by Win Blevins
He went back to his pinnacle and waited.
And waited.
Come on, Fitz.
And waited. And waited.
On the third day he slept the entire day, didn’t know why.
Bitch of a fix.
That night he considered. He said to himself, hell of a fix. This time the meaning reached deeper.
The fourth day he began to imagine what had overcome Fitz, Gideon, Clyman and Sublette, Branch and Stone. Pictures of tomahawks splitting skulls. Arrows riddling bodies. Bullets tearing up hearts, lungs, and heads. The pictures drove him wild. He ordered them to get out of his head and go away.
That night he dreamt of Indians celebrating the deaths of Diah and his men. They cut the scalps off gleefully. Tied the half-dead bodies to posts, jammed splinters into their flesh and lit them afire, built fires beneath their feet. They danced circles around his friends, waving their blood-dripping scalps on lances.
The fifth and sixth days he spent wandering around the countryside, looking for deer. He stayed within sight of the Sweetwater, so he could see his friends when they came. He forced himself to walk with a swagger he did not feel.
The seventh day he shot a deer and started drying the meat. If the noise drew Indians, too bad. Being chased was better than starving.
He checked his ammunition. Plenty of powder left, but only eleven lead balls.
On the eighth morning he began to wonder if he should go on.
Go on?! Preposterous. Where would you go?
Down the river to the settlements.
What settlements?
About six to seven hundred miles away, I think, maybe. Isn’t that what the captain said?
That’s if this is the Platte. A lot more if it’s the Arkansas.
That’s right.
You don’t even know if you’ll end up on the Arkansas three hundred miles below St. Louis, or at Fort Atkinson, four hundred miles above.
No, I don’t.
Why would you do such a crazy thing?
Because I have only eleven balls.
And what exactly does that mean?
With eleven balls, I can shoot a critter once a week and get some food. That would give me two and a half months to walk seven hundred miles.
I can’t believe you’re thinking of walking seven hundred miles. Or a thousand.
If I stay here and my friends never do come, because they got killed by Indians or whatever, I won’t have enough ammunition to get to the settlements.
(That stilled the arguing voice.)
I’ll starve to death.
He slept the rest of the day, and all night.
On the ninth morning he began to know what he would do. But he waited, and glutted himself on deer meat.
Please, please show up.
The tenth day he did the same. Now the deer meat was mostly jerked.
Oh, God, where are you? He had to admit he was not thinking as much of the probable fate of his friends. He was racked with anxiety about his own.
On the eleventh day he knew he had to go. He just couldn’t bring himself to start. To actually put one foot in front of the other and go down the river.
Once he left, his friends would never find him. Simple as that.
Part Three
THE JOURNEY
Chapter Fifteen
On the morning of the twelfth day Sam Morgan, who until now had been drawing his life in children’s colored chalks, faced a reality: He was a god-awful distance from nowhere and all alone. He faced the likelihood of getting killed by Indians, and the likelihood of a thousand and one dangers of the country getting him. Faced the choice of taking action or starving to death.
He set off walking to the Missouri River. Or Mississippi River. Or wherever help might be. Wherever civilization might be.
His whole life he had thought he wanted to be alone in the wilderness. Now the yearning for company raged in him.
Those first days he walked.
He walked, and walked some more.
His flowing lifeline, his wellspring in a parched country, the river stretched ahead of him, to a horizon. And then on to a horizon he couldn’t see. And then farther to a hundred more horizons beyond sight, receding forever.
Is this a joke? Am I kidding myself?
He walked for a day, two days, three. Maybe he would walk forever. Walk for twenty years and never stop walking and never find anyone, any human beings at all.
He went in a daze, in a kind of delirium. The world was a phantasm. It faded into the sagebrush plains shimmering in the summer heat. Shrub blended into demon, which blended into phantom bear, which blended into elusive ghost. To all of it Sam had the same response. Feel numb. Walk.
He saw no one, white or red. He hardly saw a critter. He walked.
In the evening he ate his deer charqui. He’d stuffed his possible sack full of dried meat, but every day he emptied it a little. After three days he restricted himself to one meal a day, right before sleeping.
The worst was not the hunger, or even the fear. Yes, he was damned well scared. He shook half the time. There was a world to be scared of. But the worst was the loneliness.
His ears screamed for conversation. At night he dreamed of nothing but social give and take, speak and listen, smile and laugh, duck and dip. In his dreams he went for walks with his father and talked of everything in the world. He sat with his mother at her sewing and told her what he had never said, that he was really worried about how she seemed to be retreating into a private world, and he needed her. He sat in his sisters’ kitchens and laughed and played with their toddlers while the husbands finished up the day’s work and Betsy and Gwen got supper ready. He had philosophical conversations with Clyman. He talked religion with Diah, and was glad to listen more than he spoke. He laughed and sang songs with Gideon. Oddly, Hannibal appeared several times, and they had long, long talks. Sam knew these dialogues were very important, but he could never remember what the two of them said, or even what they talked about.
After a while—he’d lost track of time completely—he came on a bullboat on the shore.
The sight of it roused him from his languor. Indians didn’t make bullboats, only white men did. They stuck the butts of willow branches into the ground, bent them into a bowl shape, glued buffalo hides on, caulked the whole, flipped it upright, and launched a crude, unwieldy, tipsy boat which had the advantage of almost no draft.
There were white men in this country.
His heart rampaged up and down and side to side in his chest.
He checked out the area. Quickly he found that a big Indian camp had stood near the river on the north side. The signs were everywhere. Circles of stones that held down lodge covers. Sticks standing as tripods to hold cooking pots, or medicine bundles. Cold ashes. Dog dung. Bones. Horse tracks and horse dung. The scrapings where the butts of lodgepoles were dragged away. A big camp. He wished he could tell from the moccasin prints, as Rose could, what tribe they were.
He felt a stabbing pain in this chest. White men. Hell, if even the Indians were still here, he’d probably walk right into camp, just to be wrapped in the sound of human voices. And get scalped for his trouble.
He sat down in the camp and had an imaginary conversation. He explained to the principal tribesmen how he came into their country, by getting lost. How he was their friend. How sorry he was he had no presents for them. How, yes, he was going to drink their water and eat their game and not give them anything in exchange. How his friends would give them presents later. He himself would come back and bring presents.
Then the leaders talked things over among themselves. When they finished their deliberations, they told him what a fine mark he was going to make, tied to a post, for the young men to shoot arrows at. What a great competition that would be!
Sam stood up in the middle of that abandoned camp, looked around at all his imaginary companions, bloody-minded as they were, and walked down the river.
And walked.
And walked.
It was his discipline, it was his monk-like practice, it was his salvation. Walk.
He ran completely out of jerked meat. He would have to find buffalo soon. A day spent hunting, even if successful, plus a couple of days to dry the meat—that was time away from his forever walking, away from his journey of body and spirit. The time away would be welcome, in a way, and in another way not. The pattern of the walking, the rhythm of days spent marching on forever got deeply rooted in his being. The motion had an endless music for him. Besides, three or four days of hunting and drying meat was three or four days more until he got to Fort Atkinson, or an outlying farm, or an Arkansas trading post, or whatever kind of civilization he might find first.
Most nights when he lay down to sleep, he fantasized about being back in Meadowlark’s camp. In these daydreams she came close and nuzzled against him, and wonderful things began to happen. Or he would fantasize about coming on a living Indian camp. Here he looked down on the camp from a rise, and seemed to see there everything vital, full of energy, charged with life. Slowly, dreamlike even in a dream, he walked straight in. The people came toward him, jabbering. The fantasy ended there, with the people talking animatedly and congregating close around him, for good or ill.
One midday of his walking-walking-walking, he saw horsemen running buffalo on the far crests of the hills across the river. At this distance he couldn’t even see if they were white men or red. He heard several gunshots, but most Indians had some guns. He forced himself not to go find out who they were. They might be miles away before he could walk there anyway.
At midafternoon that day he saw a huge herd of buffalo, probably the same one, crossing the river from the south side to his side.
He looked around for the hunters. No sign of them. He climbed a hill and looked harder. Still no sign. Maybe they had the meat they wanted and were now busy with butchering.
He edged close to the great beasts, stopped now to graze. He took the time and effort to get very close for a sure shot. The cow dropped with one ball. Ten lead balls left—more than one a week for his journey, he hoped.
As fast as he could, watching every moment, he got some meat butchered out and got into a cottonwood grove along a creek, where he started a low, smokeless fire.
No one came to investigate.
Then he realized, I hoped someone would. A friendly Indian, even. That would do a lot to ease my pain.
He gorged on hump rib roasted on a stick over the flames. Drying meat all the while, he gorged again the next day, and the next.
Suddenly he felt an urge to look at himself, to see who he was now. He stripped off his hide shirt, his hide pants, his moccasins, everything, right down to bare skin. He regarded himself. This wasn’t the body he left home with a year and a half ago. It was harder, more shaped, less a body in transition, more a man’s body. It was taller, too, he supposed, though he didn’t know. Mostly what he saw was that it was used. His shin bore an angry scar where the bullet ripped his skin and broke his leg. His hands and wrists were reddened and dried. But this wasn’t what he wanted to know.
He knelt by a creek and looked at his reflection in a still pool. Some face. The wind and sun were starting it toward the face of a middle-aged man while he was only nineteen. His white hair seemed to him as outlandish as ever. He wanted to see more, though. He looked hard for the expression in the eyes, but the reflection wasn’t clear enough. What he felt sure of, though he didn’t know why, was that he would see the eyes of a stranger.
This was frustrating. He splashed the water hard with one hand and fractured the reflection.
The next morning he filled his possible sack with the dried buffalo meat and set out again. It felt almost like he had found a path, a way, like in the Bible stories his mother told. Walking, walking, walking, that’s my salvation. Which might be Fort Atkinson. Unless I’m walking, walking to my death.
He didn’t know how many days he walked, or how far. The sun seemed to get bigger and strong and hotter every day, like someone who kept saying the same thing insistently, day after day, louder and louder, until you paid full attention.
What did it say? Death, death, death, death? You are walking into your own grave?
Yet the oddity was that Sam had never felt more alive. All the world was here, powerfully present. The heat of the sun. The cool of the evening breeze. The stars studded bright all across the sky. The meat, dried, unsatisfying, but filling after it swelled in his belly. River water to drink—sometimes he even lay down in the river, all the way. The sandy beach or leafy loam he stretched out on at night.
Never had his life been so fully with him.
Felt not like death but life, real life.
It occurred to him, sometimes, to wonder how far he had walked, where on the captain’s map he was. That seemed unreal, as the map itself was the most meager hint of the reality it represented, a pretender to a realm it didn’t know. The map knew nothing of the slap of the sun, the relentless sucking of the wind, the baked earth beneath your feet, the cool, green-blue shade of cottonwoods along the river, the vistas of grasslands reaching to every horizon, north, east, south, and far, far west.
East was the direction that mattered to him.
How far? Only ten miles some days, he thought, half a day’s walk. Maybe twenty-five miles other days, when he felt coltish, or was impatient of everything but walking. How far was unpredictable, barely thinkable, irrelevant to his real existence.
Where on that map? He had no idea. He didn’t even know how long he’d been walking.
Civilization? An infinity away. He barely thought of it. His life was here, these plains, this wind, this throbbing sun, here and only here.
That night, though, he lay back on his sleeping place, without blankets or robes, and took note of the moon. It had been new when he started. Now it was coming around to new again.
He shifted against the hard ground, trying to get comfortable. Did that mean one month of walking? He took thought. Could the moon have circled to new once already, and now be coming round again? He pondered it. No, he didn’t think so.
He tried to remember the days. He had walked a while, began to run short of meat, rationed himself to one meal a day, and finally walked a couple of days hungry. He shot a buffalo, dried meat, and walked on. No, didn’t seem that could add up to two moons. Just one.
He chuckled at himself. He was figuring time the way the Indians did, by moons full and new. If he remembered, he could figure it by half moons too. An equivalent of what white folks called weeks. He liked that. Not that anything in these measurements of time mattered, except one, the seamless smear of the long days of summer, endlessly unrolling before him.
Before he went to sleep he thought, as he usually did, of Meadowlark. He had made a promise to her. Though he had meant it, he had broken his word. What was she thinking? That his word couldn’t be trusted? That white men were unpredictable and unreliable?
Or did she think of him at all? Was she enamored of some new suitor? Her virginal ceremony was for summer, when all the Crows got together. Had she already performed it? Was she in someone’s arms? Was she already married? Pregnant?
Why not? He had taken his sport with other women.
But he loved Meadowlark.
He longed for her.
He drifted into erotic dreams.
One morning he woke up, in a grove of big, old cottonwoods, to a peal of bird sounds. He opened his eyes. Martins, hundreds of them, chattering, twittering, bickering, singing, making every possible bird sound, all of them exuberant.
He closed his eyes. It was fun, all this chirping. Kind of like being in a place crowded with people, in a tavern with folks you didn’t know, with jabbering and prattling you couldn’t follow—but it all added up to a big, fat, social babble. He loved it. It felt like company.
As he lay there with his eyes closed, the morning sun on his lids, a breeze beginning to perk up, he imagined that he was having lunch in St. Louis with Abby,
Grumble, and Governor Clark. Clark was expansive this day, telling tales of his experiences in the West, poking fun at himself. Sam, Abby, and Grumble were immensely entertained. Cadet Chouteau joined them, and this time was utterly amiable. He and Clark traded stories about adventures up the river, which seem brightly populated with incidents and people, not a bit like Sam’s current life. Then they both told stories about their friend Hannibal, also Sam’s friend, as they acknowledged. He couldn’t get the exact content of what they said about Hannibal, but it was admiring—Hannibal was a good influence everywhere he went, and a person of respect among red man and white.
Sam lay there for several hours, listening and imagining, until he woke up and realized the birds had moved on.
He did the same.
Beyond the grove, about midday, he pushed up a little rise and saw that the river looped to the south and, after ten or fifteen miles, back again. He could cut off several miles by heading straight across country. He looked carefully. He didn’t like to go without water, not if he could help it. But across his shortcut, from northwest to southeast, slanted a meager line of trees, which in this country meant a stream. Halfway across, he could strike the creek and drink. He studied the line of the river to get his bearings—its fringe of green would be his landmark—and off he went.
Toward evening he came into the cottonwoods along the little creek and sat down in the shade. He would camp here tonight. Maybe if he camped in a grove, he would be wakened by birdsong again.
Then he saw his good luck. Three buffalo bulls grazed on the prairie beyond the grove. He took thought. It was about a half moon, maybe a little more, since he shot that last buffalo. He wasn’t completely out of meat yet, but would be soon. Bulls were not good eating, not like cows. Usually, though, buffalo came in big herds or not at all. A few straying animals, that was a gift he shouldn’t turn down.
He barely had time before dark, and the bulls might be gone in the morning. The wind now was easy and from the northwest—they hadn’t caught his scent.
He slipped quietly through the trees and came to the end of the shade. Just as well not to go out and take a chance of spooking them. It was maybe a shot of a hundred steps. He considered. He didn’t want to take a chance on wasting a lead ball. But it would be worse to leave cover and lose the buffalo.
