Savage Country

by Robert Olmstead

  Chapter 14

  When Michael appeared again late in the afternoon, riding through the pale deceptive light, Elizabeth was much relieved. They were camped at a crossing, the tarps unfurled to provide them as much shade as possible.

  “What is it?” Elizabeth said, the reverend doctor at her shoulder.

  He told her what he’d discovered to the southeast. He told her it was Comanche traveling west and suggested they wait a day until they cleared the country ahead.

  “We must attend to them,” the reverend doctor said.

  “I would not go back there,” Michael said.

  “Then I will go myself,” the reverend doctor said.

  “I will go,” Michael said. He knew there was no argument to be made that would convince the reverend doctor how pointless his intentions.

  Michael ordered another horse to be brought and his saddle transferred. He took Darby aside and told him what he knew and that the men should keep their rifles handy.

  The reverend doctor came up on his gray gelding, a shovel across the pommel.

  “I am coming with you.”

  “Suit yourself,” Michael said, spurring the fresh horse forward.

  As he made his return to the site Michael again approached cautiously. He continued to study the folds and curves of the ground. In the path beside the crate of Bibles were sitting two immense gray wolves as if waiting for him.

  “Do you think they brought those Bibles for the heathens or for themselves?” Michael said.

  “They are missionary Bibles,” the reverend doctor said, “published by the American Bible Society.”

  The wolves had no fear and seemed mildly curious of them. They panted with the heat, their tongues lolling from their open mouths.

  “Do you want one as a souvenir?”

  “No thank you,” the reverend doctor said, drawing his rifle, but Michael stayed him, no noise.

  Michael cracked his whip and spurred the horse forward. He crossed the stream and climbed the sandy hill. He imagined them in this place, their sinking wheels almost to the axles, unloading their wagons as fast as they could, trying to escape the inevitable.

  At the top of the hill, in the sag of land, the wolves had joined the vultures and were at them, their bloody heads drawn down between their shoulders, their long tongues licking at patches of bloodstained earth.

  A wolf was gnawing at a half-­stripped head it held in its paws. The wolf looked up at them, squeezing its eyes. It stood and stared at the red dog as if mildly interested. The red dog kept coming until the two were side by side, head to tail, sniffing each other. Suddenly the wolf rose up and its teeth were in the back of the red dog’s neck. The red dog went down and rose back up and tore himself free. The wolf swirled and the red dog’s powerful jaws closed on the wolf’s hind leg. The wolf flung back its head and snapped at the air behind. The red dog twisted and the wolf screamed as its leg bone cracked. The red dog let go and on three legs the wolf limped away. Michael cracked his whip again and the birds flapped their great wings and flew away with hoarse and guttural croaks. The other wolves slunk off with their tails between their legs, but they didn’t go far from this place of feeding.

  The reverend doctor crested the hill and looked down the offside in horror. He covered his mouth and however hard he tried he could not stop himself from retching. He leaned over to one side and emptied his gut down one of his legs. He then composed himself and he apologized.

  Michael went down the hill to the upright saber. He leaned over from the saddle, withdrew the saber from the body and wiped it clean. Not far away he spotted the scabbard flung into the grass and this he attached to his saddle. He found a polished mirror catching the sun’s light and next to it a wooden box with hinges on one side and locks on the other. He unlatched the door to see the even backs of books. It was a traveler’s library of uniform size and binding.

  He ran his hand along the smooth spines of the books. Robin­son Crusoe. Swiss Family Robinson. It was a library of literature, travel, history, and biography titles, Sir Walter Scott, Richard Henry Dana, Washington Irving, Charles Darwin, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray. He removed the books and slid them into his saddlebag.

  “Would you like to say a few words,” he said to the horse, then to the red dog.

  He lit a cigarette and stared into the shimmering heat. He drew heavily on the cigarette. When the reverend doctor came up he passed the cigarette to him. The reverend doctor drew in the smoke and choked and coughed, but it seemed to help and he let out a deep sigh.

  “My God,” the reverend doctor sighed.

  “It’s an old-­fashioned world,” Michael said.

  He turned the glasses south and then west. They were out there somewhere. After a while he lowered the glasses and replaced them in their case.

  “Do you think she will marry again?” the reverend doctor said.

  “Who?” Michael said.

  “Elizabeth.”

  “I don’t know,” Michael said. “You ought to ask her.”

  “But I cannot ask her,” he said, shaking his head. “It could be misunderstood. What about you? May I ask what your intentions are?”

  “That is not the way I regard her,” Michael said.

  “We are not so different, you and I.”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “You have no intentions?”

  “That’s how different the difference.”

  “I was mistaken then. I apologize.”

  Michael took down his canteen. He took a drink, sloshed it around, and took another. He passed it up to the reverend doctor, warning him the water inside was fortified. The reverend doctor took a drink and another and he was much restored.

  “Have you seen all you wish to see?” Michael said. “If you feel for her the way you claim, you will convince her to turn around.”

  “Can this be all of them?” the reverend doctor said.

  “Do not ask that question,” Michael said.

  “Let us bow our heads in prayer,” the reverend doctor said, taking off his hat, holding his hat as he spoke words in the manner of someone talking to himself.

  “No. I think instead get ready to leave,” Michael said, interrupting him, and they started from that dreadful place.

  That night around the campfire the men told stories of death, torture, and capture; stories of men tied to stakes and strips of flesh cut away, red hot pokers thrust into the wounds. They wondered whether it was fear, or loss of blood or shock, or pain, or anguish that brought an end to the horror. They all agreed when things were at their bleakest, one last bullet should always be saved.

  Their voices carried and Elizabeth and Michael could hear their discussion.

  “They are talking about their obligation to kill me before they kill themselves,” she said.

  “It’s not unthinkable,” Michael said, his hands clasped behind his back.

  “Maybe for you,” she said.

  She then apologized for being sharp with him. However cautious and quiet and even secretive he was, she understood with him she was not alone in the world. She waved a hand in the air, so many days gone by and so much had happened and her life at Meadowlark another mirage in her distant past.

  “Do you always see everything and understand everything?” she said.

  “What I know I know.”

  But how do you know, she was desperate to say. She studied him in the darkness. She knew the question was unanswerable.

  “It is good counsel,” she said, “that we wait a day or two, but I am growing impatient. Our stores are dwindling, we have lost a good man, and we have not made a dime in return.”

  Michael asked after the reverend doctor and Elizabeth said he’d sequestered himself upon their return.

  “There was a look in his eye,” she said.

  “Not a good one,” Michael said.

  “He said hell itself had let loose.”

  “You see what people can do to each other.”

 
; “I’d not let them get her,” one of the Gough brothers said loudly.

  Michael stood and stepped in their direction. The red dog sprang to his side as if from nowhere.

  “By God, you will hold your tongue,” he said, and the men went silent. He then told them to move their asses and to double the watch and then he returned to his canvas chair beside Elizabeth.

  “If they come on us,” he told her, “there will be no mercy.”

  He wanted to say more, but there was nothing more to say. He wondered if she was learning the importance of hate when living in the world of men. He made himself a drink of limewater and found his pipe and tobacco.

  “Say something,” she said, impatient with his mood.

  “Is there a certain thing you would like to hear?”

  “Tell me the truth,” she said.

  “I believe the immediate danger has passed.”

  “Would you keep going?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I would, but I do not want you to.”

  “Your rule of life is to do what you want to do,” she said. “This is what I am learning to do.”

  That night the animals were brought in and secured and he sent out mounted pickets. He found a height of ground that provided a survey of the surrounding country and each man in turn would take his coffee jar, biscuits, cold venison, and rifle and sit watch.

  That night the reverend doctor came awake under canvas at 3:00 a.m., an hour before his watch. Nothing was stirring. The air had cleared and there were stars in the sky and the plain was blue and as if a sleeping ocean. He came from a dream scene that left him weak and gloomy. He’d seen a lot of dead people but nothing like that. He reminded himself he was safe and alive, but still the dream haunted him. Restless with an idea, he opened his portfolio and arranged his steel pens, penholder, ink, and wiper. He lit a candle, placed his revolver within reach, and was as if in a quiet room.

  His hand was shaking. All his life he’d been torn between the sacred word and the secular world. There was an emptiness he desperately needed to fill. It was a need to feel something never felt before, to say something never said before.

  He had done his first writing when he was a young exhorter and prayer leader and living a lonesome itinerant life. He’d left behind in Massachusetts a comfortable world of academic excellence and a prominent clerical family. His first success was a pamphlet he sold for a penny, a scathing polemic excoriating slavery. Then he authored a bondage narrative written in the name of Nero Jones. The book was promoted by the Massachusetts Anti-­Slavery Society as a great step forward. The book sold well and Nero Jones, in care of the publisher, received invitations to lecture in London and address public meetings throughout the Northeast, which he had to decline. After that, he wrote another book, the story of a reformed alcoholic with the nom de plume of Josiah Kirwin who was laid low by liquor and in his desperation turned to God and was embraced by the Cold Water Army. Josiah Kirwin’s story took him three weeks and was serialized in twenty-­four issues of Harper’s Monthly and later printed in a single volume.

  His mind and thoughts cleared. He shot his cuffs, and his body erect, he bowed his head to the paper and began to write.

  At the broken wagon, the red dog sniffed the air and showed his white fangs. His lips drew up and his spine stiffened. He made a sound deep in his throat and warily I dismounted. I went down on one knee and followed the dog’s bloodshot eyes. They were cast on a girl’s face deep inside the overturned wagon. She held a water bottle and was wrapped in a tick mattress.

  She may have been fourteen years of age. Crouched beneath the wagon, she directed her large blue eyes full on my face and continued to gaze in mute surprise and terror.

  She was long and slender and her complexion was white as ivory and there were freckles on her cheeks and nose. Her hair was the color of corn silk, and long and braided, and the braids hung to her waist. She wore long gray stockings and another pair she’d dragged up her arms to her shoulders.

  “Can you speak?” I said.

  Her response was a whimper and it built to a cry.

  “Girl,” I said, “there is nothing to be afraid of.”

  I removed a glove and reached out a hand. I asked her name.

  “Charlotte,” she said. “Charlotte.”

  “Charlotte, don’t be afraid,” I said. “Come to me.”

  She knit her fingers among my own and I helped her crawl from her den. The girl unfolded herself. She looked about and then she began to shake. She collapsed to the ground moaning and weeping. It was the wail of a lost soul, despairing and pleading for mercy.

  “Charlotte,” she said. “They took my sister Charlotte.”

  I picked her off the ground and wiped her hot, sandy face and pushed back her hair. I looked kindly at her and touched the back of my wrist to her mouth and then her cheeks and eyes. I told her I would find her sister even if it cost me my life.

  Chapter 15

  They came upon the first buffalo signs, piles of dung and wallows six feet in diameter, and then their first buffalo. It was a tangle of hair, scraps of hide, and broken bones scattered all around. The wolves had dragged it down and been at it. They’d hollowed out the carcass, torn it to pieces, and crushed the bones for the marrow.

  They crossed the Buffalo and Sand Creeks, the men whipping up the oxen and managing to roll their heavy loads across, the axles in water as the wheels bumped and sank and bumped again. Michael guided them downstream and into camp a goodly distance from the freight road where they might lay up for a few days. They made rest beneath cottonwoods with huge trunks and spreading arms near a sandbar with a clean white beach. The men unyoked the oxen and set them to graze.

  The next morning Michael took Darby with him. They entered the Wolf Creek valley between the two Canadian Rivers and bent west toward the 100th meridian. According to David’s journal, the old road ran to the crossing of Wolf Creek through an immense field of wild sunflowers. They grew to such a tremendous height they could not see over their drooping heads even on horseback. Up the course of this creek lay the route to the Comanche and Kiowa and the buffalo pastures.

  Wolf Creek cuts a broad, shallow canyon across the vast high plains, David had written. The rocks, tertiary sands, gravels, and marls . . . Spring-­fed streams enter from north and south and pour their waters into its sandy channel. The creek flows for a considerable distance. Custer and the Seventh were here in ’68.

  As they left the sunflowers, the rolling swells of the prairie melted away before them into the vast level plain of a new world.

  “This is where you turn back,” Michael said to Darby. “Keep your eyes peeled. Rest up and bring them on. I will meet you tomorrow afternoon at the bottom of the sunflowers and guide you in. Can you do that?”

  “I can do it.”

  “Make sure you get back without dying.”

  A mile after breaking through the field of sunflowers Michael encountered more wallows and crushed grass and buffalo dung fresh and moist. There were countless herds of deer, wild horses, and buffalo. There was elk, antelope, turkey, jackrabbit, quail, grouse, and chickens. There were honeybees and songbirds and the sky shadowed with raptors. There were bee caves and bee trees flowing with honey. The lush grass ran to the horizon and seamlessly filled the laterals running into the Wolf and he thought this is how the world was in the beginning.

  Not far, he found a black gelding with a bloody saddle and blood-drenched shoulders and mane, though healthy and alert. The blood was so much and days old. He was a good horse, sound and gentle, and Michael named him Starbuck for the pretty white star on his forehead and led him on.

  Soon he could see thousands of buffalo roaming the plains and he filled with a strange and powerful feeling, the passage of receding time. There were so many of them he felt diminished, infinitesimally small, insignificant. He lost his breath. It made him wonder on the courage of the first man. Man the shadow. Man the child. Man standing erect. Man just beginning and the wars of civ
ilizations yet to take place.

  He traveled south by southwest and soon he’d reached the invisible border of open and hostile country. There were three wild horses and he watched them through the glasses. They were a mare with her daughter and granddaughter. The daughter was nursing from the mare and the granddaughter from her mother.

  How rich and fecund the country, how it smelled of earth and manure, decay and return, hot, steamy, and reeky, the thousands upon thousands of years of grazing and manuring and birthing and dying on these generative plains. The land, the water, the very air generating life, sustaining life, and receiving its return to the earth as it used to in the old days.

  The plain’s trail led him deeper into the country. All about were sharp hoofprints in the pounded soil. The cut banks of dried laterals were beaten down and packed hard. Tufts of brown fluffy hair were snagged in the hawthorns and rough bark of the cotton­woods. He continued on, making his way to a darker line until he could see below the silver trace of water entering a wide and spreading world to the east. The banks ran high above the cutting water and the green plain ran to the edge without much sign to mark its course and there the land fell away as if a false horizon to the steady current below. The creek was wide, shallow, and swift, a beautiful clear-­running creek, David’s place of live water, fuel, fodder, and buffalo.

  He followed the water a short distance east to find a small valley situated in a cup among low hills. Here it was, the course so accurately drawn by his brother that he hit the mark without deflecting. It was an unnatural place, a parklike meadow bounded on three sides by the curving stream. It was unnatural in the way it lay stranded. It would need to be looked for or stumbled upon by accident. Blue-­and-­white cranes fished in the shallows. There, fire would not be seen and its smoke would float east and close to the water before rising.

  David had written, Some labor will be required to make a serviceable wagon road. There is a ford to cross where the water is shallow, and the bed hard gravel where can lay a corduroy road. Once on the bluff, a wagon can follow the points of the compass wherever a buffalo trail may lead . . . farther west an easy ford to the south. A spring of ample water threads from the bank side. An ideal hunters’ camp: plenty of fresh water, good grass, and wood in abundance. Turkeys roost by the thousands; deer, antelope, in great herds.