Heaven Is a Long Way Off

by Win Blevins

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  To Meredith,

  all my harem in one

  Rideo ergo sum.

  (I laugh, therefore I am.)

  —Hannibal McKye

  Contents

  A Note About History

  Introductory Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About History

  This book begins by following the second journey of the Rocky Mountain fur traders to California, a major event in their history, and then swings into the further adventures of Sam Morgan, which are imaginary.

  The events involving Jedediah Smith, especially the massacre and escape at the Mojave villages, are dramatized on the basis of the documentation we have. The quotations from his journal are what he wrote. The captain’s troubles in California are depicted accurately; his epistle in Chapter Ten, while invented, is based on a letter he did write.

  The picture of Nuevo Mexico in 1828 is drawn from history, including the sketch of the Indian slave trade, which was horrific, and continued under American rule and even beyond the Civil War.

  Likewise my depictions of the fur trade at this time, and of the rendezvous of 1828, are intended seriously.

  The heart and soul of this novel, and of all in the series, is the heart and soul of Sam Morgan.

  Introductory Note

  Okay, you’re in a spot. Here you hold the fourth novel in a series in your hands. (I hope they’re eager hands.) You have no way to know what wild adventures you’ve missed in the first three volumes, what achievement and failures the Rocky Mountain fur trapper Sam Morgan has marched through. You don’t know his friends or enemies, his loves or his dislikes, his heart, his soul.

  Here are some notes to help you get started.

  Synopses of the First Three Volumes, 1822–1827

  In So Wild a Dream, challenged by the half-breed Hannibal, Sam follows his heart west. After traveling to St. Louis with the con man Grumble and the madam Abby, he goes to the Rocky Mountains with a fur brigade and begins to learn the ways of the trappers and the Indians. At the end he is forced to walk seven hundred miles alone, lost and starving, to the nearest fort.

  In Beauty for Ashes, Sam courts the Crow girl Meadowlark. Helping Sam in a daring feat to win her hand, one of her brothers is killed. Seeking peace, Sam goes through the rigors of a sun dance, and Meadowlark elopes with him. Her family takes her back by force and kicks Sam out of the village. But Meadowlark runs away to join Sam, and at the trapper rendezvous they are married.

  Dancing with the Golden Bear launches Sam and Meadowlark to California with a fur brigade. After terrible hardships crossing the desert, they reach the Golden Clime and the ocean. But Meadowlark dies in childbirth. As he embarks on a harrowing journey across the Sierra Nevada and the deserts beyond, Sam passes through the dark night of the soul.

  Cast of Characters

  of the

  Three Preceding Books

  SAM MORGAN, an eighteen-year-old Pennsylvanian who leaves home for the Rocky Mountains.

  HANNIBAL MCKYE, a scholar and an Indian, born to a Dartmouth professor and a Delaware woman. He’s also a former trainer of circus horses.

  GRUMBLE, a con man of erudition and style.

  ABBY, a beautiful and clever madam.

  MEADOWLARK, a Crow girl who marries Sam.

  BLUE MEDICINE HORSE and FLAT DOG, her brothers.

  GRAY HAWK and NEEDLE, her parents.

  RED ROAN, son of the Crow chief and rival for Meadowlark’s hand.

  GIDEON POORBOY, a bear of a French-Canadian, Sam’s trapping partner.

  SUMNER, a slave who claims his freedom and follows Grumble into the con life.

  JULIA RUBIO, daughter of a California don, later Flat Dog’s wife.

  CESAR RUBIO, her father, owner of Rancho Malibu.

  COY, Sam’s pet coyote. In a huge prairie fire Coy led Sam to safety inside the carcass of a buffalo, and they’ve been inseparable since.

  PALADIN, Sam’s mare, trained in the skills of circus horses.

  Historical Characters

  JEDEDIAH SMITH, an educated and religious Yankee, one of the principal leaders of the mountain men, later co-owner of the main trapping firm.

  WILLIAM ASHLEY, the entrepreneur who opens most of the West to beaver trapping.

  JAMES CLYMAN, a trapper friend of Sam’s who sometimes tells the stories of Shakespeare’s plays.

  JIM BECKWOURTH, a mulatto and a trapping companion of Sam’s.

  TOM FITZPATRICK, an Irishman who becomes a brigade leader.

  JIM BRIDGER, trapper, brigade leader, and yarner extraordinaire.

  BILL SUBLETTE, a trapper and partner of Jedediah Smith.

  HARRISON ROGERS, ROBERT EVANS, SILAS GOBEL, and other trappers of the California brigades.

  FATHER JOSÉ SANCHEZ, head of the mission at San Gabriel, California.

  One

  THEY WERE LATE arriving, and the last of the sunlight spread red-gold across the summits of the western mountains. A fresh, damp smell lifted up off the river, a promise of a blessing as evening came to the desert. A breeze stirred among the willow branches along the banks. The finger-shaped leaves caught the light of the sun and tossed it, red-gold-green, into the soft evening air.

  Along the top ridges the cinnamon mountains turned the color of candied apples, and grew amethyst shadows on their lower slopes. The Colorado flexed and muttered on its journey from the mountains to the sea.

  Sam Morgan looked around. Again he found the desert strange and alluring. He said to himself, What the hell am I doing here?

  “On the adventure,” said Hannibal. Sam’s friend had an irritating habit of reading his thoughts.

  Village leaders were riding out to meet them. It would be impolite to go closer to the village before courtesies were exchanged. Impolite even though these were the Mojave villages, where the fur brigade had spent a couple of weeks last autumn and knew the Indians were friendly. So Sam, Hannibal, and Captain Jedediah Smith sat their mounts in this place. Sam cursed. He squirmed in the saddle, itchy from his own sweat after the long ride. His pet coyote, Coy, sat in the shade of a creosote bush and panted.

  “There’s a sorry piece of the adventure.”

  Sam turned his head. A few paces into the brush three Mojave boys had built a small fire and were torturing horny toads.

  The biggest boy reached into a hide bag, plucked out a toad, flat and ugly and the
size of a palm. The creature had daggerlike spikes all around its head, and it was fighting its captor.

  The boy laughed and threw the toad onto the fire.

  Coy barked.

  The toad skittered out of the fire like a stone hopping across water.

  The smallest boy snatched the toad up and held it close to his nose. The toad sprouted blood from its eyes—Sam had seen this trick before. The boy jumped and threw the toad into the air.

  Another boy snatched the creature on the fly and tossed it onto the fire.

  The small boy wiped blood off his nose and grinned.

  The toad came lickety-split out of the flames and slithered under another boy’s knee. The boy grabbed the toad coming out the back side.

  Coy squealed, like a plea for mercy.

  A picture floated into Sam’s mind—damnedest thing, he couldn’t imagine why. He saw his infant daughter suckling at the breast of Sam’s…

  Meadowlark. Dead.

  He shook his head to make the picture go away. But it stayed right where it was.

  The biggest boy took the toad from the younger one and dropped it into the flames.

  This time it first blew itself up big, and then, amazingly, never moved again.

  Coy growled.

  Sam started to rein his horse toward the boys. Hannibal put his hand out—no. Sam stopped. “What made them like that?” whispered Sam.

  “A bad one leading good ones,” said Hannibal.

  Sam’s eyes asked for help. Sometimes Hannibal knew things. Some of the men called him Mage, short for magician.

  “Let’s go,” said Jedediah.

  Sam handed Paladin’s reins to the magician and fell in behind Captain Smith on foot. About fifty yards off several leaders of the tribe waited to meet the trappers, and beyond them on the willow flat Sam could see the brush huts and crop fields of the village.

  Safety, he thought.

  Sam took a last glance at the boys. They were still mesmerized by toads and fire. Life goes topsy-turvy into death.

  He forced himself to turn and study the Mojave leaders. There was Red Shirt, front and foremost, smiling broadly, wearing the garment that gave him his name. As far as Sam knew, it was the only shirt among the Mojaves, and worn only on state occasions. The Mojave men wore only loincloths, and the women only short skirts of bark.

  Sam was not glad to see Red Shirt, not after he stole Gideon’s wife a year ago. But it was Sam’s job as segundo to stay with Diah, see how he handled things, learn what to do. Diah wanted Sam to be a brigade leader soon. Also, Sam had a knack for communicating with Indians, in sign language or even gestures and grunts.

  Alongside Red Shirt was Francisco, the Mojave who had been to the Spanish settlements near the ocean and knew some Spanish. Behind these two stood three other leaders.

  “Buenas tardes,” said Francisco. “Bienvenido, Capitán! Bienvenido, White Hair!”

  Sam’s hair had been straw-colored, almost white for all of his twenty-two and a half years. He said, “Gracias. ¿Como esta ustedes?”

  Francisco extended his hand to Sam and then to the captain, showing that he remembered this white-man nicety. When they shook, Red Shirt grinned broadly. His entire face was elaborately tattooed with dots in vertical lines. When he grinned, the lines queered their way into strange curves. Sam didn’t know if the dots were supposed to make a picture or pattern, but he knew the effect when the mouth curled the lines—it gave Sam the willies.

  Francisco had a simpler tattoo.

  Neither Sam nor Francisco spoke fluent Spanish, so they now resorted to gestures and single words to settle the rest. Sam laboriously asked permission for the brigade to trade and to rest its horses. Francisco translated into Mojave. Red Shirt said the people of the village were glad to give their hospitality to its friends, the men who hunted the beaver.

  Now Red Shirt spoke what was probably his only word of Spanish. “Bienvenido,” he said, grinning. The grin made his tattoos squirm like snakes.

  Captain Smith waved to the rest of the brigade to come forward.

  “¿Bienvenido? Welcome to what?” said Sam in English.

  “Maior risus, acrior ensis,” said Hannibal. The Mage liked to say things in Latin.

  “What does that mean?” asked Sam.

  “The bigger the smile, the sharper the knife.”

  THE TWENTY-ONE TRAPPERS and two Indian women set up camp hastily on an open spot by the river they used for a campground last year. Just upstream of them was the circle of brush huts, several hundred of them, that made up the village. All around them were the vegetable fields of the Mojaves. The Indians planted close to the river, and rises in the Colorado irrigated the crops.

  Last autumn, when they arrived in much poorer condition, the brigade stayed two weeks with the Mojaves to rest their horses and put some meat back on their ribs. On the men’s ribs too—they traded for corn, beans, melons, pumpkins, everything the Mojaves had to eat. Then the trappers had known them as the Amuchabas. Now they thought of them as the Mojaves, the name for them in the Spanish settlements, and the name of the desert that faced all who would travel on to California, as this brigade intended to do.

  The captain walked off to trade for corn, beans, and some of the bread the Mojaves made from the honey locust bean.

  The other trappers rigged the camp. They unpacked and unsaddled the horses, led them to the river for water, and then penned them in a rope corral. They set up, laid out bedrolls, and put their possibles in the tents.

  “Want to put a guard on the horses?” Hannibal asked Sam.

  “Only at night.” These Indians could be trusted. Sam and Hannibal, however, kept their personal mounts, Paladin and Ellie, staked by their tent.

  Exhausted, as he seemed to be the whole trip, Sam propped himself against a cottonwood and napped. Coy curled up against his thigh.

  “Garden sass!” said Hannibal, shaking Sam awake.

  Sam got up and stepped to the low fire. Everyone gathered around and boiled and roasted the vegetables.

  “Never thought I’d get tired of meat,” Silas Gobel said, chomping down on an ear of corn. Though the Indians ground their corn dry, the trappers liked to boil it and then grouse that it didn’t taste as good as sweet corn.

  “That dried meat is dry,” said Polette Labross. Everyone called him Polly. They’d had nothing else to eat from the Salt Lake all the way down through the redrock country to the banks of the Colorado River, dried meat and not enough water.

  “Even my pecker is dry,” said Gobel. He gave a sly smile. “But not for long around here.”

  “Sailors on the loose in port!” said Bos’n Brown.

  Last year the Mojave women were as eager as the vagabond trappers. Sam thought, I won’t be partaking.

  “Bitterness bites the man who puts it on his tongue,” said Hannibal.

  Sam shot him a glance. Reading my thoughts again. Are they scrawled across my face like words?

  He looked around the fire. Friends all, and he was damned glad to have them. When you rode the mountains and plains and deserts, your friends saved your life, and you saved theirs.

  Coy looked at the boiled corn, boiled beans, and bread. He whapped his tail on the ground. He whined.

  “He wants a blood sacrifice,” said Hannibal.

  Sam had gotten an education from following Hannibal’s sayings. Maybe some day he’d get Hannibal to teach him to read and write. He fished in his possible sack and tossed Coy a little dried meat.

  These five men gathered to eat and sleep together every evening, for no particular reason other than they liked each other. Sam was a Pennsylvania backwoodsman; Gobel, a king-sized blacksmith; Bos’n, a man who’d spent his life at sea; Polly, a grizzled mulatto; Hannibal, a man of mixed blood, white and Delaware Indian.

  Trappers were always a jumble of races. Sam liked that. Among the Frenchies and their Indian wives you might hear French, Iroquois, Cree, Shoshone, and English oddly mixed in one or two sentences.

 
; Captain Smith was odd himself. On the one hand he was a book-learned Yankee who carried a Bible and nearly wore it out with reading. On the other hand, most of the trappers thought he was the smartest, toughest man in the West. No leader was more respected. He’d been Sam’s first brigade captain, and their bond was strong.

  Sam thought the most intriguing man of the lot was Hannibal McKye. Since his father was a classics professor at Dartmouth College and his mother a Delaware, Hannibal grew up speaking two languages. He learned to read not only animal tracks but Greek and Latin. He could discuss Greek philosophy, Caesar’s wars, and Shoshone beadwork. To top it all off, he worked in the circus and learned their horse tricks. It was partly his wizardry with horses that made the men call him the Mage.

  Sam and Hannibal had crossed trails from time to time on the plains and in the mountains, but they’d never traveled together until now. Hannibal wanted to see California. Sam had a reason to go back, a reason that was very good and very bad.

  “I need sleep,” said Sam. He walked to the river, filled his hat with water, and took it to Paladin. The mare looked strong for this stage in the trip. She was a fine-looking Indian pony, white with a black cap around the ears, a black blaze on the chest, and black mane and tail. The Crows called this kind of pony a medicine hat.

  When she’d lapped the crown of the hat dry, he led her out of the rope corral and staked and hobbled her on some good grass near his bedroll. Since she was specially trained, he kept her close every night.

  He lay down on his blankets, looked at the stars, and then let his eyes blur. His bones sagged into the ground. Coy lay beside Sam’s head, as always.