Going Home

by Richard S. Wheeler

  From time to time she paused on a slight rise, examining the great basin they were piercing. She knew Skye was suffering. Nutmeg was zigzagging along, veering from tree to plant to brush, pausing to snatch a leaf or a root or a bloom. Whenever Nutmeg fell too far behind, Skye stopped and waited, his body rigid. She could see him admonishing the professor all that afternoon, but little good it did. The naturalist meandered wherever the breezes took him and the wandering was costing time. She knew they would make barely half of their usual distance on this day.

  By late afternoon Skye slouched grimly in his saddle, ignoring the professor, his glare restless. She knew he was worried. Nutmeg would slow them so much that they would never reach Vancouver in time. He rode angrily behind her, glaring at the dogs, at the professor, and trying to stay alert to that war party. If they ran into the Siksika they would be in trouble and it would come so swiftly that there would be little they could do. It was not a land where one could hole up and hide.

  They were traveling directly over the tracks of the war party, which worried her more and more as the sunny afternoon dragged by. Evening found them at the confluence of Henry’s Fork and the Snake, in a broad basin surrounded by distant benches and bluffs. The tracks of the Blackfoot party headed relentlessly down the Snake.

  She paused there, waiting for Skye.

  He studied the place and nodded. She and Skye and Nutmeg would camp in this area. A cutbank near the river would permit them to build an unseen fire and cook something.

  Nutmeg trudged in, his countenance radiating good cheer.

  “We’re going to stay here tonight,” Skye said.

  “Capital. I could use a bit of a break and some tea,” the professor said. “Are those rascals still ahead of us?”

  “Yes,” Victoria said. “We’re going to scout after sundown and look for a fire. Then we know.”

  “We could invite the chaps over,” the professor said.

  Skye looked as if he was about to lecture the man but held his peace. Swiftly he unloaded the panniers and packframe from the packhorse and put the animals on picket lines. The dogs showed up, looking ready for another feast, but Victoria had nothing to offer them.

  She built a small cookfire well concealed from view under arching brush that would dissipate the smoke, and boiled more parched corn. They would not risk a shot on meat, so close to a war party that would love nothing more than to torture them all before killing and scalping them.

  Skye urged the professor not to talk. There would be time ahead when they could get acquainted.

  Nutmeg nodded. He was accepting Skye’s direction, which Victoria thought was a good sign.

  She had never seen Skye so miserable and she knew every way in which he was suffering.

  And then Nutmeg’s dog, Dolly, barked.

  ten

  Skye dipped into deep shadow, cursing the dog. Artfully, Victoria doused the small fire, which hissed and spat its defiance and then faded in a cloud of acrid steam.

  “Professor, lie quiet and don’t talk,” Skye whispered in a voice so low it scarcely traveled ten feet. “Hold that dog. Try to keep her from barking.”

  “The mosquitos are a bit thick,” he said.

  He was right. A maddening swarm of them whined around them, poking and probing, lancing Skye’s neck. It had been a terrible choice for a campsite.

  When his eyes had adjusted to the starlight, he studied the surrounding country but spotted nothing. He knew that Victoria, who had better night vision than he, was padding through the area in search of trouble. She was good at this; something in her Absaroka blood had given her the gift.

  She slid down beside him a few minutes later.

  “Nothing, Skye. The horses aren’t interested, either. They ain’t making noises. They aren’t even staring the same direction.”

  “His dog’s going to get us into grief,” he whispered. “Where’s the yellow mutt?”

  “Keeping silent, Skye. He’s a smart one.”

  “I should shoot the pair of them.”

  They hugged the ground for another ten minutes, and then Skye rose quietly.

  “These mosquitos. We’re moving.”

  “I’m covered with bites, the bloody devils,” Nutmeg said.

  Mosquitos had been the ruin of many a man trying to hide. He slapped gently at the whining devils that hovered about his ears. The horses were restless, and when Skye ran a hand over them he knew why. He brushed scores of blood-filled mosquitos off their backs. He had chosen the worst possible place to camp and now they were all paying the price.

  He was in a black mood he couldn’t shake.

  He headed for the open and arid benches, hoping to escape the maddening mosquitos. Twenty minutes later, and several hundred feet higher, they were high above the valley.

  On the distant western horizon, at a distance hard to calculate, a campfire flickered.

  “There,” Skye said.

  “Sonofabitch Siksika,” Victoria growled.

  “I hope those chaps don’t suffer the way we did,” Nutmeg said.

  Victoria grunted.

  They walked the bench country through thin grasses, lit only by a new moon and starlight, until they found a sheltered bank, a cleft in rock, actually, and paused there. No mosquitos troubled them. Skye picketed the horses on thin grass, hoping they would crop enough of it to fill their bellies, and they unrolled their robes on stony ground.

  Dolly panted beside her master. The yellow mutt was nowhere in sight and Skye devoutly hoped that mosquitos had carried him off to dog Valhalla.

  This wasn’t so bad. No mosquitos. Absolutely barren approaches in every direction. He knew where the war party had settled for the night. He was hungry, and so were the rest, but they wouldn’t cook this night. A night without food would darken his mood even more.

  Angrily, he dug out some jerky, one of few pieces he had collected at rendezvous. Jerky never satisfied hunger and usually made it worse.

  “Professor,” Skye said, “I’m going to give you a piece of jerky. Keep it in your pocket. When Dolly looks ready to bark, stuff jerky in her face. We’d be in trouble now if those Blackfeet were crowding us.”

  “Why, certainly, but she gave us a warning, didn’t she?”

  “A false one, and she gave us away.”

  Slowly, he relaxed. They were safe enough here. The animals were watered. A clean breeze filtered through his buckskins and cooled his bitten flesh. His mood lifted a bit; it always did sooner or later.

  Victoria quietly scraped out the cookpot, whose contents had doused the fire, while the professor settled himself against the rock. He dug for his briar pipe, but Skye stayed him. “No, not a match, not a flame,” he said.

  “It is my one small pleasure,” Nutmeg said, desolately.

  “Friends of mine have gotten themselves killed for less.”

  “I should like to be a noncombatant in these wars,” the professor said. “Is there no signal I can give them, or sign or banner, that will tell these people I mean them not the slightest harm?”

  “No. The best bet is a gift of tobacco. We always carry a few plugs. It’s a peace offering.”

  “I wish to enlist them in a great enterprise,” the professor said. “They could all be valuable to me. Would you help?”

  Skye peered into the night, listening intently to soft sounds on the wind. “Maybe I can, Professor.”

  “Well, you see, sir, here’s an entire continent whose flora and fauna are almost unknown. Imagine it: a land larger than western Europe, and science knows very little. Back in Philadelphia, my former colleague, Professor Barton, showed me an armadillo. What an amazing creature. I’d never seen or heard of such a thing. I knew instantly what my life work would be.

  “Now, imagine it. I couldn’t cover this continent in ten lifetimes, and yet I’m committed to a project so grand that I must find the means. I’m not alone, of course. Our fellow Englishman John Bradbury has taken up the work, too, a most admirable and intrepid soul, w
ho lets nothing, neither disease nor storm nor hostile natives nor disaster stay him. He’s sent hundreds of species to the Liverpool Botanical Gardens, you know. I only hope, sir, that I may in some pale way emulate so great a soul.”

  Skye marveled that a man’s passion could lead him into such dangerous corners of the world and render him almost oblivious to that danger.

  “Some tribes might help, Professor. Not all.”

  “Well, sir, the Indians could be my salvation. Tell them that I want at least one of everything that grows, small enough for me to sketch, and to dry between papers. Tell them that I need to know the exact habitat, high or low, moist or dry …”

  Skye was skeptical. “Unless you know their tongue, you won’t get what you want.”

  “But surely there are translators?”

  “Very few. Some French Canadians know Indian tongues, and have intermarried with them.”

  “Then I must find some!”

  “And would you employ them?”

  “Oh, I haven’t a pence with me. But once they see the importance of this work, the majesty of it, surely they’ll bend the oar …”

  Skye was reluctant to say what he thought. He was still bleak of mind, worried about the delays this man would cause him, worried about shepherding a fool another five hundred miles. This man’s passion and dreams towered higher than those of ordinary mortals, and no practical matters would curb his mania. He didn’t want to help this impossible man, but he had to.

  Things puzzled Skye. “Professor, where’s the rest of your collection?”

  “Why, sir, back with Wyeth. He’ll bring it along. I’ve a packmule with him, and I’m already running out of room. We’ll find another mule, eh? Maybe I could buy yours. I’d like to stay right here. Hardly scratched the surface. We’ll meet in Fort Vancouver or some place. Wyeth’s going to ship everything.”

  Skye wondered if the professor had absorbed anything Skye tried to teach him.

  “Have you a family, Professor? A wife? Children?”

  Nutmeg sighed, happily. “Yes, the old dear. But this is my whole life, Mister Skye, my contribution to human knowledge. I hope to organize and publish in between expeditions. And you, sir. Have you an enterprise?”

  “No, nothing except surviving.”

  “A pity. A good man like you could serve king and country most admirably.”

  “My dreams are small, Professor. Once they were large, before the Royal Navy robbed me of a life. But yes, I do have a passion. A chance to go home. We’re going to see about it. Hudson’s Bay is clearing the way for me. My father lives. I yearn to see him while I can; see the old man who remembers only the boy, the pale student. He won’t recognize me, sir. Not at all.

  “I’ll walk into his parlor and he’ll think me a tradesman or some such, and I’ll tell him who I am, and we’ll not say much, not at first, but I know just how it’ll be. He’ll stare. And I’ll be ill-at-ease there, with my wife beside me, and it’ll be like a glacier thawing, but then the water’s going to flow, Professor.”

  “That’s your goal, then?”

  “I didn’t know how much England meant to me until I was offered it once again.”

  “But that’s not a goal. You must join me. You and your savage, you come help me. I’ll arrange a few dollars if I can from the American Philosophical Society, and then we three’ll go on a little field trip across the continent. I want to do a southern trip next, and especially a trip to those deserts of Mexico. Frightful succulents there, you know. Simply frightful. I must dig them up and send them East. I need a strong man built like an ox. This is a work of such importance, such magnitude, such seriousness, that I must have all the help I can manage.”

  Skye shook his head. “My goals are smaller, Professor. I would give all I possess just to see my family, even for one hour.”

  Mister Skye turned away from the conversation, his mood so low he couldn’t stand another word.

  eleven

  The Skyes visibly relaxed when the hoofprints of the Blackfoot war party veered into a ford of the Snake River and death went with it. Just to make sure, Skye forded the river himself, swimming his saddlehorse a few yards to cross a channel, but otherwise walking through shallows. The party, he reported, had headed south toward the Bear River.

  “That’s how it goes, Professor,” he explained. “Most of the time you never see them but you know they’re nearby.”

  “Well, those chaps didn’t harm me,” Nutmeg said. He privately believed the Skyes’ caution was exaggerated and he was growing impatient with them.

  They hiked along the Snake, entering a volcanic and arid land. Nutmeg devoted himself to new species he was finding everywhere: a new prickly pear, a new shortgrass, two new sagebrush variations. One of these, which he named Artemisia tridentata, he found on the river benches. The new prickly pear he called Opuntia fragilis because its lobes fell off so easily. All these he sketched, regretting that he lacked the space to send whole samples back to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.

  The Skyes kept pressing him to hurry, but they simply didn’t understand. What he was doing was timeless. Why couldn’t they accommodate him?

  He felt he was scarcely touching the surface: he ought to be capturing every bug and snake and bird, too, but the Skyes were always pressuring him to hasten. He always agreed to, but then he would discover new things and lose track of time. He roved far from the riverbank trail and his collection bag swelled with divers species, and he sketched furiously, ignoring the dark looks emanating from his trail companions.

  This was a harsh land, but it lured him into its wastes with the promise of discovery. Finding something new! He was treading where no naturalist had gone! Was ever there a more joyous occupation? How could he resist when every leaf was a bonanza? Every creek and trail leading out of it seemed to head for cool mountains, forested slopes, and lush meadows, and a dozen new species.

  Twice he had strayed far away from the riverbank trail, and Skye had come after him, finding him miles from the river. His guide rebuked him gently, stressing the importance of staying together and never losing sight of one another. And each time, Nutmeg earnestly agreed to be more considerate of his companions. But the whole business, which kept repeating itself, was demeaning. Must he always apologize?

  Skye was having trouble subsisting his entourage, and things worsened when game vanished. Nutmeg saw not an antelope, deer, bear, or any other creature larger than a marmot. His dog starved again even though the Skyes did their best, occasionally downing a mud hen or killing a snake. The yellow mutt trailed behind distrustfully, in perpetual sorrow for intruding where he wasn’t wanted, and Nutmeg wondered why it was still following the Skyes.

  Nutmeg was not a young man, but he brimmed with vigor and the joy of his quest. Behind him, in Boston, his American wife Hattie lived quite alone, though she didn’t lack the companionship of faculty wives at Harvard College. She had gotten used to his wanderings, good old sport was she, and resigned herself to a life less domestic than she had hoped for. He occasionally felt a bit guilty about that, but not very. His great North American botanical catalog was the important thing. She understood perfectly, but so far he had not been able to bring the Skyes to the same frame of mind.

  The evenings were better. He had come to cherish those campfire times when Skye and Victoria relaxed a bit and even allowed themselves a conversation. Victoria fascinated him: he had never met a woman of such contrasts: fierce, warm, suspicious, generous, loving, savage in her feelings toward other tribes. He learned swiftly to avoid the slightest condescension toward her or Skye, because she responded explosively.

  Skye proved to be reticent at first, but Nutmeg drew the man’s story out of him. The wretch had been caught by a press gang on the East End, near the London Dock at Wapping, within hailing distance of his father’s brick warehouse. His father, it seemed, was an importer of tea, coffee, and spices and an exporter of finished cottons, linen, and Wedgwood. The East End whelpe
d hooligans, and press gangs commonly roved the crowded, crabbed alleys snatching up young billies for service in the Royal Navy. But when they caught Skye, they nabbed a youth who was destined for Cambridge and eventually a vocation in a large merchant firm.

  “After that, Professor, it was war. I tried to get word out to my family, fought everyone and everything, got a reputation so bad they wouldn’t let me on deck in port because they knew they’d never see me again. I stopped just short of mutiny. That would have been the end of me. They had a way of dealing with a rebel, you know. Tie him in the rigging under the bowsprit and give him a knife to cut himself loose when he can’t stand it any more.”

  Skye told him about his escape after seven years of perdition, and his desperate flight up the Columbia, hounded by the Royal Navy and Hudson’s Bay.

  “And now you’re going straight back? To Fort Vancouver?”

  “That’s right. It’s a risk, but a chance to clear my name and see my family and rejoin the country of my birth. To England I was born, and to England I must return.”

  Thus did Nutmeg acquire a good grasp of the young man’s life, and the more he heard, the more he marveled at Skye.

  “I’m going home, sir, but not for long. I’ll soon enough have my fill of Fishmonger’s Hall and Westminster, and the swans on the Thames, and then I’ll sail back and work for the company I once hated so much I spent my hours plotting its ruin in North America. This is all the doing of John McLoughlin, sir. He’s a mountain of a man, both physically and mentally, and he took an interest in me.”

  “So I’ve heard. But why do you trust him?”

  “By his reputation, sir. He is known in the mountains, and there’s not a Yank at the rendezvous who doesn’t admire him.”

  “Then you’ve put your trust in a good man. We must trust; not to trust, not to have faith, is the doom of many a good soul.”