Jim Snow was so startled that he merely sat where he had fallen. That Tasmin was very angry he had no doubt—but why? They had finally straggled peacefully enough into the big camp in the Valley of the Chickens. Of course, Will Ashley had lots of liquor handy: many of the boys only bothered to show up at the rendezvous because of Ashley’s whiskey. The champagne Ashley kept cool in a nearby stream was weak stuff compared to the raw spirits most of the trappers drank. Hugh Glass in particular scorned champagne, which he contended was no more than sour water. Thirsty from her long trip, Tasmin had quaffed a glass or two, as did the others, but Jim did not immediately connect the fact that Tasmin punched him to Will Ashley’s champagne. The morning had been peaceful. Their son had been trying to pet the little bear cub, and then Tasmin had walked over, her face suddenly dark with fury, and knocked him off the log where he had been sitting with the boys. It was a wrong thing to do, of course—a wife shouldn’t strike a husband; but there she was, her fists doubled up, quite prepared to punch him again. For the moment Jim was too shocked even to attempt to correct her—it occurred to him that she might somehow have lost her mind.
“That’s for striking me last winter and knocking me out of our tent and causing me to scrape my leg quite painfully on the ice,” Tasmin said, her blood up. She was fully prepared for a fierce fight. The minute Jim stood up she meant to slug him again. But Jim didn’t stand up. Most of the camp was by now watching the conflict. All heads turned, all conversation ceased. Kit Carson looked especially worried.
“All right, then, coward,” Tasmin told him. “But if you ever strike me again, I’ll certainly do worse.”
Then she whirled on the trappers, who were staring from what they had supposed was a safe distance.
“You are all invited to stop looking at me as if I’ve lost my sanity—I’m speaking to you, Mr. Bridger, and you, Mr. Bonneville. I have not lost my sanity, I was merely revenging an old injustice. Perhaps you too would like a punch.”
Tasmin felt very much in the mood to throw something—she was filled with the same ugly and frustrated feelings that had once caused her to heave her father’s hunting seat as far as she could throw it. In this instance the only thing she could see to throw was the jug of coarse whiskey which the trappers had been passing around. She at once picked it up and heaved it; by luck it smashed on a rock, which gave her a feeling of great satisfaction, though this feeling diminished once she saw that neither Jim Snow nor any of the trappers seemed inclined to fight. The sharp smell of whiskey stung her nostrils. Irritated beyond endurance by the mildness of these men who were supposed to be so fierce and wild, she walked up and gave Eulalie Bonneville a good hard punch in the mouth, then walked away, right past her son. Frustrated by the departure of the bear cub, and seeing his mother near, Monty reached out, hoping to be picked up, but his Tasmin strode right past him. She crossed the meadow and continued into a little glade, deep enough that she felt sure no one could see her; she then burst into a torrent of tears, but a brief torrent. The fit passed, her head began to clear, she felt happy to have finally got her own back with Jim, and she looked out with amusement at the scene she had created. Several of the mountain men were peering uneasily at the glade into which she had disappeared. But no one followed her, least of all her husband, which showed a serious lack of instinct vis-à-vis the female, she felt. She had stopped being mad but was yet filled with a feeling that an experienced seducer could have turned this to his amorous advantage. Her husband was not such a seducer—why could men not learn?
Tasmin resolved to stay right where she was. She did not mean to apologize, be meek, explain. She waited, deep in her glade, to see what the trappers, those terrors of the mountain, might do about her. Would her husband venture over? Since the moment when anger might have become lust had passed, Tasmin ceased to care. She suspected that the eventual mediator would be the mild, passionless Pomp Charbonneau, or, if not Pomp, perhaps it would be the rather prissy fur trader William Ashley.
Jim Snow finally stood up—he went over and began to talk to Pomp, whom Tasmin had come to regard more or less as her own possession. Then Pomp went over and chatted a bit with Ashley. Monty, meanwhile, began to fret. With no bear handy to play with, he remembered that he was hungry. Jim picked him up, failed to soothe him, and passed him off to Little Onion, who quieted him but, of course, could not give him suck. Looking rather annoyed herself, Little Onion handed the baby to Pomp. Then he and Will Ashley together wandered over toward the glade where Tasmin watched. That the men felt the need to come in twos annoyed her again so that when they walked up with her hungry baby she indifferently bared a breast and delayed a moment or two before putting her child to the teat. This was mainly meant as a challenge to the affable Pomp, who had once told her that he was rarely troubled by lust, a stupid thing to say to a woman, even if true. Let him look at her breast and reflect on what lay below— that a man should decline to lust she considered an insult. Tasmin was of half a notion to see if she could change Pomp’s mind on that score but for the moment, with Ashley there, she merely regarded the nervous ambassadors with all the hauteur she could muster.
“I guess you had your reasons for punching Jim,” Pomp said—“but why’d you hit Bonney?”
“Because he’s fat, I suppose,” Tasmin said. “Besides, I needed a second victim to complete my attack on male complacency. It’s your fault, really, Mr. Ashley, for providing the champagne.”
Monty, by now, was guzzling heartily.
“When I drink champagne,” Tasmin continued, “memories of old injustices—and there have been many—just seem to bubble up. Claret makes me amorous, but champagne makes me mean.”
William Ashley managed a negligent shrug.
“Our esteemed captain, William Clark, has ever maintained that there is no wildness equal to the wildness in women,” he said.
“How exquisitely philosophical,” Tasmin replied coolly.
“Perhaps he said it about my mother—the two of them were close friends,” Pomp remarked, hoping to change the subject, or mollify Tasmin somehow.
“I met Captain Clark,” Tasmin reminded them. “He did not strike me as being a man who was free of lust.”
“Oh hardly,” William Ashley agreed. “No stranger to the battery of Venus, our Captain Clark, I can tell you that.”
“How quaintly that sounds, how romantic,” Tasmin replied. “The battery of Venus. My own first lover, Master Tobias Stiles, had little of the poet in him, I’m afraid. ’Cunt’ was the term he preferred: blunt but adequate, like himself.”
Both men retreated a step.
“Goodness, Tasmin,” Pomp said, too deeply startled to hide a blush. “Goodness.”
“Don’t you chide me, Pomp,” Tasmin remarked menacingly. The fires of her anger had been banked but were not extinguished.
“We Berrybenders will speak as we please,” she continued. “I fear I’ve come rather to distrust the poetical when it comes to amorous matters. Plain speech and stout action are what’s wanted—none of this battery of Venus folderol. You yourself, Pomp, would be a happier man if there were a bit more coarseness in you.”
Pomp was shocked—he looked, to Tasmin’s eye, virginal. Could it be that he had never even had a look at the article being discussed? It was the seat of life, of course, but rather likely to disappoint those who thought in terms of lovely locks, perfect breasts, and other goddesslike attributes, as imagined by the painters and the poets.
Then, in a moment, her mood turned, where Pomp Charbonneau was concerned. The thought that he might indeed be a virgin, might never have ventured into the wilderness between a woman’s legs, made her feel protective of him suddenly. Shy Pomp, sweet Pomp—she wondered if she mightn’t yet have to help him, guide him in.
“Do excuse me, Pomp, and you too, Mr. Ashley,” she said. “I have a rough tongue—hope I haven’t bruised your finer sensibilities. I keep forgetting that it is men who are tender souls. We women have our babies to make, and the brute n
ecessities of the business may make us rather coarse.”
She shifted Monty to the other breast, half of a mind to pour out more abuse—but the two men were careful to offer her no challenge, so, as an alternative, she went and sat in the sun with Coal and Vicky Kennet. The two bear cubs, seeing the prospect of attention, came over and licked the babies’ faces, causing all three to sneeze.
Tasmin looked around for Jim, wondering when he might get around to taking up the difficult challenge of their marriage again. But Jim was shoeing horses, with the help of Joe Walker and Milt Sublette. He glanced her way once or twice but clearly didn’t seem to feel that they had to have a reckoning, just then. In Tasmin’s view, once she calmed down, that was just as well. Probably her punch took him so completely by surprise that his temper had failed to flare. Shock smothered it. When they could talk she meant to warn him that she could not be trusted when she drank champagne.
When Pomp next strolled by, Tasmin went over and took his arm, to show that no hard feelings remained.
“Don’t you be telling on me, Pomp,” she said quietly. “Don’t be mentioning my coarse speech to Jimmy—he’s rather a Puritan when it comes to such things.”
“I won’t,” Pomp promised—in fact the unexpected scene with Tasmin had left him feeling somewhat sad.
“Anyway, you were right,” he continued. “I’m the one who doesn’t know anything about love.”
There was a droop in his voice when he said this, an admittance of loneliness and inexperience that touched Tasmin’s heart. She put a friendly arm around him.
“Now, Pomp—cheer up,” she said. “You’re young— no need to pine. I expect we just need to find you a
girl.”
Pomp smiled, but did not reply.
Jim Snow, punched in the eye by his wife, supposed that he would forever be a figure of fun among the mountain men. His wife had hit him and he had done nothing about it—of course, she had struck Eulalie Bonneville too, but Bonney was not married to her and bore no responsibility for her behavior.
Jim had hustled over quietly and begun to help out with the horseshoeing, expecting ridicule from the likes of Hugh Glass or old Zeke Williams, who had just arrived at the rendezvous, but, to his surprise, the fact that he was married to a woman of such pure fire produced the very opposite of the effect he had feared. Instead of falling, his stock rose.
“That’s some fine gal, that wife of yours,” Hugh Glass said. “Must be like living with a she-bear—wild and wilder.”
“I suppose it makes Indian fighting seem like a picnic,” Jim Bridger ventured. He felt lucky to have avoided being struck himself. Tasmin had favored him with an angry look just before she punched Eulalie.
Jim didn’t reply—he worked. But it was clear that the fact that he had gone so far as to father a child on such a woman made a big impression on the mountain men, a few of whom had been a bit skeptical of his abilities, previously. Several of them didn’t think he was actually much of a Sin Killer, but Tasmin’s utter fearlessness when she walked over and hit him at once banished all skepticism. A man who could hold his own with such a woman was indeed a man to be reckoned with. Jim shrugged off these awed remarks. He himself wasn’t so sure that he could hold his own with Tasmin—but it was a welcome thing that so many of the boys thought he could.
In the afternoon an Indian wandered into camp and reported that there was a good flock of mountain sheep on the lower slope of a large hill just to the east: at once Jim and Pomp and Drum Stewart grabbed horses and guns—the bighorn sheep were the one species that had successfully eluded the restless Scot.
Tasmin was determined not to let Jim go without his at least acknowledging the fact that she had punched him in the eye.
“I suppose you’re mad at me for having punched you,” she said, as Jim was tightening his girth.
Jim had the look in his eye that men get when they have more important matters to attend to than anything that might possibly involve women—a maddening look.
“I guess I’ll stay out of your way next time you’re drunk,” he told her. “I bet Bonney stays out of your way, too. He claims he’s got a sore tooth.”
Jim then raced off—once the hunters were gone, Tasmin went over and made a fine apology to Eulalie Bonneville.
“I’m so sorry I struck you, Mr. Bonneville,” she said. “I fear I was very drunk.”
“It is of no importance at all,” Eulalie said. “I too often strike people when I’m drunk—particularly fat people.”
Tasmin laughed. “How’s that tooth?” she asked.
“Thank you for inquiring—the agony has somewhat abated,” Eulalie said, with great formality. In fact he was terrified of well-spoken ladies such as Tasmin—his preference was for silent Indian girls who scarcely said a word a week.
The hunters did not reappear that evening—it had been late in the day when they left to go chase the sheep.
In the white foggy dawn Tasmin and Vicky Kennet sat by a low campfire, sipping coffee, their babies in their laps, when William Ashley wandered up, an unlit cigar in his mouth. He picked up a burning stick from the fire, lit the cigar, and took several deep puffs as he surveyed the layer of fog that enveloped the Valley of the Chickens.
“Ladies, what say we breakfast on a little champagne?” he suggested, just as Lord Berrybender appeared.
“I mustn’t—it makes me mean,” Tasmin told him.
“I’ll drink hers, then, Ashley—and mine too,” Lord B. said. “I’m rather past the dueling age, so I guess I can drink all the bubbly I want.”
The trappers who had not gone on the hunt had drunk and caroused all night. Vicky Kennet and her old lover, Lord Berrybender, wandered down to a big campfire the mountain men had built, but Tasmin stayed with William Ashley—she was curious why a man who was said to be so wealthy would put himself at risk every year to journey to such a wild place.
“You’re not a hunter, like my papa,” Tasmin said to him. “Why do you come?”
William Ashley considered the question.
“Addiction, Lady Tasmin,” he replied. “Some men can’t stop drinking whiskey, some can’t stop taking opium, and I can’t stop seeking the wild. I like to be where I can smell it … imbibe it … the pure wild, if you will.”
“But, sir, you’ve come so far,” she reminded him. “Is there really such an insufficiency of wildness between Saint Louis and this remote place? And besides, if we’re here—all the way from Northamptonshire—how pure can the wildness be?”
William Ashley smiled—he did like the way this English girl put things. One moment she might be calling a cunt a cunt, and the next referring coolly to such a concept as an insufficiency of wildness.
“That’s an excellent point—you’re here and your civilization will soon follow along,” he said. “That’s the sadness, Lady Tasmin—there’s not much time between first man and last man, between wild and settled. Jed Smith and Zeke Williams and I were the first white men to see this pretty valley here. We saw beaver who had never had to fear the trap, and buffalo that had never heard the sound of a gun. That was scarcely twenty years ago, and yet the beaver are almost gone and the buffalo will go next. Then, if there turns out to be gold or silver or anything a merchant can sell in these hills, they’ll tear the very mountains down and rip out whatever it is.”
He looked, for a moment, sad.
“I come so I won’t forget, ma’am,” he said. “I want to remember the wonderful country as it was before it changed.”
“Personally, I find it quite wild enough,” Tasmin told him. “I can easily imagine a tribe of painted savages pouring out of those trees to kill us all, which would be more than wild enough for me.”
“Oh no, Lady Tasmin—that sort of thing won’t happen,” Ashley assured her. “We’ve been having our rendezvous here in this valley for eight years—the Utes and the other tribes have come to tolerate us pretty well. I have never been one to underestimate the need for presents, when you’re treating
with the native peoples. Everybody likes presents, you know. A wagonful of good presents, properly distributed, will take the fight out of most savages, given time.”
Scarcely had he finished speaking than he heard the sound of thundering hooves and the scream and yip of war cries—along a ridge at the far eastern end of the valley, bent low over their horses, Jim and Pomp were racing for their lives, pursued by a wild horde of painted savages, such as Tasmin had just mentioned.
William Ashley, looking extremely startled, dropped his cigar—few of his statements had ever been contradicted so immediately.
“I can only think that you must have chosen the wrong presents, this year, Mr. Ashley,” Tasmin said, with some indignation. “And now, worse luck, we’re all going to be murdered, as a result.”
59
… the deep grass of summer would cover him with its peace …
FROM Walkura’s point of view the attack on the trappers could not have got off to a better start. The minute the big raiding party saw the three hunters and sent up their first war whoops, the tall hunter’s horse bolted, carrying him right into the midst of the Utes. There was nothing the man could do to turn his panicked mount. The Utes were startled by this piece of luck, but not so startled as to miss such an easy chance to count coup. They immediately hacked the unhappy rider to pieces—it was what he got for choosing an unreliable horse. High Shoulders tried to scalp him and made a botch of it—he had never taken a scalp before—but already, with the battle just joined, several Ute hatchets were dripping blood, the best possible encouragement when one was going into battle.
“I wish it had been the Sin Killer,” Na-Ta-Ha said, but of course that was only wishful thinking. The Sin Killer, and the hunter they called Six Tongues, because he could speak easily with many tribes, had a good jump on them. Both rode fleet mares, and were not going to be easily overtaken.
Still, with one easy kill under their belts, Walkura led the Utes in a wild charge into the Valley of the Chickens, confident that the day would be theirs and there would be many scalps to take home.
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