants and medicine poles fluttering with scalps. Smoke rose from the many smoke holes in thin gentle wavering plumes barely discernible against the graywhite horizon.
Hugh hadn’t yet seen many Mandans but he’d heard they were almost white the way they lived. And compared with the Sioux they were paleskinned. Some of the Mandans even had the blue eyes and the blond hair of Danes. To top it off, the Mandans also believed in the theory of a Great Flood and how an ark saved all living creatures.
Ae, with the bum leg stinging like a bee-bit finger it would be good to get in out of the mean wind.
Between him and the village on the plateau ran a little creek. Willows fringed it on either side. Hugh’s wise old eyes swept it, swept it again, and came to rest on a curious gathering of gray in a thick clump on the side nearest the Missouri. In the cloudy gray dusk it was hard to make out just what it was. Antelope? Elk? It was grayish and could even be an Old Ephraim.
Just to be on the safe side, Hugh picked his flint, set his trigger, and crouching low, stalked noiselessly toward it, moccasined feet feeling out a safe course through the snow-covered sweetgrass.
The gray bunching became two gray whorls, then became two gray creatures, then became two squaws wearing weather-grayed leathers.
Hugh blinked to clear his old eyes. Mandans? Out to get some sweet creek water?
Just then the two squaws turned and saw him. And they recognized him at the same time that he recognized them. He was the feared Chief White Grizzly and they were Rees, the exact same Ree squaws that Augie Neill and Jim Anderson had diddled on the Grand.
Hugh dropped to the ground and tried to duck behind a low mound of dirt cast up by a badger.
Too late. The squaws set up a howl and began running toward the Missouri. The squaws were young, and with their deerskin skirts girded up, they ran like the wind.
Hugh glanced toward the willow-fringed Missouri and spotted what they were heading for—another red-devil village, this one with low mud lodges. Just like those he’d seen on the Grand last June. Rees all right. A whole nest of them. He was caught. “A shortcut always turns out to be the long way home,” Hugh groaned to himself.
Hugh’s heart suddenly struggled in his chest. He panted. The single arteries down each side of his nose wriggled like lively red angleworms.
“There’s nothin’ for it but to see if these old legs of mine’ll still run a little,” he said, and suiting action to the words, leaped up and forced his cracking old pins into a flailing spiderlike run. He grunted in pain each time his bum leg hit the frozen ground. He ran with a princing nincing run, hoping he wouldn’t fall on the greasy terrain and rebreak his leg. He brushed through the willows; leaped the narrow creek; headed up toward the Mandan plateau.
The cries of the squaws roused the whole Ree village. Heads popped out everywhere. The chief of the village hit the bloodied pole and sounded the alarm. Warriors with paired hawkbone hairdress and naked save for gun and breechcloth swarmed after him. They gained on him swiftly.
Old Hugh saw the landscape dancing. Starlike spots before the eyes blurred his vision. “It’s gone under for this old hoss this time for sure.”
But a sentinel sitting atop one of the upsidedown kettlelike Mandan mounds saw the commotion along the creek and he in turn sounded an alarm. Quickly two Mandan braves stripped down for battle, leaped on their ponies, one a spotted red-and-white mount and the other a jet-black, and raced toward him. Manes and braids and tails flagged out stiff as they came on.
Hugh scrambled along as hard and as fast as he could.
The running Rees formed a V as they gained on him. They came within gunshot of him. One Ree settled on a knee and fired a ball. It sailed harmlessly ahead of Hugh. He could see it skipping along across the frozen ground, kicking up little white explosions in the snow.
The Mandan braves galloped furiously toward him, pennants snapping from bow tips. The Mandan brave on the spotted pony gained on the other, and made a sweeping turn around Hugh, placing the body of the pony between Hugh and the pursuing, whooping, firing Rees. The Mandan on the jet-black pony galloped directly for Hugh; hauled up hard and short; helped Hugh clamber up behind him on the rump of the pony; beat the pony into a heavy encumbered gallop back toward the Mandan mounds on the plateau. The Mandan on the spotted pony meanwhile artfully and carefully kept himself and his horse between Hugh and the Rees.
Ree balls whistled all around them. The R
ees howled with rage when they saw their hated enemy escaping them.
The Mandans galloped back to the plateau; shot through the opening in the picket fence; came to a jouncing halt dead in the center of the village.
When Hugh, panting, exhausted, got down from the horse, he found himself surrounded by a melee of laughing cheering Mandan braves, squaws, children, and barking dogs. Two feather-decked chiefs stepped forward and solemnly embraced him. They hugged him so tight he could scarcely catch his already gone breath. Vaguely in his mind Hugh remembered hearing that the Mandans believed in hugging friends so that the heart might be felt.
The elder of the Mandan chiefs invited him to a feast already in progress. Hugh accepted.
That night he heard that the Rees had ambushed the Beaver and had killed every man aboard. Patron Bush had been right that he would never see Hugh alive again.
Hugh murmured to himself, musingly, “‘Pears like the Good Lord had it in mind to save this old hoss for His revenge after all.”
3
THAT SAME NIGHT too, after smoking a pipe of peace with the Mandan chiefs, during which they assured him their attack on Major Henry’s party in August had been a mistake, that same night Old Hugh went on to Ft. Tilton a short ways upstream on the Missouri. The same brave on the jet-black horse who’d saved him, brought him in safely.
At the fort, Hugh made his report on what had happened to Patron Bush and the Beaver; asked for and got extra provisions—dried meat, pemmican, salt and pepper, coffee, a tin pot, a pack of tobacco, horse pistol, powder, balls, flint—asked for and got an extra gray woolen blanket.
Hugh also asked for a horse.
Bourgeois Tilton shook his head. In the candlelight his glossy black hair shone like polished black lava. “I’ve only got one. And that I have to use for the business. You know.”
Lord Grizzly, Second Edition Page 23
