Into the Savage Country (4 page)

By dusk I was galloping across the flats toward the half-completed palisades of Fort Ashley, having recovered my nerve by that point and trying to pretend the whole thing was just an afternoon stroll for me. All the men came out of the lodging to watch me arrive, including Bridger. I rode in and told carelessly of how we’d given chase to the natives and been split up when we’d almost ridden into the heart of their encampment.

“Should have blasted the lot of ’em,” Blanchard said.

A veteran named Pegleg gave a withering look. “He’d have had the whole hunting party testing his hump ribs with their blades. You did right keeping still.”

The others began asking all manner of questions.

“Were they Blackfoot?” “Did they move with the British?” “Did they have long guns or trade guns?” And in the midst of this, that irritating Ferris asked, “Did you see his moccasins?”

“His moccasins?” I asked in the most derisive tone I could muster.

“That’d tell you if it was Bloods or Blackfoot,” Ferris said calmly. “Most likely Blackfoot, given the slopes.”

“He was wearing brocaded Wellingtons like Chapman sells on Market Street,” I said, which sent the men guffawing.

“How many were there?” Smith asked.

“I heard many horses. At least fifteen. But there could have been many more.”

“Double sentries tonight,” Smith said. “And if they’re spotted send Peggy to invite them to trade. Don’t fire unless they do.”

Before Smith went back into the fort, he put a hand on my shoulder and said, “If you’d lost your scalp that would have been something to put in your memoirs.”

“That it would,” I said.

“Stay on this side of the slopes from now on,” he said.

Smith was a fine, sturdy fellow, and if anything, he marked it in my favor that I’d had the pluck to strike out on my own, though he’d forbidden it.

The next day I noticed Ferris riding up to the edge of our encampment, scanning the slopes with his spyglass, but the natives had departed, and he did not see them as I had.

Two days later the real snow began, and for the next weeks we packed ourselves inside the commissary. Our supplies grew low, and our tempers irritable. The one diversion was that an elk had been spotted in the lowland south of the fort. Smith offered a reward of one silver dollar to the man who brought it down and late in the afternoon on the last day of 1826, I found
myself riding alongside the high-toned Ferris, whom I had done my best to avoid, and who I felt was always silently competing with me.

As we rode toward the lowlands I saw a water bird over some unfrozen shallows, and pointing it out, said, “Duck.”

“Goldeneye,” he said, though from that distance identification would have been impossible. Another time I pointed to tracks and said, “Deer.”

“Mule deer,” he corrected, though that was obviously what I’d meant.

We rooted about aimlessly for half an hour, the sun lowering, until it was dim and shadowy, though the river, which was still sunlit, looked brilliant and blue when glimpsed from the gloom of the forest.

We arrived at the riverbank and Ferris leaped off his horse and drank with a cupped hand, then climbed back up the bank and was switching his halter from one hand to the other when his mare bolted into the woods, halter dragging.

“Pauline, you beast!” he shouted.

The mare stopped thirty yards off, and I thought, Bad rider.

“Now that all the creatures know we’re here,” I said boisterously, “might as well hold a powwow and start a fire.”

“Not that we were cautious coming in,” Ferris returned, and then quickly laughed at himself. “Blast it, Wyeth. Help me catch my horse.”

Ferris had dropped his rifle. He retrieved it and blew snow off the pan. He refilled the pan carefully, I noticed, taking his time, but even as he did, windblown snow dusted the pan again. He saw he would need to refill the pan a second time, but not wanting to keep me waiting, he left it as it was and we started for
his mottled mare, which stood thirty yards off. Ferris took several steps toward her, then considered the situation and scanned the woods to see what had startled her. He saw nothing. I looked, too. I saw nothing. He took another step and looked again and we both saw it at the same time: a large moose in snow-covered thickets not thirty feet from where we stood. It was a full grown male, taller than a horse. I could see the nubs on its head where it had recently shed its antlers. It was standing utterly still in dense shrubbery. Except for two curls of steam from its nostrils it moved not a muscle. It must have been there the whole time, but great hunters that we were, we hadn’t seen it.

My rifle was on my saddle horn, a mistake I would not make again. Ferris raised his weapon slowly. He aimed and pulled the trigger, but the gun flashed and misfired. In an instant the moose burst from the shrubbery, gave a snorting roar, and charged straight at us. I leaped for my gun but my pony sidestepped and by the time I retrieved my weapon the moose was on Ferris, who swung his gun like a club. The steel clattered on the beast’s forehead without effect, and Ferris was pitched out over the bluff.

“Pauline, you devil!” I heard him shout as he tumbled down the bank.

I aimed to fire but the moose was already in some shrubs. It came into sight again a hundred yards off as it cut down the slope to the water. I ran to the edge of the bank but it had vanished from sight. Ferris’s rifle had slid out ten feet and was lying on thin ice. Ferris stepped out after it and broke through the ice up to his knees. Meanwhile, far down the bank, the moose arrived at the riverside and turned back, gangly legs churning white ice chips, heading straight toward Ferris, who was stuck with wedged ice in the shallow water. The moose was blasting right toward him along the edge of the river. Fifty yards away. Then thirty.

“Good God,” Ferris said, reaching for a branch to use to defend himself.

The enraged creature was twenty yards off when I fired. It was a good shot. It was not a hard shot. But I did manage to hit the thing. The beast toppled forward, cracking the ice in shallows ten feet from where Ferris stood knee-deep in frigid water.

“What corncracker said it was an elk?” was the first thing Ferris said, laughing.

“I believe it was Peggy.”

“The damn corncracker,” he said.

His voice was steady ten seconds after I fired.

Ferris dislodged his legs from the ice, retrieved his rifle, and laughed at himself.

“Lost the horse,” he said. “Filled the horn in snow. Damned careless. And then scrambling over that ice. I must have looked like a fool.”

“You did not look like President Adams,” I said.

“Man of the Wilderness, western trapper, Walter Ferris, trampled by a moose two miles from the fort. The great hunter!”

“We both missed the moose sign,” I said.

“Real booshways,” he said derisively.

“The heirs to Lewis and Clark and General Ashley,” I said.

I thought Ferris would make some excuse for what had happened. He didn’t. He just laughed and went on deriding his own carelessness.

Well, you misjudged him, I thought. Might as well admit it. He’s a fine fellow.

We dressed the creature and took what sustenance we could and left the rest on high tree branches. An hour later, with just a blue light on the rim of the snowy world, Ferris and I rode back across the lowlands toward the encampment. I think we
both thought we were able hunters—greenhorns, to be sure, but not incompetent—and we’d almost been done in by a moose two miles from the encampment.

“Obliged for that shot,” he said as we rode in.

“Not at all,” I said.

He didn’t mention it again and I didn’t mention it again, but I’d shot the moose as it charged at him, and he’d thanked me for it. That was enough.

We rode on through the purple light with the sterile beauty of the icy mountains to the west and the stillness and vastness of that land resounding inside us.

We spent that night in the makeshift commissary, telling of our hunt. Ferris reveled in the ridiculous aspects of it, and the veteran hunters laughed and stomped and slapped our backs so we almost fell over, and I understood that we’d stumbled upon the best method possible of gaining acceptance into the brigade. With the veteran trappers, nothing could be more persuasive than to risk our lives needlessly and revel in our ignorance.

Ferris, as it turned out, was not some mincing dandy but an entirely good-natured fellow and a natural outdoorsman, interested in all the people and creatures and industry of the west. During the long idle hours that winter I told Ferris of my unfortunate parting from my father, and he told me how he had also shattered his father’s hopes, leaving a physician’s apprenticeship behind, though, being a more even-keeled fellow than I was, he did it with his father’s grudging acceptance. We spoke of our mutual admiration for the western mountains and bragged of the magnificent lives we’d lead once we returned and of the fortunes we’d command, and in general made asses of ourselves. Several
years later I would have a withering view of our blown-up expectations, but as I grow older I scoff at these romantic sentiments less and less. It is the yearnings of boyhood that add flavor and dash to a life that can very quickly lower to necessity. But I do not want to speak of this lowering. I am writing of the trapping land and of that glorious life that flamed up for a time in the western mountains, and of how, by luck, we came to play a small role in the great events swirling around us at the time.

The winter passed quickly and in mid-March, just before the real thaw, the company was split up into five brigades. Every man in the company hoped to be sent to the Bighorn Mountains, as a brigade in the Bighorn the year before had taken out ninety pelts in half a season, which was considered an enormous sum. Two brigades were sent to the Bighorn, but not ours. Another went to Pierre’s Hole, and one to the eastern slopes of the Tetons. But Smith, Pegleg, Blanchard, an old-timer named Glass, Bridger, Ferris, and I journeyed south for rumored trapping lands north of the Wind River Mountains. For three weeks we rode over terrain that was not even mapped and arrived at the mountains where Ferris and I first practiced the trade that would employ us for the rest of our youth.

I do not mean to go into all the particulars of the trade, as the catching and accumulating of the pelts would make dreary reading and is only superficially connected to my story. Suffice it to say that we learned to sleep out on buffalo robes and to eat only what we killed and to wake at night and stand sentry and watch the darkness and listen to it with our weapons ready. We learned the different kinds of silence: those that held danger and those that did not. We learned the various methods of trapping fur-bearing creatures and came up with our own recipes for castoreum. We learned to flesh and prepare the furs so they would
not spoil. We learned how to build a cache. In short, we learned the job of the western trapper—perhaps not as well as the veterans, but adequately and with what energy we could muster, and we had a fine time of it.

In mid-June, near the end of the spring season, after three months of industry, Smith, Pegleg, Blanchard, Glass, Bridger, Ferris, and I were gathered on an east-facing slope at the southern edge of some high, snow-covered peaks, surveying a group of thirty natives riding across the lowlands. We had been watched by natives sentries, seen their villages from afar, and had noted the location of their trapping parties, but we had not had any close encounters with the natives since our visit from the Crow the previous winter. These natives were dragging lodges and moving with many horses, and from our hidden spot up in the mountains we could see they were converging behind a low hill. Much dust was raised from behind that hill but we could not see the gathering spot. In the spyglass we could see dogs and children dashing around the ponies.

“Don’t look like a war party,” Pegleg said.

Bridger nudged Glass, nodding toward Pegleg. “I know what he’s thinking.”

Pegleg stuck his thumbs in at his waist. “Whatta you say we go down there and see if there’s any squaws looking for conversation with a gimpy old trapper?”

“You willing to get scalped for the opportunity?” Smith said.

“I’m willing to risk it,” Pegleg said cheerfully. “Dragging lodges and bringing the pups. That ain’t no war party. Maybe we fill out our map on the drainages to the south. Whatta you say, Captain?”

Smith watched through the spyglass again. Despite the fact that he carried a Bible, which would have been considered a sign
of weakness in another man, he was thought to be the bravest and most reliable captain in all the west. We waited for his verdict.

Smith collapsed the glass, unpicketed his horse, and said, “Guns on the pommel. We see anything we don’t like, we make a dash for the hills.” Then turning to Pegleg: “And if you meet any squaws they don’t come back to camp.”

“Of course,” he grinned. “Won’t take long for Old Peggy.”

In that region the higher elevations were tree-covered but the flatlands were scrubby and arid, and as we moved down the slopes we emerged out of the tree cover and onto barren hills. The natives did not change their bearing or speed when we showed ourselves. We rode on down to the flats and a brigade of French trappers, riding down the same slopes, veered when they saw us and joined our party. We all went on together, fifteen of us now, and eighteen horses. We rode across a salt pan and onto alkali flats where there were many white-rimmed pools of clear water with black pollywogs and translucent water bugs wriggling inside. We reached the small ridge that had blocked our view of the gathering and when we crested we saw, spread out beneath us, at least two hundred white-skinned lodges with fires in front and smoke racks set up, and Ferris, who could tell the natives from their accoutrements, scanned the gathering, and said, “Crow, Mandan, Hidatsa. Even a few Gros Ventre, I think.”

On the north side we saw what we thought were white trappers around two large fires, entirely unmolested by the natives.

“Ain’t no war party,” Pegleg said. “Got the whole Indian nation here.”

We picketed our horses, and for the next three hours Ferris and I wandered through the encampment, Ferris sketching arrowheads and moccasins and shields and dresses. We met or at least saw many of the famous native chieftains from that time—
Raven’s Beak, who was carried around like a pharaoh on a wicker chair, and Long Hair of the Mountain Crow, whose hair, when it was unwound, reached eleven feet and was like a bridal veil. We saw Red Elk for the first time, a Blackfoot leader who was traveling with the Gros Ventre. Ferris thought there must be some temporary truce if Red Elk was in that encampment surrounded by his enemies, and I made a point of studying the man, as he was known in the mountains as being the most clever and savage of the native chieftains.