The Last Crossing (50 page)

Suddenly, the dead and frozen grass crackles as a Cree flushes from hiding. A musket jabs up into Potts’s face, blinds him with its flash, stuns him with its explosion, bowls him off the pony’s back. For a moment, he gropes the ground on all fours, surrounded by bright, winking lights before he is submerged in a roaring, turbulent darkness.

Bit by bit, the sound of battle tugs him back into consciousness. Groggily, Potts registers astonishment to find himself alive. He gathers
his legs under him, hoists himself upright. The Cree who shot at him is nowhere to be seen. Potts notices his pony unconcernedly grazing the grass a few yards off. He turns his eyes to where the fight continues on the eastern river flats, but everything that is distant is hard to make out. He blinks his eyes, but the murk and blur does not clear.

When he rides his pony into the river, the frigid water gnaws his legs; his stones flinch up into his body. But soon they are across, splashing up the embankment, steam bursting from their bodies. Potts looks to the north where he first saw the Sutherlands rallying their men. The shock of the cold water seems to have returned his sight to him. He sees dead men scattered everywhere, some of the Cree lie in heaps where they dropped down one on top of the other. Near a small grove of cottonwoods, the Blackfoot have trapped the last of the warriors, the Sutherland boys.

When Potts rides up, Yellow Hair and his brother are surrounded by taunting Blackfoot who shake their weapons at them threateningly, show the Sutherlands the scalps they have taken from their Cree friends. The brothers sit back to back in a puddle of blood, unable to stand. Both men’s legs are useless, broken by bullets. Their carbines are empty, but they have drawn their knives, prepared to fight to the death, to sell their lives dear. Potts swings down from his pony, hurries up to the ring circling them.

The river crossing has melted some of the paint from the brothers’ faces, and it runs in thin blue rivulets down their throats. The paint is the colour of their eyes, a hard, glaring sky-blue. Blackfoot prowl around them just out of the reach of their knives, laughing and making sudden, teasing feints. The bravest dash in and strike at them with coup sticks. One young warrior has already been wounded mocking the Sutherlands, he presses a bit of cloth to his forearm to staunch the blood one of them has slashed out of him with his knife.

The Sutherland boys hurl the insults of the Blackfoot back at them. They sneer and beckon their tormentors to come closer, invite them to taste the edge of their knives.

“Enough,” Potts calls out. “Finish them.”

The young men step back, surprised by Bear Child’s command. They finger their weapons in disappointment. The Sutherlands can read the gestures of the Blackfoot, their faces, and they know that in moments they will die. In a high, piping voice of defiance, Curly Hair begins to sing his death chant in Cree. In a low, sombre voice swelling deep from his broad chest, Yellow Hair launches into a different song.

The strangeness of an English death chant fills the Blackfoot with amazement, holds them still.

The autumn sunshine bleaches the pale skin of the Sutherlands even whiter, licks the butter of their waist-long hair. They wait, their knives held ready. The ring closes on them, the Blackfoot rush at the cold flash of the Sutherlands’ blades. Rifle butts, stone hammers crash down on blond heads, over and over. Potts has no wish to strike them, he only stands and watches what must be done. When the Blackfoot warriors step back, the brothers lie crumpled, their limbs tangled in a final embrace.

After that, there are only the remnants of the invaders to mop up. Ten Cree in a clump of poplar, their musket powder wet from the crossing, one revolver among them, are quickly dispatched. The rest who have made it into brush coverts to the north are allowed to escape. Everyone is tired from the long day’s fighting, the Blackfoot dead and wounded must be brought home. Calf Skin’s wrist has swollen bigger than his biceps and turned black. Nevertheless, he will not allow anyone to remove the arrow. Strapped to a travois, he is dragged back to his father’s lodge.

Potts and the McKays return to the Blood camp near Fort Whoop-Up. All the people honour Bear Child’s bravery, the cunning he used in turning the tide of battle in his people’s favour. They touch the
thirteen scalps hanging from his belt. The children stare at the ear that the Cree warrior scorched with the muzzle flame of his musket, at the specks of black powder embedded in Potts’s cheek by the blast. Everyone praises the power of his cat medicine, which protected him even with a musket pushed into his face.

All night long the Bloods sing and dance in celebration of a victory that rubbed out three hundred Cree, but Potts refuses to join them. He hides himself away from his people in Fort Whoop-Up just as Mary hid herself from him the night the Blackfoot destroyed the Crow in Montana. Sitting silent on his bunk, absent-mindedly stroking his raw, burned ear, he thinks of the Sutherlands, half-breeds like himself, singing their two sides, the Cree and the Scottish, as they prepared to meet death.

The next morning, Potts rises early. A soft, bleary snowfall wraps the world in white as he rides to the place where the Sutherlands died. Their pale bodies, stripped by the Blackfoot, are hard to find in the snow. Finally he discovers them, wearing caps of gore instead of long yellow hair.

He works all morning, one by one lifting and carrying heavy stones to pile on the naked bodies of the brothers. In the cold, his fingers become claws, his nails break and bleed prying boulders from the frozen mud. He wishes to honour the Sutherlands who, fair enough to pass as white men, chose to give their lives for their Cree brothers. He wonders if the Scottish raiders his Almost Father Dawson spoke of, the ones who swept down from the high country into the land of the English, left the world with Yellow Hair’s song on their lips.

A little past noon his cairn is completed. Even though the Sutherlands were enemies, no Blackfoot will pass it without tucking a pinch of tobacco or a strip of red cloth into its cracks and crannies to honour their courage.

Potts stares off into the screen of snow. Right now, the Crow will be gathering in the basin of the Powder and Bighorn rivers to make winter camp.

Yesterday, he might have died. If the Cree’s muzzle had moved a finger breadth to the right, his brains would have been smashed by a musket ball like his own father’s were so may years ago. Mitchell would be orphaned as he himself had been.

Potts starts to shake. He is starved for the sight of his boy; his spirit is hungry to press his son close to him. There are no more excuses. The time has come to ride south, to beg forgiveness from his Crow family.

ALOYSIUS
Custis pulled out of town with Charles Gaunt yesterday. Custis is some better, but I don’t judge him fit to travel. I told him this, but you might as well reason with a keg of nails.

All because four days ago a hide hunter by name of Cornelius Kopp rode into Fort Benton from the Basin Country carrying a message to Custis from Jerry Potts that a young, blond white man was living with the Crow down there. According to Kopp, Jerry Potts is camped on the outskirts of a big Crow village, working on his father-in-law to help patch things up between him and his wife, Mary. Strikes me that’s a risky business for Potts. Seeing as he has such a mighty reputation as a Crow killer, you’d reckon some young Crow buck would be determined to lift his hair. But Kopp says even though Potts ain’t welcome, the Crow don’t meddle with him. Maybe his foolhardy bravery won their respect and they’ve decided it would be bad medicine to touch him.

The particulars the half-breed sent was few. Didn’t have no name for the white man but the one the Indians call him by, Born of a Horse. The little Custis learned from Kopp, he passed on directly to Charles Gaunt. That got the Englishman all het up, out of his doldrums. For two days he pitched around town pestering people, offering the moon to anybody who would guide him down to whatever Potts has found. But he didn’t get no takers. Ever since Barker and Grunewald got back to Benton, they been running down Englishmen as travelling companions and the Gaunts in particular.

I seen Gaunt do it, right here in my bar, plead with Custis to take him south. He said there was nobody else he could turn to, that he needed to know who the fellow with the Crow was. If Straw wouldn’t take him, he had no choice but to try and make it there on his own.

It took some time for Custis to reply. I wondered if he weren’t weighing Gaunt’s chances of surviving winter travel on his own. I would have been sorely tempted to let him go if I wanted Lucy Stoveall all to my own.

Thing is, Custis melts under begging, and Gaunt begged him mighty insistent. Still, Custis sat staring out the window of the saloon without replying a word. Second week of November, but the day was warm and bright, last gasp of fine weather. Finally, Custis lifted his glass and drained it. “Travel is hazardous this time of year,” he said. “Weather is sudden and changeable. Temperature can drop forty degrees in the blink of an eye. Buy us a small tent. Get yourself some warm clothes. We leave tomorrow.”

CHARLES
Mr. Straw is proving to be a trial. Ungenerous and unkind of me to think it, given the assistance he is providing me, but nevertheless true. What exasperates me so is that Straw does not understand that I cannot fall victim to unfounded optimism. And yet, I carry a pouch of twenty-dollar gold coins, ransom for the brother I dare not allow myself to believe I will find.

All I ask is to ride along and nurse my thoughts.

Straw seems to interpret my silence as brooding, and attempts to lighten my spirits by emphasizing the Crow’s cordiality towards white men, continually blathering on about his horse-buying days with these Indians. Announcing that in all his dealings with them they proved to be upright, dependable, and honest. Telling me that the relations of the Crow with white men have never been marked by the hostility which the Blackfoot and the Sioux feel towards us. If the young white man is Simon, he assures me, I can be certain no harm has befallen him.

I have not retorted that if what Straw says is true, if my brother has been rescued by a people Straw maintains are such good friends of the white race, then why has Simon not been returned safe and sound to civilization?

What’s more, Straw’s garrulous encomiums on the character of the Crow are liberally sprinkled with asides on their customs, a topic I find it impossible to turn my attention to. Does he think that it will fend off my anxiety to know that these savages are besotted horse lovers who dress their ponies in showy feather bonnets? Or that the men are particularly proud of the length of their hair? Straw even insisted on relating an interminable story about one ancient Crow worthy whose mane measured ten feet and which was kept rolled up in a package that he carried under his arm like a man returning home from a shop with a purchase. On and on, doing nothing to quell my mounting trepidation, only compounding it with irritation.

But after three days of pointless chatter, as the evening light dwindles and the sky fills with a flutter of wet snow, Straw at last says something that gains my interest, announcing off-handedly that he is convinced tomorrow we shall at last locate the Crow village. It is all I can do not to argue that we must continue on in the falling darkness. How swiftly my stoicism evaporates in the heat of my impatience to know the identity of the white man.

A campsite is selected amid a stand of pines, we halter our horses, erect our small tent, start a fire, glumly chew our hardtack and dried meat in a haze of snow. Straw and I scarcely exchange a word. While he sits gazing at the fire completely abstracted and silent for the first time today, the fitful, quavering firelight reveals a man far different from the one I met many months ago, that large, imposing, fleshy fellow. Illness has worked a terrible change in him; his vigour is extinguished. Custis Straw is a mere sketch of what he once was. If a rich, voluptuous painting could be stripped and the drawing which underpins it revealed – there you would have a metaphor for Straw. A sharp blade of nose overhangs a sunken face; the eye sockets are caverns; every plane of his countenance speaks of the underlying skull.