by Win Blevins
Sam smiled in spite of himself. “Evans, you’re two bricks shy of a hodful.”
They looked at each other, three-quarters buried.
“What if some Indians were to come along right now?” asked Evans.
“We could wave at them,” said Sam.
They cackled.
“Bad luck, we’ve left our scalps exposed!” said Evans.
They hooted and whooped until tears ran down their cheeks.
They fell silent and sat, conscious of being entombed. From time to time they rotated their heads this way and that. Sam noticed that, though the shade was sliding eastward, they wouldn’t be in the sun for a long time yet. He craned his head back and inspected the high sky. At that moment it was perfect, blue from east to west and north to south, without a hint of cloud, or even a dark bird to mar it.
“This business of dying,” said Sam, “is slow and tedious.”
When Evans didn’t answer, Sam got the two pieces of guidance out of the bag again. He rubbed the fur between his fingers. Sorry, he thought, but I am quitting.
He opened the piece of paper and looked at the words. Though he couldn’t read, he knew these words by heart.
“What does it say?” asked Evans.
“My friend Hannibal McKye gave me this advice on the night I ran away from home and started west. ‘Everything worthwhile is crazy, and everyone on the planet who’s not following his wild-hair, middle-of-the-night notions should lay down his burden, right now, in the middle of the row he’s hoeing, and follow the direction his wild hair points.’”
They both contemplated the thought in silence.
“Those are wondrous and eloquent words,” said Evans. He thumped his chest, what little of it was showing. “Look where they brought us.”
They laughed loud enough to make the needles of the cedar shake.
“You did get good things out of it, though.”
Sam nodded. “Adventures galore. My Crow name, Joins with Buffalo. Coy and Paladin. And a great woman.”
“A great woman,” Evans echoed.
“And a daughter.”
“You know,” said Evans, “words, they’re not strong enough to speak the big truths, are they? It takes music, don’t it?”
“Yes,” Sam said, “it takes music.”
The men looked at each other, dying, content.
“Let’s make a song of your life, why don’t we?” said Evans.
That sounded to Sam like the strangest idea he’d ever heard. It was exactly what he wanted to do.
They started with some ideas for the chorus.
“What’s the main idea?” said Evans. “Follow your wild hair?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll start with that. ‘Friend’ … ‘bend.’ Yes. And who was this Sam Morgan, the hero of our song?”
“A trapper. A beaver man.”
“And an explorer,” said Evans.
“To the sea. We explored all the way to the sea.”
Evans hummed a tune, a big one with a sort of grandeur, but with some bounce in a 6/8 rhythm, not taking itself a bit seriously. Then he made it work with the first line, and raced through the second line.
Sam pitched in, repeating the tune of the first line with new words for a third line, and reached a climax with line four.
“Good,” said Evans, “good. But it needs something.” Evans pondered. “A half line at the end, spoken—that’s always a good trick. ‘That buffalo man.’”
In a few minutes they had a chorus:
Sam Morgan, a woodsman, a trapper was he
Explored from the Rockies clear out to the sea
His strength was a secret, the word of a friend
He followed his wild hair all the way ’round the bend
(spoken) That buffalo man.
Now they began to rig the verses. They had nothing to distract or interrupt them, and it was fun, so the song came together in no time at all.
They both got their tin whistles out of their possible sacks. Evans sang the words, Sam piping along in unison. Every once in a while they tossed in a purely instrumental verse, Evans harmonizing above Sam’s melody.
THE SONG OF THE BUFFALO MAN
The fire, it got started he didn’t know where
It woke him, he smelled it and then spied its glare
It lit up the night like a dawn in the west
He knew right away, ’twas his bitterest test.
(chorus)
Sam Morgan, a woodsman, a trapper was he
Explored from the Rockies clear out to the sea
His strength was a secret, the word of a friend
He followed his wild hair all the way ’round the bend
That buffalo man.
The flames raged downwind, the animals fled
Sam’s pulse it ran wild, but he kept a cool head
A small coyote pup, it was yipping and yelling—
The pup led the way to the buffalo’s belly.
That buffalo cow, Sam shot her at noon
He gutted her out and left her to cool
Now her gut was a cave or hell’s hottest pit
As the two crawled inside, the fire it did hit.
(chorus)
The trees ’round the camp exploded to torches
Limbs fell, trunks popped, even rock walls got scorch-ed
Hid deep in the belly of the buffalo cow
Sam prayed for a miracle—death, miss us for now.
The miracle found them, there in the dark
The buffalo cave was Sam Morgan’s ark
He stepped out alive, the pup by his side
The world gray and ashen—only two hadn’t died.
(chorus)
But Sam wasn’t free from the pup or the cow
The pup wanted friendship, the buffalo a vow
In dream she did come—I saved you from death
Now you join my blood, melt into my breath.
The muscles, the fiber, the belly, the loins
The trapper and beast were miracle-joined.
Sam breathed through her nostrils, he saw through her eyes
Both melted, both merged, one heartbeat, one I.
(chorus)
Now they gave him a name, those people called Crow
They saluted him with it, ’twas Joins Buffalo
The wisdom it carried, if you follow that hair
You’re one with the grasses, the waters, the air.
Sam Morgan, a woodsman, a trapper was he
He explored from the Rockies clear out to the sea
His strength was a secret, the word of a friend
He followed his wild hair all the way ’round the bend
That buffalo man.
Evans whistled out the last couple of bars of melody, and the song was done. He burst into applause. “That was the world premiere!” he cried.
Sam clapped as loud as he could. “To an audience of millions,” he said. “Millions of grains of sand.”
“Let’s take a bow,” said Evans.
They looked over the sands with the hauteur of true artists and, buried to the shoulders, gravely inclined their heads.
“Encore!” called Evans. “They want an encore.”
“Give us a jig,” Sam said. He got his tin whistle out of the possible sack.
“A jig it is.”
Evans launched into some song Sam didn’t know, taking it daredevil fast.
He and Evans both bobbed their heads to the music, and their arms. Sam could feel his heart speed up and his blood rush. Even his legs, far down in the earth, tried to dance along, jiggling against the sands. Yes, he thought, in their own way they are dancing. My feet are nimble, and my toes are twinkling. I dance as I die!
That was how Jedediah Smith found them, piping and grinning, joyously playing the fool.
Nineteen
Holy Water
“They drank every bit and cussed me that I didn’t have more!” Smith told Gobel with a laugh, “and then cussed me a
gain that there was meat in it—why wasn’t it all water!”
Sam slid his head back under the liquid surface. He came up and looked at his friends. He couldn’t imagine ever being happier than he felt right now.
“Do you know how much those kettles held?” Jedediah went on. “Four quarts each! And they complained!”
“We had just discovered the pleasure of acting like madmen,” said Evans, “and were loath to give it up.”
“No danger,” said Gobel.
“Holy water, it was. I dare say we liked it ever more than Flat Dog liked the priest’s.” Evans dipped his horn into the creek and poured the sacred fluid down his gullet.
Eyes met across the small stream. Each man felt how good life was, how good comradeship was.
It was a fine little camp in some trees at the base of the unreachable mountain, with a pool big enough to sit in and some grass for the mounts.
While Jedediah went back to Sam and Evans, Gobel had killed another horse. Now he put more wood on the low fire while Jedediah sliced the meat and laid it on the racks high above the coals.
Sam climbed from the pool and stretched out on the grass naked. He might want to roll back in at any moment.
He looked around. “I almost went to hell, and this feels near to heaven,” said Sam. “Why don’t we just stay here forever?”
Jedediah looked seriously at Sam. “I thought you wanted to die.”
Sam looked into himself, and then looked some more. Finally he said, “I can’t explain it, but right now things are different. I’m different.”
Jedediah nodded, accepting.
“’Twas the saving grace of music changed his mind,” said Evans.
“Maybe so,” said Sam. He had no need to think about it. His heart was light.
“Or of foolery.”
They let it go.
That night in his blankets Sam realized he was different in another way. When Jedediah Smith showed up with those two kettles of water, he felt a freshet of emotion that astonished him. He looked into the man’s face. It was weary. It had seen and suffered more than it should. Behind the eyes lived ideas Sam didn’t share, and a hardness that put him off. But right now bubbled up a wellspring of emotion, and he knew what it was. Love.
Yes, he loved Jedediah Smith. Not as a comrade or brother—Diah made too much distance for that—but like a father.
Love, a reality, a blessing, a truth, a challenge.
The next day they needed to move on.
“We still don’t know where the hell we are,” said Gobel. He’d held back from last night’s spirit of elation.
“We don’t,” agreed Jedediah.
“Diah and I could be buried to our necks by this afternoon,” warned the blacksmith.
“We don’t know where we’ll find water,” Smith confirmed.
Though Gobel seemed determined to keep them down, spirits were up. Sam and Evans felt like they could whip a pack of wildcats, or leap from the beaches of the Pacific to the summits of the Rockies.
The four marched north, along the west side of the snowcapped mountain that had saved their lives. The earth now was dust as much as sand, and it puffed up into their eyes at every step. Several times during the day they passed springs, but all were too alkaline to drink from. And then they saw in the distance a solitary Indian lodge.
These Indians didn’t run. The father walked right out with his son and made introductions in the Shoshone language, which Diah spoke a little. Beak and Rockchuck, their names were.
Sam thought he saw strange gleams in their eyes and wondered what was funny.
“Will you come to our lodge?” said Beak. “Eat? Drink?”
This was beyond belief. Instead of shielding his women, this Indian was leading the strangers right to them. Sam thought, What’s up with you?
All walked slowly toward the lodge.
When they sat, a woman and a girl of nine or ten came out. They offered the white men water in gourd dippers. Sweet, no alkali—Sam had never tasted anything better. Then in different dippers the wife and daughter brought meat in broth. The stew was lukewarm, and Sam thought it had been thinned with water just now, the way people do for the sick.
“You have no weapons?” asked Beak.
Sam and Diah looked at each other. “He means bows and arrows,” said Sam. “He doesn’t get it that we have rifles in our hands.”
“These Indians have never seen white men,” said Diah, in a tone of surprise.
The captain invited Beak to look closely at his rifle, to examine the hammer, flint, fire hole, and triggers. Soon he got to the crucial part, explaining how the rifle fired.
While Diah taught, Sam glanced at his friends, trying not to be obvious, and began to catch on.
Diah told Beak the flint made a spark, the powder burned, and the rifle made a huge bang. When it did, you could kill a deer standing a hundred steps away.
Beak nodded with the tolerance of a mature adult for a child or a madman. Sam could see it in his face. How, exactly, is a bang going to kill a deer?
Sam thought it was too bad the captain couldn’t fire it and prove his point. They didn’t have powder and lead to waste.
Sam spoke up. “Diah, it won’t work.”
“I know,” said the captain, and went back to thanking their hosts for the wonderful food and drink.
Sam watched the mother and girl eyeing the whites and trying not to giggle. Now he was sure.
“Cap’n, they feel sorry for us.”
This stopped conversation. Indians living poor in this miserable desert feeling sorry for white men?
“They do. Look at us. All four of us are near indecent. Some of our skin is pink, some of it’s white, and our clothes are tattered and stained with alkali. We’re wearing the salt wastes we’ve walked across.
“All in all, we’re crazy, they’re sure of that, because we were dumb enough to walk across those places, and do it without any bows and arrows to get even a bite to eat. We don’t have hardly enough skin to stretch over our bones, and we look starved as something that died last winter and been shriveling ever since. We’ve worn out our horses worse than ourselves.”
Jedediah coughed, but Sam started laughing and kept talking.
“We’re pathetic. We’re out of our minds. Indians are considerate of those who are tetched.” Now Sam emphasized each word separately. “They think.”
All four white men laughed. This was a first. The rueful thing was, it made sense.
The next day Captain Smith and his ghost crew tramped ten more miles north through a valley of alkali dust and alkali springs, and came finally to the north end of the mountain that had given them the saving grace of water. That evening, after men and animals drank liquid that was barely tolerable, the four eagerly climbed the ridge to the east and there, in Jedediah’s words:
I saw an expanse of water extending far to the north and east. The Salt Lake, a joyful sight, was spread before us. “Is it possible,” said the companions of my sufferings, “that we are so near the end of our troubles?”
For myself I durst scarcely believe that it was the Big Salt Lake that I saw. It was indeed a most cheering view, for although we were some distance from the depot, yet we knew we would soon be in a country where we would find game and water, which were to us objects of the greatest importance and those which would contribute more than any others to our comfort and happiness.
Those who may chance to read this at a distance from the scene may perhaps be surprised that the sight of this lake surrounded by a wilderness of more than two thousand miles diameter excited in me these feelings known to the traveler, who, after long and perilous journeying, comes again in view of his home. But so it was with me, for I had traveled so much in the vicinity of the Salt Lake that it had become my home of the wilderness.
Energized, they turned east the next morning, parallel to the south shore of the lake, and walked twenty-five miles. After passing several salt springs, they found sweet water to camp n
ext to.
The next day, twenty more miles east, and now—hell to heaven and back again—they got nearly inundated in what they had sought so desperately, water.
This was the river that ran from Utah Lake into the Salt Lake, and it was in June flood stage. This stream divided the hostile deserts from the mountains that the men knew well and loved, mountains that would be full of deer and elk and busting out with creeks. But they couldn’t figure out how to get across it.
They waded through cane and rushes toward the main channel, which was out of sight. Even this far from the river, or what was normally the river, the water was almost waist deep. Already weakened, Paladin seemed to hate fighting through the rushes, but Sam kept her on a tight lead.
When they got to it, the river was a disheartening sight—sixty yards wide, turbulent, and swift.
They decided to build a raft of the cane. The few belongings they had, weapons, powder horns, and possible sacks, needed a ride. They made a few bundles, lashed them into one big unit, and were ready.
“We have to take the horses over first,” said Jedediah.
Sam and Diah looked at each other. Evans and Gobel didn’t swim worth a damn. From the company’s six horses and two mules they’d started with, they were down to one horse, one mule, and Paladin.
“I’ll lead two,” said Diah. “Let’s go.”
Like most hard jobs, it was best done without thinking.
Paladin was a pain in the ass. She pulled back hard. Evans and Gobel shoved her from behind and got her off her feet and swimming.
Right off Sam got slammed by the current. He had never felt anything like it. It pummeled him, it rocked him, it turned him half upside down. He had no idea how he could swim it, and he sure as hell didn’t see how he could keep hold of Paladin.
He wrapped the lead three times around his left hand, turned onto his side, where he thought he’d have the most stamina, and kicked like the devil for the far side.
