Victoria wasn’t faring any better. She dressed sullenly, as irritable as he, her eyes accusing, her glare daring him to say one word, just one word, so it would all blow up and she would stay at rendezvous. They had the good sense not to say anything to each other.
He pulled his thick-soled moccasins up, tugged his fringed buckskins over his blue shirt, and stepped into a gray and hateful dawn. The rendezvous slept sweetly. Even the revelers had surrendered to Morpheus. He saw Gabe Bridger snoring peacefully beside a dead campfire. The rain would wake him up soon. Even Bridger, one of the partners of the defunct rival fur company, was now working for Pierre Chouteau and his St. Louis capitalists. Where else could a mountaineer go? To Mexico? No one was making a living farther south, trying to drown a few beaver for Bent, St. Vrain and Company. The good times were over, and the mountain life was going under.
Smoke from a couple of fires hung lazily over the camp, layering the air. This was the time of day of surprise attack; of hordes of vermillion-painted savages sweeping into a vulnerable and sleeping village. But that would not happen here at the great trade festival. Mountain men had fangs and two-legged predators knew it. The mountaineers and Indians guarded the horse herds well, night and day. And years ago, a few Blackfoot and Gros Ventre raiders had bumped into the rendezvous and started a war, and they weren’t likely to try it again.
He headed for the river, splashed brutally cold water over his stubbled face and battered hands, dried himself with a handful of grass, and headed for the breakfast fire, walking painfully, as if on pebbles, because the chill had stiffened his limbs. Over at the store, Andy Drips’s clerks were furiously baling plews, while others loaded packs onto mules.
“We’ll be out of here in an hour,” Drips said. “Have some breakfast. Real coffee.”
“Don’t touch it.”
“You limeys. I suppose you want tea.”
“Just some meat.”
Drips pointed to a slab of buffalo loin that had been rotated on an iron spit over cottonwood flames until it was scorched outside and succulent within. Skye pulled out his Green River knife and began sawing, feeling the hot pink juices leak over his scaly hands. Buffalo was a satisfying meat, tender at the hump and loin, tough and chewy elsewhere. This was stringy meat, old bull, but tasty. It would give his teeth something to do and put some strength into his belly.
“You do a good trade last night?” Skye asked, around the meat.
“No. Not three packs of beaver from the free trappers. Few more from the Injuns, and some weasel tails, ermine, mink, and otter.”
“What happens to all these trade goods if they don’t sell?”
“It’ll all get packed back to Fort Union.”
Skye looked at the hardware, blankets and cloth, a pathetic fraction of what usually arrived in the annual packtrain. “Don’t think there’ll be much to take back, mate.”
“Fontenelle will bring whatever doesn’t sell, and whatever furs he can still buy. We’ve got most of the pelts loaded. This ain’t much of a rendezvous. You can feel it. Maybe it’s the last. Who knows? Makes a man feel bad about things.”
Skye nodded, feeling an autumnal chill, like the falling of aspen leaves, even though it was June.
He spotted the young Frenchman, Alexandre Bonfils, approaching, and studied his rival. Together they would go to St. Louis, but only one would win the trading position at Fort Cass. Bonfils peered at Skye with quick dark eyes, and then at the wavering fire. If getting up at this hour was hard on Skye, it was plainly worse for the disheveled younger brigade leader, whose lax discipline often got him into trouble.
Bonfils’s life in the mountains had been a series of narrow escapes from weather, cold, starvation, Indians, and sickness. And yet the man’s daring and genius, his uncanny ability to bring in the beaver was even more formidable than Skye’s. Bonfils did not hesitate to take his men into Blackfoot country, moving swiftly from stream to brooding stream in virgin beaver waters, and escaping before Bug’s Boys got wind of his presence.
The man affected a certain patrician elegance that shouted his superiority to the world. One of his oddities was the ever-present Royal Order of Chevaliers medal pinned to his breast. This device, a bronze medallion chased with gold, featuring the bas relief bust of Louis XVI hanging from watershot blue silk, announced the magnificence of the Bonfils name to all the mountain men, as well as stray savages. His other idiosyncracy was to have his family coat of arms sewn in gold lamé thread to his parfleches. By and large, the mountaineers enjoyed the gaudy display; beaver men could accommodate almost any attire, and the more bizarre, the better. Skye didn’t mind any of it; did he not insist on wearing his own battered beaver top hat like a bishop’s miter?
Bonfils poured steaming coffee into a tin cup, nodded at Skye, and grinned.
“So, my ami, we will go seek our fortune together on the bateau-à-vapeur.”
Skye nodded. He knew if he opened his mouth he would regret what might come out. Bonfils had been drinking all night, yet here he was, showing no effects of the binge, while Skye, sober even after a parched year, was aching, irritable and as friendly as a lame grizzly coming out of hibernation.
“Is madame coming?” Bonfils asked.
“Yes.”
“Ah, is it wise? I am lending Amalie to a friend. She would be an encumbrance in St. Louis, you know.”
A mountain marriage, Skye thought. A temporary liaison between a trapper and a red woman, swiftly abandoned whenever the need arose. A man like Bonfils would have a dozen belles in St. Louis dancing in attendance, and would not let himself be embarrassed by the possessive arm of a squaw.
Bonfils’s Hidatsa woman was pretty, bright-eyed young, vivacious, and a commodity the brigade leader sometimes lent to others for a favor. The young man’s approach to life was to treat everything as a marketable commodity: loyalty, men, beaver, nature, women, and power. But that didn’t disturb Skye. Bonfils’s approach to native women was much the same as that of most trappers. Skye’s enduring and committed marriage was the real oddity.
“I’m sure, monsieur, that Pierre Chouteau will want to discuss the trading business out of earshot of your squaw. There are certain aspects of the business that are not for savage ears,” Bonfils said. “Profit is everything!”
Skye nodded dourly, and sawed at the haunch of buffalo, sensing that Bonfils still wanted to palaver. For reasons Skye couldn’t fathom, he had never much cared for the young Creole. The man was well educated, interesting, witty, brave, adept at survival in wilderness, a great raconteur, well liked and respected among the mountain fraternity. Skye couldn’t fathom what was irritating him.
Within the hour Victoria had sullenly loaded their small seven-pole buffalo-hide lodge onto a travois, harnessed the packhorses, stuffed the panniers with their few things, fed No Name, their mutt, a buffalo rib, and was ready to go. Skye used to try to help, but she had always shooed him off, saying it was woman’s work.
Drips’s men were almost ready, too, and some of them were masticating meat before heading down the trail. Fontenelle, who would be in charge of the store, watched quietly.
Skye suddenly had a wrenching premonition that he would never see a rendezvous again. It tore at him so violently that he walked away from the hum of activity, down to the bank of the Popo Agie River, which ran through sedges there, and peered into the flowing waters that dully reflected in silvery images the distant mountains, their tops sawed off by a heavy overcast. Around him the rendezvous slept sweetly. Few men rose early during the summer festivals, and rare was the mountaineer who greeted the sun at any time.
An ache filled him. These mountain rendezvous were the only home he had had for many years. No matter where the site might be—Green River, Cache Valley—the great reunions were his hearth and parlor and kitchen. He was a man without a country.
He watched smoke curl sleepily from a few lodges, saw the mist obscuring the dark brush arbors where his friends whiled away joyous days, knew that if he wal
ked through that quiet camp, he would see scores of men he cherished, like Joe Meek, or Black Harris, or Gabe Bridger, or Kit Carson, lying in shaggy buffalo robes, or between dirty blankets, or in lodges like his own, or under canvas, all of them with their Hawken or mountain gun within easy reach, trappers and warriors, storytellers, drunks, fiercely loyal colleagues, rough and violent and young and bold.
“Mister Skye,” Drips called. “You think about what I said last night? About being a trader? You ready for all that?”
“No, I didn’t think much about it. I don’t want to think about it.”
“You and old Pierre may have some different ideas about how to do things. He isn’t going to let you trade your way. Only his way. The company way. You got that clear?”
Skye nodded. “We’ll see,” he said, cautiously. The camp tore at him; the future tore at him.
They wanted to look him over in St. Louis. It dawned on him that he wanted to look them over, too. What sort of men was he working for? Who were they, these distant lords whose command stretched even to here, in utter wilderness? Were they good men and true? Were they honorable? Did they possess that special quality of the English—moderation? Were they ruthless?
Suddenly this trip took on a new dimension. He had always been curious about the Americans, and now he would find out about them. For years he had thought about becoming an American citizen; the republic stood for things he admired. And yet, the Americans he had met were a mixed lot, some of them scoundrels and others fierce and implacable and merciless. But there were fine men among them too, men like Bridger, Carson, Fitzpatrick, and Jedediah Smith. He liked most of them. What had started a few hours earlier as a quest for a job, now loomed larger. He would see about these Yanks, and whether they were worthy of his esteem. And whether he would some day join them, swearing his fealty to them and their laws and Constitution. This trip could result in more than a job; much more. Or much less.
“Well, Mister Chouteau,” he said aloud. “You’ll look me over, and I’ll look you over. I hope you’re the man I want you to be, and your nation is the United States of America I dream it should be.”
Few trappers and Indians had awakened to see them off, and these few stood silently. Scarcely one man of the mountains cared to think about what was happening: a company pack train leaving the day after it arrived and unloaded a handful of goods, after paying a lousy fifty cents a plew for what few beaver were available.
Skye didn’t want to think about it either. He stepped into the high-cantled Indian saddle Victoria had gotten for him, and reined his buckskin into the procession. The caravan required no word from Drips; it simply started moving. Not even the crack of a whip was needed to start the packhorses. Twenty well-armed engagés of the American Fur Company, Skye, Victoria, and No Name, who mysteriously appeared when Skye stepped into his stirrups, Bonfils riding a handsome bay and leading a single packhorse, and Drips, gray and weather-whipped, his every motion economical.
Slowly they toiled up a long grade and then, at the last bend Skye turned, his heart wrenched once again by the sight of that beloved, sorry gathering, and then they rounded a spur of foothill and history fell behind them. Within minutes they had entered fog, and then icy mist, and finally they rode into a cruel drizzle, the kind Skye hated most.
All that long, cloud-shrouded day Skye grieved, while his horse plodded dully ahead. The rain quit but the overcast did not, and by noon they were chilled to the marrow. Drips stopped them in a piney glen and had his engages boil up some broth over a smoky fire while the pack animals rested.
Two days later they cut around the foothills of the Big Horns and headed northeast. For a while Victoria was on familiar ground and bubbling with cheer, but soon they would cross into the lands of the Sioux, and then there might be trouble.
Drips drove them hard the next days, but the weather was fine and they reached the Yellowstone nine days later, covering as much as forty miles in a stretch. Then the sun besieged them, and man and beast suffered under the glare of sun that burst into the heavens at five in the morning and didn’t set until ten.
They saw no Sioux, or Assiniboine either, but they fought an enemy that was even worse: black flies devoured them and stung the horses, and if not flies, then mosquitos, droning viciously at most of their camps. Bonfils, ever brave, made jokes and won the admiration of the engages with his gallantry, but Skye bore the maddening insects dourly.
They faced two difficult crossings. The first would carry them to the left bank of the Yellowstone, and the second would take them across the mighty Missouri to the portals of Fort Union. The post had flatboats, mackinaws, to help with that enterprise, but they would be on their own crossing the swollen Yellowstone.
Drips chose a broad and gravelly reach of the river, negotiable except for a twenty-foot channel, and they spent a whole day swimming horses across that narrow but treacherous current. But the old master knew what he was up to, and by evening he had assembled his caravan on the far bank.
The next evening they reached the Missouri, and Skye beheld a great post, one he had never seen, squatting on the north bank, and bobbing in the river, the paddle-wheel vessel Otter.
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Skye scarcely knew which sight galvanized him more: the white enameled Otter, tied fore and aft to great posts set into the levee, or the imperial American Fur Company headquarters, Fort Union, set on a yellow bench above the Missouri River.
It took some while for a pair of mackinaws, poled and paddled by sweating engagés, to carry the entire packtrain, horses and mules, one dog, and various pilgrims and voyageurs, across the sparkling river.
Here was the seat of an American empire, stretching from St. Louis up the river clear to British possessions and the walled borders of Mexico. He saw a snaky pennant flapping airily over the stockaded fortress, but knew even at that distance it wasn’t the Stars and Stripes, and the national flag would probably fly underneath if it flew at all. No doubt the masters of this fur empire considered mere national sovereignty of much less importance than their company banner.
Victoria didn’t like the look of that fireboat, even though its boilers were cold.
“Dammit, Skye,” she muttered. “I will walk.”
He laughed. “Twin chimneys,” he said. “Thirty-two horsepower of high pressure steam to spin those paddle wheels.”
“Bad spirits, and don’t give me no guff.”
He studied the vessel with a seaman’s eye, noting the flat, bargelike hull, which probably had only five or six feet of cargo space; the freight booms fore, the cabins aft, and the privies ahead of the wheelhouses. The white enameled superstructure rose amidships and looked the worse for wear, with soot staining the woodwork. The riverboat looked hard used.
“We will die,” she said. “The water spirits will reach up and smash us against a rock because this offends them.”
Skye didn’t argue. It would take skills beyond reckoning to steer that monster, the first steam vessel he had ever seen, though he had heard enough about it on the long, hasty trek from rendezvous. Andy Drips had waxed lyrical about this steamboat, and the others in the planning stage or being built for the company. “And we have a whole carpenter and smith shop on board. If anything breaks, we can fix it,” Drips had said.
Skye had wondered about that. It would take more than a blacksmith to fix a ruptured boiler, he thought.
When their turn came, they loaded their horses and travois and gear aboard one of the mackinaws, while No Name watched suspiciously. At the very last moment, as the engagés pushed away from the south bank of the Missouri, the old dog howled and leapt, landing aboard and shaking himself. Skye remembered another time, long before, when the strange yellow cur had followed a schooner mile after mile along the Columbia River, determined to go wherever Skye went … or die. Skye could not think about that without feeling his throat tighten
The engagés bantered in French with Alexandre Bonfils, who smiled a great deal and made friends easily. Skye wonde
red how he could possibly win a post from his French rival, in a company that was almost entirely French. Bonfils exuded the optimism that is natural to well-connected young men in their early twenties who have the inside track to everything good in the world.
The flatboat, or mackinaw, passed close to the huge riverboat, and Skye marveled that this machine had fought its way fifteen hundred river miles, against the current, often against the wind, pausing only to load cordwood. It carried a cargo that would supply not only the rendezvous, but also the entire needs of Fort Union and its satellite posts, including Forts Cass and MacKenzie, as well as Fort Pierre and its satellites. And that within this boat’s hull would lie a fortune in peltries: beaver primarily, but also otter, mink, weasel, ermine, elk hide, buffalo robes, buffalo tongues preserved in salt, and more.
They debarked at a crude wharf and were met by a crowd of people, including the Fort’s factor, Kenneth MacKenzie, James Kipp, his second in command, and assorted Assiniboine ladies, got up in high fashion. These were mountain wives, the mates of traders, the paramours of engagés, and servants who were casually traded from man to man to make the long winters go by swiftly. Many bore the cruel mark of smallpox on their faces, as did most of the engagés. The disease had obviously scythed through this place and left its calling cards.
The post itself rested on an arid bench in a yellow-rock country, a site far less handsome and inviting than Fort Vancouver, the great Hudson’s Bay post on the Columbia. Here were no orchards or cultivated fields or granaries or gardens, but only naked rock and sagebrush. Even so, by all accounts, the masters of Fort Union had found ways to fill their lives with amenities, including fine wines imported upriver, along with splendid furniture, spices, condiments, china, silver, handsome woodstoves, bolts of silk and cotton and flannel, and infinitely more.
Skye studied Victoria to see how she was managing, and found her surveying everything, assessing the dark, boisterous Frenchmen engaged to the company, examining the dusky Assiniboine women, famously dressed like tarts in striped silks and glossy satins, their hair beribboned, their feet in dainty moccasins so heavily quilled or beaded they looked like rainbows on each foot.
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