Rocky Mountain Company (19 page)

By mid-September, a rectangle of sandstone rock rose about three feet, broken by a front and rear door and notched at either end by the fireplaces. Sun and wind dried the exposed mortar into light tan hardness, but Fitzhugh knew that back under the rock, the mud stayed as wet as ever and would be drying for months, emitting a dank smell all the while, that would make the post unpleasant until the mortar froze solid in the cold. The weather was changing. The sun rose lower and fled earlier, robbing them of daylight hours. The heat vanished, turning each autumnal day into a perfect climate for hard work, but also plunging the camp into a deep pre-dawn chill, with an occasional skim of ice.

He watched his men carefully, studying each, fathoming character. The loss of the blankets still rankled, and if it had been done by some traitor in his midst, he intended to root the man or men out. But he discovered nothing. None of these hardy French, used to brute toil, was sloughing off his tasks; indeed, they worked with a cheery optimism, making small jokes, enjoying a pipeful of
tabac
in the evenings, doing their assigned tasks without being asked, knowing that any slacking hurt the enterprise, and burdened the others. His only suspect, Gallard, showed no less enthusiasm than any of the rest. He watched Maxim, too, wondering whether the lad’s enormous task and somewhat pessimistic outlook would lead to discouragement, or worse, sickness. He had no physician here except for Dust Devil and her medicinal herbs, and no shelter either, save for the pitched wagonsheet, or two wagonbeds.

One day just after the equinox, Brokenleg rode south, up the valley, under a low gray sky driven by a sharp northwind. He raised no game, and decided he’d find none on the bottoms that day, so he turned his bay eastward, toward a notch in the bluffs, thinking to ride out on the humped prairies above and shoot some antelope. The notch afforded a buffalo trace, winding through thick juniper and sagebrush growth into a dish in the prairies, its buffalo grass cured tan now and bobbing in the stiff northwind. He saw no white rumps or bellies of antelope, but what he did discover excited him more. Thirty or forty dark buffalo grazed to the east, facing into the wind, unlike cattle. He’d been lucky. If he’d come upon them a little north of where he saw his pony, his scent would have reached them.

“Buffler!” he announced to the wind. “Buffler! Eats for weeks, if she stays cold. Horns, hide, and tongue. Boudins, humprib, and backfat! Damn my bad leg, if I don’t drop two or six.”

In fact his bad leg would keep him from the most effective way to shoot them. He should work his way around to the south, tie the horse out of sight, stalk to within two hundred yards or so, and then shoot the sentries, resting his battered piece on crossed sticks. But he could no more stalk than a bull moose could stalk. But maybe the wind would work for him, masking the sound of his passage. That plus their weak eyes.

“Dang it now, horse, if I don’t lay a few buffler to rest, it’ll be because you aren’t daintyfooted,” he whispered. “Now you git a sneak into your walk, like that gray wolf yonder, lookin’ for dinner — I never seen a mess of buffler without a gray wolf or two wanting handouts — and we’ll git around south a piece.”

He backed off a hundred yards or so, and then eased the bay around the edge of the basin, staying below the skyline. There buffalo ignored him, attacking the grass with a herbivore’s greed. Minute particles of sleet, as fine as sand, and invisible to the eye, slapped at his beard. That suited him fine too. The meat would keep.

A sentry cow watched his slow passage around the perimeter, but sounded no alarm. She’d be his first target if he could just ride another fifty yards to give himself a good heart-lung shot. He spotted several calves, strategically surrounded by adult animals which could form a perimeter against wolves in moments.

Fitzhugh reached a likely spot and eyed the sentry, which stared alertly now. He wondered whether to dismount and try a prone shot, the type most likely to kill. But he knew himself, and his leg, and his awkward contortions getting off a horse, and decided he had to shoot from horseback, an event that the bay anticipated by laying back its ears and sidling, which made accurate shooting all the tougher.

“Now, dang it, horse, you mind your bad manners. What I don’t want is worse manners.”

He slid his Hawken from its quilled elkskin sheath, and checked the percussion cap. The bay sidled beneath him.”Quiet now, or I’ll shoot you, too.”

Then he lifted the heavy octagon-barreled rifle, and drew a careful bead on a hat-sized spot behind the cow’s shoulders. But the horse danced. He full-cocked the hammer, and waited for the nervous animal to stop it, cussing because the cow turned slightly toward him. He jammed the butt deep into his shoulder, aimed and waited. At last the bay paused for an instant, and Fitzhugh squeezed. The wind whipped the boom out of his ears, but he felt the jolt to his shoulder, and saw the cow shudder, shake her head, and slowly sag to the earth, forefeet first, her rump up like a surrendering flag.

The other buffalo didn’t stop their mowing.

“Hyar’s supper,” he said, digging around in his possibles for another ball and a wad. He poured a guessload of powder from his horn down the barrel, drove the patch and ball down with the rod stowed under the barrel, and then slid a tiny cap over the nipple, after checking to see whether it had been fouled.

A restlessness swept among the buffalo. In some sort of synchronization, they all shifted their positions a few yards, out of some primal purpose beyond the reckoning of man, and then settled down to eating again. With their sentry down and spasming, they’d lost their guard.

The second shot was easy, right behind the shoulder of a small cow that had started some dark winter hair. The third shot missed the lights of a large cow, and she began bawling and blowing blood from her nose, mincing in a frenzied circle. It took another shot, this time while the bay was skittering sideways, to kill her. It struck her in the neck, and pierced an artery, which began gouting. That’s when the nervous herd bolted off to the east, with the slinking wolves behind it.

Fitzhugh rode warily out to his three carcasses, knowing how often a dead buffalo wasn’t really dead. Three cows! He exulted. Three tongues, three robes, three humpmeat, more boudins that a man could swallow, and hot liver, too, ready to devour mountain-man style. He’d allow himself that, he figured. And maybe haul a tongue back.

He slid to the ground, feeling pain shoot through his bad leg, made worse by the deepening cold and the needling sleet, that seemed to increase every minute. They looked plumb dead, but a man could never be sure, so he kicked one and then another. The third shivered, so he avoided her. He eyed the skies unhappily, and gave up on cutting one open for the liver. Instead, he pried one’s mouth open and sawed away at the massive, hot, wet tongue. Even that turned out to be a mean task, with his hands going numb from the cold. He wished he’d dressed better. But at last he yanked the rough-textured meat from the mouth, and clambered stiffly aboard the bay, glancing sharply at the horizons to see whether he’d been watched. He saw nothing, and discovered that the farther hills were veiled by falling snow. He had to get back — a two-hour ride — and fetch two wagons fast. Before the early blizzard engulfed them.

Her man rode out of a whirl of snow and dismounted awkwardly, staggering on his bad leg. Then presented her with a buffalo tongue, thick and heavy and not yet frozen.

“Where?” she asked.

“Two hours. Maybe six or seven miles.”

The terms confused her. “Is that far?”

“Yes. I’ll get some men and a wagon.”

“How many?”

“Three. Unless they get et up by coyotes before we git there.”

“I will come. Whitemen don’t know how to cut.”

“It’ll be cold.”

“That’s good! It will freeze the meat.”

“Let’s hope it don’t freeze before we git to it.”

That was something to worry about. Three frozen carcasses would be hard to handle. But the snow would be something to worry about, too. It came in cruel gusts now, driven out of the north in a dull white blur, coating her man and his horse, building up on the chest-high walls of the post, numbing fingers of the engagés.

“I’ll get knives,” she said, leaving her cooking fire. She would take her blanket capote as well, along with gloves because her fingers would get stiff, and she might hurt herself sawing at the half-frozen meat. Three buffalo! It gladdened her heart. It would make her life simpler for a while.

“Throw an axe in the wagon,” he said. “So we can chop froze-up buffler if we got to.”

She eyed the low opaque sky nervously, and dug into her parfleches for her winter moccasins, with rawhide soles made from the skin of a bull, and rabbit fur lining. Wind rattled the canvas tent they’d made of a wagonsheet. It was all they had.

Her man stared into the whiteness, looking for men he could spare. He chose the three who were laying up the walls.

“Reckon we’ve got some meat to make,” he said. “Six, seven miles south. I downed three buffler. You’ll have yourself some humpmeat and boudins tonight. But we’d better git, before the snow builds up.”

Guerette, Provost and Gallard abandoned the masonry at once and began digging in their kits for capotes and gloves.

“Next yoke comes in with a stoneboat, take them. Let’s have three yoke, just in case it gets skiddy. We got to yank that wagon up a snowy grade.”

They understood his English well enough, though they didn’t speak it much, and soon had the six oxen hitched to an empty wagon. But the remaining oxen would have an easier time, skidding the stoneboats over snow. Her man would keep the woodcutters and rock-diggers busy, even in the mounting blizzard.

How like cattle and horses whitemen were, she thought, contempt building in her. Pulling and sweating in a harness made of words and commands. When her father had given her to Fitzhugh, she accepted it, thinking she would become the woman of a great warrior and fighter, but he turned out to be like all the rest of the whites, slaves, doing woman’s work. And now these white cattle were going out to butcher buffalo, just like the women of her village. She wished Fitzhugh would go kill Crows and steal Blackfoot ponies instead of — this. Then she could be proud, instead of ashamed.

Maxim showed up from the riverbank, carrying a bucket of mud. He set it down, after seeing that work had been abandoned, and watched the preparations, expectantly.

“Brokenleg, I want to go too,” he said.

“I reckon we need someone to tend camp, keep a fire cracklin’, cut us some firewood. It’s gettin’ plumb mean.”

“I want to learn the business. I want to see the buffalo, and what you do, and how you get the hide off. That’s what I’m here for.”

Fitzhugh grinned. “Well, git your winter duds on, and fetch you a knife and ax. And dump that mud so it don’t freeze in the bucket.”

“I didn’t know it got so cold so soon.”

“This hyar’s just a fall blow. We got good weather yet.”

They struck south, with the northwind harrying them along. Fitzhugh rode his snowcaked bay, looking cold, but Dust Devil chose to walk beside the lumbering wagon to keep warm. The oxen, their breaths steaming, had no trouble dragging the empty Pittsburgh, with its chattering wagonsheet, through two or three inches of snow, but coming back would be an ordeal for them if it kept falling out of the sky. Maxim huddled under a blanket in the wagon, looking cold, and the sight awakened her contempt. Why were whitemen such weaklings? It was growing colder, she knew, because Winter Man ruled the world this day.

She felt the soft snow compress under the rawhide soles of her moccasins, and heard the wagonwheels squeak and hiss as they cut a long thin line through the powder. Once they struck a small drift, and the oxen had to lower in their yokes and drag the lumbering wagon through. The cold bit her calves and stung her ears and numbed her fingers, and she drew her capote tighter, and tugged its hood forward. Ahead, the engagés trudged beside the six oxen, breaking a trail for her.

At long last, her man turned them left, toward the river bluffs, and onto a steep trail to the top of them.

“Just beyond the top there,” he said. “I ought to git on up and chase off the coyotes and crows.”

But the grade rose too steeply for the oxen, and they began churning snow into brown muck, skidding and stumbling as the deadweight of the wagon dragged them backwards. The engagés pushed from the rear, while Maxim whipped, but still the oxen made no headway and churned up the foot-deep snow. Then two went down and couldn’t get up because of the grease underfoot. Guerette had to release the front yoke from the tugs, while the rest eased the heavy Pittsburgh back a little, before the downed oxen could stand.

Dust Devil watched contemptuously. A horse drawing a travois would have climbed the grade easily. A few squaws, with a few ponies and travois, could have done what these whitemen didn’t know how to do.

“I guess that’s it,” Fitzhugh said. “Ease the wagon back down there and unhitch them yoke. We’ll take the oxen up top, and then drag the buffler down with ’em.”

The engagés unhooked the oxen and then eased the wagon backward a way, a tricky job that had them sweating and cursing and riding the wagon brake so that it skidded slowly. But at last they had the wagon parked in the Bighorn River bottoms, and walked the yokes of steaming oxen to the top of the bluffs and out into the dished prairie. Fitzhugh looked bewildered for a moment, because the black buffalo carcasses were nowhere to be seen, but eventually he found them, buried in the deepening snow, as white as the terrain around them.

It didn’t take long to pin their front legs together with thong and attach tugs to the beasts. The cows had not yet frozen, and would slide in a limber way over the snow. In fact, when they reached the downgrade, the carcasses tended to slide into the rear of the oxen, and engagés had to grab their tails to keep the carcasses from careening out in front of the ox yokes.

“Maybe we should just pull these hyar buffler back to camp,” her man muttered.