Rocky Mountain Company (25 page)

Her marriage to a trader made her a great woman among her people, too. Not a girl of her village didn’t envy her the marriage, and the things it brought, such as all the bright flannels she could ever want, and brass cooking pots, and keen knives. But above all, it brought her prestige. She had become as important as Owl Woman, of the southern Tsistsistas, who had married the great trader, William Bent, thereby cementing an alliance between the southern Cheyennes and the Bent family. In 1837, Bent had gone to Owl Woman’s father, Gray Thunder, the keeper of the sacred arrows, and asked for the hand of his beautiful daughter. And so it had been arranged, even as her own father, One Leg Eagle, the keeper of the medicine hat, had arranged her marriage to Fitzhugh, although Brokenleg had been a trapper then, and not a trader.

Still, she thought, he had his weaknesses. She wanted slaves, lots of them, to lord over, to treat like dogs, to do the drudging, the hide-scraping, the cooking. She didn’t mind cooking — that was her time-honored task — but it would be more fun to make slaves do it. All she wanted was a few slaves, a couple of clumsy Crow women, and maybe a Cree or Blackfoot too. But the more she nagged him about it, the more he laughed and told her he didn’t like slavery. What strange notions white men had.

She came to the place where Fitzhugh had killed the three buffalo, and decided she’d walked far enough from camp so she could slip back down to the river bottoms. She hiked down the long grade where the wagon had stalled in the muck, and then turned south again. It felt a little warmer in the bottoms, and the wind didn’t cut through her capote so angrily. She would have to be careful now: a lone woman would be prey to any of the enemies of her people. She would be safe only among the Tsistsistas or the Dakota people, the allies of hers. The others might make a slave of her, but she would be a very bad slave, and kill them.

The moons of time spent in St. Louis had changed everything. She had seen things beyond her wildest imagination, and more of the pale-skinned people, and black-skinned too, than she thought could exist on the earth. She saw buildings of rock and brick, and carriages, and shops full of whiteman’s magic, where one could get things by trading gold metal, or silver, or colored paper for them. She had seen pianos and harps with her own eyes, and whole shelves of books with mysterious symbols in them. She had seen the place on Washington Street where the rifles were made. She had seen them building with red bricks, all alike, and a gray mud that turned to rock when it dried. She had listened to a group of men, all dressed in blue, who played gold-colored horns Fitzhugh called brass instruments, trombones, trumpets, tubas. And on the great Father of Rivers she saw more of the fireboats than she’d ever imagined. She could not tell the Tsistsistas the smallest part of all she saw because they’d call her a liar. But that isn’t what disturbed her. She had glimpsed the future, the medicine beyond the imagining of her people, and it made her wonder about the Four Arrows, and Sweet Medicine, and the Sacred Hat, and all the wisdom of her Suhtai. She had come away from St. Louis changed, unsure whether to return to her people, unsure whether to remain with Fitzhugh.

He’d hated St. Louis, and itched to escape and become like the Tsistsistas again. But she’d seen it — she knew he couldn’t escape his origins. He had been a whiteman in St. Louis, even if he was like herself here. At any time he could go back, or become the way he was. She dreaded that: she’d always thought he had become like her and her clan. But St. Louis had changed that. She knew he would never be like her. She ached to see her people once again now, and seek out the medicine men, Big Dog especially, and find out if she needed a new name and spirit-helper. Then maybe she could decide about Fitzhugh.

She set an easy gait south, wishing her blanket capote weren’t a bright scarlet, with black bands at its top and bottom. Most of the blankets that capotes were sewn from were white, and good camouflage, especially in winter. But not this: anyone could see her. She had let her vanity overcome good sense. She hadn’t the faintest idea where she’d find her village, but it probably would be a long way. Maybe near the Black Hills, what the Dakota people called Paha Sapa, a place sacred to her own people, too, because of Bear Butte. She could not speak the tongue of the Dakotas to ask them where her own village might be. And she didn’t know all the finger signs either, but a few: enough to tell them who she was.

The land lay brown and gold and tan and gray in this Freezing Moon, just before Big Hard Face Moon, when the Cold Maker could kill her with his breath out of the north. The birds of summer had fled, and she walked through a surrendered land, when all living things had fled, burrowed, or begun a long sleep. Still, her spirit-helper, crow-bird, flew about, sometimes bursting up ahead of her, angry at her intrusion upon the somnolent quiet. And she knew coyote slinked and wolf stalked, and the deer and elk grazed.

All the day she walked toward her people, drawn as surely as the magical compass needle Fitzhugh had shown her pointed north. What medicine white men had a needle that always pointed north? When Sun began fleeing, she paused, seeking a little shelter, a place she might strike a hidden fire and make a tiny cup of broth from her jerky and berries. She eyed the sky anxiously: the one thing she dreaded was a storm, but she saw only transparent air, fading from blue to indigo as Sun slipped into the earth. Shelter didn’t worry her much. With a fire and her poncho over her capote, she’d be warm and dry. She wasn’t as soft as whitemen, and didn’t need the things they did. She’d walked all day and scarcely felt it, and didn’t need much to eat, either. If she found a camping place soon, she’d dig roots and add them to the jerky, and be filled.

The whinny of a pony ahead arrested her. Swiftly she ducked toward the cottonwoods and slid behind a barrier of red-barked brush, and there she unrolled her white poncho and slid it over her scarlet capote, making herself a spirit-person. She would have to find out who these ones were, creep close. The thought that they might be her own Tsistsistas swelled in her, and she dreamed of swift chatter in her own tongue, naming names and hearing names she knew. But it might not be: she was still farther north and west than they came, except to steal ponies from the Crow or Blackfeet.

But it might be dogs. She would have to see without being seen. Her pulse rose with the undertaking. If they were seasoned warriors, they might have keener eyes and ears and noses than she. They might read the sudden lift of a pony’s nose, or the rotation of its ears. Sometimes warriors knew without knowing why they knew, their medicine whispering to them, that something lurked beyond the camp, and even what would be found there. And if they were a war party, they might have a sentry posted upon some bluff, who might have long since spotted her in her scarlet capote, walking southward up the Bighorn.

But this was probably not a horse-stealing party, because those walked on foot and rode stolen ponies home if they were successful. They could be anything. She made swift plans: she would need to see them. If they were enemy dogs, she would slip toward the bluffs to the east for safety. Danger would lurk anywhere on the river bottoms. Up on the bluffs she would circle around them, and camp up there, and as far away as she could get with nightwalking. If they caught her, they might use her, or torture her to death as slowly as possible and count it good. She understood these things without thinking about them.

It was not yet twilight but color had bled from the world, and the scene about her had turned gray and blue. She saw no fire burning through the naked latticework of cottonwoods and brush, though she studied everything ahead with care. She slid along the edge of a meadow in her gray poncho, easing toward the single sound that had alerted her, the whicker. The valley bent sharply around a headland ahead, and just there she saw horses picketed on the meadow, dark restless shapes, all of them swinging to stare at her. She froze. They would be closely guarded. She counted only four of them, and felt safer at once.

She walked forward while the ponies watched, and was rewarded by the sight of a small fire that had been hidden by the long shoulder running down from the bluffs. She froze, not wanting her motion to betray her. Several packs lay on the earth below the sheltering mudstone outcrop, and she recognized some of them as baled up beaver plews. A sheet of canvas had been rigged up into a half-shelter in the lee of the bluff and out of the wind. And sitting crosslegged before it was a bearded whiteman. It paralyzed her. Not whitemen. The few that had come in the days of the beaver trapping had left. She would not stop here, then. She never knew how whitemen would behave. But she always knew how tribesmen would conduct themselves. This one terrified her: he wore his brown hair loose over his shoulders, like her own man; and had a great, curly beard streaked with gray. He wore a flappy widebrimmed felt hat, ancient and dirty. She didn’t like his eyes, which peered this way and that, like an evil feather dusting everything in sight. No. She would pass this one, and began to sidle back, so she could head for the bluffs and walk a great circle around this one.

That’s when an iron hand clamped around her neck from behind, and the other steely arm patted swiftly for weapons and then clamped around her waist.

“What kinda Injun lady we got here?” the man behind her asked. “Hey, Abner, I catched us a redskin maiden.”

She didn’t struggle, and didn’t respond. Let them think she didn’t know their tongue. A terrible despair pierced through her as she felt the hard-muscled arms of the one behind her steal her freedom. He walked her firmly, but not violently, into the circle of firelight that oranged a lavender gloom. He loosed her near the fire, but lounged easily, prepared to leap at her if she tried to flee. White dogs, she thought, but wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of talking in their tongue. She wouldn’t be tortured to death, but she might be used and thrown aside by these slinking curs.

“You fetched us some comp’ny, Zach,” said the one at the fire, slowly eyeing her. “I can’t rightly make out what tribe she is. Can you?”

The one that had caught her like an eagle snatching a minnow had black hair he’d plaited into two braids, like those of her own people. But he wasn’t one. He was a square-faced white, with a wide mashed nose that had seen many a brawl, and curious brown eyes that peered intently at her.

Trappers. She saw it now. A pair of them, not unlike her man, and Jamie Dance, with a load of stretched beaverskins and ponies to carry themselves, their catch, and their supplies.

“Maybe she’s one of Bug’s Boys,” Abner said thoughtfully, his gaze feathering over and around every naked cottonwood in sight. “But I don’t reckon it. They’d have our poor old scalps danglin’ from their lances if they was.”

Zach tugged aside the poncho, revealing her scarlet capote. “She’s got her a nice outfit, seems like. I don’t reckon she’s alone, though. I guess mebbe we should douse that fire and be a leetle keerful.”

The one called Abner made sign talk: Who are you? he asked her, and waited easily. She didn’t know whether to answer. But then she made the sign for her people. With her right forefinger she drew three sharp diagonal slashes across her extended left forefinger, and waited proudly. The sign said Cut Arms, the term that all the plain tribes used to describe the Tsistsistas.

“Why, I reckon we catched us a Cheyenne lady,” said Abner. “And plumb alone. Do you think she’s friendly?”

Robert Campbell drained his coffee cup and peered vacantly through the rain-dashed window of the Planters dining room. Guy knew he was seeing things, remembering rendezvous fifteen hundred miles away in the Rocky Mountains, conjuring up trips down the great rivers in mackinaws, with bales of beaver in the bellies of the boats. Campbell had been there, and had turned that intimate knowledge into a fortune. He’d become the great financier of the opposition, including Dance, Fitzhugh, and Straus.

“Don’t,” he said at last, his piercing eyes turning at last to Guy Straus, across the white-linened table. “They need you here.”

Guy sighed. He’d been torn between the need to race up the river and the demands placed upon him by Straus et Fils. He needed also to be on hand to send urgently needed goods out the Santa Fe trail. The Yellowstone operation was only a third of his business. “But they’ll have to build a post. And I want to bring Maxim back down — “

Campbell smiled bleakly. “The waiting’s terrible, isn’t it? But Guy — don’t go yourself. It’d take four months at least — four months of hardship, danger, and the possibility of illness. You’re a city-bred man. You’d make it up there in good enough weather, but coming down, Guy — what if the river froze? Can Fitzhugh spare the men to build a mackinaw for you, and man it?”

“But Chouteau’s got Hervey at Cass, and heaven knows — “

“We in St. Louis wait. And wait,” Campbell said. “It’s part of the fur business. No, Guy. You, too, will learn to wait.”

Guy grew aware of his own helplessness. He’d done all he could, selecting men he knew would act wisely. But now doubts caught him: would Brokenleg Fitzhugh be a good man out there? Would he care for Maxim? Would the entire effort collapse and ruin the family wealth?

“He’s got to build a post somewhere,” Campbell said, intuiting some of what was in Guy’s mind. “That’ll mean delay and difficulty. He can’t possibly be trading. Not with only ten engagés.”

“There aren’t any other posts they can occupy?”

Campbell shrugged. “Lisa’s has disappeared. Others burnt.”

“He wasn’t well equipped for building. He doesn’t even have hardware. Hinges for the gates and doors. Nails. Tools. A drawknife, hammers. A serious omission on our part.”

“Send them.”

“An express?”

“You want information. You also have a unique trade item to send up the river. And if worse comes to worse, you want an experienced man to bring Maxim down the river. But it won’t be cheap.”

Campbell was alluding to several hundred osage orange sticks, each carefully selected and prime bow wood, a prized item among the northern tribes.