Rocky Mountain Company

by Wheeler, Richard S.

  “Ow!” he cried, jumping up. Blood sprayed everywhere.

  She stood swiftly on numbed limbs and grabbed at him. “Let me look,” she said crossly, half-believing it had been the boy’s fault for trying to help with something he knew nothing about.

  Fitzhugh and the three engagés had finished quartering the cow into huge bloody, snowy chunks, and were loading the last of them. It took three engagés to lift a quarter over the back of the wagon and into its belly.

  “My thumb!” cried Maxim.

  She caught him at last and pried his good right hand from his slashed left one. She could barely see the trouble because of the scarlet blood. But it welled from a deep gash below the lower knuckle. Maxim held back tears and looked frightened.

  She didn’t know how to stop that much bleeding.

  Fitzhugh limped over to them, cursing the snow and his pain-lanced leg. He stared a moment. “Got to stop that fast,” he muttered. “Tourniquet. Sew it up. But we want a needle and thread.” He peered about, looking for something. “Put a hot knife to it, maybe,” he muttered. “You got starter?”

  She shook her head.

  “Somebody’s got a flint,” he roared. The engagés who crowded around Maxim now, shook their heads.

  “Hyar, now,” he said, digging in his kit for an old calico shirt he was using as rifle patching. He tore a generous strip of the green cloth and wrapped it hard around Maxim’s hand, while the boy winced. Tears built under his eyes. Red swiftly spread out upon the green. Then Fitzhugh tore a broader strip and wrapped it around the boy’s upper arm and began twisting it tighter and tighter.

  “It hurts,” Maxim cried.

  “We got to plug up the bleeding. This’ll set you back, some, boy.”

  “I’m bleeding to death!”

  “Go fetch us a good stout stick so’s we can twist it tight,” Fitzhugh said to Provost. The engagé nodded and walked toward a juniper shrub, ax in hand.

  Blood oozed through the bandage and dripped into the snow. Maxim looked pale. Dust Devil stared angrily at him, and then turned back to her butchering. Whitemen were weaklings, she thought, as she began sawing through the brisket again. Time closed in on her now; she had to gut the cows before they froze. Behind her, she heard them working with Maxim, tightening the tourniquet with the stick.

  “I’m going to tie this bandage tight with some whangs,” Brokenleg said. “And then git into the wagon, boy, and outa the wind.”

  When she’d opened up the second cow she plunged her numb hands inside and began tugging at guts, which finally tumbled out and into the snow. Then she turned to the third buffalo and began the whole thing over again, feeling her flesh goosebump and the snow rob the heat at the center of her body. She made little progress because her hands weren’t working right, and it angered her. Maybe they had offended the spirit of this one.

  Brokenleg saw her struggling, and the pathetic cut she’d started in the freezing animal. “Git aside,” he said roughly. She glared and delayed as long as she could as a matter of pride, and because it felt good to resist him. But finally she stood up, knife in hand, her skirts covered with frozen bloody muck.

  “Guerette, Provist, turn her on her back,” he said. The engagés grabbed legs and pulled at the cow. Fitzhugh’s axe slashed down, chopping straight into the chest, and then he whacked his way down the brisket with savage strokes, opening the cow in seconds, the stiffness of the half-frozen flesh helping him complete the crude cut. Then, with a grim determination, he hacked out the innards, and began quartering the cow, completing the whole business swiftly. They loaded the snow-caked quarters, while Maxim huddled at the front end of the wagon, and without a moment’s delay, Provost began whipping the reluctant oxen into the northern gale.

  She knew she must walk, move, run before she froze. The wind didn’t seem terribly cold, but the snow had wormed its way into her hair, and down her moccasins, and up her legs, and down her neck, melting into icy water that sucked heat from her. Heading into the storm felt terrible. The oxen bawled and rebelled, not wanting to walk that direction, but slowly the burdened wagon creaked through snow, leaving sharp trenches behind it.

  Ahead, Fitzhugh on his horse broke trail on one side, while Gallard, beside him, broke trail on the other. As light dimmed they pierced into the mouth of the storm, grimly northbound up the bottoms along a vanished trace. After a while Fitzhugh halted, letting the oxen sag in their yokes, and clambered painfully into the wagon.

  “I got to let some blood through, Maxim.”

  She peered into the gloom, over the pile of meat, and saw him loosening the tourniquet.

  “How does it feel, boy?”

  “It prickles. I’m so cold.”

  “Let’s see that paw.”

  Fitzhugh examined the bloody bandage. “Plumb froze up. It ain’t bleein’ anyway. You’ll be all right.”

  “I feel sick.”

  “Well, that’s natural. We’ll git on home, if we can see our way.”

  “What’s home?” Maxim asked bitterly.

  “I reckon they’ve got another tent rigged up and some dandy fires roarin’. And the other wagon’s got the sheet on it too. It’s not a house, but it’ll do. And this’ll blow off in a few days.”

  Fitzhugh twisted the stick tight again. “You can do this yourself, boy. Every fifteen, twenty minutes. Let her bleed. And if your hand don’t start up leakin’ again, maybe you can quit the tourniquet pretty soon.”

  “I’m so cold. And hot.”

  “Stomp around some. Walk when you can.”

  But Maxim didn’t respond.

  Guerette and Provost whipped and hawed the snow-caked oxen again, driving into a deepening dusk, and the wagon creaked forward. Once the wagon lurched violently, tilting to the left and then slowly righting itself. A wheel had dropped into a snowfilled hole. She wondered if they knew where they were going. How easy this would have been with a few horses and travois, she thought angrily. They struck a mass of trees and veered away from it, a sure sign they were no longer on the well-worn trace. The snow ceased to sting her face, though it whirled in, and she realized her skin had ceased to feel. Even her eyelids caught the hard flakes and held them.

  An ox fell, dragging its yokemate down also. Engagés poked and prodded, but it lay in the snow unmoving and uncaring.

  “Get shut of it,” Fitzhugh commanded. Weary engagés, floating like ghosts in the last light, unhooked the front yoke to get at the middle one, and freed the downed ox from the heavy wooden collar twisting its neck as it lay on the ground. Not even when freed did it stand, and neither did its mate. It took precious time, and the last of the light, to work the wagon and remaining yokes around the unbudging ones.

  “I’m ridin’ ahead to git some help,” Fitzhugh said. “Don’t whip these others too much. We got to save them so’s we can git out and trade. We’re not far now.”

  He vanished into a cavernous gloom while the rest stood around, not knowing whether to keep walking and stomping and running to stay warm, or whether to crawl in beside Maxim, where at least the stinging wind didn’t probe through every layer they wore. They crawled in, stumbling over the mountains of meat, and collected at the front of the box in the icy calm.

  “I want to go home,” Maxim mumbled.

  She settled beside him, discovering not warmth but at least respite from the brutal blowing snow, and not comfort but less pain. Right now, she thought, they could be in the warm, lined lodges of her people, sitting around crackling fires, listening to the wind chatter the smoke flaps. They could have traded all they brought to her people, and have a great pile of fine robes to take back to the whiteman’s world. And her people could have been well armed with rifles and powder and ball to make them strong against their enemies. But instead of listening to her, these pale ones all huddled here without a fire, some of them on the very edge of crossing into the other world.

  She knew she’d had her fill of this. A desolating loneliness settled on her, and along with it a
yearning for her village, her people. The vision of her father and mother and clan grew so powerful she gasped inwardly, filled with the light, filled with medicine. She remembered the warmth of the lodgefires, and how the cowhide cones caught and held the heat, and vented the pungent smoke through the windflaps. She thought of proud, lean warriors the color of her own flesh, muscles rippling along powerful torsos, warriors who knew how to hunt and kill and protect the old ones and the very young, and bring home gifts to their happy women. Some had courted her once, played their flutes before Fitzhugh had come.

  But then the happy imaginings of her mind slipped away, and the dark coldness returned. If she lived through this night, she would leave him.

  Fifteen

  * * *

  The stupid bay offered no help. It had one notion in its thick skull, and that was to turn its tail to the wind and stinging snow. Fitzhugh hadn’t any idea where he’d wandered, except that it wasn’t far from the camp. He reckoned they’d travelled most of two hours before the oxen gave out.

  The wind had sluiced the heat out of him, yanking his coat back and sliding icy fingers across his ribs and down his neck. His leg had stopped hurting and that was always a danger sign. Only the wind gave him direction, but it came in gusts and eddied from the side. He could see nothing: the whiteness of the snow was little help beneath the massed stormclouds. The snow looked as black as everything else.

  The horse stopped again and refused to heed the prompting of his heel. He reined the animal slightly left and tried again, and the horse walked forward a few steps. A branch whipped across his face, stinging him. Cottonwoods. He’d probably drifted toward the river. It came to him that he couldn’t find his way forward or backward, and might die. He’d been in tight corners in the mountains, more of them than he could count, and he knew this one had turned dangerous. He’d gone to the Rocky Mountain College, as the beaver men had called it — the only college where a student graduated or died. He cursed himself for not taking the simplest precautions, such as bringing a flint and striker, and a coal oil lantern. And for leaving the others and the safety of the canvas-covered wagon with its puckerholes drawn tight against the wind.

  Well, the graduating class at that college learned one thing: never to give up. Even then more than a few went under, and for a moment he played the rollcall through his mind, solitary trappers, partnered trappers, men who rode out of the rendezvous in the summer and never came back. He knew his fingers were frostbitten, and the end of his nose, and his toes weren’t far from it. It angered him, and anger felt good when he could feel nothing else.

  He yanked the horse left until he felt the northwind savaging his right cheek and neck, and then kicked it brutally with his good leg. His horse had to learn to take one-boot commands. The river. The horse shied and stopped. Fitzhugh booted it. The horse stumbled forward, dodged what had to be a great cottonwood, and stopped. Brokenleg kicked again. They made progress through the cottonwoods. He knew they were among them by the lash of branches. Once a limb brained and almost unseated him.

  He heard water ahead, a soft mocking ripple, just as the horse minced down a slippery slope and stopped suddenly. They stood on a bank, but he had no idea how it dropped to the river or how deep the Bighorn ran. He cursed, and kicked the horse again. It shrieked, plunged down a black abyss and into water, almost toppling him. Fitzhugh had no idea how high it came, but it wasn’t high enough to wet his boots or bother the horse. A path, then, unless he hit a sinkhole and got dead-wet. He sawed the rein, pulling the horse to the right, into the wind, and down the river, and kicked it into a ginger walk. He heard it splash, felt it slide and slip, but each step took him toward his camp and the fire he knew had to be there — if he could see it through the snow. Ten frozen minutes later, by his reckoning, he discerned an orange glow back from the bank on his right, a glow softened by a veil of white. He turned the stupid horse toward the bank and grabbed the horn of his Santa Fe saddle, knowing what to expect. The horse gathered itself and leaped, throwing him back into the cantle, and then shook water off itself in the middle of some sort of whipping, stabbing brush that flailed the animal and Fitzhugh. A minute later he rode up to the fire and into the stare of Samson Trudeau.

  “Thank God, monsieur,” he said. “In a few minutes I would have started hunting with a lantern. But no one knew the way — “

  Another mistake, Brokenleg thought. Not telling them where he’d shot the buffalo. “Wagon’s a mile south, maybe. We’ll need a fresh yoke if you can get them. And a lantern.” He looked around the camp. Some of his men huddled near the guttering fire, sheltered by the wagonsheet tent. Others peered out of the wagon. “Maxim’s hurt. Others half froze. Lost two ox. We got three buffler.”

  But big, competent Trudeau had already turned away to issue commands. Fitzhugh clambered down, almost too stiff to move, and fell into the snow when his bad leg buckled under him. He got up and limped to the fire, finding little heat in it as the wind flailed it, and more than enough smoke to sting his eyes. He wished he could squat and hold his hands to it. Around him men raced swiftly, good uncomplaining men willing to do brutal work for a pittance. He wondered what brought them here, into an utter wild. Not money, certainly. Something else.

  Yoked oxen materialized out of the whirl, and men helped him back up upon his bay, while two of them bearing glassencased lanterns broke a snow trail south. He followed silently, glad that he’d made it through another final examination at the mountain college. But he didn’t deserve the passing grade.

  Harried by the wind, they reached the stranded wagon in a short time. The remaining two yoke of oxen had swung eastward, trying to put their tails to the wind. The snowy hulks of the downed oxen lay where they had fallen. Meat, Fitzhugh thought, if the cold held. Or maybe Dust Devil could jerk it.

  Wordlessly, Dust Devil, Guerette, Provost and Gallard clambered out of the wagon, blinking at the lantern-light in the whirl of snow.

  “Maxim all right?”

  “He’s not bleeding,” she said.

  The answer annoyed Fitzhugh, but he said nothing. Wordlessly, the rescue party backed the fresh oxen into place and attached the tugs, while others cracked whips and yelled at the miserable animals. From behind, the rest of the engagés pushed against the Pittsburgh until it creaked forward, a reluctant monster bucking the gale. They had to keep on pushing because the oxen weren’t helping much. Fitzhugh walked his horse ahead, carrying a lantern, following the trail back and breaking it better. The wind tortured his face and hand, but it didn’t matter. In a few days it’d be mild and sunny again.

  The engagés cursed and whipped the animals back to camp in a few minutes and stopped the wagon at a place where it’d soften the wind that skimmed heat off the fire and flapped the tent. Silently, the engagés unyoked the oxen and let them drift into the cottonwoods, where they’d find shelter and branches to nibble.

  “We got to git the meat out,” Fitzhugh muttered to Trudeau.

  The engagé eyed him sharply, dreading to ask it of the rest.

  “If that heap in there freezes solid, we’ll never get it out,” Fitzhugh said.

  Wearily, grunting men lifted the quarters up, and dropped them into the snow, while others dragged them into a line, each giant piece separate. They’d have to hang it all, make it wolfproof, but not tonight. As soon as they were done, they crawled into the other wagon and pulled the canvas shut.

  “Maxim, lad. You can stay in a wagon where there’s no fire and no wind, or you can try the tent, where we got both. I’m thinkin’ you might try the fire, even if she mostly blows smoke at you.”

  From within, he heard a soft shuffle, and then Maxim’s bundled face popped into the firelight, and he clambered out, hunching against the wind. He’d removed his tourniquet and no blood oozed from the frozen bandage. Fitzhugh threw an arm around Guy Straus’s boy and helped him toward the fire and the tent.

  “I’m so cold,” Maxim said.

  “Lost some blood.”

&nbs
p; He settled the lad on the north side of the fire, in the throat of the tent, hoping the fire’s radiant heat would warm him.

  “I didn’t know it snowed so soon here.”

  “Equinox storm. Common in these parts. We got a fine fall comin’ to finish the post.”

  “Now I’m no good to you.”

  “What do ya mean, no good? I got to have a herder, lad. Dust Devil needs her a helper, too. She’ll jerk meat and you can lay it on the drying racks with your good paw.”

  Behind him, Dust Devil scraped snow from the ground. “We could be in a warm lodge,” she muttered. “This no good for anybody. I’m cold.”

  Maxim settled to the frozen, snow-flecked earth and drew his capote tighter around him. Fitzhugh added a blanket.

  “The cold comes up from underneath,” Maxim said.

  “Whitemen got no sense,” Dust Devil snapped. “Maybe I’ll go to my people. They’re plenty warm, and happy.”

  Fitzhugh had heard that often enough before, and ignored it. “We got meat. Now I can help build, Maxim. I’ll mix mud and before you know it, we’ll have walls, good and tight against the wind. And a pole roof with a foot of sod over it. Big fireplaces that’ll take a six-foot log and warm you front and rear, top and bottom. And a bunk of your own.”

  He dreamed warmth because he needed it himself, the way a starving man dreams of food. And because Maxim needed it, too. Cold and injury, the slow progress of the building, as well as the terrible losses of tradegoods all had taken a toll of Maxim’s spirit.

  A whorl of arctic air dashed smoke into him, and he coughed. “I reckon Dust Devil’s right about a lodge, Maxim. They can be plumb warm in the winter; if the inner lining’s up and some robes and mats are on the ground, and a hot little fire burns away at the center. The Injuns got their ways.”

  “I’ll never see papa and maman again,” Maxim said.