Bendigo Shafter (1979) (33 page)

Yet when I started to move, I groaned. They all looked around at me, but it wasn't the wounds. It was my back where that lion had hit me when he jumped ... it was bruised, and badly. I didn't need to see it to know.

After a while I wrestled around and got myself up, tugged on my boots, and shrugged into what was left of a good sheepskin coat. I put on my chaps and eased up to the fire to partake of some fresh elk meat, biscuit, and coffee.

Ethan watched me putting the meat away and commented sarcastically that being jumped by a lion surely hadn't interfered with my appetite.

Drinking coffee, I studied on my idea of the night before. In the clear light of day I didn't shape up to have much chance, but I surely had access to the material. Between Ethan Sackett, Stacy Follett, and old Uruwishi I had men who knew as much about wilderness living, hunting, and wild animals as anybody alive.

We had meat enough, so we packed up and started down the canyon. Climbing out would have been a struggle, loaded like we were, so we decided we'd try going down canyon, knowing all the while that we might run into a big fall we couldn't go around and have to go all the way back. We lucked out, found a dim trail out of the canyon, and climbed out to a bench that followed along for miles.

The snow was patchy, and here and there the ground where the sunlight could reach was soggy from melting. Ethan was riding point and of a sudden he pulled in, looking up at a tree.

When the rest of us drew up and looked we saw the claw marks of a big bear ... a bear stakes out his territory that way, standing up and reaching as high as he can before digging his claws into the bark. If a strange bear comes around and he can't reach that high, he keeps on traveling. Well, the bear that made these tracks was big.

Ethan looked at those claw marks and turned to us. Either that bear was standing on top of a mighty big drift or I'm leaving the country!

Of course, that was what had happened. Some bear, disturbed in his hibernation or perhaps just restless and without a full stomach, must have come here when the snow was drifted deep. We all understood that, but Ethan always enjoyed telling about those claw marks. Why, he'd say, they must have been seventeen feet above the ground! I'm tellin' you, mister, I'll never go up that canyon again.

We hightailed it down the side of the canyon, riding through patchy forest, weaving among tumbled rocks and clumps of dense brush. We saw an elk ahead, and his head came up. All right, Bud, I said, there he is, and he's yours.

Bud took out his rifle, stepped down from the saddle and Injuned up a few yards closer. The wind was right, and he made it. I was waiting, afraid he would get buck fever, but he didn't. He squeezed off his shot. The elk leaped, ran a few steps, and dropped.

We rode up, butchered him out, and while that was going on I went down to the stream to get a drink. The ice only fringed the banks; the center of the stream was running too fast to freeze. The water was so cold it made my teeth ache. I was just getting up when I saw something gleam down there on the sandy bottom, and I reached for it.

When I pulled my hand out of the water I looked at it, and what I held was gold.

It was a nugget, of rough gold, showing no sign of stream action at all, and it must have weighed an ounce or more.

Now it could be one of its kind, but it hadn't been under water long, and it hadn't traveled far, or some of that roughness would have been worn down by batting around among the rocks.

I stood up, dried my hands on my chaps a mite, then slipped that nugget into my pocket.

For a moment I stood there, listening to the talk on the bank about thirty yards off, then carefully I studied the layout.

That stream ran cold and fast where I stood, running over rocks polished smooth by the water, but upstream not more than fifty yards it cut through a ragged old ledge of crumbling rock.

There was a good chance that gold had come right from there, but I'd no idea of climbing back up there. In the first place my back was badly bruised, and every twist it got hurt something fierce, and second I didn't want anybody noticing or talking about what I'd done. I climbed back up the bank, then stopped and took in the layout.

The west is littered with lost mines, some good, some not, but those lost were usually lost because the finder was so excited he didn't find the right landmarks to guide him back. Everybody expects to come right back, but that's rarely possible due to one reason or another, so I took far-out landmarks, then distances, trying to find objects and estimate distances that would not be the same from any other direction.

We made it back to our town just after sundown, and sure enough, it turned into snow that night and by daylight the snow was eight inches deep on the level and drifted deep in every draw and canyon.

To make matters worse, one of those claw marks developed some infection with fever, and it was several days before I could get out and around.

One thing I did do. While lying in bed or sitting up I wrote a few pages on mountain lions. First, I noted down everything I knew about them, taking several days to recall it. I knew some people claimed a lion never killed except for meat, but that wasn't true. I'd seen a lion kill a doe and two fawns in just a minute or two, eat part of the meat, bury the rest under branches and such, and leave it. Occasionally a lion would come back to a kill, but only rarely would he eat from it again though he might move it to a fresh place so the meat would not spoil as fast.

When I had it all down I got out those newspapers I had and reread some of the stuff they'd published to see how others had done it, and then, trying not to be fancy for I didn't know a lot of words, I wrote everything I knew about mountain lions. I described a couple of hunts, including the lion who'd jumped me, only I wrote it like it was somebody else.

Stacy Follett dropped by Cain's one night, and I started him talking. He'd known of two men, one an Indian, one a white man who had been attacked and killed by mountain lions, and when he had gone I noted down what he had said.

Meanwhile I made notes on the location of the gold just as though it were material for an article on where we had killed the elk.

So far no gold had been found in quantity in the area, although Neely had taken out a good bit over the past two years, and Webb had also made a fair living from his claims.

Mail came through just before Christmas, and with the rest of it a bundle of newspapers, some of them dating from months back, but new to most of us. News came through by the occasional travelers, and it was rumored that by spring the telegraph wire was to come to our town.

Finally I put together my account of the mountain lion and mailed it away. Without waiting for results I wrote an account of the cattle drive from Oregon to our town, including the stories of the gun battles, but writing it as though I wrote of somebody else. Then, suddenly filled with ambition, and having little else to do but rustle firewood and meat, I wrote an account of the rescue of Mae Stuart and the children from the Indians.

Most of what I had read would lead one to think that Indians were all of a kind, and even before I heard about the first story I received a letter from an editor doubting that the older Indians would sit quietly by while a white man knocked one of them out. Well, Indians had their personal animosities as much as any white men, and that young buck needed taking down a notch.

The long, cold days gave me time to think, and much of the work that needed to be done was the kind that was conducive to thinking. When a man is sawing wood his mind is free to wander, and mine did. So much was happening in the outside world of which I knew too little. The newspapers were telling me of it, and from a distance it seemed exciting, important, and filled with color. Yet even as I thought that, I knew that here on the frontier, what we were doing was even more important.

At night I would spend hours reading the papers that had been forwarded to me, papers from New York, Chicago, and Omaha, mostly. They had started an elevated railroad in New York, on Ninth Avenue, and the American-made pianos, Steinway and Chickering, had startled the world by winning first prizes at the Paris Exposition.

Nebraska had become a state. Jefferson Davis, who had been president of the Confederacy, had been released on bail put up by Horace Greeley, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Gerrit Smith. President Johnson had fired his Secretary of War, Stanton. A man named Sholes had patented a typewriter and sold the rights to Eliphalet Remington ... whoever he was.

They had even passed a law giving only an eight-hour day to government workers ... it was getting so nobody wanted to work any more.

There was no letter from Ninon.

More and more I was thinking about that trip with old Uruwishi to the Medicine Wheel.

More travelers were coming along, despite the cold and the snow. Business had more than tripled over the past year, and although other settlements around had trouble, the bad ones avoided our town.

Colly Benson had built himself a dugout not far from Ethan and was snugged down for the winter. When I was out of town, he walked the streets and wore the star.

When he pinned it on, he gave me a hard-eyed smile. What you tryin', Ben? You want to make an honest citizen of me?

Tipping back in my chair, I grinned at him. Not you, Colly. I'm just trying to keep the others honest.

What's this talk about you going north come spring?

Ever hear of the Medicine Wheel, Colly? He nodded. Yeah, I heard some talk. Never knew anybody who'd seen it. Just a ring of rocks, isn't it?

It is more than that, I believe. It's some sort of a religious symbol or shrine for some long ago Indians. I'd like to see it.

Yeah. Colly knocked the ashes from his pipe and began scraping it with a knife point. You know, when I was a youngster I lived down along the Carolina-Georgia border, and Ma she went out one day and was washing clothes down by the river. When she came back she had a flat kind of dish, engraving around the edge. She'd found it stuck into the earth in the riverbank.

We went down an' dug around some and we found ten, twelve pots, all the same kind. We washed them up and used them for years. It was better stuff than I ever saw among the fifteen or twenty Injun tribes I've had dealin's with. Which reminds me. There was a man back yonder in our village who'd been a ship's captain. He had him all kinds of stuff, spears, shields, pottery, baskets, everything like that. He'd picked it up in the South Seas or the like.

Well, he had him one basket there that had a thin strip of oak for the rim. It was tied fast with some other strips, but it was a beautiful job. One day when I was talking to him a friend of ours, a Cherokee man, he came to see the Cap'n. He seen that basket and claimed it was Cherokee, but the Cap'n, he told him he'd gotten that basket in South America.

After he went away I sat for a long time thinking about the Indians. There were so many questions I wanted to ask, so many answers I needed, and I did not know where to find the answers. Worst of all, it was the old Indians like Uruwishi who had the answers, and so many times nobody asked them, and they'd never figure a white man to be interested. And of course, some of it was not to be told to any stranger.

Ethan came in that afternoon. Seen some pony tracks, over east of here, he said. They've been looking us over.

Sioux?

Uh-huh. Ben, I don't want to worry the women-folks, but come spring we're in for trouble. It's in the wind. He hesitated. You know, the Sioux were pushing west when the white man interfered ... they got themselves horses back there on the Wisconsin-Minnesota border country and they fanned out, their war parties raided south and west as well as north. They were headed toward conquering the whole country.

There was something in that. The horse had changed the Sioux from an earthbound people, hunting on foot and using only the dog for a beast of burden, to a mounted warrior, as fierce as any the old world ever knew. He was a knight without armor, fierce, indomitable ... a conqueror.

West there were the Crow and the Blackfeet, both tribes of fighting men, the Blackfeet in particular. What would have happened when they collided no man would now know, but in America as in Africa a conquering tribe met the white man face to face. In Africa the Bantu, migrating slowly southward down the centuries, had met no enemy they could not subdue, and then they met the white man coming up from the south. What was left of the Hottentot and the Bushmen was caught in the meat-grinder between them.

1865 had been the bloody year on the plains, with the Sioux driving hard in attack after attack against soldiers, wagon trains, settlers. In 1866, just before Christmas, the Sioux destroyed the Fetterman command, wiped them out to a man. In 1867 there had been the Wagon-Box fight, led by a more skillful soldier who understood the Indian way of fighting, and they had defeated ... or at least held off... the Sioux.

Some of this I said aloud. Ethan shrugged. The Sioux and the Blackfeet have come together a time or two, and the Sioux and the Crow never did get along, far's I know.

The Shoshone now, they're friendly. Most of that country we're going to pass through come spring will be their territory. Chief Washakie's no fool, and he's ready for peace. His tribe's not big enough, even with the Bannock's to help to keep off the Sioux, so he wants allies. He's doing just what they've been doing in Europe for years, he's getting allies where he can, and if he can't get us to help he can be sure we won't attack him whilst he's busy with the Sioux.