by Win Blevins
“The ring,” said the friar.
Angel handed it to him. It was a simple circle of gold, needing no ornament.
Father Sanchez blessed the ring in Latin and handed it to Flat Dog. Coached step by step, Flat Dog put it on the thumb of Julia’s left hand.
“In nomine Patris,” said the priest.
On her index finger. “Et Filii.”
On her middle finger. “Et Spiritus Sancti.”
And finally on her fourth finger.
Angel handed Flat Dog a platter covered with a beautifully embroidered cloth. On it gleamed two coins donated by Jedediah, one of gold and one of silver. After the translator, Flat Dog repeated these words: “With this ring I thee wed. This gold and silver I thee give, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.”
Then Father Sanchez quoted a series of short verses from the Psalms. After each verse the Catholics, Julia, Angel, Grumble, and Abby, spoke the responses learned in childhood.
Father Sanchez announced that he would now proceed to the nuptial mass. During this ceremony he enunciated a number of collects, which were prayers of invocation, petition, and conclusion.
After the “Pater Noster” he spoke a solemn blessing on the new husband and wife, and gave another blessing before his benediction.
He then administered communion to the Catholics, who now included Flat Dog, and declared the ceremony complete.
Finally he stepped close and spoke a few fatherly words to the bride and groom.
Sam looked at Meadowlark. He was in awe. He looked, fully, at the commitment he had made to this woman. He grasped it with dimensions and textures new to him. And he loved all that he saw and felt. He took his wife into his arms, and felt the child of her belly nuzzled against him.
Flat Dog and Julia led the procession away from the altar.
Where are they going? thought Sam. His heart swelled. To what happiness? To what tragedy? To what life?
He touched the medicine pouch he wore around his neck, thought of the piece of paper inside, and the words on it: “Follow the direction your wild hair points.”
Part Three
EXPLORING
Thirteen
California Mountains
Jedediah traded his beaver hides for horses. The ranchos had great horse herds roaming superb grasslands, herds so vast most dons didn’t know how many head they owned. Horses that would have brought half a year’s wages in the mountains sold for a week’s wages. Soon Jedediah had forty-eight new mounts, more than two per man. He hoped he’d need the horses to carry all the beaver they would trap.
“Do you know we’re going to have another horse come spring?” he asked Sam.
“What do you mean?”
“That mare of yours is going to foal.”
Sam felt a thrill. “You sure?” He knew some horsemen had an eye for it.
“I’m sure.”
“When?”
“Spring.”
Sam thought. Meadowlark was expecting the baby in what white folks called April. “A new human and a new horse about the same time.”
“You’re a progenitor,” said Diah, and then explained what his big word meant.
Sam decided to pick out a gelding from the new company mounts. No need to ride Paladin near her time. In fact, he would get Coy to ride Paladin, so the pup would be the complete master of balancing on the horse. They were a striking pair, the coyote riding on the back of the white mare with the black markings.
A week after the captain’s return from San Diego the brigade set out. The other men picked out saddle horses and hitched their possibles onto others.
Right off, the herd stampeded eight or ten miles before the men caught them. The ride was exhilarating, and the men made camp in high spirits.
That night Captain Smith and clerk Rogers rode back to San Gabriel Mission for a final dinner with Father Sanchez and the other friars. At this farewell the head of the mission offered them many gifts, and told them they were free to slaughter and dry all the beef they wanted for their return trip.
On the way back to camp Jedediah and Rogers talked it over and agreed that Father Jose Sanchez was one of the finest men they’d ever met, a true Christian gentleman.
And a devil of a contrast, thought Jedediah, to the damn governor.
The next evening Flat Dog and Julia quietly joined the brigade.
Rogers put on a sour face, but the other men welcomed the couple. “Ah,” said Evans the Irishman, “a beautiful woman makes the world seem finer.”
Meadowlark got out the tipi she had made for them from cow hides, and she and Julia put up the poles Sam had cut. “Damn poor ones they are,” he apologized to Flat Dog, “when you compare them to lodgepole pine.” Though California and the ocean were exciting, Flat Dog and Meadowlark missed the Yellowstone country, home of the Crow people.
Flat Dog grinned and the men relaxed, watching the women do the work. In good Crow fashion, Meadowlark wouldn’t have tolerated male help for an instant. Julia, though, clearly would have embraced anyone’s help, or encouragement. She was all elbows and knees. Sam wondered if she’d even made a bed before. That’s what you get, growing up rich.
The next morning Jedediah looked at his outfit, the surrounding countryside, the world. He told himself he should be pleased. He’d brought his brigade safely across nearly a thousand miles of terrible desert. Though he’d earned almost nothing for the company of Smith, Jackson & Sublette so far, he’d found a route to a good country, one that now had prospects of proving profitable.
Several times, over cigars and brandy, Jedediah had asked Father Sanchez about the Rio Buenaventura.
“There is a great river perhaps a hundred miles to the north,” said Father Sanchez through his translator. “It flows on to the north. On the east side of this river, a grande sierra, a range of mountains, running north and south. Or this is what the Indios say. The mountains, they have eternal snows on their summits.”
Which would mean plenty of beaver.
Riding back to camp that night, Jedediah ran it over and over in his mind. This was his chance to turn the expedition from catastrophe to bonanza.
His passports said he had to go back the way he came.
He could fudge that. The governor and the whole Mexican government be damned.
Jedediah had told the governor he was hunting beaver. He hadn’t mentioned the elusive Buenaventura. Now he was going after both.
Back over the mountains the way they came and onto the flank of the great desert that stretched to the Colorado River. Every man looked out across that desert and hated it. They remembered it less with their minds than their bodies. Dust in the teeth. Tongues turned to rawhide. Sand wherever your clothes fit tight. Skin parched. The taste of alkali in what little water you got. Eyeballs scoured and aching.
So every man, plus Meadowlark, the one woman who had crossed the Mojave with them, was happy about the captain’s decision to travel north instead. He said they might find a river that way, and travel along it back to rendezvous. The plan was to trap the spring season in the mountains reported to rise ahead, and follow the Buenaventura back to rendezvous in midsummer.
A fine plan. California was a good country—the blacksmith Reed and the slave Sumner had slipped away from the brigade to stay there. Most of the men, though, favored mountain doings. Buffalo. Indians, their kind of Indians. Hunting and trapping. The Rocky Mountains.
Flat Dog liked roaming but was eager to be home again, and show his native country to Julia. Meadowlark was downright homesick. Now she had seen the big water everywhere to the west. She said to Sam, “I’m ready to be in my own village, with my mother, my father, my brothers and sister.”
But there was no question of heading for home yet. Not and go back across the Mojave. Not traveling in a small party. They would go when Jedediah decided to go.
“We go to rendezvous after the baby is born,” said Sam. If they found beaver, he knew, the captain would want to trap
through April, at least.
Meadowlark made a face and turned away. Sam watched her walk around camp, bend over the cooking pot, stoop to pick up firewood. Her body was changing. Her breasts were fuller, her hips wider, her belly a little bulged. She was beautiful.
He thought, In three more moons she will bear our child. April. In Crow country that would be when the snow melts and the grass greens up, a time called awasiia, “earth is visible.” Who knew what it would be called here in California, where grass stayed green all winter?
What would they call the child? In the Crow way of things, he would be known as Snub Nose, or some other silly and endearing child’s name. (Sam wanted a son, though he hadn’t told Meadowlark that.) Later the lad would be given a boy’s name, not a child’s name, and later yet, much later, a man’s name, a name he would earn through a vision, or by a deed in war.
Sam thought about seeing all those changes, as the child went from toddler to boy to youth to man. Sam had to chuckle at himself, though. As he imagined his son growing up, his picture of himself, the father, stayed the same, a vigorous fellow in his twenties. It didn’t add up.
Now in his imagination he watched Meadowlark put her child into her parents’ arms, a gift. He watched that over and over.
Sometimes he wondered what kinds of changes were taking place in Paladin’s body. He didn’t know. When he’d seen mares foal in the past, he hadn’t known a foal was coming until the tits waxed up, just a few days before she dropped. He’d be damn happy to have a colt.
Northward along the desert’s edge the brigade rode, and then over a low range of mountains. Now they were back on the west side of the mountains, the well-watered side. Somewhere toward the setting sun, only a few days’ ride, the Pacific Ocean heaved, the friars oversaw their missions, and the dons ran their horses and cattle.
Somewhere to the north, probably, flowed a great river and rose a great range of mountains. And there they would find beaver.
They set their faces north.
The two couples lived in a world of their own making. Flat Dog and Julia honeymooned. Sam and Meadowlark passed their days and nights in the romance of young married love and the anticipation of the child.
Every night Sam and Meadowlark sat and looked at each other. They lay beside each other, arms and legs entwined. They dived into anticipation that was deeper than thought. Each had memories of family, each had expectations about family, each had powerful wants stirred by the thought of family. Different in their hopes, similar in their hopes, they were drawn forward by the child, a powerful current, into the unknown. They held each other in the realm of the known and dreamed a kingdom of grace.
In about three weeks the brigade saw their range to the northeast, and it was huge, full of snows that were eternal for sure. Soon they came on a big river that hurried out of the mountains and calmed as it turned north. Was this the Buenaventura?
Jedediah followed it doggedly. The river appeared to come out of the mountains on the east.
They got some information from local Indians. Yes, the Indians confirmed, the river had its sources in those mountains.
That meant it didn’t drain the entire desert, all the way from the Salt Lake. It wasn’t the Buenaventura. Jedediah rode off to the top of a hill alone and sat and thought things over for an evening. He admitted it to himself: The Buenaventura was a desert mirage. It doesn’t exist. I have chased that mythical river for more than two years. Now it is dust blowing in the air. Disgusted, he named the new river the Peticutry.
Sam, Meadowlark, Flat Dog, and Julia were sorry about their captain’s disappointment. But the geography of the heart seemed more important to them.
The other men of the outfit worried. If we don’t find the Buenaventura, will we have to cross the Mojave Desert again?
Soon the trappers got back into the routine of a beaver outfit. Men rode up creeks and set traps, rode down creeks, pulled the drowned rodents out of the water, and skinned them. In camp Meadowlark, Julia, and others dried the hides and prepared them for transport. Trapping was hard work.
Julia surprised everyone by pitching in with a will. She took pride in working as hard as anyone—she fleshed hides with a scraper, stretched them on hoops made from supple limbs, bound them into packs that rode on the backs of the packhorses.
During what Jedediah said was February, what he said was March, they trapped their way north through the foothills of the great mountain range. Mount Joseph, Jedediah named it, after the friar of San Gabriel Mission, a man they would remember forever for his generosity.
One by one, they passed the big rivers that came roaring westward out of the mountains, rampaging toward the Peticutry and then the sea. The Indians called those rivers Nototemnes, Tuolomne, Appelaminy, Mokelumne.
“Musical names,” said Evans the musician. “Beautiful.”
Jedediah gave them new names and fastidiously inked them onto the maps in his journal.
Sam chuckled to himself about this. Like they weren’t real until they had white-man names and were set down in some book.
The Indians of the region were strange. They fed, apparently, on fish, roots, acorns, and grass seed. And they were skittish as any wild animals. “Might as well be blackbirds,” Diah told Sam, “for all we can talk to them.” When they saw Indians, Jedediah made signs he meant as friendly, walked out alone, and laid presents on the ground. The Indians ran away.
The captain was frustrated. He wanted to ask about a passage across these mountains.
“I’m thinking of a more northerly route across the deserts to the Salt Lake,” he told Sam.
Jedediah was back to tutoring Sam as a captain in training. Sam told Meadowlark it made him uneasy.
“We need a way back that’s not so hot or dry,” she said.
Their eyes met, their minds full of the newborn they would be carrying across the desert.
This day’s Indians made Sam feel edgy.
They came near camp, and he staked Paladin even closer. The Indians appeared in ones and twos on ridgetops a couple of hundred yards away. There they stood and looked into the camp. Hannibal had told Sam about working for the circus, which showed wild animals in cages, animals no one had seen before, like Bengal tigers, or chimpanzees, or elephants. And people would come and stare at the animals, strange creatures from alien lands.
Not for the first time in California, Sam felt like one of those animals.
Jedediah watched the Indians to see how close their curiosity would bring them. Finally he took a blanket, some tobacco, and some beads, and rode in the direction of some he’d glimpsed. He picked a clear spot, in the open away from timber or brush or hills, where he could see anyone who approached. Then he laid out the blanket and put down the presents and sat down to wait. Though his pistol was in his belt, his rifle was back in camp.
Soon a skinny Indian stilted in from the captain’s left. Sam watched the captain open his arms and gesture to the presents. The Indian watched for long moments and suddenly was gone.
The captain waited.
Two Indians, one short and fat, the other just plain small in every direction, walked toward Jedediah from straight on. Thirty or forty yards out, they squatted and looked. They called out in a language none of the trappers knew. They smiled big.
Jedediah opened his arms wide. He made the sign of friendship toward them, though the trappers suspected these California Indians didn’t know the sign language of the plains and mountains. He waited.
They babbled, waved their arms, and ran off.
Flat Dog eased up beside Sam, holding both of their horses on leads. The two of them watched carefully, rifles in hand.
Jedediah sat and waited.
Sam thought for the hundredth time, He has incredible courage.
Time got boring. Jedediah stayed put. Everything stayed the same. Even the heavy air didn’t stir. Birds didn’t sing. Leaves didn’t flutter. Seemed like the sun didn’t make its arc.
Sam wondered how the captain f
elt, out there by himself.
SCREAMS! An incredible racket, a wild clamor.
Indians sprinting toward Jedediah, bristling with bow and arrows, spears and clubs.
In one motion the captain pulled the picket on his mount and vaulted into the saddle. He rode like hell.
Sam and Flat Dog rode like hell too. Without thinking, Sam fired over his mount’s head. He wouldn’t hit anything at this distance, but the boom and the whoosh of black smoke might scare them off.
He reloaded on the fly, pouring too much powder down the barrel and setting the ball by banging the Celt’s butt plate on the saddle.
The captain came on pell-mell.
From behind Sam heard another shot, and the tatter-tat-tat of hooves. Other boys were riding.
Jedediah galloped up to them and wheeled his horse to a stop. He looked back at the blanket, and at the Indians poised halfway between their bush hiding places and the presents. “To the devil with it,” said Diah, strong language for him, and rode on.
Sam didn’t think to the devil with it. One look and he and Flat Dog agreed. They whipped their horses straight toward the blanket.
Other trappers caught them. Rifles roared, and a couple of Indians went down. The rest ran off.
Sam gathered up the blanket and gifts, rode back, and presented them to Jedediah.
“Good thinking,” said the captain. “We give, but we don’t let them steal.”
Sam watered and rope-corralled the mount, haltered Paladin, and led her to water.
“Sam! Flat Dog!”
Julia’s voice. Desperation in it. “Sam! Flat Dog!”
Sam jammed Paladin’s stake into the ground and ran toward the two tipis. Meadowlark was curled in the dust, Julia bent over her.
Meadowlark had one hand tented over her eyes, the other clutched at her belly. She moaned.
Sam bent over her. “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”
She answered in the Crow language, “I can’t get my breath.”
Quickly Sam lay next to her and circled her with his arms from behind. Her chest heaved and spasmed. He’d never felt so helpless. What can I do?
