Into the Savage Country (22 page)

I glanced beneath my arm and saw Layton passing Bridger and the Brit. In front, Red Elk slipped farther ahead. We were approaching the small canyon that came in from the right and angled southwest. We’d all calculated the quickest route was to ride down the south side of the canyon and along the bottom, then come up on the north side through a dry channel and ride
in the last quarter mile over the flatlands. But at that moment, as I galloped behind Red Elk, as I felt the possibility of winning slipping away, I did not follow him into the canyon but rode high along the white rock lip to a point where the canyon cut steeply through a narrow channel and the two banks were fifteen feet apart. I veered from the south bank and then rode straight for the precipice. I felt Sophie resisting but then she caught my intention and being an eager, obedient animal, burst forward with mad enthusiasm. We charged at the canyon and just as we reached the precipice I heard Alene say my name:
William
. I cannot explain this but can only say I heard it clearly, as if she’d whispered it in my ear to bring me back to reason—but too late. We were just on the precipice. Sophie leaped and I rose with her.

There was a moment where I was forty feet over the canyon, where my shadow and Sophie’s shadow crossed the canyon floor beneath me and Red Elk looked up to see a horse and rider sailing overhead, crosswise. And then, the
thunk thunk
of the front hooves. We landed heavily, stumbled but stayed upright, and were galloping on toward the wildly gesticulating drunken band of trappers and squaws and spectating savages that were waiting at the finish line. Red Elk emerged from the canyon and drove his stallion desperately, but I was too far ahead, and I, William Wyeth, on a third-year mare, had beaten all the other trappers and the natives in the race for that thoroughbred.

I pierced the waiting crowd and the men practically lifted me off my horse. Jenks took the halter of the prize horse and thrust it at me. Beyond the shrieking throng, Layton pulled up short and turned away, furious. He was terribly competitive and an awful loser. Pegleg had begun to bait him when the halter was jerked from my hand and Red Elk was in front of me.

“Mine!” he was saying. “Mine! Mine!”

I reached to grab the halter. Red Elk raised his cudgel but was struck from the side and knocked into the dust. Layton stood over him.

“Wyeth won, you beast!” he shouted.

Red Elk moved to rise, but Layton was standing over him and would have kicked him if Red Elk had not rolled aside. A moment later Red Elk was up, gripping his cudgel, but Pegleg was there holding a pistol two inches from Red Elk’s head. Within another two seconds forty guns were pointed at Red Elk, who stood with the cudgel half raised, understanding the madness of his actions. Slowly he lowered the cudgel and casually slid it in the loop of his deerskin holster. He brushed dust from his chest and looked at Layton and then at me and spoke slowly, with Branch translating: “You are the men who aided the Crow in the massacre of the Blackfoot. Now you have stolen my horse.”

“Won the horse. Not stole,” Layton said in his imperious tone.

Red Elk studied Layton, then me. “I know where you trap. I know the country you must cross with your pelts.”

With that, he turned and walked off. There was a moment of silence, and then Pegleg held a bottle to Layton.

“Drink up. Tomorrow you’ll be under Red Elk’s scalping knife.”

That sent the men chattering and jesting and the crowd closed around us again and the celebration resumed, but all the while that look from Red Elk crackled inside me.

By late afternoon we had left the flats and started back to the mountains. I was leading my new black thoroughbred, which was a marvelous creature but wholly impractical for the trapping
land. We half expected an ambush by Red Elk and his men, but it did not come, and by evening we were back in our protected mountains.

By mid-fall we knew we would accomplish what I had not thought possible: We would average somewhere between two hundred fifty to three hundred pelts a man, which was the largest take for a small brigade in the history of the fur trade. We knew that if we could bring those pelts to market, it would change all our lives and possibly the borders of the west, but as the season’s end approached our enormous return provided little satisfaction, as having those furs in the mountains and having them in St. Louis were two different things. The Blackfoot had vowed revenge against us and Captain Pike had placed a bounty on our furs and it seemed every trapper in the west knew that we carried a fortune.

One night that October, just as Ferris and I were settling down to eat from a burbling pot of fat and meat, Layton came into the firelight and sat with an utterly self-satisfied and complacent expression.

“What is it?” Ferris said. “You’ve come here to say something. Out with it.”

“You don’t think I came to enjoy the company?”

“God,” Ferris said, turning to me. “Does he think us simpletons? What is it?”

Layton took a taste from the pot, smacked his lips, and said, “Eat your wonderful potage. Tomorrow we wander.”

“Guess these drainages aren’t rich enough for you,” Ferris said.

“Aren’t looking for drainages,” Layton said. “But looking for a way out of them.”

Ferris considered this. So did I. We understood his meaning.

“Through Spanish land?” I guessed.

“Why not?”

“Not the quickest way,” Ferris said.

“But maybe the safest. Not a lot of Brits to the south,” Layton said. “And not everyone knowing what we carry in that direction either.” Then, seeing Ferris’s reluctance, “The others can scrape up the dregs. If we find safe passage we save the brigade. And you can bring your quill and parchment and record land that’s never been put to paper. What possible argument could you have against it?”

Ferris seemed to resist the idea for a moment, as if he felt we were shirking by leaving the brigade behind while they worked, then seeing the sense in it, leaned back on his elbows, and said, “When were you thinking we’d start?”

“Tomorrow at dawn. Can you be ready?”

“Of course.”

“Wyeth?”

“I’d rather sleep till midday,” I said, and Layton tossed a stick at me.

The next morning, much to the envy of the rest of the brigade, Layton, Ferris, and I set out to survey for the possibility of an alternate, more hidden route out of the western mountains. We started south, and for ten days we traveled across rolling, deserty slopes and up through high, snowbound passes, sleeping in shrubs or dense woodland and passing through numerous barren valleys. It was fall, and very dry and cold for that time of year. The valleys we passed through were occupied by native and American and Spanish trappers, all of them half starving and with few returns. The farther south we traveled the more trapping parties we encountered, and the more barren the land
became. Everywhere we found the animals diminished and the men impoverished. I thought of the piles of beaver flesh we had left behind, the rotting buffalo after the surround, the waste that was involved in the industry, not overwhelming as long as we were trapping in empty, open country, but in those crowded drainages the effect of trapping brigades passing through year after year was clear. It had been a wild and untamed and beautiful country, but very quickly, in several years, it was becoming something else—mapped, over-trapped, and hostile. In ten years’ time there would be few who remembered the land as it had been in all its pure and savage glory. I was glad I had been there to see it. I was glad I had not spent my last season in waterways where the men were desperate and starving.

On the tenth day of our wander, as the mountains had begun to diminish and the air became gentler, we crested a dry ridge to see a green valley spread out beneath us, dotted with horses and cattle and regular squares of plowed land. We could hear cowbells rising faintly from the rivulets, a sound I had not heard for more than two years. Beyond the fields was a white steeple and the whitewashed walls of a church.

“Whatta you say we take a ride down there and give our regards to the conquistadores?” Layton said. “Gentlemen like us. They’ll probably give us dinner and brandy in crystal glasses.”

Ferris took a deep breath and looked away. “They’re Spanish, Layton. They arrest American trappers.”

“But we’re not trappers,” Layton said. “We’re gentlemen adventurers from St. Louis, seeking safe passage to Santa Fe.”

“Good God,” Ferris said.

“And they’re not Spanish anymore,” Layton said. “They’re Mexicans. Completely different thing.”

“Same people,” Ferris said. “Different name.”

Layton made an impatient sound in his throat. “We have ridden ten days to determine our chances of safe passage to the south. I can see no other way of determining those chances than meeting the men we would certainly encounter if we passed through with a brigade and pack train. I am going to pay them a visit. Who is coming with me?”

Layton started down the slope. I looked at Ferris.

“Not a good idea,” he said.

“Nope,” I said, and the two of us followed Layton down into the valley.

We had been riding for less than ten minutes when a group of five men on horses started out from the settlement toward us. They wore steel helmets and carried long staffs with curved blades. Three greyhounds streaked across the plowed land toward us, then curved around behind and came running back, making our horses skitter. Two hundred yards off natives plowing by hand stopped and watched silently as the five horsemen flanked us on either side and held their lances out, poised, as if to gut the horses. A man with a thick black beard on a black horse trotted up. He wore a curved sword on his belt and had a haughty expression.

“Hola,”
Layton said in a cheerful, entirely false tone.

“Ustedes están ingresando a las tierras de San Cristóbal.”

“Somos caballeros de la carretera y venimos a ver al administrador para pedirle permiso para pasar por sus tierras. Nos dirigimos rumbo a Santa Fe,”
Layton said in a halting Spanish.

“Usted es francés.”

“Americans,” Layton said. Then to us, “I told him we’re gentlemen of the road, asking for directions to Santa Fe. I think it worked.”

“Undoubtedly,” Ferris said.

The man with the sword said something to one of the men behind him, then the men with the lances moved closer and motioned for us to follow.

We rode on hard-packed trails between plowed fields where natives stopped to watch us go by. When I looked back they were still watching. I could hear bells ringing from the church.

After fifteen minutes we arrived at the settlement, which had a hardened mud wall around it, painted white. Inside the walls were apple and pear trees and the church had the large white cross on top that we’d seen from the mountainside. There was a square in the center with an oak tree and native children playing a game with colored hoops.

The riders motioned for us to halt in the square. Four of the soldiers got off their horses and we dismounted as well. The halters were taken from us and handed to natives who led them away. The four soldiers walked off and sat in the shade of the oak tree and lay their lances in the roots and sat and watched us.

“What now?” I asked Layton.

“We wait.”

“You got this all worked out, don’t you?” Ferris said. Then to me, “We’re dressed like trappers and we came from the trapping lands. They’re going to say we’re trying to open up trade through Santa Fe, which we are, and arrest us.”

I stepped to the side and saw our horses being fed grain and rubbed down.

“They’re feeding our horses,” Layton said.

“They’re Spanish,” Ferris said. “They like horses. They don’t like Americans.”

One of the soldiers ambled over and motioned for us to hand over our rifles and we did. As an afterthought he took our pistols, too. He walked back to the shade and handed Layton’s
Collier pistol to the soldier next to him and the second soldier looked at it and held it up and sighted with it, and he handed it to the next soldier and it went all around until it came back to the first soldier, who walked back over and held it up and made a motion like shooting. Then he waved his hand to indicate there was no flash pan and Layton nodded that was the case. The soldier walked back to the others, speaking animatedly, holding the pistol high.

“What are the chances I get that back?” Layton said.

“Zero,” Ferris said.

“We agree on something,” Layton said.

Four more soldiers walked from the stables. There was the clinking of chains and five natives in shackles were led out into the square from a stone lockup. A Spaniard with a black beard and a very white shirt began flogging one of the natives laconically until the native collapsed and was dragged off. The man with the white shirt wiped his forehead and had started in on a second native when the door to the main house opened and the flogging stopped. A tall, thin, elegant-looking man with a closely clipped beard and thin hands walked out. Layton walked over, smiling, and said,
“Hola. Gracias por su hospitalidad.”

This man squinted against the sunlight and winced at Layton’s Spanish.

“I speak English as well as you do,” he said, in a cool, crisp tone.

“I am relieved to hear it,” Layton said.

“Follow me.”

We followed him up the steps of his dwelling and into a house with dark wood and panes of glass, white lace tablecloths and crystal chandeliers. The servants were native women in European clothing. The furniture was from Spain.

The administrator, as he was called, sat behind a desk with an ink pen and a pad of parchment and a large book on a page half filled with scribblings.

“I am Emilio Echevaria, an administrator, formerly of New Spain, now the Republic of Mexico. You three are American trappers, trespassing on Mexican soil, invading our country in violation of the Adams-Onis Treaty, and will be detained until further clarification from the capital. I should hear a reply within a month’s time.”

He said this succinctly and dipped his quill in ink.

“What are your names?” he asked.