The Yellowstone (2 page)

Chapter 2

Moon when the horses get fat

“You got any ideas,” Mac asked Jim in the morning as they were loading the pack horses, “about how to get supplies with nothing to trade?”

Jim shook his head. “Wise Delaware saying,” Jim singsonged. “Sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof.” Jim had been raised by a missionary family named Sykes. People saw his skin color and got expectations. He liked to play with that.

Mac knew Skinhead didn’t have any ideas, not any serious ones.

So how were they going to get outfitted for next season? Mac didn’t even have the beaver pelts (they called them plews) to pay for last year’s stake. The clerk of the fort surely wouldn’t extend them more credit. Snobby Mr. Home, with his plummy accent and his “mistering” and his amused eyes and curling mouth. What Mr. Home is going to advance me, thought Mac, is a pound of mockery and a plug of humiliation.

Not that Mr. Home had anything to be snooty about. Fort Mackenzie was no Fort Union, where Assiniboin concubines dressed in the latest St. Louis fashions. Much less Fort Laramie, rich from the trade of the Sioux. Or Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas, where William Bent had a cellar of wines that would make old Chouteau proud. Mr. Home’s place of business, Fort Mackenzie, six miles up the Marias from the Missouri, was miserable, out of the way, cramped, and had little to trade, now that the Blackfeet were poor.

Mac Maclean was twenty-four years old and new to the Shining Mountains. Here he’d lived the time of his life, and he was afraid it was over.

That was Skinhead’s theme those days—the Indians have gone to hell, the country has gone to hell, the life has gone to hell. But none of that seemed to keep Skinhead from having a high old time.

The Indians were gone to hell—the Blackfeet were decimated by smallpox six years ago. Lucky for these four trappers. Now you had a reasonable chance of getting across Blackfoot country alive.

Mac tugged his hat down against the glare of the sun. They were riding slowly in a string across the plains of the basin of the Judith River, leading the pack horses. The animals’ heads were down, they were nose to tail, their tails swishing—it was hot and dry and fly season.

Skinhead irked Mac, though, when he sounded off about how miserable everything was. Skinhead had been in the mountains twenty years—he was once an Ashley man. Mac had been riding and trapping the Rockies for only three years and was crazy about the life. He thought Skinhead, properly George Gant, was in love with the sound of his own grumble.

Mac kept his eyes moving, gazing across the rolling hills, the slopes deep in green grass. The life was shining, but dangerous.

Til started humming behind Mac—some hymn. When Til was supposed to be watchful, like now, he was off in a dream world or half dozing. Maybe tetched. Sure did weird things. All Mac liked about Til was his talk. This morning he had described Skinhead’s shooting the wiping stick as “profligate,” a word Mac had never heard outside of church. But if Til weren’t Skinhead’s nephew…

It was true, though, that Mac felt protective of Til. Everyone did. The village slow-wit, maybe, but
our
village slow-wit. Bucktoothed, boyish, likable Til. If only he would trap with someone else.

Mac rode into deeper, greener grass, and it brushed his stirrups. He loved the smell of the grass. Grass fed the buffalo, and the buffalo were the wealth of the Indians.

The wealth of the fur trappers was beaver. Mac snorted. The price of beaver had hit the bottom of the well and busted. Besides that, the trappers had no plews to sell. Funny as getting both your ears clapped at once.

Mac could hear Skinhead’s wail again: “This country is trapped out.”

Maybe so. In March these four men trapped the cold, swift creeks running into the Yellowstone River from the great plateau to the south, the land of hot springs and geysers. The take was poor. Now they’d worked the small, nameless creeks of the Snowy Mountains and the Little Belts that came into the Judith basin. Poor again.

Mac looked at his own two pack horses plodding along, thought of the others, and heard Skinhead’s dirge. Pitiful beasts, bearing few possessions and few peltries.

“This child knows when he’s at the end of his string,” the fat man liked to say. “In ’33, just ten year ago, we marched this country in fur brigades fifty and a hundred strong, too mighty even for the Blackfeet.” The Blackfeet liked to kill mountain men, and all the neighboring Indians and anyone else they could find—everybody in the mountains, red and white, hated the Blackfeet, which meant the whole Blackfeet confederation; Piegans, Bloods, Blackfeet proper, and Gros Ventres.

“We filled the mountains with men. Now look at this beaver,” Skinhead would go on, “riding with two boys,” meaning Mac and Til, “and an Injun.” Though Skinhead knew Jim was one sly, subtle Delaware.

Mac had heard it all a hundred times. Ten years ago they would have gone to a rendezvous, a gaudy trade fair with hundreds of trappers and thousands of Indians, a rowdy, rip-roaring carnival of tests of skill, tomahawk-throwing, shooting, card playing, and trick riding, spiced with drinking, brawling, fornicating, and storytelling. Those were shinin’ times, beaver aplenty, and six dollars a pelt. A beaver man was rich—he could afford whiskey, plenty of traps, powder and ball, horses, dalliances, even wives, if he had a mind.

In those days, if you didn’t have plews to trade, why, the companies would give you all the credit you needed. Mountain men were rich, or would be next rendezvous. These days, thought Mac, we’re ruined and don’t have sense enough to know it.

They camped in the bottoms along the Teton River, among the cottonwoods. Plenty of water, no fire. Til piped in his high, cracking voice to nobody in particular, “Sure wish we had some coffee.” He was addicted to it, with heaps of sugar. Which cost two dollars a pint. They were all perched on deadfall, chewing pemmican.

Skinhead struggled up, pulled his breechcloth aside, and unceremoniously pissed in the dust. “This child is gonna quit,” he declared. “He’s gonna go to telling stories of wild Injuns in the St. Louis taverns for whiskey.”

“All you’re good for,” Jim put in softly. “Tellin’ stories.” The small, slender man always talked as if he had meal in his mouth. Needling Skinhead was his favorite pastime.

Mac got up and started off into the twilight. He wanted to smoke his pipe and look about and do he knew not what. Alone. Skinhead would bluster a little at Jim, and Jim would needle gently, and Skinhead would end up telling stories again. Skinhead could seem a fool. Could play the fool. But he was mountain-wise and beaver-canny. Skinhead, who looked fifty, and Jim, who looked thirty, had ridden together twenty years, since the Ashley days.

But Mac had heard all the stories, tales of the cock-o-the-walk times. Of General Ashley, the man who started it all. Of Jedediah Smith, a captain who wore his Bible leather as hard as his boot leather, but was respected, for all that. Of Hugh Glass, who survived the bear and the treachery of his companions with a griz-sized feat of courage. Of Tom Fitzpatrick, the small, sardonic Irishman with the hair of the bear in him. Of Jim Bridger, Skinhead’s old brigade leader, always ready to fight or fornicate, and the savviest of all whites about Indian ways.

Now Smith was dead, killed by Comanches on the Cimarron. Glass got scalped on the frozen Yellowstone. Fitzpatrick was nursemaiding soldiers across the trail to Oregon—“explorers” who couldn’t find their way to the outhouse, Skinhead said contemptuously. And Bridger had built a fort and turned trader. Old Gabe, a storekeeper.

Mac climbed a sandstone boulder and perched on top. He packed his pipe slowly, tamped it, lit it with a lucifer, a stick with sulphur on the end. Damned luxury, he thought—lucifers to make fire, but nothing to shoot with. He gave thought to Fort Mackenzie tomorrow. Still no ideas. You couldn’t mount a fur hunt without DuPont and Galena, meaning black powder and lead for balls. You needed some tobacco, both to smoke and to trade, and various foofaraw for the Indians. Mac even needed to replace two traps.

This outfit was finished.

For the hundredth time Mac considered doing like other trappers—going back to St. Louis or on to Oregon. Or scouting for the Army. Or guiding wagon trains. But why tease yourself, lad? You’re not going anywhere. This place has a hold on you.

He could hunt for Fort Mackenzie probably, or Fort Union. Keep the pork-eaters, people from the settlements, in decent Rocky Mountain meat. Cut and stack wood for the steamboat. But it sounded damned well like a job. And he would have to put up with Mr. Home or Mr. Kipp, the Fort Union factor.

Maybe he should turn Injun. Live with the Cheyennes, where he had friends. Follow the buffalo. Steal horses. Fight the occasional fight for excitement. Live in a tipi, take a wife or two. Raise kids.

But he wouldn’t be able to take a wife. He’d have to go to the Cheyennes poor. They’d make him welcome enough, Strikes Foot, Calling Eagle, and Lame Deer. But without a bride price he’d be a poor relation, living in another man’s lodge. And he was not all the way comfortable with the way Calling Eagle was—strange

Mac wanted his own lodge. He could picture it easily in the circle of Cheyenne lodges; buffalo hides stitched together, smoke coming out the flaps, a tripod in front with a medicine bundle. He’d keep his family Bible in the bundle, among other things. He’d have good horses, some to travel on, a buffalo runner, and a war horse, plus pack animals. He’d get a good stud and breed horses—show the Cheyennes how to improve their stock. He’d go with his friends to steal Crow and Blackfoot horses and fight when necessary.

Maybe after a while he would get a scene of coup-striking painted on his lodge, to show how fine he’d done. Maybe after a while the lodge would be filled with children. And their mother, Annemarie.

He drew on his pipe and looked around through the lavender twilight. The cottony down from the cottonwoods floated and shimmered in the still evening air. He watched Jim walk over to check the horses’ picket pins. Mac admired the small Indian. He reminded Mac of the way an otter moves, mincing, poised, with elegant control of each footpad. Skinhead called him in Cheyenne, Man Who Doesn’t Stir Air in Front When He Walks.

Mac pulled on the pipe again and dreamily let Annemarie play in the pastures of his mind.

He remembered her performing on that pony of hers. She was a sizable girl, broad-shouldered and broad-hipped, and as tall as Mac, who was white-man average. Right now she might outweigh him. She had copper glints in her black hair, along with her name the only legacy of her father, old Charbonneau, the translator for Lewis and Clark on their big trip across to the Pacific. Seemed like Charbonneau left children in every tribe in the West.

On her pony, Annemarie was agile as a squirrel. She and her brothers and sisters and other kids had riding contests, hell for leather. Mac’s favorite memory of her was putting those quail eggs of Calling Eagle’s on a twist of sweetgrass. Annemarie cantered down on them, leaned out of her woman’s saddle, and picked up the tiny eggs without breaking them.

Ah, but she was full of herself that evening.

It was that evening she gave him her pet name for him, Green Eye. Most of the Cheyennes called him Dancer, because he loved to kick up his heels.

He was staying with Strikes Foot’s family for a few days—Skinhead and Jim and Til were gone off somewhere. She talked him into playing the hand game with her, though her mother, Lame Deer, disapproved. The girl had hardly anything to bet and was teasingly open about what she meant to win from Mac, a whalebone hairbrush for her fingertip-length hair.

She told the whole family merrily that she’d get that brush, and whatever else Mac would put out on the blanket. She would bet a strip of blue and yellow bead-work, and her porcupine-quill comb if she had to, and the ermine tails she wrapped her braids in. To get that mirror she’d even bet her dress, if she had to take it off and play naked.

This quip shocked the family. Cheyenne girls were not like Crows—they were chaste. Annemarie was tickled by everyone’s embarrassment, especially Mac’s.

Mac felt roped into playing with her, but he had no intention of letting her lose that dress. At first he did a sloppy job of concealing the bone in one hand or the other and let her win.

But she caught on and acted miffed. She felt lucky and wanted really to win, she said. She claimed that when she wanted to know which hand the bone was in, she only had to look at his eyes. The blue eye was unreadable. But when she started to touch either hand, the green eye told her whether it was the one.

“Which hand, Green Eye?” she’d say teasingly, and then choose—usually right.

Finally she egged him into putting the brush on the blanket. She matched it with an awl. The first bet she lost the awl. But then she won the brush and retired delighted. And never had to take off the dress.

That night, after they all bedded down in the lodge—his feet were to Annemarie’s—the smell of her seemed to fill his nostrils. He thought of her young body under the blankets and imagined how it would feel to touch it.

Lord, Mac told himself, hadn’t he acted like the lovesick boy that night! And him a grown man, experienced with women.

He thought of speaking to Strikes Foot about her then. He still thought of it, every day. But Mac didn’t have the necessary. He was worse than busted—he owed. The damn company owned even the shirt he was wearing.

“Goddamn Br-ritishers,” railed Skinhead, his voice echoing through the Marias River valley. He might as well holler here—there could be no danger this close to the fort. “Goddamn John Bull. This nigger says they should use the Union Jack to wipe their r-r-ruddy ar-r-rses. John Bull oughta be outa this country, north to Hudson’s Bay. They take our plews and don’t even know what way the stick floats.”

He was sounding off, Mac knew, because they were getting close to the confrontation with Mackenzie’s factor. But Mac didn’t rail like Skinhead. For one thing, Fort Mackenzie was owned by the American Fur Company, not the Hudson’s Bay Company. For another, Mr. Home was Mac’s countryman, and the accent Skinhead was mocking was a Scots burr like Macs. The fur trade was full of Scots.