by Win Blevins
That day, for sure, they couldn’t start walking. Gideon’s foot gave him too much pain, and Sam was half dizzy.
The next day Sam was much better, but Gideon’s pain was sharp. “Why so much hurt in such a little hole?” complained the bear-sized man.
Jackson had the men construct a litter from poles and a blanket. They dragged Gideon along, with the big man grousing loudly.
That night the puncture wound looked red, and Clyman thought it might be infected. Puncture wounds, they knew, were the most likely to fester. The next day it was red, oozed puss, and was even more painful. “Infected,” James said soberly.
Now every man was thinking of gangrene. Gideon squeezed his eyes closed and said nothing.
One morning Gideon sang canoeing songs as he bumped along. During the afternoon he acted tired, but he told occasional cripple jokes. The brigade walked quietly downriver, trying not to jounce him too much.
One night the swelling and redness seemed no better. The next, the wound looked green around the edges. Clyman sniffed. “It’s beginning to stink.”
Except for Sam and Clyman, men stopped talking to Gideon. No one wanted to cozy up to mortality.
The next day Gideon sang songs again. And either he forgot his English or his mind was weakening. He didn’t speak, and sang only in French.
Sam slunk along beside the litter all day, and Coy slunk behind Sam.
Late one afternoon they made camp along the river with a good grove of cottonwoods at their backs. Clyman checked the foot. The green around the wound had turned to black. Red streaks ran up the calf. “Blood poisoning,” said James loud, like an announcement.
The men looked at each other. Everyone knew.
Suddenly, they heard a kind of a roar. What is that? Horses!
Men ran for the best cover available, trees, bushes, boulders. They primed their muzzleloaders.
Horses for sure. The roar was becoming rat-a-tat-tats.
They couldn’t see beyond the cottonwoods. Friends? Enemies? They squirmed. They looked along their sights.
“Some niggers, coming on us in the broad open,” whined a nasal voice near Sam.
A voice came through the trees, or voices.
Men heaved big breaths in and out. Hammers snapped back. Powder was poured into pans, ready for the flint spark.
The voice made melody.
Sam lowered The Celt. “It’s Beckwourth,” he said happily.
“How does you know?” whined the voice.
“He’s singing, ‘My Lord, What a Morning.’”
“Yi-ii-ay!” So it was Flat Dog too. And Paladin. Sam grinned big. He gave the long, loud whistle he used to call Paladin to him.
About a score of horses rat-a-tat-tatted into the grove on the trot. Sam saw his big white mare come galloping around them, looking for the source of the whistle.
Sam laughed. Flat Dog slid off the mare and the friends grinned at each other.
Sam set to stroking Paladin’s fine head, sliding up onto her bare back (which made his injured side hurt), checking out her hooves, and the like. Beckwourth and Flat Dog headed for fires and meat fresher than the jerked stuff they’d been eating. The men gathered around, curious.
In the end it was left to Beckwourth to tell the story of how they got the horses back. Well, some horses—twenty-one to be exact.
Jim was big with the story. The tale of their trek over the pass to the north and down the Hoback River was epic. The episode of sneaking up on the Blackfeet camp was nerve-tingling. The attack on the guards was hair-raising and bloody, and Jim himself was as mighty as Joshua at the walls of Jericho. Someone said he seemed to have killed, by his own hand, more Blackfeet than there were in the party. When he got to the part about running the horses off—all the horses—someone called out, “Jim, if you run off all the horses, where’s the other forty-nine?” Guffaws all around.
Jackson asked some hard questions. Were the Indians on their tails? Was the camp in danger of attack right now?
“I don’t think so,” said Jim. “They had all the lead they’ll be wanting.”
Flat Dog confirmed that he had doubled back at first light this morning and found no one on their back trail.
Jackson pulled at his chin and allowed that the Blackfeet might be satisfied with getting away with fifty horses, particularly if they lost a couple of men. Blackfeet took dead comrades hard. Their idea of winning was strictly to go home unscratched.
Jim and Flat Dog felt damn lucky, Jim said, to find the outfit not many sleeps from where they left it.
That brought out some grousing noises.
“But any coon can see why, that’s sure,” said Jim. He kept himself from looking at Gideon.
“Matter of fact, we’re acting like we don’t know the true business of this evening,” said Clyman.
Men peered at him like they didn’t know what he was talking about.
Clyman asked softly, “What do you say, Gideon?”
“Do it,” Gideon roared in English. Everyone recoiled from the violence of his tone. “For sake of le bon dieu, do it.”
He shook himself wildly on the litter. “I am coward. A man, vraiment, he choose death over cripple. I am no longer such big man. I am afraid to die. Do it.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
SAM KNEW THAT he and Clyman were somehow elected.
Jackson broke out whiskey, enough for Gideon only. Gideon got drunk enough to pass in and out of consciousness. Sam, Clyman, and several other men whetted their knives as sharp as they could. Sharp blades would make it easier. They thought of themselves. In Gideon’s place, they would insist on sharp blades.
Flat Dog looked at his friend’s wound and ran his eyes from it to Sam to Clyman to Jackson and back to the wound. He couldn’t feature what on earth they were about to do.
“I’ve never done anything like this,” said Clyman. It sounded like a statement of fact, not an excuse.
“Me neither,” said Sam.
The long May evening would give a lot of light, probably enough. A fire was built within reach of the surgeon. They put a log under Gideon’s knee.
Flat Dog sat down bewildered, but no one noticed.
Though no man there had performed an amputation, or even seen one done, frontier people had heard about how such things were performed. “At the knee,” Clyman. “We don’t have a saw to cut through the shin bones, and they say the joint is best anyhow.”
Jackson tied a tourniquet around the thigh and cranked it tight, using a stick for a lever. Sam felt sheepish that he hadn’t thought of the tourniquet. What other ghastly mistake are we making? Are we doctors or killers?
A half dozen knives gleamed on a slab of sandstone next to Gideon.
“I’ll hold his leg,” said Sam.
Gideon lifted his head for a moment. “I want Sam to do the job,” he said.
Everybody stared. They thought he was gone. Jackson poured more whiskey down his throat. “Sam,” Gideon choked out. “He’s my man.”
Clyman looked at Sam and nodded. James went to the foot, squatted, and clamped the foot between his knees.
“I want Flat Dog hold leg,” said Gideon harshly. “You watch careful,” he said to Clyman.
Flat Dog took the leg. His mind was whirling. Surely these white men weren’t about to…
Clyman regarded Flat Dog carefully, then duck-waddled up beside the knee.
Sam picked up his own butcher knife, held the blade in flames for several moments and studied the knee carefully.
After consideration he made his first cut.
Gideon screamed.
IT TURNED OUT that Clyman thought of things Sam didn’t. For instance, you leave skin a couple of inches below the joint, so you’ll have enough to fold back over the wound.
Sam worked in a sort of trance. Gideon bellowed sometimes—loud, wordless, howling roars with no apparent relationship to what Sam was doing. Sam heard, but they were remote and unreal to him. Even Gideon himself was remote, in a way. S
am saw only the flesh, the ligaments, the tendons, the cartilage, the bones. And the blood, too much blood. Part of his mind wondered whether Gideon would survive the blood loss. Most of Sam’s mind was focused, with a dreamlike intensity, on the joint itself.
Every frontiersman, every rural cook, had seen lots of joints of animals, and had some basic idea of how they worked. Sam went forward with this knowledge and common sense—that was all he had, and hard necessity.
He switched knives often. Other men whetted them again.
Flat Dog held on grimly, his face pale, his mind numb.
No one spoke, except that Clyman occasionally pointed and said, “There,” or “Like that.”
Gideon’s hollering occurred in another world.
Then Sam was to the bones. He had to go between the knobby bone ends and pull the leg apart, not cut it apart.
Soon the joint no longer joined anything. Sam let out a big breath of relief. From here he more or less knew his way.
After another eternity, or passage through a surreal world, Clyman eased Gideon’s lower leg away. It was done. For better or worse, done. Forever done.
Flat Dog dropped the half leg. Then he flopped onto the ground on his back.
Clyman handed Sam an axe whose head glowed lurid red. Sam nodded to himself. He understood. He pushed the flat side of the head firmly against Gideon’s stump. Sizzle, steam, stink.
Gideon, unconscious, uttered no sound.
Sam looked at his work, turned the axe head over, and applied the other side to another part of the stump.
Gideon writhed and uttered soft, mewling sounds.
Flat Dog sat up and stared at what was happening. He didn’t know human beings did such…
Jackson handed Sam needle and thread. Sam took the flaps of flesh that had once covered the upper part of Gideon’s calf and folded them over each other. The bloody wound was completely covered. Patiently, with a coppery feeling of revulsion in his mouth, Sam sewed the pieces of flap together.
He sat back on his heels. He put down needle and thread. He let his head drop. Done.
“Well done,” said Clyman.
“Damn well done,” said Jackson.
Flat Dog couldn’t decide whether it was well done, or insane.
Sam felt…He could not have said, so many strange, winding, blowing feelings, wisps of gauze in a breeze of consciousness.
The men, who had watched with rapt attention, began to drift away. Time for coffee, time for a bite to eat.
Jackson said, “I think we ought to loose that tourniquet, see how bad it bleeds, and tighten it again. Keep doing that until the bleeding stops.”
The brigade leader looked inquiringly at Sam, as though he now had some authority.
Clyman set the calf and foot in Sam’s lap. “Seems like you oughta be the one decides what to do with this.” Then he took over at the tourniquet.
Sam cradled the severed leg in silence and wept gently.
He sat by himself for half an hour or so, rubbing Coy’s head.
In the very last of the evening light, he carried Gideon’s leg upstream into the densest part of the cottonwoods. A melancholy memory walked with him—how he had done the same for Third Wing in this same valley. He climbed into the biggest cottonwood he could find and carefully set the half leg in a fork. Then he took thought, pulled the tail of his shirt out of his trousers, and cut a long, wide strip of hide off the bottom. He wrapped the leg in that. It seemed respectful.
He slid down the tree and stumbled back to camp, wanting and not wanting to see his maimed friend.
Gideon was sleeping. Not sleeping forever, from what Sam could see.
Clyman had taken the tourniquet off.
As far as Sam could tell by the firelight, the wound wasn’t bleeding.
He took Gideon’s hand, held it for a moment, squeezed, and put it on the bear-man’s belly.
Though he stretched out near Flat Dog, he didn’t sleep all night. He scratched Coy’s ears and watched the stars. They wheeled very, very slowly across the sky, dancers beyond the reach of time. Somewhere, somehow the world turned. Time tick-tocked, somewhere.
Sam looked but didn’t think. In the first light he closed his eyes and eased off.
THE NEXT MORNING Flat Dog got breakfast for two and took one bowl to Sam, who was just waking up. Gideon lay nearby on his litter, half-conscious.
“Let’s see if we can get Gideon to eat something,” Flat Dog said.
Sam sat up, wiggled his eyebrows to wake up, and eyeballed Gideon. “Probably not,” he said, and accepted his own bowl.
“If we can,” said Flat Dog.
James Clyman joined them. The other men stayed at their mess fires. Flat Dog noticed how most of the men didn’t want to associate with a badly injured man. Were they embarrassed by his wound? By his…half-human state? Or was it just an aversion to being so close to injury and death, like it might be catching?
A man without a leg. Flat Dog had seen dogs without legs, but never a man. A man deliberately made legless.
“Lot of sitting to be done today,” said Clyman.
And for a few days, thought Flat Dog. If we want him to live. If he wants to live with one leg.
Sam’s head was hanging. He looked exhausted from the ordeal.
Clyman seemed even-keeled. Not much excited Old James, as he called himself.
Flat Dog still felt like somebody’d whacked him in the head with something heavy and made him silly. He kept looking at Gideon’s face, down at the missing leg, back at the face, and across at Sam, and then repeating the whole cycle.
Clyman spooned a little broth onto Gideon’s closed lips. The lips opened and the tongue accepted. Clyman spooned more. The eyes opened, and the head lifted a little.
Coy went up to Gideon’s leg, sniffing. The one-legged bear man cuffed at the coyote irritably, missing by a wide margin, but Coy skittered off. Gideon lay back down and closed his eyes. “I’ll eat a little,” he said softly. “Though, le bon dieu, maybe I should starve until I die.”
Clyman spooned it to him.
“I’m going to hunt today,” Flat Dog told Sam.
“I’m too tired,” said Sam.
Flat Dog nodded, smiled with his eyes at his friend, and headed off.
White people had always been strange. The men traveled without their families. For years, amazingly, they went without their families. They earned lots of things, but seemed to have no reason for owning them, except to do more traveling without their families and get still more things. They liked adventure. Flat Dog now understood the adventure part, and enjoyed it himself.
But Gideon. Gideon, and what Sam had done to Gideon, that slapped Flat Dog in the face. It brought up questions that stunned him.
Flat Dog rode out to find elk or deer, but his mind was elsewhere. He was learning something tremendous, maybe, something that knocked his idea of the white man cockeyed. He hefted this new bit of understanding, rubbed it with his fingers, prodded it, checked it from every side to learn its true nature.
SAM AND FLAT Dog inspected the wound. Coy wanted to sniff it, but Sam pushed him away. Sam said the wound seemed to be healing fine. No bleeding. Jackson had already said the outfit would travel tomorrow, Gideon on a litter. They were in luck—now the litter would be pulled by horses, not men. But all this only half-mattered to Flat Dog.
When they had poured coffee from the pot on the mess fire, Flat Dog said, “I don’t understand cutting off a man’s leg. It’s wrong. This is not life, a man should not be like this. It’s…wrong.”
Sam said a bunch of something.
Flat Dog heard the words but he didn’t regard them. At the end he asked one question. “So Gideon will use a crutch for…however long he lives?”
“No, he’ll wear a peg.”
Flat Dog made a gesture of complete bewilderment. Sam got a piece of driftwood, held his own foot to his butt, and mimicked walking on a peg. “He’ll strap it to his leg with a leather belt.”
Flat Dog understood, but…
They drank coffee for a while. Coy lay with his head on his front paws and made pathetic eyes at them. Finally, Flat Dog said, “My uncle told me something. Life is a butterfly, delicate and beautiful. You cup it in your hand gently, but it is always ready to fly. Your life is an opportunity to dance with it. If you grab it, though, you’ll kill it. When it wants to fly, you must watch it wing away and love its beauty.”
Sam studied Flat Dog for a moment. “Say that another way.”
Flat Dog shrugged. “It is a good day to die.”
WHEN HE WOKE up the next morning, Sam realized he was wondering if Flat Dog was still there. Two or three times during the night he’d dreamed that he woke up and his friend was gone forever.
Flat Dog sat up in his blankets.
Sam grinned crookedly at him. Coy went to him to get his head petted.
Jackson called the men together. The stolen horses belonged, he said, most of them, to the Ashley-Smith company. The twenty-one that came back, fourteen belonged to the firm. Sam would get Paladin back, and because of his job on the surgery, a horse to replace Pinto. Beckwourth and Flat Dog would get back the two horses they started with, plus one each for their good work in recovering the mounts. The rest belonged to Ashley-Smith.
“Now you, Morgan, Beckwourth, Flat Dog, I have to ask you. We need all the horses for the moment, to carry the equipment.”
“And carry Gideon,” Sam put in.
Jackson acknowledged that with a nod.
Gideon still kept his head down, as though he didn’t see or hear a thing.
“Is that all right?”
Sam spoke up. “I’m not easy with Paladin being used as a pack horse.”
Jackson thought on that. Then he said, “How about if she’s the one drags Gideon? With you beside her?”