Rocky Mountain Company (24 page)

He waited, feeling the sun warm his buckskin, feeling pain radiate out from his leg, pour from his eyes and out upon his gaze until it smacked the fort. He felt his pain savage the fort, probe it, pierce its cracks, jab at those within, and home of its
bourgeois,
who probably still lay abed, with another stolen squaw. It pleased him, the reaching fingers of his pain, here upon a cold morning in a place unknown to the world, unknown to his innkeeping family in upper New York. It pleased him to think of cowing a fort, and murder, and willfullness and doing exactly as his whim dictated.

Nothing happened. But a head or two poked from a lodge door, only to duck back inside. He lifted his Hawken again, feeling the faint residual heat of the last shot in the fine thirty-four-inch barrel, planning to make more heat. The day had grown brighter, and he could make out the crack dividing the two heavy plank doors, and he sighted the weapon at the crack, and squeezed.

He made a fine racket, and he thought he saw splinters fly from the massive doors where the half-inch round ball struck. But no one moved. He loaded again, picking his fouled nipple clean, watching Fort Cass, but nothing happened. The weak sun promised warmth, but didn’t deliver. If it warmed him, it’d ease his pain, and he didn’t want that. He waited, watching the fort, knowing that it watched back. A pair of black and white magpies burst upward from the stockade, and flew away chattering. Minutes passed, or at least what he reckoned to be minutes. He’d been a long time away from clocks. Fort Cass watched and waited. He walked to and fro, out of boredom, to keep his leg hurting and his temper mean. Off to the east, several Crow women scurried from their lodges toward the river, and into its brush, peering back at him. He spat.

“Hervey. Julius Hervey, come out,” he yelled.

The fort watched him.

“You’re a coward, Hervey.”

He thought he heard his yell echo from the stockade, and thought he heard muffled laughter. The sun lit a log bastion in the northeast corner, and lit the brown suiting of a mortal peering from one of its slit windows.

“Go away,” said Julius Hervey.

Brokenleg fired at the voice, which rose from the slot in the log blockhouse. A white dot blossomed in the waterstained gray log inches away. He heard laughter.

He loaded his fifty-two caliber mountain rifle, the handiwork of Samuel Hawken of St. Louis, taking his time about it, letting the sun blazon him. He wished to be a temptation.

“Go back to Missouri,” Hervey yelled. “Leave the squaw.”

Brokenleg lifted his Hawken and aimed the blade at the slot, and fired. Gray powdersmoke bloomed, and the butt bruised his shoulder. In the fading echo, Hervey laughed. Brokenleg cleaned the fouling from the nipple again, reloaded, and let the sun warm him.

“I have your profit,” said Hervey. “And I’ll have your woman. Your beautiful brown woman. Your wife, Stiffleg.”

From within the post, a stars and stripes rattled up the staff above the bastion, but no breeze teased it. On a staff anchored above the massive gates, a Chouteau and Company banner rode upward, scaring off two angry crows. A mysterious dog appeared from somewhere, trotting along the palisade, lifting its leg to establish proprietorship. Brokenleg followed it with his Hawken.

All the eyes of the fort watched.

“Come out, Hervey,” he yelled.

Some catcalls.

Black barrels poked out here and there, several from the top of the palisade, two from the bastion, and one from a small port near the gate. Sunlight magnified the ones projecting from the bastion, turning them into cannon whose bores pointed at Brokenleg. The rest lay in blue shade along the north palisade, and were almost indistinguishable. Brokenleg turned his back on them and studied the river, flowing aquamarine in the bright morning. The waters would eventually flow past St. Louis, and then past New Orleans, carrying any blood spilled on its banks.

“Hervey: Stay inside of there,” Fitzhugh yelled. “Don’t ever set foot outside.”

“I have your outfit,” Hervey replied. “And Dust Devil next.”

Fitzhugh sighed. Hervey wouldn’t come out. Maybe he could keep Hervey in. Keep them all in. Keep the Crows away. He’d think about it. Meanwhile he had to build his fort, somehow. Tiredness hit him. He walked west, toward the trace up the Bighorn.

Behind he heard laughter, and a ragged volley of shots. Balls plowed the naked yellow earth near him, but none came very close. He stopped. He was not inclined to give the appearance of fleeing. A ball singed past him, whispering through the fringes of his elkskin coat, followed by a familiar laugh. It didn’t matter. Hervey wouldn’t come out. Brokenleg felt nothing, and limped away.

Maxim surveyed the camp solemnly, not knowing what to make of it all. Save for the sound of distant axes among the cottonwoods, the morning lay deathly quiet. The engagés had given up on the livestock, and returned to construction work. Dust Devil had vanished somewhere. She probably was digging roots along the river, he thought. She did that often, patiently extracting a thick brown root full of white meat, something like a carrot. Or perhaps she’d gone out among the dead oxen, butchering. And Fitzhugh had vanished in the night carrying his rifle. It struck him as foolishness. The man was supposed to be a trader.

The youth sighed, not knowing what to do or think. He ached to go home, to warmth and soft beds and regular baths with hot water. He felt grimy and cold and constantly tired from sleeping on the ground, where the cold seeped upward and numbed him in the night, stealing rest. The hunger to go home had become desperate in him. It began long ago, when the blankets had vanished from the tradegoods he was watching over. He’d emerged from that feeling too young, too small, for the tasks assigned him. His homesickness had deepened when they’d discovered they couldn’t just move into old Fort Cass, with its comforts, but had to build a new post out of nothing. And then the rest, the wound, the fever, the despair of seeing his father’s wealth swallowed up by Fort Cass, had plunged him into a melancholy he couldn’t shake off. Monsieur Fitzhugh did not have a single buffalo robe to show for all of this expense and labor.

Dust Devil was probably out butchering an ox to make jerky. He wandered that direction, over frosted grass, in heatless sunlight, looking for her. He dreaded being anywhere near her when she was using her knife, but he forced himself. He could hang the thin strips on a pole rack she’d built for drying. He wondered why they bothered. The only thing impelling him out into the meadows was his father’s admonition to be helpful, and learn, and give of himself in all the ways he could.

But she wasn’t there. He walked among the corpses, lying so still and cold, the Crow arrows still poking from them. He could never get used to death, and it frightened him. He’d scarcely thought about it until the fever burned him up and his young body refused to work, and then it had terrified him. He wanted to see
papa
and
maman
again; he wanted to go home.

The oxen wouldn’t rot, he knew, not as long as the nights were icy and the days not much above freezing. They’d save Fitzhugh some hunting. But it was odd she wasn’t here, slicing meat before the crows and magpies and coyotes got it. He hated butchering, and was glad he didn’t have to help. He hated the sight of organs, of heart and long pearly guts, and purple things, which brought the gorge up in his throat. All those things were inside of him, too, and he knew someone could butcher him the way an ox or a buffalo was butchered.

Desolately he walked back to camp. He had no livestock to herd, no camp chores to do, and for once he was at loose ends. He peered darkly at the sturdy amber walls of the post, hating it, knowing how much of his family’s treasure had been expended on that rock and mud. He nourished dark thoughts about Monsieur Fitzhugh and that Monsieur Dance, too, who’d lured his
papa
away from the family business into — this. Into disaster. What did
papa
really know about running a fur post? And competing with the Chouteaus, lords of all the western wilderness? Nothing!

Even while he stood solemnly before the tent and the ashes of the last fire, the object of his thoughts limped grimly into sight, looking haggard. Fitzhugh glared at him from pain-fired eyes, and at the cold ashes, and Maxim glared back at this man who would be the cause of his family’s grief.

“What’re you lazing for? Where’s Dust Devil?”

“I don’t know.”

“Find her. Git me some vittles.”

“I looked for her.”

Fitzhugh muttered something under his breath, and glared at the cottonwood forest, where the sound of axblows drifted to them.

“Where did you go?” Maxim asked.

“Had a score to settle at Cass.” He took a step toward the woods, and Maxim saw his lips writhe with pain. Then Fitzhugh deliberately stood on his bad leg, throwing weight on it, while the features of his face hardened into a kind of granite, and his eyes laid sparks upon Maxim. Fitzhugh stepped toward the cottonwoods, at whatever terrible cost to his body. Maxim followed, admiring the man even thought he’d come to despise him.

They found the engagés near the river, debarking and shaping a long twisted cottonwood limb with their axes and the adze. They’d felled a ridgepole, Maxim realized. But cottonwoods were thick and crooked and perverse, and this ridgepole needed the improvements of the axe and adze to thin its thick end, flatten a hump, and reduce its diameter. The ten men had whittled the huge log like furious termites, until now it had become a proper ridgepole.

“Ah, Monsieur Fitzhugh,” said Trudeau. “The cottonwood, she is not the best for this. But we have no choice, yes?”

Fitzhugh stared at the giant white pole, virgin white in the gray woods. Beside it were a half a dozen short lengths of log stripped of bark. “I didn’t get any stock,” he said shortly. “It’s penned inside Cass.”

“Ah! Monsieur, you don’t know what beasts Creoles are. We pole the
bateaux
— the boats up the river. We drag them on ropes if we must. We are ox.”

Trudeau grinned, but Fitzhugh’s face remained solemn and haggard.

“I read in the books when I am little, monsieur. The ancient Greek, the one called Archimedes of Syracuse, he says that if he had a lever long enough and a fulcrum, he could move the world,
oui?”
Trudeau waved his hand grandly. “We make the ridgepole. We cut levers from saplings. We make rollers. And we’re like the ox. Now you’ll see!” He waved at his men.
“Allons, allons.”

The burly men jumped into action. Several grabbed long poles, while others carried those short lengths of wood that Maxim had supposed were for fires. Another tied a stout manila rope to the lighter end of the ridgepole, and tugged on it. In moments, eight men had jammed their levers as far under the ridgepole as possible, and set the levers on log fulcrums. Then, without command, they tugged downward on their levers, lifting the ridgepole easily, while the remaining engagés shoved those white rollers underneath, until the ridgepole rested on a set of them.

“Ah! We will roll it now to the post!” Trudeau cried. Eight men grabbed the rope, hunkered low, and pulled. The ridgepole rolled easily. The remaining two lifted freed rollers from the rear, and ran forward with them to drop ahead of the sliding ridgepole. Maxim gaped. Even Fitzhugh’s flinty gaze seemed to soften as the great log slid easily out of the woods and over meadow, drawn by laughing, joking engagés as if it were a mere stick.

“We are better than oxen,
n’est-ce pas?”
cried Trudeau.

Maxim felt a stirring of pride in them. Excitement flushed the despair from him as the naked beam bounced and bobbed clear to the post, never halting. He ached with the need to believe that everything would work out; that loss of all the stock would not defeat them. But he couldn’t. Even this miracle would come to nothing.

There remained the awesome task of raising the pole to its final resting place at the peak. They would have to do it without the help of block and tackle, and without much help from levers, either. About this the engagés argued furiously. Some wished to build a ramp of poles and roll the ridgepole up it with ropes. A ramp would be an enormous undertaking. Others wanted to stand the ridgepole on one end, using levers and ropes, and then maneuver that end into the hollow prepared for it in the peaked chimney wall, using the longer wall as a fulcrum. Then they could lift the other end with ropes, they argued.

Maxim listened, fascinated, while the ten engagés debated. He had no idea which would work, or whether neither would work and they’d end up where they were before the oxen were slaughtered.

Fitzhugh listened to the bedlam a moment, obviously not grasping the rattle of French, and turned instead toward the camp, puzzlement in his face. He was plainly wondering about Dust Devil. He limped toward the frayed wagonsheet tent, and clambered awkwardly inside, something he could manage only by bending at the waist because of his stiff leg. Maxim saw him flailing about in the creamy light within, pawing at parfleches and trunks, muttering angrily. Then he crabbed back out, looking bitten.

“Capote’s gone. Winter moccasins gone. Little doeskin tote bag o’ hers gone. Some other stuff. Blouses, and all that.” He glared icily into Maxim’s eyes. “Don’t you got eyes, boy? Don’t you keep track none? My squaw’s took off and lit out to her people, and you let her go.”

She would take her name back. She was Little Whirlwind to the Tsistsistas, the People, not Dust Devil. At the top of the bluff she turned south and began the long walk, the walk that might never end. She didn’t expect her man to come after her, but she would be wary anyway. He was a cunning tracker — not like one of her people, but good enough for a pale-skinned man — and might catch a glimpse of a faint moccasin print. That’s why she had climbed the bluff before following the Bighorn river south.

She couldn’t fathom her own complex feelings. She loved Fitzhugh; loved his vast red beard, and his half-bald head with red hair cascading from the back half down to his shoulders. She loved his hard blue eyes, bits of sky painted like two chips of rock in his freckled face. She loved his flinty laughter and the tenderness of his lovemaking, a gentleness she knew wasn’t common among the men of her people.