The Seekers

by John Jakes

  He gazed at the fast-flowing, muddy Missouri for several minutes. He was struck by the way his own fate and his father’s had been so closely linked with rivers.

  A river had taken the older brother or sister he’d never known.

  Another had flowed by the place where he was born, and where his mother died.

  A third had meandered past the dreadful patch of ground where he and Amanda met Blackthorn.

  He’d followed a fourth to St. Louis.

  And still one more was bearing him toward an un-guessable future.

  The west was growing chiefly because of the rivers. The seekers of escape and the seekers of dreams poured forth from the east, and the rivers in their silent, eternal power carried them, changing the nation, changing the lives of its people, including the Kents—

  He lifted his gaze from the river to the land. He was spellbound by the vista. The prairie seemed to stretch away endlessly on both sides of the Missouri, broken only here and there by small groves of trees. On the starboard side, he saw bison—for the first time—two or three thousand, a great mass of hide and hair and horn moving slowly along the bank.

  The majestic motion of the herd, the wind-lashed water and prairie grass, the turbulent, white-lit clouds folding in upon themselves as the storm advanced made him feel as he had long ago, times when he’d clambered to a Boston roof or dashed to the end of a pier and beheld sea and sky together, immense and breathtaking—

  My God, he thought. How beautiful it is.

  The wind blew harder now, flattening his hair against the top and sides of his head. He strained to keep the distant horizon in focus, no longer despairing, but thrilled, expectant—

  In searching for Amanda, maybe he could find a place where he belonged—

  A place where I can be happy.

  I see what Weatherby meant. Out here, there is room for hope to begin again—

  His fear of the land had begun to wane when he had ceased to fear himself so much. He no longer felt contempt for the family he’d glimpsed at the ferry on the Illinois side of the Mississippi. He no longer pitied the men and women and tiny children huddled in wagons or riding on mules or horses—or walking—he’d passed on the trails up from Nashville. He understood them.

  He was one of them.

  The clouds had darkened the sky overhead. The keel-boatmen hauled down the sail and pitched the anchor overside, preparing to ride out the storm.

  Thunder blasted. Lightning hit the river about a mile ahead. Openmouthed, Jared watched as the forked whiteness licked down a second time, striking the earth in front of the plodding buffalo. In moments, fire ignited.

  It spread quickly, fanned by the wind until a monumental wall of scarlet rose toward the heavens. Even on the keelboat, Jared felt the heat.

  The silhouettes of the frightened buffalo passed before the scarlet wall, stampeding. The earth shook. The sky turned black and so did the surrounding land. Only that towering rampart of flame lit the stygian gloom—

  Marveling at the sight, Jared was unprepared for the slash of the rain. With a yelp, he headed below. He was soaked by the time he got there.

  The rain lasted a quarter of an hour, then slacked off abruptly. In five more minutes it was over. He returned to the deck, the wind cool against his cheeks.

  The clouds cleared. A gold sunset burnished the river and the wet prairie. To starboard, billows of smoke marked the site of the drenched fire. The distant reverberation of the stampeding buffalo blew along on the wind.

  He felt a presence at his elbow.

  “What you lookin’ at?” Weatherby asked.

  In a hushed voice, Jared answered, “Everything.”

  “Makes a man feel right clean again, don’t it?”

  Weatherby had that sad, remote look in his eyes, Jared noticed. It brought something to mind, something that had needed saying for a couple of weeks.

  “Elijah—”

  “Uh?”

  “You know one of the reasons I decided to come with you?”

  Weatherby shook his head.

  “I talked to some other fur men before we left St. Louis.”

  “Did you tell ’em where you come from?”

  Jared smiled. “I did. I said I’d come on foot and on horseback and by wagon and keelboat all the way from Boston. I had three solid offers to hire on.”

  “Knew you would.”

  No longer smiling, Jared went on, “I also asked about the windigo.”

  The words seemed to crush Weatherby like a blow. But after a moment, he straightened up and faced his younger companion. “So you know the story I spun about my Frenchie partner was a lie.”

  “I found out you had a partner who was French—”

  “But he didn’t disappear because of no buffla dance. We was in the mountains last winter—”

  “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “I want to. It was snowin’ to beat hell. We lost the packhorses with all the food. Then my partner, old Marcel, he”—for a moment it seemed as if Weatherby couldn’t continue—“well, there was a rock fall, and Marcel, he was broke up pretty bad under it. There was no way he could live, an’ no way I could carry him out. It was all I could do to keep myself alive. I had to make the filthiest, meanest choice a man could be asked to make. I’ll say this. Old Marcel, he helped me make it. I was ready to die with him but he wouldn’t have no part of that. He—finished himself with his own gun. Then I was able to walk out of those mountains seventeen days later. Alive because I had flesh to eat.”

  iii

  Even now, Jared experienced the horror that had gripped him outside Lisa’s warehouse.

  Presently the trapper said, “There ain’t much worse a man can carry on his soul, Jared.”

  “I’d guess not.”

  “Sometimes I can’t carry it all, so I frolic, like I did at Mrs. Cato’s. Now you see why I told you what I did? That any mistakes you made ain’t nothin’ compared to mine? But I swear—there is somethin’ of God in this land. I know it, dumb as I am. I can’t read nor write, but I know that much. A man’s born like a cracked jar, and livin’ don’t improve the condition. There’s never a way to repair the jar so it’s perfect. But somehow, it’s so clean and blessed beautiful out here, you’re—”

  “Forgiven.”

  “Yes. Maybe it’s because there ain’t many souls in these parts yet to see the crack in the jar. Maybe it’s because you’re so busy keepin’ alive, the crack ain’t very important. Even after last winter, I can stand up and start over.”

  “You showed me how I could do that, Elijah.”

  Weatherby managed a smile. “Then I’m good for somethin’, I reckon.”

  “Listen, I’m counting on you to show me a lot more. I intend to make some money in this fur business.”

  “Fair enough. I don’t guarantee it, but we’ll give ’er a Tennessee try. I do promise you one thing, though. A year or so out here, and there’ll be a fire in your soul like you never felt before. A fire to make that burnin’ prairie look like sparks in brushwood.”

  Jared smiled back. “You’ve a poetic turn of mind—you know that?”

  “Wouldn’t go quite that far. But a fur man spends a lot o’ hours inside his own head. Most times, there’s nobody else for company—”

  “And what kind of fire is it that’s going to burn me up?”

  “Why, the one that made me commit a great sin an’ leave my woman and my youngsters. You keep hankerin’ to see past the next hill, then the next, and one day it gets so bad, you can’t stay in the same place more’n a week without goin’ crazy.”

  “I had a curiosity about new things once upon a time. Somewhere along the way, I lost it.”

  “Well, you wait. The fire’ll stoke up hot and you won’t be satisfied till you’ve set eyes on the mountains—then the ocean—”

  “You’ve seen the Pacific?”

  “ ’Course I have. I’ve et and smoked with the Haidas on the very shore of it. I’ve been a while in the e
arth lodges of the Pawnee and I’ve worked trap lines in the country of the horse tribes, too—the Cheyenne, the Blackfeet, the Crow. You’ll see wondrous sights out where we’re goin’, Jared—”

  There was silence broken by the whisper of the wind and the lap of the Missouri against the hull.

  “Y’know,” Weatherby continued, “I really did mean what I said in jail. I think you got the stuff.”

  “Kind of soon to tell, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, no. I’ve had three partners and I reckoned their good points and bad points mighty quick. Old Marcel, he was the best of the lot, God keep him. But I’d be proud to call you my kin.”

  Moved, Jared couldn’t reply immediately. Finally, very softly, he said, “The feeling’s mutual, Elijah.”

  Weatherby clapped his hands. “By damn, I think we will make some money! You may even find an Injun girl you fancy. A lot of ’em are right pleasing.”

  And start the Kents growing again? It was an unexpected idea, but a warming one.

  Rain-washed hills gleamed amber as the last clouds passed. A single shimmering star lit the pale blue far overhead. In his mind, he saw the passage from Ezekiel.

  I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken—

  He had it in his power to begin the family anew. He must do it as best he could. Whether a hope of locating Amanda was justified was another matter—

  Once again Weatherby exhibited his uncanny faculty for sensing what was in Jared’s mind, perhaps because Jared’s eyes were focused on the remotest point on the river.

  “I think we’ll find her, Jared.”

  “Sometimes I think so too. Other times, I wonder.”

  “From all you told me about her, I’d say she’s got too much life in her just to lie down an’ die. I got a powerful feelin’ she’s still alive somewhere out yonder.”

  “I’ve almost come to believe that myself.”

  “Even if we don’t find her, you got to remember it’s the tryin’ that counts most. It’s the tryin’ that makes a man worthy of the name.”

  Jared nodded slowly. His hand moved to his belt and touched the fob tied there by the raveling ribbon.

  But his eye remained fixed on the horizon.

  Epilogue

  In the Tepee of the Dog Soldier

  AMANDA KENT OPENED HER eyes.

  In the first seconds of wakefulness, she noted details of her surroundings without recognizing their significance. She floated in a pleasant state of lassitude, fascinated by the colorful geometric designs daubed on the skin lining of the tepee. The lining stretched from the ground to perhaps a height of five feet.

  Amanda was lying on one of three beds arranged around the tepee wall. Hers was positioned to one side of the oval entrance, which was closed. The entrance faced east, away from the prevailing winds.

  On the other side of the entrance were the two beds for the tepee’s regular occupants. The head of one abutted the foot of the other. All three beds were similar in most respects: two poles had been staked parallel on the ground, and the space between filled with dried prairie grass, then covered with hides. But only one of the beds had an angled backrest of closely spaced willow sticks. The top of the backrest’s frame was connected by a thong to a tripod directly behind it.

  Perhaps twenty poles, most of them toward the rear, formed the skeleton of the tepee, which was reasonably large, and filled with a delicious warmth that prolonged Amanda’s sense of euphoria. Three very long poles, again in a tripod arrangement, shaped the tepee’s basic structure. Additional poles spaced around the perimeter, plus a cluster at the back, stretched and braced the hide covering. Outside thongs staked into the ground helped keep the tepee standing in high winds.

  Slightly behind the center of the dirt floor, a small fire burned—buffalo dung, though Amanda did not know that. She was only conscious of a peculiar aroma she had never smelled before. From the various poles hung items that obviously belonged to the tepee’s owner. A large, ornately painted parfleche. A shield of bull buffalo skin decorated with a crude representation of a bird with a great curving beak and immense wings. A willow bow reinforced with sinew. A quiver of arrows. A medicine bag.

  A long thong hanging from the smoke hole suspended a bundle of saplings above the fire. The smoke, rising straight upward, cured the saplings that would become iron-headed arrows—

  Awareness was returning slowly. Amanda recalled that it was fall, and the evening was chilly. Hence the fire. Overhead, she saw that the smoke wings had been opened about halfway to permit air to circulate. Where the smoke drifted into the darkness, she glimpsed a few faint stars. She heard, then recognized, sounds—

  Heavy thumping, as of hide drums beaten.

  Stamping, rhythmic clapping, the chant of many voices.

  Occasionally a man or woman shouted something in an unfamiliar language. Or a child squalled. Or one of the dozens of dogs she had seen in the encampment barked—

  Encampment—

  She remembered where she was, and why.

  With a low cry, she lunged upward to a sitting position, all at once feeling the thongs that bound her dirty wrists and ankles. As her angle of vision changed, she saw an object previously hidden by the willow backrest. A huge horned skull, the bone yellowed, the eye sockets black and terrifying—

  She almost screamed aloud as it all came back.

  The traders had brought her here. On a keelboat much like the one she remembered from another, almost unreal period in her life.

  After the boat, the traders used horses. There were four of the white men, led by an immense, reddish-bearded fellow with a veined nose. His name was Maas. She had slept at the foot of his bed on the boat, and whenever he had wanted her beside him, he had dragged her up by the hair.

  The scream gathered in her dry throat. She fought it. She was sickened by the filthy feel of her skin. Something crawled beneath her arm on her left side, under the greasy buckskin dress that had replaced her other clothing.

  She ached from the days of traveling across the empty grassland, sometimes permitted to ride behind Maas when he was in a good mood, but most of the time walking, connected to his saddle by a halter looped around her neck. Gazing down at her unwashed feet, she saw half a dozen healed cuts.

  When the traders had finally reached the encampment earlier in the day, they had met with the Indians in the open. Amanda was relegated to a position some yards from the large group surrounding the whites, and from there watched Maas communicate with the ferocious-looking brown men in a combination of their tongue and hand-signs. There was much display of, and haggling over, the contents of the bales the white men had brought with them.

  One moment was unforgettable: when the crowd parted abruptly, and she saw a tall, well-built but cruel-looking Indian gazing at her.

  The Indian, in his twenties, made more hand-signs at Maas. The final sign was a finger jabbed in her direction.

  Maas grinned, nodded—and she knew without being told that she now belonged to the Indian, who wore a bonnet of eagle feathers.

  The bonnet was a kind of cap with thongs hanging down. Some of the feathers projected from the back of the cap. Others were attached to the thongs. Each feather had an ornamental tip of white weasel fur. What struck her was the absence of such bonnets on most of the other young men.

  She saw several bonnets on older Indians. Some of those bonnets had trains of feathers that reached all the way to the ground. Instinct told her the Indian who had pointed to her was very powerful and much respected—thus the honor of the bonnet—but because he was younger, his bonnet was not yet as impressive as those worn by his elders.

  Tonight there was a celebration in progress outside the tepee. At dusk, Amanda had seen chunks of the carcass of some kind of animal being dragged toward blazing cook fires. She remembered an Indian carrying a hairy hump, its underside gory. Another proudly displayed what appeared to be a tongue.

  Then M
aas had come to her, and officially informed her that she had been sold to the young man in return for buffalo hides gathered in the hunt two days ago. The young man was the son of one of the tribal elders, Maas said. He had counted coup many more times than any other young man of the tribe. The number of feathers in his bonnet attested to that. At birth, the young man’s father had christened him with a name that anticipated this prowess—

  Here Maas reeled off guttural syllables, then gave them an approximate English translation: Plenty Coups. The trader said Plenty Coups was further distinguished by belonging to the dog soldiers, the elite group that controlled and directed the all-important buffalo hunts.

  In cynical fashion, Maas wished her well with her new owner.

  Amanda was not permitted to take part in the feasting and celebration. She was led away by several young women, one of whom carried a sapling, and struck her in the face several times before supervising the tying of the thongs in the tepee. Amanda was deposited on the hide-covered bed. Miserable and exhausted, she fell asleep—

  Now she was awake. Remembering—

  Very little spare flesh remained on her rapidly maturing body. She had trouble recalling her last solid meal.

  But that was of trifling importance. What mattered was the man who had bought her. He would surely come to her before the night was over. No doubt he’d do what she dreaded: strip her dress away, lower his body on top of hers, and heave back and forth until he had satisfied himself.

  A sharp memory of the first time it had happened set her to shivering. She remembered faces—one of them fondly. She remembered blue eyes, tawny hair, kind and gentle hands that had helped her when she faltered—

  Tears came to her eyes at the thought of her cousin Jared. Where was he now? New Orleans, she hoped.

  She gazed at the bracelet of tarred rope, partially hidden by the thongs around her wrists. The bracelet was her last tangible link with the past—and Jared. As she looked at the blackened cordage, she knew she’d never see him again. But she’d keep the bracelet until she died.