The horses fascinated him. He needed to know all there was to know about them. They were shy, easily frightened animals, whose instinct was to flee rather than fight because they had few weapons other than teeth and hooves. One was sullen and did not like to carry him. That one became the packhorse, but he determined to ride it now and then because there would be times when he would have to. The other one, the brown mare, accepted him without sulking, but wasn’t obedient or didn’t understand what he wanted. He didn’t know how to discipline her and decided just to be patient until he knew.
One day he struck a great river that had to be the Snake. It ran in a trench cut in volcanic rock, across a dreary plain with distant peaks in sight. A well-used trace ran along its south bank. He rode eastward through vast silences, acutely aware of his loneliness but not melancholic about it. He had too much to celebrate. He was free!
May passed into June. He was sure of that, though he had lost track of the days. He had a month or so to find the Americans, and not the faintest idea how to do it. If he did not find them, he would push ahead anyway. Somewhere, far to the east and across a continent, the Americans had forged a civilization out of the wilderness. He would find it.
He added an otter pelt to his growing collection of furs. If worse came to worse, he would have enough pelts to fashion into winter gear with the coming of the cold.
Twice he forded formidable streams flowing out of the south. There were well-beaten trails on both sides of each river. The Snake itself ran through an astonishing black canyon with walls so vertical that they denied him access to its water. From then on, he took every opportunity to work his way down to the river with his horses. Eventually the canyon played out and the river returned to the level of the plains. And still he saw no Shoshones—or anyone else.
The river swept to the northeast, and Skye sensed it would lead him away from the rendezvous. All he knew was that the trapper’s fair would be well south of the Snake country. And then one day he did find a whole congregation of Indians on the move, perhaps even a village. He drew up his horses and waited while the vanguard approached. Then he lifted his hand in what he hoped was a friendly manner.
These were a less handsome people than the Nez Percé, plainly adorned, the women mostly stocky or fat, and the men lean and hawkish.
“Are you Snakes?” Skye asked.
A headman lifted a finger and described a wavy line with it. Skye suspected it meant snake or people of the snake. Ogden had told him that was their sign.
“I’m looking for the rendezvous,” he said, relieved.
“Ah, rendezvous,” said the headman, his face lighting up. “Rendezvous.” He consulted with other headmen, and then motioned for Skye to wait.
Had he found the right people? Skye and the village leaders gazed at one another some more, while the rest of the long procession crowded in. Skye thought there were two or three hundred here, innumerable horses drawing poles that carried the tribe’s possessions. Many of the horses dragged the skin lodges he had first seen among the Nez Perce. These were not salmon-fishing Indians, such as he had seen on the Columbia, but a tribe that depended on the bison as well as the abundant fish. The men were well armed, some with muskets, the rest with bows, arrows, shields, lances tipped with iron points, and various war clubs.
“You Yank?” the headman asked, drawing his pony beside Skye’s.
“British, mate. I am Skye.” He waved a hand in a gesture he hoped would convey a sense of the heavens. “Skye,” he said.
“Skye,” the headman returned, duplicating his gesture. “Rendezvous.” The headman summoned a gray man forward, an elderly Indian, but taller and gaunter than these stocky people.
“Perrault. I’m an Iroquois. I speak de Englees. What you want, huh?”
“What’s Iroquois?”
The old man wheezed cheerfully. “Where you from?”
“London.”
“You Hudson’s Bay, eh?”
“No. I’m alone. I want to go to the Americans’ rendezvous.”
“Ah, dat’s where we go. You come. What’s you name?”
“Barnaby Skye. And what’s Iroquois?”
The old man cackled again. “Eastern tribe. Big civilized tribe. Me, I ain’t civilized no how. I’m a trapper before I got sick and old. Canada and United States, that’s where the Iroquois are from. New York, Quebec. I don’t want nothing to do with Hudson’s Bay. Them’d starve you to death. You HBC, I’d shoot you.”
“These are Snakes?”
“You betcha. Mean bastards but I got a woman takes care of me. How come you here? You all alone.”
Skye debated whether to tell Perrault, and finally decided to. “I was with the Royal Navy. I jumped ship at Fort Vancouver.”
“Ah! You make a good free trapper then. Hate them damn British. You come with us and we make friends. Ah, Skye. I’ll tell ’em you a big-water man. They don’t know ‘navy.’ We holding up the parade now. Tonight, we talk. You got some whiskey?”
“I haven’t anything.”
“It don’t matter. Soon comes rendezvous and then we drink whiskey until we get sick.” He laughed.
Perrault talked at length with the Snake elders, who eyed Skye now and then. Skye had no idea what was being said or how much trouble he was getting into. But eventually they nodded at him to join them and the lengthy procession began again, retracing country Skye had passed through until they reached a river that flowed out of the south. The great caravan swung into that mountain-hemmed valley and made its stately way another five miles until dusk.
The village headmen left Skye to his own devices. He watched the women build cookfires while the youths took the horses to the thin grasses on the slopes. No one was erecting a lodge. He hunted for Perrault, and found him with three women, one older, the other two stamped in their mother’s image.
“Ah, Skye, you got food, eh?”
“I have some otter—not very tasty but it’s food.”
“Good, we eat it.”
“And these bulbs. I found they make a paste I can eat.”
“Camas. Big food for Snakes. Taste like no damn good. I don’t want none of that stuff. You get me meat and you make old Perrault and his women happy. Me, I got big belly. I got some French blood. French and Iroquois know how to eat meat and make love. Tonight, Skye, we eat big, then we all make love. I got some damn good women. You take your pick, eh?”
Chapter 17
Skye’s blood ran hot but his memories ran bitter. He stared at Perrault’s younger women and found them comely. They were stocky, golden-fleshed, cheerful, with bright black-cherry eyes and heavy cheekbones. One wore her straight blue-black hair loose; the other’s jet hair had been done in braids that she tied with ribbons. He watched them, burning with sudden heat as they cooked a supper. Sometimes they gazed at him with broad smiles, almost coquettish.
Skye’s life had suddenly plunged into a vortex of hunger, hope, need, and excitement. Women were a mystery to him. He could remember his sisters and his mother, but they were ghostly presences lost in the mists of time. He remembered the starchy girls he knew as a youth, in their pinafores and frocks, with all their politenesses and reserve. They had been fair-skinned, brown-haired or sandy-haired, their girlish figures buried in ruffles and layers of petticoats. About the time he was pressed into the navy, some of them were budding into women, giving him flirtatious glances, foolish and giddy girls suddenly shy around boys because they knew of things they hadn’t known about as children. One of them, Molly, he had been drawn to, and she had filled the thirteen-year-old Skye with joy and terror and intense curiosity. What was this mystery? He had kissed her once and told her he would marry her someday. She had whickered and kissed him back, and they had held hands, happy and content.
Then ruffians had manhandled him into a cart, and he had scarcely seen a woman again. At sea he had the run of the ship, but when they approached port, the lord officers always managed to find some infraction and throw him into the bilge, w
here he spent days and weeks in irons, tormented beyond anything he could put into words, a young man with volcanic needs and rages and deepening bitterness. It wasn’t misconduct that put him in the brig at every port; his masters knew his soul, his rage, his history—and what would happen if the boy got loose. It amused them to torment him.
So he rarely saw a woman in his seven years with the Royal Navy. Once in a while, though, Lady This or Dame That or Princess So and So came aboard, always on the arm of Admiral Lord Such and Such, and then Skye would glimpse a female at last. They all looked indescribably beautiful to him, and their smiles set his heart to fluttering. Then they would go away, and another year or two would pass without his even seeing a woman in pastel silk or crinoline or linen, and all the while his young body howled.
His shipmates knew his torment and enjoyed torturing him. They came back after shore leave and told him lurid stories of easy women, seamen’s conquests, bordellos and bagnios and easy times, women who cheerfully did this and that and ten times a night. Of Burmese beauties and Singapore sweethearts and Marseilles bawds, of bare-breasted South Sea islanders who wore only grass skirts, and gorgeous Chinese, and Greek harlots, and icy Spanish ladies who exploded like a canister of grapes, and uninhibited Filipinas and midnight black Kaffirs.
Skye heard it all, and these things hurt, as his boastful shipmates knew they would. Danny Boggs and Harry Peck loved to torment him. Even the bosuns and lieutenants loved to torture him.
“You missed it again, eh, Skye? Well, it’s all your fault, laddie boy. Make yourself into a good seaman, and you’ll taste the sweets,” they would say.
But Barnaby Skye knew that no force on earth would reconcile him to his slavery. So he endured, hated, hurt, yearned, and tried to remember his sisters, his aunt Clarice, his mother, the sweet pigtailed girls he had met at tea parties and May fairs. These women were different from sailors’ women. These women went to church, took communion, and got married and had families. Or were they so different? Maybe they enjoyed the mating, too. How could he know? Miserably, Skye pushed all his confused thoughts, his ignorance of females, his yearnings, aside when he could. But no young man in the prime of his life could put such things aside. The hungers returned again and again, brutal in their power.
Now he watched Perrault’s women cook, watched their heavy breasts shift under their dresses, watched them talk and laugh among themselves. These were Shoshones, Snakes, savage women, wild and uninhibited.
He watched eagerly, alive with anticipation, wild to find out what this ultimate mystery was about. It had taken just one casual remark from the Iroquois breed to fan flames in him. Around him the Snake encampment settled for the night. He watched old men at prayer, hands lifted to the red sunset. A youth played a flute next to a beautiful girl, who pretended to ignore him. Skye discovered another odd thing: a lad and a maid stood facing each other, and then the lad drew a blanket over them both. There they stood, the boy’s leggins and moccasins poking out under the blanket, along with the girl’s skirts and moccasins. Were they kissing under there? He had no idea. No one bothered them. Perhaps this was the accustomed way for lovers to find a moment of privacy. He stared, fascinated. Then, at dusk, the youth drew the blanket off, the girl smiled and slipped away to her family.
Maybe that girl was like his sisters, who would be married now and have children. He could be an uncle. But he would never know his nieces and nephews, not even their names.
Men gathered in groups and smoked, rotating a single pipe among them, content to sit silently in the lavender twilight. The women retreated to the river—the Malade, the sick river, Perrault had told him—to perform ablutions shielded by thick purple night with only a band of blue lingering on the high black ridge to the northwest. Youths watched the horses. Perrault had taken Skye’s two out to the pasture and put them in the care of the village herders. Skye wondered whether he’d ever see his horses again; he felt distrustful and didn’t know why. These people had accepted him, and yet he wasn’t accepting them.
The pungence of the new-leafed sagebrush eddied through the camp on the evening breezes. The first stars emerged, as if from a veil. Young men tied their ponies close at hand and set their bows and quivers beside their robes: this village had fangs, even in the midst of tranquility. A burst of embers fled a dying fire, momentarily illumining a group of women who were whispering to each other. Someone sang a monotone melody, or was it a prayer or a chant? The high nasal voice was an old man’s and it sounded like the plainsong he had heard once in the cathedral. Skye wondered what these people believed and who their demons might be, and whether their morals were the same as white men’s morals—or better.
“You want a pipe, Skye?” asked Perrault, and handed Skye a lit pipe without waiting for his response.
Skye took it silently, sucked the unfamiliar smoke—he hadn’t acquired the habit, lacking the pence and the opportunity until now—and coughed.
The Iroquois laughed. “You don’t know nothing, sailor,” he said.
“I’m learning,” Skye said. He had never said anything truer about himself. In the space of a few weeks he had mastered more things than he could name. And maybe this night he would master something more. Neither his gazes nor his attention drifted for long from the two young women, who had ceased their labors and were sitting quietly, still aglow with the day.
“Damn, we gonna have fun,” the old Iroquois barked. “My old Molly, she likes to rut better’n me, almost, and comes after me if I don’t make her happy.”
Skye could hardly imagine it. He remembered shy pale girls with ringlets, starched manners and starched frocks, keeping a stiff distance from the boys.
“Too bad you don’t got some whiskey, Skye. Maybe at rendezvous you give me some whiskey, eh?”
“How far away is that?”
“Two, three weeks mebbe. Got to go down to Cache Valley, near the big Salt Lake, Bear River. Then let the good times roll, ah, ieee!”
“Isn’t it a fair?”
“A fair! Why, garçon, it be more. No words for it. It be games and cards and makin’ friends and chasing the petites filles. It be getting a new fusil or traps or red cloth or ribbons. It be a good brawl, too, if one likes to wrestle a bear.”
“Wrestle a bear?”
“Just talkin’. Them free trappers got the hair of the bear.” Perrault sucked smoke, knocked the dottle out of his pipe, and laughed. “I guess it be time to go please old Molly afore she come after me with the scalpin’ knife.”
Skye found himself alone and taut as a strung bow. The younger women eyed him boldly, mischief in their faces, but didn’t approach. They each unrolled a pair of blankets and made a show in the tumescent dark of wriggling into them. The two weren’t more than ten feet apart, maybe fifty feet from Skye’s bedroll. Was one closer to him by design?
A shyness tormented Skye. Was he supposed to crawl over there? Would one come to him? Who were they? Perrault’s daughters? No, they looked to be pure Shoshone, probably stepdaughters, but who could say?
No such inhibition troubled Perrault and his woman. There, in the night blackness, the grunts and pleasures of mating filtered softly outward, and the night was not so dark that Skye couldn’t see a little. The sight tormented him. This wasn’t what he expected: nothing private, nothing tender.
He waited for quietness, but it didn’t come. Perrault and Molly whispered and laughed and made noises. What did her daughters think of this? What would an Englishwoman think of this? Skye itched to throw off his cover, but sheer fear paralyzed him. He lay in the coolness, sweating, clenching and unclenching his fists. It was up to him. That’s what it came to.
And then he went to her. He didn’t care what he had been or who he was or what anyone thought. He didn’t care whether she found out he had never done this before. It didn’t matter that this dusky savage maid wasn’t the pale blue-eyed lover of his dreams. His pulse lifted until he feared his heart would burst. He crept to the nearer of the daughters, expect
ing anger or a shriek, and sheer embarrassment. Instead, she whispered cheerfully, tugged him to the ground, and threw herself toward him. His hands found velvety flesh, wondrous to touch, and hers ripped at his clothing, while she cheerfully rebuked him with a noisy chatter that must have awakened all the neighbors.
And after that, he discovered a whole new world filled with shining joy and inexplicable tears.
Chapter 18
In the slate gray dawn, Skye stirred with the first light, as he always did, and noted a peaceful and utterly silent village, a mood that matched his own. The young Shoshone woman, whose name he didn’t even know, lay beside him, naked under her blanket.
He had slept soundly after an hour of delirium and feverish exploration. Gently he arose and dressed. No one stirred, but he saw a Shoshone on horseback among the horses, ever watchful. Skye stretched his arms upward to touch the untinted sky, and then walked down to the Malade River. He had much to think about and things to relive and remember.
Now, he supposed, he had reached manhood after his long, bitter sojourn in the belly of the navy, like Jonah in the whale. He found himself beset by various strands of feeling: pleasure, relief, peace, guilt, fear, and loss. He wondered why he felt loss and what had been taken away from him. Perhaps it was his youthful vision of romantic love. What had happened here had nothing to do with love or tenderness or commitment. Certain youthful visions lay shattered; perhaps those English and Christian things he had soaked up in the Anglican church on Sundays, or in all the instruction and example of his parents.
He knew what lust was now. This mating was bereft of spiritual communion or any sort of friendship and tenderness with a woman. He supposed this Shoshone girl was wanton, but he had no comparison.
It didn’t matter. He had enjoyed a fine, mad time, and the memory enflamed him. He had known ecstasy, trembling delights, and sudden peace. He had discovered the silky joy of a woman’s flesh, and had responded with an explosion of pent-up need. He had learned his desires could build again and again, and that his bedmate’s desires matched his own. He would never forget that night, or the sheer happiness of the moment, when nothing else mattered. Tonight there might be more. He would while away the slow daytime hours and hope for another turn, another embrace of smooth, golden flesh.
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