The Big Sky (40 page)

"You can keep power over your young men if you want to."

"The white brother who goes to the enemy is not a brother."

Big Shield was nodding. The shine of the fire on his red face went up and down his cheeks as his head moved.

"Goddamn it! Have it that way, then! I reckon I'll do as I please."

Red Horn sat straight in his scarlet uniform, holding the swan's wing idle in both his hands, while his mind seemed working at the English Boone had used.

"No cause to git r'iled," Jim put in. "You don't even know you're goin' yet, Boone."

Teal Eye came back into the lodge, came back noiselessly and went to work again on the shirt. From the trouble in her face Boone could tell she had been listening. Christ, even a squaw cramped a man some, or anyhow wanted to.

He turned to Jim. "I been settin' on my ass quite a spell, all right."
 

Peabody was the man's name -Elisha Peabody, a name that tasted strange on the tongue and sounded strange in the ear. "I am told you know the mountains as well as any man," he said while his wide eyes pried at Boone's face. He waited for an answer, but Boone didn't make one. There wasn't any sense in answering a thing like that.

Jim broke in to ask, "How's this here trip goin' to set with the company?"

Peabody moved his plump hand around, as if the room they were in and the two wine bottles on the table were answer enough. "I have talked the matter over thoroughly with Mr. Chardon. We find no conflict of interest. None whatsoever. If one existed I hope I should be gentleman enough not to impose on the hospitality of Fort McKenzie." Peabody's round and earnest face turned itself on Jim and then on Boone and then opened in a little smile that made his mouth look small and babyish. "Sit down," he invited. It was a clerk's room they were in, Boone thought, with a fire in it and a bed held up by cottonwood blocks and a mud-and-stone chimney and a window with a broken glass. Someone had stuffed a piece of old blanket in the hole. Through his moccasins he felt the dirt floor packed hard as a slab of rock. Over his head the sod roof had sent roots down between the timbers. He heard a mouse squeaking up there.

"Have a seat," Peabody said again while he lowered his butt to the bed.

"The company can make a man a heap of trouble, one way and another, eh, Boone?"

Boone walked to the fire and turned and stepped back. He said, "Sons of bitches!"

"What is it?" asked Peabody, and then it came to him what had been said and he ended up with "Oh."

Jim sat on a stool, looking awkward perched up that way, and began putting tobacco in his pipe. There was a lighting stick by the fire, and he picked it up and held it in the flame and got his pipe going with it.

When Boone didn't sit down, Peabody asked, "Have another drink," and got up and filled the glasses, and then returned to the bed and put his butt down again, in a neat and sort of womanish way. He was a sawed-off man, thick-set without being roly-poly, and had a spot of pink in each cheek. He was a man Boone couldn't picture in buckskins or even linsey but only in the brought-on clothes he wore and the brought-on shoes, as if he had been born in them and would look raw and butchered with them off.

Boone stopped his walking back and forth to look down at him. "There ain't any pass hereabouts like the Southern Pass, none so easy and open. It snows enough to cool off hell."

"Indeed!"

"What you lookin' for -one short and quick, or long and easier?"

"In general, of course, a short route is to be desired but not if it is a great deal more difficult. Is there one that might become a wagon road?"

"Good Christ! Marias Pass is open enough, if you don't count the dead timber, but where's the wagons as'll roll over it?"

Peabody leaned forward, and interest seemed to bring his round face to a point. "Open enough, is it? By thunder!"

"There's a heap of down timber in it."

"The Indians use it, don't they?"

"Not much. Not any more." Boone drank his wine. He couldn't figure why anyone would put out wine unless he couldn't get better. A man could swallow a river of it and never feel exactly good but only dull and lazy.

"Are there better ways?" Peabody asked.

"Southern Pass."

"I mean in this region."

"Shorter and rougher ones."

"Suitable eventually for wagons or carts?"

"Hell, no!"

Peabody lifted his rump and went over to the table. "Would you be good enough to look at the maps I have here?" He picked up a book. "Unfortunately, Mr. Irving's account of the journeys of Captain Bonneville isn't much help. The map it contains shows no detail east of the Rocky Mountains." He put the book aside. "Here, however, is the map accompanying the Rev. Samuel Parker's journal." He looked up, his eyes questioning Boone. "It is a recent work."

"Wrong as hell, just the same. It ain't but two long camps across the mountains, maybe three, startin' from the Marias canyon. This here's supposed to be Flathead Lake, ain't it? And here's the Marias. There ain't no such stretch of country between."

"By thunder!" said Peabody. His face looked pleased and eager.

"Why'n't you just go ahead and cuss?" Jim asked from the stool.

Peabody turned aside long enough to answer. "I have never found it necessary."

"Helps, though."

Peabody was opening another book and flattening out the map. "This," he said, "is the latest thing available, the Memoir Historical and Political on the Northwest Coast of North America and the Adjacent Territories, by Robert Greenhow, librarian to the Department of State. Notice what he calls `the Route Across the Mountains."' Again his face questioned Boone.

"It ain't so far wrong," Boone said slowly while he studied the map, "savin' on t'other side. The trail don't lead south of the lake to Flathead House, but north. It turns northwest here, where Bear Creek flows into the middle fork of the Flathead."

"Splendid!" said Peabody, rubbing his plump hands.

"Splendid!" He added, "By thunder!" and looked over, quick, to Jim as if he expected him to say something.

Boone said, "The time is goddam late."

"I daresay we'll make it."

"If it was just gettin' across, maybe yes. But Jim here says you want to go on and down the Columbia a piece."

"That's right."

"It ain't all-summer country, yan side of the mountains. It gits cold enough to freeze the tail off of a painter."

"We'll make it, God willing."

Jim said, "A body never can tell about God."

Boone studied Peabody, starting from his feet and going up to his head, and Peabody spoke with a stiff edge in his voice. "I believe I can go where another man can."

"I think I'll have me a little drink," Jim said, getting up and pouring a big one. "Wisht old Poordevil was around. He was a man, now, for a trip. That Injun could keep warm with no more'n a rabbit skin for his pizzle. Heerd tell of him lately, Boone?"

"Last I knew he was north, with the Bloods."

Boone had seen men like Peabody before, men who were simple in a way and serious as owls and so sure of themselves that everything they said was a kind of brag without being a brag, either. When they got their comeuppance, it was something like a baby being hurt.

The room darkened as a cloud went across the sun. Through the window Boone saw a shadow running along the ground and up the pickets and over. The pound of a blacksmith's hammer came to his ears. He turned to Peabody. "Y'ever see a horse froze dead?"

Peabody's wide eyes widened more, as if he was seeing the horse now. After he had taken a good look at it, he answered, "New England weather is hardly tropical, you know."

Boone poured his glass full. "I wouldn't know as to that."

For a while nobody said anything. Then Jim spoke up, just to make talk. "Me and Boone met up with Bonneville and Wyeth more'n once."

"They didn't come out so fat," Boone said, watching Peabody's face.

"There are good reasons. Bonneville, for one, never knew what he was after. He chased one way and then another. He never decided whether he was explorer, trader, trapper, or mere adventurer. He couldn't choose between fun and furs."

"He was an all-right man, just the same," Jim answered.

"I refer to his business abilities."

"Not so different from you in looks, if only you had a bare scalp in place of that there suit of hair."

Boone asked, "What about Wyeth? There was a man knew which way his stick floated."

Peabody nodded. "I know Wyeth personally. Splendid gentleman. He was the victim of misfortune and bad faith. If the Rocky Mountain Fur Company had kept its contract with him, I dare say he would be in the mountains still, instead of cutting ice at Cambridge for the South American trade."

"Ice!" Boone said, "Kin a man sell ice?"

"All the same," Jim put in, "beaver would have petered out on him, same as on the rest."

"I'm not interested in beaver. I've told you that. It is development I'm interested in, future development. You appear to think, because the Indians haven't made use of this great western country, that nobody can."

"They live in this country. They live off of it, and enj'y themselves and all," Boone answered. "What in hell do you want. Christ Almighty!"

Peabody took a deep breath, as if to make sure he had wind enough for his argument. "When country which might support so many actually supports so few, then, by thunder, the inhabitants have not made good use of the natural possibilities." His wide eyes looked at Boone, earnest and polite but not afraid. "That failure surely is justification for invasion, peaceful if possible, forcible if necessary, by people who can and will capitalize on opportunity."

"I say it's all fool talk."

"If you live, you will realize how wrong you are. Can't you see? We are growing. The nation is pushing out. New opportunities are sure to arise, bigger opportunities than ever existed in the fur trade. Transport, merchandising, agriculture, lumbering, fisheries, land! I can't imagine them all."

"Goddam it, you talk like a man could put a plow in the land and grow corn, maybe, or sweet potatoes, or sorghum, or tobacco. The season ain't long enough to make a crop. This here's Injun country and buffler country, and allus will be."

"I doubt what you say, even as regards this Blackfoot country itself. As for Oregon and the Willamette valley-" Peabody spread his hands. "The Hudson's Bay Company has crops there, and cattle. The missions are doing well. A hundred settlers went there this past summer under the leadership of Dr. Elijah White."

Peabody's mouth was drawn straight in his round face. The pink in his cheeks had spread out so that most of his face seemed red. He took another breath deep in his belly, as if to send his big words out again, but all he said was, "I didn't come to debate but to hire guides." He sat down and rubbed his face with a white handkerchief that he pulled from the pocket of his roundabout.

Jim took the glass from his mouth long enough to say, "It's British country acrost the mountains. How you aim to fix that?"

"It isn't British country. It's joint-occupancy territory, by treaty."

"I reckon the Hudson's Bay Company ain't heard about that."

"I understand the settlers aren't being treated too badly. That question aside, do you think the United States of America will let the company, or even the British army itself, stand in the way? Nothing shall stop us. British? Spanish? Mexicans? None of them. By every reasonable standard the land is ours -by geography, contiguity, natural expansion. Why, it's destiny, that's what it is -inevitable destiny."

Jim grinned and his arm came out stiff and his finger pointed. "Hurrah for the first gov'nor!" His glance came over to Boone. "A man that can talk that high and handsome don't ever need to turn his hand."

Peabody was flushed with talking. He flushed hotter at Jim's words and got out his white handkerchief again.

"I reckon we'll have a time of it, just the same, pushin' them Britishers into the sea," Jim said.

Peabody took his cup of wine from the table and sat on the bed and took a bare nip and clamped his lips over it and held it in his mouth for a while without swallowing, as if to get all the good out of it before giving it up to his stomach.

Boone let himself down and sat cross-legged on the floor. "How far you want us?"

"To the head of navigation on the Columbia, at least."

"For big boats or small?"

"We shall have to see."

"You figure to stop at Hudson Bay forts?"

"Perhaps not." Peabody considered. "Perhaps it would be best not to. Not this trip."

"It's crazy to put out now. I say wait until summer."

Peabody shook his round head while his mouth made the tight line again above the small, square chin. "That point is settled. I am not going to lie idle because of a little unpleasant weather. If you won't take me, I shall look for someone else."

Jim had his knife out and was whittling on the stool between his spread legs. "Here's a hoss as knows his own mind."

"Mr. Chardon thinks the snow in the mountains presents no obstacles as yet."

"Could be he wants to get you froze," said Boone.

"Once it makes up its mind to snow in this country, by God she snows," Jim added. "Chardon tell you that?"

"You haven't given me your answers."

"If a man was smart now, I reckon he'd hoof it." Jim's gaze was on Boone.

"I have equipment, you know."

Boone shook his head. "Could be horses would come in handy, if we get snowed in and no game about. There's worse doin's than horse meat."

Peabody's round face got a look of surprise on it.

"And if snow kep' away," Jim said, "we'd get through that much quicker."

"Are you accepting, then?"

"Reckon I'll go, like I told you once," Jim answered. "It ain't me you need so much as Caudill, though. I never traveled this here pass. What you say, Boone?"

"I say it's a crazy idea. There won't be no sight of people travelin' this way, ever, and no sight of people fixin' to farm. It's too cold and dry and windy for folks. Them as try it will clamp their tails down and run for home, if their scalps ain't already on a coup stick. And some will starve and some will freeze. That's what I say." He watched Peabody's face. "It's plumb dangerous to go now. That's what I say, and dangerouser if we got to dodge the British forts."