The Big Sky (31 page)

He hadn't time to get out his own blade. As he twisted away, the knife came down and cut through his shirt, and the bite of it along his arm was like the bite of fire. He snatched at the wrist and caught it. Above the whistle of their lungs Summers' voice came: "By God, he asked for it!"

His hands fought the wrist, the knuckles, the clutched fingers, and caught a thumb and bent it back. He jerked the hand around under his chest and saw it weakening, one finger and another letting up like something dying and the handle coming into sight. The knife slipped out and fell in the grass. Boone snatched it up, holding to Streak with his other hand. A word stuttered on the man's lips, and the campfire showed a sudden look of fear in his face, a look of such fear that a man felt dirtied seeing it. The eyes flicked wide, flicked and fluttered and came wide again and closed slow as Boone wrenched the knife free and drove it in again.

Boone pushed with his hand. Streak fell over backwards, making a soft thump as he hit, and lay on his back, twitching, with the knife upthrust from his chest.

Poordevil let out a whoop and began to caper around, and Jim joined in, dancing with his knees high and yelling, "Hi-ya!"

Summers' rifle still was in the crook of his arm. "I'm thinking the trouble's over," he said, and nobody answered until Lanter spoke up with "Let's git on with the game. The parade's done passed. Any of you niggers want to take Streak's place?" Boone heard him add under his breath, "That damn Caudill's strong as any bull."

Boone turned to Summers. "Maybe you're ready to wet your dry now?"

"'Pears like a time for it, after we doctor you."

"It ain't no more'n a scratch. To hell with it! Let's have some fun."

Summers looked at the long cut on Boone's arm. "Reckon it won't kill ye, at that."

The men went back to playing hand, leaving Streak's body lying. Closed out from the firelight by the rank of players, it was a dark lump on the ground, like a sleeper. A man had to look sharp to see the knife sticking from it.

Boone passed it again, near daylight, after he had drunk he didn't recollect how much whisky and had had himself a woman and won some beaver. There was the taste of alcohol in his mouth, and the gummy taste of Snake tobacco. He held his arm still at his side, now that the wound had started to stiffen. He felt fagged out and peaceful, with every hunger fed except that one hankering to point north. With day coming on the land, the world was like a pond clearing. From far off on a butte came the yipping of coyotes. Suddenly a squaw began to cry out, keening for a dead Bannock probably, her voice rising lonely and thin in the half-night. A man could just see the nearest lodges, standing dark and dead. There was dew on the grass, and a kind of dark mist around Streak's carcass, which lay just as it had before, except that some Indian had lifted the hair, thinking that that plume of white would make a fancy prize.
 
 

Summers took one last look from the little rise on which he and Boone and Jim stood.

The camp had begun to stir now that morning was flooding over the sky. Squaws were laying fires and fixing meat to cook, and so were the white hunters and company engages who didn't have a woman to do the squaw's work. He and Boone and Jim hadn't taken up with the squaws so much as the others, except for a time or two. As far as Summers knew, they hadn't fathered a child either, not anywhere, though like as not they had. Already one Indian was at the counter, probably asking for whisky. Summers saw a squaw come poking out of a lodge and after her two half-breed children, whom the French called brules on account of their burned look. He wondered whether even the squaw knew who their pappy was. Farther off, horses were running, bucking and kicking up and nipping at one another in the early chill. The sun touched the tops of the hills, but lower down the dark lay yet. Against the morning sky the mountains were still dead, waiting for day to get farther along before they came to life.

"Me," said Jim, "I'd wait and go east with the furs."

Summers didn't answer, but it went through his mind again that he didn't want to go back with anybody. He wanted to be by himself, to go along alone with the emptiness that was in him, to look and listen and see and smell, to say goodbye a thousand times and, saying it, maybe to find that the hurt was gone. He wanted to hear water at night and the wind in the trees, to take the mountains and the brown plains sharp and lasting into his mind, to kill a buffalo and cook the
boudins
by his own small fire, feeling the night press in around him, seeing the stars wink and the dipper steady, and everything saying goodbye, goodbye.

Goodbye, Dick Summers. Goodbye, you old nigger, you. We mind the time you came to us, young and green and full of sap. We watched you grow into a proper mountain man. We saw you learning, trapping and fighting and finding trails, and going around then proud-breasted like a young rooster, ready for a frolic or a fracas, your arm strong and your wind sound and the squaws proud to have you under a robe. But new times are a-coming now, and new people, a heap of them, and wheels rolling over the passes, carrying greenhorns and women and maybe children, too, and plows. The old days are gone and beaver's through. We'll see a sight of change, but not you, Dick Summers. The years have fixed you. Time to go now. Time to give up. Time to sit back and remember. Time for a chair and a bed. Time to wait to die. Goodbye, Dick. Goodbye, Old Man Summers.

"We didn't do so bad," Boone said, "what with beaver so trapped out and the price what it was."

Summers wondered whether he had done bad or good. He had saved his hair, where better men had lost theirs. He had seen things a body never would forget and done things that would stay in the mind as long as time. He had lived a man's life, and now it was at an end, and what had he to show for it? Two horses and a few fixin's and a letter of credit for three hundred and forty-three dollars. That was all, unless you counted the way he had felt about living and the fun he had had while time ran along unnoticed. It had been rich doings, except that he wondered at the last, seeing everything behind him and nothing ahead. It was strange about time; it slipped under a man like quiet water, soft and unheeded but taking a part of him with every drop --a little quickness of the muscles, a little sharpness of the eye, a little of his youngness, until by and by he found it had taken the best of him almost unbeknownst. He wanted to fight it then, to hold it back, to catch what had been borne away. It wasn't that he minded going under, it wasn't he was afraid to die and rot and forget and be forgotten; it was that things were lost to him more and more -the happy feeling, the strong doing, the fresh taste for things like drink and women and danger, the friends he had fought and funned with, the notion that each new day would be better than the last, good as the last one was. A man's later life was all a long losing, of friends and fun and hope, until at last time took the mite that was left of him and so closed the score.

"Wisht you'd change your mind," Boone said. "It'll be fat doin's up north, Dick."

Fat doings! Jim and Boone wouldn't understand until they got old. They wouldn't know that a man didn't give up the life but that it was the other way about. What if the doings were fat? What if beaver grew plenty again and the price high? He had seen times right here on the Seeds-kee-dee when beaver were so thick a hunter shot them from the bank, and so dear that a good pack fetched nigh a thousand dollars. Such doings wouldn't put spring in a man's legs or take the stiffness from his joints. They wouldn't make him a proper mountain man again.

The sun was coming up over Sweetwater way. The first red half of it lay lazy on the skyline, making the dew sparkle on the grass. To the west the mountains stood out clean, the last of the night gone from the slopes.

Summers looked east and west and north and south, hating to say goodbye.

"Fair weather for you," Jim said.

"Purty "

Boone's eyes came to his and drifted off.

These were Summers' friends, the best he had in the world, now that the bones of older ones lay scattered from Spanish territory north to British holdings. There was Dave Jackson, who started for California and never was heard from again, and old Hugh Glass, put under by the Rees on the Yellowstone, and Jed Smith, who prayed to God and trusted to his rifle but died young for all of that, and Henry Vanderburgh, a sure-enough man if green, who lost his hair to the Blackfeet, and Andrew Henry, the stout old-timer, who had died in his bed back in Washington County; there were these and more, and they were all gone now, dead or vanished from sight, and sometimes Summers felt that, along with some like old Etienne Provot, he belonged to another time.

And yet it had all been so short that looking back he would say it was only yesterday he had put out for the new land and the new life. A man felt cheated and done in, as if he had just got a taste of things before they were taken away. He no more than got some sense in his head, no more than hit upon the trick of enjoying himself slow and easy, savoring pleasures in his mind as well as his body, than his body began to fail him. The pleasures drew off, farther and farther, like a point on a fair shore, until he could only look back and remember and wish.

These were his best friends, he thought again, while for no good reason he took another look at the pack and saddle and cinches on his two horses. They were his best friends -this Boone Caudill, who acted first and thought afterwards, but acted stout and honest just the same; this Jim Deakins, who saw fun in things and made fun and had God and women on his mind.

"This nigger oughtn't to be takin' your Blackie horse," he said to Boone.

"Might be you'll need him, goin' alone."

"I ain't forgettin'."

"It ain't nothin'."

"Not many gives away their buffler horse."

"Ain't nothin'."

"Wisht I had him to give," Jim said.

Summers turned away from them. It was sure enough time for a mountain man to give up when his guts wrenched and water came to his eyes.

"Whar'll you camp tonight?"

What did it matter? It was all known country to him, the Seeds-kee-dee Agie and the Sandy and the Sweetwater. There was hardly a hill he didn't know, from whatever direction, or a stream he hadn't camped along. He could say goodbye to one as well as another. Leaving, a man didn't set himself a spot to make by night. There wasn't anything waiting for him at the end, except a patch of ground and a mule and a plow. He would take it slow, looking and hearing and remembering, while one by one the old places faded away from him and by and by he came on the settlements, where men let time run their lives -a time to get up, a time to eat, a time to work, a time to be abed so's to meet time again in the morning, a time to plow and sow and harvest. A man didn't live off the land there. He worked it like he would work a nigger, making it put out corn and pigs and garden trash. He didn't go out when he got hungry and kill himself a fat cow. He didn't see his living all around him, free for the shooting of it. He had to nurse things along, to wait and figure and save.

Things pressed him all around. He had to have money in his pocket, had to dicker for this and that and pay out every turn. Without money he wasn't anything. Without it he couldn't live or hold his head up. Men in the settlements gave a heap of time just to trading money back and forth, each one hoping he had got the best of it and counting his coins and feeling good at having them, as if they were beaver or rifles.

"You bound to go north?" he asked, knowing they were.

"Boone is," Jim said.

"We'll get us aplenty of beaver on the Teton and Marias and along there," Boone explained.

"If the Blackfeet'll let you. If the Piegans ain't trapped it out for Fort McKenzie."

"We'll get it."

"Teal Eye would be how old now?"

Jim said, "Old enough to have a man, and young'uns, too. Eh, Dick?"

"We'll get us beaver," Boone said.

The campfires sent up a thin blue smoke, so many campfires that a man wouldn't want to count them. The smoke rose straight, growing thinner while it climbed, until you couldn't see it at all, but only the clear empty sky it had lost itself in.

"Reckon Poordevil will stick by you?"

"Sure."

"Boone's l'arn't a right smart of Blackfoot talk."

"I taken notice."

"It'll come in handy. You'll see."

He wouldn't hear these sounds again, Summers told himself, or see these sights, or smell the smoke smell of quaking asp. He could hear the sharp voices of the squaws and the throaty talk of their men and the cries of children. The tones of the hunters came to him, too, and the knock of axes. He looked at the lodges standing in the glistening grass, standing clean against the blue distance. He looked at the dogs and children trotting about the lodges, at the horses done with their playing now and moving purposefully out to good pasture, at the river flowing steady between its fringe of trees, winding forever to the south to strange land he had never seen. It all was a regular town, of a kind, and it all made a smell and a sound and a picture. Could he get it again in his ear and eye and nose, once he was back in Missouri with time nudging him and his hand always feeling for money?

His eyes went to Jim and Boone. More than ever, the feeling of being father to them rose in him now that he had to leave. It was as if he was casting his young'uns loose to shift for themselves and feeling uneasy at what might happen to them.

"Well," he said, "time to put out. It is, now." He held out his hand. "This nigger can't make talk all day."

He got on his horse and reined it around, toward the rising sun, toward the east from which young Dick Summers had come a long, long time ago.
 
 

Poordevil hung back, his face screwed up and anxious, and his eyes searching around like the eyes of an animal that had got a whiff of danger.

Jim was slewed half-around in his saddle, watching him. "Come on, Poordevil," he called. "If'n elk can pass along here, I reckon horses can."