Fair Land Fair Land - A B Guthrie

by A B Guthrie

  The cabin was warm enough but not stuffy, as it would have been if he and Higgins had built it tight. Loose-built, it let in the whiff of horse manure now and then. In bad weather horses always crowded around a cabin or barn or tumble-down building. Given time, they would butt and shoulder it down. Damn nuisance, but it saved trying to catch them up in the open. The mouse sat still and beady-eyed, soaking up heat.

  The cabin shook to a harder blast, and Higgins said through his pipe smoke, "I never knowed it to blow so hard without snow or rain comin' after. This time I'm bettin' on rain."

  Summers rose. His bad leg almost let him down, the damn thing. "Foot's asleep," he said. He made it to the door and opened it a few inches and looked out, looked out at nothing but sweeping snow and the nose in front of his face.

  He closed the door, sat down again and said, "Ground blizzard. It will sweep the flats clean."

  "And leave hellish drifts."

  "March and April are notionable months."

  "Bad as people," Higgins said. They relighted their pipes.

  "Speakin' of notions — " Higgins began and fell silent.

  Summers didn't speak, knowing that Higgins would go on in time.

  Teal Eye stirred. "I hope Lije not out in this wind." She kept thinking about Lije.

  "Brother Potter look after him," Little Wing said as she scooped the cut meat in a pot.

  Nocansee lifted his head, perhaps having heard the little movement of the mouse. The mouse watched.

  Higgins said again, "Speakin' of notions, I kind of got one in my bonnet."

  "Let it out."

  "Or me'n Little Wing have."

  "So?"

  "She hankers to see her folks."

  Summers puffed on his pipe and found slow words to say,

  "Can't blame her none."

  "Not to leave us," Teal Eye cried out.

  "Just for a spell," Higgins told her. "Long enough to get there, visit a while and come back."

  He meant it, Summers knew. He meant it, but who could tell? Not even God himself.

  "It is for good," Teal Eye said to her beadwork. A gust shook the cabin, carrying her words to wherever it went.

  Little Wing brought the pot over and nested it in the fire.

  Higgins said, "She's got a right to see her kin. Been a long time. I figure we would take off when the first flowers bloom so's to be back, Teal Eye, before frost sets in."

  Little Wing was making happy noises in her throat. Nocansee kept working the stiff from the hide. The mouse ducked back in its hole, stirring up a trickle of dust. Things were closing in and closing out, Summers thought. Life narrowed as the years grew. It crowded and narrowed.

  With Higgins and Little Wing gone?

  He puffed, but his pipe had gone out.

  * * *

  They were ready to go, horses saddled and packed, one tepee down, the cabin and grounds looked over again for items maybe forgotten.

  "You should have picked better horses, 'stead of these old pelters," Summers said. It was like Higgins to take the four oldest of the nine horses they had.

  "They'll get us there, don't you worry," Higgins answered.

  They were all standing around, waiting, holding the parting off for this minute. Little Wing and Higgins just fiddled with the reins in their hands, not up to goodbyes quite yet. The day was good, at least. The spring sun was warm, lighting a sky without a wisp of cloud in it. The trees were about to leaf out, their buds swollen and sticky, soon to give birth. It was a time of birds and bird songs.

  Little Wing said, "We come back. Look for us. Look before snow."

  Sure, Summers thought, they'd come back maybe. Maybe on some fair afternoon they'd return to pick up the life they were leaving. Maybe.

  The two women hugged each other, both crying. Little Wing laid a hand on Nocansee's shoulder and said, "I hope good things." She hugged Summers. Higgins helped her on to her horse and turned. "You good old son of a bitch," he said and swung around fast. "Goodbye, goddamnit."

  "Keep your scalp, old pardner."

  As they rode off, turning once to wave, Teal Eye came to Summers and put her head in the hollow of his shoulder, more for his sake, he thought, than her own. He kept control of his voice. "Hardest lesson of all is to learn to say goodbye."

  Inside their tepee lay Higgins' cased fiddle. "Hell's sake,"

  Summers said. "He forgot. I'll have to catch up with him." A scrap of tanned deerskin lay on the fiddle. It had words on it, written in charcoal.

  "Nocansee you can lern to play it good."

  35

  DUST ROSE upstream across the river. It rose and hung there, wavering just a little to the breath of air. Men would be working there, working with big shovels drawn by horses, tearing up the buffalo grass.

  Summers had ridden once close enough to see. Loaded wagons waited and running gears piled high with logs and raw lumber, and the sounds of men reached him and the knock of axes and the scrape-scrape of saws. Some soldiers moved around, doing nothing but watch. There was to be the new agency. It was located about four miles away from his camp, between the Teton and a small creek that flowed at the far side of the valley and joined the Teton a short piece lower down.

  He sat his horse and watched the dust rising. Soon enough the agency officers would arrive and probably more soldiers and then a straggle of Indians coming to see if the white man lived up to his promises. He wouldn't.

  Put down another marker to judge time by. Let it stand in the story. Big doings. A new agency, and it would give way to time, too, though nobody thought so, not with change just taking place. Everything was new as of its time. And everything was old, or would be with the years. Nothing stayed put. Men came with their big ideas, looking to a future that would laugh at their work. Why not let things be? Why the hurry to play hell with what was? That was the way of man. That was the way of men who bred and increased and reached out.

  He fingered his cold pipe and put one hand to his knee, which didn't bother him so much in warm weather. Pretty soon he'd make sure his loose horses hadn't strayed. In these long sunset and twilighted days the workingmen would knock off long before dark, and they and off-duty soldiers would be banging away with shotguns and rifles, and the game would run and be lost or lie crippled and dying with the men too eager for fresh targets to follow the blood trails. Sport, they would call it.

  No one could fault a man who shot meat for the kettle or frying pan, but damn the man who shot to be shooting and killed to be killing. While in camp they had been hearing shots, some too close, where before there had been silence.

  Lately he and the family had had to make do with grouse and mallards and cottontails and the trout of the Teton. Once in a while a deer. Once in a long while an elk. Never a buffalo now. Not here. Not hereabouts.

  From here he could see the tepee and the cabin. Taking Nocansee with her, Teal Eye had gone down the river to see if the June berries were ripe. She kept busy. She always had, but now it was as if she moved so's not to think. She didn't complain, but some of the sparkle had left her, some of the spirit.

  Her eyes sometimes looked empty. He could understand. Lije gone, and no word from him. Higgins and Little Wing far away with the Shoshones. For company just himself and Nocansee, and mostly it was only old talk they could talk, talk they'd talked before. Often they were silent, the only sound the sad sound of the fiddle that Nocansee practiced on. He watched the dust rising and thought that for two bits he'd leave the Teton if he knew where to go.

  The dust rose and, closer, another weaker trail of it that seemed to lead toward his camp. He made sure his Hawken was loaded and rode down to meet it.

  three Indians dragged up on their poor-flesh cayuses. It was a time before he recognized Heavy Runner. He left the saddle and made the peace sign and motioned for them to come forward.

  Heavy Runner got off his horse and said in Blackfoot, "We come in peace and to talk, Bear Maker." He looked tired and drawn, and his buckskins weren't proud. "I bri
ng two good

  men."

  "Come, friends, and smoke. My lodge is yours."

  The other two Indians dismounted, and Heavy Runner named names that Summers didn't catch. One of them tied up the horses.

  The tepee was the proper place for sober palaver, and Summers led the way to it and invited them to sit down. He lighted his pipe, pointed it in the four directions and passed it around. They sat and talked, as Indians did, avoiding and circling around the point that was to be made. Summers told them,

  "My woman has gone to pick berries. The pot is empty. But whiskey I have."

  Heavy Runner shook his head. "It kills my people."

  "It is not trade whiskey, not poison."

  Heavy Runner took a long look at him. Summers rose and got the jug. They were old men. They swallowed small. At last Summers said, "You can tell me. My ear is open."

  "My people die," Heavy Runner said as if measuring his words. "My young men go crazy. It is the firewater."

  "From whiskey traders?"

  Heavy Runner bowed, head and body, and his hand moved, saying yes. "They travel the whiskey road, the traders, from Fort Benton to Fort McLeod across the Medicine Line, and they sell as they go. Sell to my people."

  ‘°In the wind I have heard."

  "So many die. So many young braves drink it, steal for it, steal horses, anything, for to trade."

  "I believe you."

  "The white soldiers, the white chiefs, hear of stealing. They hear of white men rubbed out. They do not like it. They hate us. But what to do with my young braves? A chief he is not a general. He can speak but not order, and his words fly away."

  Heavy Runner's friends hadn't spoken. They sat listening, their hands folded unless used in the yes sign.

  "Why, friend, come to me?" Summers asked.

  "My village is friendly village. We do not want the trouble. It is Mountain Chief whose men kill. They come across the Medicine Line and steal and sometime kill, but to the white men all Indians are Indians.

  "It is so. My heart is low because the white man is foolish."

  Summers waited and then put the question again. "But why come? What can I do?"

  Heavy Runner's tired face lifted, and his eyes met Summers' square on. "Because we need you."

  "F or what, my friend?"

  "In our camp we need a white man, a good man, a wise old man to tell us."

  "I wouldn't know wise words to say."

  "A good white man in our camp shows everybody we are good people."

  "Don't bet on it. But is it protection my friend thinks about?"

  "Someone to guide us the right way. Someone to explain to the white chiefs before trouble comes. That is you, Bear Maker, for we are poor in words."

  "I must talk in my mind, Heavy Runner. I think no but maybe yes. If it is no, we are still friends."

  "My lodge is always yours."

  "Where is it?"

  "On what is called the Marias. It is sometimes good hunting. It is big land, far as the eye sees, and our people, the Blackfeet, they be not so many."

  "I will think."

  The Indians rose, shook hands, walked out to their horses and rode away.

  After they were gone, Summers climbed into the saddle again. The sun was halfway past its high, and he hadn't yet seen to the loose horses or shot anything for the pot. There was time for both, if he didn't have to look too long for game. That was the question, what with workers from the agency banging around.

  Sometimes two or three of them rode by his camp, not stopping, their eyes curious as if they saw the last of a race, as if he were out of place in the world, something left over from the first days. He reckoned they weren't so far off at that.

  A shot sounded from behind a thicket. He put his horse to a lope and rounded the edge of it. A man stood there, a rifle dangling from his hand, and a horse lay thrashing in the grass.

  "Hold it!" Summers shouted.

  The man turned, his eyes wide. "I didn't mean . . ." The horse had climbed to its feet. It stood still with the dull look of slow suffering.

  "Goddamnit, kill it!" Summers told the man. "You gut-shot it, now kill it."

  The rifle still hung from the man's hand. "I couldn't — I mean I can't — not a horse."

  Summers lurched from the saddle. He took aim with the Hawken, dropped it, grabbed the man's repeating rifle from his loose hand and shot the horse in the forehead just above the eyes. The horse went down, quivering, and lay still.

  "You can still brag it was your gun that kilt him," he said. He swung the man's rifle against a rock, then swung it again. "You dumb son of a bitch. Best horse I own."

  "But I tell you, I didn't mean . . ."

  He wasn't a man but a boy, a boy with fear and regret in his l eyes. "It looked like an elk or maybe a deer, so . ."

  "So you just fired away, like a fool. Shoot at anything that moves, just to be killin'."

  "It was a new rifle, a Henry repeater. I wanted to see . . ."

  "To see if you could get yourself a prime horse. I ought to give you a runnin' start and see do you like lead in your ass."

  "I can pay you, in time, I mean. And I'm sorry, sir. I acted the fool." The boy did look sorry, sorry and pained, a boy at a loss.

  Summers sat slow in the grass. It wasn't the bad leg that let him down, not it alone. It was the weight on his shoulders, the heaviness in his head and the let-down feeling that followed rage.

  "Christ," he said, "there are too many of you. Pick up your rifle and go."

  "I don't know that I understand."

  "I said you are too many just go, boy."

  He sat with the dead horse and the live one and watched the boy walk away. Likely the rifle wasn't damaged too much. On the ride home, for lack of better meat, he shot the heads off two jackass rabbits. They would be tough as bull hide but better than nothing.

  As he dressed them out, the thought was with him that the time had come to go. He would have to talk to Teal Eye, but the sooner the better would suit him. To gut-shoot a poor, goddamn horse!

  * * *

  By first light they had the tepee down and the horses packed. Teal Eye looked at the bare earth where the tepee had stood. The unknowing grass would cover it, cover where she and Summers had loved, where Lije had been born, where the days, the happy days were, and it would be as if they never had lived, never talked or laughed or had friends or sat by the shores of the Teton. The air was empty and torn where the tepee had risen.

  But Summers was right. It was time to go, and she had said a sad yes to him, and Nocansee, like Lije before him, had said, "I do what my father says."

  They were mounted and ready to leave when Summers got off his horse. Teal Eye watched him gather twigs and branches and old bark and carry them inside the cabin. Coming out, he laid a little trail of gunpowder from cabin to ground. He struck a spark with flint and steel.

  The cabin was burning bright before they had gone far. Looking back, Teal Eye said, "No one would know, not ever."

  Summers nodded his head. "Best to leave it as we found it. That's what I'm thinkin'. New — like but o1d."

  36

  IT WAS COLD in the village of Heavy Runner, cold everywhere in the country of the Marias, so cold that the lungs hurt with breathing and face and fingers turned white with frost if a man didn't take care. When, inside the tepee at last, he put his feet toward the fire, they caught fire with itch. People stayed close and tight in their lodges, their bodies covered with blankets or robes in spite of the fires they kept burning.

  There was sickness in camp, too, smallpox, the gift of the white man to the red. The village wasn't big — maybe twenty lodges on one side of the river, eleven on the other. Its size didn't keep it from being hungry.

  Summers slapped his arms across his chest and made and unmade fists with his hands. He had been lucky enough to get a deer in his sights. He would divide it as far as it went if he could get it to camp. His nostrils were narrowed with frost. Each pant of his breath
made a cloud.

  Even so, he thought as he ordered his hands to make use of the knife, his lodge fared better than most. He put out set lines in the Marias, chopping holes in the ice when he had to, and caught mostly catfish but often a pike or a trout. They were good food, though they didn't stay with a man like buffalo meat. The Indians wouldn't eat fish, calling them the underwater people, but Teal Eye had outgrown such notions.

  He looked up from the work of gutting the deer and slapped himself again. The blood and the entrails had warmed his hands, but soon enough the blood would turn sticky and freeze if he left it on. The day was clear, the ground mostly windswept and bare, but the sun was cold brass and the breeze had icicle fingers.

  It had been different when first he came to the Marias. High summer then, and the sun shone warm on a world without limits, broken by the spires of the Sweetgrass Hills and the shadows of western mountains. There were buffalo about, not too many but enough for the Indians, and he had come upon hunting parties on their buffalo horses, riding wild in the herds, shooting arrows or old Hudson's Bay muskets when they came within range. The squaws pounded the meat, mixing the flesh with wild berries and grease, making pemmican for winter use. He wiped his hands dry on the hair of the deer, slid the knife in its case and put on his cold mitts.

  Once he had made a two-day journey eastward and south and turned back when he came upon hide-hunters and heard the boom of their guns. A good killing rifle, one man had told him, a Sharps, and a bullet most anywhere would knock a bull down.

  He led the pack horse close to the deer. It was a good piece to camp, and some of the way was broken country. That was how it was along the Marias, broken country, but once a man was out of its gorges and channels the land swept away. Good buffalo country come summer. Deer in the swales.

  He took off his mitts, lifted the deer carcass to the horse and lashed it on. The horse stood, patient and cold, and the breeze played along its winter hair. The saddle horse was cold, too. Its eyes seemed to say he was at fault for the weather. "Not my doin's," he told it through stiff lips. He got himself into the saddle. In times like this his leg acted up. Teal Eye would put a hot blankets on it.