The Big Sky (24 page)

He went to sleep thinking about her and about plews and wealth and the new house and, on the rim of things that could be, a great trading company that alone enjoyed the trade of the Blackfeet.

When he awakened in the morning, Teal Eye was gone.
 
 

Every day before he let them put across from the south shore Summers went off with the ship's glass while Jourdonnais fretted, striding back and forth on the bank or pacing the boat, looking over the river to the growing pile of cottonwood pickets, looking upstream, looking down, looking for Summers to come back, and swearing in French because he had to wait.

Boone scouted while the men worked, he and Deakins and Summers did -Boone up the river and Deakins down it and Summers straight away up the gulch that flowed out into the little prairie they were building the fort on. Often when the plains seemed peaceful and a man couldn't see anywhere the rising dust that might mean buffalo and might mean Indians, one of them would come in and give a hand. They shot meat when they needed it, but mostly in the late evening when the men were easing up and the chance of bringing Indians on was least.

Half the men and more worked in the trees that spread down from the gulch, cutting down cottonwoods, lopping off the bigger branches and the tops and toting the trunks to the others near the bank for shaping up as pickets, to be set later in the trench they had dug. One in every five men took a gun with him. Rifles for the others were stowed behind the threesided breastwork they had built. The men kept busy early and late, working like niggers while they swore and dripped sweat in the autumn sun, driven by Jourdonnais' rough voice and led on by him, too, for he did the work of three men, helping chop, helping trim, helping shape. Since Teal Eye ran away he was like a man with a fever in him. His hard square face never smiled now. When the teeth shone under his black mustache it was because he was swearing at the men or calling on God to see what he had to put up with. The men growled and often sassed him, their anger showing black in their eyes, but they did as he said, maybe afraid to balk or run away, maybe knowing they had best stay with him for all he was so cranky. "Come Indians," Summers had told them while their eyes flicked from one to another, "make for these here logs and grab a rifle. Shoot plumb, too. Noise don't kill Injuns. We can hold off a heap of Blackfeet if you do right."

Lying on the deck or standing guard at night or looking for Indian sign by day, Boone thought often about Teal Eye. Things didn't seem the same without her though she wasn't much more than a papoose. Why did she run away? Did she get back home to her pappy? Summers had tried to track her down that first morning but had come back at noon shaking his head. "She just lit out. She did now. Ain't nobody can trace her, I'm thinkin'."

Jourdonnais' jaw muscles ridged his face. "Someone pay for this," he promised. "Someone asleep on guard let her go. I find out."

"We didn't look for her to run," Summers reminded him. "Ain't anybody's fault more'n our own."

From a rise up the river Boone could see the men working and the felled trees lying naked near the bank. Jourdonnais voice carried to him, small with distance but still full of fury. "You, Chouquette! You, Lassereau! You think we have the year to build! Goddam!" Boone could look up to the crest of the bare hills on the north shore and southward across the river to the top of the slope and beyond, where the yellow prairie lay. Jourdonnais and the men and the axes biting into wood were the only noises in the world, except for a bird sometimes and late in the evening the nighthawks whimpering in the deep sky. He wondered whether Teal Eye heard them, too. He wondered if ever he would see her again. All the time his eyes kept busy, looking for movement, looking for color, looking for something out of place. After a while he would go on, down to the river, maybe, watching for moccasin tracks, or up on the plain where he spent a good part of his time, his eye out for moving streamers of dust. When the sun sank he would start for the boat, seeing from the rise the lazy plume that Pambrun's fire sent up from the cargo box. When Summers returned with the glass on the third morning of their stay, he drew Jourdonnais aside and then motioned to Boone and Deakins. "Something this nigger don't know about, south."

"So?"

"Heap of dust, makin' this way. Maybe just buffler, maybe Injuns. I best see."

"We go across without you," Jourdonnais suggested. "We never get the fort up, waiting."

Summers nodded. "Keep your eye peeled. Do it, now."

Jourdonnais got out a segar and chewed on it, forgetting to light it.

"I'm thinkin' you better let Caudill and Deakins scout afore you put the men out." Summers turned and walked away and was lost to view in the brush.

They rowed across, losing ground against the current and afterwards bringing her upstream with the line. Boone and Jim leaped ashore. The sun had just got itself clear of the hills and shone round as a plate. The chill was lifting off the river in little lines of vapor. "We'll git back, quick as we see," Boone said.

"Go! Go on!" Jourdonnais' voice was harsh. "We be all right."

Boone made for the woods at the back of the clearing, from the side of his eye seeing Jim going on downstream. The grass was wet as rain with the dew. Things looked as they always had. There was the big cottonwood, with the broken limb flying its yellow leaves, the buffalo-berry bush showing silver and red, the game path going into the woods, marked with fresh tracks from the night. A striped squirrel played along ahead of him.

The first notion he had that things weren't right came with a small shifting in a thicket a hundred yards or more away, a patch of brown that faded out before the eye and might have been nothing. He saw a puff of black smoke and felt a tug high on his shoulder, close against the neck, and heard the crack of a rifle. Then all the quiet woods came alive. From behind trees and clumps and thickets Indians leaped, whooping. He saw them in one confused instant, the feathered headdresses, the medicine bags bobbing, the faces daubed with red and black, the mouths open, the guns puffing smoke, and the taut wood of the bows leaping against the strings. He heard bullets whistle and the flutter of arrows. Then he did what he had been told to do. He gave one sharp cry of warning and turned and ran for the breastwork. Before him the crew broke into a scurry like half-grown birds that a hunter had stumbled on. One of them ran ahead, making for the boat.

Boone fell behind the logs and slewed around and rested his rifle and pressed the trigger and saw a heavy-set buck falter and go over. The Indians weren't more than fifty yards away, the closest of them. The shot slowed them but they came on. Jourdonnais lay beside him, and Romaine, sighting along his rifle. Jourdonnais' voice sounded above the cries of the Indians, calling on the crew to come and help. His rifle spit out a cloud of smoke. Boone reached for a loaded weapon. Romaine's gun exploded in his ear. Boone shot again. The wave of Indians faltered, and suddenly there was no wave at all, but only the top of a headdress showing over the grass or the black of a scalp above a hump and the noses of the muskets poking out and the arrows being fitted to the bows.

"
Non! Non!
" It was Jourdonnais, screaming as if a pain was in him, Jourdonnais, turned half-about and screaming at the crew. Boone caught one glimpse of them splashing in the water, climbing wildly aboard the Mandan. Someone had cut the boat loose. It was edging out and down with the current.

"
Non! Non!
Mother of God!" It was as if nothing but the boat counted with Jourdonnais. It was as if the boat pulled him to his knees, to his feet, to his full height. He began to run for it. He shouted over his shoulder, "Romaine!"

Someone on board touched off the swivel. Its boom beat against the hills, wiping out all other sounds, halting the crawling Indians in the grass. Boone looked behind him. Jourdonnais had staggered round, a great hole showing in his chest. He fell sprawled out. There was no one in the breastworks now but Boone. He fired once more and dropped the gun and scuttled for the shore, seeing behind him the Indians rising and coming on. Their shouts pounded on his ears. Romaine was on his hands and knees with half the shaft of an arrow sticking from his back. He motioned Boone on with a weak and helpless gesture of the hand that left him face down in the grass.

Something told Boone to keep away from the boat. He ran, hearing the bangs of muskets and the feathered whisper of the arrows, and dived into the river, turning upstream after he hit the water so as to keep close in to the shore, swimming under water until his lungs were like to burst. He turned over and let his lips up for air and went under again, stroking with arms and legs while the trapped breath in his lungs went to nothing. Branches scratched his arms and chest and he let himself up easy, his head poking into the brush of a fallen tree. He saw bodies lying humped and sprawled on deck. The air was full of a wild shouting which the water cut off as he went under again. He heard instead only the river murmuring by his ears. He came up and sank and swam, came up and sank and swam. After a while the cries of the Indians began to seem distant. He pulled himself into the bank, into a thick cluster of red willow, and sat there for a long time, watching through his screen. It was all over now, except for the yelling and the prancing and the sound of muskets shooting into dead men. When the Indians passed Jourdonnais' body or the big lump that had been Romaine, they pointed and fired, or fell on their knees and beat the heads with rocks. Boone reckoned it was scalps they waved around their heads. Squaws and naked children had flocked out of the woods like chicks at the call of a hen. They started beating at the bodies, too, aiming mostly at the crotch. A squaw with a knife went to work on Romaine, holding up her cut afterwards for everyone to see.

The
Mandan
had been brought to again. Boone couldn't see the bodies for the Indians on her. The men were all dead, though, dead and being shot up and cut to pieces with the tomahawks he saw raised. High on the mast clung Painter, his dark coat fuzzed out. Some of the Indians had painted their faces coal black.

Boone fingered the hole by his neck that the ball had made. It had no feeling in it. The blood had seeped down and made a watery stain on his chest. He crawled away with a coldness on him, inside and out, thinking of people who beat a man's brains out or cut off his pizzle after he was dead. His heart made a slow, heavy thump in his chest. His wet buckskins chafed him. He wished he had his rifle.

The river made a slow turn to the left, leaving the Indians in sight whenever a man wanted to stick his head out of the shore bushes. They were still yelling, still shooting, still prancing around. He saw one of them carrying a keg. He was safe for a spell. They wouldn't leave there until they had drunk up the whisky. He looked across the river, thinking he might see Summers. Did Jim get away? He was down river, out of the charge. Jim seemed far off, like someone he had known a long time before. He couldn't put his face together in his mind. He could see the blue eyes and the red hair and the mouth smiling, but he couldn't fit one to the other and make Jim's face.

He kept going, traveling soft as he could. He didn't seem to feel the mosquitoes that found a man no matter what. The sun swung up and started down. The point of land that the curve looped shut off his view of the Indians, but he could hear them yet. After a while they were only a lost echo. Would it be Teal Eye that set the Indians on them? It didn't matter, he reckoned. The sun went behind the hills and the air was still as glass and the sky deep. When he stopped, the silence seemed to sing above the little whine of the mosquitoes and the sound of water. He pulled himself into some thick bushes and lay flat with his head on his arm, feeling empty and loose like a sack. A bird hopped on a limb and for a long time looked at him out of its round eye and then went on with its business as if he wasn't there. He heard the silence and the mosquitoes and the river. By and by he remembered he was hearing something else, something far off across the water, something he had heard before in another time of his life. It was a sharp, rising whistle such as the curlew made.
 
 

The wind was warm, coming over the mountains, and notionable. Sometimes it cried shrill and wintry in the branches of the trees and then it would ease up and be no more than a whisper that the ear wouldn't catch unless it listened. When it quieted Boone could hear water dripping in the dark, dripping from the iced tree limbs and the shoulder of rock that rose just behind the camp. The wind blew most of the time in this country, squeezing out of the canyons and sweeping on to the high plains, until a man got so used to it he hardly paid it any mind, except sometimes at night when he'd wake up and hear the wild, sad sound of it and hunch down farther in his blanket and buffalo robe, feeling safe, somehow, and good. By and by sleep would come on him again, and the wind would be like a river flowing, running along with his dreams.

Out from the circle of the camp with its center of fire the snowy land seemed to float off into darkness, rising or falling or stretching out, depending on which way a man looked. In the west the mountains made a high broken line against the night sky. Summers reached out and got a branch from the fire and lighted his pipe with it, his weathered face coming out red as he drew on the stem. He had taken his cap off, and the fire played along his hair, bringing out the white in it. Jim was chewing at a bone. Out of the side of his mouth he said, "Comin' time to git busy."

Summers squirmed his tail farther down on the sheep's skull he sat on and rested his elbows on the horns that arched up at his sides like the arms of a chair. It was like his hair got whiter every day, or maybe it was just that the white showed more with the hair reaching down to his shoulders. "Ain't spring yet, I'm thinkin'. Winter'll get in another lick or so." He puffed slowly on his pipe, looking into the fire.