Into the Savage Country (24 page)

Money began to change hands.

“He’s mad,” Ferris said.

“He said it was the cure for his ill temper,” I said.

“Of course it will be a cure. He’ll be dead,” Ferris said.

The crowd around Layton grew. More bets were placed. Then a bell was rung and Layton walked to the edge of the corral, wrapping a red sash about his hand. The throng of men—French and British employees of the HBC, American free trappers, Spanish from Santa Fe, and natives from at least five different tribes, all in various stages of drunkenness—crowded around that makeshift corral to watch. They had had other volunteers for the bull-bear fight but never a self-satisfied St. Louis dandy. They were all jostling for position. Layton put a foot on a cross slat and for a moment I wasn’t sure he was really going to do it. I waved for him to come back, but he only shook his head, swung a leg over the fence, and dropped into the corral.

As soon as Layton landed in the dirt the bear swung around to face him and the bull raised its head. Layton unwound the red cloth from his hand and bent on one knee and took a handful of dust, then stepped toward the bear slowly, stopping several times to mark the bull, then moved on again. The bear strained toward Layton and the boulder with the chain attached to it rocked forward. Layton checked the bull again, then turned back to the bear. He took another step forward and the bear lunged to the length of its chain, reaching with one outstretched paw. The bear moved elastically and reached much farther than I expected. The swipe of the claw crossed Layton’s chest. Tiny fragments of his shirt flew.

“Ah ha,” the crowd yelled.

Layton held his arm to his gut. He stumbled back then steadied himself. Blood dripped from beneath his arm. Behind Layton,
the bull began trotting, unsteadily at first. It moved not toward Layton but along the edge of the makeshift enclosure. Ferris raised his gun and aimed at the bull, but seeing Ferris with the gun, Layton motioned violently. He would not go on until Ferris lowered his weapon.

“Damn him,” Ferris said.

The bull passed behind Layton and went on around the corral and when the bull passed us I could see the pulse of blood from its wounds, which left a trail in the dust. The bear turned to follow the progress of the bull, straining against the chain. The boulder turned slowly leaving deep brown grooves in the dust.

The bull came all the way around and as it did it veered from the edge of the corral and trotted toward Layton, who turned to the bull and held out the red sash. The bull ran for the cloth and Layton jerked the cloth away from the bull and put it in reach of the bear, who caught a segment in its claws, jolting Layton forward. The sash tore. Layton fell. The bull wheeled and turned on Layton, who rolled out of the way. The bull was carried close to the bear, who raked the bull’s side with an awful tearing sound. The bull tottered. The bear turned back to Layton and Layton threw dust in the bear’s eyes and moved suddenly to touch the lime, but the bear felt Layton’s presence and snapped at him and Layton dropped. The jaws went an inch over Layton’s head. The bull wheeled and was thundering toward Layton, who lay flat in the dust. The bear, hearing the thunder of the bull’s hooves, swatted out blindly, smacking the bull on the head. The other horn was knocked sideways and the bull’s head twisted. At that moment Layton leaped up and put his hand on the bear’s forehead, then dropped and rolled out of the bear’s reach. Then he was sprinting back toward the edge of the corral. The bull tottered toward Layton, hornless, but Layton was already leaping the fence head-long
into the arms of the waiting men. He thrust his lime-covered hand in the air and a singular cheer went up from the crowd.

A moment later the men hefted Layton on their shoulders and carried him about, shoving a sack of coins into his hands. I could see Layton grinning complacently, pleased with himself, as if for once the world was treating him in the manner he deserved, but he was also pale and his hands shook. Blood oozed from the gashes in his gut.

“We’ll hear about this for the rest of the season,” Ferris said.

“For the rest of our lives,” I said.

After Layton was set down he reached inside his shirt and wrapped the sash around his torso to bandage himself. Meanwhile, the bull had staggered to the far end of the corral. It had been raked deeply by the bear and its guts bulged from the wounds. Layton consulted with two Spaniards. He gave them each a coin from his sack and they walked off and returned with eight-foot lances with gleaming triangular blades. They entered the corral and walked up carefully to the bull, positioning themselves, lances raised. The bull watched them dully, not moving. In a sudden gleaming flash of metal the bull’s throat was slit twice and it collapsed, dead.

The lancers turned to the bear but Layton yelled out, waving his purse. The men with the lances walked back and Layton gave them each another coin. The men set aside their lances and came back with sections of rope and reentered the corral on horseback with two other riders. The lead rider swung the rope in the air, and when the bear reached out the swinging rope circled the paw, catching it. The first rider backed up gently with his horse, stretching the bear with the weight of the horse. The same was done with the other paw, and then the back legs, so all four limbs were bound. The riders backed up carefully with their large
Spanish horses until the bear was stretched out along the dust, grunting and thrashing but powerless.

At a signal from the lead rider Layton ran in, inserted a gray key at the bear’s neck, unlocking the clasp of the chain and then hurried off. The crowd, who had watched all this with interest, began drifting away nervously. The bear was now held only by the riders, but was not chained to the rock. Men with rifles positioned themselves. The gate to the corral was opened. Layton, with difficulty, got on horseback. He nodded to my horse, and said, “I’d get ready, Wyeth. You too, Ferris.”

Ferris put a hand on the neck of Layton’s horse.

“That was worth the ride out here.”

“I thought that would please you,” Layton said. “And I saved the beast’s life. You can congratulate yourself, Ferris. You’ve made a naturalist of me.”

“I’d hardly call you that,” Ferris said.

“Henry Layton,” he intoned. “Friend to all creatures.”

Before Ferris moved on, he opened the front of Layton’s jacket and peeled back the sash. Blood was seeping into Layton’s leggins. Ferris looked as if he wanted to treat Layton right there, but Layton waved him off.

“Later,” Layton said. “Horseback.”

Ferris got on his horse and Layton motioned to the four horsemen who were holding the bear outstretched. At a sign they let go of their ropes and galloped out of the corral. The bear, suddenly unbound, leaped up in an explosion of twisted rope and dust. A moment later it had flung the binds and loped out the open gate. It lurched at a drunken Frenchman, snapped air, and moved off through a marshy area and between two lodges. A minute later the bear was seen on a far slope, lumbering up the mountain.

“That will be a story to tell the ladies,” I said.

“I am looking forward to not having to exaggerate for once,” Layton said.

We rode fifteen minutes outside the encampment and settled at a pleasant spot along a creek where Layton dismounted and Ferris stitched his belly with deer sinews and a bone needle. Layton’s ribs were bruised as well as gashed, and though I had not seen it happen, apparently Layton’s foot had been trod on by the bull. He winced and hobbled his way through the next few days, needing help to get up and down from his buffalo robe and unable to raise his left arm over his head. I was unsure if Layton would be able to travel, or if he did, what sort of black mood the injuries would put him in. I need not have worried about that. Once we resumed our journey, Layton hardly spoke of his ailments and, if anything, seemed in a better mood because of them.

I understood something about Layton that day. He was peevish and voluble about any slight irritation or discomfort but took real physical harm indifferently, as it calmed his inner churning. And what’s more, though he had relapses into distemper from time to time, his desire to remedy his life was genuine, and was succeeding. I was not surprised by this improvement. There is little that ails a man, particularly a St. Louis dandy, that is not remedied by a season in the mountains.

Twenty-five days after first leaving our brigade we returned to report that there was no safe passage to the south and that if we were to bring our furs to market we’d have to make a run for Fort Ashley across that no-man’s-land east of the Wind River Mountains.

In late November the Crow, who had mostly ignored us, began passing through our camp on a daily basis, apparently friendly
but surveying our position, and noting the number of our pack horses and, if possible, the location and number of our furs. Branch, who had a wife in the Crow village, told us that many of the young men in the village blamed Layton for the Brits arming the Blackfoot and wanted to renegotiate the contract that Long Hair had made with the brigade or, more likely, to take all the furs from us by force and sell them to the British for more guns and powder. It was rumored that some of these Crow braves had received gifts from Pike’s emissaries with promises of much more if the American furs were brought to trade at Flathead Post. These rumors filtered into camp for a few weeks. Then one morning Branch galloped into camp and said that the Crow were gathering their weapons and an attack was imminent.

The packs of furs were hastily gathered and loaded on ponies. We all bedded down, as if to retire for the night, but as soon as it was dark and the fire dwindled we rose again and as silently as possible, and without a word of parting to the Crow, left our encampment and wound our way out of the mountains, nine men and thirty laden horses. We rode all night, hid ourselves in shrubbery before dawn, rested through the short daylight hours, and rode north and east during the long winter night with only the stars to guide us.

The land to the east of the Wind River Mountains is arid sagebrush country and high-desert steppe, and for four days we made no fires and survived on dried meat and berries and the horses survived on what they could forage while picketed. When we rode, the white horses were covered with dark saddle blankets and we abstained from calling to one another or firing our weapons. On the evening of the fifth day the land became too broken to travel by night. We rested half that night and were up before
dawn on the following day, the sixth, in which we began traveling by daylight.

On this day we passed through an arid land of many low waterways, and among enormous gray rock lumps, the largest of which was at least five hundred feet high. All of these stones had gray sloping sides and were faced the same direction and we called these rocks “elephants” because of their size and shape and gray color, and that afternoon, from the top of one of the elephants, we saw the smoke from a large native encampment to the south that Branch said held Red Elk and his men.

“Can they see us from there?” Smith asked.

“They can see our dust. No way they don’t.”

“Guns on the pommel,” Smith said.

That afternoon Ferris and I were managing the rear of the pack train when he scoped the land behind us and kept the glass at his eye for a long time. A while after that I saw him glassing the land again. I rode back and he handed me the spyglass and pointed to the west and I saw what he had been seeing: dust rising in the afternoon light.

“Could be a herd of elk stranded out of the mountains,” I said.

“Could be a lot of things,” Ferris said. “But no herd of elk’s going to follow us like that. You know that as well as I do.”

Smith and Pegleg rode back and surveyed the land but already the dust had diminished and it was hard now to tell what we’d seen.

We rode all afternoon and stopped at a dirt crater with a small spring at the bottom of it. The spring was ice-rimmed and meandered off into a narrow, jagged canyon. Smith ordered the packs to be unloaded and set up as fortifications around the edge of the
water hole. That took about forty minutes. After we arranged the packs Ferris glassed the land to the west again and we both saw the dust, closer now. Pegleg walked over and looked to the west with the spyglass and then held the glass to Layton, who looked, and then handed the glass back to Ferris.

“Whoever it is has been following us all day,” Ferris said.

“Probably some of the squaws back in the Crow camp,” Pegleg said. “Didn’t get enough of Old Peggy during the season.”

“Undoubtedly,” Layton said. Then to Ferris, “What do you see?”

“I see dust that could be made by anything. But there is little out here besides men on horseback that would follow us for half a day.”

All agreed with his assessment and there was little discussion about it. Only two years before Ferris had been considered a greenhorn trapper with the regrettable habit of sketching whatever he saw. Now he was one of the most trusted men in the brigade.

Pegleg handed his horn around and we all loaded our weapons and then Pegleg refilled his horn and afterward went down with Grignon to corral the horses in a narrow canyon that ran off to the east from the water hole. The rest of us stood at the south end of the crater and waited. We knew that British and Americans alike thirsted after our furs, but we were all good shots with the long guns, and if we had a favorable position, which we had in that location, we knew we could hold off a much larger brigade.

There was maybe an hour of daylight left. We watched the land to the south as the rising dust formed itself into a vague line and then became the wavery image of a single rider on horseback and then a man wearing a beaver hat and a native sheepskin jacket.
Layton, Smith, Ferris, Branch, Bridger, Glass, and I stood at the edge of the crater. Behind us we could hear Pegleg and Grignon driving the horses into the protection of the canyon.

The man in the sheepskin jacket approached. He stopped at two hundred yards, waved once with his gun, then rode in slowly.

It was not until he neared that I was sure he was a white man.