by Win
“Perhaps,” answered Walkara, which meant yes. He said it in a tone that indicated he didn’t want to spend time talking about such petty matters.
“Tomorrow morning?”
A shrug that meant yes. Then, “You are going to the beaver man rendezvous?”
“Yes.”
“After we find me sisters,” put in Tomás. Sam flicked a glance at him: Let me do the talking.
“It is a long way.” The rendezvous was at Horse Creek on the Siskadee, fifteen or twenty sleeps above there. “The route you travel is dangerous,” said Walkara.
Only because of the Utes. This man crowded you at every moment.
They talked of this and that. Always Walkara’s eyes gleamed, and he acted like a man playing a high-stakes card game and winning.
Not knowing what else to do, Sam just laid the words out. “We seek two women taken by Nez Begay at Tosato.”
“The white man dances through many words and finally speaks what is on his mind. I am more direct. I gave Nez Begay horses in exchange for five slaves, three women and two children. I have many horses.”
It was a point of pride with the Ute people to keep far more horses than they could ever ride or use in any way.
Sam gave the be-quiet at Tomás again. The youth’s face gave him away.
Then Sam looked at Walkara and saw knowledge in his eyes and a smile on his lips.
“These two women, they are my son’s sisters,” Sam said. No point in being coy now. The price had already gone up.
“What are their names?”
“Lupe and Rosalita.”
Something passed across Walkara’s face, but Sam couldn’t read it.
“I will tell you where these women are. Not merely that. I will escort you to them.”
Tomás nearly jumped.
“Yes?” Sam was on the lookout for a trick.
“Escort you directly to them,” repeated Walkara. He drew a slow smile.
“We accept with thanks,” Tomás blurted out.
Walkara looked at the young man with sly indulgence. “Lupe and Rosalita, I traded them to my friend Pegleg Smith. He and my brother left here traveling to the very rendezvous where you wish to go, so he can trade them again.”
“Pegleg!” cried Tomás, looking hard at his father. “That son of a bitch!”
Sam stopped him with a shake of the head. Both of them remembered the fight that crazy son of a gun had with Tomás, and the pro-slave talk that provoked it.
“Pegleg Smith is my brother friend,” Walkara said. His face maintained geniality.
“How long ago did they leave?”
“One moon,” said Walkara.
Sam looked sideways at his son, wondering if Tomás realized this timing wasn’t right. “Pegleg usually makes it to rendezvous,” he said.
They looked at each other, Sam, Walkara, and Tomás.
“I escort you directly to them,” said Walkara again.
Lots of questions, thought Sam. “Sometimes,” he said, “you get lucky.”
That evening Sam, Tomás, and Baptiste were guests at Walkara’s lodge for a good supper. The young chief already had two wives, and plenty of fresh meat. He was cordial, and talked expansively about his ambition to improve his people’s lot through trade with everyone—the Mexicanos, the beaver men, the Comanches, even the Shoshones.
Sam raised an eyebrow at him.
“I don’t make enemy with Shoshone,” said Walkara. “Trade, I trade, all peoples trade, we all happy.”
Sam just looked at him.
“You, you bring me the slave blankets from Santa Fe and Taos, also anything silver. I like silver. In return you get beaver hides, buffalo hides, plenty. You white men like the hides.”
“Maybe so,” said Sam.
Tomás gave him the evil eye.
Walkara, though, seemed not to notice. “I even think of the Californios,” he told them. “You beaver men, you travel to California.”
Sam nodded.
“You yourself, you been to California?”
“Yes.” He said no more. He wondered if this man, suddenly affable, intended to trade slaves from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico.
“You and I go to California,” said Walkara. “My friend Pegleg, he says California has many, many horses.”
Sam could almost feel the heat radiating from Tomás. He and his son were both thinking, horses and slaves.
“We have plenty of time to talk business at rendezvous,” said Sam.
They slid along the trail in the last of the light, considering. Sam told Tomás and Baptiste, “There’s things he’s not saying.”
“What do we care?” said Tomás. “He is helping us find my sisters.”
“All right. I need to ride on ahead and see Esperanza. You two bring Walkara along.”
“And keep an eye on him,” said Tomás.
Sam shrugged. “I need something. I can’t ride Paladin. It’s too near her time, and I’m going to push hard. Tomás, I’ll leave her with you.”
“And a new foal when we get there,” said the young man. “But what will you ride?”
“Alice, and lead the mule.”
Alice was a two-year-old appaloosa from Paladin, barely trained. Sam had been leading her as a pack horse.
“Dad, that’s no good. I have a better idea.”
Sam looked into his son’s smile. The youth was fond of Alice. He had named her, and intended to spend the days at rendezvous making her into a good saddle horse.
“Take Vici. Vici’s got lots of bottom. You couldn’t do better. Use Alice for a second mount.”
Tomás was proud of his horse, justifiably so.
“You sure?”
“Damn sure.”
“Good. Thanks.”
They stretched out on their bedrolls.
The next morning, when the beaver men were ready to ride, the column of Utes paraded up, Walkara at their head.
Sam reined Vici over to him, and Tomás brought Paladin alongside. Walkara eyed the medicine hat mare and gelding with the appreciation of a connoisseur of horseflesh. Baptiste sat his black stallion.
“Baptiste and Tomás will ride with you to rendezvous. I’m going ahead and tell everyone you are coming and choose a good place to camp.”
“White Hair, why do you not ride with us?” said Walkara.
Sam said, “It is a matter of the heart.”
Walkara cupped his breechcloth. “I think it is a matter of the man berries.”
Sam nodded. It was good to know the Yellow Chief could be wrong. He touched his heels to Vici and was off.
20
Traveling alone in Indian country—a thought to make your skin pucker. Yes, the Utes were reasonably friendly to the beaver men. So were the Shoshones, whose territory bordered the Utes’ on the north. But any fur trapper made a tempting target. Besides having two fine horses, Sam was carrying weapons, and he had good tools of mountain survival in his belt and pouches. By Indian standards he was a rich man, and an easy target for a single, silent arrow.
So Sam rode all night and part of each morning and forted up to sleep during the heat of the day. He alternated riding one mount and leading the other, to keep from wearing either horse out. He avoided skylining himself. He used brush or timber as cover when he could. He kept his eyes roaming always, and felt like one of the buzzards that floated overhead. Sam wasn’t looking for prey but predators.
He didn’t hunt. He carried a dozen pounds of jerked meat, enough to get him through a journey he hoped to cut in half, to eight or nine days. He didn’t build fires. And he kept his mind on his business.
He had one respite every day. He found some brush to hide in, staked his horses, noted the routes of escape, and stretched out to sleep. Before he drifted off, he thought of the heart reason he was hurrying to rendezvous—Esperanza. During the short nights of late June, riding under a waxing moon, he had the same thought: I’m going to see Esperanza, and my brother-in-law Flat Dog, and Julia.
It was a story he didn’t tell, because the pain was too raw. In 1823 he came to the mountains, joined the Crow people, made best friends with two young Crow men, Blue Medicine Horse and Flat Dog. The next year he married their sister Meadowlark.
He had to fight another suitor for Meadowlark, Red Roan, the son of the chief, who was also courting her. Foolishly, Sam led Blue Medicine Horse into battle and got him killed. Then the family opposed Sam’s courtship fiercely. Yet Meadowlark chose Sam.
The newly-weds got away from the Crows and went to California with Jedediah Smith’s brigade—Sam wanted to be in the first outfit to cross the continent to the Golden Clime, and Meadowlark wanted to see the big-water-everywhere. There she bore a child, and in giving Sam Esperanza, she died.
Sam brought the infant back to the Crows, where she belonged. He entrusted her to his closest family, Flat Dog and Julia, to raise, and to her grandparents to watch over.
When challenged, he killed Red Roan.
Now he was unwelcome in the village where his daughter lived. So he saw her once each summer, at rendezvous. Flat Dog and Julia made the journey to do a little trading, and let father and daughter get to know each other.
Already Sam was late to rendezvous. Flat Dog would be waiting and wondering whether Sam had gone under. He would be patient. But every day late was one day Sam didn’t get to see Esperanza.
He pushed the two horses, and he pushed himself.
Sam pointed north along the Siskadee. When it started its big turn around the Uinta Mountains, flowing in the shape of a sharply curved scimitar, he cut straight across, through the pines and aspens, enjoying alpine air and relief from heat. Coy was visibly perkier in high country, and Vici had bounce in her step.
When he came out of the mountains, he rode down a little creek through a narrow canyon and ran smack into a camp of Blackfeet.
Rotten luck—they saw him when he saw them. The young men hollered like hell and ran for their horses.
Sam dropped the lead on Alice and put his spurs to Vici. Straight up the mountainside he clambered. Vici sprayed dirt from his hoofs, dodged trees, and clattered across occasional rocks. Up and up and up Sam urged him, spurring and slapping his hindquarters with his hat. For long minutes at top energy Vici gave Sam all his powerful body had to give.
Sam’s mind searched for his best chance. He thought it was to get to a divide where more than two canyons dropped away, and maybe fool his pursuers.
He got to a ridge and saw that some of the warriors, starting just a quarter mile lower down, had crossed this spur at a low spot and were pushing their horses up the canyon.
He stopped Vici—the horse was heaving for breath and couldn’t do this any longer.
Sam was out of choices. He jumped to the ground, slipped off Vici’s bridle and reins, slapped his ass, and sprinted up the hill. Coy squealed once, looked back at Vici, and trotted along with Sam.
From behind came whoops of triumph. That meant some Blackfeet had found the abandoned Alice. After a while he would hear a second round of cries, and that would be a painful moment. Tomás’s horse gone.
He ran upwards.
And ran.
He stopped and chuffed like a steamboat. Coy panted.
Sam ran.
Finally, he saw a breath of a chance. A red outcropping was split by a vertical crevice. Brush sprouted from the bottom like a beard from a billy goat’s chin. The surface between here and there was sandstone. He dashed for the cleft.
He picked up Coy, scrambled up the rock, and dropped behind the brush without disturbing it. He turned sideways and slithered through a narrow place. Coy padded through easily. Beyond that the crack opened out to several feet. Sam checked it further in and above—in both places it narrowed to finger width.
He looked around. There was debris on the floor, leaves, small limbs, pine cones, and rocks, some of them as big as his head. He started piling up the debris in a way that might look haphazard.
Coy sat and looked at him peculiarly.
Whoops and shouts of delight down the mountain. They had found Vici. Captured Vici.
Sam picked up the single big stone left, hefted it high, and slammed it down on his wall.
Sam sat. And sat. And sat.
Coy curled up and napped.
Sam thought, and thought, and thought.
He took an occasional sip from his flask. He poured water into his hat and let Coy lap it up. He listened to the shouts and the war cries. The young warriors invoked their medicine, their invulnerability to projectiles of stone, steel, and lead. They sang songs to make their medicine stronger. Some, he knew, would paint their faces and their horses.
Sam couldn’t be skeptical about other people’s medicine. He carried the sacred pipe himself. In a sun dance he had seen beyond, and knew that power lived there. But he didn’t know exactly what worked and what didn’t. He didn’t know whether medicine could make a man impervious to arrow, knife, tomahawk, or lead blown out of a barrel. He didn’t believe, but he didn’t disbelieve.
Part of him thought that medicine was thinking with your heart as well as your head. Using your vision, not just your eyesight.
He knew that smoking the pipe brought him calm and clarity.
Pipe? Damn, I lost my pipe. It was in its bag in his possible sack rolled up in his bedroll on Vici’s back.
In the shadows of this cleft he felt a chill.
Calm and clear, he told himself, and he breathed.
Think.
Blackfeet were hostile Indians, always ready to fight everyone, red man or white. They made no alliances, observed no truces, granted no mercy. But this was a different kind of Blackfeet tribe, the Gros Ventres. The Frenchies said it meant Big Bellies, which was a compliment. The Arapahos, who were cousins of the Gros Ventres, said it meant Rotten Guts, which wasn’t. This tribe must have been heading south for a visit with the Arapahos, far from their own country, or maybe returning back north. Sam just blundered right into them. Like all Blackfeet they would be bloodthirsty, which was all he needed to know.
He was scared, and his heart hurt. He felt like he’d run away and left his entire life.
I lost my pipe.
I lost Vici.
I still have Coy.
He took inventory of what else he had.
Right in his hands he held a good .50 caliber rifle—the Celt, his legacy from his father. In his belt a pistol of the same caliber, a tomahawk, a butcher knife, and a throwing knife. Over his shoulder Vici’s bridle, reins, and lead—he couldn’t get to rendezvous without a horse. In powder horns, two kinds of gunpowder. In his shooting pouch, a bar of lead, a tool to make it into balls, a cloth, a patch knife, and other handy items. Dangling from his neck, his field glass. In the gage d’amour that also hung from his neck, flint and steel. The gage d’amour that was the first thing Meadowlark ever gave him.
He had two other weapons, the hair ornament, a gift of Hannibal MacKye, and his belt buckle. The buckle popped out, revealing a wicked-looking blade—Gideon Poorboy had forged it for Sam.
He had his beaver hat, moccasins, leggings, breechcloth, and a cloth shirt. These were not to be thought of lightly, especially the moccasins and hat. He wondered whether the moccasins would take him all the way to rendezvous.
If he ever got out of this crevice.
And he had Coy. Also not to be thought of lightly.
He heard a rat-a-tat-tat of hoof beats. They roared by.
The riders would be back, with a tracker, going slowly.
No tracks led to this crevice—he had walked up on stone.
Probably they wouldn’t inspect this hole in the rocks.
All right, inventory, what did I lose? Not only Vici but his saddle. Alice. A water keg. Bedroll. And in the bedroll, spare clothes, extra moccasins, and a volume of poems by Byron. That book had cost more than a horse.
Options? It was foolish, but he was stuck in a crack in a rock wall with no one to talk to but his rattling mind. He needed to make his mind clear
and simple. Usually, he would smoke the pipe to get there. Now he couldn’t.
He felt a spurt of anger, bile in his gullet.
Put anger away. Clear and simple.
I can go back over the mountain and wait for my friends to come up.
He played with that in his head.
Or I can steal Vici back and go on to rendezvous.
He didn’t have to play with that. He had to go see Esperanza, so he had to steal a horse. Why not Vici?
I want my pipe.
No way to know in such a large camp who had it. No way to find out. Some things you had to put out of your mind.
Vici would be in the horse herd. He began to imagine just how he would steal one of scores of horses. Maybe he could get away undetected leading just a single mount. Maybe he needed to kill a sentry. Maybe…
He heard walking horses. Voices. A horse stopped in place, tapping its hoofs and blubbering. The tracker was here. Maybe these warriors would steal his life.
The party moved on.
Sam went back to imagining, and maybe sometimes he dozed. When he woke up, the world was dark.
21
By the full moon he inspected the horse herd. It was a huge throng of horses, guarded by young men stationed at several key points. Sam had to circle the herd and get various angles to study it out. He slipped carefully from ridge to creek to hillock, looking. A medicine hat pony would be very distinctive—a white animal with black markings on the head and chest. The white back and rump should gleam in the moonlight.
Sam stole from place to place around the herd all night, careful not to come near any sentries. He glassed the herd from every angle, and he didn’t see Vici.
Before dawn he walked downstream, the opposite direction of where the warriors searched for him yesterday. He and Coy bunked among thick willows, and napped in that cover all day.
He slipped back onto the ridge above the herd in the twilight this time, and saw Vici right off. Saw something, in fact, that seared him. Vici was limping, couldn’t bear weight on his left forefoot. Alice grazed nearby.
He sat leaning against a tree and watched Vici and scratched Coy’s head. How in hell had this happened? Clearly some warrior had claimed Vici and ridden him and… They hadn’t come back to camp last night, maybe had bivouacked out somewhere, looking for Sam. Riding your quarry’s mount to hunt him down—that must have appealed to him. Did you abuse my horse, you bastard?