Yellowstone Kelly

by Clay Fisher

  Excepting only for the word “Yellowstone” itself, “Gardner’s Hole” was the oldest place-name in the Park. Its lovely meadowed basin, lying between the Gallatin and the Washburn Ranges, had been the old free trader’s secret rendezvous forty-four years before when, in 1832, Gardner had stumbled across it while trapping out of Fort Union for the American Fur Company. Its rich history was as well known to Kelly as his own poor small biography, and it was with heavy regret that he realized, having come so close, he was not to see its legendary beauties.

  Still, it was not to be. The Great Trail, bearing away from the Gardner to follow the Yellowstone as it did, would take him many miles west of the old mountain man’s reported paradise, beginning with tomorrow’s earliest daylight.

  He made a fireless camp, putting on Spotted Eagle’s shaggy forelegs the set of Sioux hobbles which Antelope Boy’s thoughtful comrades had laced to their dying brother’s saddle before racing off to cut back Crook’s carrot-red muttonchops over on the Rosebud.

  He used the hobbles rather than the picket rope—also thoughtfully provided by the dead youth’s lodge brothers—for a good hard High Plains reason.

  Any spooked yearling colt could snap a braided horsehair rope and run off beyond recovery. But a four-year-old stampeded bull buffalo could not break a set of Hunkpapa foreleg hobbles, nor get far enough from camp in a whole night’s hopping to take more than a pleasant morning’s stroll to round up again. And in his position at the moment of his cautious cold supper of rancid last-winter’s pemmican at the forks of the Gardner and Yellowstone Rivers the night of June 4, 1876, Luther Kelly figured he could not afford to take a great many liberties with the uncertain laws of Sioux chance.

  The fact was that he had made up a great many miles on Sayapi and Crow Girl in the past forty-eight hours. Gall’s nephew, apparently expecting immediate and hot pursuit in strength, had clearly been thrown off guard by his uncle’s failure to appear in force along his backtrail. Especially during the second day, just past, had the Hunkpapa youth’s pony tracks shown him to be slowing carelessly. Now, safely within the tangled vastnesses of the Park, he was moving entirely at ease and completely without suspicion that he was being followed within fifty miles. Much less that he was being followed, according to Kelly’s grim guess as the sun sank that fourth day of June, within five miles!

  With the jade-green mountain twilight fading peacefully and with Spotted Eagle contentedly cropping the verdant Gardner River grass not thirty feet away, and with the murmuring, passing swirl of the stream’s smooth-bouldered current soothing his weary nerves, Luther Kelly found life good again. Wrapping himself gratefully in Antelope Boy’s worn Three Point blanket, he sighed deeply and lay back upon the fragrant meadow hay. Within thirty seconds he was dreaming of Crow Girl’s calm gray eyes and curving, soft-lipped smile.

  But from a weathered eagle’s-nest lookout spire perched atop the gaunt stone flank of Gardner Canyon high above his grassy campsite, the glittering Indian eyes which looked down upon him were not calm and gray.

  Nor were the cruel knife-thin lips below those eyes, soft and smiling.

  With daylight the morning of the fifth, Kelly was moving. He did not move far. He had no more than forded the Gardner to pick up Sayapi’s tracks on the far side than he sat the surprised Spotted Eagle on his haunches.

  Turning him, he cut to the right, coming off the main thoroughfare of the Great Trail to halt where a dim sidetrack led off up the Gardner toward that stream’s canyon issuance. This latter track appeared to be no more than a game trail, grass-grown and little used. But there was one big trouble with that last assurance. What little use it had been getting had been given it within the past twelve hours.

  Kelly could have read that triple line of fresh prints leaving the Great Trail and starting off up the Gardner goat path in his sleep.

  They belonged to Gall’s two top buffalo runners and a very tall, shod mule. And if they had been cut into the firm clay of the riverbank trail more than thirty minutes before his own arrival at the forks last night, Luther Kelly could not tell a bighorn biscuit from a buffalo chip.

  Flinching to the thought, he threw his eyes nervously upstream toward the weirdly oxidized rock fangs arming the weather-rotted jaws of the canyon ahead.

  Nothing moved.

  Not a lizard stirred, not a pack rat scurried, not a deerfly droned to break the orange– and ocher-stained stillness of the crumbling canyon walls. The only movement within anxious eye’s reach of the Gardner and Yellowstone forks was the lazy swing of a mated pair of osprey eagles soundlessly circling the blue air over their rock-spired nest fifteen hundred feet above the river’s canyoned exit.

  Kelly ground his stumpy white teeth, fingered his blue-bearded chin, studied the ground, and scowled darkly.

  He had made a bad mistake with that five-mile guess last night. He was very lucky to be alive this morning to realize it, too. Actually, he must almost have run Spotted Eagle’s soft pink nose up the lathered crupper of Sayapi’s borrowed black gelding late yesterday afternoon. He could not have missed him at the forks by more than two miles, and it might as easily have been less than one.

  It must be the cursed spell of the Park that did that to a man. Stunned his senses. Overcame his ordinary cautions. Dulled his painfully sharpened instincts. Made him unaccountably careless as he, Kelly, had been the night before.

  Be that as it may, the last of his Irish luck had been used up in saving him from stepping on Sayapi.

  The dangerous youth had only spotted him, then cut and run like any wolf-shy Sioux. He could just as well have hung around to night-sneak his camp and slip a knife between his blanketed ribs, Pawnee style. But saved or not, the hump-fat was now in the fire. Kelly had overridden his big luck in a tomfool way worthy of a Yellowstone yearling running his first hostile trail. He had galloped right up his quarry’s unsuspecting back as stupidly as a Pony Soldier sergeant on his first Sioux patrol assignment. He had wantonly thrown away the tremendous advantage of surprise which had been his up until sunset last evening.

  Now there was the Indian piper to pay.

  The moody, unpredictable Sioux youth was alerted. And six feet three inches, a hundred and ninety-five pounds of forewarned, mentally unstable Hunkpapa subchief was something to sweat about.

  Would he turn and fight proudly by open challenge? Would he set an ambush and strike from cover?

  Would he whip up his tiring mounts and run straight away, slowing himself to suit the necessarily laggard gaits of an ungainly pack mule and a woman eight months heavy with child, yet still hoping to lose his white shadow by superior trail craft?

  Or would he cut the mule’s throat and put a bullet through the burdensome squaw’s head, taking both ponies to make good his own escape by relay riding?

  Only one answer was certain in the white scout’s desperately turning mind. Now that the issue was committed, the chase clearly joined, Sayapi would never abandon Crow Girl alive. If he could not now win through and have her for himself, he would kill her as surely and naturally as dark follows daylight.

  But which of these perilous choices the unpredictable young Sioux would make, no man could foretell.

  Only God knew that and, as usual, God was not talking.

  A man would have to gamble now with the girl’s life. To pit his own wilderness skills against Sayapi’s. To hunt down the dangerous Sioux and kill him like a rabid dog. No mercy shown. No quarter considered. Crow Girl’s precious life and that of her (and his!) unborn child at stake every chancy step of the way.

  Either that, or he conceded the game to Gall’s nephew. Refused to risk his Absaroka mate’s dear life. Gave both her and their baby over to the hunted life of a Hunkpapa hostile’s squaw. Turned around right now and went back to the outer valley and his old free, uncluttered life along the Montana game trails.

  It was question enough to set the jaw and blacken
the scowl of any man’s Christian charity of decision.

  Yet, as he sat there staring off up the Gardner, Kelly’s frown faded. The quick trace of his pawky grin picked up his mouth corners. He gathered the single-plaited rawhide reins of Spotted Eagle’s Indian hackamore, clucked to the little horse, and gave him the indicating knee-squeeze.

  Spotted Eagle stiffened his flopping ears, shot them forward, then back, blew out softly through his flared nostrils, glided off on a left-foot lead into his ten-hour trail gait. Aboard him, his new white master sat to the swinging single-foot as fluidly as any Sioux, his dark eyes fastened on the rocky flanks of the rising trail ahead, his wide lips still touched with the strangely eager little smile.

  Luther Kelly was pleased enough.

  He was going to see Gardner’s Hole after all.

  29

  Despite the need for extreme care not to crowd up on Sayapi or to blunder into any traps he might set, Kelly could not keep his naturalist’s eyes from wandering the wonders of the trailside. This was as it would be with his nature-worshiping kind, for, since leaving the forks five miles back, the canyon track had climbed nearly a thousand feet, opening up vistas undreamed at the lower elevations at which the Great Trail entered the Park.

  Now, spread all about him were scenes such as would subdue the senses of the dullest clod, let alone the acutely tuned feelings of a wilderness lover like Luther Kelly.

  Behind him and to his right, across the Gardner, loomed the ninety-five-hundred-foot funeral crest of a tremendous mountain shaped like a sepulcher. Immediately below the grim peak began a remarkable mile-long “sliding hill” apron of moving foothill earth being pushed forever forward and downward into the river to assuage the insatiable land hunger of its predatory current and to replenish the resultant never-ending crumble of its eroding banks.

  Behind him, to the left, rising more than two thousand feet above the already mile-high bed of the Gardner, was a second towering behemoth. This monstrous Cretaceous relic, more cliff than mountain, whose somber three-mile facia of alternate glistening black coal seams, dove-gray andesite extrusions, and colorful rhyolite porphyry caprock, had been a Great Trail landmark for more centuries than the white man knew, was even more humbling than the snow-crowned immenseness of the tomb-shaped peak to his right.

  Guarding the canyon trail above and below him were perpendicular walls of heavily fossilized marine rock, stained and emblazoned with every possible oxide-of-iron pigment from palest cream through fiery orange to deep blood red. Contrasting brilliantly to the rufous earth, yellow rock, and aquamarine river water were the shadowed green of the Rocky Mountain red cedars, silver gray of the sage, dusty olive of the greasewood, mellow chartreuse of the bankside willows, flaring purple and saffron of the prickly-pear cactus blossoms, and the rare golden haze of the night-blooming stickleaf thistle.

  Kelly rode on, entranced. The miles, with their weird and wonderful markers, fell silently behind. There was first the eight-foot-wide, scalding-steamed channel of a boiling hot river. Then, the roaring hundred-and-fifty-foot plunge of the Gardner over a falls where dozens of osprey eagles wheeled and screamed.

  Next, the dizzying two-mile rampart of Sheepeater Cliffs, where the Indian tribe of the same name had reputedly lived in ancient times. And westward, the sky-high, unbelievable steam clouds hanging over some nearby and immense hot springs. There was literally no end to these continuing wonders. But the peculiar suspended stillness of the Park, that strange sense of God’s great quiet which no Yellowstone visitor ever forgets, was once more getting to Kelly.

  As early afternoon set in, his dark eyes left the trail ahead less and less frequently.

  He became abstractly absorbed in Sayapi’s track line.

  A restless depression began to grow upon him, a feeling of premonition not warranted by the sparkling sunlight and cedar-scented air bathing the tranquil Gardner game trail and the clear-cut Sioux pony prints.

  Shortly after one o’clock, Spotted Eagle halted of his own accord. He stood flicking his coarse ears first west, then north, then south, his pale eyes walling to follow their changing point.

  Kelly let his own puzzled gaze join that of the wise little Appaloosa. The Nez Percé pony was right. There was indeed a matter of direction to be guessed at, of decision to be gambled upon.

  They were at a blind crossroads.

  In from the right at this juncture, running due north and south to cross the Gardner where it left Sheepeater Canyon, came a well-marked Indian trail, no doubt an important division of the Great Trail itself. From its bisection of this trail, the river bent sharply northwest to begin its last steep climb into old Johnson Gardner’s Hole.

  Kelly gritted his teeth, took down the glasses which he had unslung and focused but the moment before. As far as he could scan along both the Gardner’s Hole track and the north-south Indian path, the surface of both trails lay across dry bare rock. A herd of ironshod elephants could have taken either route and the best tracker in the world could not have told you which way they had gone. Not, at least, without wasting precious, perhaps irretrievable time, running out all three options.

  At the point of giving Spotted Eagle the knee and leaving the choice of trails to his Indian-bred instinct, Kelly straightened suddenly in the saddle.

  Flat and many-echoed with altitude and intervening rough terrain as it was, the distant sound was nonetheless as familiar to him as the tone of his own voice. Its origin was equally clear and identifiable.

  That rifle shot had come from a new model .50-caliber Springfield trap-loader, fired not over five miles to the Northwest. Sayapi’s gun! The Lord be praised. The Sioux had gone on across the Indian trail, up the Gardner!

  There could also be, Kelly told himself excitedly, but one interpretation put upon the fact the fleeing Indian youth would chance his shot being heard by his white pursuer. His supplies must have given out in some way—most likely lost in a river crossing—forcing him to kill game to keep going. Now, with proper care, a man had him. He had him right where he wanted him. Position located. Distance known. Direction definite. All he had to do was go and get him!

  He nodded to himself, spoke to Spotted Eagle, sent the little Appaloosa across the Indian trail.

  There was still an hour of good shooting daylight remaining when Kelly topped out on the low pass which dropped the river trail into Gardner’s Hole. It was high up here, a good thousand feet higher than where the Gardner had come out of Sheepeater Canyon to cross the Indian branch trail. Where he sat, up there in the notch, it would have to be well over seven thousand feet. Yet, nevertheless, the sun was already gone behind the Gallatins, shielded thus early even from this elevated vantage point by the ten-thousand-foot upthrusts of a set of huge twin peaks immediately to the west.

  Below him the Hole spread in all its staggering immensity, running from a long ridge to the east between him and an unnamed peak, westerly to the base of the Gallatins. To his right lay a beautiful large lake he could not place in his memory of the Park Expedition’s charts. To his left lay two smaller lakes, completely uncharted. And everywhere the delighted eye might reach was the bright running water and waving blue-green mountain grass of Gardner’s three-forked upper drainage basin.

  The Hole was alive with grazing game.

  Mule deer, pronghorn antelope, moose, bighorn sheep, wapiti, and buffalo all came under the passing turn of Kelly’s glasses in their first thirty-second sweep of the great sunken pasture below him.

  Surely it was a sight to let a man die happy, having seen. And which he could know not over fifteen or twenty other lone white wanderers had gazed upon before him.

  Suddenly, Kelly froze the glasses, all thoughts of living game driven from his mind.

  Down there, a mile out across the floor of the Hole, near the yellow sand beach of the smaller of the two lakes, the buzzards were circling. Below their wheeling arc lay what he sought�
��Sayapi’s kill.

  It was a big, long-yearling buffalo calf, a bull to judge from the dark head curls and light cape beginning to show their rich contrast. It lay back-to to Kelly’s vantage point, so that all he could see of it was that the hump ribs had been hacked out. As to why the buzzards were not down upon it long ago—it had been all of four hours since he heard the shot—a man was left with two guesses.

  Sayapi was ambushed somewhere down there covering the kill, visible to the vultures but not to Kelly. Either that, or the Sioux youth had risked lingering at the kill to eat and rest, had gone on only now, perhaps bare minutes before Kelly’s arrival.

  Of the two ideas, the first was palpably impossible.

  There was not within one hundred yards of the slaughtered bull a solitary stick nor upthrust stone large enough to hide a five-year-old boy with a blunt-arrowed rabbit bow. Let alone to screen a six-foot buck with a Pony Soldier Springfield. And by Plains Indian ambush standards, one hundred yards did not constitute anywhere near a proper wikmunke.

  If you were a Sioux setting a trap for a white foe of Lone Wolf Kelly’s rifle-handling abilities, you simply did not take hundred-yard chances. Ten yards, yes. Fifteen, maybe. Five preferably. Never over twenty. Otherwise, you were gambling on giving the second shot to a man who had already—in Sayapi’s case—shown you he could knock a gun out of your hands at seventy feet firing from the hip.

  No, Sayapi was not laid up down there covering that kill. Your second guess was the right one and, depending on how fresh you found his pony tracks when you got down there, might put you anywhere from twenty minutes to a short hour behind him. Kelly nodded to himself, grunted to Spotted Eagle. Ten minutes later the little horse had him down out of the pass gap, across the Hole meadow, and up to the stiffening carcass of the dead bull.

  He swung down, letting the Appaloosa’s reins slide.