Going Home

by Richard S. Wheeler

  “Sorry, mate, but this is Blackfoot country, and they come here. It’s a favorite spot. This is not safe.”

  Nutmeg looked so bitter that Skye almost relented. But the thought of a party of Blackfeet drifting this way to enjoy the hot waters, hastened Skye away. They proceeded another two miles before dusk caught them, and settled under a low cutbank carved eons earlier by a creek now a quarter of a mile away. The surrounding brush would conceal them and their horses well. The dog sniffed out the territory and settled just outside of the camp.

  They were depending entirely on Victoria’s powerful yew wood bow. That afternoon, she had driven an arrow through the neck of an antelope and they had hastily butchered it, taking only the hindquarters and leaving the rest to the wolves and the dog, who stayed behind for a feast.

  They were in a good spot, invisible, out of the wind, far removed from the creek, and shielded by brush and trees that would dissipate the smoke from Victoria’s hot fire. Victoria cleaned the ground for their bedrolls, taking care to remove the smallest rocks and twigs, and then laid a mat of sedge over the cold earth while Skye climbed a nearby slope to reconnoiter. Early night was always an excellent moment to spot distant campfires. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the blackness, found the North Star, and began a quiet study of the country. Spring breezes steadily raked the area, and he drew the air through his nostrils, seeking the slightest scent of smoke: sour smoke if it came from cottonwood, sweet smoke if from pine.

  He could not tell. His skills weren’t the half of Victoria’s who had been born to this life and whose instincts were often intuitive. He saw, smelled, and heard nothing, and then retreated to his own camp, satisfied, the dog a shadow behind him.

  He always slept lightly, in part because hard ground didn’t foster deep sleep, and partly because his ears were attuned to subtle changes in the rhythm of the night. He and Victoria always slept close, but the professor usually unrolled his blankets at a distance, out of a certain delicacy.

  Skye awakened in the gray half-light before dawn, sensing something was amiss. He glanced about fearfully. The horses stood quietly. The camp gear was undisturbed. He padded over to Nutmeg’s blankets and found them neatly rolled beside his gear. But he was not present. Skye waited a moment. The man might merely be in the bushes. But the professor did not return and Skye knew at once that the naturalist was heading back to the hot springs and the unique flora that grew there.

  Annoyance built in him.

  “What?” said Victoria in a voice that carried only a few feet.

  “The professor.”

  She rolled out of her blankets, stretched, and padded over to the professor’s ground.

  “At the springs,” Skye said. “He wanted to go back there, collect and sketch, and return before we broke camp.”

  “We gonna wait?”

  “I suppose. Country’s empty, far as I could tell.”

  “This is no damn good,” she said.

  Skye wasn’t so sure. “He’ll be back soon,” he volunteered. The dog will find him.”

  “And if he don’t?”

  Skye had no answer to that.

  forty–nine

  No one was at the hot springs. Skye and Victoria and the dog searched the area and found nothing. The only hoofprints were those of their own horses. Eerie silence greeted their calls.

  “Well, dammit, let’s circle around,” Victoria said.

  She and Skye had broken camp, packed the professor’s kit and loaded it on his horse, and searched the campground area thoroughly before returning to the hot springs. Plainly, the professor had dressed—his clothing and boots were gone—and gathered his collection bag and sketch paper and drifted away just before first light.

  But he wasn’t at the springs or in the marshes below it or along the creek racing to the Gallatin River a few miles distant.

  Victoria studied the moist earth, looking for the professor’s bootprints, but saw nothing she was certain were his.

  “I’ll go down one side, you the other,” Skye said. “If we’re separated, meet at the campsite, and if we’re in trouble, head for Bridger’s Pass.”

  She nodded, wove her pony in and out of thickets, her eye keen and focused, her senses tingling with all the sights and smells and sounds reaching them. The dog came with her, sniffing, pausing, growling now and then.

  “Nutmeg,” she cried, her low voice reaching just as far as she wanted it to. “Professor Nutmeg.”

  But all she managed to do was stir up the magpies and startle two crows. The dog paused, sniffed, whined, and then trotted on. Victoria studied the spot where the dog had paused, finding nothing.

  She turned the pony out of the river brush and rode to a nearby hill to reconnoiter, squinting hard at distant horizons, trying to separate the fleeting shadows of clouds from the movement of armed men or drifting herds of buffalo. The May morning was benign, a copy of the previous day.

  From her vantage point she spotted Skye now and then, working down the creek, until at last he turned toward the springs. She met him there, and the dog burst out of the bush, panting.

  “Vanished,” he said.

  “Not Siksika,” she said. There were no moccasin prints in the soft spring soil. No Blackfeet or other People had wandered by.

  “No prints of his boots, either,” he said, awakening to something. “He never came here.”

  The realization startled them both.

  They rode cautiously back to their abandoned campsite. But only silence greeted them when they reached the cutbank.

  This ground was higher and harder than the ground around the hot springs, and less likely to reveal Nutmeg’s tracks, so they dismounted and began their search on foot.

  Victoria wondered once again what sort of man would drift away, scarcely aware of those who were shepherding him, obsessed with his work. Beyond the creek lay the grassy slopes of the first foothills of the Spanish Peaks, and she scanned them for the familiar image of the man.

  One could not know what interested him: one day he would be hiking ridges, the next day studying river bottoms, the day after that wending through rock at timberline, yet another day studying the life in a still pond. He had no favorite haunts; he sought to open the whole natural world to his understanding.

  She climbed a ridge and cautiously peered over it, always alert, and saw only the magpies.

  Magpie. Her spirit-helper.

  She lifted her arms, a thin young Crow woman sitting in the white man’s saddle, reaching upward and outward with a prayer:

  “Fly over the man. Lead me to the man,” she asked.

  But the magpies did not fly.

  She slumped in her saddle and closed her eyes and beseeched the Old Ones of the earth and sky and under the earth.

  “Old and Wise Ones, have pity on your poor daughter; bring this man who collects all the growing things of Mother Earth to put in his books, bring him safely to us, and keep him safe, and answer the mystery,” she whispered.

  She opened her eyes and beheld a land warmed by a gentle spring sun, empty and peaceful. The dog lay beside her, questions in his eyes. She watched a soaring hawk far distant, and crows talking in shrill alarms, and the eternal breezes whispering the leaves and rustling the verdant grasses. And not a sign of the professor.

  If he did not go to the hot springs, then where?

  She circled the campsite again, hoping to cut his path, but saw nothing but a fresh track of a young grizzly bear. She turned to follow the tracks as they drifted toward the foothills along a rivulet that would soon dry up in the summer’s inferno. The bear would be cross and hungry after the winter’s sleep, and ready to kill. She would be wary. It could run faster than her pony, at least for a short stretch.

  The bear had descended into brush, so she followed it there, reaching a larger stream where it had fished, or eaten a rotten carcass and left. She smelled death, and hunted the ground carefully. The dog sniffed and whined and poked his nose into the brush.

  Bu
t the professor wasn’t there, nor could she find the remains of any creature. Relieved, she backed out of the brushy cul-de-sac and headed back to the campsite, where she found Skye, his face like a thunderclap.

  “We’ve left enough hoofprints here to bring the whole Blackfoot nation down on us,” he said.

  “But the prints go every direction, back and forth, here and there.”

  “That’ll make them all the more curious. We’ve got to move.”

  She wondered if he was about to abandon the professor.

  He led them up the middle of the creek to a long slope leading toward a spring high in a grassy notch, and then settled their horses, along with the professor’s, in the notch and out of sight, and waited. The dog had vanished again, and returned.

  He had chosen well. Her man always chose well. From this high point they could see much of the surrounding country. They could see the sky, and read the weather, and prepare for distant storms. From this vantage point they could peer straight down upon their campsite, a tiny spot in the distant emptiness, but close enough to reveal the movement of the professor should he return there.

  They picketed the horses and let them graze, watched clouds build over the peaks to the south and east, and waited. All that day they waited, often misled by scudding shadows racing across the great basin of the Three Forks. The dog lay beside them, not interested in the hunt.

  That day passed. In the evening they descended. On foot, they searched the slopes and creeks, pawed through brush, sniffed the air for the iron smell of blood and decay. They padded by moonlight toward the hot springs again and probed the area, smelling the rank sulfur of the mineral water, studying earth and brush and secret places, and even trees.

  The dog whined and shivered.

  Nothing.

  Skye grew morose. Victoria watched him sink into bad humor. He was hating this vigil now, and itching to leave, but she knew he wouldn’t. These white men stuck together, and that was often their salvation. He had told her about the time Jim Bridger had abandoned the wounded and feverish Hugh Glass to his death, and how Glass had miraculously survived and heroically dragged himself hundreds of miles to succor. He would not be a Jim Bridger. He would not abandon a man, or lead rivals into the deadly arms of the Blackfeet, as Bridger had done just last winter.

  They retreated to their small aerie at the top of a slash in the foothills, and slept uncomfortably, with Nutmeg’s ghost haunting them. The dog was gone all night.

  The next day passed slowly and silently, and the next. Each day they scoured a broad area, riding quietly through meadows and groves of aspen or cottonwood, poking around brush, studying streambanks, only to return mystified to their high lookout. Their food was running out along with their patience. But still Skye stayed put, studying their campsite far below for any sign of the missing naturalist.

  Four days had passed. Skye’s temper was not far behind his eyes now, and she could say nothing to temper it.

  “He’s either dead or faint with hunger and wandering wherever his collector’s eye leads him,” he said. “The way he did to Wyeth after the rendezvous.”

  “He is a good man, but a child,” she said.

  “He’s an irresponsible fool.”

  “Making bad words about him does no good.”

  Skye subsided. The anger in his face slipped into desolation. He had lost a man in his charge. He had lost a friend. He had lost a man who was attempting to bring new knowledge to the world. Only the intervention of the Above Ones would ever bring Professor Nutmeg back to them.

  She knew that in the morning Skye would leave and she knew that if he gave up and headed over Bridger’s Pass, this would haunt him all of his days. He would blame himself, feel the sting of failure. But she knew that none of this was his failure. Nutmeg had made his own choices. He had been severely warned over and over.

  She brimmed with curiosity that itched and scratched at her. Where did that man go? What was his fate? Did he live? Skye was half-crazy for knowledge, too. They both knew that this was the worst of all endings because it didn’t end. He was alive or dead or wounded and immobile. He was a captive or slave or not. He was sick or not. He was wondering across meadows, looking for specimens, unaware of time—or not. They would never know, and that was a burden that could scarcely be borne.

  In the night the weather changed, and Skye and Victoria awakened to overcast and the iron scent of rain in the air. Their unprotected ridge-top aerie was no place to weather an icy spring storm. Birds no longer tarried in the sun, but flew with purpose. The breeze no longer toyed with their clothing, but stabbed icy fingers into their flesh.

  Darkly, Skye saddled his pony, and then the professor’s, and loaded the gear onto the horses while Victoria made ready to leave. They had not eaten, and were out of food. The dog was spending more and more time rummaging a living. But they would make for Bridger’s Pass this day and leave Professor Alistair Nutmeg, lecturer at Harvard on the natural world, to the fate he had carved for himself.

  Darkly, they rode away.

  fifty

  Barnaby Skye was enjoying a hard-won peace. The disappearance of Professor Nutmeg still haunted him, but he believed that the man himself caused his misfortune, and the Skyes had done everything within their power to look after him.

  Still, they missed the man, missed his innocent cheer, missed his boyish enthusiasms and the ecstacy in him whenever he added a new plant to the catalog. No one could know whether he was dead. They found no body, nor any place where carrion-eaters congregated. They had scoured the whole country, finding not a trace of the man. If he had been taken captive, it was by men on foot because they found no hoofprints marking the passage of any large party.

  And when they left, at last, they put a message into a cairn at the campsite, telling Nutmeg to head east over the pass and into Crow country where Victoria’s people would be alerted and ready to care for him.

  That was all anyone could do.

  He and Victoria and No Name arrived at the Green River rendezvous on June tenth, and found that many of the free trappers, along with Wyeth’s party, Bonneville’s group, and the rival outfits, American Fur and Rocky Mountain Fur, had set up shop. There was even an English noble named Stuart, along with his entourage, camped in colorful tents with coats of arms flapping in the wilderness winds.

  Victoria discovered that several lodges of Crows were present along with many Snakes, and she discovered friends among her people, which gladdened her heart. But Skye roamed the gathering restlessly. His mood was not helped by a heavy overcast that carried occasional cold showers and hid the tops of the distant mountains, turned the world gray, and made dry firewood a scarce item. There were times when he pondered the stupidity of living out of doors year-round; times when a hearth, a roof, a soft bed, an easy chair, and a good kitchen seemed more inviting than this wild life.

  He lacked so much as a cent and hadn’t a single pelt to trade, and often roamed hungrily through the two trading posts, or even through Captain Bonneville’s crude fort where other goods might be purchased. But a penniless man could only yearn and study, and sometimes scheme of ways to squeeze some small item out of these ruthlessly commercial enterprises.

  He passed knots of his old friends, talking and smoking their pipes, enjoying the luxury of tobacco after most of a year’s privation. Sometimes he joined them, and they always welcomed him, and once he even sucked some smoke into his lungs when they passed a pipe around. But he was famished in a dozen ways, and sat irritably as they spun yarns, bragged about the pelts they had gathered, the bears they had subdued, the icy rivers they had crossed, the Blackfeet that had chased them, the rattlesnakes they had captured by hand, the Indian maidens they had conquered, the tribes that had adopted them, the buffalo they had eaten, and the jugs of trade whiskey they had demolished …

  He could not bear any of it and retreated, a solitary misfit, as itchy and angry as he had ever been. What had the year brought him? It had started so high, a chance
to recover his good name, word from his father, a trip across the sea followed by a high position in a company spawned by the nation of his birth. Then it had sunk so low, so dangerous, so desperate, so impoverished, so devoid of succor. Only the kindness of John McLoughlin had rescued him and Victoria and enabled them to reach the mountains again. And then the final blow, losing a great naturalist and friend, as if he had stepped off the edge of the earth.

  His old comrades at Rocky Mountain Fur greeted him amiably but not with the whoops they reserved for their old brethren. His departure for the Hudson’s Bay Company had changed everything, even though he had ended up not joining the British concern. So he and the mutt drifted through the vast grassy flat along the icy river, choked with snowmelt out of the mountains, poking into Bonneville’s fort and trading post, visiting the tented stores of the rival companies, and studying the vast herds of Indian ponies and white men’s mounts.

  He felt again like a man without a country, especially when he spent time with Sir William Drummond Stuart, a Scotsman, actually, and captain in the Royal Army. In the presence of the Empire’s military, Skye was wary and did little to promote a friendship with Stuart and his men. But that only left him all the more bereft of comrades.

  Then one morning Andrew Drips approached him, and invited him for a little stroll along the purling river. Drips was somewhat older than the run of the mountain men, a veteran of the fur trade, the head of American Fur Company’s mountain operations, and backed by the powerful Chouteau family of St. Louis, which had the means to muscle into the Rocky Mountain fur trade.

  “I hear you’re a free agent,” Drips said. “Tell me what happened. Last I knew, you were accepting a tender from McLoughlin.”

  Skye told him the story as they hiked past Snake lodges, and the dog shuttled back and forth ahead of them.

  “Ah! That naturalist was a man who could not help himself, Mister Skye. He went under. You bear no blame. You never abandoned him.”