Sin Killer

by Larry McMurtry

  “I try to warn people when there is danger, that’s all,” Greasy Lake insisted. His feelings were hurt that Walkura was behaving so coolly to him, and acting so skeptically about the news he had ridden hard to bring. Of course, Walkura had always been a difficult person—though a great raider, of course. Greasy Lake would rather have taken the news to Blue Thunder, his cousin, but the camp of the Piegans was many days north and Walkura’s camp only half a day’s ride west.

  “Not only that, there’s more,” Greasy Lake declared. “They don’t just talk to one bear, they talk to three.”

  He had ridden on to the rendezvous with the other whites and seen the two bear cubs, which were as friendly with the trappers as two dogs would be. They didn’t even try to eat the three babies, but merely licked them in their faces as a dog might.

  Greasy Lake had had no intention of getting into a dispute about the Bear people when he followed the English girl to the creek that night—he followed her because he had always liked to watch naked women bathing themselves. The Englishwoman happened to be too tall and stringy for his taste—he liked short, compact women, young ones about fourteen or fifteen summers when possible. This particular Englishwoman was shapely enough, as such women went; it was interesting to watch her as she squatted naked in the stream. But of course Greasy Lake ceased to care how she looked the minute he saw the bear, a male grizzly, one of the largest he had ever seen. Yet the bear made no attempt to attack the woman, and when she told it to leave, in her firm voice, it trotted right off, a shocking thing to see.

  Then, at the big rendezvous in the Valley of the Chickens—so called because of the abundance of prairie hens—there were the two bear cubs, being petted and made over by all the trappers. This obvious alliance between the white people and the Bear people was such a shock that he didn’t even wait to secure the presents that he was sure William Ashley, the chief of the traders, would be happy to give him. Instead, he had rushed right over to the Ute encampment to warn the People, a warning Walkura received with unseemly rudeness, although several of his elders, old wise men who knew how extremely uncommon it was for any humans to successfully ally themselves with the Bear people, paid respectful attention and listened closely while Greasy Lake told his story.

  “And listen, that is not all!” Greasy Lake insisted to his audience of elders. “There is a small witch there who can talk to snakes—according to the Sin Killer himself she is even friendly with the Turtle people.”

  “It sounds like a story somebody made up while they were drunk,” Walkura replied. “White people playing with bears and little witches talking to snakes. What next?”

  “It is a family of witches, I tell you,” Greasy Lake went on. “The Piegan Blue Thunder traveled with them for many weeks. He says there are even whites who can swallow fire and not be burned.”

  “Now that’s silly talk,” Walkura said.

  But then old No Teeth, himself a powerful medicine man—he had once made a mistake with a poisoned root, a mistake which caused his gums to turn black and all his teeth to fall out—remembered something important.

  “If the Sin Killer is with them, that’s really not good,” No Teeth claimed. “The Sin Killer has eaten the lightning, remember. And now he’s married to a witch who can talk to the Bear people—that’s not good.”

  “Oh, that Piegan was probably lying,” Na-Ta-Ha remarked. “The Piegans are all liars and Blue Thunder is the worst of them.”

  “How would you know—have you met him?” Greasy Lake asked. He was becoming more and more irritated at the stupidity and rudeness of these Utes. Of course, it was nothing new—no Ute had ever been particularly nice to him. Now he had ridden his horse hard to get to this village and warn the Utes of a big danger, and yet only one or two old men were bothering to take him seriously. No Teeth seemed to believe him, but No Teeth’s reputation as a medicine man had fallen off in recent years. A medicine man foolish enough to consume a poisoned root could not expect to command much respect. Medicine men were supposed to know about such things.

  Though Walkura and a few other strong warriors were more or less indifferent to the news Greasy Lake brought, the young braves of the band were another matter. They were young and ready for any fight. There was nothing they would like better than to race over and kill all the trappers; perhaps they could even capture a few women, young women they could copulate with.

  High Shoulders, the boldest of the young braves, the one Walkura expected to have the most trouble with, made so bold as to offer a comment, although young warriors were supposed to be quiet and respectful when their elders were holding a serious discussion.

  “It sure sounds like a family of witches to me,” High Shoulders said—“and besides, those trappers have no business being in our country anyway. I say we round up some warriors and go kill them all.”

  “Who asked you to say? You don’t make decisions about war in this tribe,” Walkura told him sharply.

  The young brave’s comment was particularly irritating because the part about the trappers being in Ute country without permission was true. These big rendezvous had been going on for several years—various chiefs had proposed attacking them but too many of the Ute women had got used to getting nice presents from William Ashley or Eulalie Bonneville or whoever had the best presents at any particular time. The presents, it was true, had begun to have a corrupting effect. Some Utes now claimed that they couldn’t possibly catch a fish without the white man’s fishhooks, an absurdity, since even the warriors making the claim had caught hundreds of fish on nice homemade bone fishhooks. Or, if not on bone fishhooks, in big reed fish traps.

  The problem of the trappers and their big annual party was one Walkura had worried about in his mind for several years. It was true that the Utes ought to get together and kill all these trappers—they had trapped many of the streams and ponds so hard that it was not possible to find even a single beaver in some of them. All the furs they took ought to have been Ute furs, by right, and yet, in Walkura’s experience the trappers were vigorous fighters—any force that moved against them had to be ready for serious fighting, with, very likely, considerable loss of life.

  It was a lingering, troubling problem, and one Walkura had never quite got around to dealing with, and now here was that old pest, Greasy Lake, stirring up the young men and giving them dreams of battle.

  “There is one more thing—I nearly forgot,” Greasy Lake told them. “It’s the worst thing of all.”

  “What does that mean—did one of those witches get ahold of your penis and pull it off?” Walkura asked, hoping to get a laugh. The young men were all getting in a war mode; a little comedy might cool them down.

  “I don’t go near witches—no one pulled my penis off,” Greasy Lake countered indignantly. “What I was going to say before you interrupted me was that I saw the Wandering Hill.”

  His remark at once silenced the crowd. Old No Teeth was so startled that he let some tobacco fall out of his mouth. Na-Ta-Ha looked worried. Of course, medicine men knew better than anyone that a sighting of the Wandering Hill was no joke.

  “Are you sure?” Walkura asked.

  “Of course I’m sure,” Greasy Lake told them. At last he had the tribe’s attention.

  “Where was it?” High Shoulders asked—he looked nervously around him, as if he expected to see the Wandering Hill sneaking up on the camp.

  “Back on the big plain, two days north of the Shooting Water,” Greasy Lake informed them. “And that’s still not the worst.”

  “Go ahead—I know you’re dying to tell us the worst!” Walkura remarked sarcastically—too sarcastically, in Greasy Lake’s opinion. Sarcasm was well enough when some warriors were just joking around, but it was definitely something a leader ought to resist when real danger was being described.

  Still, Greasy Lake did his best to hold his temper.

  “The English witch walked right by it and the devils didn’t kill her,” Greasy Lake reported. “The little witc
h even climbed it partway, and yet the devils did nothing.”

  There was silence.

  “To my mind that proves that all the English are witches—we ought to catch them and put them to death right away,” Greasy Lake insisted.

  “It would be easier if the Sin Killer and all the trappers weren’t there to protect them,” a third elder, old Skinny Foot, observed.

  “The trappers stay drunk all day,” Na-Ta-Ha observed.

  “Drunk or not, those trappers are hard fighters,” Walkura remarked. “Are you sure it was the Wandering Hill?”

  “Of course—it even had that little tree on top,” Greasy Lake told them.

  Walkura hadn’t paid much attention to Greasy Lake’s talk of the Bear people and the English witches—that kind of information was often only a matter of opinion. Things could easily be exaggerated—in fact most of the bad news Greasy Lake spread around was exaggerated. All serious leaders knew how unreliable his information was likely to be.

  But no one, not even Greasy Lake, would be so foolish as to lie about the Wandering Hill. Only last year three Crow warriors were said to have fallen victim to the devils’ deadly arrows. Greasy Lake, though irritating, was not an utter fool. It might be that there was a connection between the English witches and the Wandering Hill.

  As a leader such a problem was one he couldn’t entirely ignore, though that was a pity, because Walkura was feeling lazy. He had caught a new wife while on a recent raid to California, a fine girl of the Modoc tribe. She was a plump, jolly creature, and, once she got over the fact of capture, had become increasingly amorous. Walkura had planned to spend the rest of the summer doing a little fishing, a little hunting, and a lot of copulating. The last thing he had contemplated was the need to make a hasty war on the trappers, most of whom were formidable fighters. The presence of witches made matters even more complicated. The first thing he needed to do, Walkura decided, was to send a reliable man up to the big rendezvous, to see how many trappers were there and what kind of weaponry they had.

  The young braves, of course, had no interest in a sober assessment of the situation with the trappers.

  At once they set about sharpening all their weapons, honing axes and knives, fitting new strings to their bows, and firing off what few guns they had to be sure that they would still shoot. A few even began to paint themselves, though nobody had told them a battle was imminent.

  After watching all this militant behavior for a few hours, Walkura—who was not young—began to be affected by what he was seeing. Watching the young men prance around with tomahawks and race here and there on their horses, he began to feel the tingle of war feelings himself. Was he not the greatest war chief of the Utes? Had he not taken thousands of horses from the Californians? Wasn’t the big powwow of the trappers a brazen affront to Ute sovereignty? Little by little his mood shifted. Soon he began to gather up his own weapons, making sure they were as they should be. Was he not still the leader? How dare the young braves act as if they could just go make war anytime, whether he approved or not! Soon he had dispensed runners to other Ute bands nearby, telling them to gather up their battle gear and get ready for a good fight. He didn’t bother to send a man to the rendezvous to check out Greasy Lake’s reports, or ascertain the strength of the mountain men. As he got more and more steamed up, it seemed to him that the more mountain men there were, the better: however many there were, the mighty Ute warriors would soon make an end to them all. Then, once more, the ponds and streams would fill with beaver, whose furs would belong only to the Utes.

  Walkura did not have to wait long for a response from the other bands, either. By the next afternoon warriors began to stream in, ready for a fine war against the trappers.

  Seeing that his words had not gone unheeded, Greasy Lake caught his horse, who had been grazing on good summer grass, and slipped away. It was good that the Utes were finally going to act like men and kill the trappers. He hoped they killed the various English witches too, or at least took them captive, so they could be tortured properly, as witches should be. But he himself was a shaman, not a fighting man; his task was merely to understand the nature of the world, and the many things in it, from clouds to spiders. His policy had always been to stay as far as possible from the scenes of battles. Once men got to fighting they were apt to be careless—bullets or arrows might easily fly off in the wrong direction and kill whoever happened to be in their way. Greasy Lake wanted to avoid such dangers; he thought he might go south and meditate awhile beside the Platte River, on what his cousins the Sioux called the Holy Road. Along the Holy Road he might enjoy a quiet time, and do some thinking, without having to worry about arrows or bullets flying out of some big battle to wound him. News of whatever happened near the Green River, between the trappers and the Utes, would reach him soon enough. In the more and more crowded plains there would always be somebody to bring the news.

  By the time he left the Utes, just at dusk, the encampment was already filling with warriors from other bands. The whites were going to be in for a hard tussle with these angry Utes, that was for sure.

  That night, to be safe, Greasy Lake climbed up in a tree to sleep. He had come back east, meaning to slip quietly past the camp of the trappers, but then he bethought himself of the big grizzly bear that had been in that vicinity only the night before. That bear might still be near. The best thing to do was find a good stout tree and doze for a few hours high in its branches. A bear that large would probably not be able to climb high enough to get him.

  In fact no bear came to trouble his slumbers, which were light in any case. He never slept deeply, or long—his life required alertness from him; deep sleep could make a man slow to respond.

  Just as he was dozing off Greasy Lake thought he heard a flutter above him, which annoyed him somewhat. The bird mostly likely to be hunting at that time of night would be an owl—and if it was an owl he would have to change trees at once—owls were extremely bad medicine, and particularly bad if one happened to be a shaman. Owls were very jealous of shamans, because the shamans rivaled them in knowledge; as a consequence owls always did what they could to arrange shamans’ deaths. There was some moonlight, just enough so that, when he wiggled around, he could clearly see the bird, only a foot above him; it was not an owl but only the white witches’ talking bird. He himself had heard the bird speak two or three times—it mostly seemed to talk to the Broken Hand, and usually just cackled out a strange word or two, in a tongue the shaman could not understand. Greasy Lake was relieved that he wasn’t dealing with a great horned owl, the most deadly owl of all—on the other hand he wasn’t happy that the talking bird had followed him. It might be a sign that the witches didn’t intend to let him get away. Greasy Lake thought he had a good solution to that problem: while the old parrot dozed, Greasy Lake reached up, grabbed him, and with one motion wrung his neck, making a speedy end to the witches’ talking bird. If those English witches wanted to keep track of an experienced shaman such as himself, they would have to come up with something better than an old green bird who was slow to fly.

  58

  … she indifferently bared a breast…

  THE three little boys—Monty, Talley, and Charlie—two of them new to the complex art of crawling, and the third, Charlie, just beginning to walk, were all of them struggling, each at his own pace, to reach the bear cub Andy, who lolled on his belly, regarding their approach without alarm, when, to the blank astonishment of the grown-ups who were idly watching—in this case Jim Snow, Jim Bridger, Billy Sublette, and Eulalie Bonneville—the blow was struck that was to echo in mountain legend for many seasons. Tasmin Berrybender, a little unsteady on her feet from having quaffed two glasses of William Ashley’s cool champagne but firm of purpose nonetheless, walked up, made a fist, and, without a word being said, drew back her arm and struck her husband such a solid and forceful punch in the eye that he fell backward off the log where he had been sitting.

  The mountain men could only gape in dismay, but the bear
cub, Andy, not liking what he saw, at once wandered off to seek protection with Pomp Charbonneau, to the shocked disappointment of his three small pursuers.

  Lord Albany Berrybender, several sheets to the wind himself, thanks to the generosity with which William Ashley dispensed his excellent champagne, merely chuckled at the sight, though William Ashley himself was as startled as the mountain men.

  “Good Lord—she’s knocked Jimmy over—I confess I never expected to see that!” Ashley remarked.

  “Not wise to cross Tassie when she’s in her cups,” Lord B. remarked. “Apt to be bellicose when she drinks. Gets it from me, I fear. I’ve challenged many a man as a result of good champagne. Frankly didn’t expect to meet with such excellent champagne this far out in the wild.”

  William Ashley, who had long since sold his interest in the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, but continued to come to the rendezvous just for love of the wild, had not expected the Berrybenders, either. He knew they were in the West but had supposed that Lord Berrybender would long since have had his fill of hunting and would sensibly have gone back down the river to Saint Louis. And yet, there they were, Lord Berrybender shorn of part of a leg, much of a foot, and three fingers of a hand—and there stood Lady Tasmin, a ruddy, well-browned Western girl now, her fists doubled up, clearly prepared to do battle if her husband—by common consent one of the most volatile of the mountain men—chose to stand up and fight.

  Jim Bridger, Billy Sublette, and rotund Eulalie Bonneville, though deeply puzzled, were nonetheless well aware that they were in the company of a very angry woman, a creature as much to be feared as any bear. Quietly they got up off the log and moved away. It would be impolite to run, as Andy, the bear cub, had done, and yet all of them were rapidly making tracks.