The Berrybender Narratives

by Larry McMurtry

  So now what had Jim done? He had ridden off and left Kit aboard a mule nobody liked, with a gun that was unreliable. Kit was about to put Brantly in a high lope, in an effort to catch up, when—as if to prove his point—the old Indian appeared. One moment the plain was empty, and the next minute there the man was, standing over what appeared to be a dead horse. A swell of the prairie had concealed him. Kit grabbed his rifle but then realized the Indian was only old Greasy Lake, a harmless prophet who was apt to show up anywhere there was a gathering of any size, in hopes of delivering a prophecy or two in exchange for presents. Faintly, over the prairie breeze, Kit could hear the old man chanting. He spread his arms to the heavens and shuffled around the horse, which turned out to be not quite dead after all. Now and then Kit saw the horse raise his head, though it made no move to get up. The horse, if it was Greasy Lake’s same old nag, was as famous in prairie circles as its master. Mountain men who had first seen the animal twenty-five years earlier and had not supposed it could last a week were astonished to discover that the spavined old nag still hadn’t died. Efforts to figure out how old the horse might be revealed only that it had very good teeth for an animal that had been alive so long.

  Kit thought he might as well investigate—it was better than riding on alone, thinking gloomy thoughts. At first Greasy Lake, who, as usual, was in a kind of trance, paid no attention to Kit at all. He was rattling some kind of rattle as he chanted and shuffled. Kit politely drew rein; he didn’t want to interrupt a religious ceremony. Perhaps Greasy Lake was singing his trusty mount a death song—giving him a proper send-off. To Kit’s astonishment the old horse twitched an ear, lifted its head, and slowly got to its feet. Greasy Lake at once stopped chanting. He tucked his rattle into a little pouch he carried and got ready to mount his horse.

  “I wouldn’t do that, Greasy,” Kit advised. “That horse will die for sure if you put any weight on him.”

  “He’s a strong horse,” Greasy Lake assured him. “I just have to sing to him in the mornings, to get him up. He’s a horse who likes to sleep late.”

  “That horse is older than me,” Kit replied.

  The horse did shiver a bit when Greasy Lake climbed on top of him, but no longer seemed to be about to die.

  “That horse beats all,” Kit remarked. “If I thought he had a year left in him I’d trade for him and let you have this expensive mule.”

  Greasy Lake ignored that remark—he was not such a fool as to trade for a stiff-gaited mule. It annoyed Kit that he had chosen a mule that not even this old prophet would take. No one had ever been able to pin down quite what tribe Greasy Lake belonged to—his age, like his horse’s, was also hard to calculate. He claimed to be the cousin of various powerful chiefs, but no one could be sure of the truth of anything he said. Because it was his habit to wander constantly over the West, he was known to everyone, from the Columbia River to the Rio Grande. No tribe claimed him, yet no tribe turned him away.

  “Where are you bound for now?” Kit asked—at least the old fellow was usually good for a little conversation.

  “I am on my way to see the Partezon—he is my cousin,” Greasy Lake replied. “He doesn’t like me but I don’t think he’ll kill me.”

  The Partezon, war chief of the Brulé Sioux, was the most feared Indian in the West. It was the Partezon who had destroyed the steamboat the Berrybenders had been traveling on, once it got stuck in the ice above the Knife River. Fortunately Jim Snow had led most of the party overland to Pierre Boisdeffre’s trading post on the Yellowstone, but Captain George Aitken, several passengers, and a number of engages had been cruelly butchered up.

  “I’ve heard that old Partezon’s mean,” Kit said.

  “He is not friendly,” Greasy Lake admitted. “But now I am on my way to look for some white people who can fly. All the tribes are looking for them. I am going to see the Partezon to see if he knows about these flying men. They fly in a little basket attached to some kind of cloud.”

  Kit wanted to laugh—white people couldn’t fly. Probably the old prophet had gone a little daft.

  “I’ve never seen a white person who could fly,” he remarked. “Where are these fellows supposed to be?”

  “They are flying over the Platte,” Greasy Lake said. “If we watch we might see them.”

  “How close are we to the Partezon’s camp?” Kit asked—even mention of the old warrior’s name caused the prairies to take on an aspect of menace— and now Jim Snow was nowhere to be seen.

  “The Partezon is always moving,” Greasy Lake said vaguely. “He may have gone to see the Bad Eye, to ask him to make a spell that will cause these flying white people to fall out of the sky.”

  Kit had never seen the Bad Eye, an old, huge, gross shaman of the Gros Ventres—he lived near the Missouri River, in a dwelling called the Skull Lodge, the whole top of which was covered with buffalo skulls. Blind from birth, the Bad Eye was said to have hearing so acute that he could identify different kinds of flies just by their buzzing. He was now so fat that he could no longer stand up; when he needed information about some distant happening, he relied on a dark woman named Draga, thought to be a powerful witch and known to be a cruel torturer who had sent many captives to painful deaths, pouring boiling water over them in a mockery of baptism if they were priests, or draping them in ringlets of white-hot hatchets if they were traders who had not been judicious in the distribution of gifts. Bess Berrybender had briefly been Draga’s captive and had suffered many cruelties before she could be ransomed.

  Kit hardly knew what to believe about this story of the flying white men—it sounded like a wild lie, but he was experienced enough in the ways of the wilderness to know that it was unwise to entirely disregard the ravings of old prophets, a few of whom actually had powers whites didn’t possess. When they were camped in the Valley of the Chickens, the Berrybenders still had their old parrot, Prince Talleyrand, who muttered a few words in the German language one day while Greasy Lake was within hearing. Greasy Lake had announced to all the mountain men that the old bird would be dead within the week. Sure enough, less than a week later, a Ute warrior, come to trade, showed up with the head of Prince Talleyrand, which he said he found under a tree—a badger had evidently carried off the rest of the tough old bird.

  The fact that Greasy Lake had predicted the demise of the parrot so accurately convinced Kit that he ought to think twice before rejecting the old man’s prophecies. It occurred to him, as he walked Brantly slowly along beside the old man’s decrepit horse, that there could even be something to this rumor of white men who could fly. He had forgotten about balloons. He himself, in his last visit to Saint Louis, had attended a kind of fair in which a magician of some sort went quite a ways up in the air beneath a hot-air balloon. The balloon went higher than any church steeple in town, but the trick had ended badly when a wind came up and blew the balloonist over toward the Mississippi; when the man finally descended, he plopped straight down into the mudflats and emerged covered with mud. Nonetheless he had flown, riding beneath the balloon in a basket of some sort. Greasy Lake, not being a city dweller, had never witnessed a balloon ascent—what he took to be a cloud was probably the balloon itself, but of course that didn’t explain why people with the ability to make a balloon go up would want to fly it over the Partezon’s country, where there could be few paying customers and a fair chance of being subjected to serious tortures. Could the balloon have been blown off course, as in the case of the Saint Louis magician? After all, a flying basket with some silk puffed up above it could not be particularly easy to control. Maybe the balloonist had had the bad luck to be blown into the Partezon’s hunting territory.

  One result of having to think all this through for himself was that Kit became even more annoyed with Jim Snow for leaving just at a time when two heads might have been better than one.

  ’Aren’t you with the Sin Killer? I thought I saw the tracks of that little mare of his yesterday,” Greasy Lake inquired.

  “I was
with him, but he’s gone off—we’ll be lucky if we catch up with him in a week,” Kit said.

  He had no sooner said it than he was made to feel foolish—Greasy Lake was pointing at something.

  “I don’t think it will take that long,” he said. “Isn’t that him skinning an antelope, over by those rocks? He must have killed the antelope with an arrow. I didn’t hear a shot.”

  Sure enough, there was Jim, plain as day—Kit had been looking in every direction but the right one.

  “It looks like a young antelope—young and tender. We’ll have a good supper,” Greasy Lake said.

  Of course, it was just like this old rascal to invite himself to the feast—Kit supposed Jim would be annoyed when presented with a guest.

  “There’s some men out here flying—I suspect they’ve got a hot-air balloon,” Kit blurted, when they arrived. He hoped this startling news would distract Jim from the fact that he had arrived with an uninvited guest.

  But Jim Snow, to Kit’s surprise, smiled at the old shaman.

  “Get down, Uncle, and rest your horse,” he said. “We got fresh meat.”

  The remark stumped Kit completely. He had seen Jim chatting with the old fellow once or twice when they were camped at the rendezvous, but had never supposed Jim was that friendly with him.

  “How’d he get to be your uncle?” Kit asked, when he dismounted.

  “He kept me from starving when I was with the Osage,” Jim told him. “So I adopted him, once I got grown.”

  “I never knew that,” Kit said, in a reproachful tone.

  “No, but I could fill a barrel with things you don’t know,” Jim remarked.

  “Your friend almost rode past me,” Greasy Lake said. “My horse was laying down at the time.”

  “He’s got good eyesight but sometimes he don’t pay attention,” Jim allowed, with some amusement in his look. “He could be building a fire right now, so we could cook this meat, but I guess he’s feeling sleepy because I don’t see no fire.”

  “I just got here,” Kit pointed out, annoyed. Jim Snow was every bit as bad as his sometime tent mate Jim Bridger; both of them seemed to feel that he had been put on earth expressly to do their chores.

  Greasy Lake was not listening to this irritating palaver. He was giving the antelope skin a close examination.

  “I can use this skin, if you don’t need it,” he said. “My old pouch is wearing out. I could make a nice new one with this good piece of skin.”

  Kit looked around at the bare prairie—he was beginning to wish he had had the good sense to stay with the big group in the Valley of the Chickens, where he would at least have had the beautiful Tasmin to look at. His gloomy feeling was getting worse—there was Jim Snow, an unbending kind of fellow, expecting him to build a fire in a place where there were very few sticks lying around. Of course, there were quite a few buffalo chips, but they yielded a poor grade of fuel, in his view.

  “Greasy’s off to see the Partezon,” Kit informed Jim.

  But Jim, still busy with his butchering, didn’t seem to hear, so Kit, in a lonely mood, took a sack and wandered off to see if he could collect the makings of a fire.

  6

  The day had begun hopefully, too.

  BENJAMIN HOPE-TIPPING, tall and thin, did not much like the looks of the old Indian on the white horse, the one their interpreter, the youth Amboise d’Avigdor, insisted was the dreaded Partezon. Ben looked at his colleague, Clam de Paty a man who usually bubbled over with French witticisms; he saw that Clam was not bubbling at the moment. And the boy Amboise was plainly terrified.

  The day had begun hopefully, too. Clam, something of a dandy, put on his red pants; they had each had a snort of cognac to wake themselves up. Amboise d’Avigdor, a skilled chef, had poached them several plovers’ eggs, which they had with bacon and some of the flat bread Amboise baked in profusion whenever they were stopped long enough to allow him to construct a Dutch oven. A fine breeze was blowing, which helped with the gnats and mosquitoes. For a time he and Clam, each on their old palfreys, had ridden along happily, composing articles in their heads for their respective newspapers. Ben Hope-Tipping had just been composing a few paragraphs about hominy, a dish not then known in Europe; whereas Clam, who had been kept awake part of the night by the roaring of buffalo bulls from a herd of many thousands nearby their camp, was attempting to describe, for his Parisian readership, what the roaring of these bulls, angry in their rut, sounded like on a prairie summer night. The two of them discussed whether it might be worthwhile to include a few notes about burial scaffolds— European readers were always apt to be interested in the burial customs of savage peoples.

  Their balloon and all their gear was stored efficiently in a small wagon, driven by Amboise d’Avigdor, who, in the weeks they had been traveling, had become an expert packer. If one of the surly wagon horses didn’t kick him, Amboise could have the wagon packed and ready in a commendably short time. Of course, one reason Amboise could have the wagon packed in such a short time was that he had become increasingly reluctant to unpack anything at night. They had scarcely left Plattesmouth when Amboise began to argue against the necessity of linen tablecloths and other common amenities, matters which Ben and Clam had long been in the habit of taking for granted.

  “No, messieurs, tablecloths are quite unnecessary out here,” Amboise informed them, on only the second day out. “Quite unnecessary. Nothing is more likely to cause savages to attack than the sight of a white tablecloth.”

  “Surely you jest, monsieur,” Clam had remonstrated—he hardly proposed to abandon the habits of a lifetime, one of which was to dine off white tablecloths—because of the whims of savages. Liberties might be permitted at breakfast, but dinner, to a Frenchman, was a sacrament.

  “I fear I am unwilling to go native quite to that extent,” Clam went on, giving young Amboise a look of such severity that Ben Hope-Tipping supposed the matter to be at an end. He himself felt the same extreme unwillingness to lower his standards, which were no more than the standards of any proper civilization. He was not about to betray his convictions by rashly dispensing with tablecloths.

  Nonetheless, Amboise d’Avigdor soon had his way, dropping, as they plodded along, whatever linen he felt disposed to dispense with off the back of the wagon; by the time Ben and Clam discovered this treachery, the tablecloths were gone and many of the heavy napkins as well.

  “No napkins—we should kill this boy!” the indignant Clam exclaimed. “How does he suppose we are to wipe our faces?”

  “Patience, Clam—I don’t think we should kill him just now, just here!” Ben argued. They were in the middle of a vast prairie, hundreds of miles from any settlement. Matters were inconvenient enough, what with the flies and mosquitoes, and no tablecloths and few napkins; but it was certain that matters would be even more inconvenient if they lost Amboise. They were, at present, in no position to dismiss, much less execute, an insubordinate servant, vexing as the silly creature undoubtedly was.

  The necessity of somehow tolerating Amboise d’Avigdor was almost immediately driven home to the two Europeans—Amboise himself being Canadian—by the abrupt and quite menacing arrival of the Partezon and his highly painted band. A Brulé Sioux named Hollow Foot, returning from a vision quest, had happened to notice a trail of white cloths on the prairie. Hollow Foot had hastened over to the Partezon’s village to inform him of this phenomenon. The Partezon, who considered it his duty to protect the Holy Road— to the whites merely the route along the Platte—was not indifferent to this information. In fact he gave Hollow Foot a nice young wife, for being so good as to make a prompt report. The Partezon paused only long enough to allow his young warriors to paint themselves appropriately. He himself rarely bothered with paint now, but he was happy enough that the boys of the tribe kept to the old traditions.

  Even without the trail of white cloths it was a simple matter to track and overtake the travelers, who were possessed of a slow, heavy cart whose tracks were easily follo
wed. When the Sioux spotted the three travelers, the young warriors wanted to race down and hack them to pieces—it seemed to the Partezon that half his energies as a leader were needed just to restrain the young. Being young, they had little patience with well-planned ambushes or mature battle plans. The young just wanted to strike, and would have under a lesser war chief; but when the Partezon rode with them, they behaved themselves; he had demonstrated many times that he meant to have obedience. Riding with the Partezon was the greatest honor a Sioux warrior could have, but it was also an honor that could be quickly withdrawn.

  The fact that thirty savages seemingly popped out of nowhere and surrounded them came as a considerable shock both to Ben Hope-Tipping and to Clam de Paty. The shock did not serve to increase their already shaky confidence in their interpreter, young Amboise d’Avigdor.

  “I thought you were supposed to know how to deal with Indians,” Hope-Tipping complained, once it became evident that the red men in the war paint were not going to allow them to advance another inch.

  “Well, I do possess some expertise,” Amboise said.

  “I know, for example, that these men are Brulé Sioux and that their leader—that’s the man on the white horse—is the dreaded Partezon.”

  “Still, it’s quite rude of him to arrive unannounced,” Ben pressed. “He seems unwilling to let us pass—why is that? Free country, America, I was led to believe.”

  “I suppose they’ve merely come for their presents,” Clam de Paty remarked. “Give them a few fishhooks and a few handfuls of beads.”

  “Yes, quite—that should make them happy,” Ben said.

  “It won’t make them happy, monsieur,” Amboise remarked, emphatically.

  “But why not? They’re excellent beads and very effective fishhooks,” Ben insisted. “I caught a fish with one of them myself.”