In the relative safety of the juniper, calm returned to him. For several months he had been transforming himself into a mountaineer. He had learned steadily, and now he would employ what he knew. He acknowledged he was afraid, and couldn’t help the rush of fear every time he thought of the Blackfeet. And yet, the trappers dealt with that same fear day after day. They went about their daily toil with that fear never far from them. How did they do it? Skye marveled at their courage, and hoped to discover within himself the same fatalistic acceptance of danger along with their sharp, tough confidence that they could weather trouble.
He waited for several more hours and then, upon seeing no sign of danger, quietly walked eastward past giant foothills that guarded the towering peaks to the south. He knew from the crude maps drawn by Jedediah Smith and William Sublette that off to the east somewhere, over a high pass, lay the land of the Crow Indians and the Yellowstone River, the greatest tributary of the Missouri. There he might find safety, and maybe even Sublette. It would be the logical place for the brigade to wait for cold weather.
Two uneventful days later he reached what seemed to be the southeast corner of this giant basin, and beheld a sharp notch in the mountains, cut by a small creek. Signs of passage suggested the trail was heavily traveled, which worried him.
He turned into it, followed the creek beneath gloomy gray ramparts of limestone, and eventually topped the pass. At its crest he saw off to the southeast the most majestic mountains he had ever seen, jagged ramparts capped with new snow. He descended a long grassy valley and found himself a few days later on the bank of a large river he believed was the Yellowstone. It curved here, turning from its northward direction to an easterly one.
If he was right, this was Crow country, and while that didn’t preclude the arrival of other tribes, including the Blackfeet, he began to feel less fearful. The river flowed at low ebb, and he found he could ride the mare through belly-deep water to a long semiwooded island that would offer him some concealment and protection.
He found a hollow near its eastern end where he could build a small fire that could not be seen from either bank, and settled down for the night, plagued by mosquitos. He rejoiced to be in Crow country. His thoughts turned to the girl he had renamed Victoria. Suddenly she was present in his mind. He wasn’t going to Boston, at least not until next summer, and her image danced before him, slim and fierce and tender. He wondered if he could find her, and if her family would welcome him when the cold set in.
His larder was reduced to cattail roots again, and he spent an hour collecting the miserable food. He kept smelling roasting meat on the wind, and ascribed it to his all-too-familiar hunger, which often excited fantasies of banquets.
“Well, dammit old coon, if you’re goin’ to come all this way and not jine us, then the devil with ye.”
The voice behind Skye raised the hair on his neck. He whirled and peered into the dusk, discovering slope-shouldered Jim Bridger, old Gabe himself.
Skye roared. Bridger howled like a wolf. Trappers materialized out of the gloom and hugged Skye. The mare, picketed on grass nearby, reared back and broke her tether. Someone caught her. Skye fought back tears that welled unbidden.
“Why, old Mister Skye’s a daddy, looks like,” said one, observing the horse colt.
They escorted Skye to the other end of the island, taking his horses and gear with them. There Skye discovered Sublette and the whole brigade, much to his relief and joy.
And meat. Buffalo roasted over two fires. These mountaineers weren’t concealing their presence, and the fires threw light on the far shores.
“He looks poor bull, don’t he?” said Beckwourth. “I guess we got to put some tallow on him.”
“He’s been cavorting with Blackfeet women,” said Black Harris. “That’ll thin down a coon in a week.”
Skye didn’t argue. This outfit understood. Eat first and then talk. He ate. Succulent, dripping buffalo meat melted in his mouth. He wolfed down one cut, and another, eating with his fingers, juices running down his jaw and off his fingers. He had his fill and he kept on eating until he couldn’t stuff another morsel into his mouth. Two additional quarters of a buffalo cow hung from thick limbs. He would soon tackle another pink, hot, dripping slab of the best meat he had ever tasted. But now he felt satiated, and that was an odd sensation.
They studied his plunder, what little there was of it, his mare and foal, his crudely patched moccasins, his mended tack.
“Hard doin’s, eh, Mister Skye?” asked Sublette when Skye paused.
“I got here,” Skye said, pride welling in him. “Pretty good for a limey sailor.”
“Ye come over that pass?” Bridger asked.
Skye nodded.
“I don’t suppose ye saw any Bug’s Boys. Just limey luck.”
Skye wiped his mouth with his buckskin sleeve. “I saw them but they didn’t see me.”
“Hull country’s swarming with ’em. We come through at night, so damned many of ’em.”
Skye nodded. Apparently he had done something even more daring than he realized. At ease for the first time in days, he settled back into a tree trunk and told them his story, beginning with his departure from the rendezvous, his loss of everything to the Blackfeet, the bear that saved him, his indecision and fear and despair when he was lost, his desperate quest for food, his wild moment on the Madison River when he was caught between a village he couldn’t identify and raiders who came within a few yards of him.
“Poor doin’s. Probably Shoshones, maybe Bannacks,” someone volunteered. “Best not to tangle with Bannacks. Miracle you didn’t get your ha’r raised.”
They questioned him at length, and he asked them about their journey, which had been uneventful until they reached the Three Forks and found Blackfeet everywhere. After that they had slipped over to Crow country, the great bend of the Yellowstone, and had been here a fortnight waiting for the weather to cool, feasting on buffalo.
Sublette raised the question on all their minds. “What are your plans, Mister Skye?”
“To enter your service, sir.”
“I thought so. We can use every man we can get. You’ll need an outfit. We carry two or three spares; every year someone or other loses his plunder—traps, rifle, flint, and steel. We can outfit you.”
“How will all that earn out, sir?”
“Camp tenders earn two hundred a year. Your outfit’ll cost about a hundred. That means you’ll have a mountain rifle, pound of powder and a horn, lead balls, thirty-two to a pound, half a dozen traps, a good skinning knife, blankets, and some odds and ends including a few yards of flannel.”
“You’d make me a camp tender?”
“It’s an apprenticeship, Mister Skye. Free trappers earn more, but you’ll need to learn some things first. Beavers don’t just come to you and offer themselves up. We try to have one camp tender for every two trappers but we’re short. You’ll skin and dress the pelts, dry ’em out, cook, keep the fires going, and herd the company horses and mules. It’s hard work and these old coons’ll give you all the grief they can. Next season, or maybe sooner if you’re up and the beaver’s coming, you can go out and trap and make a good living. You ever shot a rifle?”
“No, sir, except a few times at the rendezvous.”
“Not even in the Royal Navy?”
“I wasn’t a marine, sir. I was a powder monkey mostly and then a seaman.”
“Well, you’ll be getting some lessons in the mornin’. You’ll learn the whole drill, from keeping your piece clean and dry to making meat. We’ll burn a little du Pont. Old Fitzpatrick here, he’s gonna turn you into a mountaineer. Let me tell you something, Mister Skye. Learn how to use that rifle. How to load fast and shoot slow and never waste a shot. A red man can pump six or seven arrows at you in the time it takes you to reload. So every shot counts. Believe me, before we’re done with the Three Forks, you’ll be put to the test.”
Chapter 37
When the grass gave out, Sublette took the
brigade off the island and into a broad valley of the Yellowstone that was hemmed by majestic mountains.
Skye marveled at its beauty. Never had he seen such a place.
“Up ahead a piece is Colter’s Hell,” Bridger told him. “With biling springs, hot water that shoots out of the ground, and the smell of sulphur. It’s the doorway to Hades. We all been there and peered in and saw the old horned rascal hi’self grinnin’ up at us.”
Skye smiled. He was onto old Gabe.
“You don’t believe me, eh? Well, we’ll go have us a sample.” He turned to Beckwourth and Tom Fitzpatrick. “Old Barnaby hyar don’t believe in Colter’s Hell. I reckon we’d better go show him where a man can get a whiff of sulphur and brimstone.”
“Skye, you don’t believe in hell? We found it and we’ll show it to you,” Beckwourth said. “We’ll show you where you can roast your pale white hide. This is where Old Bug himself lives.”
“It’s Mister Skye, mate.”
“Well, you’d better tell that to old Satan,” said Fitzpatrick. “The devil should address a man proper.”
Skye smiled. This had been going on ever since he arrived. For days he had devoured good cow—the mountaineers made sure he knew good cow from poor bull—and sometimes elk or mule deer. For days he had slept warm under two thick blankets spun and carded in England. For days he had learned wilderness arts, fire tending, hide dressing, and how to shoot his heavy, octagonal-barreled rifle.
They had disabused him of various notions, such as that he should stand up to shoot. Instead, they told him to lie down or get behind a tree or log or rock, and make no target at all. He should steady the barrel on anything solid and squeeze the trigger sweet and true. They didn’t have much powder or lead to spare, but a man who could shoot true could make the difference in a scrape, so they instructed him anyway. They taught him how to load fast, even how to load without measuring powder in an emergency; how to drive a patched ball home with the hickory rod clipped under the barrel, how to pour a little powder in the pan, how to scrape out damp powder after a rain because if he didn’t he wouldn’t be armed.
He progressed from clumsiness to some skill, occasionally hitting a distant target, and they pronounced themselves satisfied that he could make meat or send a few red devils to the spirit world. He wondered about that. He had fired cannon in war, and brawled in bloody mayhem, but coolly aiming at and killing a mortal bothered him.
Skye, Bridger, Fitzpatrick, and Beckwourth set off on horseback that golden October noon for the gates of hell, and told Sublette they’d be back the next day. Skye kept his counsel, expecting that all this was an elaborate prank on a pork-eater. But it would be fun, and he’d had little enough fun in his constricted life. They rode south along the Yellowstone, scaring up flocks of Canada geese and ducks and alarming a few snorty cow moose and calves.
Beckwourth was at his gaudiest—to impress the ladies certain to be dipping their toes in the boiling waters, he said—with elaborately quilled buckskins he had talked some Crow maidens—or matrons—into making for him. The fringes of both his tunic and leggins were extra long. He wore a great floppy felt hat that concealed his dusky face, and his untrammeled dark hair stretched far down his back, making him rakish. The man had style, Skye thought, and never more so than in his bawdy recollections of nearly the entire distaff side of the Crow Nation.
“Why,” Beckwourth was saying, “I was so smitten by Bad Bear’s buxom virgin daughter Raccoon, the Teton Queen I called her in honor of her assets, that I went to the chief and made him a proposition. ‘Ol’ Bear,’ sez I, ‘I want Raccoon for my very own, and in return I’ll be in your service, come war and come peace.’ Well, Bear, he smiles, and sez he’d be honored, and he sent Raccoon over and I indoctrinated her in all the arts of amour for a fortnight, spending a pleasant January last winter. My reputation grew—deservedly of course—and next thing I knew, Bear’s wife and three other daughters came into my lodge for their own initiation, and that’s how I spent a pleasant February except that I was plumb exhausted and out of sorts by March.”
Well, they were all marvelous liars: Beckwourth, that son of a white man and slave woman, most of all, and if that was what wilderness did, Skye supposed he would turn into a gaudy liar himself.
Bridger was steering them toward a conical peak to the southeast, and then into its foothills. Skye couldn’t imagine a less likely place for brimstone and sulphur, and waited patiently to see how this great prank would end.
“We’re getting close now, Skye. You can smell the sulphur. Wherever Bug is, there’s the smell of burning sulphur,” said Fitzpatrick. “This is just a sample, sort of an outlier. Hell’s real front gate’s another fifty miles south of here up on a steaming plateau where boiling water erupts and sulphur stinks up the air. I’ve seen old Bug hisself, and so has Bridger, but Beckwourth’s so saintly Bug leaves him alone.”
They were progressing up a bleak gulch with a small creek in it. The creek steamed in the crisp October air, which puzzled Skye. His husky colt poked a nose into the water and jerked back. They finally arrived at a place where water boiled out of a steep hillside and into pools, one below the next. Steam billowed into the chill air, and Skye realized the water actually was hot.
“Well, ha’r we are. I’ll go pay Bug the admission,” Bridger said, vanishing into brush. The rest were picketing their horses on the grassy slope and peeling off their duds. Skye watched, uncertain, wary of a prank. They’d get him down to the buff and then ride off. Yes, that was it. The whole elaborate business would teach him a lesson.
“Couldn’t find the Divil,” said Bridger. “Guess we go in for free this time.” He began tugging on his moccasins. “I left him a message that ol’ Skye was hyar, sampling the Divil’s wares.”
Next thing Skye knew, his comrades were poking toes into the pools, sampling them for heat, and then lowering themselves into the water with many a happy sigh. Where was the prank?
“Well, Skye?” Fitzpatrick, in waist-high water, addressed him. “Are you a shy fellow?”
“It’s Mister Skye, mate.”
“Well, this pool will boil off your cooties, and the next one up will boil you. Go down two pools and you can sit for an hour without getting lobstered.”
Skye needed no more invitation. He dropped his grimy duds, stepped into the pool, and found himself immersed in just-bearable heat, which swiftly opened every pore and swept away every ache. He celebrated. Rarely in his brief life had he experienced a hot bath. He marveled at the water and wondered where it came from and what subterranean fires heated it. The water exuded a certain mineral odor, and Skye sensed that it had leached chemicals out of the bowels of the earth somewhere under this hot-bellied mountain. This was probably volcanic country.
That evening, they feasted on cow elk after Skye had collected wood and built a small fire for them.
“Actually, Skye,” said Beckwourth, “we was elected to bring you hyar. The vote was unanimous.”
Skye waited.
“You got the smelliest feet in Creation, and we was commanded to bring you here to clean your toes so you didn’t foul up the whole camp.”
Skye hardly knew what to say.
Bridger hiccuped and snickered.
Skye got the drift. “It’s Mister Skye, gents. When you introduce me to the Devil, remember it.”
“Bug wouldn’t let ’im into hell, not with them feet,” said Bridger.
They were making him one of them, but not without some initiation rites. Skye sensed how he stood with them. From their standpoint, he was an odd duck who talked with an accent and used sailor words and harbored a vision of going back to the civilized east. But he knew he had done something they admired, something that might have sunk even the most experienced of them. He had survived two encounters with the Blackfeet, picked up a horse and food and gear along the way, and somehow made it to the brigade through a wilderness he didn’t know. They were going to put him through some more of this, but all the while they
were teaching him everything they knew about staying alive in a land without roofs and constables and butchers and bakers. Skye glowed within. These were friends as well as mentors.
Leisurely they rode back to Sublette’s encampment. The aspens had bloomed yellow and withered to nakedness, but the cottonwoods were just reaching a burnished gold radiance, somehow joyous and sad. The air had changed, and each breeze carried tiny knives in it. In camp, the pace quickened. Skye found himself jerking meat, packing “Indian butter,” which he learned was the soft tallow that accumulated along the back of the buffalo—a delicacy that mountaineers as well as the tribes cherished and ate raw. It preserved well, and Skye filled leather sacks with it.
They trapped a few beaver just to have a look at the pelts, and pronounced them not yet prime but getting there fast. Skye learned to roast beaver tail and to flesh each pelt and dry it on a willow hoop. Sublette kept him busy but he still found moments he could call his own, and these he used to master the arts of war as it was fought here.
They showed him an Indian-made bullhide shield so tough it could deflect arrows and even a rifle ball that hit it askance. They taught him to throw a knife and a hatchet, and he, in turn, showed them the sailor’s weapon, the belaying pin with its flared cusp that protected the hand from lance and knife. He surprised them in several mock fights, deftly deflecting a wooden mock knife and a mock lance fashioned from a stick, and thumping his adversaries in the ribs, or neck, or knees, which set them to howling. He knew little about shooting arrows or bullets, but when it came to close quarters, he won their respect in a hurry.
“That Royal Navy’s tougher’n I thought,” said Fitzpatrick. “It can fight with a damned stick.”
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