The headmen and seers seemed to be taking forever. He wandered back to their circle and listened to the deliberations. Father of All Buffalo was resisting; the rest wanted to go to the place where buffalo were thick and they could turn every robe and pelt into something valuable.
Finally Rotten Belly intervened. “We are divided. I will say this. I will send four wise men to the Rotten Sundance River and they will look for buffalo and wood and grass. And I will send four wise men to the Big Horn, and they will look for buffalo, grass, and timber. We will decide at the place where the Rotten Sundance River flows into the Elk River.”
Beckwourth translated for Bissette. “They’ll send a party back with you to look over the Big Horn, and another party will work ahead and look over the Clark’s Fork, and they’ll decide at the junction of the Yellowstone and Clark’s Fork in a week or so.”
“Ah, it is less than we hope.”
“No, we’ll see them on the Big Horn—if the buffalo are there.”
That was how it played out. Father of All Buffalo didn’t look happy, but the council had not rejected his winter ground. Beckwourth watched four veteran war and police and camp leaders of the People ride east with Bissette, and watched four others, all appointed by Plenty Coups, ride ahead to the Clark’s Fork area.
The village didn’t get much farther that day. A worsening of the weather caught them. Temperatures dropped sharply until not even a hooded blanket capote turned the cold. They had made no meat this trip, and the stocks of trail food were declining. All the more reason to head for the buffalo, Beckwourth thought. Father of All Buffalo had waited much too long to move camp.
He and Stillwater set up their small lodge under a sandstone escarpment to escape the vicious wind that night, and then he rubbed down his fine brown horse. A temporary village of sorts had sprung up along the Yellowstone, the People huddling against the bitter weather. It would be a great night to have company, but he knew Victoria wouldn’t enter his lodge until they were well settled in their winter camp. Travel was exhausting, especially for women, who bore the brunt of the work, raising and lowering lodges, packing up and unpacking, wrestling with sullen horses, caring for children, dealing with dogs, butchering any meat their men brought in, and trying to put food in the mouths of their families.
The next several days they struggled east in relentlessly cold weather. The only good about it was that it didn’t snow or rain or mire man and beast. Beckwourth was ebullient. The more desperate their circumstances so late in the year, the more likely they would be to winter on the Big Horn, close to American Fur’s outpost. The traders would ship many packs of beaver and robes downriver in the spring—and Beckwourth figured it would net him a raise.
On a gray day with flakes of ice in the air, they reached the confluence of the Yellowstone and Clark’s Fork. There, the party sent up Clark’s Fork awaited them, and their news delighted Beckwourth. No buffalo that direction, but plenty of deer. There was no reason to tarry there; the Big Horn awaited them, but Rotten Belly decreed that they would stay and hear the news from the other party when it returned. The village chafed at the delay, wanting to settle in for the winter. But grass was plenty, and the weary horses and mules could fatten on it while the village waited.
Then, one evening two days later, the Big Horn party rode in—and drew a crowd. One, Man With Many Horses, had been seriously injured in the thigh, which was covered with bloodstained leather bandaging. His woman, Sweet Root, cried out and helped her man off his pony. They all soon had the story. The Crows had ridden to the Big Horn, found that Bissette had spoken truly: there were buffalo everywhere, wintering in small herds that occupied adjacent valleys. The old trading house was located on the flat just west of the confluence, and each man had received a twist of tobacco as a gift from the American Fur Company.
But the rest of the story was darker. Returning to the village, they had been set upon by Piegans, a dozen roaming horse thieves out of the north, and had barely escaped. Only because one of them, Big Moon, had a musket that reached beyond the Piegan arrows had the outnumbered Absaroka escaped. An arrow had lodged in the thigh of Man With Many Horses, and he had bled almost white.
What now? Beckwourth saw the chance and stepped forward, addressing Rotten Belly as well as Father of All Buffalo and other headmen. “Let us camp where there is ample meat, and we can trade robes for guns. Then I will personally lead a party against the Piegans to avenge this terrible thing. I will take many scalps.”
No one disagreed. In the next gray dawn, they would start for the Big Horn.
fourteen
And so the Kicked-in-the-Belly people wintered on the Big Horn twenty miles south of the American Fur Company outpost, in a sheltered bend of the river where thick cottonwood forest supplied firewood, brown grasses stretched in every direction, and high bluffs baffled the wind. Buffalo were plentiful, even as the trader at the outpost, Samuel Tullock, had said.
But no sooner had the village erected its lodges than a storm howled in, dumping a foot of snow on the village. Father of All Buffalo, never reconciled to the change, nodded knowingly Women fought drifts to cut firewood with their hatchets. Others cut brush and packed it around the lodges to subdue the relentless wind and protect man and animal. The herders checked the horses now and then and hastened to their lodgefires, knowing no thieving enemy would be out in such weather Horses, huddled rump to wind, pawed through snow for brown grass or stood quietly and endured the caked snow or their backs and whatever else life brought them. The days grew short, and Father Sun hovered low in the south and vanished midafternoon.
Only at night, when the temperatures plummeted and the stars looked like chipped ice and the snow squeaked underfoot, did the weary, bone-cold People relax their constant labor to settle in. In those times, they gathered together to gamble with sticks, or tell stories, or smoke their special mixture of red willow bark and tobacco, or make clothing to subdue the icy breath of the Cold Maker. The new winter would be long and hard, but most of all boring, confining an outdoor people to tiny leather cones.
But as harsh as winter was in these days of endless darkness and twilight, the Absaroka people didn’t much mind. The village seemed almost magical, especially in the evenings, when lavender light crept over the snow and vanished in the tree-blackened bluffs, and orange light from the lodgefires glowed luminescently through the tawny lodgecovers, turning every smoke-stained lodge into a street lamp. This was a land of plenty. Beside or within each lodge was a pile of dry firewood, dead cottonwood limbs. From the few trees within the village, frosty quarters of buffalo and mule deer hung, fresh and ready for the black cast-iron cookpots gotten from the traders.
A few hardy hunters supplied the village with ample buffalo meat. The lumbering animals didn’t run well in snow and were easy to pick off in box canyons or narrow draws. Skye was among the hunters. From the moment the Kicked-in-the-Bellies arrived on the Big Horn River, he had saddled the weary black horse and ridden out for meat. He shot several buffalo, employing his Hawken at a distance to save his horse a risky chase over snow-covered, treacherous ground. He shot carefully, aiming for that vulnerable heart-lung spot just back of the forelegs, preserving his precious caps and powder as he had learned to do with the fur brigades. After each shot, Walks Alone and Arrow lifted their numb hands to the gloomy sky and prayed to the departing spirit, apologizing for taking its life to feed themselves. Their profound spirituality affected Skye. He liked a people who so respected all life that they would apologize to the killed animal. Then he and Walks Alone and Arrow butchered the bison and dragged bloody quarters back to camp on a groaning travois, one at a time.
Skinning a carcass was itself an ordeal that took time and numbed the hands. Once they had skinned one side, they had the brutal task of turning the buffalo over to skin the other, no mean feat because the hump prevented it. Sometimes not even the three of them could turn over a carcass, and then they had to use a horse to help them.
Once, jus
t as they approached a cow lying in a pool of reddened snow, the buffalo struggled to her feet, snorted, sprayed blood from her mouth, lowered her massive head until her horns were swords, and thundered toward Walks Alone. Skye was just then ramming a new charge home. Swiftly he extracted the hickory rod, fumbled a cap over the nipple, and shot into the chest of the pain-crazed animal. It dropped just before careening into Walks Alone, whose retreat was slowed by the snow. They stared, shaken. Skye reloaded with shaking hands, not bothering to clean out the fouled nipple, and then they set about gutting the lifeless animal, each of them working in wary silence. During those hard winter days, when they toiled from the late dawn to the early dusk, Skye sensed that he was being accepted, though no word was ever spoken. The hunting had bonded the men of the lodge.
The women soon had five prime winter-haired buffalo hides to flesh and tan, but the grim weather prevented them from making robes. The hides were stacked outside Walks Alone’s lodge, stiff boards of hair and skin. Frozen meat hung from cottonwood limbs, enough to feed the lodge for two moons with juicy hump meat, delicious tongue, and spicy backfat that seasoned every pot. The big white guts were carefully washed and packed with shredded meat and fat for future use. And one by one, the buffalo’s very bones were cracked open and the delicate marrow scraped from them for a sort of pudding that set their mouths watering. These were good times, despite the numbing cold. Walks Alone and Digs the Roots were happy. The hides were future wealth. Skye’s position among his in-laws improved a little. His Hawken had ensured a fat and happy winter.
Around the wavering fire, the women toiled endlessly. Victoria completed the elkhide tunic for Skye, embellishing it with blue quillwork across the breast, the blue for sky. She presented him at last with a golden coat, while her father smoked and watched.
“Here, dammit,” she said, holding up the shirt. “I make this for you.”
It fit him well, and warmed a body too lightly clad.
“It is beautiful, Victoria,” he said. “Now I am warm. You have chased away winter. You are good to me.”
Then she surprised him by extracting a pair of elkhide moccasins, cut high to turn the snow and lined with the soft pelt of a rabbit.
“My mother make these for you,” she said.
The moccasins were much needed, and wrapped his cold feet in instant warmth. “Tell the one who is your mother,” he said, politely avoiding her name, “that I am pleased and honored and wish her the blessing of a happy lodge and plenty to eat and many grandchildren.”
The last evoked a sharp look from Victoria as well as her parents. Their marriage had been barren, but in Arrow’s lodge, three children had been added to the People. It had been something to hold against Skye.
In some ways, the camp on the Big Horn was the best of times. Other lodges were enjoying the same bounty. Wolves circled the camp, shy by day but bold at night, driven half mad by the smell of meat hanging well above their snapping jaws. Skye often listened to the wolves at night, aware of how thin the buffalohide wall of the lodge was against the full ferocity of nature.
The deep cold and darkness enforced intimacy, and at last he spent hours with Victoria. At first he tried to engage her in English, but her responses were always in Crow, and he realized it was impolite to address her in a private language in the midst of her family. Everything spoken between them would be for all to hear. That was still a nagging problem with him, and made him yearn all the more for his own lodge.
Each day he took generous cuts of buffalo to his friend Red Turkey Head, and brought armloads of dry wood scavenged from the surrounding hills. And each day he paused to visit with the old man, often wondering why the seer stayed so much alone in his small cold lodge during the most social time of the year. The shaman had been steadfast in his friendship, and Skye wished he could do more for the man whose vision embraced things unseen by others.
“Your time will come, and then the People will know who you are,” the shaman said one afternoon. “The bear sleeps in his den all winter, but when he awakes the world trembles,” he said on another occasion.
All these things Skye filed away in his mind, wondering what they might mean. He had come to the Crow village because Victoria needed the company of her people, but this old sage was telling him that he would have a larger destiny among the Crows.
Whatever the future might bring, Skye was fairly certain it would not include future employment with Rocky Mountain Fur Company, except perhaps as a trapper or camp tender. Beckwourth had been quick to exploit his new advantage now that he was close to a source of trade goods and could easily deliver peltries to the trading house on the Yellowstone. His lodge had bloomed into a small store where a Crow could trade buffalo robes, beaver pelts, fox, otter, wolf pelts, weasel, ermine, and even deer hides for almost anything—lead and powder, rifles, awls, knives, bells, blankets, calico, flannel, salt, sugar—and whiskey. Alcohol was illegal in Indian territory, but that had never stopped American Fur Company from supplying it. Beckwourth was suddenly doing a lively trade in jugged Indian spirits—actually grain alcohol, river water, tobacco, and a close of cayenne pepper for flavor. Whatever the elders thought of it, they averted their eyes. Beckwourth was a headman, an authentic hero among the people, and a gracious friend of most of the senior warriors in the village.
What was winter for, if not to gather in lodges through the long dark afternoons and evenings, laugh, tell tales, gossip, gamble—and now drink the water-that-makes-one-crazy. Skye registered the subtle change in the village and knew that some of those parties, most of all Beckwourth’s own, had grown wild. And even as those parties drew crowds, so did his supply of robes and pelts grow. His periodic trips to the Yellowstone, laden with furs, told the tale.
Skye had lost the Crow trade and could never get it back. Worse, now that the camp had settled into its long winter’s night, Victoria had started once again to frequent Beckwourth’s lodge.
fifteen
These were good times for Jim Beckwourth, yet he was not content. What more could a man ask for?
First there was the beauteous Stillwater, boon companion in his robes and devoted to making him happy and comfortable. She was a bright-eyed, honey-fleshed woman with blue-black hair she wore in a single braid, often with a yellow ribbon tied into it. She was also fun, and had a belly-shaking laugh that erupted through his lodge now and then.
Secondly, he had Pine Leaf—after a fashion. She was the slim young woman who had become famous as the woman warrior of the Crows, having vowed revenge upon the Blackfeet who had killed her brother. She was fast, lithe, adept with lance and bow and arrow, and had come to Beckwourth’s aid several times in pitched battles, once saving his life. Pine Leaf had vowed never to marry, but that didn’t prevent her from enjoying lovers, of whom Beckwourth was the most prominent. He had often asked her to marry him, and she had always replied, “When the pine leaves turn yellow.”
Which they never would.
Of all the women he knew, he loved Pine Leaf the most. Stillwater was all for having more wife-sisters around to share the work and provide companionship all day. If Beckwourth did manage to acquire more wives, she would be the senior and most important one, the sits-beside-him wife, seated at the place of honor beside him in the lodge. And she could boss around the younger and lesser women to her heart’s content, which she intended to do.
It came down to Victoria Skye. He wanted her as much as the others, and her refusals only spurred him to find the way to win her. He wondered why, in the midst of success, he could not be content. He pondered it, looking for answers. Was he trying to prove something? He couldn’t say. He knew only that some worm kept eating at him, making each of his triumphs bitter because it didn’t fulfill him. If he couldn’t take Victoria from Skye, then nothing else mattered very much.
No woman among all the Absarokas had been more perfectly formed or walked the earth with more grace and poise. No other woman was more splendidly dressed or did finer quillwork. And only Pine L
eaf outdid Victoria when it came to armed struggle, because Skye had taught Victoria all he knew of lance and knife and muzzle-loading rifle. Beckwourth envisioned a lodge filled with beauteous women, a veritable army of women, and maybe even a few children, too. Even now Stillwater bloomed with child.
It wasn’t that he wanted to wound his friend Skye; he liked Skye, and liked talking English with Skye now and then. And he respected Skye’s prowess as a mountaineer, for the Englishman had proved himself over and over to be resourceful during starving times, danger, war, and brutal weather.
He was halfway rich, thanks to all the trading he was doing. Some of the villagers chose to trade directly with Tullock up on the Yellowstone, which was fine; Beckwourth got the credit for steering the Mountain Crows to the little outpost that American Fur had set up there. But more often, the villagers bargained directly with Beckwourth, and he scrupled to deal fairly with them and charge slightly less than the company did, or at least offer more for a pelt or hide or robe. Whenever the hard winter permitted, he rode north, with packhorses bearing his furs, and exchanged them for more trade goods, always making a little in the process.
He profited especially from the illegal nectar of the fur trade, smuggled countless leagues up the Missouri, well hidden from the watchful eye of the army at Fort Leavenworth. American Fur contrived to have a few barrels of pure grain spirits on hand, carefully concealed in a bunker yards from the Yellowstone post in case some wandering official—or rival—should show up. At this priceless fountain, Beckwourth regularly replenished his jugs—and then added the water and plug tobacco and spices that turned spirits into Indian whiskey. And this he sold at his little soirees, usually after supplying a free sample just to prime the pump. It was amazing how the pelts accumulated in his lodge from just one little party.
Dark Passage Page 9
