by Win Blevins
He saw several Rees most of the way across the river, swimming straight toward him.
“Sam, they’re coming fast.”
“Save yourself! I can’t run!”
Clyman looked back at the swimmers. He thought, Maybe I can row out and brain them with an oar. But there were too many and they were too close.
Sam crawled up to where Clyman was.
Clyman looked around for a hiding place. Nothing but scanty brush.
“Run, Clyman. If you escape, write my family at Morgantown, Pennsylvania, and tell them what happened to me.”
Clyman ran.
Sam crawled into the brush.
The Rees took out after Clyman.
He sprinted for open prairie.
Soon Clyman looked back. Three Rees were coming for him, one out to the left, one out to the right, and the third directly toward him. They wore nothing but belts holding knives and tomahawks, and carried bows and arrows.
Clyman ran for his life.
The ground was smooth and level, with no places to hide. He had a lead of maybe a hundred and fifty yards. He could see high ground maybe three miles off. He headed for that.
He ran. He just ran. There was freedom in running, even exhilaration. He felt the sun on his body, the earth beneath his feet. He ran forever.
His side hurt. Breath burned his throat.
He ran.
He looked back.
He still had his lead.
He ran, and after a long while the rising ground looked closer. It was still a long way. He might never get there, and the earth there might still be too smooth and perfect to give him a hiding place.
His job was only to run. He did.
He felt his heart flop about in his chest madly.
He slowed. He turned his head.
The man in the center was gaining on him.
He ran.
Now the land began to roll. For the first time he topped a little rise and dropped out of sight.
He saw a little rain-washed hole, as wide as his body, maybe three feet long and two feet deep. He dived into it. The prairie grasses rose about a foot high on either side.
He silenced his breath.
His main pursuer passed about fifty yards away.
He waited.
His left-hand pursuer passed.
He waited.
Much later, the right-hand pursuer went by.
Something like hope welled in his heart.
He trotted off to the right.
A glance told him the Rees had dropped into some low ground and were out of sight.
He hit sloping ground the other way and plunged ahead.
Soon the slope became a ravine.
Later he climbed out and mounted a ridge.
About a quarter mile away stood the three Rees.
James Clyman spread both his arms and bowed low to them.
Sam waited to die. He lay flat on his back and looked up at the wide, wide sky. He hated this, the waiting. Why didn’t they come and kill him decently? I don’t care what they do after, he told himself.
He was in a rage that they didn’t get it over with. He whispered, “It’ll stop my damn leg from hurting.”
The leg kept throbbing like hell.
Soon his breathing eased.
He looked around what little he could.
He turned onto his right side. No Indians.
Painfully, he pushed himself onto his left side. No Indians.
But so what? The brush blocked his view as much as it blocked theirs.
He slipped onto his back again, rigid and determined.
He waited.
Nothing happened.
Nothing.
Carefully, gingerly, he rolled onto each side again. He seemed to be alone. He pushed onto his belly and forced his head up.
Alone.
Feeling like a fool, he started crawling. In a few feet he was at the edge of the brush. He lay very still and looked. No Rees on the beach. No Rees in the water. No Rees across the river—he’d been swept a ways downstream. No Kentucks or voyageurs in sight. No boats on the river.
He might have been alone on a desert island.
He held his heart with his ribs.
The keelboats had drifted downstream, getting away from the villages for safety. However many men had died on that beach, most of the whites were on the boats and had survived.
If he floated downstream….
He got to his knees and looked around in every direction. Evidently, the Rees had ignored him to chase Clyman. Unbelievable. He wondered if Jim was alive.
Right now it didn’t matter. He had a job to do.
He crawled back to the rowboat. He refused to think about luck or no luck. He thought of the rowboat and floating to wherever the keelboats were. If he had to row, he would find a way.
He took stock. He had his rifle, The Celt, and the pistol and knife in his belt. He couldn’t walk a step. The nearest fort was about two hundred and fifty miles downriver. The boats were his only hope.
The eddy immediately took him upstream. He had to row. It was awkward, pulling the oars on one leg, and it hurt like hell. He set the other leg in the boat bottom, a useless thing, but somehow it shot with pain every stroke. He forced the boat into the current and floated downstream. He rested his oars. If he just steered a little and stayed in the current, he would find the keelboats.
When Clyman considered his circumstances, he didn’t feel so feisty.
He had dumped his rifles, his pistols, even his knives in the river.
No telling where the boats were. They picked up anchor and floated down. They might go all the way to Fort Kiowa, which he guessed to be three hundred miles south.
He walked to some high ground and looked around. Though he knew the river lay west and south of him, he was out of sight of everything. No boats, no Indians chasing him, no villages, no white men—no one.
He needed a drink. Which meant the river. He could see timber along the bank. He could drink, hide, and rest.
As he scooped up his second double handful of water, the keelboats floated right in front of him.
The men hailed him as quickly as he shouted at them.
The small skiff was launched to get him.
The small skiff?
Was Sam … ?
Chapter Eleven
Sam was glad to see Clyman standing over him. It took his mind off what the surgeon, Fleming, was doing to his leg, and off the pain that would have made him scream, except for the stick Fleming made him bite down on.
“I gave up on you,” said Clyman.
Sam took the stick out and looked at his friend. “Did you give up on Rose too? He’s here.”
When the attack started with Rose at the pickets, everyone gave him up for lost.
“Praise be.”
“The ball broke the little bone in your shin,” said Fleming. He stopped probing and put a poultice on the wound.
“What’s the total situation?” Clyman asked.
“We left ten bodies on that beach,” said Sam to Clyman.
“Plus Aaron Stephens.”
“Three more went down in the river,” said Fleming. He’d already cut away the lower leg of Sam’s hide pants. Now he bandaged the wound with cotton cloth. He picked up two boards he’d scrounged somewhere. “Hold these for me while I tie, will you?”
Clyman held the boards tight against the front and back of Sam’s leg. As the surgeon bound them to the leg with hide thongs, the young man put the stick back in his mouth and wheezed big breaths.
“How many wounded?” Clyman asked.
“Eleven wounded,” said Fleming, “three or four of them mortally, I think.”
“They made clowns of us.”
Sam giggled, maybe hysterically.
Fleming finished and raised up. “Put no weight on this leg for at least six weeks.”
Sam jerked the stick out. “Six weeks?”
Fleming nodded. “That’s no weight. Sit, lie, or
use crutches without touching the foot to the ground. If you ignore me, you’ll break it again.”
“How long before I’m back to normal?”
“Two months, at least. The pain will tell you.” Fleming stood up.
“Want me to get a green deer hide?” asked Clyman. “Wrap it around the leg? When it shrinks, it will hold the bone tighter.”
“Sure, why not?” said the doc.
Sam noticed that his tone meant, Guess it won’t hurt. Doctors felt the same snotty way about wards and protections made with herbs, though everybody knew they worked.
“You want the hide?” This was to Sam.
“Hot damn, bring it on.”
“Young man, you don’t appreciate how lucky you are. Think about having a Ree spear through your chest.” Fleming walked off, probably to see to other patients.
Clyman squatted next to Sam, and they traded survival stories. To Sam Clyman’s sounded heroic, while his own sounded like dumb luck.
When Clyman was finished, Sam said, “You decoyed them off me.”
“Not on purpose,” said Clyman, and laughed. “It worked out good. Worked out great.”
They looked long at each other.
Sam felt different inside. He couldn’t have said how.
They floated on down to an island. Ashley thought an island would be easier to defend if the Rees showed up again. The men dug holes to bury Reed Gibson and John Gardner. Then they stood around leaning on their shovels, looking at each other somberly, feeling like something was left out.
Jedediah Smith stepped forward, a Bible in his hand. Most of the men, not knowing him well, squirmed or backed away. He looked around at them, and without a word bowed his head and began to pray. He appealed to the God whose sternness all of them had just witnessed; he declared that they all needed, in this moment, to believe in His compassion. As he prayed, men looked in wonder at their companion. Bible stuff was for kids and women. If these men thought about it at all, they joked about it. But now they saw idealism and perhaps nobility. Though they feared his God, they felt admiration and respect for Diah Smith.
When Jedediah said “Amen,” Gideon surprised them all. He floated out a tune from his fiddle—Sam didn’t even know Gideon was a fiddler. It sounded like an ancient melody, handed down for a hundred generations in a haunting minor mode, drenched in melancholy. It spoke of the sorrows of the Israelites of over thousands of years, the heartache of mothers, father, brothers, sisters, of one feeling common to all human beings, grief at the loss of a loved one to death. Yet as it languished in sorrow, it spoke in the same moment of motion, of the pulse of life that carries all human beings on.
When the last of Gideon’s tones drifted away on the evening breeze, men stood silent, their hearts stirred.
Then they put the bodies in the graves, and left only a log as a memorial—otherwise Indians might disturb their friends’ rest.
Sam couldn’t sleep that night—his broken leg throbbed. He laid on the deck of the Packet and stared at the stars and listened to General Ashley. The stars stayed maddeningly still, and the general paced maddeningly all night.
It was the general’s bark that awoke Sam at dawn.
Turned out Ashley was bound and determined to take these keelboats upriver and get his hunters into the field to find beaver. He lined the men up on the deck of the Packet. Apparently he’d worried up a plan during the long darkness. “First we will picket the larboard side of the two keelboats,” he said, meaning the side that faced the villages. “That’s for protection against their fire. Then we will pass by the villages at night. They’ll never know we’re there.”
It didn’t fly with the voyageurs for a moment. Sam could see that in their faces. He’d expected they might be stubborn and sullen. Instead they were panicked.
Gideon spoke up for them. “General, I don’t think these men will go to the Rees again for any reason.”
After some bickering, Ashley asked for commitments. “I’m going to send to Major Henry to reinforcements. How many men are willing to stay with me until help comes?”
All the Kentucks volunteered, even the injured ones. Except for Gideon, the French-Canadians didn’t—forty-three of them wanted out now.
Ashley asked directly. “What will happen if I order them to stay?”
Gideon answered with seeming casualness, “They will desert.”
The general considered. Sam read the look of his face as desperation. Maybe he thought his whole enterprise was going to go under right here. He said, “I want two volunteers. You will go overland to Major Henry and let him know we need reinforcements.”
Without hesitation Diah Smith stepped forward. Sam studied the face of the man he considered very admirable and a little odd. Why did he take every risk? To get in good with the general? Because he thought it was his duty? Because, under the mask of quiet dignity, he liked danger and difficulty?
Gideon stepped out next to Smith. Sam thought maybe he was making a statement on behalf of all the French-Canadians.
“We’ll talk in a minute,” Ashley told them.
He assigned the Packet, the bigger of the boats, to the French-Canadians. They would take his trade goods back to Fort Kiowa and give them the news. Then they would float down to Fort Atkinson and tell Colonel Leavenworth of the defeat here.
He talked briefly with Smith and Gideon. Smith showed the general the maps he’d been making of the fur country in his notebooks. Diah understood navigation instruments and cartography. He showed the general how he and Gideon could go up the Grand River, strike the Yellowstone, and follow it down to Fort Henry.
Gideon left them to talk it over. He would do what had to be done, just that, however it needed to be done.
The pair left immediately. Since all the horses had been killed, they had to go on foot.
The big keelboat pushed downstream. No Kentuck was sorry the forty-three voyageurs left. Sam wondered if the general would be able to get the furs he needed without them. Sometimes he talked nervously about his creditors.
Ashley built some fortifications for The Rocky Mountains. He said he’d float slowly down to the mouth of the Cheyenne River, just in case any other men escaped alive. There everyone would await Major Henry.
The high point of Sam’s day was when Clyman brought him two crutches, fresh cut from saplings on the island. Very quickly, though, he found out he didn’t have the energy to clomp around, and motion started the bleeding again. He collapsed on his blankets exhausted and stared at his bloody leg.
He thought about it, and that evening he asked James Clyman. Clyman had been a surveyor in earlier years, and had the habit of saying exactly what he saw without blarney. “Jim, is Fleming telling me the truth? Will this leg heal up? Will I be able to walk?”
“Depends,” said Clyman. “I’ve seen them go red and pussy and make a crip, or worse. I’ve seen people limp for good. And I’ve seen them walk like it never got broke.”
That was not what Sam wanted to hear. He spent another night watching the stars and listening to the general pace.
“Hello the boat! Hello the boat!”
The men looked toward the west bank. There a human figure was waving at them wildly. It spoke English, which was all they needed to know. The general dispatched a rowboat.
Four days after the defeat they’d found a survivor.
It turned out to be Jack Larrisson, naked as the day he came into the world. And badly sun-blistered, skin puffed up all over him, and in some places hanging in sheets.
Fleming put him in the shadow of the hold. He had a bullet wound in both thighs—the ball passed through one leg and lodged in the other. Fleming took the ball out and rubbed fat on the blisters.
Clyman helped Sam over to Larrisson so they could hear his story. He got wounded on the beach, hobbled into the water, and was swept downstream. His hide clothing felt so heavy he stripped it all off. Quite to his surprise, he washed up alive on a bar a half mile or so downstream. He didn’t know where the b
oats were, and he could barely walk. He found a log and floated downriver holding to it, looking for the boats. Then he gave up on finding them….
Soon Larrisson passed unconscious. Fleming poured some meat broth into his throat, and he drank without waking up. Sometimes he raved. He developed a fever—Fleming gave him willow bark for it and predicted he’d come out of all this good as new.
The next morning Sam didn’t wake up, not really. His forehead was burning. When Fleming checked his wound, he saw a big circle of red around it, and yellow pus. “Going foul,” Clyman said.
Fleming gave Sam willow bark, and asked Clyman to put cloths dipped in river water on his forehead regularly. When Fleming wasn’t looking, Clyman took the bandage off and exposed the wound to the air. Different people had different opinions about these things.
The Kentucks anchored the boat at an island off the mouth of the Cheyenne River. Men went ashore to hunt only occasionally—they were still worried about Rees. Supplies ran short. So did tempers.
In three or four days Larrisson was up and around, hobbling but cheerful.
Sam spent every day in half delirium. His wound kept suppurating.
Far downriver Colonel Henry Leavenworth, in command of Fort Atkinson, was outraged at the news brought by Ashley’s voyageurs, and declared that the Rees must be punished. Indian agent Benjamin O’Fallon agreed completely. “The problem is,” he said to Leavenworth, “the tribes of the Upper Missouri have no respect at all for American military prowess. They need to be taught a lesson.”
O’Fallon was also incensed at the forty-three voyageurs who deserted Ashley. His sense of national pride was aggrieved. Leavenworth was mounting a great expedition against the Rees, he told them, and needed boatmen. “This is your opportunity,” he told the assembled men, “to revenge the death of your friends, and bury the bones of your brave comrades whose spirits have pursued you downriver, shedding tears in your tracks.”
Either O’Fallon’s exhortation or Leavenworth’s offer of wages persuaded twenty of the French-Canadians to go back. Twenty-three decided it wasn’t their fight, much less their national pride. Men of the wilderness, they would make canoes or dugouts, or simply walk wherever they wanted to go, two hundred fifty miles from the nearest fort.
