Sin Killer

by Larry McMurtry

  For several minutes he waited, peering now and then at the cubs, whose solemn looks had not changed. There was no roar, no charge from the mother, but still Pomp waited. He remembered that his own mother, Sacagawea, had cautioned him about how sly the grizzlies were. He watched and listened; it was finally the buzzing of many flies that led him to the dead mother bear—she had been dead at least a day. Pomp looked, but could not determine what had killed her. Bears, like other creatures, sometimes just died, as his own mother had.

  Catching the cubs—which would make a wonderful addition to Drummond Stewart’s menagerie, proved no easy matter. Even though Pomp spoke soothingly to the little bears, they retreated deeper into the underbrush, where he could not follow. When he went around to the other side of the thicket, the cubs moved back to the side where they had been.

  Pomp soon concluded that the best thing to do was wait. He had some venison with him—with their mother dead at least a day, no doubt the cubs were hungry. When he held it out to the cubs they merely stared at him with solemn caution.

  Finally Pomp left the venison in the middle of a small clearing, and then hid himself close by. Though the little bears had no doubt been suckling still, he thought they might at least sniff at the meat. He waited more than an hour, hardly moving, and at last his patience was rewarded. Very cautiously the cubs edged out of their thicket and sniffed the meat. Then Pomp pounced—the little bears turned to flee but then floundered into each other and fell in a heap. Weak from hunger, they suddenly gave up the struggle, whining sadly when Pomp picked them up by their scruffs.

  “Now don’t be crying, bears—we’ll soon have you fattened up,” Pomp assured them. Having, by one stroke, captured the one species Drum Stewart had only faint hopes of securing, Pomp decided to give up on mountain sheep for the day and hurry to camp. He didn’t want the bear cubs to die, as young animals sometimes would if weakened or discouraged.

  Fortunately Billy Sublette had just returned from California, where he had purchased a dozen Spanish horses to help pack out whatever furs they took. Three of the horses were mares in foal.

  When Pomp got to camp Jim Bridger was so delighted with the little bear cubs that he milked two mares himself. The two cubs, starving, at once lapped up the steaming milk and followed it with a big bowl of porridge that Joe Walker had whipped up, sweetened with a daub of wild honey. Both cubs whined piteously the first night, even though Pomp held them and stroked them; but on the second day, after more mare’s milk and more porridge, plus much friendly attention from the trappers, the cubs accepted their role as camp mascots. After some sharp debate they were named Andy and Abby. By the third day they were thoroughly at home, getting into everything, laying waste the cooking supplies, and even eating a plug of tobacco that Joe Walker had left lying around, a feast that put them both in low spirits for a time. But they soon recovered and were as pesky as ever. The only trapper who didn’t immediately lose his heart to the friendly cubs was old Hugh Glass, who at first refused to let them lick his face.

  “Being kilt by a bear has rather put me off the species,” Hugh declared. “These cubs will grow up pretty soon and eat one or two of us, if we’re not lucky.”

  “Why, Hugh—how can you hold a grudge against our little Abby?” Jim Bridger asked.

  “It wasn’t you that was kilt, Jimmy,” Hugh Glass replied; and yet, not more than three days later, he was spotted slipping choice bits of buffalo liver to Abby, who was soon trailing him like a puppy wherever he went. If Hugh slipped away for a day to hunt, Abby whined unhappily until he returned. They even had to chain her by one foot to keep her from plunging off after her friend Hugh.

  “I wonder why she likes that old raunch so much,” Jim Bridger asked—he was a little jealous.

  “Hugh’s half grizzly himself—that’s why,” Milt Sublette suggested.

  “More than half, I’d say,” Eulalie Bonneville declared. He had had some lively disputes with Hugh Glass over the years.

  Andy, though friendly with everyone, attached himself mainly to Pomp, his rescuer, and Pomp was especially careful that no harm came to the cub, whose mother, like his own, had died.

  48

  He had been born in the wild, and then taken from it.

  EXCITED by Pomp’s capture of the two grizzly cubs—sure to be the noblest specimens in his great game park if only he could get them back to Scotland alive—Drummond Stewart tried again to get Pomp to agree to come back home with him and manage the park. None of the trappers was as good with animals as young Pomp. Already they had elk, deer, moose, antelope, and buffalo—all fawns and calves Pomp had taken—penned up in an ample box canyon, well watered and barricaded with logs. The other trappers seldom bothered with these young creatures, but Pomp went into the enclosure every day, his pockets stuffed with little cubes of sugar, which he dispensed to the spindly calves, none of whom showed any fear of the man. When the little bear cub Andy, Pomp’s special pet, followed him into the enclosure, the young quadrupeds were skittish at first, but soon settled down and accepted the cub, who even romped a bit with the spindly buffalo calf.

  “I’ll never manage them without you, Pomp,” Drum insisted. “I’ll lose them all if you desert me.”

  “But I won’t desert you, sir,” Pomp assured him. “I’ll stay with you until you are all safely on the boat in New Orleans—that was my promise.”

  “Well and good, but what will happen when I get them back to Scotland?” Drum Stewart asked. He was a man used to getting his way, by charm if possible, by bullying or by the expenditure of a great deal of hard cash if charm didn’t work; but, in Pomp’s case, none of the three worked. At a certain point in the discussion Pomp’s mobile, handsome face and liquid eyes ceased to be mobile or liquid. He was never rude, he never shouted or cursed; but when implored to do something he had no intention of doing, his face became a mask, mild in aspect but glazed like porcelain. When that happened discussion proceeded no further.

  Pomp respected Drummond Stewart, whose desire to bring the animals of the New World back to a park in the Old World—rather than merely slaughtering them, as Lord Berrybender did—seemed to him an ambitious thing. And yet, even as he devised traps and set lures, Pomp began to develop mixed feelings about the project. The innocence of the young animals touched him. Far from being too cautious, they were, in the main, too trusting, yielding their freedom too easily. Of course, he knew that both losses and gains were involved: the two appealing bear cubs would have soon died had he not found them. Cougars, wolves, or bears would have succeeded in dragging down many of the young quadrupeds. In capturing them he had saved them—and yet a feeling of disquiet wouldn’t leave him. He saw the trusting creatures who learned to eat sugar out of his hand as being rather like himself. He had been born in the wild, and then taken from it. His parents had delivered him to Captain Clark in order that he might have schooling; a little later, kind Prince Paul of Württemberg had taken him to Europe in order that he have better schooling: he himself had been like a small animal in a game park, though a park with a gentle and amiable keeper.

  Like the little bears or the spindly young elk, his life had been without the risks that would have been his every day if he had grown up with the Shoshone— his mother’s people—or even the more settled Mandans or Rees. With those peoples he might have died any day, from attack, bad luck, arrows, weather, bears. He would have been free, but that might only have meant free to be dead if he had been careless, or merely unlucky.

  Which was better: freedom with its risks, or the settled life with its comforts? It was not a question he could fully answer, but he did know that now he himself belonged to the wild. He did not intend to go back to Europe. When he returned from Stuttgart, when he stepped off the boat at Westport Landing and looked again at the great Western prairies, it seemed to him that those prairies had been there all along in his head, even when he hunted in the forests of Germany. At once Pomp rid himself of European clothes and went back to the Osage band he h
ad been hunting with when Prince Paul found him. The Osage welcomed him—though many of the young braves who had been his friends were dead, victims of the wild way of life.

  Very soon after coming back Pomp realized he was a man whose worlds were mixed. He spoke good Spanish, which meant that he had a value to anyone needing a guide for Santa Fe; he spoke fair French, which put him in demand with trappers who meant to trap the waterways of the north—and he quickly picked up a smattering of the tribal dialects of various Indian bands. Many customers of means—rich travelers like the Berrybenders—would have been happy to hire such a well-spoken and competent guide. Of many possibilities Pomp had chosen Drummond Stewart because the project seemed interesting. Merely helping rich people indulge themselves didn’t interest him. But exploring little-known pockets of the West did interest him, as did the chance to catch, rather than kill, animals. One of the few things Pomp could remember his mother telling him was that the animals were his brothers and he should treat them with the respect he would owe a brother. It was that duty that made him uneasy, as he walked through the box canyon, letting the young animals eat sugar out of his hand. Was it respecting his brothers to cage them, even if eventually they would roam free in a spacious Scottish park? Was it respecting them to move them from their homes, even if it allowed them longer lives? His kindly tutor, Herr Hanfstaengl, had tried to interest Pomp in philosophy, particularly the philosophy of Kant, of which Pomp grasped almost nothing. And yet, there on the slopes of the Wind River range, walking with his innocent brothers—elk, antelope, buffalo—Pomp wondered, even as Andy, the jealous little bear, tried to snatch cubes of sugar out of his hand before he could give them to the other animals—whether only some philosopher, some very wise man, could resolve the question he himself could merely formulate.

  He knew that his parents had been trying to do their best by him, when they took him to Captain Clark to be schooled—his father had had little education and his mother none. Sacagawea had been of the wild—as purely of the wild as the bear cubs or the little elk. The Hidatsa, to be sure, had stolen her from the Shoshone, but the Hidatsa had not taken the wild out of her, because they were wild themselves. Sometimes, walking amid the young animals, pestered by Andy, Pomp felt an ache inside—an ache so deep that he feared he would never be free of it. He had been removed from the wild, and had come back to it, and yet he had not come back to it wild—even some of the mountain men he camped with every night were closer to the wild state than he could ever be. The animal in Hugh Glass was barely subdued—nor was it subdued in Jim Snow. Those two at least, Hugh and Jim, were more like Indians than Europeans. It was a thing he envied them, since he himself was neither the one nor the other. He could fight, of course, if his life was threatened, and yet he didn’t like to. Unlike Jim and Hugh, he had been tamed—yet in the West, where he was making his life, the tamed were of little consequence. The wilderness, the wild, only truly welcomed the wild. It seemed to Pomp that the best loyalty he could make his mother was to live where she had lived, on her plains, in her mountains. He didn’t want to feed tame animals in some misty Scottish valley. There were times when he felt like kicking down the barricades and turning all the animals free—they were his brothers and they might prefer to stay wild. Though he felt the impulse, he didn’t kick down the barricades because he knew it was already too late. The captured creatures were not wild enough to survive; they would all be immediately eaten by keener creatures who had never been anything but wild.

  Drummond Stewart, watching Pomp with the deer and elk and antelope, knew that in this case he had not won his man. Pomp Charbonneau would see him to New Orleans, as promised, but not a mile farther.

  When he said as much to Eulalie Bonneville, the trapper at once agreed.

  “Pomp will never go back, but you might tempt Jimmy Snow,” Bonney said. “He’s got that English wife.”

  “No thank you,” Drum said. “Mr. Snow seems to me to be wilder than these animals. I doubt he’d take kindly to the kilt and the kirk.”

  Drum had often found himself thinking of Tasmin, though—the woman had from the first looked at him with scorn in her eyes. He didn’t like Tasmin’s attitude, but he was not disposed to challenge it—not yet, anyway. His thoughts more often turned to the long-legged beauty Venetia Kennet—their frolics had livened up the dullness of a northern winter. Her ardor had surprised him, indeed almost worn him out, but now that he had been absent from her for a few months, she had begun to swim through his thoughts again. He remembered her long legs, high breasts, avid mouth, untiring loins.

  Lady Tasmin might look at him with scorn, if she wished. He thought he might just revisit the tall cellist, play a few new tunes between those long legs— for one thing, he liked her stamina. She had survived not only Albany Berrybender’s rough treatment, but a northern winter too. Perhaps, if the two of them found that they still got on, he might even take Venetia Kennet to wife. It would outrage rigid home society, but then he had never been obedient to that home society’s narrow rules. A man who aspired to be a proper Scot laird would not like be camped by the Wind River, trapping animals that he would then have to transport for thousands of miles.

  “It’ll soon be high summer—I expect old Berry-bender and his company will be showing up any day,” Eulalie Bonneville said. “That tall girl with him had a considerable fondness for you, as I recall.”

  Dummond Stewart didn’t answer. Bonney was as big a gossip as any woman—might as well cry a secret to the mountains as tell it to Bonney. Let the Berrybenders come—time enough then to see if the tall lass, Vicky Kennet, still favored his rod.

  49

  … Black Toe, a cautious yet proficient man…

  BLUE Thunder had always flourished in winter— the cold sharpened his senses, made him feel keen. To a man brought up amid all the bounty of the northland, winter—so long as one was healthy—was a season to be welcomed.

  Blue Thunder even enjoyed blizzards—when a good northern blizzard was blowing, at least there was some privacy to be had—and he liked privacy. In any band of warriors—even Piegan warriors— there were sure to be several chattering fools: just the kind of people Blue Thunder didn’t welcome. Even if a man didn’t happen to be at home in a well-banked lodge when a blizzard struck, anyone who knew the country could always find shelter under a creek bank, or in a thicket where firewood was plentiful. It was true that blizzards sometimes blew in rather quickly, but then Blue Thunder too was quick—the minute he sensed a lift in the wind, of the sort that made the snow fly, he chose his shelter and made his fire. Then, if there was time, he might catch a porcupine, a hare, or a couple of fat squirrels at least.

  Blue Thunder had learned the ways of weather, and how to survive blizzards, from his wise old grandfather Black Toe, a cautious yet proficient man. Black Toe was by far the best snare maker in the whole of the Blackfoot nation. In all his life Black Toe had only been careless once—he had failed to look where he was going one morning and had been bitten on the toe by a small but venomous prairie rattler. Before that accident, which caused his toe to rot, he had been called Leaping Elk, a far more flattering name than the one he ended up with.

  The injury to his toe in no way impaired Black Toe’s skill as a snare maker. He carefully explained to his grandson that though it might be all very well for hunters to kill big animals—buffalo, moose, elk, even bear if they dared—the fact was that, to a man of sensitivity, the flesh of large animals was often stringy and tough. If there was nothing else to eat, of course, people had to make do; but for those with more delicate palates, who cared to pick and choose, the flesh of birds and small animals was almost always better. Old Black Toe liked geese, green-headed ducks, plump prairie chickens, quail, porcupine, hare, squirrels, curly green snakes, chipmunks, and tiny songbirds so small they could be eaten in one bite. Mice, too, could be eaten in one bite, but Black Toe had little fondness for mice, unless a bunch of them could be roasted together in their nests under a brush pile or some
where. Of course, the fetus of any animal was apt to be tender—now and then he would roast part of an unborn fawn and leave the mother doe to be eaten by the tribe.

  What Black Toe liked best was making snares, and not crude, all-purpose snares, of the sort a clumsy hunter might resort to, but intricate, delicate snares fashioned after long study of the habits and personalities of the various creatures that might be snared. Snares for hares could be made in a few minutes. Porcupines were so stupid and slow that it was not really necessary to snare them. Porcupines were best taken on the end of a lance and their needles carefully saved. Snares for waterbirds had to be carefully secured under the water, a tedious business, especially if it was winter and the water cold. Sometimes Black Toe preferred to net waterbirds, in order to avoid cold work in the water. Once, while setting a snare for geese, he had accidentally snared a small owl, a mistake that disturbed him so badly that he gave up snaring birds for some years. It was after he snared the owl that the snake bit him—the former Leaping Elk felt very lucky that his brush with the owl resulted in nothing worse than one lost toe.

  Owls were the worst medicine of all, of course— confusion in one’s behavior toward owls almost always meant that death would be coming soon—and yet Black Toe lived thirty years after his brush with the owl, plenty of time to instruct his grandson in the proper use of snares.