Boone's Lick

by Larry McMurtry

  “Yes—I have no doubt he would have had me shot, if it had been his say,” Ma said.

  She had changed her attitude and was letting Uncle Seth drive the mules.

  I guess all the soldiers knew Colonel Fetterman was mad at Ma, because the troop passed us at a gallop and not a single soldier waved or looked our way.

  3

  OUR first night out from Fort Laramie we got a big surprise—just at dusk, as we were building our campfire, we heard horses coming and our two half brothers, Blue Crow and He Sleeps, came racing into camp. He Sleeps had snuck up on a fat goose, on some little skim of a prairie pond, and they brought it to us as a going-away present.

  We were all glad to see them, even Ma. The goose was mighty tasty, and the boys spent the evening trying to improve our command of sign language—or at least, Neva’s command. She had already learned it and could make her fingers fly when talking to Blue Crow, the more talkative of our half brothers. G.T., though, had no skill with his hands—Blue Crow laughed until he cried at G.T.’s attempts to use a few simple signs. He Sleeps was the more solemn of the two—he was in awe of Ma and behaved very politely in her company.

  “I don’t need to learn sign language, I’m a Baptist anyway,” G.T. said, when we got tickled at his crude efforts.

  “Maybe so, but where you’re going the Baptists have kind of thinned out,” Uncle Seth said.

  Despite the chill, we were all glad to be out of the fort. Some of the soldiers were civil, but some weren’t. He Sleeps caught a tiny little field mouse and taught us a game involving three cups. The field mouse was under one of them: the point of the game was to guess which cup hid the mouse. He Sleeps moved the cups so fast the confused little mouse didn’t have time to run. Neva beat both He Sleeps and Blue Crow, which didn’t please them, particularly. When G.T. tried it he got so annoyed at guessing wrong that he finally knocked over the cups and let the mouse get away.

  Ma didn’t play—she liked watching the two Indian boys.

  “That boy’s got more than Dick’s dimple, he’s got his mischief, too,” she said, referring to Blue Crow.

  He Sleeps and Blue Crow rode with us for most of a fine bright morning—we were soon in higher country, though the big mountains were still just shadows in the far distance. Then the two boys turned their horses and went racing back toward Fort Laramie. Neva liked both of them—I believe she enjoyed having two new brothers to pester. She signed for a while, trying to get them to come north with us, but they just shook their heads. He Sleeps even made us a little speech—it may have been a warning.

  “I believe he’s of the same opinion as Red Cloud,” Uncle Seth commented. “The one thing folks agree about is that there’s going to be trouble at them new forts.”

  “There sure is, and I’m going to make some of it myself, once I find Dick,” Ma said.

  That afternoon we started an antelope and G.T. shot it—it was the biggest thrill of his life, up to that time.

  “It was just that critter’s bad luck that he ran into a Baptist,” Uncle Seth said.

  One thing Neva and G.T. and I talked about a lot, when we were off to ourselves, was Pa’s other family. We wanted to know the same thing Ma wanted to know: if he had one extra family, what if he had more? Maybe he had two or three.

  “Or eight,” G.T. said.

  “Not eight, you oaf!” Neva said. “Nobody could have eight families. There wouldn’t be time.”

  “I wish there was eight and I wish you belonged to another one, not this one,” G.T. said. He had about all he could take of Neva.

  “I believe I’ll start one with Bill Hickok when we get back,” Neva said. She never tired of reminding us that Mr. Hickok had bought her two beefsteaks in one night.

  I didn’t think Pa had eight families, but I did ponder the whole business, as we made our way north, toward the high mountains. Sometimes I got to feeling real uneasy, at the thought of what Ma might be planning, once she found Pa. I knew she wouldn’t have traveled so far, through all the dangers, if she didn’t have something serious on her mind. But the only person I could have asked about it, other than Ma herself, was Uncle Seth, and he wasn’t as available for questions as he had been in the past.

  For one thing, since Ma had decided she was ready to let him drive the team, he seldom left Ma’s side. The two of them sat there on the wagon seat all day, as we plodded along, leaving the rest of us to look after ourselves—Marcy included. She was weaned now, so Ma didn’t have to pay such close attention to her. Marcy could also walk, which meant that she spent most of her time wandering off into trouble. She irritated the mules so much, pulling their tails and stomping around under their bellies, that it was a full-time job for one person, trying to keep her from getting kicked or bitten.

  When it came to Ma and Pa and their differences, Neva held the most extreme opinion: she thought Ma meant to shoot Pa.

  “That’s what I would do if I was her and found out he had another wife—maybe two other wives,” Neva said. “I wouldn’t have it for a minute, not me!”

  “Sassafras,” I said. “You saw Ma with Stones-in-the-Water. The two of them got along fine.”

  “I’ll stick to my opinion,” Neva said.

  I didn’t believe that the reason we were crossing Wyoming, at a time when the Indians were angry, was because Ma meant to shoot Pa. But I did think that something hot was likely to happen at Fort Phil Kearny, if Pa was there. I didn’t know what it would be but I wanted to hurry on to the fort, so Ma could get it over with.

  “I don’t care what they do as long as they don’t make no more babies,” G.T. said. “Keeping up with Marcy’s about tuckered me out.”

  Three days after G.T. shot the antelope, with the sky spitting snow and the weather looking ugly, we found the first scalped man.

  4

  MARCY found the dead miner while the rest of us were making camp. Uncle Seth decided he didn’t like the tone of the weather, so he pulled up near a little grove of trees, where there was plenty of firewood and a little cover. Ma was rarely in the mood to quit early, but this time Uncle Seth persuaded her.

  While we were all doing our chores, hobbling the mules, gathering firewood, getting out the blankets, and unpacking the cooking gear, Marcy came waddling up to the fire carrying an arrow.

  “Now that’s unusual,” Uncle Seth said. “Indians aren’t usually careless with arrows—it takes too long to make one. They will even pick up arrows off a busy battlefield. Where’d you get it, honey?”

  At first Marcy just sulled. She could talk a little—“mule” was one of her words, but usually she had to be coaxed before she’d come out with a word, and sometimes she wouldn’t talk no matter how much we coaxed. Ma had wrapped up a few sticks of candy, back in Omaha—I believe she was saving them for Christmas—but she had no intention of using them to bribe Marcy into telling us where she picked up the arrow.

  “I am not fool enough to bribe a child,” Ma said. “She’ll come out with it when she thinks it’s the only way to get attention.”

  Ma was right. Marcy sulled for a few minutes and then led us right to the dead miner—a sight none of us had been expecting to see, just before supper. The man’s head had been pounded in with his own spade; his eyes were missing and his legs had been split to the bone. A big patch of hair had been ripped off the front part of his head, which was black with blood. The dead miner was naked—no sign of his clothes anywhere. It was only because of the bloody spade that we figured he was a miner. His stomach had been opened and most of his guts thrown to one side—the varmints had been into those, already.

  I got to the corpse first. What was left didn’t even look like a man. I thought for a moment that I had stumbled on the carcass of some strange Wyoming critter that I couldn’t identify. Somehow it was his ears that convinced me that what lay exposed on the mountain meadow were the remains of a human being.

  I guess G.T. felt just as confused.

  “What’s that?” he asked, when he first
spied the body.

  “Uh-oh,” Uncle Seth said, when he saw the corpse. He tried to wave Ma and Neva off.

  “You don’t need to see this, Mary Margaret,” he said. “Neva don’t either.”

  Ma ignored the comment and walked right around him.

  “Whoa!” he said to Neva, but she walked around him too.

  Then we all looked at the dead man for a while, in the thin failing light.

  “Well, now I expect these young ones will have nightmares,” Uncle Seth said. He was put out with Ma for ignoring his advice.

  “Let ’em!” Ma said. “They’ve come all this way with us and they’ll all be grown soon. Let them look at what happens when people get too mad to control themselves.”

  The snow began to fall, while we stood there looking at the dead miner. In a minute it covered the cavity in his belly and the bloody patch on his head.

  “What did they do with his eyes?” Neva asked.

  Nobody had an opinion. Ma took Marcy by the hand and walked back to start the cooking.

  I remembered all the miners we had seen tramping along, while we were traveling by the Platte.

  “Some people must want to get rich bad,” I said.

  “Yes, they do,” Uncle Seth said.

  “Not me,” G.T. said. “Not me, not me, not me.”

  “Let’s get him buried, before the ground freezes,” Uncle Seth said.

  We got a spade and a pickax from the wagon—none of us much wanted to use the miner’s own spade. Soon we had a pretty good grave. Ma called us to eat before we quite got finished—she had stewed up some of G.T.’s antelope. We lowered the man into his grave, but the stew was ready before we covered him up. Somehow just thinking about him hiked our appetites.

  After supper Uncle Seth took a lantern and went back himself to cover up the dead traveler.

  “Do you want to say a scripture?” he asked Ma.

  “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth,” Ma said. “You boys go cut some more wood—the chill’s coming. We’re going to need a good fire tonight.”

  G.T. and I chopped firewood from the little grove, while Uncle Seth shoveled clods over the dead miner. G.T.’s hands were so cold that he did a poor job of hobbling our mule Montgomery, who got away during the night.

  The next morning, half a mile away, we found Montgomery dead—he was almost as messed up as the miner.

  “Cougar,” Uncle Seth said. “I expect when we strike Fort Reno we better bargain for another mule.”

  “Damn that Montgomery!” G.T. said. He was miserable all day—the death of our mule had been his fault.

  5

  I FOUND the second dead miner while following a deer near a little copse of trees—I wanted to get that deer, to show G.T. he wasn’t the only one who could shoot. The miner’s body was on the bald prairie, with an arrow stuck in the ground beside it, like a signpost.

  I was nearly a mile from the wagon when I stumbled on the body, which was even more cut up than the first corpse. It was cold—the body sparkled with frost. It didn’t look human, any more than the first one had. The face was all smashed in, but the eyes hadn’t been removed: they were staring up, like frosted crystals, into the sky. A patch of scalp was gone, and so were the man’s privates. Both legs had been split open and his tongue had been cut out.

  I stopped dead, when I saw that corpse. The hair on my head stood up—I couldn’t control it. The grove of trees wasn’t fifty yards away—it was right there, dense and dark. Whoever killed the miner might be right there, watching me. I wanted to turn and run for the wagon, which was just over the swell of the prairie, getting farther away every minute.

  Then the deer I was following stopped too, just shy of the woods. It stood in plain view—it seemed to be staring into the woods. Maybe it saw the Indian who had killed the miner—maybe it smelled an Indian, or a bunch of Indians.

  The deer suddenly turned broadside to me, making such an easy target that I aimed, shot, and killed it. I felt that I either had to steady myself and shoot that deer, or else scream and run off. I shot, and the deer fell, perfectly dead. Usually a deer, even one hit solid, will jump around a little, or run a few yards before giving up its life; but this deer just dropped.

  It was a small deer, smaller than G.T.’s antelope. I felt I could probably carry it to the wagon, or at least drag it close enough that someone would see me and come help.

  But the fear inside me had me paralyzed. I couldn’t step around the dead miner to go get the deer. What was in my mind was that if I went a foot closer to the trees I would end up with my head smashed in and my privates cut off; there would only be a patch of blood where my hair was.

  I don’t know what I would have done—it was my good luck that Uncle Seth heard the shot and came loping over on Sally to help me.

  “Venison, that’s fine,” he said, when I pointed to the dead deer.

  Then he looked down and saw the corpse.

  “Uh-oh,” he said. “This is getting repetitious. Let me see the arrow.

  “It’s a Sioux arrow, same as the one Marcy found,” he said. “If Charlie or Villy were here they could probably tell us what band it came from. I’ve not had a proper opportunity to study Sioux arrows, myself.”

  Ma and Neva didn’t come look, this time. The ground was frozen so hard we couldn’t get a real grave dug. We put the miner in a shallow trench and piled rocks on until we had it pretty solidly covered.

  “An antelope beats a deer, anytime,” G.T. said.

  “Yes, and there’s something that beats an antelope,” Uncle Seth said, pointing to a half dozen brown dots, far up the valley.

  “Buffalo!” Neva said. “It’s about time we seen some.”

  At first I could hardly believe the brown dots were buffalo. Pa and Uncle Seth had talked to me all through my childhood about buffalo, and yet these were the first we’d seen. Even now, the fact that they were so few was disappointing.

  “It’s only six,” I said.

  “Maybe if I’m lucky I can bring one down,” Uncle Seth said.

  He wasn’t lucky, though. Long before he came upon the buffalo they took fright and rumbled over a ridge, into another valley, where Uncle Seth didn’t seem to think it wise to follow them.

  Ma noticed his caution and taxed him about it when he came back.

  “Why’d you pull up?” she asked.

  “The bufs had too big a lead,” he said.

  Ma didn’t press him, but that night she raised a question that had been in my mind all day, ever since I stumbled on the second miner.

  “Do you think they’re watching us?” she asked.

  Uncle Seth shook his head. “If you mean Indians, no,” he said.

  “Why wouldn’t they be?” Ma asked. “This is their country. They were watching those two miners who got chopped up.”

  “Maybe not,” Uncle Seth said. “It might not be a tribe or a band that’s doing this. It might just be a lone warrior who don’t like miners.”

  “If they’re watching us, would you know it?” Ma asked.

  “The Indians out here ain’t shy,” he told her. “If they wanted to come out and inspect us, they would. Remember the Pawnees, and the Bad Faces? If the Sioux or the Cheyenne wanted to come out and inspect us, they would, even if all they wanted was to bargain for a little tobacco.”

  That seemed reasonable to me—I don’t know what Ma thought, but she and Uncle Seth sat up talking, now and then throwing wood on the fire, until real late. I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but just the fact that they were talking pleasantly made it easier to go to sleep.

  6

  THE next day we reached Fort Reno and managed to purchase a large brown mule, to take the place of Montgomery. Ma objected to the trade—we still had four mules and a horse, which she thought was ample, but Uncle Seth bought the brown mule over her objections.

  “They’ve got more transport animals than they can feed, at this fort—this mule was a bargain,” he said. “I say we nam
e him Reno, after the fort he’s leaving.”

  In fact, Fort Reno seemed to be a foul place, full of soldiers who were drunk and scared. Some of the soldiers stared at Ma and Neva as if they had never seen a woman or a girl before—their stares were impolite, the more so because all the soldiers were filthy.

  “We don’t bathe much, when it’s chilly,” the quartermaster explained. He was a skinny corporal with a wheezing cough who claimed that hardly a day passed without some patrol finding a dead miner or two on the prairie trails.

  “If you’ve found two, that makes sixteen,” he said. “Sixteen dead is a lot of dead—the army ought never to have put up these forts if they can’t protect the roads any better than that.”

  “Why, it would take a thousand soldiers to protect this route,” Uncle Seth said. “I doubt the army can afford to allow a thousand soldiers to loiter around in a place like this.”

  Ma asked about Pa and was told he was at Fort Phil Kearny, hauling wood—the news made her impatient to leave, but the new mule, not knowing any of our mules, was jumpy and took a while to harness.

  In the center of the fort, not far from where the mules were stabled, there was a wagon with a wooden cage in it. It looked empty, except for a pile of rags in the corner, but as we were getting ready to leave, the rags began to stir around and an old Indian man crawled out from under them. He was a terrible sight: naked, except for the rags he held around him, filthy, toothless, his hair full of straw and lint, his wrists bloody from a pair of handcuffs, blind or nearly blind. There seemed to be a film of some kind over one eye. While Uncle Seth was trying to get the new mule to accept the harness the old Indian man began to chant, in a high singsong voice. Pretty soon he was singing loud enough that everyone in the little fort could hear him.

  Uncle Seth stopped what he was doing and stared at the old man for a while.

  “Who is that?” he asked. “I swear he looks familiar.”

  The wheezy little quartermaster, whose name was Botchford, must have heard the old Indian’s singing once too often, because he turned red in the face and began to threaten him with an iron from the smithy’s forge.