Ruth came to the door, her dark hair blowing a little in the wind. “I have coffee on. It will seem like old times.”
Ethan was there, squatting against the wall. He already nursed a cup in his hands. He nodded briefly. “She’s got a gingerbread stashed away, boys. Don’t let her fool you.”
He sipped his coffee. “Stacy come in last night. The Sioux are making medicine.”
“Well, we expected that, and if they want our hair they’ll have to fight for it.”
“They will.” Ethan put his cup down on the floor. “That ain’t all. There’s a Shoshone brave who’s broke with his people. He’s picked him up a bunch of wild Shoshones and some other bronco Indians, and they are on a warpath of their own.”
“A Shoshone?”
“Uh-huh. His name is Little Buffalo, and they say he’s got his own blood feud with a white man.”
“The same one?”
“I figure so. Stacy heard tell a mighty lot about him. He’s a big man now. He led a raid on a railroad work party two years ago, and wiped them out. He ambushed an army patrol, and only two men got away. He raided the stage station at Three Crossings and drove off a dozen head of horses.”
“But you saved his life, Ben! You brought him in when he was dying in the cold!”
“He don’t see it thataway, ma’am. He says his medicine was too strong for Ben, that Ben intended to kill him, but his medicine was just too strong.”
“How many has he got with him?”
“Eighteen to twenty ... I guess more or less, depending on the time and place. You know how Injuns are. They come and go. But he’s made a name for himself, and them he’s tied to are a bunch of wild, trouble-hunting bucks.”
The subject changed and we talked of newcomers, of the changing times, and after a moment I eased out of the conversation, and sitting back a little, let the words wash by my ears, not thinking of what was said, but just soaking in the good feeling of it, and of this place.
“I got the books you sent,” Ruth said suddenly, “and the papers. It seemed like old times ... in some ways.”
“In some ways?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but somehow a lot of the things they bother about seem so unimportant out here. It seems to me that the more money one has the more one worries about little unimportant things.”
“Them Indians,” Ethan commented, “mightn’t be the only trouble that’s shapin’ up.
“Ollie Trotter. I picked up his sign a few days ago. I’d killed a deer and went down to skin it out and come on some tracks. Seemed like an odd place, down in a canyon thataway, so after I taken my meat, I scouted around.”
He drank a swallow of coffee and put the cup down. “Found a cut bank behind a sandbar in the creek. Been three, four men camped there.” “Four?”
“Maybe another one, too. Yep, anyway four men. The way it shaped up, the remains of fires, and the like of that, I figure they’d met there several times. There was some wood cut several weeks ago, some only a few days back. The tracks showed up to be both old and new.”
“The same horses?”
“Uh-huh, and like I say, a couple of extras. I couldn’t make ’em out, but I know four men camped there and I think five.”
Finnerly, Trotter, Pappin, and who? Who else? That needed some thinking about, for there were a lot of strangers in our town and in the settlements close by.
“Maybe we should stake out Neely’s place. If they did leave something else, they’ll come back for it again.”
“Somethin’ else,” Ethan commented. “That outfit ain’t one to live out in the country. Trotter could do it, fair to middlin’, although he’s no woodsman when it comes to that, but not Finnerly. I think they’ve got themselves a place. Maybe over to South Pass City, maybe one of the other settlements around.”
Yet, if they were living elsewhere, what could be done? They had stalked me and tried to kill me. I knew what Colly Benson thought of that. Find them, call them out, shoot them. He had even offered to help. For that matter Drake Morrell felt much the same way. I knew that if I dropped a word to Stacy he would hunt them down and shoot them like so many varmints. Stacy Follett was nothing if not a realist. You had an enemy, you killed him before he killed you.
Yet I was not one to borrow trouble, and it was likely they had other things in mind, although knowing them I doubted if they would leave the country without one more try for the gold ... which must be there.
Ruth had set up her trading post with a long counter and a wall of shelves. There was a potbellied stove, several chairs, and benches. The room was pleasantly warm when I went in from the living quarters and began studying the shelves for what I might want on our ride north.
Long ago I’d discovered half the things a man might think of taking are never used. We had to go prepared for snow, for we were headed to high country, and the season was early. I bought some new socks and a pair of boots more suitable for hiking than those I usually wore and found a fine pair of elk-hide moccasins that would fit. These Ruth had in trade from some Indian, Shoshone, by the look of them.
I browsed around alone, picking out the various items I would need, then trimming the list from those I thought I’d need to those I knew I’d need. Yet, was it only that? Or was I savoring these last moments in a place I had helped build and in which I had spent so many happy hours? Ruth Macken was important to me.
Not in any romantic sense, and not simply for the books she had loaned me or the casual way she had guided me in many of the social graces. Ruth Macken may never have given a thought to instructing me, but she had set a standard of womanhood against which every woman I later was to know would be unconsciously measured. She was quietly beautiful, moving with an easy grace and confidence. She was tolerant, understanding, and intelligent, a good listener ready with apt comment; she understood my shyness and my eagerness to learn and overlooked my occasional clumsiness. She had style, but for that matter, so did Drake Morrell. He had a dash, a flair, that made every boy in his school wish to be like him and every girl to be worthy of his attention.
The children who studied with him were of the country, of the backwoods, perhaps, but no one who knew them in the years that followed would have believed it. He gave them pride of bearing and appearance as well as a love for knowledge ... I shall not say “scholarship,” for that is often a different thing.
Soon I would be leaving this place, but as I idled there in the empty trading post, listening to the murmur of voices from the next room, I knew how fortunate I’d been to have known these people. To know Ruth Macken, John Sampson, Drake Morrell, and Cain.
Yes, and Webb.
He had prospered less than the rest of us, yet he had worked hard. Whatever else might be said of him, he possessed a quality of loyalty to comrade and principle given to very few. Whenever in the future my own stand would be put to the test, I knew I would think of Webb. Often I wondered if he knew fear, I know he had no doubt when the chips were down. He revealed nothing of himself, but I knew wherever I went in the future I would be conscious of Webb at my shoulder and would be stronger for it.
Several boxes of shells, a new ground sheet small enough to handle easily, a couple of wool shirts.
Ruth came in. “Are you finding what you want?”
“Yes.”
“Be careful, Bendigo. An Indian woman was in, she is here often and is very friendly, and she warned me the Blackfeet would be riding the war trail in the spring.”
“I know. Some other tribes as well, I expect, but we won’t be long.”
“I wish I could go with you. How many white men have seen the Wheel?”
“Not more than a dozen and probably only half that many. Ed Rose spent time in the Big Horn Basin as early as 1807, and there’s a rumor the Spanish sent an expedition as far north as the Yellowstone many years ago. Whether they were east or west of the Big Horns, I don’t know. The land didn’t have many names then, and a man has to guess where they actually were. But there are o
ld diggings all over the country.
“We only have written history to go by, and there was so much that went unwritten ... most of it, probably. So far as we know it was well over a hundred years after De Soto saw the Mississippi until it was seen by another white man.”
I stopped, my hands resting on the canteen I’d been checking. We would have small use for such a thing, for there was water everywhere ... still, I was a cautious man.
“I want to go there, Mrs. Macken. I want to visit the Medicine Wheel... not just to see it. I’ve had it described and know about what it is and what it looks like, but what I want is to be there, to stand there ... not for a minute or two, but to see the sun rise, the sunset, and the moon over it.
“I am tantalized by this country ... there’s so much we don’t know. On the wagon train there was a man who lived in Ohio who told us about a great mound there, built by men. Maybe it was built by those we call Indians and maybe by somebody who came before them. I’ve heard of such mounds far to the south in Mississippi, and now I hear of this Wheel.”
“Do you think there is a connection?”
“Probably not But I believe that if I was there, if I was alone on that spot, I might grasp something intuitively that evades me now.”
“You’re a mystic, Bendigo.”
“No ... just an interested man. I never liked the term mystic as applied to someone or a way of thought. It covers something very profound and an awful lot of nonsense passes as profound thought.
“It is just that I have an idea that people who live long in a place leave an imprint upon it. Perhaps if I am there, where they were, I may catch some of their thinking. And maybe all of this is just an excuse to go wandering again.
“I like the wild, far country. There’s a lot of Ethan in me, and Stacy, too. Do you think they were really hunting furs out here? Don’t you believe it. They were seeing new country.
“Think what it means to top out on a ridge and look over a vast land beyond, which perhaps no other white man has seen? Or even an Indian? There were areas where they rarely, if ever, went. Much of Tennessee was hunted over only occasionally.”
We walked back into the other room. “Trouble is,” Ethan was saying, “an Indian an’ a white man just don’t think alike, so there’s got to be misunderstanding. It’s what Ben here calls “the Christian-Jewish ethic.’ We’re all brought up according to it until we figure that’s human nature, and it ain’t no such thing. The Indian, he has his own way of thinking, and it’s nothing like that at all. Each of us gets mighty upset that the other doesn’t react the way we figure he ought to. Trouble is, there’s no common standard.”
Chapter 44
Lean upon the hillside the old cow stood, watching as we passed, tall were the pines among the barren rocks, while the streamers of snow reaching ghostly fingers from their protecting shadows. I saw a deceptive spring being born upon the mountains, deceptive because the time was early and the danger of snow lingered.
We rode a narrow trail along the mountain’s lumpy face, weaving among the trees, our horses walking with feet alert for shifting rock or snow, each step delicate, poised for a leap.
Five men we were, reining in upon a bare shoulder to catch a glimpse of the Big Horn Basin, far away. Meadows showed green at this distance and the forest was laced with a silver of mountain streams. We studied all we could see, our eyes searching for any hint of movement, any suggestion of enemies awaiting us there.
“I saw a smoke when the sun went down,” Stacy commented, “a thin smoke, afar off. Injuns,” Stacy spoke around his pipe, “movin’ out to get a start on the grass. There’ll be a stirring in the lodges now, and the braves will be painting themselves for war.”
“We’ll not be hunting trouble,” I said, “only the Medicine Wheel.”
“When you tell them that,” Stacy said, “be looking down the barrel of your Henry.”
There was dampness in the air, a dampness from earth turned black from the melting snow and from a trickle of snow water running off. We ducked our heads under low pine boughs, skirted mossy boulders, and sometimes turned deep into the forest where no sound was.
Saddles creaked when the horses climbed, and when we stopped to let them catch their wind their breath showed at their nostrils. Today the icy peaks showed three dimensional in the deep blue of the sky.
Uruwishi sat beside me when our horses rested. “My heart is young again, as when I rode the war trail.”
“Do the Sioux ride this far to the west?”
“A Sioux rides where he will. They are a bold people.”
“Red Cloud is their chief.”
“Huh!” Uruwishi was silent, then he said, “His words are spoken. The young men’s eyes follow others now. Have you heard of Gall? He is fierce in battle. I think the young men will follow him ... or Crazy Horse.”
“Have you no wish to return to your own land?”
“My land is where the wind blows. Should I claim a land I cannot keep? Once my people roamed from the Yakima River to the Blue Mountains, from the Cascades to the Rockies. We were one with the Nez Perce and the Klickitat. Our war parties raided the Blackfeet and the Gros Ventres.”
“You knew of the Medicine Wheel?”
“We have always known. Sometimes our wise men went there to dream ... as I did.”
We talked no more then, for voices carry in the canyons. Once we saw an elk move away, slowly as if aware we hunted no meat, and again there was an old brown bear, thin from a winter’s sleep, who stood up on his hind legs and studied us.
“It’s a long way to ride just to see a ring of rocks,” Stacy said, skeptically. “Maybe there’s a treasure buried there.”
“They had no treasure other than treasures of the mind. If you go there looking for gold or silver you’re wasting your time, for the people who built it knew nothing of metals. They were building a shrine, or maybe a calendar to measure the equinoxes. Men always had reason to measure time, for ceremonies and the like, but sometimes I think we’d all be better off if we had no clocks or calendars. Then we might never get old, for we wouldn’t know the passing of time.”
“Man’s bones would tell him,” Stacy said, dryly. “A time comes for sitting by the fire.”
“Like Uruwishi?”
“Ben, you know as well as I that if you hadn’t come along the old boy would have been dead by now. You took him along, you asked his advice, and suddenly he had a reason for living, he was riding the trail again.”
“It goes to show you. People don’t wear out, they give up. And as for as trails go, there’s always an open trail for the mind if you keep the doors open and give it a chance.”
Uruwishi turned suddenly and lifted a hand. Ethan moved toward him.
I rode closer to Short Bull. “What is it?”
“Shoshone.”
“How many?”
He shook his head, his eyes busy. We had stopped under a stand of aspen, the leaves dappling our bodies with the pale sunlight that fell through the slight overcast that held the sky. We were bunched there because it offered what we hoped was concealment, and because the view was good.
On our left was the high, bare range of the Wind Rivers above timberline. On our right was another bald mountain and to the right front still another bare ridge. Below and northwest of us, not too far away, a dozen small lakes were clustered ... one was of fair size ... amid parklike meadows and forest. Through an opening between the two bald mountains on our right we could see the beginnings of the basin.
Miles away, across the basin thunderheads clustered over the Big Horns, and I saw a couple of distant rainstorms walking the hills. I remembered something Ruth Macken had said long ago when we first settled our town, that I was a man who loved to look upon distance, and it was true. There is no majesty like the grand sweep of miles upon miles of mountains and peaks with only the sky above and the silent canyons and timberline slopes below.
Uruwishi spoke, talking to Short Bull. “Five,” he said, then
to us, “Five men riding, since the first sun.”
Five braves ... not too for ahead of us and no way off the mountain here. It was a steep slide among rocks and deadfalls into the canyon hundreds of feet below, and the mountain reared up, openfaced and without concealment, on our left.
Stacy turned around to look at me. “Shafter, if it was me I’d turn off down Crooked Crick ... she’s a mite ahead ... an’ git shut of the mountains. Git down off this mountain.”
“Stace,” Ethan spoke quietly, “if we skirt Moccasin Lake I know a way to cross the fork of the Little Wind River an’ we can hold west of Bear Peak an’ down into Sage Creek Basin.”
“All right, Stacy?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Never tried that way. All right with me.”
Neither of the Indians knew the way, so with Ethan to guide we started once more.
We were in high country, ten thousand feet or so above sea level. There was some good timber here and there, a lot of aspen, wild flowers already in bloom; and just above it the green played out suddenly against the slide rock. Most of the peaks were still covered with snow, and we saw several shadowed canyons where the snow remained, still eight to twelve feet of it. But there was runoff from all the drifts.
Here and there were vast slopes, gray with the dead trunks of fallen trees lying among other dead trees still standing in place. All had been killed with mighty winds that flattened whole slopes, laying the trees down like mown wheat.
Ethan led off, and within a few hundred yards suddenly turned from the trail we had followed, and the one taken by the Shoshone, into a notch where the dull gray of huge boulders, polished smooth by wind and ice, poked their ancient brows above the green of the new grass.
We skirted the boulders and went up through the notch. Ethan advanced slowly at the last until only his eyes looked through the notch. After a minute he motioned us on, and we all followed him down into Sage Creek Basin. There among some aspens and willows, we made camp on Sage Creek. “Over yonder,” Ethan said, pointing northeast, “there’s a cave. Never looked into it much, but she’s there. Maybe three, four miles from here.”
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