The Big Sky (26 page)

When the Indian had finished the meat he combed his hair again, looking pleased and friendly. He yawned then and suddenly let himself down, squirming onto his back on the pine boughs that Summers had spread over the last snow. "Sleep," he announced and closed his eyes.

Summers looked at Boone and Jim. "We got a partner, if'n we want him."

The wind had strengthened again, wailing through the trees. Through the wailing Boone could catch the sound of the creek, beginning to run with thaw.

"You can't kick a man out brings meat to camp," Jim said, motioning toward the antelope. "Besides, he does me a sight of good."

"Acts like he's asleep a'ready," Boone said, "like a baby or a pup or something. For all he's so damn ugly, he tickles a man."

Summers didn't say any more, but got up and went inside his shelter and came back with an old robe. "This is like feedin' a lost dog," he warned. "I'm thinkin' we can't get shet of him." When Jim and Boone didn't answer he dropped the robe over the Indian. He looked out into the dark then, looked out and listened while he thought. "Wind feels like spring, sure enough. This nigger thinks if need be we could go acrost to the Bear or along Lewis Fork and down the Snake a ways."

Boone lifted himself from the ground and stood straight and looked at the dipper again and at the North Star it pointed to, the North Star shining steady, lying over the Blackfoot country, lying over Jourdonnais' bones, which were likely rotted and gone now, lying over the lodges of the Piegans, and Teal Eye maybe in one of them. It was a time since the
Mandan's
crew went under. He counted back.

Seven seasons. Seven seasons since he had seen the Indian girl with an eye like the bluewing teal. She would be growed now, and most likely have a man. He wondered what had set him to thinking so keen about her. It couldn't be just a foolish runaway Blackfoot with a long nose and a gap in his teeth -not him alone, anyhow. From high overhead he caught the faint honk of geese driving north to nesting grounds.
 
 

There was still snow above the Wind River plains, a deep snow with an old crust that skinned the front legs of the lead horse after he had broken through. Boone and Jim and Summers took turns breaking trail, so as to even the hurt among the horses. Loaded with furs and traps and bedding, the two pack animals followed along, one behind Boone and one behind Jim, and at the rear came Poordevil, riding the horse they had spared him and singing out "Hi-yi" every once in a while. Whenever Boone looked back Poordevil gave a big grin, showing the slot in his teeth. Sometimes he would pull out of the trail and lunge up alongside of Boone and grin again and say some fool thing just to hear his own voice. "Heap beaver heap quick betcha goddam." Down from the hills the plains looked almost dusty, and warm and quiet, as if below the reach of the winds that on the ridges were like a hand pushing into a man's face. Boone could see buffalo below, like a fluid stain on the tanned grass, and bunches of trees, and antelopes moving light and easy as birds. The sunlight lay yellow and soft on them all, seeming to have a warmth down there that it lost on the high places. Across the plains to the west the Wind River mountains climbed into snow banks.

Boone told himself they would find fur, traveling few and quiet this way. Big parties, like Jim Bridger's, put such a fright into beaver they wouldn't stir from their lodges or wouldn't come to medicine if they did. Even when the parties thought it was safe enough to split up, they left more beaver than they caught, what with one man holding a rifle and the other setting traps and both of them splashing along and maybe talking. A man took chances, hunting small; Indians might happen on him any day. If he kept his scalp, though, he got plews. And the risk wasn't so great with Summers along -not with a man along who could tell from the eye and ear of a horse or the set of a buffalo whether there was aught about. Boone figured he and Jim had got good themselves at smelling Indians; they wouldn't have their hair if they hadn't. He had seen men at rendezvous wouldn't know a war whoop if they heard one. Some of them were dead now, and others were bound to be, in time, if they didn't learn better, or if they didn't quit the mountains, as some of them were doing, and some true trappers, too. They had hurt the hunting, though, pushing up every trickle of water until there was hardly a place a man could feel was fresh any more.

It gave him a little pinch when he thought about them, about pork eaters from Canada and Missouri graybacks and Yankee traders and men from Kentucky and Tennessee moving in, traveling along streams and through passes that a man liked to think were his own, just as it gave him a pinch when he thought back to last year and remembered the white women that a couple of crazy preachers had brought to rendezvous on Horse Creek, bound on across to the Columbia. Damned if they weren't on wheels, those preachers and their women! He heard later they got a cart as far as the British post on the Boise. White women! And wheels! They figured to spoil a country, except that the women would leave or die. Ask any hunter who had fought Indians and gone empty-stomached and like to froze, and he'd say it was no place for women, or for preachers, either, or farmers. And no place for wagons or carts, except maybe to bring trade goods as far as rendezvous. The rocks would knock them to pieces, and the rivers wash them down, and the sun shrivel the wheels apart. All the same, he got a pinch of misery, thinking, just as he had sometimes in Kentucky when he'd be out in the woods, feeling good that he was alone, with everything to himself, and then he would spy someone and it would all be spoiled, as if the country wasn't his any more, or the woods or the quiet.

Ahead of him, Jim's hair streamed from under his hat like a lick of fire. Jim let his hair hang long and loose, like Summers. For himself, Boone liked it better in a couple of plaits, like the Indians wore it, tied at the end with red cloth. He would get himself some new ribbons, come the rendezvous, and a new hunting shirt and leggings, with some hawks' bells and colored strings for the fringes. Buckskin got old and greasy in a year and lost its fringes, one by one, as a man needed laces for his moccasins. He would buy himself a new rifle, too, a percussion Hawken, about thirty-two balls to the pound; people were coming to see that a cap and ball was better than a flintlock, just as he had always said. And he would play some hand and drink some whisky and have himself a squaw, and then he would be ready to go on. There wasn't any sense in staying when a man's beaver was spent.

Summers pulled up and swung his leg from across his horse and stood looking down at the plains, which seemed close but would take a spell to get to with the going like it was. Though spring was coming on, Summers still wore his old capote with the hood that came up from it and went over his head. He reached inside and got out a piece of roasted liver and began to munch while his eye traveled north and south and back again. Jim dismounted, too, and then Boone, and from the back Poordevil came galloping up and threw himself from his horse, showing off, and fell in the snow. Summers handed him a piece of liver when he got up. Poordevil grinned and bit into it and cleaned the slot with his tongue and took another bite.

Summers said, "This nigger's had enough of sagebrush fires and cold camps. That there timber looks good."

"It's like someone forgot to put a tree between the Powder and the Popo Agie," Jim said. "I aim to put my feet to a sure-enough fire and cook meat over quaking ash and set and set and eat and eat. It wears a body down, pullin' stems to keep a blaze."
Over nothing, Poordevil said, "Oh, goddam!" and laughed.

"You can't tell from what that nigger says what's bitin' him." Summers' gray eye was studying the Indian.

"He just talks to hear hisself, like a boy shootin' a new rifle at nothin'."

"All the same," Boone said, "he's comical. I wouldn't care no more for a bear cub."

Poordevil saw they were talking about him and felt big for it. He hit himself on the chest. "Hi-yi. Love whisky, me."

"Git on your medicine dog, you crazy bastard," Summers said. "We're goin' to kill us a bull and build a fire." Before he mounted he added, "We'll poke along the Popo Agie and the Wind and maybe up the Horn, dependin'. We'll catch beaver enough with the plews we got from fall, I'm thinkin'."

Jim faced half around to the north. "Reckon we'd fare better up a ways?"

"With Bridger's men thicker'n wolves around a hurt cow!" Boone said, "Rendezvous is comin' soon enough, Jim. You'll see all them as is on Clark's Fork."

Summers said to Boone, "Ol' Red Head is a sociable nigger."

The horses stood slack in the snow, their eyes sad and lifeless, their ribs showing through the long winter hair.

"I'll break the way for a spell," Boone said, and stooped and examined the knees of his horse. "Come to Tar Springs, I'll doctor ye, Blackie," he promised. Blackie was a good horse, for all that he was ganted up now. Let the Indians have their white and spotted buffalo ponies; he would take a solid dark.

The bull Boone killed was young and fat enough, fatter than a cow would be now with a calf pulling on her and the grass scant yet. A couple of wolves loped up out of nowhere at the sound of the shot, and from a sky that didn't have a bird in it three crows came flapping. They lighted a little piece off and stepped back and forth, all the while keeping their sharp eyes on the butchering. The wolves rumped down to wait, their tongues hanging out and dripping, their gaze following the tenderloin and tongue and liver and marrowbone that Boone and Summers packed on the horses. The horses had come alive, now they were out of the snow, and kept cropping at the grass, eating it clear down into the dirt.

There was a good camping spot, with a small meadow almost shut in by the trees, near where the Wind and the Popo Agie joined to make the Horn. The four men pulled the saddles off and hobbled the horses with rawhide and turned them loose to graze. Summers took a long look around first, saying as he nearly always did, "It's a sight better to count ribs than tracks," and meaning it was better to keep a horse tied up and hungry than to turn him loose and let him get stolen by Indians.

Poordevil gathered wood, and Summers laid it and struck fire. In a little while all of them had sticks slanted over the blaze with chunks of liver on the ends. Jim had put a pot on the fire, too, into which he had cut pieces of bull meat.

Summers said, "Wisht we had some coffee," and Jim put in, "I hanker for salt," but straight meat and river water were good enough. They kept up a man's strength and never made him sick, no matter how much he ate, and made his blood good, too. A mountain man never got a running sore or a toothache or shook with a fever -or almost never, anyway. After a while he lost his taste for salt and bread and greens and such.

It was warmer down in the valley and clear of snow except where the trees grew thick and kept the wind and sun away. The sun was shining now, far off, giving only a touch of warmth when it lay on the back of a man's hand. It was making downward for the Wind River mountains that reared up, white where the snow lay and blue on the bare rock. From the west the wind was puffing. After he had a bellyful Boone stretched out with his feet to the fire and his head on the saddle and slept. When he awakened the sun was near to the mountains, fixing soon to sink from sight.

"Jim went downstream, him and Poordevil," Summers informed him. Summers was spreading skins over some saplings to make a lodge.

"I'll point up, soon's I get my outfit on." He peeled off his leggings and got into a pair that had been cut off at the knees and pieced out with a blanket. There was nothing gave a trapper misery like hide drying tight on the legs, unless it was moccasins that hadn't been smoked enough and pinched a man so, drying out, that he had to cripple out of his bed at night and dip them in the water again. Boone's own moccasins were made from an old lodge skin that was half smoke itself.

There were beaver left all right. Boone saw cuttings along the stream and after a little came to a dam and peeked over. The pond lay smooth at first, and then a wedge of ripples started close to the bank and the point of it came toward him and sharpened into a head and turned and went the other way and sank into the water without a sound, leaving just the ripples running out and whispering along the banks.

Boone slipped along the shore, walking soft in the snow that lay old and coarse underneath the trees, keeping back from the ice that edged the pond where the water was shallow. When he found a likely place, he walked around it and went beyond and laid his traps down. He leaned his rifle against a bush, cut and sharpened a long, dry stick and cocked a trap, and them, carrying rifle and stick and trap, went to the spot he had chosen. He rested his rifle on the bank there, felt for footing on the fringe of ice, stepped on it once and then beyond it, into the water.

The water was cold -so cold it knotted the flesh, so cold it made a man wish for a larger stream where he could use a dugout and poke quietly along the banks, dry as could be. He lifted a foot out of the water, grunting a little with the cramp in it, and put it back and brought the other one up. After that, they didn't hurt him any more, feeling only dead and wooden in his moccasins. He felt the mud stiff and thick under his soles and saw bubbles rising around his ankles and smelled the sulphur smell they brought up.

He stooped and put the cocked trap in the water, so that the surface came a hand above the trigger, and led the chain out into deeper water until he came to the end of it. Then he slipped the stick through the ring in the chain and pushed the stick in the mud, putting all his weight to it. He tapped it next with his ax to make sure it was secure enough. Back at the bank he cut a willow twig and peeled it, and from his belt took the point of antelope horn he kept his medicine in. The medicine came to his nose, strong and gamy, as he took the stopper out. He dipped the twig in the medicine, restoppered his bottle and put it back, and stooped again and thrust the dry end of the twig into the mud between the jaws of the trap, so that the baited end stuck about four inches above the surface of the water. It wouldn't be long, he reckoned, until a beaver came to medicine. Backing up, he toed out the footprints his moccasins had left. With his hands he splashed water on the bank so as to drown out his scent. He reached out and got his rifle then and waded along the edge of the pond. When he came opposite his traps he stepped ashore.