“Load the wagons,” Fitzhugh said quietly. “I want everything that can be rain-damaged — the ribbons and tradecloth especially — under the sheets right away. That, plus the fusils, powder — and those casks of turpentine and vinegar. We’ll load tonight, and leave at dawn.”
But no one moved. The wilderness closed about them suddenly, a chill on the hot summer’s air. He heard crickets. Something splashed on the river, a dusk-hunter. After the daily hum of the boat, comforting in its way, the smallest sounds of nature seemed alarming. Even the snort and snuffle of horses grazing made him jumpy, and set engagés into spasms of watchfulness. Far away, up on a bluff somewhere north, a coyote barked just once. Men peered fearfully into the surrounding cottonwoods, whose thick canopy plunged the ground at their feet into blackness.
“Monsieur Fitzhugh,” said Trudeau softly. “I think while a bit of light remains, the men might reconnoiter the woods, and the grass here, and see what is best to hold the livestock. We don’t have hobbles.”
“Do it,” Fitzhugh snapped. He’d had the same notion himself, getting oriented, probing outward, looking to defenses. Ten men, even armed with good percussion locks, weren’t much of a force.
Dust Devil watched them all disdainfully. She looked utterly at home here; in fact, everything had reversed. She’d been uncomfortable in St. Louis and on the riverboat but once she set foot on land under the benign watch of Sweet Medicine, all that had changed. It suddenly occurred to Fitzhugh, as he watched her wicked grin, that she would come to him one of these nights full of fierce passion and joy.
“Monsieur Trudeau,” he added, as men fanned out quietly, “we’ve all spent our lives in places like this.”
They were back in ten or fifteen minutes, having probed out to the looming bluff and the silent trace below it to their satisfaction. The golden moon afforded enough light to load up the wagons with the important and vulnerable things to be taken on the first passage. The livestock settled down to contented grazing, freed at last of the miserable confines of the packet.
By the time the day faded into a faint blue memory on the northwestern horizon, they’d made a camp of sorts. But not a comfortable or cheery one because he’d banned fires, and mosquitos whined like bullets around them. The Creoles brooded, which was quite unlike them. He’d expected quiet humor, small ribald jokes. Still, they’d done what they could. He’d appointed two men to each of the watches and made sure they were well armed. He himself would take the third watch. There’d be only five hours of true darkness in this northern clime, this time of year.
It irked him that LaBarge had pulled out so fast. That the captain had been cool to him ever since Fort Union. Brokenleg resolved to tell Guy Straus about it. There wasn’t even a parting drink, a round of spirits, a warm clasp of hands, a big hooraw, the way it had happened at the rendezvous when things were breaking up until the next year. No. Just some tart, hasty au revoir. He got the feeling that the master didn’t like him. Well, too bad. Maybe he didn’t like that master and his thieving blanket-stealing crew.
The river glittered by, bouncing stars off its oily surface, on its long, mysterious passage to the sea. Somewhere to the south and west snow from the gulches of towering mountains, the backbone of the continent, melted into rivulets that found their way to tributaries and finally to the Yellowstone — the Elk River, the Crows and Blackfeet called it — and on to the Missouri, still snow-cold and crystalline. And then at some unfathomable moment, having tumbled down a continent, these waters flowed, warm and muddy, into the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans. A light steamer could come the whole distance bringing goods from anywhere. From England. From Europe. Independence lay some unspeakable distance down its path, and beyond it St. Louis, farther than a man could walk in many months. The rivers were a golden cord stretching from this silent wilderness back to a land of brick buildings and frame houses, places he didn’t like much, but whose steel and gunpowder he badly needed.
“Sweet Medicine,” said Dust Devil, breaking into his sad reverie. “Ah, it is good. My people aren’t far. Maybe along the Powder. I can almost tell you where, even though I can’t see them. See, Fitzhugh, this is the place where Sweet Medicine sees me. If Crow dogs come, we will kill them.”
“I reckon we won’t,” he retorted. “We’re gonna trade fair and square. You got to cut that out.”
She laughed, disdain back in her throat. “Well then, we’ll kill Assiniboin. Or Blackfeet. Or Gros Ventre. Or Hidatsa. All dogs.”
“You’re a bloodthirsty whelp tonight.”
“Tonight I am home.”
“I reckon you are, and I reckon there’s a few around hyar who’d like to lift your scalp.”
“Not as much as they’d like yours — what’s left of it, redhair.”
“I ain’t got me enough up front to scalp.”
She laughed, a child’s glee silvering out into the night, caught his hand with one of hers, snatched up their robe with the other, and dragged him along the bank to a hummock where tall grasses grew thick.
* * *
No tribulation on earth could stay the swift blossoming of Brokenleg Fitzhugh’s soul. It began, actually, with the departure of the Platte, although he’d been too irked and worried to notice. But the next day broke upon joy, and not even the maddening difficulties and delays involved with yoking oxen and harnessing mules, assigning engagés to wagons, and choosing the two who would stay behind, could arrest the sweetness of this life in the wilds that began to percolate through his hot blood.
They made sixteen miles that day, by Fitzhugh’s reckoning, along a trail that had never seen a wheeled vehicle. The trace along the south bank of the Yellowstone had been cut by buffalo and other animals, widened by horseback Indians, and rutted by the poles of countless travois. Only now and then did sagebrush or juniper or a fallen cottonwood log impede their progress. And none of these bothered him in the slightest.
He didn’t understand what pressures he’d been wrestling with until he no longer felt them. Even the riverboat, that last vestige of polite society and manners, had managed to bottle him up, force him into a taut silence, and build in him a dour, rank sullenness. He scarcely paused to consider his own mood. Overland travel had been torture for him ever since he’d ruined his left leg. He had a special saddle with a long left stirrup to accommodate that stiff limb, but it didn’t save him from pain. He could take only two hours of that sort of torture, and then he had to tie his horse to a wagon, and slide aboard until its jarring had tortured his leg in new ways.
But the odd thing was, he didn’t mind it. He scouted ahead as much as his leg permitted, and when pain drove him back to a wagon, Dust Devil automatically rode ahead, her skirts hiked high and her jet hair blowing wild as the wind. His attention had returned to an older, atavistic, primitive knowing of the land. He read the circling bald eagle with his eyes, spotted a purple summer thunderhead off to the south, watched a pair of whitebellied antelope skitter up a long slope and then pause on its crest to watch the strange procession of carts, things new to antelope-eyes. Once he watched the two spare horses lay back their ears and stare into a cottonwood copse, and he knew intuitively they’d scented or sensed a catamount in there. That day, like the ones before it, burnt hot and breathless through the afternoon, but the dry air sucked the sweat away as fast as it formed, and he scarcely knew discomfort.
By that evening he should have been exhausted, but he wasn’t; he felt elated. His engagés were savvy about the ways of the wilderness and didn’t shy from the toil it required. Like Brokenleg, they belonged here and knew what to do without being asked; knew how to remove obstacles from the trail, how to sound a bottom and a ford, how to rest the sweating, lowing oxen and comfort the nervous mules. He let Samson Trudeau choose the stopping place, and the engagé did it expertly, on a grassy flat in a vast side-coulee where bluffs would conceal their fires and the livestock could be easily herded. The place lay higher and drier than the Yellowstone bottom, and there was not a mosquit
o to torment them. Men and stock would sleep well.
“You are happy,” Dust Devil said to him in the lavender twilight.
It startled him. “I cain’t rightly say I noticed it. My haid’s been full of stuff. You know. Getting the goods shelved, fixing up the old place, getting word out to the — the tribes. Sending the wagons back for the next. Who should go, who should stay. Trading. Gettin’ that first robe through the window and giving out something for it. We’ll be manned pretty thin — but, yeah, I’m feeling perky at that.”
“It is because you’re here. You don’t like it back there with all the whitemen and the cities. Not even the riverboat.”
“I reckon that’s it.”
“I hardly know you back there. You were different. Now you’re Cheyenne like me.”
“Reckon so.”
She’d put it into some sort of words for him, and after that he knew what was happening inside of himself each day and they toiled west and south, day by day. They hit a hailstorm one day and soggy ground the next, which mired the iron tires and exhausted the oxen and mules. They had a bad time fording the Powder, quicksand sucking at hooves and wheels, and had to double-team once to drag a mired wagon out. They saw a barechested horseman atop a bluff on the north side of the river one day, and knew they’d been observed. One day they couldn’t make meat, and gobbled down oat gruel boiled from precious stores. Four of the oxen were rebellious and troublemakers, and the engagés fought among themselves to avoid having to use them. Brokenleg established a system of rotation, so that the troublesome beasts were inflicted evenly on each pair of engagés. And through it all, Brokenleg felt restraints falling away like dead leaves, and he was discovering that even the annoyances didn’t bother him.
One day while he was resting on a wagon, Dust Devil rode back to him with a wild joy illumining her face. “A village of the People ahead. They’re gone now but they were there.”
He rode ahead of the wagons with her to the bank of the Tongue River, and she showed him the site. It’d been some village all right. The grass was clipped down; white bones lay about; teepee rings remained in large concentric circles across the open flat.
“How do you know it’s the People?” he asked.
“I know.”
“Could be Sioux. They’re some like your Cheyenne.”
“It was the People.”
“You figger out how you know, cause I want to learn it. Maybe it smells right.”
“Smell! Smell! The People don’t smell. Whitemen stink. Crows smell like dog-vomit.”
He laughed. “You smell some, at least on Sundays and Tuesdays,” he said, but she whirled her spotted mare and rode off, indignant. Before they’d gone down to St. Louis, they’d spent many of their waking hours insulting each other and laughing. He hadn’t even been aware it had stopped, or that it had started up again.
They’d planned to camp at the Tongue that night but pushed on two extra miles to get to fresh grass. That made another night without meat because whoever’d camped there had driven it miles away.
Through the fat long days of July they toiled westward, fording the Rosebud and then Sarpy, closing in on the place where they would start a trading post. The oxen were thinning down but the mules showed little sign of their long toil. Fitzhugh eyed the stock warily, hoping it’d last out the return trips. He worried about the mountain of goods left behind, and the two left to guard it; but he could do nothing, and it didn’t pay to let a thing like that nag at him.
They made their last camp about eight or ten miles from the Bighorn, he reckoned. One more day, at any rate. That evening they stopped right beside the Yellowstone, surrounded by thick brown grass, with scarcely a tree in sight. Some places along the wide river were like that. He’d shot a buffalo cow there; a good, careful shot that struck right behind the shoulder, where his fifty-two-caliber ball would have the greatest effect, and had it half butchered when the wagons pulled up. That seemed fitting enough — a buffalo feast on the last night out, to celebrate the start of the Buffalo Company’s new post. The engagés rejoiced but Dust Devil turned solemn, and he couldn’t fathom it.
“I don’t want any,” she said, and refused to touch even the succulent humpmeat, or tongue.
He shrugged, wondering if it had to do with that mirage way back down the river, when they stood on the hurricane deck and watched all the buffalo march into a hole in the sky.
“It’s sacred!” she cried, angrily.
The next day, a rare overcast one in which July seemed to vanish and the Moon when the Chokecherries Ripen replaced it somehow, she remained sullen and stayed by herself, as if the company of whitemen was as loathsome as the Spirits she feared so much, which lived under the earth. The chill day delighted the engagés, and made life sweeter for the livestock, and they made good time. Trudeau, who knew the country well, thought they’d reach Fort Cass by mid-afternoon.
Brokenleg didn’t sense that anything was amiss until he began to smell woodsmoke, faint and pungent and elusive, on the air rolling out of the west, upriver. A village, he supposed, right there on the confluence of the Bighorn and the Yellowstone, always a choice place to dwell, with its ample fuel and grass. He hoped the good buffalo grass around the fort and the nearby hills wouldn’t be eaten off by the herds of whatever village it might be.
By noon the woodsmoke smell had grown stronger, and Dust Devil had grown more sullen.
“Absaroka,” she muttered, and he couldn’t imagine why she said it. Certainly a little smoke in the air didn’t provide the clue. The engagés smelled the smoke, too, and looked a little fearful.
“Trudeau, tell them to relax. We’re traders, not soldiers. They can be armed if they want, but I want those weapons sheathed.”
Trudeau walked among the wagons and the gaunted teams, giving the solemn engagés the word.
They’d been discovered now. Horsemen up on the hills above the broad valley watched and waited, in twos and threes.
“Absaroka!” Dust Devil spat, a loathing underlying the name.
Nonetheless, Fitzhugh led the wagons upriver, even while knots of almost naked warriors rode out to escort them, smiling, pointing, guessing at the contents of the giant wagons, exclaiming at the strange sight of yoked oxen and harnessed gray mules dragging the giant boxes toward the village.
“I reckon they’re camped around Fort Cass outa habit,” he said to Trudeau. “We’ll just drive on up to the fort and claim it, and you and the rest can start unloading while I palaver with their headman. Stroke a luck, actually. We got us a whole blooming Crow village to trade robes with, fast as we can get the stuff on the shelves.”
They rounded a last headland looming up on the south, and beheld a vast village, with lodges everywhere, dimpling the broad flats under a low gray sky. A skim of gray smoke layered over the encampment. He glanced at Dust Devil, who stared at the sight angrily, withdrawn into herself, like a nun in a bawdyhouse, he thought, amused. From everywhere, Crow people tumbled out to see the amazing sight, these white-sheeted monsters pulled by slavering whitemen’s buffalo. A happy crowd, he thought, enjoying the bright children, the little lads naked but the girls in skirts, and the broad-cheeked young women, laughing and pointing and obviously guessing at the mysteries within the wagons.
They rode down a sort of street, exciting yellow curs, which barked at strange sights; past smoke-blackened lodges of cowhide, with medicine tripods before them, the doors of the lodges all facing east to greet Sun and bless the lodge.
Ahead lay Fort Cass, on barren land stripped of the cottonwoods that once surrounded it, the palisades silvery in the gray light. It excited him. The post! They’d restore it, renew it, clean the cobwebs and rattlers out of it, sweep the dirt floors of its warehouse, chase away the small wild things that had taken it over . . .
It flew two flags.
It took him a long, dark moment to register it. One was the familiar Stars and Stripes. He closed his eyes, half-wild. The other pennant was the familiar ensign o
f the Chouteaus.
He paused on his slat-ribbed horse, his leg aching suddenly, staring at this apparition. Fort Cass had been put back into service. Its giant doors had been rehung. The hardused grassy meadow around the fort had been ground down to tawny dust. His heart sank at the sight. This was no Crow village; it was Fort Cass doing a booming trade with the Crow nation.
As he sat his horse, gaping, a brown-bearded man emerged, a man with bright black eyes and a sharp cruel twist of lip. Julius Hervey.
Nine
* * *
Oh, the waiting was hard. In spite of all his careful planning, he hadn’t counted on this, the daily toll upon his health and mind simply from waiting for news, and keeping his imaginings under control. Guy Straus had a vivid imagination, especially when it came to calamity — shipwreck, Indian trouble, pox or cholera . . .
He’d kept busy, of course. Most days brought some business, in the form of currency exchange. His ability to change reals and pesos into dollars was valued in frontier St. Louis, as was his ability to convert buffalo robes into gold, or wolf pelts into iron kettles. The thrust of business kept him from worrying too much about his sons, especially Maxim, out there in a land no one but a few trappers knew. But he had bad moments, especially when Yvonne’s worrying undermined his own optimism, most often at night as they snuffed the last candle and the torrent of doubt flowed from her like ink into the dark.
Oh, there’d been things to do. He’d contacted a French-Osage métis and offered him fifty dollars to cut five hundred selected sticks of osage orange, all prime bow wood, and deliver them bundled into hundreds to his agent at Westport. The thought of trading a prime buffalo robe, worth four dollars in the east for a stick of supple yellowish wood worth a few cents, pleased him. In fact, it tickled him because it gave them an edge, at least for a while, against Pierre Chouteau le Cadet and all his numerous family and Creole relatives and allies by marriage, and loyal retainers.
Rocky Mountain Company Page 9
