Going Home

by Richard S. Wheeler

  The young man nodded but did not otherwise reply.

  Skye remembered the jingle bells. He dug out several and handed them about, first to the young man, and then to the nearest of these people.

  Dogs sniffed, growled at Dolly, and Skye wondered where his dog had gone. Maybe the beast was so cowardly that he would not enter a village and was lurking around at the periphery, waiting for his friend—Skye knew better than to suppose he was the mutt’s master—to escape this foul place.

  But Victoria was busily finding someone she could talk to, and eventually found a Nez Perce woman, a wife of one of the young fishers, who was acquainted with the sign language.

  Skye held Victoria’s pony while the women sign-talked. Yes, these were Cayuse people. Fishing now, then catching horses in the fall and training them through the winter.

  But it was Nutmeg who found a welcome. Children flocked to him, fascinated by the canvas packs carried on Dolly’s back. The naturalist sat down, pulled out one of his thick folders filled with pressed leaves and stems and flowers, each between a sheet of soft paper, and his penciled drawings of various species. Sitting crosslegged, he showed these to the children, and then the women who came to see what strange thing the white man possessed, and finally to a throng of Cayuse people, who marveled at each rendering of each plant.

  “There, you see?” Nutmeg said. “I collect one of each species and write them up, eh?” He showed them his bulky notes, which they could not in the slightest comprehend. It was the sketches that fascinated the Cayuse people. With each likeness they exclaimed and talked among themselves.

  “I have more in my knapsack,” he said. He pulled the straps off his shoulders and pulled off the heavy bag. He rummaged in it and pulled out two more folders of pressed plants and sketches.

  “See here,” he said. “I collect these. I’ve six notebooks filled with all this.”

  The village women crowded close so they too could see these amazing drawings.

  “No, it’s not magic, and I’m a poor hand at drawing, but I have to get things right. Everything perfect and exact, and showing the species to best advantage, eh?”

  They listened solemnly, saying nothing. It dawned on Skye that maybe they knew some English but weren’t admitting it. They traded, after all, at Fort Walla Walla, and had no doubt spent plenty of time among Englishmen.

  “Does anyone speak English?” Skye asked.

  A powerful warrior, middle-aged, graying at the temples, his eyes as opaque as basalt, nodded.

  “I make trade,” he said.

  That was good. Skye and Victoria had been trying every way but the obvious to talk to these people.

  “I am Skye. We are going to Fort Vancouver,” he said.

  The man nodded. Then pointed at himself. “Waapita,” he said.

  “We come in peace.”

  “You trade?”

  “No.”

  “What people is the woman?”

  “Absaroka. Far east, over the mountains. She is my woman.”

  “You Yank?”

  “No, English.” He pointed at Professor Nutmeg. “He’s English.”

  “You Hudson Bayee?”

  Skye pondered that a moment. “No.”

  The big man didn’t reply and Skye felt him withdrawing. These people were bonded to the great trading company.

  “I am going to talk to the White Eagle. Then maybe I am Hudson’s Bay.”

  “White Eagle. Ahhh. You want to trade horse?”

  Skye did not like the look of the Cayuse ponies, which were ugly, small, ribby, and deformed. His Plains horses were better stock.

  “No,” he said. “But maybe buy one?”

  He was thinking of a pony for Nutmeg, whose slow passage on foot, in bad boots and on sore feet, was slowing them down to a crawl.

  “Trade,” said Waapita. “I like you horse.”

  “No, no trade. But I will give two knives and one awl for a gentle horse with good feet and legs.”

  “No,” said his host, whose gaze flicked to Skye’s equipment, and then to the knife at Skye’s waist.

  Skye suddenly sensed that this was not good. He turned to Victoria. “Get out,” he said.

  She glanced swiftly at him, and instantly clambered onto her pony.

  He walked to the crowd being entertained by Nutmeg.

  “We’re leaving, Professor.”

  “But Mister Skye, these people are enjoying my little picture show—”

  “Now.”

  “Oh, pshaw, Skye, don’t be in such a dither.”

  “Gather your things.”

  Then it happened.

  Skye watched some playful urchins unbuckle Dolly’s harness and furtively slide Nutmeg’s two packs chock-full of his collections and notes into the dense crowd.

  “Professor!” he barked. “Your notes!”

  “I say, Mister Skye!”

  Then Nutmeg’s knapsack vanished, and two of the three notebooks vanished, while Skye watched, horrified.

  He plunged into the crowd, pushing carefully, fighting his way toward the fleeing children, who dodged, rounded corners, reappeared, and ran free, into the maze of shacks and fish-drying racks and middens of refuse. Astonishingly, the yellow cur followed the boys, a yellow flag for Skye to follow.

  Skye sprang after them, a lithe force, and yet he made no headway. The boys separated, one carrying the knapsack going one way, another vanishing into a longhouse, and another bearing Dolly’s packs and harness starting for the river. Another boy joyously carried one of the notebooks Nutmeg had exhibited, his laughter a cataract of childish delight. Skye chased that one until suddenly a dark wall of men with leveled fishing spears loomed before him. Skye stood, paralyzed, knowing he was one breath away from death from a dozen iron-pointed lances.

  He sat swiftly, knowing that a sitting unarmed man facing warriors is safer than a standing one.

  The boys had disappeared.

  Skye heard Nutmeg’s strangulated bellowing. He sat panting, sensing that he and Nutmeg and Victoria might not leave this village alive.

  He gauged the temper of these young fisher-hunter-warriors, and stood slowly, gathering his courage. He elaborately ignored them, turned his back to them, feeling his flesh prickle, and walked wearily across the entire village, in what seemed an eternity, to the silent crowd surrounding the naturalist.

  He found the professor slumping at the same place, Dolly at his feet, clutching one remaining folio of species, notes, and sketches. He looked a lot calmer than Skye felt, but Skye knew it wasn’t calm. The professor stared, vacant-eyed, into space. Victoria had climbed to her saddle and had grabbed the halter rope of the packhorse.

  “You’ll get them back, of course, Skye,” Nutmeg said in a dreamy whisper. “Five are gone.”

  “I’ll try, Professor.”

  The crowd had quieted. Skye walked slowly to the one who knew a little English, who stood apart. The man shifted slightly as Skye stopped before him.

  Skye lifted his hat and settled it. “Him wise man. Spent many months collecting all plants, for the wisdom of the world. Now you must bring everything back to him, every thing the boys took, or Hudson’s Bay very angry.”

  The big man shrugged.

  “I will give you gifts. Everything on my packhorse. You give us everything the boys took.”

  “They my boys,” the man said. “Go away now.”

  Skye studied the man and knew he meant it. He wondered what he would tell Professor Nutmeg and what faith the naturalist would profess after that.

  twenty

  The sun scorched the whole world white, and for a moment Alistair Nutmeg was blinded. He closed his eyes against the pain of the sun, but the whiteness persisted. He heard the yelping dogs, listened to the excited Cayuse people, heard running and shouts. When he opened his eyes again, the crowd had pulled back from him. He clutched one folio. Dolly rubbed his leg, the hair of her neck bristling.

  He sensed that he would never see the five stolen foli
os again, but waited tautly until Skye would return with news. He was a born and bred Englishman, and punctilious about displaying emotion. To all the world he seemed collected and in control of his fate. But in fact, his mind tumbled through loss: months of collecting gone unless Skye worked a miracle. He wished he might sit down on the grass and weep, but that would be unthinkable and a ghastly sign of weakness. An Englishman was he, an Englishman, an Englishman …

  So he stared numbly, his thoughts frozen by grief. It was all he could do to pay attention, and not drift off somewhere in the clouds, to a meeting of the Royal Academy of Science to honor his great achievements in North America, or his lectern at Harvard, educating eager acned boys about hitherto unknown flora of this vast continent.

  He smiled at the savages, holding everything in like a draught of air in his lungs, and pausing only to exhale and inhale again, smiling at these brutes who had observed nature closely but had made no systematic note of what they knew. No one would ever accuse Alistair Nutmeg, lecturer at Harvard, adventuresome naturalist, of losing his composure in a bitter moment.

  These were friendly people; the urchins were only doing what daring boys do. But as he stood there, awaiting direction from Skye, he grasped how foolish he had been and how valid were the cautions of his wilderness guides. Nat Wyeth and his men had constantly admonished him to be careful. Skye had warned him so often that Nutmeg had privately raged at the man.

  But it wasn’t war or death or murderous intent that had caused this loss: it was the gulf that lay between him and these people. They did not know the value of his collection or its purpose. They had yet to encounter science or the arts. They had yet to invent the wheel or an alphabet or mine and refine metal or put their own language on paper. They were Stone Age men.

  They could not know what this fateful moment meant to a naturalist who had devoted months simply to planning and financing this expedition, and then months in the actual and difficult work of examining flora, categorizing them, checking them against known botanical specimens, drawing them accurately, describing their habitat in detail, and noting any practical purpose for the plant, whether as medicine or dye or food or fiber.

  He stood stoically, with a stiff upper lip, an Englishman to the core, weeping at his fate within, a mask to this raw world.

  Skye approached. “We’ve got to leave at once, mate. No telling what’ll happen if we stay.”

  “The folios?”

  “Scattered in the camps, hidden by boys, prizes of war … I am sorry.”

  “Is there the slightest chance?”

  “Always a chance, mate. Hudson’s Bay is a powerful force. All they have to do is threaten to close the trading window.”

  “But this won’t happen soon. And the specimens may not survive …”

  Skye led the professor away from the silent Cayuse people, and Dolly followed. Nutmeg, his movements jerky and stiff, like a windup tin soldier, walked away from the rank-smelling camp, walking alongside Skye, feeling as bereft as if he had lost his entire family, his good name, his reputation, and all that he had ever written into the Book of Life.

  Skye leaned over the mane of his horse.

  “You all right, mate?”

  “Never better,” Nutmeg replied.

  “How much did you lose?”

  “Five of six folios. All my notes and sketches. Almost everything. There are a couple folios with Wyeth, but I will have to start over.”

  “A year lost?”

  “Two, actually.”

  “That is a great loss,” Skye said. “You could change your plans, Professor. Head east overland, next spring, after wintering at Fort Vancouver, collecting all the way. Undo the loss, from west to east.”

  Nutmeg sighed. “I’m afraid it won’t succeed, sir. Collecting requires large amounts of soft absorbent paper. I dry my leaves and stems and flowers between the sheets. I should need reams of that, and reams of writing paper for notes, and reams of paper for sketches, you see. And some waterproof folders to store them. I don’t suppose I’d find such a trove of paper at Fort Vancouver.”

  “Likely not,” Skye said. “But if you sailed down the coast to Monterey, capital of Mexican California, you might acquire these things, and a guide to take you east.”

  “With what, sir?”

  Something in Nutmeg’s voice gave him away, and Skye turned silent. Nutmeg knew he was barely controlling the festering anger within him. He was doubly angry: at himself for ignoring the warnings of experienced wilderness men, and at Skye, whose very concern now rankled him. One more kind inquiry from Skye and Nutmeg would decant a magnum of bitterness.

  But Skye had sensed his rage, and pulled ahead of him.

  Victoria rode silently beside them, sharing all this without comment. Then, ahead, they beheld the yellow dog lying in the worn riverside path.

  Dolly bounded ahead to sniff No Name. She looked happy without the pack she had carted for so many hundreds of miles. The Cayuse boys had liberated her, and she had instantly become less dutiful. And that festered in Nutmeg, too. Everything in his existence was needling and jabbing him, and most of all Skye and his squaw.

  He composed himself once again. It would not do to let himself be discovered in a tantrum like some schoolboy, and be laughed at or condescended to by the likes of that ruffian Skye, who may have started as a cultivated London youth, but now was coarse and brutal …

  Petulantly he forced his mind from that sort of disdain.

  Mostly, he felt despair. He had lost scores of genus and subgenus possibilities, several new species. He had lost numerous new pteropsida: ferns, conifers, firs. He had lost several new dicots: elms, peaches, blackberries, mustards, nightshades, and ragweeds. He had lost a rich assortment of new monocots, including endless varieties of grasses, sedges, lilies, and yuccas. He had lost several new mosses, or bryophyta, several mycophyta, or fungi, mushrooms, and toadstools. He knew he could never recover samples of the rare ones. He would always be in the wrong place, or in the wrong season. Some appeared to be so local that he doubted he would ever find them again.

  Worse, he had lost a dozen or so specimens of plant life he could not classify: he was not sure of the order or genus or subgenus of any of them. He lacked the taxonomic skills to place them in the botanic universe. Some were tiny. Some were water-borne. One flourished deep in a limestone cave he had explored. And these were the most exciting of all. They might lead anywhere: even to a new order. Losing those was comparable to losing his health, or the crown jewels, or his mind. All gone, gone, gone.

  His surviving portfolio contained some fine new peas and sages, as well as a fine collection of lichen. But he no longer cared. He wished the Cayuse boys had taken it, too.

  He stumbled forward amid a quietness that radiated more from the Skyes than from nature. They were leaving him alone to come to grips with his loss.

  Then he discovered Skye standing just ahead.

  “Would you like to ride, Professor? I need to walk.”

  Nutmeg felt weary but shook his head. “I am not in need of charity,” he said.

  Skye turned aside, addressing the empty world. “When I was at sea, and the rails of the ship were the bars of my prison, I didn’t know why I was set upon this earth,” he said quietly. “I lived a futile life, without purpose, serving masters who wanted only the use of my muscle, men who saw me as no more than a problem in the ship’s company.”

  “What are you getting at?” Nutmeg asked, too sharply, and then regretted the tone that erupted from him.

  “We are here on earth for some reason,” Skye said, “even though we may not understand it at the time.”

  “I suppose I was put here so that I might lose my life’s work? And therefore learn a bit of humility?”

  Skye laughed. The rumble began within him, like the prelude to an earthquake, and then erupted like a volcano, cascading joy and humor over his world.

  Nutmeg didn’t want to laugh, and loathed himself for starting to laugh, but then he
laughed, too, disliking the eruption.

  No Name peered at them, sunk its tail between its legs, turned soulfully, and bayed.

  “Now you have something to tell your colleagues at Harvard,” Skye said, at last.

  Victoria was puzzled. She obviously understood very little of this. Whenever the white men’s way proved too much for her, she seemed to pull into herself, which was what she was doing now. Nutmeg approached her pony and peered up at her from those wise and guileless eyes.

  “What I have lost is very large, and cannot be replaced entirely. But on this trip I have found good things. From you I have learned about the Absaroka, and listened to your wisdom and admired your skills, your beauty, your kindness, and all your fine qualities. These are things that any people, anywhere, from any nation, would admire.

  “So all is not lost. You and Mister Skye have been my traveling companions for several weeks, and you have taught me many things I did not know. I was an innocent, wandering a dangerous world without knowing it. Now I have some of your wisdom, and look forward to learning more if you wish to teach me. Maybe, some day, when I am wise in your ways, Victoria of the Crow people, I might successfully prosecute my own work.”

  She stared down at him softly, smiled, and touched his lips with her slim fingers.

  twenty–one

  Skye found himself admiring Professor Nutmeg, who soldiered on without further complaint. But never more so than one evening at dusk, when he confessed remorse.

  “I imagine Wyeth thinks I’m dead,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done that to him. He must have spent days searching for me, sending men out and about, tracking me. Worse, you tried to get me to wait but I didn’t. I insisted on tagging along. No, Mister Skye, I would now have everything safe and secure if I had abided by your counsel.”

  Skye found himself liking that. The professor was a decent sort, with all the noble qualities of the English. And maybe some of the eccentricities and weaknesses, too.

  “That’s the past, Professor. We’ll look to the future now. Count it a lesson.”