Into the Savage Country

by Shannon Burke

  I laughed loudly. It seemed an overly dramatic way to put it. “If he is such a devil as all that, undermining my flimsy character is hardly a worthwhile challenge for him.”

  “It is not for the challenge that he would do it.”

  “Why then? He’s a rich man. I’m a lowly trapper. I have nothing he values.”

  “I can think of one thing,” she said.

  I opened my mouth to ask what but just at that moment Meeks came bumbling in and Alene changed the subject. I wanted to brain the poor fellow.

  An hour later, as we were plodding through the dry snow with the cold stars spread out overhead, Meeks rattled on about the crane migration and the native maneuverings beyond the settlement and the growing barrenness of the trapping lands and the hope for the next summer’s harvest, and I wanted to strangle him to shut him up so I could consider what had passed.

  As soon as I was back in my lodgings I fell onto my bed and went over the situation in my mind. Layton was a wealthy, charismatic, forceful young man, and I thought by the lively way Alene spoke of him that she must be at least half in love with him. But then I recalled that she had said that I had something Layton wanted, and I imagined she was acknowledging her friendship with me.

  I lay there with a warmth and heaviness flowing through me. She considered me seriously. I thought she did. But she was also charmed by Layton.

  Snow tapped lightly on the windowpane.

  As Grignon was the one who delivered the money to Alene, and as he plays a role in this narration, I will describe him more fully now.

  Max Grignon was a waddling plug of a man with buck teeth that rested on his lower lip, a thick red mustache, and muttonchop sides. He wore a soiled black vest every day, even on the march, and spoke in long, elaborate sentences. His manner was peripherally formal and polite, but beneath this formality he was a cunning, underhanded, mean-spirited rogue. Once I saw him reach behind Smitts’s bar, uncork a bottle, drink from it, then put it back furtively. Afterward he grinned at me and held a finger to his lips to silence me. I would not have told Smitts what I’d seen, as I do not go telling stories for trivialities, but there was no need to make me an accomplice in his petty theft, and I remember thinking he’d gone out of his way to involve me, which was the sort of thing Grignon was always doing. Like many accustomed to underhanded dealings, Grignon could not conceive of anyone acting from anything other than the lowest instincts. In short, I found him to be a wholly disreputable fellow, and my judgment of Layton lowered because of his use of this unpleasant and greedy man.

  Grignon stayed in the settlement two weeks after Layton’s departure, trailing mischief and discontent wherever he traveled, and then one day he vanished without a word of parting, to the relief of everyone.

  Two days after Grignon’s disappearance, Ferris, Glass, and Bridger arrived in the settlement. It had been almost six months since I’d seen them and they were decked out in native garb, with beaded hair and caps fringed with wolverine or coyote fur. Ferris leaped off his horse and embraced me, and laughed afterward, seeing my expression, as he smelled like a beast after hibernation.

  “You were once the same, Wyeth,” he said. “Let me wash and we’ll split a bottle.”

  Ferris went to secure lodgings and took a long time in his preparations. I waited, grew impatient, and walked across to the stables where I found Ferris collapsed in straw with half a bottle of Taos Whiskey in the crook of his arm.

  I helped him to his room and he slept all afternoon and it was only near supper that he rose and staggered across to my lodgings.

  “Sorry, Wyeth. Was overcome by fatigue.”

  “And a bottle of whiskey,” I said.

  “Just a taste,” he said. “It’s the first I’ve had in half a year. Set me reeling.”

  We made arrangements to go hunting the following morning, though I only half believed he would awaken, as he was still well-seasoned when we made the plans.

  The next morning I overslept, assuming Ferris would as well. When I woke I looked out my window and saw Ferris standing in the frozen road in his moccasins with a robe about his shoulders. I was up in an instant, feeling like a blackguard for keeping him waiting. Fifteen minutes later the two of us had set out for a patch of lowland to the west, where Ferris had spotted a large bull on his ride into the settlement.

  Our route toward these lowlands took us on the path near the infirmary, and we passed Alene on her way into town.

  “Are you off to raid the Sioux?” she called to us.

  “To hunt the savage creatures,” I said. “We’ll bring you hump ribs for your larder.” And then motioning to my companion, “This is Walter Ferris. Back from the western mountains.”

  “I gathered,” she said, as she had heard they’d arrived.

  “Pleased to meet you,” he said, and reached from his horse to take her hand.

  “Your companion promises me hump ribs,” she said. “Do you share his confidence?”

  “I have confidence that we will be lifting a bottle tonight,” Ferris said. “That is the only thing I am sure of.”

  “An admirably cautious forecast,” she said. Then, “I hold no stake in your partner’s judgment, so I appeal to yours. Take care not to tarry in the hunt. The weather’s changing.”

  “By the time it changes we’ll be roasting buffalo steaks over Smitts’s fire,” I said.

  “Or raising a bottle to our empty larder,” Ferris under his breath.

  “Make sure that you are raising those bottles and not out in the lowlands,” Alene said.

  Ferris wheeled his horse in a jaunty manner. “We’ll return early. Come raise a horn with us.”

  “I’ll need to come early if I expect to see William upright,” she said.

  “That you will,” Ferris said. He held a hand up. “Until tonight.” We rode off with unnecessary vigor as Alene was watching us, and when we were out of sight of the settlement Ferris gave me a knowing look. He had heard of Alene in St. Louis, but he had not known she was in the settlement.

  “I see you continued the hunt even after you left the drainages,” he said.

  “If it is so, it has been a particularly meager sport,” I said. He glanced to check my meaning, and I said, “She is in mourning.”

  It was a cold, clear, windless day, the snow dry and glistening. On arrival at the lowlands we did not attempt to hunt, but spread out buffalo robes and lay on a snowbank with a robe on top and one beneath, gnawing on bits of jerked meat and passing a corked gourd between us.

  “You wouldn’t believe who we met on our return from the mountains,” Ferris said.

  “Henry Layton,” I guessed.

  “Yes!” Ferris said. “A thousand miles from St. Louis, and he’s wearing an ambassador cap. I thought I’d died and woken up on Market Street. Pegleg asked him if he had porters on the march.”

  “Did he take offense?”

  “He knocked Peggy’s hat off and said, ‘Hadn’t thought of porters, but I’ll be glad to consider you for the position.’ ”

  “What’d Peggy do?”

  “He swung his rifle around, but Layton had the draw on him with his pistol.”

  “It’s a Collier,” I said. “Repeating. Can fire eight shots without reloading.”

  “Yes. He mentioned that afterward,” Ferris said dryly. “Not that he’d have needed more than one bullet at that range. The rest of us were scattering, but Pegleg pretended he was only checking the firing pan.”

  I laughed at that, imagining Pegleg’s feeble attempts at dissimulation.

  “Ten minutes after turning his gun on Pegleg he tried to hire us,” Ferris said. “Including Pegleg. Apparently he’s forming a brigade in the spring. He says he’ll pay three dollars a pelt. The others didn’t believe it. I can see the three dollars if he intends to make it up on the transport. But what mountains does he imagine we’ll trap? Did he tell you?”

  “No. And I’d hardly believe anything Layton said. He’s a damned scoundrel, though I admit he
’s an entertaining one. We’ve had some dealings because … his companion married the Widow Bailey, who you just met, and was then killed in the settlement last March. He brought Alene’s correspondence.”

  I told Ferris how we’d ridden together during Layton’s time in the settlement, and how, on the last day, I’d seen him give money for Alene, which she’d accepted.

  “It is hardly charity if it is done in the open for all to see,” Ferris said heatedly. “It’s more like coercion and self-aggrandizement. The damned blackguard. When we met him in the native encampment he tossed a coin to a native boy. Some ungodly sum that I’d have gotten down to scramble for myself. He shouted, ‘Water, water!’ ”

  “What happened?”

  “The boy took the coin and got the water. But he would have done it without the coin. That’s the sort of thing you can do in St. Louis. Not out here.” Ferris hesitated, then said, “The widow seemed a fine western lady. Was she won over by his beneficence?”

  “Not by his money. No,” I said. “And she seems to hold her dead husband’s death against him. She paints him like he’s the devil, but she’s flustered when she’s around him.”

  “And you’ve made your own advances?” Ferris said after a moment.

  “I made an attempt. She slapped my face so I saw double.”

  “Did you counter?”

  “I did not at first. And then”—I hesitated, remembering how she’d made clear that she would not settle on a man bound to a brigade—“I countered with … nothing.”

  “Oh Wyeth.”

  “What?”

  “Renew the assault.”

  “She’s in mourning.”

  “Mourning is preparation for marriage. The widow has tamed you.”

  “She has showed me my manners,” I said with some heat. “And if I make an attempt and am wrong she’ll think me a scoundrel.”

  “If you do not she’ll think you perfectly respectable,” he said, with derision. “She is in her ninth month of mourning. That dandy Layton will slip ahead and—”

  Ferris stopped. He’d heard something. We both turned to the south where a large buffalo, up to its belly in snow, lumbered out of the pine forest. The great beast plowed forward, then stopped suddenly. It had scented us. It snorted. Slowly Ferris reached for his gun, but the ice on his robe cracked sharply when he moved and the bull bolted. In an instant Ferris and I were up on our horses, dashing through a heavy winter snow, up and down through the channels in the lowlands and out onto a windswept patch of ice that was a shallow branch of the Missouri.

  Once on the ice the beast pawed and fell and stood unsteadily and fell again and wheeled as if it would charge us and slipped and fell and tried to get up and slipped once again. Ferris and I dismounted. It hardly seemed fair to shoot the beast when it was helpless like that. We watched for a full minute, but the beast merely grunted and flailed and could not move. Finally, we both raised our guns at the same time and fired. The beast lurched and tottered and stood still and Ferris reloaded rapidly and fired again. His first shot and his second were within an inch of each other, just above the shoulder, the exact spot aimed for in a bull, which fell heavily.

  “Why, you’re a regular green jacket,” I said.

  “I’d have missed the beast entirely on the third shot,” he said, though as I found out later, this was untrue. Among his other accomplishments, half of which he’d hidden from us, Ferris had the best shot in the brigade.

  I heard a cracking sound out on the ice. I heard water glugging and more cracking and the bull began to sink.

  “We should have waited until it was off the ice,” I said.

  “It’s you who were hasty.”

  “I was hasty?”

  “Yeah. You. Hasty in shooting but not in anything else,” he said, and I gave him a dark look.

  Meanwhile, the beast sunk bit by bit into the water. Ferris stepped off the bank and tested the ice gingerly with one foot. I strode halfway out towards the fallen beast. I motioned for Ferris to follow.

  “The ice held a buffalo. It’ll hold us,” I said.

  “You show some sense there, Wyeth.”

  “I’ve been known to,” I said.

  It had started to snow, coming fast at moments and then clearing suddenly with patches of blue showing here and there overhead. The low clouds moved very fast. Ferris and I walked out to the bull and stood there, far out on the ice. We could just make out our picketed horses on the bank, gray silhouettes through gray veils of snow.

  The buffalo had sunk to about a third of the height of its body and then hit the shallow bottom. Bits of dirt spiraled in the icy water. I measured the water’s depth with a stick. It was higher than my boot tops. I cleared a spot on the ice then untied the binds at the base of my leggins and peeled them up and pried my boots off. I stood barefoot on the ice, hopping from foot to foot. Ferris grinned.

  “How’s it feel?”

  “Balmy,” I said.

  I tossed my gloves back with my boots and edged up to the spot where the ice was cracked and then, carefully, stepped into the water. The muscles in my calves tightened and began to ache and then go stiff and numb like wood. I gripped the beast’s fur with both hands and lifted my feet from the water and placed them on the thick, stiffening fur, then lifted myself up and plunged a knife in at the neck and drew it backward, wedging my feet on the bulging girth of the great beast, using all my weight as I sawed through the tough, thick pelt. The cut widened and the intestines toppled out and splashed in the water. I hacked at the hump ribs until I’d cut through bone and tossed them back on the ice. I found the gallbladder and punctured it. The green juices poured out around the blade. I cut the liver out and tossed it back on the ice with a slap, skidding, so it left a red streak and melted the snow around it and lay there steaming on the wet ice. I went for the heart—an enormous, squishy, rubbery thing, as big as my head. I cut the great vessels with a splash of warm blood around my hands. When I squeezed the heart, blood oozed over my hands and down my arms. I tossed it back onto the ice and it rolled and wobbled to a halt leaving a trail and a bright splash of red where it came to rest. I cut the choice pieces of meat from the breast. I cut out the tongue. When I was finished the ice was scattered with red gore and all around was that vast wilderness with just that spot of blood and tossed nastiness, a tiny stain in all that white world.

  Ferris had started back for a deerskin on his pony that could be used to wrap meat when there was a whooshing sound. Blood and gore rained around me. Ferris slipped on the ice, but was up in an instant, scrambling. There was a native on horseback on the crest of the riverbank, a vague gray shape in the snow, lowering his weapon. I dropped into the water up to my thighs. Something splattered overhead and I heard the delayed pop of gunfire. Ferris rushed past and slipped on the ice and clambered behind the beast.

  “Wyeth!” he yelled.

  “What?”

  “You alive?”

  “I’m half frozen in this blasted water.”

  Over the edge of the ice I saw our horses fading into the snow, a caterwauling Indian driving them on. There were three more natives at the river’s edge.

  “On the bank,” I yelled.

  “What?”

  “Three on the bank.”

  “I’m going to fire,” he said. “When I do, get out of the water.”

  I heard the scrape of the ramrod as Ferris loaded his rifle. I heard the metallic click as he cocked the hammer. He was aiming. Three natives slipped behind the bank. I leaped out of the water, grabbed my gun, and skittered along the ice. Ferris fired and I saw the snow explode several inches from where the natives had vanished.

  I joined Ferris behind the buffalo.

  “You get one?”

  “I think I scared them,” he said.

  We pressed ourselves to the buffalo. The ice had broken cleanly on the back end of the buffalo so we could lean against the beast and not be in the water. The ice bent as we stood on the edge but it was wedged agains
t the buffalo’s fur and did not break. I loaded my rifle.

  “You wait a moment after I fire,” I said. “Get them when they come up.”

  “Good plan,” he said, not earnestly.

  I pulled up to aim. Saw nothing. Just snow and the riverbank and the gore spread across the ice. Then, to my right I saw the three natives crouched in a declivity, loading their weapons. I fired and they dipped beneath the bank, and when one came up Ferris fired and they slipped back down again and then they all came up at once and fired and one of the bullets grazed Ferris’s leggins. We were at a bend in the river and if the Sioux spread out far enough they would be able to get a shot from either side. Ferris reloaded. I reloaded, too. We pressed ourselves against that beast, making the most of the shelter.

  “Too exposed here,” Ferris said. “If the snow dwindles we’ll be easy prey. We’ll scramble to the embankment. You ready?”

  “You can go first.”

  “You got the footwear for it,” he said.

  My bare feet were pale and bluish and looked shrunken to me. I could not feel them. Ferris gripped his rifle, then sat up and aimed.

  “Go on!” he hissed.

  It was snowing heavily. The bank was only a gray shadow. I turned and ran over the ice barefoot. It was like running on wooden stilts. I made the far bank and clambered up across rough ground. I threw myself over the rocky edge and while I was doing it I heard a shot. The smoke from Ferris’s rifle drifted past me.

  I positioned myself, peering over the bank. I saw nothing except the frozen river and the gray shape of Ferris huddled behind the bull.

  “I’m loaded,” I yelled.

  Ferris bolted and all the while I scanned the far bank. I could see some of it clearly. Other parts were simply a gray silhouette. Ferris threw his rifle over the top and heaved himself up and landed next to me. We both put bullets in our mouths and looked out over the windswept ice and the lump of the dead buffalo. The snow came heavily for several minutes, blotting everything out, and then dwindled. We lay there, scanning the bank.