Savage Country

by Robert Olmstead

  “What more?” she whispered, and thought, Nothing is left now but to endure.

  Chapter 26

  It was their third day on the kill when Matthew and Mark stopped to look where Michael was glassing, south by southeast. Who it was Mark wanted to know and Michael told him they were men he knew and he’d been anticipating, and at the rate they were coming, they’d arrive in three hours’ time.

  The figures in the little caravan were coming up the valley of the Canadian. They came from the southeast, laboring up through the Red River country, a wickedness of men riding horses and driving oxen and mules hauling steel-­barred cages capable of resisting a bear’s claws and teeth. The men in the saddles turned their necks right and left, forward and back as their bodies tipped in the opposite direction. The axles were dry and the wheels in the cold transparent air creaked and screeched as they jounced along. The teamsters trudged on at the head of their teams, cracking whips dyed black with oxen’s blood.

  They were true bloods and half-­breeds. They were Americanus, Europeanus, Asiaticus, and Africanus. They were Negroes begotten of white rape: halves, quarters, and eighths, bought, sold, freed, and hated. They were Mexicans still Spanish and Mexicans still Indian with almond-­shaped eyes black as obsidian. There were hunting dogs and their Irish dog masters. These were men he’d hunted with on several continents, men who possessed no inner self, men broke free from the great chain of being, men incapable of comprehending their own death and so they lived on. They were men by appearances unhealthy and indestructible.

  They were led by his friend the Métis from northernmost Canada, a man whose father was French, descended from a coureur des bois and whose mother was Cree, both races war-­loving, and with him was another friend, the Lord, driving a two-­wheeled, one-­horse cart with a fringed top.

  The Métis suddenly reined up. He lifted field glasses to his eyes, their reflected light a momentary shock of brilliance across the land. He made his decision and after doing so he was coming directly toward them.

  “Friends of yours,” Mark said.

  “Colleagues,” Michael said.

  He then made a nicking sound and Khyber wheeled about and they began the long walk back to camp. The brothers, tagging along behind, could not help but glance back, for how unlikely the oncoming caravan.

  That afternoon when they rode into camp, Elizabeth saw them before she heard them. In a dust cloud they came on the wagon road, crested the bluff, and descended as a disorderly rabble. She threw aside the novel she was reading and stood, the back of her hand to her mouth. She went quickly up the path to stand by Aubuchon, who was preparing for the return of the hungry men, a mountain of steaks under cloth waiting for the fire. John, Luke, and Charlie joined them from where they’d been down on their knees cutting holes, driving pegs, stretching hides.

  Then she heard them, the oxen moaning for water, the shuttering clatter of the steel cages, the howling dogs, the braying of the mules, the knock of bones against wood. They mounted the bluff and came on, stumbling and plunging, some down the road and some off the sides. They poured from its edge, where it was steep, and splashed down into the creek. They fell off their horses and found them and got back on. The dog handlers came next. They were dragged down the wagon road by the seat of their pants and bumped over the corduroy road crossing the creek before they could regain their feet. Then came a black man in top hat smartly driving a two-­wheeled cart pulled by a high-­stepping pony.

  “Stir up the fire,” she said, but Aubuchon already was.

  The Métis wore a linen coat, a red belt, brown cord trousers, and deer hide gauntlets. He was olive-­skinned, well built, and bright-­eyed. He had left the northern territories, their lush meadows and evergreen forests; the abundant fish in the rivers and streams; the elk, bear, and buffalo, and like his forefathers, he answered the call to trade and adventure. It was in Africa where Michael had met him and the Lord and all three came to benefit from Mr. Salt as they traveled from one continent to the next.

  The Lord was dressed in a scarlet coat and vest with brass buttons, which he wore over buckskin breeches and polished high boots with silver spurs. A silk handkerchief was knotted at his throat and beneath his coat he wore a spotless linen shirt. The Lord’s face was ritualistically tattooed and his forehead was gnarled with scarification. His nose had a high prominent bridge and his eyes were large and velvety and black as the night. In Africa the Lord was respected for his intelligence, his political acumen, his ruthless authority. He was a mganga, medicine man and sorcerer, whose powers included exorcism, prophecy, and the removal of spells. On his wrist he wore an elephant-­hair bangle to keep him safe on his travels and this bracelet he would give to Elizabeth.

  In one wagon were the carcasses of a bull, a heifer, and an antelope the hounds had taken down and the men had been eating off since. The meat was green and coated with flies. In another wagon were sacks of snakes, shovels, nets, and snares as well as the bones of Indians they’d looted from their burial mounds for export. Some of the bones did not look so old and Michael saw upon closer inspection that there were knots of leathered flesh and dried blood. No doubt a few of them belonged to men who started up the trail with the Métis and the Lord and perished along the way. It would not be the first time.

  The sacks of snakes began to writhe and the deadly sound of them could be heard. No man was immune to the rush of blood and the cold tremor induced by such a sound, but however much the snakes tried, their fangs could not penetrate the enclosing folds. The Lord selected one of the sacks. He unknotted the lash and took out a specimen for all to see. It was of an immense girth, seven feet long, with teeth an eighth of an inch in length. On its tail, it carried fourteen rattles.

  He offered it to each of the boys to hold, and cheered on by the men and spellbound, they passed it from one to the next by its throat before letting it drop back into the sack to be cinched and knotted. Long after, each boy would still feel the snake in his hand weighing down his arm, would see the flick of its tongue, its unfolding fangs, the drops of venom.

  Aubuchon called to them, and as if the spell removed, the men descended on the big pots with knives and spoons they pulled from their boots, spearing the meat and scooping out the broth, burning their mouths, cursing and swearing, burning them again. They ate until they were bloated and blear-­eyed.

  The boys brought the buffalo calves they taught to drink by letting them suck their fingers beneath the surface of the milk. The wolfer came in with young wolves and coyotes. Aubuchon took out the brandy and joined the Métis and wolfer, and for a while the three men privately spoke their French, gossiping with pleasure.

  Michael lit a pipe and sat down and was soon joined by the Métis and the Lord. The Métis had discarded his linen coat for a blue capote and the Lord had removed his own coat to show a necklace of lion teeth and ivory, heavy brass bracelets, and a gold chain at his vest button attached to a gold watch with Arabic numerals and moon phase calendar made in Geneva, Switzerland.

  The Métis untied his hair and let it fall down his back. While they spoke he busied himself with stuffing the skin of an ivory-­billed woodpecker he bought in Galveston.

  He told Michael he’d been in the north all spring, collecting infant animals to hand-­raise and ship when they were hearty, tame, and tractable. They’d started in British Columbia and worked their way south and picked up a very nice pair of wolf cubs and grizzly bear cubs and kits of the carcajou, the wolverine, and they were already ferocious.

  He said Mr. Salt wanted a family of Indians, preferably Comanche, and another, a family of American Negroes. He also wanted a white wolf and a white buffalo. He was interested in any albinos they might acquire. Already in the cages, they had coyotes, raccoons, polecats, beaver and otter, but no albinos.

  Michael and the Métis stood as Elizabeth and the reverend doctor joined them. Elizabeth looked to where Michael sat by the fire. His countenance was that of a boy, a younger brother. Soon he would leave her to
fulfill his contractual obligations with Mr. Salt, the reason he’d come to America in the first place, to hunt and collect. It was how he made his money. It was how he bought the paper on Meadowlark held by Whitechurch, who’d bankrupt her.

  She watched him closely. He was as if lost in thought. Suddenly he reached for her hand and took it in his own.

  “I will leave Sabi with you?” he said, and then he said, “Where we are going . . . ,” but he did not finish his sentence.

  “Of course,” she said, clasping her other hand over his to say Sabi would be safe with her.

  She wondered if she would ever see him again, but she could not bring herself to ask. She wanted to thank him but could not do so.

  “What’s it like in Africa?” the reverend doctor was asking the Métis.

  “There are fish that fly and birds that talk.”

  “And what’s it like up there where you come from?”

  “Blizzards, sandstorms, and missionaries,” the Métis said, and then he said, “At least you are not a missionary.”

  However strange and frightening and wicked these men, however violent and savage their lives, it was a joyful encounter. It was as if the rambling circus of the human imagination had come to town. Just as suddenly they were gone, and Michael, with so many thoughts born in his mind, was gone with them.

  Chapter 27

  The fall had long since merged into winter and it was cold and the one season disappeared into another. With Michael gone, Elizabeth kept steadily to the routine of her work. Each day Matthew and Mark killed buffalo at a furious rate, exceeding all previous tallies. More men came in looking for work. She sized them up and made her decision to hire them or send them on their way after a hot meal.

  Then came a day, a bitter frost, and Elizabeth was invaded by worry. It took hold of her as if an illness. She could not sleep that night, waking fitfully, tossing and turning. She was convinced that something was wrong. She thought of all that she’d not said to Michael, all that he’d not said to her, and yet how much he’d become part of her thinking.

  There was a new thought she was trying to fashion. She stood and began to pace about. It was so simple and yet the words would not take shape.

  She did not want to leave her tent that morning, but it occurred to her how anxious she’d become and how foolish it was to shut herself in. She dressed for the cooler weather. She called Sabi from her warm bed and together they went out.

  Aubuchon stood before the fire cutting meat to cook. John was singing to himself a little song as he worked. The horses were feeding. For some reason she expected to see Khyber among them. Aubuchon called to her and asked her where she was going.

  “You let me sleep too long,” she said.

  “I apologize. I thought on your behalf you wished to rest.”

  “I am going to the top of the bluff,” she said, and then, “Where are the men?” and Aubuchon pointed to the southwest.

  “He will make it,” Aubuchon said, and she smiled grimly.

  She walked the wagon road to the top of the bluff and unfolded a camp chair beside John who was knotting the string for his two older brothers. To the west she could hear the boys shooting, the minute-­by-­minute report of the Sharps. The sky was brittle. The plains were firm and hard. They were the same and boundless. The buffalo kept them pastured short and bare and fertile, and she found this place beside the boy well suited for waiting and thinking as he tied his knots.

  “Are you ever homesick, John?” she said to the boy.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She listened over the fields strewn distantly with the dead of so many buffalo and wolves and coyotes and birds of prey poisoned by eating their flesh.

  “When my husband died, it was as if the life went out of me, and I have been sad with Michael gone. But there comes a new day and after that day there are other days.”

  “How did your husband die?” John said.

  “A horse, John. He was kicked by a horse. It was his own fault. He should have been more careful.” Her words were as if self-­inflicted. Her breathing caught and her chest ached. She thought she might cry, but she didn’t.

  “A horse can kill you dead,” John said.

  “My husband was very sad, John. He’d lost a lot of money.”

  “What happened to the horse?”

  “I put it down. It was a good horse and now I wish I hadn’t.”

  “Do you ever think we will see Michael again?” John said.

  “That’s what we fear,” she said.

  From his tent where he was earnestly writing, the reverend doctor watched her go out. He leaned back in his chair to see better, swung his foot, and he was thoughtful and happy.

  He stood and looked intently at the sheets of foolscap, the words he’d written in iron gall ink.

  Having experienced the delights of whiskey, the Comanche and Kiowa were again on the maraud. The Red Devils shot their arrows to wound and not to kill so they might experience the pleasure and ecstasy their kind found in human torment. For one, a stake was driven through him and his head separated from his body. For another, the tomahawk in his back was deep enough to reveal his spine. Him they scalped, skinned, and roasted alive.

  Charlotte surveyed the scene of wet horror from the back of the horse she rode. Her eyes took in the men and women and children, their bodies naked and violated and bound together by their still steaming entrails ripped from their insides while still alive.

  “You have no idea of the meaning of the word fear,” she said.

  “You are safe with me,” I said.

  “I should not ever like to be taken prisoner again.”

  “Nor shall you be.”

  “I am not afraid of death.”

  “Do not talk like that.”

  “Promise me something, old campaigner,” she said with throat-­closing fear.

  “Anything,” I said.

  “Save the last bullet for me.”

  He clasped his hands behind his back. The writing was four hundred pages and as if automatic and a kind of spiritual dictation. He dipped the nib of his pen in the inkwell, and with a soft clink, he tapped off the excess against the side. Something calls to me from out of the dark and gloom, he wrote, the sharp metal point scratching over the paper. I will go to meet it, and then he followed Elizabeth as she headed toward her place on the bluff.

  The reverend doctor could not help but gaze out at the land that lay before him. He thought about the times he lived in, the latter half of the nineteenth century. He saw the years ahead to be full of promise and permanent greatness and of late his extravagant visions had become gifted revelations. Soon this desolate land of nowhere would all be changed and it was all happening so quickly that he knew he would live to see it happen. The Comanche would be subdued, their naked children and women clothed, their spiritual lives Christianized, civilized, and after the soldiers, surveyors, and cartographers would be men like him of human will, men with spiritual and executive ability, and they would take over the open land and make it ready for law-­abiding productive citizens. There would be an end to foreclosures, economic insecurity, and debt. There would be boom times, times of reverence, fulfillment, and human improvement and the end of despair, fear, restiveness, meaninglessness. No darkness but rather light. There would be farms and ranches, fabulous gold and silver lodes in the hill country. The land would be fenced, grazed, planted, harvested. Roads and canals would be built, a lacework of railroads. Rivers would be diverted to irrigate the crops and slake the thirst of the livestock. The plains, liberally fertilized, would become fields of abundance. Rain would follow the plow. The air would fill with the smell of kerosene and oil. He imagined the little children with their dinner pails marching to school. There would be a new masculinity. It would be a land of yeomen farmers and the work they provided for their hired men. Wages would be kept low to prevent working people from wasting their money on alcohol, gambling, and prostitutes.

  He then saw her beyond a tusso
ck of grass. She was watching him and he called out to her.

  “May I join you,” he said.

  “Of course,” she called out.

  “I hope you weren’t going to shoot me,” the reverend doctor said. “Hello, John,” he said to the boy. “How are you this beautiful morning?”

  “I am well, sir.”

  “Very good,” he said. “Steady on!”

  Elizabeth smiled for how in the bleakest of time the reverend doctor could buoy up her emotions and inspire a kind of cheerfulness in even the hardest man.

  John was on his feet holding up the string with ten knots. Elizabeth smiled and nodded as if to say yes, go ahead.

  “One hundred,” John cried out. “One hundred. Time to move your asses! One hundred to the south!” he cried as he ran off the bluff.

  Elizabeth stood aside to watch as the men climbed the bluff with the oxen hauling the big wagons. She felt a thrill run through her from head to foot. She watched them as they traveled west and forded the creek and disappeared south.

  “I was thinking, Elizabeth,” the reverend doctor said, “if you would just let me look after you. Someone to lean on,” he said, and in his voice it was as if she heard his thoughts: someone who will love you and you will love back.

  “You are too good and I will try better,” she said, “but it’s not in my nature.”

  “It was at one time.”

  “I am sorry if that was your impression.”

  “It is what David wanted.”

  “David?” she said, looking up at him. “You would wound me that way?”

  She felt a strange fear, the sinking of her heart. Her eyes were bright and wetting with tears. Would David have wanted such? Would he have said these words to another man?

  “As you know,” she said, “I read and write and think and I am quite capable of taking care of myself.”

  “And you have natural moral superiority.”

  “I assure you I have no moral superiority and want so even less.”