Dark Passage

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Beckwourth lunged; Skye cracked the wood over the man’s arm. The shock sent the knife flying, and Skye thrashed into him, knocking him back. Beckwourth fought hard and easily. He was taller than Skye, longer-armed, but lighter. Skye knocked him into the snow again and landed on him, his rage flowing like a river, his thick fists hammering, even as Beckwourth hammered back, threw Skye off, and gouged at his eyes. Skye was scarcely aware of the bite of the snow, the gathering crowd, the moaning of the women, and sobbing of Stillwater. He saw only his tormentor, and he hammered at the man, at the same time taking whatever Beckwourth delivered, oblivious to his own pain or punishment. He didn’t care how he hurt; he cared only to hurt. They rolled, one or another on top, one or another bucking the other into the slush.

  The imperial voice of Arapooish cut through the mayhem. Skye ignored it. The voice repeated itself sharply. Skye didn’t give a damn. He was giving more than he got from Beckwourth. His fists ached from hitting Beckwourth so hard, and Beckwourth was hurting.

  Hard hands yanked him away. He fought maniacally to free himself, but more hard hands stayed him, and he found himself caught and being hog-tied by the Kit Fox warriors, the village police this season. Beckwourth had ceased resisting and stood, panting. Snow slathered off his soaked clothing.

  Stillwater wept, great tears flooding her golden cheeks.

  There had been no satisfaction in it. Victoria was gone; this man had slept with her and stolen her. He could pound Beckwourth to pulp and not put his life back together again. Skye sagged, suddenly hollow, his rage dripping away like the melted snow trickling down his bare back.

  The chief said something. Skye was too upset to understand the tongue and stood, dazed, while rawhide thongs imprisoned him. He saw Red Turkey Head, wrapped in a gray blanket, watching him sharply. He saw the village chiefs, the headmen, the elders, the shamans, the powerful scarred face of Night Owl, chief of the Kit Fox police. They didn’t need explanation. It was all clear.

  They were waiting for Skye to clear his head, for Skye’s wildness to ebb. Then at last the chief spoke, slowly so Skye could understand.

  “You have violated the peace of the village. You have entered a lodge without being invited. You have stamped upon our customs and laws. You have fought with a war leader. You have shed blood—it is there upon the snow. Therefore, hear me now. You will leave our village. You may not return to the Kicked-in-the-Belly people. You will get your things—all that is yours. You will get your horses. You will prepare for your passage from us. The Kit Fox Society will see to it.”

  Skye felt bone cold. His elkskin clothing was soaked. He felt as cold within his breast and heart and mind as he did within his body. He walked wearily through the emerging dawn to the lodge of Walks Alone, followed by the police and by his erstwhile father-in-law. He saw his friend Red Turkey Head turn away. Vaguely, among the women, he spotted his in-laws. He reached the lodge, put together his kit, pulled on his belt with scabbarded knife, hung his powder horn, and carefully lowered his bear claw necklace over his cold, soaked shirt. Then he filled his bag with his possibles, the spare moccasins and mittens Victoria had made for him, a beaver hat, his battered top hat, and his flint and striker.

  Then he rolled up two robes—a fair-enough exchange for all the buffalohides just outside the door—and stepped back into the cold world. Victoria had vanished. Just as well. He couldn’t bear the sight of her now. Not after seeing her sitting naked in Beckwourth’s robes, her golden bare shoulders, her bare breasts and legs and feet, her long black hair loose and tangled, beautiful, shocked by the intrusion. He would see those things in the nights ahead. He would see them as he rode down trails. He would see them writ upon the sky. He would see them on his deathbed and on his way to hell.

  They had gotten his horses for him, and they had put one of Walks Alone’s saddles on the good black, and on the dun a packframe, which held a large slab of frozen hump meat, enough to keep him fed for a week. Walks Alone was giving him that much, anyway. Walks Alone’s face was inscrutable, but Skye felt sorrow lay behind the blankness. Walks Alone and Arrow had become his friends and workmates.

  They would not look at him. He could not say good-bye. He mounted the black, studied the faces of these people he loved, and rode away, towing the packhorse behind. The Kit Fox warriors followed, two by two, saying nothing, leading him far beyond the village, north up the river a mile or two. Then they halted and wordlessly let him continue. They stayed there. He was soon out of sight.

  He would ride a while and then build a fire and try to dry out his sopping leather tunic. He didn’t much care if he lived or died. Everything inside of him had died in those moments of dark revelation that dawn. He didn’t know what to do, or where to go, or why to live, or how. And it didn’t matter. If he didn’t survive this winter odyssey it wouldn’t matter.

  It would be a mild day once the sun got up on its haunches, but that didn’t matter. He rode cold and alone the long silent miles to the Yellowstone. When he came to the fur company cabin, he paused, not wanting the company of anyone. He had lost Victoria, and no company could replace her. Maybe someday he would remember the good times, the days under the clean blue skies when she rode beside him, the times they gazed at each other, saying more with a glance than any string of words. He would remember the silky beauty of her flesh, the crush of her lips, the laughing banter she made with the other trappers, the swift clean butcheries that turned game into food.

  Maybe someday he would heal, and remember his Indian wife of four years, a girl in her late teens, barely twenty at the last. Maybe that would be the best way to remember her, a girl not yet twenty, the image frozen within him as he grew old.

  But maybe it would be best not to remember her at all, because it hurt too much to even speak her name, as he was doing as he led his horse along the river.

  “Victoria,” he said, and nothing answered.

  twenty—one

  In his short life, Skye had suffered all sorts of wounds. His nose had once been broken, swelling his face into an aching pulpy mass. He had been flogged thrice in the Royal Navy, ten lashes less one, and his back still bore the scars where his lacerated flesh had knitted itself into ridges. Each lash of the whip had shot raw red pain through him, spasming his young body, forcing howls from him. He had once suffered dysentery during the Kaffir wars, and lay dehydrated and feverish, wishing he could perish rather than endure the raging sickness and weakness of his flesh. On board the frigate he had fought brutal seamen, larger, meaner, crueler than he ever imagined, and they had pounded on him until his flesh ached and his bones hurt and his head rang. Here in the mountains he had frozen and boiled, starved until he was mad, been knocked senseless in a scrape with Cheyenne dog soldiers, and awakened sick and nauseous and seeing double images.

  All these he had borne, and none of them had affected his will to live. In fact, many of these insults to his body had kindled the rage to live and triumph and be a free man. He had not surrendered.

  But now he wrestled with a new kind of wound, one far more piercing than anything he had ever experienced in his young life. He could scarcely find words for this wound—betrayal, loss, anger, despair, desolation, rejection, breach of trust. Words didn’t describe the plunge of his feelings, as if he had been thrown into the abyss. Physical pain was an old and known enemy that he dreaded but understood. But this pain of the soul he didn’t understand. He was born under a curse, and whatever small handhold he had purchased on the cliffside of joy had crumbled, and he was falling, ever downward.

  He paused at the small log structure at the confluence of the Big Horn and Yellowstone, resurrected for the season by American Fur. The present tenants had repaired the roof and covered it with a foot of sod. He saw small portals on the two sides visible to him, but these held no glass. Hides scraped thin enough to pass light filled each small frame. He had been in rude huts like this one, immersed in perpetual twilight even on a bright day.

  He stared, not knowing what
else to do. The cabin stared back solemnly. He had never been here. He tried to think but couldn’t. His mind had numbed and narrowed down to blankness and instinct. He knew he should try to reach one of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company brigades, but that was really not an option. The largest brigade, led by Bridger and Fitzpatrick, was wintering in the Three Forks country, the headwaters of the Missouri, on the other side of a vast and snowy range of mountains that locked him out until spring. He might, if he could find snowshoes, negotiate the icebound pass that would now be choked with twenty or thirty feet of snow. He might with a backpack manage to ascend and descend, endure the icy blasts and treacherous fog on the ridge, and reach the Gallatin valley without his horses or kit. But he had no snowshoes or cash to buy some. The other RMF brigades were even farther. One was wintering down in South Park, actually in Mexican territory, and the other, in the Snake country, was equally out of reach until the spring melt.

  None of that made any difference. He sat his black horse, staring at the blind-eyed cabin, watching blue smoke eddy from a fieldstone-and-mud chimney. The cabin gave him no answers.

  “Well, come on in or be gone,” came a voice from the dead cabin. “We don’t take kindly to varmints aiming to do us harm.” Skye saw the muzzle of a rifle in a slit.

  Skye nudged his black forward and stopped at a hitch rail in front of the place. The massive hand-sawn plank door swung open and he beheld a potbellied red-maned giant with a pair of dragoon pistols in hand.

  Skye stared inertly, neither dismounting nor talking.

  “You ill?”

  Skye didn’t respond.

  “Well, get down, dammit.”

  Skye shook his head. He had no business here, no business anywhere. He turned his horse and tugged his dun packhorse around. Nothing mattered.

  But the red-haired giant sprang out the door, cursing, and yanked the black’s head around. “Now get down and abide a wee.”

  Skye heard Scotland in the voice. And saw Scotland in the face: freckles, fierce blue eyes, crags and ridges running across brow and cheek.

  Skye sat the black, paralyzed. “I’ll go,” he muttered.

  The Scot glared into Skye’s face. “You’re a man staring into a grave,” he said. “You’re sick.”

  A second man, this one dark and cross-eyed, with a luxuriant black beard, appeared.

  “Help me get this mountain of dead meat off his plug,” the Scot said to the other.

  They pulled the black’s head around and took the reins from Skye, and waited for Skye to dismount. But Skye sat.

  “We’ll lift ye off,” the Scot said.

  Skye let himself be lifted off. He was confused. Why were they doing this?

  “Take the plugs out to the pen and bring his kit in. We’ll get some tea into the mon,” said the Scot.

  Skye had yet to say an intelligible word. They steered him into the place. It wasn’t much; a small room with rough-hewn shelves on the far side, earthen floors, gummed by spit and sweat and grease, and scabrous gray logs. A few trade goods on the hand-hewn shelves: pots; knives; awls; powder and ball; jingle bells; blue, red, and green beads; bolts of chambray; iron lance points; steel arrowheads; hatchets. A rude counter of splintery cottonwood. A low opening to a rear room where a fire burned. A perpetual gloom about the whole outfit.

  The Scot herded Skye into the rear room, half of it stacked with robes and hides and exotic pelts, the rest reserved for bunks and a cooking area around the rock fireplace. On each side was a plugged gun port. The hides and pelts and robes exuded dead animal smells, rancid and thick and choking.

  “I’m Tullock, American Fur,” said the Scot. “My partner’s Pierre Bonfils. And who are you?”

  Skye stood, dazed. He couldn’t bring his name to his lips. He didn’t want anyone to know his name.

  “You sick? Get some heat into you thar,” he said, gesturing. “Your leathers are soaking. You must be colder than a grave. Give us that shirt and we’ll dry it.”

  The golden elkskin shirt with fringed sleeves, Victoria’s fine quillwork on it in blue and red patterns. Skye stared.

  “Your shirt, man. You’re cold.”

  Skye shook his head and sat down before the fire.

  “You have a name? You Skye, down with the Kicked-in-the-Bellies? You fit the description.”

  Skye nodded.

  “Well, that’s progress. You hungry? We got us more frozen buffler here than we can eat in a month.”

  Skye shook his head.

  “You in some kind of trouble? Sick?”

  Skye stared. A faint heat penetrated the clammy cold of his elkskin shirt.

  “You know Beckwourth? Our man down there?”

  Skye stared, rose, wrapped his robe about him, and headed for the door.

  “Hey! You come back here. You’re not fit to go out.”

  The burly dark man caught Skye at the door and forcibly steered him back.

  “Let go of me,” Skye said.

  “Well, at least ye can talk,” the Scot said. “Something’s happened to ye.”

  “I have to go.”

  “Na, laddie, don’t ye be going now. We’ll pour us a bit of whiskey I’ve been hiding from Pierre. Something’s happened and ye need a dose.”

  The Scot pulled a grass-filled tick from his plank bunk, revealing a jug wedged against the cottonwood log.

  “Sacre bleu!”

  “Real whiskey, not the other. Ye need a few droughts of medicine, that’s what I’m thinking. Ye act like ye’ve seen the Devil, old Bug himself.”

  Tullock uncorked the jug, poured a generous slug into a tin cup, and handed it to his guest. Skye sipped, coughed, swallowed, and sipped again. The spirits, taken neat, scorched his innards. Silently he handed the cup back to his host, who sipped and passed the cup to his partner.

  “It’s getting dark and you had better stay here tonight, Skye.”

  Skye nodded. “It’s Mister Skye,” he said.

  “Eh?”

  Skye felt the spirits permeate his body, even as heat from the fire dried his buckskins. “Forget it,” he said.

  “Now, what’s the trouble, mon? Are ye ill?”

  “Thank you for the spirits,” Skye said, and rose. “Time for me to go.”

  “No ye don’t, laddie.”

  “I am a free man.”

  “You’re a sick man. Ye’ll stay, and we’ll see what the morning brings.”

  It didn’t matter. Right now, in the warm dark of Beckwourth’s lodge, Victoria was probably coupling with her new mate. The images filtered through his mind. She would enjoy herself with Antelope. Maybe more than she had enjoyed herself with her husband of four years. She had abandoned him, just like that. He was like most people, struggling to make some small sweet life out of nothing, but surrendering what little they possessed piece by piece by piece.

  He began to doze, the spirits working in him. He was conscious of someone pulling a robe over him, of his hosts boiling some buffalo tongue in a pot suspended over the fire. The heady smells of cookery filled his nostrils.

  But it didn’t matter. Nothing did, or ever would.

  twenty—two

  Skye did not know where he was. Dim light filtered into a log room. A banked fire exuded a residual heat from under the ash. Then he remembered and wished he hadn’t awakened. Someone stirred out in the trading room. He threw off the robes and stood. His hosts were not in sight.

  Stiffly—he felt ill—he drew a robe about himself and walked into the better-lit room, where Tullock was standing at a counter entering something in a ledger with a quill pen.

  “Ye lived, did ye?” the trader asked, surveying Skye’s face.

  Skye nodded, and headed into an icy dawn. He found the Frenchman out there chopping wood. There would be a fire and breakfast soon.

  Later, he poked at a slab of buffalo for breakfast. He wasn’t hungry. The traders eyed him curiously but didn’t probe.

  “I’ll be going now, mates. Thank you for quartering me.”

/>   “Nay, mon, ye’ll be staying a while. A fever eats ye, and it’s not a fit day.”

  “I’m going.”

  “And where, may I ask?”

  Skye shrugged. He would go until he froze to death, and that was all he envisioned or wanted. He rolled up the robes, collected his kit, and headed for the rude door.

  “If a mon’s bound and determined to die, not much can save his mortal soul,” Tullock said. “But if a lad’s a wee bit uncertain, he ought to stay put. Buffalo meat we have aplenty.”

  They were curious about him, but it didn’t matter. Skye continued his preparations.

  “Where are my horses?” he asked.

  “Enjoying some cottonwood bark for breakfast. If I let ye at them, I’d be an accessory to murder, seeing as how you’re bent on destroying yourself.”

  Skye set down his kit.

  “That’s better. Now have some meat and get close to the fire. I have a wee bit of good tea, and we’ll brew it up and get it down ye.”

  Skye sipped tea—it tasted just fine—and slipped back into his buffalo robes. They left him alone that day. No one came to trade, and the traders whiled away their time chopping wood, playing monte, and observing the unchanging dull weather. Skye’s body mended a little, but the pain of having to live deepened and cut like a knife wound. In a way, the pain was good. It prodded Skye, harried him, forced him to contemplate Victoria and come to grips with events. But it didn’t change anything.

  That afternoon he rose, washed his face, brushed his leathers, and ran a bone comb through his unruly hair, while his hosts watched silently.

  “I’m better now, mates,” he announced.

  “Well, Skye, tell us your plans.”

  Up to that moment, Skye had none, but suddenly he did. “I’m heading east,” he said.

  “East? The States? Not without grass for your horses and a wee bit of sun on your back.”