Sin Killer

by Larry McMurtry

  “I rather fear she means it—damned stubborn on that point,” Lord B. was forced to admit.

  “Oh damn! Now?” Tasmin protested, but Venetia Kennet held her ground—she refused even to come out of her tent, insisting that they become man and wife before risking the prairies.

  “All right, be quick, then—Geoff, get to it! Marry them!” Tasmin demanded.

  “But I’ve hardly had my coffee,” Father Geoffrin protested; but Tasmin was ablaze with impatience. Father Geoff managed to find a prayer book, lined up bride, groom, and attendants, and proceeded to intone what seemed to Tasmin like rather dubious Latin, while the mountain men listened in wonder. The minute he was done the bride and groom exchanged a lusty kiss, the mountain men cheered again, and the company slowly climbed into wagons or mounted horses and proceeded out of the Valley of the Chickens. Old Hugh Glass traveled on foot, the bear cub, Abby trailing behind him.

  As the bright sun shone on the long plain ahead and struck gold glints off the snow on the high peaks to the north, Tasmin felt her spirit suddenly soar. They were moving again, they were on their trip in this wide, sunny land. They had been too long stopped, all crowded up together. No wonder she had become moody; no wonder she had worried too much about what Jim or Pomp might feel. Now at least they were on the go: travelers, adventurers! What a fine life it was!

  Vicky Kennet, the new bride, sat beside Tasmin on the wagon seat. Lord Berrybender, much excited to be loose amid the game again, had converted their old cart into a kind of fiacre; he raced ahead with Senor Yanez and Signor Claricia, provided with some new guns he had purchased from William Ashley, eager to shoot whatever beasts presented themselves.

  “Well, Vic, I guess you’re my stepmother now,” Tasmin remarked. “I hope you’ll attempt to give me motherly advice when I need it, which is apt to be often.”

  “I will, but it’s not likely you’ll take it,” Vicky said, with a smile.

  ’At any rate, congratulations—I thought you had about given up on the old boy” Tasmin offered.

  “I did give up on him, several times,” Vicky admitted. “But Drum was killed and I came to find that I rather missed your father, odd as that must sound.”

  “Pretty odd, yes,” Tasmin said.

  Vicky Kennet didn’t feel especially victorious. Mainly she felt tired. The struggle with Lord Berrybender had filled some years of her life, and would no doubt go on being a struggle, and yet the sun was bright and the sky above them vast and blue.

  “I expect we’re suited enough, your father and I,” she remarked to Tasmin. “He knows my ways and I know his.”

  Tasmin wondered if she would ever be lucky enough to say such a thing. Would she ever know Jim’s ways—or he hers? Would she ever know Pomp’s ways? Did he even want to know hers?

  Before she could slip into a funk again from pondering the imponderables of human love, Monty, too unsteady in the bouncing rig to stand up, crawled to his mother, pulled himself up by grasping her long black hair, and began to make hungry sounds. As if on cue, Vicky’s little boy did the same.

  Tasmin handed Vicky the reins and pulled Monty into her lap.

  “If you drive while I feed mine, I’ll drive while you feed yours,” she offered.

  “Oh Talley won’t wait,” Vicky told her. “He’s as greedy as his father. Perhaps Little Onion can drive— then we can nurse our brats together.”

  Little Onion, stunned at first to be offered such a huge responsibility, nonetheless accepted the reins and was driving the team as if she had been doing it all her life. She drove, the two mothers nursed, and the Valley of the Chickens was soon just a blue shadow, far behind them.

  18

  . . . two wolves, huge and insolent. . .

  JIM SNOW had just killed an elk—more meat than he needed, but the only game he had seen larger than a prairie dog for three days. A week earlier he had been among innumerable buffalo, but the great herds were being pressed by so many Indian bands—Sioux mainly—that he had thought it wiser to leave the buffalo prairies and drift back to areas where there was too little game to attract many hunters.

  It was an old elk—it had been trailed by two wolves, who were waiting for it to weaken sufficiently that they could attack. The elk’s flesh would be barely edible, but prairie dog made poor eating too, and Jim had to eat. The two wolves, huge and insolent, only retreated a few hundred yards at the sound of his shot. They expected to get their share of the elk, and no doubt would.

  Jim was just sharpening his knife, preparatory to cutting up this old, tough animal, when he thought he heard a shout—it seemed he could just see a moving speck, far to the east. The speck might be a human or a solitary buffalo—he couldn’t yet tell.

  By the time Jim was half done with his butchering, the speck had grown and divided: two humans were approaching on foot from the east. It seemed likely that they were friendly, since they were approaching him directly, making no attempt to conceal themselves. Jim continued his work; he felt little enthusiasm for jerking meat that was almost too tough to chew, but nothing better offered, and a man who was too picky about food could easily starve.

  Jim had not seen a soul in six days, as he scouted to the south, enjoying the calm of the great empty country. Very likely the Berrybender party would have left the Valley of the Chickens by then—they would be expecting him to rejoin them soon and lead them to Santa Fe. With Pomp and Kit and Jim Bridger and the others with the party, Jim saw little reason to worry; they were all competent guides.

  Then he stood up in surprise: one of the two advancing specks was clearly Maelgwyn Evans, a trapper and friend he had last seen in his camp on the Knife River. The larger speck was probably one of Maelgwyn’s sizable wives. But why would Maelgwyn Evans and a large wife be hoofing it across these dun prairies, where there were no beaver to trap?

  “Ho, Jimmy,” Maelgwyn said, in his lilting Welsh voice, when the couple came in hailing range.

  “Hello yourself—this is a fine surprise,” Jim said. “I didn’t know you was much of a hand for taking long walks like this.”

  “Well, no, I ain’t that much of a walker, and neither is my little bride here, Corn Tassel, who was a maiden of the Chippewas. She’s the one gave you that good rubbing with bear grease, when you visited me on the Knife.”

  “I remember Corn Tassel, but you used to brag that you had six hundred pounds of wives,” Jim reminded him. “Corn Tassel’s no fawn, but she don’t weigh six hundred pounds, either.”

  “She don’t for a fact,” Maelgwyn agreed. “I guess you ain’t been to the Missouri lately, Jim. So you don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?”

  ’About the smallpox,” Maelgwyn told him. “Water don’t burn, but the pox swept up that river like a blaze. I doubt there’s thirty Rees left, maybe forty Mandans, and not more than a dozen Otos.”

  Maelgwyn sighed.

  “That’s it, Jimmy,” he went on. “There’s been a raging plague—I expect it’s in Canada by now. Bodies everywhere in the villages—wolves feasting. The living too weak to bury the dead. I lost four hundred pounds of wives in less than a week—that’s how fast people went.”

  Jim Snow could hardly credit what he was being told. The Rees and the Mandans had been populous tribes, strong enough to hold their positions as river keepers since long before Lewis and Clark made their trip. Barely a decade earlier, the Rees had turned back William Ashley and a boatload of well-armed mountain men, and the Mandans had been courted by traders from as far away as the Columbia River or the Hudson.

  “Only thirty Rees?” he said, shocked—it was almost too much to believe.

  “If there’s that many,” Maelgwyn said. “They may have all died by now. People couldn’t die much quicker if you shot them. I seen six dead in a bull boat—I guess they meant to paddle off, but they waited too long to escape.”

  Jim could hardly get his mind to accept it: as long as he could remember, the Rees and the Mandans had been the powers of the North.
If they were gone, what would it mean?

  “But you didn’t live on the river,” he said to Maelgwyn. “How’d it happen to hit you?”

  “My smallest wife’s sister came to visit, just as the pox hit. She brought it. Most of the Missouri valley’s just a land of ghosts now, which is why me and Corn Tassel are moving west.”

  Jim was still absorbing the shock of what he had been told: the Rees gone, the Otos, the Mandans— suddenly gone. It was hard to accept.

  “They say birds carry it—I don’t know if that’s true,” Maelgwyn went on. “I just thought I’d better leave while I still have one good wife. I couldn’t do without my Tassel. She’s spoiled me, with her good rubs.”

  The two large, insolent wolves still sat in the distance, watching.

  “This is an old elk,” Jim mentioned. “I’ve got what I need. You’re welcome to the rest. Not much game to the west that I can find.”

  “Tassel and me are bound for the Russian River,” Maelgwyn told him. “Then we may go north. I’ve an urge to learn to hunt the seal.”

  The sun was low, so the old friends decided to make camp together. There was little wood to be found, but Corn Tassel soon gathered enough buffalo chips to make a fire.

  “It’s good exercise for the jaws—that’s the best I can say for your elk,” Maelgwyn remarked, as they were eating.

  “I thought you was married, Jimmy—what became of that brash English wife, and the old wild lord?” he asked.

  “They’ve been with Ashley, at the big rendezvous,” Jim said. “I imagine they’re on the move by now. Kit and I decided to do a little scouting.”

  Maelgwyn made a show of looking around.

  “I don’t seem to see Kit,” he said. “If he’s playing hide-and-seek, I hope he won’t jump out and scare me too bad.”

  “He won’t—I left him with the balloon fellows,” Jim told him. “Heard about the balloon?”

  “Oh, everybody’s been talking about that balloon,” Maelgwyn told him. “What’s your news?”

  “Some cranes hit it while those two fellows were flying over the Platte. The two men didn’t know their way around, so I left Kit to look after them.”

  “Bill Ashley’s sold the skins of a big number of beavers,” Maelgwyn mused. “You’d think he’d be rich enough by now that he’d get out of the country before somebody lifts his hair.”

  “He says he’s quitting,” Jim mentioned.

  “If Ashley’s quitting, then that’s about it, for beaver,” Maelgwyn remarked. “I might do better to try seals—seals might get popular, for all we know.”

  ’Any news of the Partezon?” Jim asked.

  Maelgwyn, yawning, shook his head.

  � day of walking will tire a man out,” he said.

  He lay down with his large wife and was soon snoring. Jim liked Maelgwyn but didn’t care for the snoring. Most of the mountain men snored noisily, another reason he liked to roam around by himself from time to time.

  Usually Jim slept easily—even Maelgwyn’s snoring would not have been enough to keep him awake. But he didn’t sleep well that night—the story of the smallpox plague unsettled him. What if birds did carry it? If it could wipe out whole villages of Mandans and Rees, it could kill mountain men too, not to mention English travelers. What if it had struck the company? Tasmin and Monty might already be dead. He had traveled away from them happily enough—not a worry had crossed his mind—but suddenly a big worry came. While he was roaming around, enjoying the prairie light, Tasmin and Monty might be suffering. Maelgwyn had lost four wives, all healthy women, within a week.

  The more Jim thought about the matter, the more anxious he became. He had scouted enough—most of the Indians were to the east, with the buffalo, getting their meat. Progress to the south should not be too difficult. Maelgwyn’s story of whole villages of unburied bodies convinced him that a worse threat was loose in the land.

  Jim didn’t want to wait. In a minute he had Joe Walker’s little mare saddled and ready. Corn Tassel, large and silent, watched alertly. When Jim was ready to leave he put a hand on Maelgwyn’s shoulder—the trapper’s eyes at once came open.

  “I think I better get back to my family,” he said. “That news about the pox is bad.”

  “Sure is—be careful then, Jimmy,” Maelgwyn told him. “If you ever get over by the Russian River, look me up.”

  By the time Jim mounted, Maelgwyn Evans was already snoring again.

  19

  The cawing of the ravens—hundreds of ravens . . .

  THE cawing of the ravens—hundreds of ravens— made the Bad Eye realize that the People were dying. He could not see the festers breaking out on his face and on the vast bulk of his body but he could feel them: he called for Draga. He had become too large to move upright by himself—two stout young braves helped him out of the Skull Lodge when he needed to drop his excrement. But both these young braves were now dead, along with most of the Mandans, Hidatsas, Gros Ventres. Some had fled, but others lay around the village, rotting—wolves and dogs, coyotes and ravens pulled or pecked at them. A few young girls were left alive but they were not strong enough to support the Bad Eye’s weight. One of the girls told him that the witch, Draga, was not infected—she still lived in her earth lodge outside the village.

  The Bad Eye, blind from birth, could not see the festers, popping out like pods bursting over his body but he could smell the smell of sickness, the smell of rot. Stalled on his filthy platform, unable to do more than sit up, he sent one of the young girls hurrying to Draga. Near the platform was a big trunk, given him by an important French trader, long ago. In the trunk were his money, his beads, his knives, watches, pistols —all the things the French and English had given him as presents over the years, either in ransom for captives or in hopes of buying his favor. It was a large trunk, but it was full. As he sat on his platform he could hear the groans of dying people, hear the wailing of the grieved and the despairing.

  The Bad Eye did not intend to die with them—he wanted the powerful witch, Draga, to come and cure him. If Draga could protect herself from this evil plague, which caused the hot pods to burst out on his skin, then Draga could help him too. She could make the pods dry up, make his skin grow cool again, not feverish, as it had been since the illness came. If Draga would just cure him she could have what she wanted out of the trunk. He knew her to be a greedy woman— it would be easy enough to bribe her with the treasures in his trunk. Then, once the plague passed, the French and English and Americans would return to the river and make him rich again.

  At first Draga refused to come—she told the girl to tell him she was busy. This delay infuriated the Bad Eye—he knew that if Draga didn’t come and bring him a cure, he would die—it would be too late. He sent the girl back again and this time Draga carne. He didn’t hear her enter but he knew she was there because her presence made the air feel bad.

  “I want you to make a spell and cure me,” the Bad Eye told her. He did not immediately mention the treasures in the trunk.

  Draga only chuckled. She was not a friendly woman—even her chuckle was like a curse.

  “You are the great prophet of the Mandans,” she reminded him. “You are the prophet all the People feared. Make your own spell.”

  “There’s a great trunk there, full of treasure,” the Bad Eye told her—he didn’t want to waste time haggling. “If you cure me, I’ll give you the key and you can have it all—then no one will be as rich as you.”

  “Why would I need your key?” Draga asked. “I brought an axe.”

  The Bad Eye had not considered that possibility. No one of the People would have dared touch his trunk— but Draga was not of the People. She began to chop into the trunk—he could hear the tinkling of his treasures as they spilled out onto the floor.

  “Take it all, but make me a spell,” he offered, but again, Draga laughed her evil laugh.

  “The whites fooled you,” she said. “They knew you were blind so they gave you only the cheapes
t trinkets. You were a fool to suppose that the whites would make you rich, when they could trick you so easily. And your People were fools to believe you were a prophet. You’re just a blind man who got too fat to walk.”

  “Make me a spell!” the Bad Eye commanded, summoning all his force; but no one answered. He could tell by the feel of the room that Draga was gone.

  In the delirium of his fever the Bad Eye slept a little and dreamed of water. In his dream he was floating on the river, whose ripplings he had heard all his life. As he floated, many tiny fish came and nibbled at his sores. He felt them nipping, and little by little, his sores healed and his skin grew smooth again.

  When he woke the Bad Eye knew that in his dream he had been granted a good prophecy. The water would save him; the little nibbling fish would cure him. The only problem was that he was in the Skull Lodge—he could hear the river as it flowed past, but he needed to be in it, and there was no one strong enough to help him out of the lodge and into the water. All the warriors were dead—the few children and few old people who were alive had not the strength to support his weight. The Bad Eye felt bitterly angry. He was the great prophet of the Mandans, but the tribe had collapsed and there was no one to assist him in the time of his greatest need.

  Then it occurred to the Bad Eye that perhaps there was a chance, after all. He couldn’t walk but it might be that he could crawl. Carefully he rolled off the low ledge where he had held court to tribes and traders for so long and managed to heave himself onto his hands and knees. The effort was enormous; sweat poured off him, stinging sweat that mingled with his sores; but he did manage to crawl a few yards before he had to stop and rest.

  Three times he had to stop, exhausted, before he was out of the Skull Lodge. All around him he smelled death—it seemed there must be hundreds of cawing ravens in the camp. But he could also smell the water, which gave him hope. It seemed not far. If he stopped and rested from time to time, surely he could reach it and be saved by the nibbling fish. It was not an easy crawl. Several times he blundered into corpses, or parts of corpses. Once he became entangled in a tree that had washed ashore. But he kept on, convinced that he would be healed if he could only reach the water and give himself to the little fish, the nibblers. For a time it was day—he felt the sun—but the river was much farther than he had supposed it would be, and there were many obstacles in his way. A large creature that he supposed to be a dead buffalo, putrid now, had to be skirted. Finally, after much pushing, he got around it.