A full moon followed him every step of the way. At night, the Badlands country was an eerie wonder world, silvered over with muted luminescence as if all were in dream and he a bearded bad conscience.
A south wind followed him, too, blowing up the valleys in long hooing drafts and whistling in the cedars on the yellowwhite cliffs. Sometimes the wind moaned in the rock crevices; sometimes it rustled softly in the first yellow grasses of spring. It was a lonely and an old land.
The sooing south wind was especially haunting. It made him cry sometimes. It played old harps in his head. It made him wonder at the good of it all. What did a man really live for? Today’s meat? Tomorrow’s journey? Or what?
It was a cinch there was no life if a child sat still and failed to eat and sleep. There was life only if a man was on the move, ae, on the run even. Crawling, walking, running. Journeying, journeying, journeying. Always on the go. Heading toward a Somewhere that always and ever in the end turned out to be a Nowhere. For what? For a God? For a Devil? For a Man? For a Beast?
Or was it merely for Mister Stomach and his ability to beget other Mister Stomachs?
“‘Tis so. Friend stomach has little patience with queersome notions. This child’s seen it. Little patience.”
What about the Lord’s vengeance he was supposed to be getting for Him? Or, for a fact, his own private revenge?
Hugh didn’t know. Sitting in the moonlight on a rock overlooking a gutted saffron valley of a million acres, with Vampire Peak and Cedar Butte rearing up over the far wall beyond and the driving south wind playing organ music in the great pipes of the deep earth, Hugh didn’t know.
“Maybe it’s neither one that shines. Neither the Lord’s vengeance nor this child’s miserable revenge. This child feels queer, he does, like a buffler shot in the lights, thinkin’ on it. I’ve knocked about these free mountains from as far north as Missouri’s head to as far south as the starvin’ Gila, and I still don’t know. And if life deals fair a-tall, this child’ll pro’bly never know.” Hugh slowly tolled his white hoar head in the moonlight. “Maybe the ants has the answer, as the Good Book says. Dig, eat nits, and hide in the dark when somebody steps on the mound overhead. ‘Tis so.”
The rock he sat on was perched on the very tip of the south wall. Wind and rain had honed it into the shape of a crude grampa’s chair, with a high back and wide armrests, and a rough footstool beneath. A stunted wizened cedar, clinging to a crevice, rustled beside him like a nervous green parrot ruffling its feathers.
Overhead, the full moon moved through the silverblue skies of night. Below, shadows replaced shades, shades chased shadows; points of light replaced spots of white, spots of white chased points of light.
After a while the moon seemed to stand still in the fantastic valley, while the moonwhite peaks and the ghostly spires and the trembling pinnacles moved, began to sail by, all of them like silent icebergs lost in hard open land.
Hugh saw old ships, three-masters and four-masters, sail serenely by. Below and hard on the right, chasing a prize Spanish galleon, drove Pirate Lafitte’s favorite ship, The Pride. Hugh shivered at the likeness. It brought back haunting memories of butchery and murder, rapine and looting. The fluttering silverwhite sails of The Pride seemed to be gaining on the ghostly sails of the three-decker Spanish galleon. The sea even rippled with whitecaps.
Hugh blinked, and in an instant the scene was no longer a sea but a city with gold-walled castles and delicate white minarets and soaring towers and serrated battle walls. The Seven Cities of Cibola at last? He could see priests and men, duennas and maidens, and all dressed in silver-trimmed black, strolling through the streets.
Hugh blinked, and in another instant he was looking upon a vast graveyard with a thousand kingly monuments of polished white marble. There were tombs for nobles and sarcophagi for popes and single lonely dazzling white pillars for virgins and lofty pyramids for long-dead Egyptian Josephs.
Hugh blinked, and in still another instant he was looking upon a sea of faces. There was the old she-rip Mabel, mouth wide in a bellow for him to take up the harness and support her and the lads. There were the lads themselves, still looking to him for a way of going in a woman-run world. And that crook Jacob and fair-haired Esau. And Pirate Lafitte dressed in black and his gang of scarred cutthroat buccaneers. And Clint, eating an antelope with a Comanche face. And Clint again, besplintered on the Platte and screaming the minute he became a flaming torch to the delight of the Pawnees. And Augie Neill and Jim Anderson, lips moving in soundless appeal for help. And sweet lad Johnnie Gardner, so full of holes he was made a riddle of before he was dead. And the laugher Marsh, with his neck broken and his head askew and hanging down his back, smiling ludicrously at his own fleeing. And the boy Jim Bridger ready to strike with his great fist again, at last a man. And blackhearted Fitz, still enjoying a life he no longer deserved.
“Yes, Fitz, enjoy life while you may. This child’s comin’ to get you.”
Hugh suddenly caught himself trembling and sweating.
“Whoa there, lad,” Hugh said, jumping up. “Steady as you go. You’ve got to hold your noddle steady on Reed and Fort Kiowa, lad, or by the bull barley it’s over the hills and far away for you.”
Hugh climbed down from the high place, walked east along the rim of the wall.
“‘Tis a bad place for a bad conscience, it is.”
Walking, he watched the changing shapes and shadows, the lights and whites, moondaft and marveling to see still other mirages parading past.
“‘Tis a place where the Lord is likely to come to a man in a visitation. Or come to wrestle with a child and touch him on the hip and change his name from Jacob to Israel.”
Walking, he watched a certain draw rise and fall between the thinnest of parallel fluted columns, a column colored rose and a column colored cream and a column colored milkwhite. “‘Tis a church, it is. A church to stand silent in while waiting for the Word.”
He swung on, intending to cut away from the rim of the wall, yet not being able to, irresistibly drawn by the old shattered hulks riding at anchor in the graveyard of the Heavenly Shipwright.
“I feel clean,” he said, pulling on his whitening beard. “Clean.”
Walking, he watched another ship ride by, in full sail, jib flying, spanker rattling, mizzen royal popping, a triumph of building genius and a glory of the seas.
“Steady, Hugh. It’s time to ask what’s trump and whose the deal.”
Then, like an Indian at parting, he walked away from it without waving good-by.
One dawn, just south of White Clay Butte, where the Little White River came swinging in from the south, Hugh saw some fresh grizzly tracks. They were headed down river too.
That gave him pause.
He studied the tracks carefully. The prints were huge, and they dragged. There were no cub prints about. A he-grizzly. An Ephraim both old and huge.
The land about was bald save for a little patch of tufted buffalo grass growing on either side of the White. The grass was of a pale green hue and had short shriveled blades. Beneath the grass, in the roots, would probably be a few white grubs, perhaps a few ants, and maybe even a gopher or two. Ho-ah! That meant both he and the grizzly would soon begin eyeing each other as fair game, with the grizzly better armed. Lonely he-grizzlies rarely attacked man unless they were extremely hungry. But hard barren ground could have only one effect on the grizzly—kill the first thing it saw moving.
At the same time Hugh saw that he couldn’t very well leave the White for, say, the Bad River to the north. He’d have to cross hardpan stone-cropped prairie every bit as cracked and dry and merciless as the hogbacks between the Grand and the Moreau, and the Moreau and the Cheyenne, and he’d had enough of that kind of travel, even if he did have full use of both his legs again.
Hugh decided to sleep on it. It was day; he had walked a full long night, and he needed a rest. So he drank a few swallows of chalky salty White, caught a gopher and roasted it, and crawled int
o a shadowy cave under the north riverbank.
He woke well before sunset. And he woke feeling queersome. Something had altered while he slept.
Cautiously he crept out of his hole. He looked up river and down river. He searched the opposite bank. He examined the bank behind him, casting uneasy glances toward White Clay Butte. There was nothing so far as he could see.
Yet he was conscious that something had altered.
He thought on it awhile, watching the sunlight slanting lower and lower across the running dirty-cream water, and finally decided he couldn’t wait on something he couldn’t see. “What this child don’t see he don’t know.”
He elected to follow the river again and so willynilly had to follow the grizzly tracks. He hoped Old Ephraim had rambled on right lively during the night and so had left him far behind. Or else had turned aside, either north or south, across the country.
A mile down the river he came upon a prairie-dog village. It was all torn up. The grizzly’d had himself a feast. He’d cuffed and clubbed out about an acre of mounds. Gray dried pelts and dry clots of blood and freshly dugout mounds of pale gray dirt lay in every direction.
“Ho-ah! So Old Ephe’s et, has he? Maybe now he won’t have a hankerin’ for this child’s liver.”
Hugh tromped over the torn up sour soil. It was a small village and such live prairie dogs as were left were cowed and had skulked deep in their burrows. The yellow sun was almost down and each pale gray mound cast a grayblack shadow.
Off to one side he found a half-dead prairie dog that Old Ephe had missed. Hugh pounced on it. Meat.
He skinned it and built a small stinking fire out of driftwood cast up on the treeless shores. While he ate, the live prairie dogs behind him at last dared to come out of their burrows. They scolded him furiously. Their wifelike yapping made him feel uncomfortable.
When he set off for the night again he noticed that the grizzly’s tracks led directly from the prairie-dog village to the river, and then vanished. Hugh crossed the river twice, going both up and down stream on both sides of the river, but still couldn’t find trace of which way Old Ephe had gone.
Hugh decided not to worry about Old Ephe until he should meet him face to face. “What this child don’t see he don’t know. Reed’s only four, five days away now.”
He tramped on. The earth turned away from the big sun, and yellow light became rusty dusk, and stars came out to belittle man and all his worming trails.
He tramped on. The earth turned toward the full moon, and soon darkness became silver luminescence again, and stars paled in the silverblue sky.
The riverbanks and the sloping sides of the White valley held bare. There were no trees, no bushes, no carpets of grass. If there hadn’t been occasional Dakota prickly-pear cactus underfoot and the moon a hanging ball of pure silver in the eastern heavens, Hugh could easily have mistaken himself for that first interstellar traveler at last wandering across the face of the moon, afoot and musing in its lifeless valleys.
He’d had a good long drink from a fresh spring, miraculously spilling out of the north wall of the White valley, when he noticed it. And for a few seconds he thought himself back in the wind-hewn grampa chair overlooking the valley of the Badlands with its draws full of riding ghostships and its sea of phantasm faces. Because what he saw when he looked back was a silver shape walking along behind him in the silver light in the silver valley of the White. And the shape was only a score of steps behind him.
Bewitched and gone loco at last, he was. It was one thing to make imaginary ships and faces out of fantastic eroded land, ae, but it was another to have one of the silver shapes crawl out of the Badlands valley and follow him down the White. Ae, he’d gone loco, he had.
He wished for his rifle, Old Bullthrower. A flying pill from Old Bullthrower would soon settle whether it was a ghost or critter or companyero or what.
Worse yet, the shape resembled a silvertip, a grizzly the size of a great bull. Had Old Ephraim, who yesterday preceded him down the White and who plundered the prairie-dog village, had he got scent of Hugh and so taken to pursuing him?
Hugh decided to test his senses.
Hugh took a step toward it, and stopped. The silver shape backed a step, and stopped.
Hugh blinked. Who ever heard of a grizzly playing follow-the-leader?
“Best hurry to Reed afore it gets worse,” he murmured within his white whiskers.
He turned his back on the silvertip and once again headed for Ft. Kiowa.
A hundred steps later, Hugh looked over his shoulder. Companyero Old Ephe was still a score of steps behind him, following him slow step for slow step, a silver shape in the silver light in the silver valley of the White.
Hugh stopped dead. Ephraim stopped dead.
“‘Tis a mirage,” Hugh said aloud. “Like what this child and his companyero Clint saw on the Brazos after Clint helped himself to that antelope with a Comanche face.”
Hugh started up again. Gravel rattled underfoot. The shape started up again. Gravel rattled under its claws.
“Ho-ah!” Hugh said aloud. “Now I see a different light.”
Hugh took a dozen steps to his left, toward the whiteyellow cliffs to the north of the river. Old Ephraim took a dozen steps.
Hugh took a dozen steps to his right, toward the riverbank. Old Ephraim took a dozen steps.
Hugh stood facing the silver shape.
The silver grizzly stood facing him.
“What be ye? Shape? Critter? The devil himself come to haunt me in a bearskin?”
The silvertip lifted its flat snout and sniffed the air.
“‘Tis a critter,” Hugh said. He trembled. He preferred the haunt.
There was one other test. He could ignore Old Ephraim.
He tried it. Resolutely, without a backward glance, his back a continual shiver of flesh, he began marching down the river, the fringes of his elkskin hunting shirt threshing gently at each step. Gravel crunched underfoot. Sand crinched. He walked across bars of gray silt, and beaches of sand, and up banks of flour-fine loess, and across sunbaked flats of wild salt.
He looked back. Step for step, bar for bar, beach for beach, the silvertip—or was it a silver shape?—had followed him all the way, its front feet padding along dog-fashion and its rear feet lifting along grampa-style.
He shook. With all his talk of Lord’s vengeance, maybe at that the Lord Himself had come down to make him a visitation, to teach him forcibly that he was not an Esau after all but a Jacob, that after he’d wrestled with the silver shape until break of day, against which he would not prevail, the silver shape would touch the hollow of his thigh and he’d be cripple again.
“Let me go,” Hugh cried.
“Go,” the valley answered.
“What mout your name be?”
“Be,” the valley answered.
Again Hugh faced ahead, and led the way down the White.
They came to a thick grove of cottonwood, brush, saplings, old boles. A stream of fresh water fed the trees. In the silver night the leaves tingled silver.
“Ah,” Hugh said, “maybe now I lose him.”
Ten minutes later he emerged from the grove. When he looked back, the silvertip—or was it a silver shape?—had vanished.
“Ah,” Hugh said, “he’s run across a better scent. Good. May it be a dozen antelope so he’ll have more than his fill.”
Dawn broke pink, and he supped on gopher, and drank fresh water from the stream, and went to sleep in a bed of leaves under a bullberry bush.
When he awoke in midafternoon, after he’d breakfasted on gopher, he found the grizzly tracks again. The tracks were headed straight for Ft. Kiowa.
Then Hugh had enough of it. He decided to kill the grizzly. He drew his knife.
He tracked Old Ephraim carefully, following him along the winding riverbank, across sand bars, through groves of cottonwood, skinning knife flashing in the evening sun.
At the third grove he lost all track of him. The c
law prints trailed clearly up to a little spring, then disappeared as if tracks, grizzly and all, had been washed away into the White.
Hugh couldn’t cipher it. The little spring poured out of a rock some forty feet from the bank of the White, and trickled flashing across a flat bed of gold sand and beneath a grove of stately cottonwoods, and dropped splashing a few feet into the river. No matter how often he surveyed both sides of the sparkling streamlet, he couldn’t find a trace of where Old Ephraim had left the stream.
“Another Ascension, that’s it,” Hugh said smiling to himself. “Or else a grizzly finally climbed a tree.”
He was about to go on when his eye caught movement ahead. Some twenty feet on the other side of the streaming spring lay the fat bole of a fallen cottonwood patriarch. The old tree was at least four feet through. Looking carefully Hugh noticed that the edge of the whiteocher bark along the top seemed blurred, as if somehow it had grown silver fur which a breeze was ruffling.
Fur?
Hugh stood puzzling.
Just then, with a snort, with a grunt like a laugh at having been discovered, Old Ephraim jumped up from his hiding place and galloped away down the river. Every now and then Old Ephraim tossed his big doghead this way and that as if he couldn’t get over the humor of it.
Hugh said, “You know, to play a joke like that on me, Old Ephe must’ve liked me.” Hugh looked from the fallen tree to the flowing spring and back to the fallen tree again. “He must’ve jumped all of twenty-five feet.”
Fifteen days after he’d climbed out of the snake’s den beside the Platte, in May, the Moon of Planting, Hugh reached Ft. Kiowa on the Missouri.
His moccasins were worn to shreds. He was gaunt. He was white.
When Hugh stuck his old hoar head into Bending Reed’s tepee, Bending Reed clapped a hand to her mouth, slant Siberian eyes staring in surprise at the pure white of his whiskers. “White Grizzly,” she managed to get out at last.
“‘Tis white you see all right, Reed. White. But it ain’t a grizzly robe like last time. It won’t pull off. This child’s still an Esau.” Hugh humphed to himself. “He hopes.”
Lord Grizzly, Second Edition Page 30
