Skye thought to count the ways. For saving Mercer’s life just a few days earlier. For showing him strange things, introducing him to strange people worth writing about. For keeping a prairie fire at bay. For putting food before him. For showing him how to survive without white men’s tools. For sheltering him from weather. For nursing him through grave illness. For translating among the Indians. For his knowledge of the American West.
But the man was leering at him, triumph in his eyes, enjoying every moment of it. Here was the man, his soul naked.
Dawson intervened. “Mercer. I don’t think I’ll let ye out of here until ye pay the man.”
Mercer’s smile was dangerous. “Oh, is that how it is, eh? I’m going to enjoy this. Came along, Dawson. Let’s have dinner. Just you and I, eh?”
“I have invited Mister Skye and his wives.”
“Squaws? That reprobate at my table?”
“My table, Mister Mercer.”
Dawson herded them out of the trading room and locked it with a heavy iron key. He spotted one of his men in the yard and beckoned.
“Mister Mercer will sleep in the yard, or wherever he wishes, and I want you to extract his things from my bedroom.”
“Yassum,” the man said, hurrying to the house.
“Mister Skye, bring your ladies to dinner.”
Skye nodded. The chief trader was the absolute master of this small world and Mercer was finding that out. “We are pleased to join you, Mister Dawson.”
“What? What?” yelled Mercer.
“Ye have chosen not to enjoy our company, Mister Mercer. Ye may bed where ye choose. The manger, in the horse pen, makes a good bed, I’m told, if ye pitch in some hay first.”
“Oh, Mister Dawson, you think you’re god out here, lord of your own world. How little you know.”
Dawson ignored the threat. Skye nodded, knowing that no dinner with the chief trader could ever assuage the loss he was undergoing, the demolition of dreams, the brutal discarding of ordinary justice.
Dawson clapped Skye on the back. “A little of Scotland’s finest will work a little warmth into ye.”
Skye was in no mood for a little warmth. But the darkness evaporated as he fetched his wives from their room. They met him at the door, refreshed, beautiful, and glowing in the evening light.
“We’ll be dining with the chief trader,” Skye said.
“Something’s wrong,” Victoria said.
“I’ll tell you later.”
They were swiftly welcomed into Dawson’s home. Mary had never seen a furnished home, every shining piece of furniture in it brought upriver. There were oil portraits of Dawson’s ancestors on the wall. She marveled. Victoria had seen such things but that didn’t allay her curiosity.
“Where’s the explorer?” she asked Skye.
Dawson replied. “He chose not to join us. He chose to bed down out in the horse pen, madam. Welcome. Now, madames, and Mister Skye, shall we have a wee drink, just to whet the appetites?”
They had more than a small drink. They had more than they should have and the next day they didn’t remember much.
And the next day they heard that Mercer had been forcibly booted out of Fort Benton at dawn.
forty-seven
Gone. Skye learned about it the next day. Graves Duplessis Mercer had hied himself to the Opposition post, Fort Campbell, discovered that an express was leaving for St. Louis within the hour, traded his nags for passage, and hopped aboard a large voyageur’s canoe paddled by an engaged man and floated down the river.
If all went well, Mercer would be in St. Louis within a month and reach London in November. Skye absorbed that numbly. Now there was nothing in his purse and nothing to show for hard and dangerous service to the explorer.
He found his women loading the packhorses.
“He’s gone,” Skye said.
Victoria nodded stonily. “We should not have taken him to the bones. The spirit has repaid us.”
Skye plucked up his robe and headed for the trading room, and waited patiently while Dawson completed a trade with a Blackfoot woman, a robe for some hanks of beads.
“I owe you putting up the horses,” he said. “Would this robe do?”
Dawson shook his craggy head. “It would not do, and put it away, man. The bastard skipped, did he? It is a bad thing. I’ll send word down the river and maybe something’ll come of it.”
“We’re going to head south,” Skye said.
“Not for a little bit.”
Skye waited grimly. The chief trader would ask for some labor to pay for horse feed.
“A man gets stiffed, and it’s like an arrow through my own heart,” Dawson said. “I can lend you a little bit. Pick what you need.”
“How’ll I pay you?”
“Some robes at any American Fur post. Or one month as an engaged man. After that it’s nothing but a bit of bookkeeping.”
“I’ll do it. Thank you, Mister Dawson.”
“Ah, ye’d do the same, would ye not?”
Something unspoken passed between them that made them brothers of the wild.
Skye needed powder and shot, a few tools, an axe handle, and then he indulged in four-point blankets for the three of them, and a bit of foofaraw for the ladies, particularly some bright blue beads they cherished.
Dawson smiled. “It comes to nineteen and a quarter, and ye needn’t be in a hurry about it.”
“I’m always in a hurry to pay debt.”
“That bastard,” Dawson said. “He’d better not show his face in any post run by American Fur.”
The women had his small caravan readied in the yard and even had saddled Jawbone, ignoring the laid-back ears and snarls emanating from the young stallion.
He handed them their four-point blankets and blue beads. Mary ran her hand over the smooth nap of the wool, her eyes shining. Hers was cream with blue bands at the ends; Victoria’s red with black bands.
“Dammit all to hell, Skye,” she said. “Dammit all.”
They forded the Missouri and rode into a golden autumnal day, with the air crisp and sweet. The cottonwood leaves were starting to turn. The sun’s light sparked off the river. The land seemed clean without Mercer in it.
Leisurely, they drifted south toward the land of Victoria’s people, enjoying the rhythms of the horses under them, the cold nights and bright days. Nature was bountiful. Skye shot a buffalo cow and they spent a few days jerking meat and making pemmican, employing chokecherries growing abundantly everywhere. They feasted on hump rib and tongue, watched Jawbone’s wild ones fatten, fleshed and tanned the buffalo hide, repaired the old lodge, but always kept a wary eye out for marauding war parties or hunters.
They found the Kicked-in-the-Bellies band of Victoria’s people on the Yellowstone, enjoying a fall hunt when the hair was thick and the animals were fat. They wintered that year north of the Yellowstone beneath the Birdsong Mountains, peaks sacred to the Absarokas, a range that stood apart and north of the main chain of the Rockies. Lewis and Clark had called this place Rivers Across because streams debouched into the Yellowstone from north and south there.
It was a good winter, with many guests filling their lodge. Skye and his wives had no trouble preparing a dozen buffalo robes, which would more than pay his debt to the fur company. The cold sometimes enveloped them, and they were forced to bury themselves under a heap of robes in their lodge. The women braved frostbite to collect deadwood to keep the lodge warm. There was never enough wood to keep the north wind at bay. Between the hard work, the elders told stories and passed along the story of the Absaroka people to the next generation. Sometimes they talked about the mysterious bones. Young men prepared themselves for manhood, learned the arts of war, made their vision quests, so they might receive the spirit helper who would guide their lives henceforth.
Skye worked all winter at subduing the wild horses, and eventually he succeeded. These he gave to Victoria’s family; they would return the favor if Skye was ever in need of horseflesh.
When spring was just around the corner and the ground was still frozen so passage was not difficult, Skye packed up his goods and his lodge, and began the long trip south to Fort Laramie on the Oregon Trail. Times were changing and Skye knew it would not be long before this life, lived so amiably by the Crows, would come to an end. Not far away was the time when these people would be placed on reservations. He wanted not only to prepare his women for that but to make a living. The idyll would not last. The time when he could take his rifle out upon the plains and feed and clothe himself with it, and care for his women with it, was drawing to a close.
He knew a certain sutler at Fort Laramie, a Colonel Bullock, who often arranged matters for wayfarers who needed a guide or a responsible party to escort them west. Skye could do that. Many an old trapper was doing it. The Sublettes, Jim Bridger, Broken-Hand Fitzpatrick. It was a living.
So Victoria hugged her family, Mary hugged them too, and they started toward the army post far away on the North Platte River. He knew it well. It had been a fur post for decades before the army bought it and turned it into a supply base and entrepot on the Oregon Trail.
They worked their way around the Big Horn Mountains, up and down giant shoulders of land, ever southward. They were a solitary family on the move across an endless and hollow land. But one day they struck the Platte and turned east along its well-worn trail, the very trail that had carried thousands of Yanks to the Oregon country, a flood of them each summer. But now there was not a soul on that worn trail. In the mornings the trail was ice-bound and hard; by afternoons soft and exhausting.
Then one afternoon they reached rough country and found themselves in the military reservation of Fort Laramie, crammed into a jaw of land between the Platte and the Laramie Rivers. Mary and Victoria saw the soldiers, cavalrymen in blue, details collecting firewood to feed those hungry stoves or working the cavalry mounts in close drill, or constructing outbuildings.
“They’re all the same damn blue!” Victoria said. “Can’t tell one from another.”
“Army likes it that way,” Skye replied.
Victoria grunted. How could a warrior fight if he was the same as every other warrior?
Other groups were receiving instructions in firearms and the tactic of volleying from drill sergeants. A great many of the blue-bellies were caring for horses. A farrier corporal was operating a smithy where horses were being shoed for spring campaigns.
They progressed toward the old adobe and log post, entered a yard, and Skye suddenly headed toward a log structure with a great verandah at its front.
He watched Mary and Victoria absorb all of this. They had little experience with the Yank army, and most of it bitter. Both of his wives were suddenly subdued, aware of power, aware of some sort of medicine in the flapping flag and guidons.
A hitch rail had been planted before the post’s store, and there Skye dismounted, tied the other horses, but let Jawbone stand. That horse would not submit to tying, but neither would he roam.
The sheer ugliness of the beast drew the gazes of some of the cavalrymen, who flocked close.
“Better not get too close,” Skye said.
“Does he kick?” asked one.
“No, he kills.”
The trooper laughed uneasily.
A door clapped, and a black-suited, silver-haired gent boiled out on the verandah. “Well, bless my eyes, sah, it’s Mister Skye and his ladies!”
It was Colonel Bullock, the Virginia-born sutler, retired from active service but still in the West because he liked it.
He invited the Skyes to his bailiwick, and they walked past burdened shelves and bags of goods that would put any trading post to shame, back to Bullock’s cramped office, where he hastened to supply chairs for his guests.
“Well, Mister Skye, sah, you have magnified and amplified my day. It is good to see you! Now, introduce me to your lovelies.”
Skye did. “This, sir, is my dear Victoria and here is my beloved Mary. They both speak excellent English and in that I am most fortunate.”
“Worthy wives for a worthy gentleman,” Bullock said. “Mister Skye, sah, your reputation abounds. You honor us by your presence. There’s not an officer here who doesn’t know of you. There are stories told of Mister Skye around every campfire, in each barracks, among all the guests and travelers who drift through this post.”
Skye nodded, embarrassed. What had he done that was different from what hundreds of others had done?
Mister Bullock slid his monocle into his eye, much to the alarm of Skye’s ladies. “In fact, sah, I have a bundle that arrived by army courier just a week ago. Addressed to Mister Skye, Fort Laramie. It’s from the American Fur Company agent in London, I believe. Monsieur Borchgrave. The company does a heap of business there, you know, all through Borchgrave. Well, sah, he sent the bundle here, confident that it would wend its way to you before the year was out. Let me get it.”
Bullock dug into a pile of materials behind his desk, and extracted a well-worn package wrapped tightly in butcher paper, its surface begrimed by months of slow passage from England to this far corner of the known world.
Skye reluctantly cut the twine, fearing bad news from his family. But when at last he popped the wrapping off, he discovered a number of newspapers. The London Times, Manchester Guardian, and several others. Nothing more. Intuitively, Skye knew what he would find within each one, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to read any of them.
forty-eight
Skye leafed through the yellowed papers. Those around him sat solemnly, awaiting what was to come. These were dated from late November, 1857, to early December. These were about five months old. Mercer had found swift passage to London.
He tried to read but his eyes had changed. He could barely read the print, even at arm’s length.
“Do you have some ready-made spectacles, Colonel?”
“A tray of them, Mister Skye.”
Colonel Bullock swiftly produced a tray of wire-rimmed eyeglasses, which Skye sampled one by one, and finally settled on one that fit his right eye perfectly and his left eye less sharply. He jabbed the wire around his ears, and found himself able to read. He would buy these as soon as he could.
“This is the London Times. It says its correspondent, Graves Duplessis Mercer, is freshly returned from North America, where he spent a season beyond the borders of the Republic, observing strange native cults, odd natural phenomena, and things unknown to the civilized world.”
Victoria was frowning. Mary looked rapt, marveling that Mister Skye could examine the marks on this paper and turn them into words and ideas.
“‘In late summer, I witnessed an extraordinary event: a renegade Briton, a deserter from the Royal Navy named Skye, lives like a lord of the wilds beyond the borders. He took it upon himself to acquire a second wife, though his first is perfectly serviceable. Of course I use the term wife loosely, this being a purely whimsical transaction involving female slavery.
“‘The brief transaction proceeded as follows: Skye, a shaggy, degenerate sort who fashions himself a Beau Brummell of the wilderness, adorned with a battered top hat that he believes grants him status, transacted an arrangement with the girl’s father, a Shoshone savage with several such daughters to spare. I wasn’t able to ascertain the exact purchase price, but young wives go for a pony or two, or maybe a blanket, or a hank of beads. At any rate, the arrangement complete, our wilderness Brummell, with no evidence of so much as a trim of his tangled gray hair, collected this second wife, and hied his way to his ill-kempt lodge, a conical tent made of skins.
“‘Now, here is the mystery: what are the arrangements among wives and this rustic Lothario? The odd cult of the polygamous Mormons, currently settling around the great lake of salty water, is clear enough: each lady has her own household and the master of these domestic nests visits each in turn. But here, hundreds of miles from civilization and law, matters are somewhat different. This master of two wives has but one lodge and was not seen evicting e
ither wife at any hour.
“‘Now, among savages it is a matter of prestige for a headman or chief to acquire several of these willing wives. It is quite common to find an important man possessing half a dozen wives, and these fill his lodge along with his numerous offspring. When the lodge is too small, his wives build him a larger one, so that some lodges house a veritable crowd of all ages, including a few parents and grandparents as well as squalling infants.
“‘The wives prefer it because it lightens the burdens of maintaining the lodge. It falls to women in these rude societies to do the heavy labor. They collect firewood, slaughter game brought to them by their hunter-mates, flesh and tan hides, fashion clothing out of them, produce not only the daily meals, but also the preserved food, dried meat known as jerky, or a mixture of berries, shredded meat, and fat called pemmican. What’s more, the senior wife in these savage societies gets to sit beside the master of this odd household, and is called the sits-beside-him wife. She is the boss; the junior wives, often her sisters, are at her absolute mercy. So just what advantage this wretched Shoshone woman gained by being sold into this carnal servitude is not easily fathomed. Nonetheless, on this occasion she was all aglow, having been sold by her father for a fancy bride price and handed over to the degenerate who bid for her.
“‘Skye himself, though once an Englishman—he claims to be born in London but I could not detect it in his voice—has now given himself over to the wild lands and wild practices to be found out beyond the rim of the known world … .’”
“Liar,” said Victoria.
“You must tell me what those things mean,” Mary said.
Colonel Bullock was caught between two impulses, the first to gaze politely on Skye, and the second to guffaw. Skye saw the colonel subside into cautious politeness.
“Let us not pursue this any further,” Bullock said, stiffly.
“Do you make me to be a degenerate, Colonel?” Skye asked.
“Of the very worst sort, Mister Skye.”
“And am I a rude Beau Brummell?”
“Unsurpassed, sir.”
The Canyon of Bones Page 25