by Mike Blakely
“Mister, you scared the hell out of me!” Caleb said.
Burl laughed.
“I thought you were a Ute,” the boy said.
“Ute wouldn’t have asked you who you were. One white man is like another to them, with the exception of Burl Sandeen.” He jabbed himself in the chest with his thumb. “What happened to your britches?”
“I don’t know. They got wet when I crossed the river yesterday, and they just kept gettin’ tighter.”
“Where’d you get ’em?”
“Bought ’em from the Nez Perce.”
Burl laughed again and came out from behind the mare. “They took you for a fool, son. Them skins haven’t been cured proper. Might just as well have wrapped yourself in rawhide. Better cut ’em off or they’ll squeeze the liver out of you.”
“But I don’t have anything else to wear except for my long handles.”
“I got duds I’ll swap you. What do have to trade?”
“Nothin’ much. I can’t let go of my guns or saddle, or my coat.”
“What’s in here?” Burl asked, tapping his rifle barrel on the fiddle case tied behind the cantle.
“My fiddle. But I can’t trade that either.”
“I wouldn’t know how to work it anyhow. Do me no more good than a steam calliope. But you can swap me some fiddle music this evenin’ while I take up an outfit so’s to fit you.”
Caleb finally took his hand away from his pistol grip. “I’d be obliged, sir. I’m Caleb Holcomb.” He waddled forward in his shrunken skins to shake hands.
The old man laughed at the sight. “We got two hours of light and three hours of ground. I suggest we git.”
They arrived at Sandeen’s cabin after dark, unpacked the supplies from the mule, and put the animals in a pole corral. The cabin stood wide as a barn but only eight logs high at the ridge pole. The roof was braced to handle the heaviest snows. When Caleb followed his host in, he bumped his forehead on a rafter in the dark.
“Why do you live so high up?” Caleb asked as he cut his shrunken deerskins off.
Sandeen was stoking a fire to cook supper. “Because I like it up here, that’s why. The stars up here shoot thick as white hairs on a roan horse. They don’t look like that below.”
For furniture Sandeen had only a couple of sawed stumps that served as stools, or as dinner tables when the diner sat on the floor. Pegs sticking out of the walls snagged hats, snowshoes, ropes, traps, and other assorted possessions. The heavy rafters were at eye level, bolstered in the middle by posts sunk in the dirt floor. Layers of buffalo robes, bearskins, and beaver pelts made a regular carpet except for a semicircle around the fireplace where sparks tended to leap. Piles of hides made couches for sitting or sleeping.
“Don’t you ever bump your head in here?” Caleb asked.
“I’d just as soon duck,” Sandeen answered. “A low roof means less air to heat.”
Caleb wrapped himself in a long buffalo robe and ate a roasted jackrabbit with the old man. After supper he opened his fiddle case as Sandeen produced a needle and thread to alter a pair of pants. The musician played as the old trapper tapped his toe and sewed.
“Do you know how to play ‘Careless Love’?” Sandeen asked.
“No, I never heard of that one,” Caleb admitted.
“Well, it’s an old song. I can’t carry a tune in a grass sack, but I’ll tell you some of the words:
Love, oh love, oh, careless love,
Love, oh love, oh, careless love,
Love, oh love, oh, careless love,
You see what careless love has done.
I love my mama, and papa, too,
I love my mama, and papa, too,
I love my mama, and papa, too,
I’d leave them both for lovin’ you.
“That was my Sary’s favorite back in old Missouri,” Burl said, after reciting.
“Who was she?”
“Should have been my wife.” Sandeen pulled a few more stitches tight.
“Whatever happened to her?” Caleb asked.
“I guess she’s still down there. Moved to Saint Jo last I heard. But that’s been, oh, twenty-five years or so.”
“How long have you been up here?” Caleb asked.
“Goin’ on forty years. I left Missouri in ’32. Wasn’t much older than you. I had courted Sary about a year by that time. She was a keeper, I tell you. Pretty as a button. Come from a good church-goin’ family. Not at all disagreeable about marryin’ me.”
“So how come you didn’t marry her?”
“Oh, I got a idea to come out west, make a bundle in the fur trade. I asked her if she’d wait till I got back to marry me. She said if I left and went to the mountains, she wouldn’t know if I was alive or stone dead. Said she wouldn’t wait for me. Said she wouldn’t be a widow before she was wed.”
Caleb stroked a chunk, of rosin against his fiddle bow. “I guess you came up here anyway, didn’t you?”
“Well, that was the only way I knew of gittin’ here, and I wasn’t about to let no gal tell me where to go. At least not before we was married. I didn’t believe her anyhow. I figured she’d wait at least a year before she took up with some other jack, and I knew I’d be back by that time.”
Burl looked up from his sewing. “Son, the beaver was thick as the hair on your head back then. I threw in with a party out of Saint Lou and we took in I don’t know how many pelts along the Yellowstone. One of our boys lost his own pelt to the Blackfeet, but we made good on the long haul. I was satisfied that I’d seen the wilderness, so I went back to make Sary my wife.” He shook his head and let his hands fall still on the clothes he was taking up for Caleb.
“What did she say?” Caleb asked.
“What could she say? She’d married a fellow named Ludlow. That left me nowhere to go but back to the mountains. Now they call me a legend from Taos to Green River.” Burl chuckled and started sewing again.
“You never got married?” Caleb asked.
“Oh, I’ve had me a squaw or two, but that ain’t the same thing. No, there won’t never be one like Sary.” He massaged his black eyebrows a moment. “You haven’t left you some pretty little gal down below, have you?”
“Me? No, sir.”
“Well, if you have, you better get back there or some other young buck will take up with her. Now, play a couple more, son, then we’d better turn in. You’ll want to get started early in the morning.”
* * *
After breakfast, Burl advised Caleb to follow the North Platte out of North Park until he found the railroad, but Caleb shook his head. “I’m not goin’ north, I’m goin’ east over the mountains to winter in Denver. Where’s the closest pass?”
“Now, listen here, son. You won’t make it through any of them passes. Winter’s comin’ early this year. Don’t try it or you’ll get snowbound. You’d better get out of North Park in a week, or they won’t find you till next spring.”
“But it don’t make sense to head north with winter comin’ on,” Caleb argued.
“It don’t make sense to head up to high country. You do as I say.”
“Yes, sir,” Caleb said. But he had no intention of traveling north for days, when east was where he wanted to go. He was going to find himself a mountain pass. Hell, he could see a low spot in the divide as well as any old mountain man.
After the boy left, Burl took his ax down from a peg and spent the whole day cording wood, his breath turning to ice on his whiskers. The next morning snow began to fall and continued for two days. He knew it was time to let his mule wander down to the low country and winter in some canyon.
The morning he went to the corral to set the old mule free, he heard someone approaching through the woods below his cabin. It could only be the boy, he thought. No one else would be fool enough to travel this high up with winter on.
Caleb led Five Spot to Burl’s cabin, slogging through drifts waist-deep. The mare was so exhausted that the boy was having to break the trail for her. W
hen he got near enough for conversation, he looked at the old man’s scowling face and said, “I didn’t have nowhere else to go.”
“You tried to get through the mountains, didn’t you?” Burl asked, looking at the layers of ice caked around the boy’s feet.
“I tried to, but I never found a pass. I guess I should have gone north like you said.”
“You guess!”
“I got lost. The snow covered all the trails. Somethin’ got all my food. Drug it off two nights ago.”
“Didn’t you tie your grub sack up in a tree?”
His knees wobbled with the cold. “Didn’t think of it. I haven’t et in a day and a half.”
Burl took a pole down from the corral fence and threw it into the snow. “What do you expect me to do for you? It’s too late for me to take you down now. Even if I did get you down, I’d never make it back up. And I don’t have supplies enough to get both of us through the winter!”
“I’ll go huntin’,” Caleb said.
“Shit!” Burl threw another pole down. “Game’s scarce. They got sense enough to go down below when winter comes on.” He walked into the corral, kicking snow at his mule. He knew the boy would starve or freeze to death if he tried to get out of the mountains alone. “Take your gear off that mare,” he grumbled.
“Sir?”
“Take your saddle and bridle off that mare, I say! Let her wander down below with old Katy.”
“How will I ever find her?”
“She’ll follow Katy. I’ll know where to find ’em in the spring, if that mare of yours don’t die tomorrow. Now turn her loose before I decide to butcher her for stew meat!”
Caleb began stripping his tack from the horse, feeling utterly ashamed for the trouble he was causing the old man.
“As soon as you thaw your feet out, get your rifle and go huntin’. I doubt you’ll find anything alive, but we’d better try. We’ll have to start short rations if we’re to make it through to spring.”
“Yes, sir,” Caleb said. “But could I start on my rations before I go huntin’? I haven’t et since…”
“I know, since somethin’ drug off your grub sack! Go on to the cabin and I’ll give you somethin’ to eat.”
Caleb hunted harder than he ever had that afternoon. He sat stone still in the snow for hours, though the cold felt like a thousand needles pricking his toes and fingers. When he moved, he paused a minute between each step, watching for deer or rabbits or mountain sheep or anything edible. Still, he had to trudge back to Burl’s cabin empty-handed at dark.
“Did you see anything?” Burl asked.
“Just one wolf,” Caleb said.
“Well, where is he?”
“Sir?”
“You said you saw a wolf. Why didn’t you shoot it?”
“You can’t eat wolf,” Caleb said, collapsing on a couch of beaver pelts.
“The hell you can’t! You can eat damn near anything that grows meat on its bones if you get hungry enough!”
“Well, he was too far away to shoot anyway,” Caleb said. “If I see him again, I’ll shoot him.”
“You’ll not likely see him again,” Burl grumbled. “Every critter with a brain’s gone below.” He poured a meager helping of beans into a pot and cooked in silence for several minutes.
Caleb leaned against one of the roof poles, so filled with shame that he forgot his hunger. He hadn’t meant to cause anyone trouble, but it looked as if he would half starve himself and old Burl before spring came. He almost wished he had stayed in the mountains alone to freeze to death. The night was hardly colder than the old man’s words. He thought of spending every day of the long mountain winter with the old man’s anger.
“Mr. Sandeen…” he said.
“What?” the gruff voice returned.
“If you’ll allow me two days’ rations, I’ll go on down alone. I ain’t got the right to make you suffer on account of what I’ve done.”
Burl didn’t reply. In a few minutes, he laid out the beans and a little smoked meat and told Caleb to eat. They sat on the fur-carpeted floor, their legs straddling the sawed-off stumps they used as tables.
“You clean up the dishes,” Burl ordered when he had finished.
“Yes, sir.” At least it was some relief to be of service in the cabin.
Burl threw a limb on the fire. “Son, you ain’t the only damn fool to ever make a mistake. It ain’t worth freezin’ yourself to death over. You’ll stay here with me.”
Caleb was melting the snow to wash the tin plates with. “But what about food?”
“We’ll ration what we’ve got and hunt every day we can. I’ll make you some snowshoes. You play the fiddle, and I’ll make the shoes.” He shuffled through some skins, looking for one he could cut into rawhide strips to lace the snowshoes with. “I’ve made it through tougher spots. We’ll make do.”
The cabin was warm, and Caleb knew another couple of nights in the snow would likely kill him. Maybe Burl was right. It was like what Buster had once told him about the time the ridge log fell on his mother. He hadn’t meant to do anything wrong. He was trying to do right. It just happened. No need to freeze to death over it.
THIRTY-SEVEN
It especially bothered Burl that he had to ration his whiskey on top of the food, but he would not deny Caleb a gut warmer after a cold day of hunting. After supper they would sip whiskey from tin cups as they played a few hands of poker, wagering with beaver pelts.
His first taste of Burl’s whiskey reminded Caleb of his drunk in Milt Starling’s saloon and almost made him gag. But after a few days he started looking forward to the nightly jigger. This was the proper way to use whiskey, he thought. One jigger a day.
“Where did you get that spotted horse of yours?” Burl asked one evening. He was sitting cross-legged on a mound of beaver pelts, dealing the cards.
“We breed ’em on our ranch,” Caleb answered.
“Where’d you get your brood stock?”
“From an old mountain man.”
“Cheyenne Dutch?”
Caleb looked up from his poker hand. “You knew him?”
“Knew him! Hell, I’ve fought with him and fought again’ him. Me and Dutch saw some hard times and some good times together. What’ll you bet?”
“A couple of pelts, I guess.”
“Well, don’t guess. Make up your mind, then bet.”
“Two pelts then,” Caleb said, throwing his wager onto the pot.
“I heard some desperado shot old Dutch last year.”
“He killed my brother,” Caleb said, tossing three of his cards aside. “Our ranch manager shot him for it.”
“Ranch manager? I heard it was some outlaw.”
“He killed my brother,” Caleb repeated.
“I heard you. I guess old Dutch had it comin’. He was a careless soul. I went with him once to San Francisco back in the fifties. We’d made a good haul on hides together and went to blow it on women and whiskey. Dutch got drunk and had some tattoo artist put those spots on his butt. He put a lot of stock in those spots. Said they made him bulletproof. Anyway, he killed a Chinese girl in San Francisco, and we had to light out in the middle of the night. Never went back to California after that. I’ll raise you another pelt.” He dragged three ovals of dried beaver skin onto the pot and tossed a card on top of the ones Caleb had thrown down.
“Was he your friend?” Caleb asked.
“In this country you run with whoever you have to to stay alive,” Burl said, dealing the new cards. “Dutch was good at stayin’ alive before he got addlepated. Then he let that Indian magic get the better of his senses.”
Caleb had forgotten which cards he had thrown aside, so he reached for the discard pile to refresh his memory. Burl caught his wrist and clamped it down against the fur carpet.
“Don’t monkey with the deadwood,” the old trapper warned.
“But, I was just…”
“I don’t care what you were doin’. Once you throw them cards aside,
you don’t get another look. Some gamblers will cheat by peekin’ at the deadwood. If you’re to learn poker, you better learn it proper, or you’ll get in trouble.”
“Yes, sir,” Caleb said.
He released the boy’s wrist. “Your bet.”
Caleb threw in another pelt, and Burl raised him with three more.
“Sorry Dutch got your brother,” the old trapper said as he spread his winning hand across the fur.
* * *
They gave up hunting in the middle of the winter without having burned a grain of powder. Burl decided the exercise was draining too much energy and making them hungrier. He said they would lay up in the cabin until the weather broke again. They would keep the place warm and just lounge about like a couple of hibernating bears. The most exercise Caleb was allowed to get was sawing on the fiddle or blowing on the harmonica. Rations were so short he hardly had the energy for either. The pants he wore seem to have shed the stitches Burl had put in them to make them fit.
One night Caleb was playing “Don’t You Marry Those Texan Boys” on the fiddle and singing what verses he could remember:
Missouri gals, come listen to my noise,
And don’t go marry those Texan boys.
For if you do, your portion it’ll be,
Johnnycakes and venison and sassafras tea,
Johnnycakes and venison and sassafras tea.
“I’m hungry,” he said, stopping in the middle of the song.
“Don’t play them songs about food,” Burl replied, rolling over on the beaver pelts.
“I can’t help it. I’m starvin’.”
Burl chuckled. “You don’t know what starvin’ is, son. You’ve had food in your mouth every day.”
“Not very much of it,” Caleb complained.
“Wait’ll you go two weeks without a bite. Wait’ll your gut’s burnin’ you for something to eat. You’ll shit like a calf with the scutters and hump up with cramps like some poor ol’ wormy dog. Then you’ll know you’re starvin’.”
Caleb put his fiddle down and slumped against the roof post. “Have you ever gone that long without food?”