Rocky Mountain Company (32 page)

“I’m afraid — “

“They ain’t goin’ to shoot us.”

“I never forget,” Hervey said, enjoying himself behind there.

But Fitzhugh dragged the terrified boy back, away from the palisade. No rifles poked out, no head peeked over its top, and a minute later they’d scrambled beyond rifle range.

“You tried to kill him,” Maxim accused.

“I got that in me, boy.”

“He would have opened up. He was just toying with us until you — “

“This isn’t St. Louis, boy.”

“It doesn’t matter where you are! There’s right and wrong wherever you are!”

“I reckon you’re right. A feller can be daid right. I prefer to be hellish wrong. Out here, Bug’s Boys and the like don’t have our notions. There’s prizes to take and they get took. That’s how come your pap joined up with Jamie Dance and meself.”

He felt no pain at all during the long limp home because his blood pounded through him. But Maxim had turned silent and hostile, and Fitzhugh felt a kind of pity that a lad with such ideals had to see life without law, both God’s and men’s.

He found the engagés had built some rough slabwood bunks and cut some firewood that day. But the hunters had stumbled back with nothing — not an elk or deer or antelope or buffalo, no roots or berries or seed; no fish or ducks or geese or crows. And every one of the twelve, himself included, felt faint with hunger. In a day or two it’d anchor them to their pallets.

Hervey had laughed, knowing all about it.

The terrible thing about starving, Maxim discovered, is that it doesn’t go away. The craving consumed him wherever he was. It assailed him when he rested quietly on his pallet; it agonized him when he walked or sat. The smallest exertion set his heart to racing, and a dizziness engulfed him.

Some engagés had boiled rawhide and wolfed its bitter broth, but most stared gloomily at the new day, a bright one with the low sun blazing off snow.

They glared at Fitzhugh, who’d stored so much of the fort’s supplies behind the impenetrable palisades of Fort Cass. Any one of them could desert Fitzhugh’s company, show up unarmed at Cass, and find a berth and plentiful food there. Maxim wondered how long their loyalty would endure, how great the temptation would become before they staggered the four miles to the American Fur post.

Silently they shrugged into their capotes and hats and mittens, and gathered their powderhorns and mountain rifles. One took the company’s sole fowling piece with him. Another found an ax to chop a hole in the gray ice of the Bighorn, and a sharpened willow wand he’d fashioned into a barbed spear. Maxim watched them hopelessly, knowing their stomachs hurt as badly as his own — maybe worse because they toiled constantly.

He drew inside of himself and searched his soul, trying to find the fortitude to endure. He couldn’t find anything in himself to allay the hunger. He closed his eyes and desperately invoked the help of God, turning his back upon the others so they might not see him and laugh. No comfort came to him, but he had the haunting feeling that he had been heard by some ear, some majestic force he could scarcely fathom.

“Maxim, boy. These hyar are starvin’ times, and we got to hunt. Let’s you and me go fetch us some vittles.”

Maxim turned to find Brokenleg behind him, outfitted for the cold, his Hawken cradled in the crook of his arm.

“I can’t,” Maxim mumbled. He wanted to save his strength. Exercise would make everything worse.

“Fetch that sack along. We’ll fill it afore the sun sets,” Fitzhugh said, but Maxim knew empty talk when he heard it.

They braved a vicious cold, but at least one without wind. The air lay quiet and heavy as lead, and the sun kindled no warmth with its glaring rays. Maxim followed Fitzhugh wearily, feeling shaky, caring nothing about where they were going because only his stomach filled his mind. But Fitzhugh surprised him, limping gingerly out upon the river ice, testing with each step, listening to the ominous cracks and snaps. He motioned Maxim to stay well behind and spread the weight. But eventually they stepped onto the western shore, a forest of naked cottonwoods similar to the eastern one.

“Nobody’s fetched himself over hyar,” he said. “From now on, don’t talk unless you got to. With this leg I’m not much of a stalker, but don’t make it no worse.”

Fitzhugh trudged straight through the wooded area to the open flats beyond, heading for the whited bluffs. Maxim watched alertly, but the hunger seemed to weaken his eyes so thing swam. He spotted nothing: no slinking coyotes, no winter-white hares, no geese or ducks, not even a crow in that silent deadly cold. Fitzhugh began puffing up the bluff, and then halted suddenly.

“Hyar,” he said softly.

Maxim stared, puzzled. Fitzhugh pointed at a thicket of prickly pear.

“Git your knife out and cut them. Get the pears.”

“But — “

“Cut, boy. The pears can be et up. They got to have their stickers roasted off. It fills a man but don’t put any strength in him.”

Maxim stooped, felling dizziness engulf him. He knew Fitzhugh couldn’t bend over. A sticker jammed through his mitten, biting him. He cried out, but kept on sawing and hacking. Cutting a cactus lobe turned out to be harder than he’d imagined. He kept at it, though, while Fitzhugh studied the open country. By the time he’d filled the sack, his hands trembled and he could barely stand.

“I reckon neither of us oughta haul that sack. Leave her sit, and we’ll go fetch us some meat.”

Maxim followed silently across snow-caked flats, wondering where Brokenleg found the energy to limp forward. They struck a rabbit track, its orderly dimples plain in the light snowcover, and Fitzhugh muttered, backtracking toward the river and a vast thicket of red-stemmed brush there. Closer to the thicket the tracks multiplied, and Fitzhugh mumbled incoherently.

“Hawken’ll blow it to pulp,” he said. “Boy, you git yonder to that end and start thrashin’ through that stuff. Me, I’ll poke this old thunder-stick at anything that skitters.”

Maxim circled north to the far end of the brush, and then pushed into it, feeling the whip and insult of the branches. The hunger-weakness engulfed him until he could scarcely move, but he thrashed onward, gritting his way. Midway through, he halted, utterly spent.

“You in there, boy?”

“Tired,” Maxim said.

“Nothing poppin’ out hyar. Git agoing.”

It seemed endless, the twisting and ducking, the slash of bowed branches across his frozen face. He paused, a sob caught in his throat, not wanting Brokenleg to know how close to collapse he felt. He broke out, at last, scarcely twenty feet from Fitzhugh’s grinning face.

“Shoulda scared the bejabbers outa them hares. I guess you aren’t ferocious enough.”

Tears welled in Maxim’s eyes, and he brushed them aside angrily with his snowy mittens.

“I’m plumb done in, boy. Enough for a day. We’ll fetch the sack and have us a prickly pear feast.”

They stumbled home through a deepening cold, the day more than half consumed. The dead quiet of winter lay everywhere, and all the while they saw not a living thing; not even a crow circling in the ice-hazed bluffs. At least until they rounded the rear of the post and discovered four mules and a horse tied carefully to a wagon, for lack of a hitching post.

“Be damned,” Fitzhugh muttered. He eyed the mules narrowly. “Meat,” he said. “They been packing, by the looks of ’em. Whoever it be, we’re going to borrow them.”

He burst through the thick door, his Hawken lifted, just in case, and Maxim followed. At the fire stood a solitary traveller warming himself, wiry and dark and smiling crookedly.

“Ambrose Chatillon!” Fitzhugh yelled.

The name meant nothing to Maxim. But the newcomer peered closely at the boy, as if he knew him, his dark eyes registering Maxim’s pinched look.

“Brokenleg. It has been many years,
n’est-ce pas?”
He peered about, noting the desperate emptiness of the post. “How goes it — you are hungry,
oui?”

“I got them all out hunting — “

“On horses? I see nothing outside that tells me you have horses.”

“Stole,” Fitzhugh muttered. “But Ambrose, you old coon, how come ye to — “

“Express.”

Fitzhugh gaped. Maxim couldn’t fathom why, nor did he understand the word.

“This hyar’s from your pa, Maxim.”

The young man felt a sudden welling of wetness he couldn’t choke back. The small man glanced at him, and sprang toward one of the new packs lying near a wall.

“I think maybe I’ll slice up some tongue first, and then we’ll talk, eh, Fitzhugh? Guy Straus, he worries himself half sick, so I come to tell him it’s good, it’s bad, it’s all gone to the devil. Which is it, eh?”

In a moment Chatillon handed them slick slices of buffalo tongue, which Maxim wolfed down like a berserk animal. Fitzhugh did the same, and snapped up each slice as fast as the messenger could hack it off the heavy tongue.

“I shot it yesterday. A pity to leave the rest to the wolves. But there’s many more a day’s ride east,
oui?
We’ll save this for the rest. It’s hard to make meat on foot.”

He set the remaining tongue aside, while Maxim watched like a ravenous dog.

“Now then,
mon ami,
tell me everything. Beginning with your beautiful Dust Devil.”

“She’s took off for her people,” Fitzhugh said shortly.

Maxim realized Brokenleg didn’t want to say more. He listened while the company partner described the trip, wagoning up the Yellowstone, the discovery that American Fur had put Fort Cass back in business, and the decision he had to make then.

“You left the outfit with Julius Hervey?”

“Yup. He’s got roof. I had seven wagonloads of truck and nothing to protect it and us, when you git down to it.”

Chatillon sighed. “I hope the man is reformed,
oui?”

“We’ll git it out.”

But Maxim thought not, and boldly said so. He described their recent attempt just to get at the staples stored there, while Fitzhugh listened sullenly. Chatillon heard him out, his attention fully upon the young man.

“When does the rent end?” When do you pick up — “

“First o’ the year.”

“Soon, then. Without wagons, Brokenleg?”

“Got the horses stole. That’s fixed us good. Can’t make meat and can’t haul the outfit to the villages to trade.”

Chatillon nodded. “I think,” he ventured, “it’s plumb gone to hell.”

Little Whirlwind stood outside of the door of a small lodge at the edge of the village, waiting patiently to be invited in. The voice came, eventually, just when she was feeling the cold pierce through her winter moccasins, and she entered into the bare warmth of Hump’s dark home, and settled herself in the place where women sat, near the door. No ground robe protected her from the icy earth.

“I’ve been expecting you, Little Whirlwind. It has been many winters since you’ve come to me,” said the ancient shaman, greatest of all the Tsistsista medicine men, who had lived in solitude since the death of his wife many winters ago.

“You are a Suhtai, and I am a Suhtai,” she responded proudly. “I’ve something for you.”

She handed him a small leather sack of roasted coffee beans, a rare and sacred gift that lifted a man’s pulse and took the weariness from his bones and helped him be fleet in war or hunting. Not often did a Tsistsista sample the brown decoction of the whiteman’s coffee bean.

He smiled, eyeing the beans with rheumy black eyes. “We will purify us with sweet grass, and then you will talk. You’ve been among the whites. Your medicine is gone.”

He tossed small twists of grass on a fire so tiny that it lived on twigs. Its heat barely kept the frost at bay, but he seemed not to notice. A thick pearly smoke swelled from the low flame, and whirled loosely around the unlined lodge. She breathed it into her lungs, and let it flow through her scarlet capote, scenting it. He added dried sagebrush stalks, silvery in the dull light, and more pungent than the grass.

Then he closed his eyes, vanishing into himself, while she sat crosslegged before him, feeling cold creep through her capote. He wore only an elkskin tunic and leggings, unadorned, as if the medicine he possessed lay wholly within him, and was not something to be displayed. Not even his long graying hair had been braided, but hung loose, as if he scorned the vanities of the earth.

“Our friend Fitzhugh has become a trader, and everything you do affects the People,” he said at last. “I hear you have left him. Were you thinking of the People?”

She heard rebuke in his tone. She’d come all the way to her village, following the guidance of crow-bird, her heart filled with eagerness, only to hear rebuke. But Hump knew her heart and she had to respond truly. “I am sick of living among them. They will not hear Suhtai wisdom. I told him to bring the things here and trade with the Tsistsistas, but he refused. He said a post must be neutral, and he would trade with the Absaroka dogs.”

“Ah,” said Hump. “You told him these things. And a lot more.”

“They don’t live according to our Way,” she said. “He doesn’t keep himself clean with morning baths as we do, and neither do the rest, the French he has doing the women’s work. He does not greet Sun, or care about Sweet Medicine or the sacred ceremonies. They’re like the Absaroka dogs, like all the rest, like — “

He cut her off with a wave of a hand. “You are too proud,” he muttered.

“I’m Suhtai,” she retorted, amazed at her defiance of him.

“You went with him to the whiteman’s village called Saint Louis. And came back up the river on a fireboat, it is said. What did you think of the white man’s village?”

“It was strange. They have medicine, but it is all because they are weak. They build huge lodges — bigger than Mandan lodges — and keep them too hot. They are nothing — full of sickness.”

“You saw no good in them?”

“I wanted to return to the land blessed by Sweet Medicine.”

Hump closed his eyes and sat, communing with himself, while she waited, on edge. “It is said that crow-bird brought you here safely. Why do you doubt your medicine helper?”