The outcry that went up was like unto a congress of crows, no pun intended. The captain’s many Sparrowhawk wives were among the welcoming throng, ranging in age from the senior wife, a dumpy, sharp-tongued old wench of perhaps thirty years, misnamed Still Water, to the most recently acquired, a slim, shy little thing whom he called the Little Wife. She looked to be no more than twelve or thirteen years of age, but then the Indians marry young.
That night there was a festive Scalp Dance that went on loud and friendly until the moon was setting, and a big feast of buffalo meat. For the first time I cracked roasted marrow bones and ate the rich, buttery contents. My, was it good! We slept that night in Still Water’s tepee, me and Owney and Spybuck, that is. Beckwourth went to the Little Wife’s tent. A couple times during the night we could hear young girls lurking outside our tent flap, giggling and talking, and one of them even dared to peek in: a pretty little thing with fun in her eyes. But Still Water threw a billet of firewood at her and shrilled something in Crow.
“Goddamnit, she is a sourpuss all right,” I said. “I am going to sneak out of here and have some fun with those girls.”
“No, you dassen’t,” Owney said. “We are guests here and must not rush things; you don’t want to end up with a tomahawk in your head, do you?”
“And anyway, you can spare no time for dalliance,” Spybuck adds. “Tomorrow we start you as a beaver man.”
GOLIGHTLY SAYS, “FIRST thing you look for when you want to trap beaver, the first thing is—”
“Sign,” says I. “And I see it.” I point to the sharp gnawed stubs of alder and popple in the thicket alongside the Bighorn, and to the stumps of the bigger aspens chewed down by the bigger beavers.
“Sign of what?” asks Golightly, grinning as always in his superior way.
“Well, beaver of course,” says I.
He laughs. “No, you damn fool; first thing you look for is Indian sign. Lest you end up dead with a raw spot atop your noggin and an arrow or ball through your guts. In short, gone beaver.”
We are standing beside the Bighorn in early light, me with the sack of traps in one hand, the Leman in the other. Golightly’s fiike rested in the crook of his left arm in what they call the Indian carry. We had left our horses on good grass, picketed and unsaddled so they could roll to their hearts’ content. The saddles we’d hung in the trees, well hidden from the eyes of man and out of the reach of hungry bears.
Owen had gone off to the mountains with Bar-che-am-pe to hunt for signs of gold or silver—“color,” he called it. He’d brought a gold pan with him from the East.
“Why, we are only two, three miles from camp,” I argue back at Golightly. “No hostiles around here, I am sure.”
Golightly walks over to the riverbank and stares pointedly down at the grass. I follow. Sure enough, there is a moccasin track in there, and another, and another, leading on out.
“Whose tracks are they? Crow, I would bet,” says I.
“No, Oglala,” he says. “That is Sioux footwear. See the pucker at the end of the toe? Sparrowhawk squaws do not draw the buckskin so tight at the toe tip, but the Oglalas do. Hunk-papas also, but they usually sew their moccasins out of elk leather, a heavier shoe than this.” I look up quick and start scanning the cottonwoods. Again Golightly chuckles.
“You won’t find him skulking in the bushes,” he says. “No, he is long gone. That track was laid down some time last night, early morning at the latest. See how the grass has begun to spring up?”
But there was beaver sign aplenty in that grove, and the Shawnee now proceeded to show me the craft of trapping. First thing we set the traps, with Golightly compressing the springs between two thick, straight rods of ash wood, tied together at the near ends to make a press; then he carefully spread the wicked steel jaws while I set the dogs on the pans. One trap snapped shut because I hadn’t been careful enough, narrowly missing my finger, and Golightly hissed at me, poison in his eyes, “Quiet, you damn fool!”
That done, we walked soft and slow upstream, well above the cuttings, until we came to a small feeder creek. There Golightly bade me enter the water with him. The water was cold and when it reached my waist I could feel my skin start to shrivel. A few hundred yards up the creek we saw the beaver dam, and another beyond it, and the round bulge of the lodge where these animals made their home. Between the dams were quiet, limpid ponds with trout dimpling the surface.
All Indians know the beaver to be among the wisest of animals, else why would he build such snug little tepees for himself and stock them before winter set in with so much of his favorite food: juicy popple bark? Even Spybuck the Shawnee, who had spent much time among white men, still had great respect for the beaver, and he taught me a little prayer he always said before setting his traps. I cannot remember all the words just now, it was so many years ago, but still recall the most important part: “Forgive me, Father, for the taking of your coat, but I will have need of it in the winter to come, while you stay snug in your house.”
Just then a beaver popped his head above water in the middle of the first pond; he saw us, and with a loud smack from the flat of his tail dived back into the depths. I guess he had not heard the prayer.
We waded back downstream and near every place where the Shawnee saw a beaver slide coming down to the water we stooped over near the bank and with our butcher’s knives, wet to our elbows, cut a level shelf. Then we lay a trap carefully on the shelf, about half a foot deep in the creek.
Last, with the flat of a hatchet we drove a float pole into the creek bottom, through the big eye at the end of the chain, and Golightly anointed the tip of a willow switch with what he called his “medicine.” This was a pale yellowy-brown glue, some call it castoreum, extracted from beneath the pecker skin of a dead beaver. This noxious fluid Golightly carried in a length of hollow deer horn he wore dangling round his neck, on a leather thong, and stoppered with a plug of popple wood. Phew! Did it clear the sinuses! He planted the willow withe, butt-end down, inside the spread jaws of the trap, with the sticky end about a foot over the water.
Says Golightly, “Now when Father Beaver—we call him Amaghqua in Shawnee—when he comes down the bank in search of breakfast, he will smell the medicine and pause to investigate, see if he can recognize its owner by the smell; he does not like interlopers coming onto his property any more than we do, and thus when he stands up to sniff the castoreum his back foot will engage the pan of our trap. If you want to nab him by the front foot, you just have to cut a shorter switch. When the trap snaps, he’ll panic and flee for deep water. The weight of the trap will hold him there until he drowns. If he manages to pull the trap with him, the float pole will show us where he is when he dies. So as to spot it easier amongst the flotsam of the creek, you’ll notice I’ve cut three wide rings in the bark, top and bottom, to make it distinctive.”
“Clever,” I admit. “Now let’s get out of the water; I am damn cold and already talking in a squeaky voice.”
“Not yet,” says he. “First we must wade back downstream to where we went in and splash water over our tracks, lest Father Beaver know we’ve been here. Then we go on to another brook and I set my traps while you stand guard.”
SO THAT WAS our routine from then on. The following morning my traps held five drowned beaver. Big, heavy animals, about twenty-five pounds apiece, with long, sharp, chisellike buck teeth, slightly orange in color, and with thick coats of lustrous long fur. Golightly said that the mountain beaver of this Crow country, especially farther up the Wind River, had the finest quality fur he had ever taken. We skinned them out as you would a muskrat—a cut up the belly and lateral cuts up the insides of the legs. We cut out the medicine glands and finally lopped off the scaly flat tails to bring them back to camp. Good eating, Spybuck said. You can eat the whole animal—the meat is sweet and oily—and many a trapper has done so when working alone in hostile country, so as not to alert his enemy with a rifle shot while hunting other meat.
With our butc
her knives we scraped the raw red insides of the plews clear of any flesh or integument that might have adhered, then stretched them over hoops of green willow, loosely basting the edges to the hoop with laces of rawhide babiche through the holes punched by our awls. Later, back in camp, we hung these disks in the sun, high over the reach of the always-hungry camp dogs, and they spun and twirled in the wind like so many small war shields, alternately red and shiny dark brown in the hard, clear daylight. When they were dry, after a couple of days, we worked them back and forth over a smooth log until they were supple, then folded them fur side inward and flattened them down tight into packs. Each plew weighed from a pound and a half to two pounds, so each pack came to about fifty or sixty plews, or 100 pounds a pack: $300 at the fort, cash or credit. Down in Saint Louis a pack of peltry would fetch from $500 to $800, but that was the price of living in the mountains. You get what you pay for.
We had no trouble from hostiles. Captain Beckwourth’s Crows had chased that party of Oglalas clear out of the country after we reported their presence, and I guess the Blackfeet had other concerns to occupy them.
Life was pretty good in the Crow camp. Always plenty of buffalo meat to eat, varied now and then with elk or moose or antelope. With my smoothbore Leman and a load of birdshot I liked to go out on the prairie of an afternoon and see if I could scare up some sharp-tail chickens or maybe a covey of sage cock. A few of the camp dogs always came with me; although they sometimes helped put the birds to flight, when I knocked one down it was always a footrace to get to it before the dogs. Nor did I always win, and let me tell you, it only takes about three seconds for an Indian camp dog to gulp down a sage cock.
One afternoon I found a pair of the Crow girls from camp following me out onto the prairie. One of them was the girl who had peeked in the tent that first night. They kept a discreet distance from me at first, hanging back and giggling whenever I looked over my shoulder at them; but when a flock of chickens flushed right out from underfoot and swung behind me and I managed to kill two of them with one shot, as pretty a shot as I’ve ever made, the girls ran out ahead of the dogs to grab up the birds. One of them brought the birds over to me. She was the one who’d peeked in the tent, a bold and pretty little thing: long thick black silken hair in braids down to her waist; big wide-set eyes like midnight beaver pools with long lashes; a flush on her cheekbones that glowed beneath her dark, smooth skin. She smiled with her big square white teeth when she handed the chickens to me. She had a fine wide mouth and a nice smile.
By now I knew some sign talk and asked her, “What is your name?”
She made the signs for “Pretty Singing Bird,” and then some additional flourishes which meant “the Plover.”
“Plover,” I said in American. “You are the Plover.”
She laughed and nodded her head.
“And your friend, her name?” signs I, pointing to the other girl.
“Yellow Calf,” she comes back at me.
The Yellow Calf walks over now, and she is as pretty as the Plover, though maybe a little plumper of bosom.
“You hunt with me,” I tell them. “Fetch my birds; I share them with you later.”
They nodded their assent and thus I acquired the two prettiest little retrievers that ever a bird hunter could wish. Late in the afternoon, we lay resting beneath the shade of a cottonwood along a quick little rill, my game bag full; the Plover rolled over against me and gave me a long, warm kiss full on the mouth, her tongue hungry for mine. Then I felt the Yellow Calf’s soft hands touch me … privily.
Well, the events that ensued might best be described in biblical terms, if you know the passages to which I refer. The Song of Solomon comes to mind … frankincense; sweet dripping myrrh; breasts like unto twin fawns of the roe deer. Black flowing tresses adorned their pretty heads; their lips were smooth as hot oil.
The only women I had “known” until then were cynical old whores in the river towns of the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri; soiled doves, as it were, harlots with rotten teeth, sagging teats, and great wiry thickets of rank bush between their ponderous thighs. These girls’ breasts were small but firm, with tender pink nipples, their teeth white as fairweather clouds, breath sweet from the chewing of wild mint; the nap upon the portals of their sex was minimal, yet soft and sleek as that of a beaver kit I had found one day in the cruel jaws of my set. The beaver kit had dragged the trap up onto a small shoal in the river; she was in process of chewing her forepaw free when I discovered her. Then she must have heard or felt my footstep on the gravel of the riverbed. She looked up at me with gentle young eyes, stared at me unafraid, no fight, no fear, not a whimper. … How could I kill her? I depressed the springs of the trap; she swam away … down, down into the blue of the river.
Since Indians are said to be descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel, I knew these girls henceforth as “the Daughters of Jerusalem.”
BROTHER OWEN HAD met with but little success thus far in his search for precious metals. He had panned scanty traces of color from a few westerly creeks but found no nuggets from the riverbanks, excavating with his knife above the places where the pan found gold. Yet he was not discouraged.
“There’s no mother lode here,” he told us one night as we all sat supping in Still Waters lodge. “I’m pretty damned sure, though, that we’ll find gold aplenty just over the next range of mountains.”
“Ah, the song of the Argonaut,” Beckwourth said with a laugh. “How many times I’ve heard those sad yet hopeful strains! Still, you may be right. There’s an area over the divide, up near the headwaters of the Río de Santa Buenaventura, that’s said to be chock-full of the stuff. Some padres from Santa Fe were up there as early as 1776, Dominicans I think. Escalante and Dominguez were their names. Later some other black robes came in, Jesuits I’m told. In a place called the White Hart Hollow, just over the divide, the Indians tell me they’ve plucked nuggets big as goose eggs out of the creek.” He dipped his hand in the stew pot and snagged another hunk of buffalo. “By God, this woman can cook!” says he, grinning up at Still Water. “As sweet as I find the Little Wife, she still has a lot to learn about keeping a man well fed.” He belches politely.
Still Water smiles now, and for once she is pretty. Though Plover and the Calf seem not to mind sharing their favors with me, I begin to understand that marriage is a different business altogether. These Crow wives did not wish their husbands to divvy the largesse equally among them but to have the most of it each for herself, and Captain B. had not spent enough time with Still Water so far.
Yet with nine or ten wives to satisfy, he would have to spread himself mighty thin to be truly democratic about it!
“How do I get to the Buenaventura?” Owney asks. I swear he looked positively fevered. “How do I get to White Hart Hollow?”
“You don’t want to go there,” Captain B. answers him. “Not without the whole Crow village goes with you. It’s way up in the Encantadas. Four great rivers head in those mountains: the Snake, the Wind, the Arkansas, and the Río Bravo del Norte. Just over the hill from White Hart, the Multnomah rises, a mighty river itself, which some now call the Columbia. All that height of land is Blackfoot country, and they would have your scalp in a jiffy.”
“What if Dill and Spybuck come with me, and maybe a few of your warriors?”
“Frankly, I do not think my warriors would go,” says the captain. “The Indians take a dim view of white men plundering the earth of precious metals. What we call mere mining is the blackest sort of sacrilege in their eyes. They hold those gold and silver to be the slow-moving blood of the gods beneath; such materials may only be removed with the most reverent of prayers and ceremonies.”
Owen drops his head and stares into the fire. I can see that stubborn set come into his jaw, the same look he used to give Mam when she got all shrill about chores or schoolwork or churchgoing.
LATER THAT NIGHT, we are wrapped in our blankets outside the tepee—Captain B. has asked us to do so, since he must
perforce spend the night with the Still Water. Unless old Jim spends more time with her, she has threatened to leave his lodge and go back to her father, taking along the many ponies Jim has given her over the years. So the captain must put up with her, for he loves his horse herd above all else in the world.
“How many packs of beaver have you taken so far?” Owney asks.
“I have near on two full packs; Spy has two and a half, if I’m not mistaken.”
“So you have between you enough to pay Beckwourth for the horses, free and clear.”
This was a statement, not a question; thus it took me aback for a moment.
“How did you know about it?”
“The captain told me. Do not fret yourself over the matter. Of course he has fleeced us good on the deal, but what do you say we clear out of this place, head over to the Buenaventura, find us some real wealth? We can take Spybuck in as a partner, using the money we get from his peltry at the fort to buy the necessary—picks, shovels, two more pans, some sledges, saws, hammers, and nails to build our sluice boxes.”
He was all lit up by now, eyes sparking like the very stars, a vibrancy in his voice that I had not heard in weeks. And yet…
FIVE
AND YET I was torn. I loved the trapping life. For all the miseries it entailed, the cold and the wet and the always being on the alert for hostiles and grizzly bears, for all the early hours, for all the agues and stiff muscles and catarhhs it caused me, it was still the freeest life I had ever known. Three dollars a plew paid for a lot of anguish. Clerking in the coal company office back in Swartsburg, I was hunched over a musty ledger all day long—growing the hump, we called it—scratching away at row upon row of meaningless figures from six in the A.M. to six at night. I had had my fill of ink blots and frayed nibs. And all of that for three dollars a week, mind you, while miners earned a dollar a day or more.
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