The Big Sky (35 page)

"Piegan camp, Poordevil?" Boone asked.

"All goddam gone."

"Been a fight, maybe, and all went under."

"Sick. Smell sick."

"Best not go closer, Boone. Hear?"

"I aim to see."

"The stink's enough to sicken a man. I'm fixin' to puke a'ready."

"Bad," said Poordevil. "Injun sick, dead, heap go under."

Boone dropped from his horse and started ahead, carrying his rifle.

The magpies quieted again, and one by one flapped off, scolding as they went.

Two coyotes slid from among the lodges and slunk away, looking full-bellied and heavy, as Boone approached. The stink made a man's hair rise. He breathed short and quick, not wanting to get the air deep in him.

He pulled the flap of a lodge wider and closed it quick, snorting the smell from his nose. He made himself pull it open again and look in while the rotten air from inside poured over him. There were three bodies there, chewed some by coyotes, looking so black and bloated a man would have taken them for extra-fat niggers. In another lodge it was the same, except there was just one Indian in it, sprawled dead and black, the flesh puffing tight against his clothes. A squaw rested on her back outside another, and a young one alongside her. The magpies had been busy on them, and the coyotes. A whole damn village dead and gone, put under by a sickness, men and squaws and young ones lying stiff and bloated, and some with their eyes pecked out by birds, leaving pockets in the dead fat faces that maggots worked in.

He heard a thin whimpering, like a pup weak and hurt, and followed the sound of it and came to another tepee in which he saw a boy lying. The boy's face was one solid scab.

"How?"

There was a dead squaw inside the lodge and a dead buck to one side, likely the boy's parents. "How?"

The thin whimpering kept on, trembling out with the boy's breath and stopping while he drew in and then trembling out again.
Boone raised his voice. "What ails you?"

It occurred to him that he had been talking white talk. He thought out some Blackfoot, shouting so's to get it through to the boy's mind.

Only the whimpering answered him, and it growing weaker and far apart. While Boone watched, the body stiffened and the scabbed mouth fell open. The lungs let out a long shuddering breath, snatched once at the air and then gave up. Boone backed out of the entrance, feeling his nostrils shrunken and his belly crowding close in his throat. He walked beyond the tepees into the wind, letting his lungs drink. At the edge of the camp he passed the bodies of a man and a squaw, part-eaten but not black or scabbed. Each had a knife wound in the chest. Blackened with blood, the knife lay close by the man's hand.

After a while Boone turned and walked back into the stink. He made himself look into every lodge, made himself look at every woman's face. The lodge skins were brown and thin with time, so that light came through them as it couldn't come through new ones. Some of the lodges were empty, but partly readied up all the same, with robes lying in them or a kettle or a can standing or a horn spoon resting by the fire stones, as if the owners expected to come back directly, or as if they had taken a sudden fright and run away, snatching up what they could carry. A man couldn't tell one face from another, swollen the way they were and scabbed, and sometimes eaten on. There wasn't one person alive. The boy had been the last.

He walked back to where Jim and Poordevil sat. They had got tired waiting and had unforked from their horses to sit on the ground. To the question in their eyes he answered,

"All dead. Every damn livin' soul dead."

"Sick," said Poordevil, nodding. The slot showed between his grinning lips as he came out with "
Petite verole. La
petite verole
. You betcha."

"You hear that, Boone? French talk for smallpox!"

"I heerd it."

"God Almighty! Reckon he knows what he says?"

"Could be."

"You been doctored so's not to catch it, Boone?"

"I had it onc't. A man don't take it twice."

"How about you, Poordevil? You catch 'im ever?
Petite verole
?"

Poordevil's face was one big smile. Everything was a joke to that fool Indian, except Colter's Hell. He bobbed his head and pointed to pits that lay along his hair line.

"Best I stayed away, I reckon," Jim said.

"There was a squaw and her man stabbed," Boone told Jim. "I don't git the reason of that. And some of the lodges are empty, with fixin's left around."

"That would be people runnin' away from the smallpox, Boone."

"What about the stabbed ones?"

Jim's eyes studied the ground. The stubble on his chin was a match for the hair of the red horse. "Could be they were Injuns that knew they had to die and wanted to do it quick. Could be they kilt themselves."

"Could be."

"Don't you git it, Boone?" Jim went on. "That's why we ain't met up with Blackfeet. They're all dead, likely, and them as ain't are runnin' from the smallpox."

"A whole nation don't die."

"A whole camp did, all the same."

"Not all of them. Some run away."

"You reckon that's Heavy Otter's band, Boone?" Boone didn't answer.

"You reckon, Boone?"

A crow coasted over them, throwing a shadow on the grass, and let itself down among the lodges.

"I say, you reckon that's Heavy Otter's band?"

"How's a man to know? Goddam it!"

"I didn't go to r'ile you."

"You don't have to be askin' all the time. Askin' this and askin' that till you git a man crazy. Goddam it!"

"I said I'm sorry, and that's enough. Git mad if you're bound to."

"God hisself wouldn't know Heavy Otter, chewed up and black and swole the way them Injuns are."

Poordevil said, "Heap beaver now. Injun all gone."

Boone mounted his horse and led the way around the lodges, hearing the magpies come crying in after they had passed. He kept nudging at Poky, wanting to get along. A man moving, giving to the twist and the rise and fall of his saddle, could ease himself away from his mind. He rode straight and stiff, feeling Jim's eyes on him, and answering goddam it with the set of his back.

When they came to a little flat Jim rode up alongside. The little smile on his mouth put Boone in mind of Summers. "I reckon I know how you feel, Boone," Jim said. "I didn't aim to fly off at you."

After a silence Boone answered, "They can't all be dead, Jim. Not the whole nation. Not the whole damn Blackfoot Nation."

Jim gave him a long look. "I'm hopin' you're right," he answered, and let his horse fall behind as they entered timber again.

The Missouri valley wound north before them, opening and tightening some and opening again, the valley that was as empty as if not a man ever had lived there. Once they saw a single lodge, half blown down, and bones lying around, picked almost clean of meat, and skin clothes scattered and torn by the teeth of wolves, and once they came on a couple of campfires, cold but not more than a day or two old. A child's body was hoisted in a tree close by, but not wrapped careful. Already the birds had pecked away into the flesh.

One day and another of travel, and the valley still empty and the Blackfeet gone from the face of the earth. At night now they camped careless, building big fires and eating elk or deer meat, or one of the buffalo that had wandered up the valley into the hills. They camped silently, except for Poordevil, who grinned and talked as before, carefree as a young one who didn't know what made his elders solemn. Jim spoke little jokes now and then, trying to get shut of the cloud that hung over them but making a poor out of it. The sun rose bright in the morning and shone white and glaring in the day and left the western sky ablaze at night. Later the sky cooled to a red like an old wound, and still later the stars popped out, seeming low and plain as candles in the dark. It was prime weather for fall hunting, prime weather and prime country, but even Jim had quit laying his traps. A quiet hung over things, except for the cawing of crows and the chatter of magpies and the wind's whining in the trees, whipping the yellowed leaves away. At night the call of wolves beat back and forth in the valley, and the whistle of bull elks hot for cows, leaving the night emptier than before. By day Boone would watch the wind riffling the short grass and worrying the trees on the eastward slope and flowing on out of sight, farther than a man could know, to places a man never had heard tell of. The grass was curled and dry, headed out in darker brown. The feet of the horses raised puffs of dust from it that fell back if the wind was quiet, or streaked away. Riding all day in the wind, a man felt the grit in him, in his clothes and down his neck and against his skin, and grating between his teeth. He rode hunched against the wind, one shoulder up shielding his chin, and his mouth tightset and dry, tasting the dirt.

Slanting out from the west bank of the river, they came from the valley into a basin and threaded through a growth of trees, and it was then they saw their first live man. He sat a horse a quarter of a mile away, and when his eye caught them he wheeled about and cut his pony with his quirt, high-tailing for a finger of timber. Boone slid from Poky, handed his rifle to Jim, and with the lariat took a quick hitch over the red horse's nose. "Foller along." He leaped astride the red horse, took back his rifle, and kicked the red belly. He felt the horse leap into movement under him and steady into an easy, long-striding run. He saw the proud head lifted and the small ears pointed ahead and the ground streaming under them. There wasn't a horse he ever knew could match that pace. The rider before him grew bigger and plainer in the eye. The rider's arm rose and fell with the quirt, and the horse answered to it with all he had.

He was a buckety runner, though, galloping stiff and short.

With the red horse after him it was as if he was standing still.

A musket shot short of the timber, the man saw he couldn't make it. He pulled up and got off and stood quiet, his arms hanging at his sides and his hands empty and his bow dangling from his shoulder. Boone slowed the red horse to a walk and after a while dismounted and led him, going slow toward the Indian. The Indian didn't move. Not even a muscle in his face moved. He didn't act like a Blackfoot. It came to Boone, studying him, that there was nothing in the face to see, except that he was reminded of a beaten dog. It was as if hope was gone and all good feeling and all proud spirit. Here was a man wouldn't fight against anything, not even death, but would only run like a rabbit and hunch down and wait, humble and sad before it. While Boone watched, the Indian got down on his hands and knees and bowed his head. His hair fell in a tangle at the sides of his neck.

"Git up, for Christ sake! I ain't aimin' to kill you."

Boone squatted down and took his pipe from the ornamented case that hung around his neck and filled it with tobacco and struck fire.

"Howgh," he said in his throat, and puffed and pointed the stem toward the Indian. He hunted for the Blackfoot words.

"The white hunter's heart is good." The Indian's sad face lifted.

"The Long Knife looks for Heavy Otter -for his brother. Heavy Otter, the Piegan."

The wind played with the worn fringes of the man's buckskins and left him and whirled in the grass, sending up a spiral of dust.

Boone put a twist of tobacco on the prairie, to show it was a gift.

The Indian's eyes fixed on the tobacco, and a little gleam of hunger showed in them.

"The Long Knife looks for Heavy Otter -for his brother, Heavy Otter."

Only the Indian's eyes seemed alive, fixed on the twist.

Boone turned around and beckoned for Poordevil and Jim to come on. They trotted up, bringing the pack string.

"Tell him the Long Knife looks for Heavy Otter," Boone said to Poordevil. "Ask him whereabouts Heavy Otter is."

Poordevil slid from his horse, took a hungry suck at Boone's pipe, and then put the question.

"He don't care to talk," Jim said, grinning from his horse. "Ask him has the cat got his tongue, Poordevil."

"Shut up, Jim! Is he a Piegan, Poordevil, or what?"

"Piegan, him."

"Ain't nothin' like whisky to ile a rusty tongue," Jim said.

"Sometimes you talk sense, Jim. Damn if you don't." Boone went to a pack horse and loosened a rope and from the pack took the bottle he had saved. He came back and took the cork out and set the bottle alongside the twist. "Good whisky. Good medicine water."

The Indian reached out suddenly, like a man snatching at a varmint, and caught the bottle and held it up. Some of the whisky spilled out over his chin.

"There's an Injun as would drink a still dry," Jim said, still sitting his horse.

The Indian brought the bottle down and spit and belched and wiped his mouth.

"Ask him whereabouts is Heavy Otter, Poordevil."

Poordevil only grunted.

"Take a drink yourself then, goddam you!"

Poordevil's mouth spread happily, then closed over the mouth of the bottle. Boone took the whisky from Poordevil's hand and set it close by his side. "No more until we make talk. By and by, whisky. Tell him that, Poordevil." The Piegan's face was turned on the bottle. It was still a sad and humble face, but with a hankering in it now that saved it from being dead. With whisky a man could get nearly anything he wanted from the Indians -from all of them, anyhow, except the Comanches, who didn't care for drink. "Ask him where at are the Piegans. Ask him about Heavy Otter."

The Indian listened while Poordevil spoke. As an answer, he brought up his hands and rubbed the palms together.

"Rubbed out?" Boone asked sharply.

The Indian spoke, spoke hoarse and deep in his chest. Boone shook his head. It was only the Blackfeet words he had practiced that he knew. "What's he sayin', Poordevil? I don't git it all."

Poordevil talked part by sign and part by tongue. "Big sickness come. Long Knife bring sickness in fire canoe."

"How's that?"

"Boat that walks on water bring sickness to big house."

"To Fort Union?"