Rocky Mountain Company (27 page)

He spent a foul-mood day with her, following her about like a starved pup, and the next night, scarcely after sundown, she’d turned her back to him, slid out of her whitened wedding doeskin with its quilled bodice, tugging it over her black locks, and untied the sacred knot at her waist, and unwound the woven ropes that ducked between her legs, as solemnly as receiving a communion wafer on the tongue, and stood lean and honeyed and arched as a foot-caught hawk. Then she’d turned and smiled, a wildfire burning across her face.

Oh, the feel of her! Oh, the wrap of her slim arms and the velvet of her belly, and all the joys that raced those moments by! Oh, the strength in him that renewed itself faster than it was spent! With the next red dawn, he knew he’d fallen in love. Either that or had rendezvoused in heaven.

“Now you will be a great warrior,” she said. “I have made it so. I am Suhtai.”

He’d scarcely known what all that was about, but he made haste to find out. Later, Dance peered at him smirkily, but he ignored his old trapping pal and sought the elders, bearing a twist of tobacco, so he might fatten his knowing about the Suhtai and their medicine hat and all the rest. He figured he’d gotten him some kind of priestess.

“You’ll make a great warrior and bring me many scalps,” she said the next night, her face alive with triumph after they’d coupled.

“Me, I’m a trapper, Little Whirlwind. I’m a trapper. I got a stiff leg.”

“You are stiff, yes,” she said solemnly, and only her shining brown eyes betrayed her mischief. “Make war again.”

He didn’t think he could, but he did.

He stood on the bank, his weight off his bum leg, remembering all that and the strange corkscrewed union that had followed for several winters more. They’d fetched no child, and he wondered about it, and thought she might be drinking some herb tea — or something. He’d an inkling she didn’t want his miserable whiteman blood mixed with her own. But it had never been addressed, and he didn’t want to probe.

He’d been a squawman, all right. And it hadn’t been all that close, this union of theirs, at least not the way whitemen make out a good marriage. He wondered how other squawmen fared, whether the same rocky walls existed, or whether it was just him and his Suhtai Cheyenne who inherited all the mysterious distances. How did Alec Culbertson up at Fort Union fare with his Natawista, daughter of Blood Indian chiefs? How did James Kipp and Malcolm Clarke, the other American Fur traders up there, do with their Mandan and Cree ladies? Had they confronted barriers as vast and mysterious as the ones cleaving his own marriage?

He peered angrily at the roiling water, at life flowing by with helpless leaves on its breast. He desperately wanted her back. He’d gone hollow in the moment when he had found her gone. He’d scarcely known, until now, how much they’d become one in spirit and soul, as different as they were. They’d been knitted by something that transcended language and custom, and it was enough, ample, that she presided in the lodge, like an anchor on his restless life. He’d win her back; he’d find a way. He’d light off to her village somehow and knuckle the shamans, spread tobacco, sweat the grease and armpit stink out of him in a steaming lodge, whip his hot flesh with sweet sage, and ask her to be his lady again. But even as he thought these things, he understood their futility. She was gone. And more than loss, he felt anger rising in him, as dark and hard as basalt.

Dust Devil relaxed a bit when they handed her a generous slab of meat, charred black on the outside from its crude roasting on a spit, but juicy and tough inside, so that she had to chew endlessly to reduce the meat to something she could swallow. She saw a doe hanging with its haunch cut away.

“She don’t speak English none, but maybe you could try some of that Cheyenne you got on her,” Abner said.

“I forgot it, and my jaw’s plumb rusted shut if it’s Cheyenne’s talk,” Zach said. “Odd she’s alone. Like she was going for a hike. You suppose she’s got relatives lurking around?”

“None as I could see. She’d be on a horse if they was, most likely, and not dressed like some Injun princess. She looks like some trapper’s woman to me.”

She pretended not to understand, but their speculations worried her. She was carrying too many whiteman things. At least they seemed to mean her no harm — so far. She didn’t like the way Abner’s gaze feathered over her, settling lightly on her capote, obviously curious about what lay within. She chewed the tough meat, and stared into the flames, letting herself be night-blinded by them. The warmth felt pleasant, and the meat satiated her hunger.

“You reckon she’d enjoy some little fun tonight,” Zach?”

“Cheyenne,” Zach replied.

“Scratch my eyes out,” Abner said, thoughtfully.

She felt grateful for that. She’d have cried Suhtai at them rather than Cheyenne. She wasn’t like those easy Crow women, who’d lie on their back for a ribbon or a mirror.

“I’m not one to twist arms and go where I ain’t wanted,” Zach said. “I’d plumb feel bad doin’ that.”

Abner nodded, but never stopped gazing at her. She gazed back at him imperiously, letting her eyes tell him she didn’t traffic with smelly verminous dogs.

“I suppose we’ll git a notion about her when we reach Cass,” Abner said. “Maybe she’s some engagé’s woman, all decked out like that.” He turned to her.
“Parlez-vous Francais?”

The tongue of the engagés. She stared at him dumbly, and then tried her Cheyenne on them. “I am Little Whirlwind, of the band of White Wolf, and a Suhtai, daughter of medicine man of the Tsistsistas’,” she said.

“You make sense of that, Zach?”

“Only two words, Suhtai and Tsistsistas.”

“You suppose we ought to take her on up to Cass? Like she’s maybe runnin’ off from one of them traders up there?”

“It don’t figure to be our business, Abner. Maybe she’s just going to her people.”

She listened intently. These two didn’t know of Fitzhugh’s new post, nor was there any reason they should. The post was scarcely built, and wouldn’t be trading for a while anyway. But they would discover it en route to Fort Cass, where they obviously were going to trade their beaver skins. They would discover her man, and would tell him about her. But it’d be nothing he didn’t know. Fitzhugh knew exactly where she was going.

She addressed the black-braided one called Zach, in English. “I am Little Whirlwind — Dust Devil — and my man is Robert Fitzhugh,” she said quietly.

They gaped.

“I am going to my people,” she added.

“Fitzhugh! Brokenleg!”

She nodded solemnly. “Tell him I have come this far safely,” she said.

“Where’s he? How come you to be here — “

“He’s building a post a day’s walk north. Near Fort Cass.”

“Fitzhugh’s trading? Jamie Dance with him?”

She shook her head. “He’s gone out to the Comanche and Kiowa.”

“Jamie’s tradin’ too? How come — “

“They have a buffalo robe company, Dance, Fitzhugh and Straus,” she said.

“Well, hyar’s news!” Zach said. “How come ye not to have a pony, Dust Devil?”

“All were stolen by Absaroka dogs.”

“Ol Fitzhugh — he’s in some fix, is he?”

“He needs ponies.”

“He’s alone up yonder?”

“He has ten engagés and the boy — the son of Monsieur Straus.”

“How come ye not to speak plain English at first?”

“I do not know who you are.”

Zach stared at her, understanding her caution. “I mind the time him and Dance and me lifted a mighty jug or three at rendezvous,” he said. “Fitzhugh, that was how he made his bad leg quit hurting a whiles, with the jugs. He’d come to the rendezvous, and dicker for a few jugs, and then he’d not have a hurting leg for a few days. You his woman, you say?”

She nodded, not sure inside of herself. “I am going to my people.”

“You runnin’ from him?”

“He knows,” she replied. She wouldn’t speak to these smelling dogs any more, and drew her capote tight around her. The night had begun to bite at her neck and ears.

“Well, ain’t this just like old days. I reckon we’ll go piss up his rope tomorrah. He tradin’ yet by any chance?”

She shook her head. “I will go now,” she said, rising.

“I reckon you can stay here safe enough. Warmer, too, with heat from that fire catched up the half-shelter.” She eyed them carefully, seeing no harm in them. But one never knew about whitemen.

“I am Fitzhugh’s woman,” she said, and sat down again.

Well before dawn she slid away from them, through a biting cold, feeling a scab of frost on the wounded earth. Abner watched in the dark, his gaze feathering over her, but didn’t stop her. He slept the way most mountain men slept, instantly awake at the slightest change in the rhythms of the night. She stepped south, with no dawn to guide her, but only the cold star of the north bearing icily on her back. That and the soft rustle of the river now and then, and a star-shadowed trace.

She walked up the Bighorn River that day under a carpet of scudding clouds, seeing no one. Vees of geese honked over her, fleeing the Cold Maker. The damp wind cut through her capote, but it harried her along. She slid the canvas poncho over her scarlet coat, as much to subdue the wind as for camouflage. The world had turned vast, stretching beyond the imagination, and she didn’t know where her people might be. All the day she didn’t talk to a soul, though she paused to invite a crow-bird, her medicine helper, to lead her. But crow-bird wasn’t hearing, and cawed away, indignant at the intrusion into its dominions. She didn’t feel hunger until late in the day, when light simply faded from the gray overcast. She found a place easily, a hollow in the wind-sculpted rock back from the river, well concealed by a copse of jackpine, which dulled the relentless blade of arctic air as well. Back on the river, in a slough, she found a whole hollow of frost-murdered arrowhead, or tule potato, and these she pulled upward from their cold slime beds, until she had all she could carry. These she washed carefully, and toted to her camp, where she set her tiny cup over a fire, and roasted one cut-up tuber. She had enough to last for days.

She sat subdued in the dark, her back against the hollow of rock, wanting wisdom. Each day she walked, the world seemed only to grow larger until she felt she had accomplished nothing but was only making the endless world larger by adding steps to it. Beyond her glade, wind gusted through the long-needled pine, shivering it, and she saw that the overcast had slid away, going south like everything else. She could not see out upon the river valley, so she let her tiny fire die so anyone out there could not see in. Above, she saw winter-stars, harder, whiter, larger than summerstars, which lay soft and blurred. She knew time ebbed away, and she was not as wise as the geese that had honked their terror of the north as they flew over her.

She didn’t know where to go. She had looked for signs along the river, signs of her people, the cairns and feather-symbols of passage, and saw none she could identify as the Tsistsistas. Her village could be twenty sleeps away. Did Sweet Medicine watch over another land now, or had Little Whirlwind’s long congress with whites destroyed her knowing? She’d lost the knowing, the knowledge that came without thought, of where her people would surely be. Her hands had numbed under the subtle chafe of the icy air, and she tucked them under her capote, and pulled its hood over her hair. These were poor defenses against Cold Maker compared to the warmth of a good Cheyenne lodge.

She decided to keep a vigil this night and think only of the medicine things of her people, and trust that by dawn she would know, the sacred knowing would tell her where to go. She missed her man, Fitzhugh, but yearned for her people, and feared she might fall into some terrible fissure in the earth between her man and her people, and never again be seen.

That afternoon, in cold dying light, Brokenleg watched his wild past trot into the present on ponies. He recognized them far off, and hailed them in. Abner Spoon and Zachary Constable had been free trappers back in the sweet singing days of the beaver, and a decade or so ago the pair of them, Jamie Dance, himself, and others had headed out from rendezvous into the aching wilds, a small company sticking together for protection, gathering the precious plews from icy creeks and whiling away the firelit nights with mad yarning and woolly good humor.

“Brokenleg, ye old coon,” said Zach. “I figgered ye’d hightailed outa the mountains years ago.”

“Me? Why I don’t fit nowhere in the States,” Fitzhugh replied, his heart gladdening at these spectres from the dead. Around him engagés paused and stared amiably from their precarious perches on the roofbeams.

“What ya got here, Fitzhugh?” asked Abner, gazing across the rising post.

“A ticket to the mountains is what,” Brokenleg replied. “I’m a partner in a robe outfit. Jamie’s another, but he’s down pestering the Bents.”

“Well, hyar’s news,” Abner said. “Findin’ your ugly busted carcass here. They all gone away, at least mostwise, when the beaver wasn’t worth nothing, and half trapped out anyway. All the porkeaters took off like scairt rabbits. But me and Zach, we just got the itch to stay and we git on, one way or another, half-starved mostly. In thirty-nine, we couldn’t even find the rendezvous, and got half-scairt when nary a coon set foot on the Green. Like we was out here all alone, two stray geese after the rest flapped off to the south. Baddest moment we ever had. But we trade a little. We get enough plews for powder and shot, a little coffee and sugar, and a jug or three.”

“You’re staying in the mountains?”

Zach turned solemn. “Brokenleg, this hyar land’s bit us. We’re land-bit. The pair of us, we got to starvin’ after the beaver went under and all the old coons took off for Oregon or Taos or Santa Fe, and we get to thinkin’ we’re plumb alone, and maybe we’d better git on back like some civilized folks, and get us a wife and farm, and all — well, you know how that went. We got as far as Westport, and some sharpers cleaned us of drinkin’ money, and some other gents tells us we could hire on for a dollar a day doin’ this and that. And I looks at Abner and he looks at me and we rode back out the Platte trail, worrying Injuns all the way, and now we’re free trappers with hardly a dime betwixt and between.”