“You see?” Three Geese said. “He is not speaking white man’s language. That’s buffalo he’s speaking.”
Old Cat Head, the most flagrant of the skeptics, was not convinced.
“I have never heard a buffalo speak like that,” he pointed out. “I have never heard a buffalo say anything.”
Cat Head didn’t want to yield any ground to Three Geese, who had been much too full of himself since he brought the small white man to the village; but even he was rather startled by the strange language the white man babbled. At first Cat Head would have been happy just to hit the white man in the head with a good hatchet, but the strange babble caused him to waver. Even if the white man hadn’t come out of the womb of a buffalo, he was still a peculiar man. Cat Head thought he might be some kind of holy fool—there was no point in acting rashly. Killing a holy fool could bring all sorts of calamities down on the people.
Draga did not welcome the presence of this Buffalo Man in the Sans Arc village. She knew he had come from the white men’s big boat—the Thunder Boat, the Bad Eye called it—and she told the people as much, but to her annoyance, she was greeted with insults and sneers. The Sans Arc had always been independent and aloof. They scorned corn growers such as the Mandans; they were people of the buffalo and did not consider themselves subject to Draga’s wishes, or the Bad Eye’s either. Draga had brought some poison with her but the Sans Arc were not about to let her poison their holy fool. They never let her near the little man, lest she stab him or try to interfere with his food.
Draga had not expected to have much luck with the Sans Arc—like all the Sioux bands, they were difficult; but she had made the trip to the camp anyway, in order to bring the Bad Eye a report. Now that he was too fat to move around much he had begun to worry about messiahs and other prophets. It made him anxious to think that there was a Buffalo Man of some sort living with the standoffish Sans Arc. Any little threat caused him to build a new sweat lodge or go into a big trance. In two minutes Draga could easily have beaten the little white man to death with a stone, or even a big stick—but the Sans Arc maintained a good guard, so good that she was forced to go back to the skull lodge and report complete failure.
“A Sans Arc named Three Geese started all this,” she said. “And that’s not all.”
“What else?” the Bad Eye asked. He hated bad news.
“They have given the white man two wives,” she said.
“Is that all?” the Bad Eye asked. “Why should I care how many wives they give him?”
“These wives are twins,” Draga continued. “They are called Big Stealer and Little Stealer, although they are the same size.”
“Why are you bringing me all this terrible news?” the Bad Eye exclaimed. That the Buffalo Man should be married to twins was the worst possible news. Twins always had formidable powers—twins married to a Buffalo Man could lead to any number of calamities: wars, pestilence, flood. The old women were already talking about the likelihood of a great flood in the spring; there was too much snow upriver, they had heard. A terrible flood might even threaten the skull lodge—the Bad Eye might have to move himself to higher ground, which would be a lot of trouble.
“Maybe this Buffalo Man will just get sick and die, twins or no twins,” he said.
“We won’t be rid of him that easily,” Draga said darkly.
Gladwyn was not quite sure what kind of special person he was supposed to be, but it was clear that the people who had taken him were determined to treat him well. They made him a warm tent and fed him tender buffalo liver and their fattest puppies. His bloody clothes were taken away and a suit of soft, warm skins was fashioned for him. He was not required to do any work at all. The most they required of him was that he come and sit outside his tent, by the campfire, when visitors came to see him. The boy Grasshopper was given a lance and made to stand guard so that no one could threaten him or get too close. He was always guarded; Three Geese saw to that. It was no secret that the Brulés and the Miniconjous were jealous of the fact that the Sans Arc had a Buffalo Man. There was danger that some envious warrior might just walk up and stab him out of pique. Grasshopper was told to lance anyone who made a suspicious move.
All Gladwyn had meant to do, when he stumbled away from Lord Berrybender in the terrible blizzard, was die somewhere out of range of the old man’s hated voice. Lord Berrybender continued to give him orders even as they were freezing, orders about guns, orders about firewood. Gladwyn, His Lordship’s man for many years, decided to die as his own man. He was about to curl up and let the blowing snow cover him forever when he had the great luck to stumble on to the buffalo cow just as she was laboring to get her calf out. Something had gone wrong in the birthing; the calf wouldn’t quite come free, and when it finally did, with Gladwyn pulling and tugging at the warm calf, the cow’s lifeblood came too, only slowly—so slowly that Gladwyn was able to use her warmth to keep alive. She was still alive when the six wolves came and began to eat her calf, though she died and was growing cold when the Indians came.
At first, when he was not sure what his captors meant to do with him, Gladwyn gave some thought to escape—but his half-formed plans were soon abandoned. He would probably just get lost and freeze after all, and even if he were very lucky and managed to get back to the boat, what would it gain him? He would once again be merely Lord Berrybender’s man. When the theft of the claret was discovered, very likely he would be the one blamed.
Once in a while he did miss Eliza, Cook’s fumble-fingered assistant, who readily offered her ample body to his embraces; but once the Sans Arc presented him with twin wives even Eliza soon faded from memory. It was true that the twins, Big Stealer and Little Stealer, bickered constantly, and sometimes grew so hot that they came to blows—but that was only to be expected of sisters. Him they never neglected. When he wasn’t on show for envious visitors he lounged in his tent, naked amid warm robes. His efficient wives rubbed him with oils, attended quickly to his lusts, and even fed him with their fingers—tender morsels from the stew pot.
Gladwyn had no way of knowing how long his comfortable celebrity would last, but he didn’t trouble himself by looking ahead. His lodge was warm, his wives competent, the prairies thick with buffalo. The tribe gave him a pipe and ample tobacco; his wives kept his pipe filled; Gladwyn smoked and rested. Blizzards blew, snow fell, geese probed in the Mandan corn, wolves howled, the hunting birds—eagle, hawk, owl—hung in the white sky or came dropping down on sage hen, quail, hare, or the incautious rat; the great bears slept in their dens, buffalo pawed the snow and grazed, while the Sans Arc hunters made many kills; slowly, in this way, the winter passed.
The complete Berrybender Narratives
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Sin Killer
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Wandering Hill
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Folly and Glory
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SIN KILLER
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“Quirky. … It’s never less than entertaining and is often fascinating.”
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“The indefatigable Larry McMurtry has rounded us up yet again. … Sin Killer is a comedy, though it can be downright grim—a balance that McMurtry achieved on his last novel, Boone’s Lick, and that no other writer of westerns has quite matched.”
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“[A] hilarious good time. … Wonderfully funny and smart. … The wait for the next installment will be far too long.”
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BY LARRY MCMURTRY
The Wandering Hill
Sin Killer
Sacajawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West
Paradise
Boone’s Lick
Roads
Still Wild: A Collection of Western Stories
Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen
Duane’s Depressed
Crazy Horse
Comanche Moon
Dead Man’s Walk
The Late Child
Streets of Laredo
The Evening Star
Buffalo Girls
Some Can Whistle
Anything for Billy
Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood
Texasville
Lonesome Dove
The Desert Rose
Cadillac Jack
Somebody’s Darling
Terms of Endearment
All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers
Moving On
The Last Picture Show
In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas
Leaving Cheyenne
Horseman, Pass By
BY LARRY MCMURTRY AND DIANA OSSANA
Pretty Boy Floyd
Zeke and Ned
LARRY McMURTRY
THE WANDERING HILL
THE BERRYBENDER NARRATIVES, BOOK 2
The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author for the sale of this “stripped book.
A Pocket Star Book published by
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2003 by Larry McMurtry
Originally published in hardcover in 2003 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN: 0-7434-5142-2
ISBN 13: 9780-7-434-5142-0
eISBN 13: 978-1-439-14147-2
First Pocket Books paperback edition November 2003
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The Berrybender Narratives are dedicated to the
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who have done so much, over a fifty-year stretch,
to help me to an education.
BOOK 2
Abandoning the steamer Rocky Mount, which is stuck in the ice near the Knife River, the Berrybender expedition makes its way overland to the confluence of the Missouri and the Yellowstone, where we find them snugly ensconced at the trading post of Pierre Boisdeffre.
CONTENTS
Characters
1 An Unexpected Reappearance
2 Tasmin’s Restlessness
3 Pomp Stands Apart
4 Otter Woman’s Complaint
5 Nature of Angels Disputed
6 Vicky Kennet Ambushed
7 A Slap in a Blizzard
8 A Snowy Visit
9 Kit Carson Gets a Nosebleed
10 The Sin Killer Reflects
11 Bobbety Loses an Orb
12 The Wandering Hill Relocated
13 The Hairy Horn’s Reluctance
14 Coitus Interruptus
15 Gladywn’s End Discovered
16 Kit in Love
17 Reunions and Departures
18 Glooms of Deep Winter
19 Cook’s Refusal
20 Absence of Wet Nurses Feared
21 Two Models in a Windstorm
22 Assiniboines Puzzled
23 Bobbety’s Bad Shot
24 The Mediterreaneans Escape
25 Jim Snow’s Dilemma
26 Tasmin Gets a Back Rub
27 Little Onion Takes Flight
28 Efficacy of Rattlesnake Rattles
&
nbsp; 29 Thin Air of Canada
30 Maternal Musings
31 Perplexities of a Father
32 The Broken Hand Endangered
33 A Piegan Stabbed but Not Dead
34 Vicky Cuts Her Hair
35 Lord Berrybender Enraged
36 Tasmin Thinks It Through
37 Surprised by Sex
38 A Longing for Sardines
39 Piet Finds a Bear
40 Lord B. Gets His Claret
41 Minatarees Pose for Presents
42 A Portrait Interrupted
43 Kate Tames the Sin Killer
44 Tasmin Defies Her Father
45 A Disorderly Departure
46 A Mite in the Armpit
47 Pomp Catches Two Cubs
48 Wild and Not Wild
49 Blue Thunder Meets His Cousin
50 Homecoming Is Never Simple
51 Lord Berrybender Befogged
52 Homesickness Attacks the Europeans
53 A Narrow Escape
54 The Naturalist Well Whipped
55 The Wandering Hill Follows Along
56 Tasmin Meets a Bear
57 Difficulties with Utes
58 Tasmin’s Drunken Fury
59 Fog and War
60 The Jesuit a Surgeon
CHARACTERS
MOUNTAIN MEN
Hugh Glass
Tom Fitzpatrick (The Broken Hand)
Jim Bridger
Kit Carson
Eulalie Bonneville
Joe Walker
Milt Sublette
Bill Sublette
Zeke Williams
FROM SIN KILLER
Lord Berrybender
Tasmin
Bess (Buffum)
Bobbety
The Berrybender Narratives Page 24
