Boone's Lick

by Larry McMurtry

  “Shut up, you goddamn squeaker!” Botchford yelled—but the old man just went on chanting, as if Botchford wasn’t there.

  Botchford put the iron back in the forge—the color gradually left his face.

  “I wish they’d hang him!” he said. “He’s always making that racket.”

  Neva couldn’t take her eyes off the old Indian in the cage.

  “I wish I knew what he was singing,” she said.

  “Oh no you don’t, young lady,” Botchford said. “What’s he’s singing ain’t for a young lady’s ears.”

  Ma jumped in at that point, on Neva’s side.

  “I’m curious myself,” she said. “What is the poor man saying?”

  “Ma’am, it’s just wild Indian preaching,” Botchford said. “He’s been preaching this wild Indian preaching all over the plains. It’s got the tribes stirred up, which is why we caged him. They’re sending him down to Fort Leavenworth until the tribes settle down.”

  “He’s just one old man,” Ma said. “What could he say that would be so bad?”

  At that point Botchford got exasperated, partly with Ma and partly with the wild old prisoner. He began to stomp around and get red in the face again, as if the old man offended every belief he held.

  “Oh, you want to know, do you?” he said. “All right then, you’ll know. What he’s saying is that a sheet of shit ten feet deep will cover the whole earth pretty soon, and all us whites will drown in it! Green shit! But the Indian folks can just dance on top of this shit! Then new grass is supposed to come out all over the world and all the dead buffalo will rise up and the Indians will rise up too, the dead ones and the living ones, Miniconjous and Cheyenne and the damned Blackfeet, and all the tribes will get to help themselves to the buffalo, without a single white person left to interfere with their feasting and whatever else they want to do.”

  After that speech Corporal Botchford was so out of breath that he sat down on an overturned bucket and glared at the old wild man in the cage.

  “The Indians call him the Man of the Morning,” he said, which caused Uncle Seth to perk up.

  “Oh, that’s him, by golly,” he said. “He was way over at Fort Pierre the last time I saw him. Dick and I gave him a ride. He’s aged a bunch since then.”

  “I guess he would, traveling all over the country, preaching his rant,” Botchford said. “It’s because of the likes of him that we’ve got sixteen chopped-up dead people scattered all over these plains.”

  The old man in the cage just went on chanting, as if we didn’t exist. The few Indians lazing around the fort didn’t seem to be paying him any mind at all.

  “Do you feed him?” Ma asked. “He looks pretty starved down.”

  “Not starved down enough!” the corporal said. “I’d hang him right now if it was my choice, but it ain’t my choice.”

  “Why hang a preacher for preaching?” Ma asked. “I’ve heard plenty of white preachers say the same thing: the good dead will all be raised up to a new day, and the others will burn.”

  G.T. was getting spooked by all this talk of shit floods and the dead rising up.

  “That’s why I don’t like sermons,” he said. “I think it would be a better world if all the dead people just stayed in their graves, where it’s comfortable.”

  “Give that old man some tobacco, Seth,” Ma said.

  “Hell, if you’ve got tobacco to spare, give me some,” Corporal Botchford said. “I’m the fellow who just sold you a fine mule too cheap.”

  Uncle Seth gave them both a little tobacco. He even slipped the old Indian a little antelope jerky. When we rolled out of Fort Reno we could hear the Man of the Morning, still singing.

  “I can see where listening to that all day might make a man jumpy,” Uncle Seth said.

  “It’s just preaching, Seth,” Ma said. “I despise it that they’ve caged him like that.”

  7

  THE farther north we went, the colder it got; in those days of bitter chill Uncle Seth’s gimpy knee began to plague him. Some mornings Ma had to walk him around a little while, holding his arm, like you might do a lame horse, before he could get his knee to start working fairly well.

  Once in a while we’d even hear him groan in his sleep. When he was awake he complained plenty, tracing the trouble all the way back to the day the Civil War started, although it had been the day after it ended when he accidentally shot himself.

  “Seth, you can complain all the way back to Adam and it won’t make you young again,” Ma said. “You shot yourself in the knee, and that’s that.”

  What annoyed Ma most about it was that we weren’t making very good time—the need to help Uncle Seth loosen up his knee every morning meant that we got off to a late start. Besides, we were in high country and it was already past the middle of December, which meant that we were traveling in the short days. It seemed as if the sun barely rose above the mountains before it started down again. Snow threatened nearly every day, and some days it did more than threaten. We saw no Indians, and no more buffalo, although Uncle Seth did kill a large cow elk, out of a herd we surprised one morning.

  With the weather so sharp and the terrain unfamiliar, we didn’t risk traveling after dark, so most days we couldn’t make much more than ten miles.

  At that we were lucky, I thought, because we were traveling a fairly smooth plain, with not too many humps or bumps in it. The mountains to the west looked too high to even think about crossing.

  G.T. didn’t like the mountains, or the thick forests on them, either.

  “There could be a thousand bears, in a forest that thick,” he said.

  As we got closer to the fort where we were expecting to find Pa, everybody’s mood got tense, except Ma’s. She didn’t seem to think it was anything out of the ordinary to plod along in the deeps of winter, in a country full of violent Indians, to find a man she hadn’t seen in nearly two years. She was annoyed by delays, though, and was apt to speak sharply to anyone who didn’t get their chores done quickly, in the mornings.

  “If it was June you could loiter, but it ain’t June,” she pointed out.

  It was clear to all of us that Uncle Seth wasn’t nearly as eager to come on Pa as Ma was, even though Pa was his brother and his business partner.

  “Dick Cecil does not like to be criticized, by women or anyone else,” Uncle Seth remarked one night, while we were making supper off some of the cow elk he had killed. The meat was a little stringy, but it still beat mush.

  Ma just gave him a mild look. It was clear that Pa’s preference on that point didn’t mean beans to her.

  “I haven’t come all this way to kiss his feet, if that’s what you suppose,” Ma said. “I have a few likes and dislikes of my own, you know.”

  “I speculate that it’s mainly that Indian family of his that you don’t like,” Uncle Seth said.

  Ma just shrugged, as if she were a little disgusted by his line of reasoning.

  “Don’t speculate,” she said. “Mind your own business and I’ll mind mine and Dick’s.

  “In some ways you have less sense than anybody I know,” she added, after a pause.

  “Now, that’s a wild opinion if I ever heard one,” Uncle Seth said.

  “I wish we’d get to a fort,” Neva said. “I’d like to hear someone play a fiddle or something. There’s no excitement in this travel.”

  “I guess you’d be excited enough if some scalping Indians got after you,” G.T. said.

  The next day we saw our second grizzly. It was about a mile away, across a snowy meadow, standing up on its hind legs, looking around.

  “Get ready to shoot,” G.T. urged Uncle Seth.

  “Settle down,” Uncle Seth said. “It’s just a bear minding its own business. It hasn’t given us any reason to shoot.”

  The bear never came any closer, or gave any reason to shoot, though we kept it in sight most of that day. It ambled along north, still about a mile away, as if it meant to keep us company at a comfortable distance.


  “There would be nothing to keep it from sneaking in after dark and eating us all,” G.T. said.

  That night the moon shone unusually bright, so bright that it dimmed out the stars.

  “It’s getting toward the solstice,” Uncle Seth observed. “Means winter’s here. That bear we seen needs to be looking for itself a den.”

  The next morning was unusually cold. The mules’ breath condensed in sizable clouds. Uncle Seth was a long time getting to his feet, even after Ma brought him three cups of coffee. In Fort Laramie we had all bought heavy gray coats, with hoods for our heads. I didn’t wear mine often, because of the weight, but I wore it this morning and was glad to have it. Neva was the only one of us who seemed to like the cold.

  “I’d like to go where it’s colder than this,” she said. “I’d like to go clean to the pole.”

  “You may get your wish, the way this weather feels,” Uncle Seth said.

  Although all of us knew, in our heads, that we were traveling to a certain place, to look for a certain person, we had been rolling on for so long that it seemed that rolling on was just our life, now. The old life we had had in Boone’s Lick seemed far away, not just across distance but across time too. I could hardly imagine going back there and having a stopped life again.

  That wasn’t the way Ma seen it, of course. For us it might be a new way of life, but for her it had a plain purpose.

  “Think we’ll make it by Christmas, Seth?” she asked, when we finally set off, that cold day.

  “I sure do,” Uncle Seth said. “I think we’re close enough that we could run into a patrol any day.”

  The words were scarcely out of his mouth before Neva began to point.

  “There’s a fort!” she said. “Is that it?”

  Neva had by far the best eyes in the family. I looked, but I couldn’t see anything.

  “Is she seeing things?” Uncle Seth asked.

  Ma was staring too.

  “It seems like I see something,” she said. “Is it a fort?”

  “Fort, fort, fort!” Marcy said. She was at the stage where she could repeat any word she heard.

  “I believe she’s right, Seth,” Ma said. “I believe it is a fort.”

  “Is it the right fort, Seth?” Ma asked, when we were close enough that we could all see it.

  “It sure is—we’ve arrived!” he said.

  “Pa, Pa, I see him,” Neva said. “That’s him with an axe, standing by that wood wagon.”

  “You must have been an eagle in your other life, Neva,” Ma said. “I can’t see him yet.”

  “Right there, right there!” Neva said, pointing.

  She was excited at being the first one to spot Pa.

  She was right, too. It was Pa, and he was standing by a wood wagon, with an axe in his hand. The only thing Neva didn’t notice at first—I guess because of excitement—was the young Indian woman standing beside Pa, big with child.

  8

  SEEING our wagon come creaking up to Fort Phil Kearny that morning must have given Pa one of the biggest shocks of his life.

  At first he didn’t seem to notice us, or think anything out of the ordinary was happening. I suppose he thought we were just one more wagon full of hopefuls, on our way to the gold fields up the Bozeman Trail. A couple of other woodcutters were sitting with their backs to the wagon wheels, sharpening their axes—I believe Pa was trying to josh one of them into sharpening his, when we approached.

  What he missed at first glance he saw plain enough on the second: his own mules, his own wagon, his brother, his own children, and—particularly—his own wife.

  You can bet that we were the last people Pa expected to see, coming up that prairie road to the fort. In his mind I’m sure he had us way back down the Missouri River, at Boone’s Lick—when his eyes finally told him his mind was way off track, he didn’t want to believe it at first. He blinked two or three times and looked off—then he looked at us again, as if we were just a mirage that would vanish once he got a better look at it.

  When we were only about forty yards away and he had to admit to himself that he wasn’t seeing any mirage, he just looked stumped for a minute, blank, and then his face darkened and we could all see his temper rising. That was Pa’s way: it never took him long to go from being stumped to being mad.

  The young Indian woman with the swelling belly must have learned something about Pa’s moods by that time: the minute his face changed she went scurrying like a doe through the gates of the fort. Big belly or not, she moved quickly.

  The woodchoppers who were sharpening their axes hadn’t noticed Pa’s change in mood—at least, they hadn’t until he dropped his axe and came charging out to meet us.

  “I believe he’s mad as a bear,” G.T. said.

  Ma didn’t say anything, and neither did Uncle Seth.

  Neva wasn’t scared of anything, not even Pa. She had noticed the Indian woman’s belly, of course.

  “I wonder if I’ve got any more half sisters, up here at this fort,” she said.

  “I’d ask your Pa, if I were you,” Ma said. “I hope he’s kept count, at least.”

  Our skittish new mule, Reno, must have thought Pa was as mad as a bear, because he tried to bite him when Pa walked up and stopped the team.

  Pa just whacked him one—he had no use for impertinent mules.

  “What in the hell is this, Mary Margaret?” Pa asked, spitting mad.

  “Why, can’t you see, Dick? It’s your family,” Ma said.

  “Your Missouri family, that is,” she added. “I realize you’ve got a few others. We hadn’t seen you in such a spell we just decided to pay you a Christmas visit.”

  Ma was perfectly cool—it startled Pa a little. He may have forgotten how cool Ma was in a storm—or it may be that he just wasn’t used to people who didn’t seem to care that he was mad.

  “Seth, goddamnit, what is this?” Pa asked. “Who said you all could come here? You oughtn’t to have allowed it.”

  “I didn’t allow it,” Uncle Seth said. “It happened despite me. I’ve done nothing but argue against it mile by mile, all the way from Boone’s Lick, Missouri. But here we are.”

  There was silence for a minute.

  “It’s my opinion that shooting Mary would have been the only way to stop her, and I wasn’t up to shooting her,” Uncle Seth said.

  Neva had no use for family arguments—anyway she scarcely knew Pa, and she was eager for company, so she jumped off the wagon and marched right over to where the woodchoppers sat. In no time she had struck up a conversation with them.

  “Seth’s right,” Ma said. “He would have had to shoot me to stop me, and he wasn’t up to shooting me. Would you have been up to shooting me, Dick?”

  Although still plenty mad, Pa seemed a little off balance. Even though he was standing only a few feet from Ma and Uncle Seth—just far enough back that the new mule couldn’t bite him—I think part of him still didn’t believe his family had actually showed up in Wyoming. Some little part of him must have still thought it was a dream he ought to be waking up from, anytime. He looked at Uncle Seth again, and this time he didn’t sound so fierce.

  “There must be some way to stop a woman, rather than let her drag a wagon and a bunch of kids all this way,” he said. “You could have hog-tied her and left her in the cellar.”

  “We don’t have a cellar,” Ma reminded him.

  “Well, then the stables or somewhere,” Pa said. He seemed confused—I think he was losing steam by the minute. I was even beginning to feel a little sorry for Pa—I don’t know about G.T., who had got off on the wrong foot with Pa years before by losing a good pocketknife Pa had given him, which got him such a thrashing that he had been leery of Pa ever since.

  With Uncle Seth watching, Ma climbed off the wagon seat and marched over to Pa, looking him up and down from a short distance away. Something about her stance made Uncle Seth nervous.

  “Maybe the children and I better go on into the fort and see
if they can spare a little fodder for the livestock,” Uncle Seth said.

  “You stay put,” Ma said.

  “I was just thinking you might want privacy,” Uncle Seth said. He was getting more and more nervous—and so was I.

  “Seth, shut up,” Ma said. “Don’t talk and don’t move. This will just take a minute.”

  “A minute?” Uncle Seth said. “After traveling all these months?”

  “Some things take months, and other things just take a minute,” Ma said.

  She turned back to Pa.

  “You’re not making me feel welcome, Dick—although I’m your wife,” Ma said. “Am I welcome, or ain’t I?”

  “Did I ask you to come—no!” Pa said. “So you’re not welcome. I expect you knew that before you left home, you independent hussy.”

  “I did know it before I left home but I wanted to hear it from you,” Ma said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not the sort of woman to quit a man through the mails,” Ma said. “I can only quit a man face-to-face, and right here and now I’m quitting you.”

  Marcy woke from a nap. She didn’t see Ma, so she raised a wail.

  “Good Lord, you even brought the baby?” Pa said.

  “Yes, the child you’ve never seen,” Ma said. “You understood me, didn’t you, Dick? We’re quits.”

  Annoyed as he was with Ma, those words were not quite what Pa had been expecting.

  “We’re quits? That seems hasty, Mary Margaret,” he said.

  That must have been the wrong thing to say, because Ma colored up and gave him a roundhouse slap that would have floored any man less tall and stout than Pa.

  “Not hasty, tardy—tardy by sixteen years!” Ma said.

  Then she got back in the wagon, took the reins from Uncle Seth, and drove us into Fort Phil Kearny, leaving Pa standing by himself, rubbing his sore jaw.

  9

  MA never explained why she did what she did that cold evening in Wyoming—for it was nearly dark when we reached the fort. The bright moon, not quite full, came up not much later.