The Berrybender Narratives

by Larry McMurtry

The question seemed to stump him for a moment. Tasmin waited with growing impatience—she was feeling hungrier by the moment.

  “I must confess to you that I am at the moment very hungry,” Tasmin said—impatience often got the better of curiosity, particularly if she happened to be hungry. “Do you know of anything that we might eat for breakfast?”

  This question, delivered with more than a touch of adamancy, produced an unexpectedly winning smile.

  “Know how to make a fire?” the young man asked.

  He must have seen, from the expression on her face, that she was not in the habit of making fires, because he smiled again, pitched a small, soft pouch at her feet, and left, taking only his bow and quiver of arrows.

  Tasmin was, as she had often asserted, the one competent Berrybender; even if she now disclaimed the family connection, she hoped to retain the competence. She had never made a fire, but she had read several of Mr. Cooper’s novels, and supposed that, with application, she could soon master the essentials of flint and steel, the very objects contained in the young frontiersman’s small deerskin pouch.

  Remembering, as best she could, her Cooper, Tasmin assembled a sizable pyramid of grass and twigs, whacked away with the flint and steel, and was rewarded, after only a few minutes, with a respectable column of smoke. She was down on her knees, puffing at the pyramid, encouraged now and then by a tiny tongue of flame, when the young man came back with a dead doe over his shoulders, the arrow that had killed her still wagging from her side.

  No sooner had he dropped the doe behind the log where he had been praying than he bent and with a flick or two reduced her grassy pyramid to one half its size, after which, immediately, a sturdy flame shot up.

  “Too much grass,” he explained. In only a few minutes he had the liver out of the deer, seared it over the blazing fire, and offered it to Tasmin on the point of his knife. A lifetime of eating amid the violent contention of the Berrybender table had long since rid her of any pretentions to ladylike etiquette when it came to food. Well used to fighting off her siblings with elbow and fist, Tasmin seized the dripping liver and ate it avidly; no meat had ever tasted better.

  Her host and victualler watched in silence, then quickly butchered the little deer, which was already beginning to attract a green buzz of flies.

  “Do you know that girl that sniffs out roots?” he asked, watching Tasmin closely.

  “Yes, that’s my sister Mary—she seems to have an unusually keen smeller,” Tasmin said. “How did you know she could sniff out roots?”

  “I seen her last night—she was talking to a snake,” he said. “The snake led her to that turtle. A turtle that size could have bitten her arm off, but it didn’t.”

  “No doubt she took it unawares,” Tasmin said, a little puzzled by the drift the conversation had taken.

  “A child that talks with serpents has a powerful sin in her,” the young man said. His brown eyes had suddenly turned to flint. The look was so hard that Tasmin, of a sudden, got goose bumps. Who was this young fellow, who looked at her so?

  “I still don’t know your name, sir,” she pointed out, meekly, hoping that such a normal inquiry would make him mild again.

  The young man shrugged, as if to suggest that a name was of little importance.

  “Depends on where I am,” he said. “Round here I’m mostly just Jim—Jim Snow.”

  Intrigued, Tasmin ventured another question.

  “But Mr. Snow, who are you when you’re somewhere else?” she asked, coquettishly.

  “The Assiniboines call me the Raven Brave,” he said—“they’re way north of here. Some of the boys just call me Sin Killer. I’m hard when it comes to sin.”

  Tasmin could see that, just from the change in his eyes when the subject of sin came up, a subject Tasmin had never given even a moment’s thought to, though growing up in a family of flagrant sinners had given her plenty of opportunity to observe the phenomenon at first hand.

  “You’ve got no kit,” Jim Snow pointed out, more mildly. “I expect you could use some help, getting back to the boat.”

  “Why, yes . . . if it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” Tasmin said, but Jim Snow was already shifting some of the more edible portions of the butchered deer into the pirogue. His rifle, bow, and knife seemed to be his only possessions. In a moment he had settled Tasmin in the front of the pirogue and quickly moved the small craft toward the middle of the river: they were on their way to catch up with Tasmin’s wandering kin.

  4

  As there was only one paddle, and Mr. Snow had it . . .

  AS there was only one paddle, and Mr. Snow had it, Tasmin could be of little assistance—she sat idly in the front of the pirogue, in a mood of indecision. Her oarsman soon demonstrated a keen eye, easily anticipating sandbars and hidden trees, obstacles he skirted with a few flicks of the paddle.

  The fact was that Tasmin didn’t much want to return to the steamer Rocky Mount, and yet, when she considered the matter from the point of view of logic, it became readily evident that she had little choice. Only two hours earlier, a naked Amazon exalted by the prairie dawn, she had resolved to cut all ties, to accept such fugitive company as the prairies might offer, to roam free and roam forever. She liked it that the country was so unsettled; on her native isle quite the reverse applied. Everything was settled, including the matrimonial futures of herself and all her sisters, all sure to be married off to such pasty lords as could afford their dowries. Lord Berrybender regarded his daughters as being little more than two-legged cattle—they were taught the little that they were taught so that they could more swiftly marry and mate.

  Cleansed by the Missouri’s water, thrilled by Western sunlight, Tasmin had for a moment supposed herself deliciously free, a notion of which Jim Snow quickly disabused her. The fact was she had no kit, not even shoes. Though she had scarcely covered fifty yards on shore her feet had already been stuck with burrs and stickers, her ankles scratched by stiff prairie weeds, and her calves attacked by an invisible burrowing mite which produced a most aggravating itch. The mite, Mr. Snow informed her, was called a chigger—he advised her to apply mud poultices to her itching legs, a remedy Tasmin adopted with some reluctance, since it rather cut against her vanity.

  Tasmin had never before had to consider what a difference shoes made. Barefoot, she could have walked across half of England; in the rough Missouri country the same two feet would barely have taken her a mile.

  Of course, with a little effort she could easily acquire kit: shoes, blankets, skillets, guns. Various servants would be only too happy to escape Lord Berrybender’s incessant demands. Tim, the stable boy, whose crude embraces her sister Bess was occasionally disposed to accept, could be stolen in an instant. Vanity led Tasmin to suppose that she could easily tempt half the party; but the fact was, she didn’t want any of the party. She wanted this New World to herself, and yet the morning’s mild exercise had demonstrated only too forcefully that she lacked not merely the equipment but also the skills to master it. Though she had seen foals birthed and cattle butchered she could not easily have extracted that delicious liver from the doe; though she did believe she could have eventually made a fire, by working along Cooperish lines.

  Her companion, Jim Snow—Sin Killer, or the Raven Brave, depending on his location or his mood—was not an easy man to make conversation with. He rowed; he didn’t talk. The long silence, broken only by the occasional slap of a wave or call of a bird to break it, contributed to Tasmin’s low mood. For a time she thought seriously of jumping out and swimming away: better to drown than to go back; and yet, with the water so shallow, she would probably merely have bogged, a ridiculous comeuppance to one so wedded to extremes. And thanks to the chiggers, she had quite enough mud on her legs anyway.

  “How long will it take us to catch up with that wretched steamer?” she asked, finally. Jim Snow had rowed steadily, and yet the river ahead was empty as far as the eye could see.

  “If they slip through the riffles
we won’t catch ’em today,” he said. “If they stick we might.”

  Tasmin had not considered that their pursuit of the lost steamer might mean a night spent on the river, or the prairie, with her rescuer, Mr. Snow. That prospect did not worry her particularly; she was mainly desirous of securing a less muddy dress.

  “Once they figure out you’re missing I expect they’ll send a boat back for you,” he said. “Some of them Frenchies are pretty good boatmen. They might show up and get you home for supper.”

  Tasmin doubted that any such expedient would occur. Lord Berrybender considered his oldest daughter such a marvel of self-reliance that he might consider a rescue attempt superfluous, presumptuous even.

  “What, Tasmin missing? . . . Why, I expect she’s only picnicking . . . Might take offense if we harass her . . . bound to show up in a day or two . . . No need to worry about Tasmin . . .”

  Some such, she felt sure, would be her father’s response, if the fact of her absence was conclusively determined—after which His Lordship would take a little snuff; Lady B., meanwhile, would tuck into a great beefsteak, washed down by a bottle or two of claret. The wine would soon numb whatever anxiety she might feel about Tasmin, which was not likely to be excessive, anyway: after all, Master Stiles had been hers until Tasmin grew up and caught his eye; the years had not yet much abated the bitterness of Lady Berrybender’s jealousy.

  Danger Tasmin didn’t much mind—it was ennui she despised. Mr. Snow’s long silences left her increasingly bored, a condition she could endure only so long without protest.

  “Look here, Mr. Snow,” she said, when she had had good and enough. “I fear I am taking you a dreadful distance off our route. I am quite a competent rower, when it comes to that. Why don’t we put into shore? You can go your way and I’ll just row along until I come up with the boat.”

  Tasmin’s frank speech startled Jim Snow greatly. He looked at her briefly, and then turned and gave close inspection to the western shore of the river. Then, rather to Tasmin’s mystification, he pointed to the sky, empty except for a great flock of birds, winging so high above them that Tasmin could but faintly hear their call—rather an odd, whistling call it was.

  “It’s the swans—they’re coming in,” he said.

  “So they may be, but I don’t see that it affects our situation,” Tasmin told him. “You need go no farther out of your way. I’m quite sure I can get back to the steamer on my own.”

  “No,” he said, and went on rowing, as if his mere denial was all the explanation needed, in which regard he reckoned without the notable obstinacy of the de Burys—obstinacy enough to have carried them through three Crusades.

  “Explain,” Tasmin demanded, speaking quite sharply.

  Jim Snow frowned.

  “Explain!” she repeated, even more fiercely this time.

  “We’re close by the Swamp of the Swans,” he said, with another gesture toward the high whistling birds, whose long necks were outstretched. “When the swans come the Osage come too, and there’s plenty of Osage in these parts even when the swans ain’t nesting. If the Osage get you, you’d be in for worse than chiggers, I guess. They’d sell you to some slaver who’d haul you off to Mexico, if you lasted that long.”

  The steamer Rocky Mount was rife with just such rumors of rapine and kidnap. The only common ground Fräulein Pfretzskaner and Mademoiselle Pellenc had been able to find was a shared fear of abduction by red Indians. Even the haughty Venetia Kennet could be reduced to a jelly of apprehension by the mere suggestion of the ravishment she could expect to suffer should her fair form ever fall into savage hands. Lord Berrybender, though hardly wishing his daughters to adorn the harems of Comanche or Kickapoo, nonetheless saw the matter mainly in practical terms: that is, the prospect of greatly reduced dowries should rumors of these ravishments follow them all back to England.

  Having come so recently to the country, Tasmin hardly knew how to assess this threat—it was a fair summer day, and except for the gliding swans, not a creature was visible on the whole huge plain to the west. Having spent one of the most restful nights of her life sleeping alone in the pirogue, she could not persuade herself that any such woeful captivity was imminent; and yet she knew that she had much to learn about this New World. Mr. Cooper’s books had said nothing about grass burrs, scratchy weeds, or chiggers.

  The Raven Brave, as Tasmin now liked to think of him, was clearly knowledgeable. It had taken him only a few minutes to find a deer and kill it. Now he seemed to consider it his duty to protect her, an attitude she would have been happier to accept if she could have detected in it some tendril of fondness, of liking, of hot lust, even. She was, after all, a woman whose nakedness he had glimpsed. If he was only going to think of her as a duty, she felt she might prefer to take her chances with the Osage. A duty—a mere duty—she did not care to be.

  “I don’t fear the Indians, Mr. Snow,” she said. “I’d prefer to put you ashore now—I’ve wasted enough of your time.”

  Jim Snow looked at her as if she had gone daft.

  “You ain’t got good sense—just hush about it,” he said.

  Tasmin found the remark peculiarly irritating, since among her own family she had long been applauded for the very quality Mr. Snow claimed she lacked: good sense.

  “You are entirely wrong, sir!” Tasmin retorted hotly; but before she could refute his silly assertion a wild yodeling commenced on the near shore and a bullet whacked into the side of the pirogue, just above the waterline. The plain that only a moment before had seemed so empty now sported a host of more or less naked, vividly painted savages, all of them screaming and shrieking in their fury. Several of them rushed into the water, brandishing hatchets and knives, a development that prompted the Raven Brave to at once turn the pirogue and row as rapidly as possible toward the opposite shore. A second bullet skipped off the water just beside the boat, but was the last. Distance rapidly grew between themselves and their attackers. Several savages on horses had arrived at the western shore, but they didn’t enter the water.

  Mr. Snow seemed no more concerned by this little attack than if it had been a sudden gusty wind or squall of rain. Though his comment about Tasmin’s lack of good sense had been immediately driven home, he himself seemed to have forgotten it. Tasmin felt, for the oddest moment, that she had stepped off the steamer Rocky Mount right into a Cooper novel, with Mr. Snow as Hawkeye, a man well equipped to protect her from the harsh inconveniences she would be sure to suffer if captured by the red men. He now seemed to be making for a low bluff on the eastern bank of the river; the Osage, if such they were, were now mere dots on the western shore.

  “Bravo! I do believe we’ve eluded them,” Tasmin said, when the boat reached the shallows.

  “Not yet . . . there’s plenty of them on this side too,” Mr. Snow said. He hastily pulled the pirogue out of the water, took his rifle, bow, and haunch of deer meat, grabbed Tasmin’s hand, and urged her to a breakneck run along the muddy shore, their goal, it seemed, being the little bluff she had noticed as they crossed the river.

  Tasmin thought such haste to be unnecessary until she heard a babel of shrieks just behind them and looked around to see four more savages, painted in yellows and blues, giving hot chase, hatchets in their hands.

  The Raven Brave was confident of his tactics, though. They raced to the little bluff, where, quickly cupping his hands and indicating that Tasmin was to step in them, he hoisted her atop an immense boulder at the foot of the bluff, after which he turned and faced the Osage, then some hundred yards away. Tasmin expected him to shoot them, or at least loose an arrow or two, but instead, mildly amused, he pointed at the cliff above them, whereupon the Indians stopped as abruptly as if they had run into a wall. The painted faces that, a moment before, had been contorted with fury now wore looks of uncertainty, or even dejection. From being wild killers they became, in an instant, stumpy Pierrots, clowns in a show that had somehow gone wrong.

  When they stopped, the Sin Killer
’s eyes became flint again and he hurled a great cry at his pursuers, a violent ululating cry in a language Tasmin knew not. The Osage quickly passed from dejection to terror—they immediately ran away, disappearing into the underbrush where they had been hiding before the attack began.

  Tasmin made no attempt to conceal her astonishment: they had been surprised, they had been chased, and now they had been saved—she felt extreme excitement but not much fear. Her companion of the day, the Sin Killer, was evidently more than a match for the painted Osage. On this occasion he had been content to frighten the Indians away, but had it been necessary to kill one or all of them, she had no doubt he would have done just that.

  His face still reflected the violence of his expression; but, once the Osage were clearly gone, his face cleared, his eyes softened, he became mild Mr. Jim Snow again—he pointed above her at a kind of drawing on a rock that extruded from the little bluff. Tasmin could just see that some crude figures had been traced on the rock face, stick men of the sort that a child might draw, except that these stick men sprouted antlers or horns from their heads. There was also a sketch of a shadowy four-legged beast of some kind, perhaps a mammoth or great mastodon—one such, Mr. Catlin claimed, had been excavated from a bed of loam not far down the river.

  “The Osage won’t come here—not close, anyway,” Jim Snow said. “They think devils live on this hill.”

  “You seem to have addressed them quite positively,” Tasmin said. He reached up a hand to help her climb down.

  “They were so hot to take our hair they forgot about the devils,” Jim said. “I reminded them.”

  His comment was a little startling, but Tasmin slid down the big rock anyway and followed her companion back along the muddy shore toward the pirogue, wondering what new surprises the coming night might bring.

  5

  The swans were whistling, high overhead.