The Big Sky (42 page)

The column slowed and shuffled to a stop as Caudill stopped to look up and down the canyon. After a while he slipped from his horse and tied it to a limb and came back to borrow Peabody's glass. All he said when he handed it back was "Let's git on." Peabody used the glass himself while Caudill returned to the head of the string. His horse kept moving under him, nosing for spears of cured grass, with the result that his eye couldn't fix on a place. Things swam into sight and out again, the pine trees rising stiff and tall, the river winding, the mountains shouldering up to the timber line. He took the glass from his eye. The plains were shut off from sight here. One felt alone with the great hills; one felt imprisoned, and voiceless in an eternal silence; one felt buried below the ragged spires that pierced the sky. Fort McKenzie was a lifetime away, a five-day lifetime away.

Where the trail dipped down to water, Caudill brought the string to a halt for the night. The stream was little more than a trickle now, chuckling over stones slick with rusty moss. Peabody imagined he could see the divide ahead, where the sun was sinking in a fiery glory. He got off his horse and held to the saddle for a minute while his stiff legs renewed their acquaintance with earth. The sunset held him. He could lose himself in it. Melancholy ran through him, and ecstacy -a sad enchantment that made personal ambition seem almost unimportant. "Majestic!" he said under his breath. "Majestic!"

Caudill asked, "How's that?"

Peabody only motioned toward the west.

"Red as all hell. Reckon you can eat, regardless." Caudill set about unsaddling the horses while Deakins took a side of deer from a pack and began to build a fire.

"We'll keep the horses close up," Caudill said for the benefit of the Frenchmen. "Soon's we get 'em unpacked just take 'em to that little flat there, and remember to hobble 'em, every head."

"Meat's almighty scarce," Deakins observed while Peabody fumbled at his saddle. "Ain't seed elk nor deer since morning, and little sign."

Peabody pulled the saddle off and laid it for a pillow where he planned to make his bed. It gave him a certain feeling of pride to perform his share of the tasks. "At the rate we're going, we'll be in the Flathead basin before we want for more game."

"Shoo!" answered Deakins, while his gaze followed Zenon and Beauchamp as they led the horses away. "I reckon you ain't watched them pork eaters make a meal."

"Everything's working out. This pass, man! I couldn't have wished for anything better. Why, with the timber cleared away, wagons could roll across here."

Caudill was working on the venison with his knife. He said, "If anyone wanted to roll 'em."

"I'd like to have the toll rights."

"Toll! Toll! By Jesus, Jim, greenhorns no sooner see a place than they hanker to spoil it. They want to grab things for their own and close a country up. Who you think the country belongs to, anyway, Peabody?"

"I imagine the man who cleared the way would have some rights to levy on those who used it."

"It don't make no difference," said Caudill more mildly while he plied his knife. "A tollman could hold his hand out until Christ come again and never find money in it."

In his mind's eye Peabody saw the wagons rolling and the collector busy making change. His gaze went to Caudill. Something in the man was a challenge to him. It was as if self-respect demanded that he provoke him more. "It isn't too difficult to think that some day, maybe in our own time, the steam railway will be heard clanking over this pass, carrying passengers three hundred miles in twentyfour hours."

"Your head's got room for the damndest notions."

"It's ag'in nature," Deakins answered. He already had speared a chunk of meat on a stick. "Why'n't God put wheels on a man if he aimed for him to hump it so?"

"People are going against nature in four or five states already, then, and not being hurt by it. Albany and Buffalo are connected by rail now, I understand."

Caudill asked, "Where's that?"

"New York State."

"That ain't Injun country."

"I never seen a steam carriage," Deakins said.

"Me, I don't never care to see one. A horse is good enough, or these here feet, if it comes to that."

The Frenchmen trailed back from the flat and set about cutting roasting sticks. Zenon squatted down afterward with his knees up under his chin, watching his roast cook. Caudill laid the side of ribs close to the coals.

Peabody dipped a can of water from the stream and set it to heat. Straight meat was a diet that grew agreeable with use, and it so simplified the business of cooking that a mountain traveler felt disinclined to make use of the flour and meal he had packed. A civilized stomach demanded a swallow of coffee, though, with a generous addition of sugar.

Watching him, Beauchamp said, "Me think good." Beauchamp lay on his stomach, with his stick propped against a rock and his roast scorching in the fire. He was a careless Frenchman for all his muscle.

Peabody sent his gaze up toward the divide again. The sunset had burned itself out. Of it all, only one thin red streak remained above the hills, and even as he watched, it darkened and the mountains began to lose outline against the sky. Darkness seemed to squeeze around him -darkness and silence, made the darker and silenter by the little flame of the campfire and the mindless chuckle of the water. The cold crept through his woolens and lay like metal along his skin. He pushed his feet closer to the fire. Perhaps Caudill was right, saying Indian shoes kept the feet warmer than the cobbler's product.

Caudill licked his fingers and wiped them on his buckskins and drew the knife across the leather to clean it and then put it back in its case. Not until he had fired his pipe did he speak. Then he said, "We'd best set a guard."

"Set a guard?" Peabody asked. He saw the campfire mirrored minutely in Zenon's lifted eyes.

"Just playin' safe," Caudill replied.

"What is it? By thunder, you'd think I was a child."

"I ain't seen a thing to scare a man. Just got a notion, is all."

"You didn't have a notion last night, or before."

"No cause to."

Deakins put in, "His medicine's workin', Peabody. It's tellin' him."

"Telling him what?"

"It ain't medicine, but just sense," Caudill said.

"Speak so a man can understand you, will you, please?"

Zenon asked, "Les sauvages?"

After a silence Caudill said, "You got a right to know, only I don't want to scare the French into leavin' us. This here pass is a dog-leg. There's a shorter way across, from the hip to the foot of the dog. It's rough but quick, runnin' up Cut Bank and over to Nyack Creek." He paused for a minute and added, "That's how the old Blackfeet kep' trappin' the Flatheads and Snakes."

"Who in the world would want to trap us? You two are Blackfeet yourselves."

Beauchamp was looking around into the darkness, as if the possibility of danger had just entered his dull head.

"Could be they'd foller and not cut ahead," said Deakins.

"Could be," Caudill agreed. "I didn't see nothin', though, the back way, and it ain't likely, besides. A party would've had time, now, to take the short cut and sneak back on us."

"For heaven's sake, answer. Who would want to trap us?" Peabody let his full impatience come into his voice.

Caudill shrugged. He let the words out along his pipe stem. "Red Horn, maybe, or some of his boys."
 

There was the bite of winter in the breeze the next morning and a skim of snow in the ground, stretching out white under the lingering darkness. Swift-running as the creek was, shore ice was closing it in. The Frenchmen came to the fire with their teeth chattering and rubbed their hands close over the red coals, swearing through stiffened lips.

"Get up the horses soon as you thaw out a little," Boone ordered. "We won't get across huggin' a fire." Their gaze came to his face and traveled from it out to where the night still wavered over the snow, and he added, "It's safe enough. I took a look around."

Peabody blew out his breath, watching the cloud that it made, and scuffed the palms of his hands on the skirts of his long-tailed coat. He had on a woolen cap, with flaps that came over his ears. "Cold," he said while he hunched inside the coat. "Cold for so little snow."

"You'll be seein' snow, I'm thinkin', before the day's over," Jim said. His eyes lifted, trying to make out what the sky looked like. The dark was close down, though, like a fog, and nothing showed overhead -not even a pale streak to the southeast where the sun would be climbing after a while. The breeze curled around a man, licking at him with a tongue of frost.

"Our visitors didn't appear," Peabody said. His round face, lighted up by the fire, looked fresh again after the night. The cold had brought out the red spots in his cheeks and had put another in the middle of his chin.

"Trouble with Injuns is they don't let a man know when they'll show up," Jim answered. "It ain't polite, not givin' a body time to fix for 'em."

"I see," said Peabody, smiling a little as if he didn't know quite what to make of Jim.

"Varmint scared the horses a while back," Boone said. "Painter, likely."

"Horse meat beats no meat, even to a painter. I bet he ain't had a bite since year afore yesterday, game's so scarce."

Jim knifed a piece from what was left of the side of deer.

Peabody watched him fill his mouth and then went to his pack and got out a towel and walked to the creek and squatted down. Boone could see him, stooped dark against the snow, with the creek running black and small at his feet. Peabody took off his cap and loosened the collar of his coat and pulled his sleeves up. He dipped up a hand of water and rubbed his two hands together and dipped again and held his hands tight for a minute to ease the cramp the cold had put in them. Then he dipped with both hands and brought the cupped water to his face and rubbed hard and fast, like trying to get a spot out. He came back blowing.
Jim said, "Shoo, that ain't nothin', Peabody. Wait'll you have to wash that there face with a icicle. You ain't a true
hivernan
till then."

The Frenchmen, and the horses behind them, took shape across the stream. The dark was drawing off, leaving the sky gray all over -the same kind of gray, with no light spot in it even yet.

"I et," Boone said, "so's I could take out ahead. You bring my horse along."

Jim nodded, but Peabody put a quick question. "You're not going to walk!"

"Thought I would."

Jim answered, "Same reason a war party walks. A man ain't so plain to see. He can get where a horse can't."

"And be run down more quickly, too."

"If he lets hisself be seen, maybe. And if t'other man has the stummick for it. Ain't many would want to chase after Boone, not if they knowed him."

"Do you really expect trouble?" Peabody asked Boone.

"I wouldn't say, either way. Only, if Injuns are after us, I figure they'll cut across and come at us from the front or sides."

"I can't believe anyone has designs against us."

"Maybe not, but the wolves have et many a feast on men as thought that way. You don't take chances, not if you know Injuns." Boone lifted his rifle to the crook of his arm.

"We'll see you later, then," Peabody said. Greenhorns kept saying things that didn't need to be said, nor answered either. A fool would know he would see him again, saving only that maybe his eyes didn't see any more.

Zenon and Beauchamp came up with the horses, which were snorty and touchy with cold. "Make them Bad Medicines hump it," Boone said to Jim. "I'm thinkin' hell is fixin' to freeze over." He set out up the canyon.

Daylight had come, or as much of it as ever would come on this day. The sky lay low over the mountains, so low that their tops were lost to sight. A man felt closed in, with no distance for his eye. It was as if the sky lay on his shoulders, bearing him down. From somewhere ahead the wind came, with a growing strength in it and a sting that drew up the face. The snow squeaked under his moccasins. Red Horn's young men would be shivering in their robes if they were out today. They would be shivering but looking just the same, seeing the snow and the trees black against it and the mountains climbing and the slopes dimmed with gray. Their eyes would be poking for distance, watching for color, watching for movement. A man got so's he could foot it fast and easy like a wild thing. He got so's he could cover ground without trying and go quiet without taking pains, so that his mind was free to think and his eye to look and his ear to listen. Jim was right, saying game was scarce. There was hardly a track in the snow, except now and then for the skittery print a mouse had left. The shoulders of the hills lay quiet and empty. A man walking alone got the notion that everything was gone except him, everything except him and the hills and the gray sky and the running wind.

The wind pinched his nose and cheeks and got a cold whisper inside his clothes sometimes. He would stay warmer than most, though, come no matter what, with wrappings of blanket under his leggings and fur-lined shoes made with long flaps that wrapped around his lower legs, too. Teal Eye had cut the blanket and made the shoes herself and seen to it that all were put into his pack. Blanket and fur and buckskins were better than boughten clothes anyway you took them, except that the Nor'West capote that he wore, with a hood that fitted over the head, was a good thing.

The stream dwindled to a swift trickle that fed off snowbanks high on the slopes and splashed down in little falls and made a bed and ran away, bound for the Marias and the Missouri. Another day like this one and the warmth that the sun had put in the earth would go out altogether and the snowbanks would close tight and the last of the water would freeze in long icicles over the faces of rock where it fell now. Already the ice hung at the sides of the falls.

Along toward the middle of the day, beyond where even a trickle of water ran, Boone climbed the last lift to the divide. One way the land pitched down to Oregon, to the Flathead and Clark's Fork and the Columbia and the western sea; the other, it fell off to the Marias and Missouri, to Blackfoot country and Red Horn's band and Teal Eye carrying his young one in her. It was strange that a man could go off and leave a part of him living behind him and have no power over it and no say-so but only the knowledge that there was a live piece of him that wasn't with him. It was as if a man couldn't get free from what he had been and done. He couldn't be himself alone; he had to be all the other men he was, in the season before and the, season before that and the season before that. He couldn't stand just by what he did now; he had to stand by what he had done in the past, too. Old Dick Summers would understand if he was around to be talked to. Still, it was all right, all right this time. A man knowing he had got himself a young one was all right. It gave him a different feeling from what he had had before, a kind of secret fullness in the chest.