by Jory Sherman
I picked out a cow that was about twenty yards from me. She had stopped and I had a clear shot at her heart, just behind her right leg. I took aim, held my breath, and loosed the arrow. It thunked into her and she took off at a run. I thought for a moment that I had missed hitting her heart, but as she crashed through the shallow water, I saw blood streaming from her wound. She ran about fifty yards, then dropped, skidding through the shallows. Her chest stopped heaving and she lay still, dead as a stone.
I quickly nocked another arrow. By now, some of the herd had started to run up the trail next to the Poudre. Arrows flew from both sides. Elk dropped in their tracks or ran on, wounded, only to fall later. I shot a small bull, missed the vital part, and penetrated its stomach. I felt sick and put another arrow to my string. The elk was turning in circles, blood streaming from its wound. I drew my bow, took aim, and shot it again, the arrow ramming in just behind its right shoulder blade, into the lung. It coughed and struggled to stay on its feet. Pieces of white lung matter came out of its mouth along with a great deal of blood. It went to a deeper part of the river and fell into it, then wallowed there for a good five minutes. It tried to rise again, and fell down for the last time.
The herd began to run upriver, and soon only the fallen elk were left behind. Arapaho emerged from their hiding places and checked the fallen elk, cutting the throats of those still alive. Two braves rode off to fetch the women and children, ponies and travois. From the looks of it, I knew they would be butchering all day. I checked the last elk I had dropped and determined that it was dead. The cold water had stopped the bleeding before it died apparently, but my arrow had punctured a lung. It must have bled to death, but I knew the shock of that arrow with the weight of the shaft behind the arrowhead was powerful. The Arapaho had told me that the animals felt no pain when they began to die. I wasn’t so sure.
I walked down to the smallest elk I’d killed. I pulled the carcass up on the shore, slit it open, and removed the heart. I knew some of the Arapaho were watching me, so I was determined to put on a good show for them. I ate the warm heart, letting the blood run down my chin and onto my chest. I made grunting sounds and pounded my chest to show that I had taken on the power of the elk. My stomach rebelled against the raw meat, but I held it down. I removed the liver from the same elk and tucked the meat into my shirt, stuffed it under the sash I was wearing.
Soon, the women and children arrived and there was great rejoicing among them. The children had a field day running from elk to elk and striking coups on them with their sticks, howling like a pack of banshees until the canyon rang with their cries.
For a time I felt like part of the tribe, but my mind was on Kate’s letter. If I didn’t get away soon, she would go up north and be farther away.
And I got to thinking about those boot tracks around the bodies of the two Frenchmen. The more I thought of them, the more familiar they seemed. Back when my folks were still alive and we were still a family, I was sure I had seen those same boot tracks. But at that time, I never even thought of tracking. Since being with the Arapaho, I had learned to be more observant of everything. One Dog had made me lie down and study a patch of grass for almost a whole day. He told me to remember everything I saw and then tell him that night.
At first, I thought it was a stupid thing to do. It didn’t make any sense to me. Then, as I lay there on my belly, watching the grass and the dirt, I began to see things. Small things. Tiny things. I saw the grass move when a bug crawled along a blade, climbing to the top to snip off the tip. I saw ants and small insects moving through the dirt and over it. I soon lost track of the big world and became absorbed in the miniature realm that existed on that small chunk of soil. I felt like a giant in a kingdom of small creatures.
I became aware of every tuft and sniff of breeze. I saw what the wind did to the grass and I saw ants toiling, traveling back and forth across the patch, sometimes carrying a piece of a dead worm on their backs. I noticed that they went to a place unfettered and each came back with a portion of a dead worm or a bug. One ant reminded me of a man lugging a huge grand piano on his back. It kept staggering and dropping the dead bug, only to persist and pick it up again, continuing on its way.
I saw a universe in miniature that day, and when one of the braves walked across that same piece of ground, I opened my mouth to yell at him in admonition. He was destroying my world. I looked up at him, ready to berate him. He walked on past and said, “Look. You will see.”
I watched the way the grass flattened under his moccasins and then watched as it slowly sprung back, marveling at its resilience. I looked at every crushed blade and saw them each move back to their former shape. Like magic. I saw flying insects land and take off. I saw one ant tribe make war on another. I saw little bugs burrowing beneath the soil and emerging somewhere else. A mouse even picked its way through, and I saw what effect his passing had on the grass, and I pushed up to see the tiny, almost invisible, tracks he left in the dirt.
When I spoke to One Dog that night and told him all that I had seen, he seemed pleased.
“There is more,” he said.
“But I saw much.”
“There is always more, White Man.”
And he made me do it again. And again.
“This is what the tracking man must know,” One Dog told me. “He must know all of the world he sees and the world he does not see.”
Gradually, I began to understand what One Dog meant. I did see more, and I began to piece together the small lives that lived underfoot. In doing so, I gained more respect for all living things.
This was why I was puzzling over those boot tracks that I saw. I knew that I had seen them before. I just had to remember and then I had to trust my memory. One Dog had told me a thing that I have not forgotten.
“Your memory must be as clear as those words you scratch on the deerskin. It must remain like the pictures Yellow Water draws. You must be able to see through the running water of the creek and count the little stones and know each one.”
I began to practice my memory because One Dog was always testing me. When we would ride on the hunt, he would ask me what I had seen along a particular stretch. He made me name the trees and tell about the kind of bark they had. He would ask me about rock formations and the way the land rose and fell. I would have to name landmarks, both large and small, and if I made a mistake, he would tell me that I had the eyes of an old blind woman.
I roamed back through my memory as a white boy before I had ever seen an Indian. And I saw those same boot tracks around the fire, by the wagons. I saw where men had gone to take a piss or where they squatted and made grunt. I saw all those things through the haze of memory and they became clear and vivid to me, as if they had happened yesterday.
Hogg. One of those sets of boot tracks belonged to Cassius Hogg. And the other might as well have had the man’s name written on it in big block letters. Rudy Truitt. Those were the two men who had murdered Pierre and Jacques. I was sure of it now. Perhaps it had been a small suspicion in my mind, but it was no longer. I knew, without a doubt, that Hogg and Truitt had ambushed the Frenchmen, killed and robbed them.
The hatred for those two men began to build inside me. I think I was hating them more than I had once thought I hated One Dog. Hogg and Truitt were the source of all the troubles that had befallen Kate and me, my folks. They had been the ones who killed and scalped the two Arapaho boys, for no reason, and then Hogg had laid the blame on our pa. He had banished us from his wagon train; he had turned us into exiles and kept our money. In looking back, I realized that what he did that day might have saved Kate’s and my lives, since I suspicioned that he might have done away with the Prentisses and the Bandinis as well.
He sure as hell hadn’t taken them to Oregon. And probably not even to Santa Fe.
As we rode back to camp that night, the travois full of fresh meat and elk hides, I had much to mull over. As exhilarating as the hunt had been, I knew that I would never be completely happy l
iving as an Arapaho. Maybe if Kate had still been with us, I might have felt a lot differently about it. Maybe. There are journeys we never take, and we always wonder what might have happened at that fork in the road if we had taken one path instead of another. But we can’t go back. We can’t correct our mistakes, or carry regrets for what we might have done but didn’t do.
Kate was alive. She was living with a white family, but I knew, reading between the lines of her letter, that she was not happy. She had said that Amos Pettigrew was a mean man. I knew Kate. She would never have said that unless it were true, and knowing her, I was sure that Mr. Pettigrew was more than mean to her. She always looked at bad people more kindly than I did, probably because of her feminine nature and the fact that she was more like our ma.
There was jubilance among the Arapaho that night and for several days thereafter. The weather turned warmer each day, and I knew it must be April or perhaps May. I did not have a calendar and the Arapaho did not mark each day as white people did. Time meant little to them. They spoke of a sun as being a day and they spoke of years. But they never spoke of moments or hours or centuries. Time was a fluid thing that they recognized and accepted, but made no special mention of beyond noticing the seasons and the months. One year was much like the next, without any special number or name to it unless some great event had happened.
But for me, time was now a gnawing animal in my mind. Like a giant rat, it was eating me from the inside out. I thought of an hourglass set with its full side up, and I could feel and see the grains of sand seeping through the hole and filling up the bottom half.
Time and the Arapaho were my enemy, and I had to find a way to conquer each one and set out to find my sister Kate.
The falling sands seemed to be speeding up, and I had no idea where the Arapaho would go next. I lived in dread that we would go into the mountains and not come out until the Moon of the Falling Leaves.
And where would Kate be by then?
I resolved to escape before One Dog gave the order to leave the Musselshell. We were so near Fort Collins now and this was my best chance. But how could I escape and take that rifle I so wanted?
That was a question I had to answer.
Soon.
Seventeen
Fate, the mysterious and elusive thread that wove through a man’s life, that controlled his destiny perhaps, occupied my thoughts at the end of that winter. Homer’s heroes, the people in his stories, were controlled by Fate and the gods controlled Fate. I felt like Odysseus tossed upon an unknown sea, the winds driving me toward an unknown port. But Odysseus had fought against Fate, and so would I. I did not believe in Homer’s gods, but the Arapaho, and One Dog, most surely did. If man has gods directing him along life’s path, I reasoned, let’s see whose gods are more powerful, mine or the Arapaho’s. The great heroes controlled their own fates. I hoped I could find the same courage.
As luck would have it, Fate did play a hand in certain future events. Luck or Fate? Both were intangibles, hard to pin down. Although I was a dreamer, I was also a determined man.
A few days after the elk hunt was over, when the Arapaho were feeling fat and sassy, with full bellies, plenty of meat, and spring well on its way, a party of traders descended on our camp along the Musselshell.
The leader of the party was a jovial man named Ormly House. He was tall, thin as a rail, with curly locks and a full beard. With him was a cadre of fellow adventurers, all grown men, drovers by trade, all with wagons. They had four wagons and two men to a wagon, with extra horses besides those that pulled the wagons, two to a wagon. They spoke the lingua franca of the plains, sign language, and said they had been with the Crow and the Lakota and were headed for Santa Fe.
They had goods to trade and wanted some buffalo robes and elk hides to sell in Santa Fe. One Dog seemed pleased to have visitors, even if they were white men. And the women of the tribe were like a flock of clucking chickens when the traders laid out their blankets and covered them with beads, silk cloth, mirrors, trinkets, and all sorts of gewgaws.
Ormly came over to me and looked me square in the eyes.
“You ain’t no redskin,” he said. “Though your skin’s plumb near burnt to a bacon crisp.”
“No, sir. I’m an American.”
“What you doin’ with these red niggers, son?”
“I’m a captive, sir.”
“A captive? Well, what the hell? You want to come with us to Santa Fe?”
“I surely would like to do that, mister. But I don’t think One Dog will sell me to you.”
Ormly laughed. Uproariously.
“Hell, I ain’t goin’ to buy you, sonny. I’m just sayin’ you can come along with us, if you want.”
“You’ll have to talk to One Dog.”
“He the big chief of this outfit?”
“I guess so.”
“I reckon you’ll have to do the talkin’. I don’t speak Rappyhoe none. You know, you look plumb Injun, ’ceptin’ for them blue eyes.”
“I’ve got to get away from these Arapaho. Maybe you and your men could jump them and . . .”
He held up both his hands and backed away from me.
“No, siree sir, not this child. We wipe out this band and we’d have the whole Rappyhoe nation down on our asses. You got troubles, son, you solve ’em your own self. I seen enough scalpin’ in my day.”
I glared at him, but I knew I had failed to gain an ally. Ormly would be no help to me. I started wondering if I could hide out in one of the wagons before they left and maybe hitch a ride without anyone knowing.
The women and braves bargained for the goods the traders had laid out. Ormly and his men wanted some of the elk meat, and there was plenty to give them, and they wanted skins and buffalo hides, which the Arapaho were reluctant to part with, but the trading went on, with both sides wrangling for the best deal.
At the end of the trading, when there was just one fine buffalo hide left on the blanket, one of Ormly’s bunch went to the wagon and brought out a large wooden box.
“Firewater,” he said, setting the box down next to the buffalo hide. “For the robe.”
One Dog’s eyes widened.
He reached in and pulled one of the bottles from the box. He shook it and the sun struck the contents, making the liquid glow like amber.
“Go ahead,” Ormly said. “Take yourself a swaller.” He made a sign of tilting the bottle up.
One Dog pulled the cork out with his teeth and poured whiskey down his gullet. A lot of it. His eyes watered with tears and he shook with the power of it.
“Good whiskey,” One Dog said in English.
Then he pointed to the buffalo hide.
“You take,” One Dog said. “Me take whiskey.”
Ormly grinned. He nodded to one of the men, who swooped in and snatched up the heavy robe and staggered off toward one of the wagons.
The Arapaho braves began to clamor for the whiskey, and One Dog started passing out the bottles.
“Thank you, Chief,” Ormly said, rising up from his squat on the ground. “We’ll be passin’ on then.”
One Dog waved Ormly away and took another swig of the whiskey. He grinned at Ormly and that was all.
I walked over to Ormly.
“Do you think that was right, giving these Indians whiskey?”
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Jared Sunnedon. Sundown.”
“Sundown, whiskey’s what them red niggers thrive on. It makes them feel real big. But you want some advice?”
“If it’s good advice.”
“Them Injuns’ll get real rotten drunk tonight, and if you ever got a chance to light a shuck, that would be the time.”
“Can you do me a favor, Ormly?”
“I might.”
“Down the trail, where the two rivers meet, could you leave me some powder and ball in .64 caliber?”
He grinned wide.
“You aimin’ to do it, ain’t ye? Well, I reckon we can leave you a cac
he. Them’s the South Platte and the Poudre yonder. I’ll pile some rocks up over the powder and ball, so’s you can find it. That all?”
“I can’t pay you.”
“Maybe someday we’ll meet under brighter circumstances, Sundown. You can pay me then.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
He touched the brim of his hat and climbed up on his horse.
“Good-bye,” I said.
“So long, Sundown. Watch your hair.”
He laughed, raised a hand, and let it fall. The wagons rumbled off behind him. I watched them until they disappeared over the horizon. When I turned back, the Arapaho women were fighting over the goods they had bought and the men were all sitting around in a circle, sipping the whiskey, talking about how good the firewater was in their bellies.
I had never seen Indians drink whiskey. I didn’t even know that the Arapaho knew what it was until that day. But I had seen men come out of the taverns back in Missouri, drunk and staggering, sometimes fighting with each other. Pa had always abstained from strong drink, and he often warned me about its effect on men. He never told me not to drink, but advised me that if I ever did drink whiskey, to take it only in moderation.
The way the Arapaho were going at it, it didn’t look much like moderation to me.
Yellow Water lifted his head and saw me. He gestured for me to come over and join them. Then One Dog looked at me and beckoned for me. So did some of the others. I walked over and sat down next to Yellow Water and Black Horse. All of the men were grinning like a bunch of empty-headed yokels.
“Drink,” One Dog said.
Yellow Water handed me the bottle he had in his hand. All of the men told me to drink. I upended the bottle and pressed my lips together so that only a small amount would enter my mouth. I pretended to drink a swallow or two, but let only a trickle pass my lips.
I handed the bottle back to Yellow Water and wiped my hand across my lips. He slapped me on the back and all of the others grunted their approval.
The whiskey seeped down my throat. It warmed me. Then it reached my stomach and I felt the fire of it. It made me feel a little giddy, and I knew that if I drank any more I would get drunk and lose what few senses I still had.