Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher

by Vardis Fisher

  It was a riddle, Sam thought, listening to the night sounds and moving a hand caressingly back and forth over his wife’s thighs—it was a riddle how the grizzly managed to get so many heads in its mouth. There was Lewis Dawson on the Rio de las Animas Perdidas: in his fight with a bear his companion’s gun had missed fire three times; three times a bitchdog had attacked so furiously that the bear had turned to chase her; and three times the beast had returned to maul Dawson. Three separate times it had Dawson’s entire head in its mouth, and his wounds, like Jed’s were stitched together with leather thread. But one big tooth had gone through the skull, and after three days the brains began to leak out and Dawson died in

  delirium.

  How will I die? Sam wondered, and sniffed the night air for scent of Blackfeet. How would Lotus die? He was sure that neither of them would die in bed. Few whitemen in this land had sense enough, when eyes and trigger finger began to fail, to pack their possibles and get out. Tom Fitzpatrick might die in bed but how many times had he come within a hair of going under? He hadn’t turned gray overnight for no reason at all. Tall, grizzled, hard-muscled, Fitz had been one of the biggest and best of them, until that day in 1831 when his hair turned white; most of the flesh wasted from his bones and, too weak to stand, he had been found by two half-breeds crawling along a creek bottom. One day when alone on the Big Sandy he had come face to face with a band of Gros Ventres and had raced for his life until his horse fell dead under him. He had then crawled into a hole in a mountainside and filled the entrance with stones and leaves, and had remained there until almost dead of hunger and thirst. Crawling out, he had headed for Pierre’s Hole but while crossing swift waters on a raft had lost his rifle, pouch, and knife. Defenseless, he had had to climb a tree and sit in it all night, when attacked by a pack of wolves. There were no words, Sam supposed, to tell how much a man suffered, whose hair and beard turned from brown to white in a few days.

  When they came to the big bend of the Musselshell, Sam and Lotus gathered a pile of dead cedar boughs and stripped off their clothing. Sam then fired the pile and they stood naked in the heavy smoke, holding their garments in their hands. It is possible that Sam overrated the redman’s sense of smell, because his own was so acute; but his years in Indian land had convinced him that often the redman could smell an enemy when he could not see or hear him. He had concluded that the whiteman had a strong body odor, of which he was unaware. After all, was the mountain goat conscious of its odor? Or the cougar and the wolf? With the wind coming from the beasts, Sam could smell a pack of wolves five miles away. He had got to know the body odor of all the mankilling beasts, and of such birds as the horned owl and redtailed hawk; but it was the odors of red people that had been his special study, until now, by odor alone, he could distinguish between Blackfeet and Crow, and between these and the Cheyennes and Eutaws. When he saw the four warriors the woman had chopped down he would have known by their body smell that they were Blackfeet, even if he had not known by the shape of their moccasins or by their hairdress.

  After he and Lotus had saturated their pores and garments with cedar incense they turned their moccasins inside out and smoked them, for there was no part of man with a stronger odor than his feet. If their path were found a score of Blackfeet warriors would go down on hands and knees to sniff at the footprints of horse and man.

  8

  WHEN ON A late September day they looked over at the woman’s shack there was no smoke or sign of living thing. After staring for a full minute Sam said, “I don’t see hide or hair of her but I feel she’s there.” He went down to the river trail and followed it to the lean-to. Nobody had been there in a long while. On the path leading to the river he saw her tracks and took the path up the hill. She had been sitting just inside the hut, on her bed. He was never to forget how she looked, the moment she came in view, standing there by the shack, the rifle in her hand, her body bent forward, eyes staring and ears straining.

  “It’s me,” he said in a loud voice, for he was a hundred and fifty feet from her. “It’s Sam Minard, your friend.” For two or three minutes they looked at one another and nothing more was said. He thought she had a very crazy way of staring at him. Putting a hand behind him, his lingers motioned to Lotus to go back down, for he suspected that the woman had seen her and recognized her as Indian. He then advanced, slowly, until he stood before her and looked down at her gray hair. He thought it had turned gray since he saw her last. Father in heaven, how she had suffered! “I’m your friend,” he said, and looked over at the sage plants, and the wild flowers by the graves. The wetness of the earth around them showed that she had watered them within the past two or three hours. Nowhere was there any sign that she had made a fire.

  Still moving slowly, lest she become terrified and scream, he set his rifle by the wall and took the gun from her hands. “I guess you fired this since I left,” he said, “because it isn’t loaded now.” She had not yet looked up at him. Thought of her sitting with an empty gun before her enemies filled him with such pity and pain that he placed a hand lightly on her graying head and kissed her hair. “I’m your friend,” he said, his voice low and gentle.

  Then he took his rifle and went back down the hill. He couldn’t stand any more of it; he was afraid he was going to break down and cry like a child. To hide his emotion from Lotus he said they would go out and get a couple of deer, but even after they had come in with them and he was slicing liver for her he felt sick clear down to his guts. The trouble with deer and antelope, he said, to make talk, was that they didn’t have the full-bodied chewing of beef. He guessed it would be all right to make a fire here; the skulls were still on the stakes, the Blackfeet had scouted this area perhaps a dozen times. They had read the warning. They would never strike here, not now. The woman up there, she looked as if she hadn’t eaten a thing since he left her; she was scrawny and gray, and so full of sorrow that it made a man want to cry just to look at her.

  His rifle within reach, he knelt to slice venison, and Lotus brought wood for the drying racks. The larger intestines he cut into lengths about eighteen inches long, and turning them inside out, took them to the river and thoroughly washed them. With a hatchet he laid open the spine and the shoulder and thigh bones to get at the marrow, for he intended to have boudins tonight. Lotus came over to see what he was doing. She hadn’t got used to the fact that he liked to cook and had a gourmet’s interest in food; she invariably looked astonished when he gave a cry of delight over some delicacy. She preferred a slice of raw liver to his warm golden biscuits, dunked in hot marrow fat; and the serviceberry to any other berry. But when he was feasting and exclaiming she had learned to smile and exclaim with him, and to say, “It’s all free,” after hearing him say the words a hundred times. She hadn’t the slightest notion of what a whiteman meant by the word “free.” Boudins she did like, and she watched with fascinated interest as he prepared them.

  When he heard a meadow lark he stood straight and tall and listened. Its song was so much Hner than the meadow lark’s back east; this he took to be a sign that these mountains were a better home for a man than the hills of New England. The purple finch had a marvelous warbling song that was continuous; the orchard oriole’s welcome to springtime was almost as fine as the bluebird’s; the hermit thrush in the high cool canyons sang as he imagined the angels must sing; but this solitary vocalist of the prairies and fields, with its yellow vest and black cravat, was his favorite of all songbirds. He listened until it flew away.

  “I wonder,” he said, “if she ever hears it.”

  He now put the marrow and the tenderest part of the kidney fat in a frying pan and melted them. The choicest flesh of the tenderloins he minced, using his hatchet and knife, along with a portion of liver, two kidneys, a cupful of brains, and a pound or two of hindquarter taken close to the bone; and all this minced meat he mixed with the rich marrow and suet greases, sprinkled the compost with salt, squeezed over it the juice of a wild onion, and stuffed the whole of it in
to several lengths of the intestine, with one end tied off. When the boudins were ready for cooking each was about ten inches long and tied oil at both ends. It had taken him an hour to prepare them for slow broiling or roasting; he now turned to the biscuits and steaks, but paused every minute or two to glance round him and listen. Lotus meanwhile laid slices of flesh on the drying racks and kept up the fires.

  A man and woman in love, preparing their supper, was the most beautiful thing in life. Didn’t she think so? No taxes, he told her for the twentieth time; no policemen, no laws; the odorous abundant earth turning over in its garden of good things, round and round, its face following the sun like a child its mother. He was mixing biscuit dough. Rib steaks and a large roast were laid out, ready for the fire. He hadn’t left her much flesh to dry, had he? he asked, looking at the slaughter he had made of two carcasses. Tomorrow they might find an elk, though this was a long way from elk country.

  When the supper was almost ready, the roast and steaks brown and dripping, the boudins gently simmering in their hot juices inside the gut-sleeves, the biscuits ready to bake and the coffee to set on, he said he guessed they ought to go up the hill and ask the woman to eat with them. He supposed she wouldn’t but they ought to ask her anyway. The rifle over his left arm, his right arm gently across his wife’s shoulders, he went up the hill; and the moment Kate heard their footfalls she reached for her gun. With Lotus behind him now Sam went forward, knowing that her gun was not loaded; and Lotus followed, peering round him, for he had told her the story of the woman and she was curious. Sam called her attention to the graves and their flowers, and black eyes looked back and forth from the graves to the woman. She knew that the mother who stood there; looking so frail and alone and frightened, had three slain children buried under the withered flowers.

  Taking his wife’s hand, Sam said to Kate, “We’re your friends.” He watched her face, hoping to be able to tell if she understood him. “We have a fine hot supper down by the river. We wonder if you would come eat with us.” Before he was done speaking he knew that she would not; the way she sat and everything in her face told him that she wanted them to go, that she wished to be alone. She looked terribly thin in her huddle of clothes, and very white and tired and old.

  Kate’s next response amazed him. Apparently she had been only dimly aware of Lotus, if at all, and now she saw her as an Indian; for she screamed, and the cries of the loon, the bittem, the hawk, the grebe, all together, were not as blood-curdling as this woman’s cry. In the moment of the scream she ran frantically to her bed just inside the cabin and began to paw in it for the axe. Her cry had been so dreadful, so unhuman in its hate and fear and desperation, that Sam was unnerved, almost shattered; his bronzed face turning a shade paler, he seized his wife’s arm and moved swiftly back. The woman had found the axe but had got entangled in something and was struggling to get up; and because she was so weak, so desperate with fear, she screamed again, and in all his life Sam had never heard such a sound. He moved back again, back and back, until he and Lotus were almost a hundred yards distant; and there he stood, shaken and unbelieving, his eyes fixed on the creature (she could hardly in that moment have been called a woman) who crouched at her doorway and peered, the axe in her grasp.

  “Almighty God!” he said. He felt nausea all through him. He felt that he was going to cry like a child. And he was trembling, clear down to his moccasins.

  Sensing at last the pathos of it, the ghastly woe of it, the broken mother-heart of it, he took his wife’s arm and went down the hill. The supper had been spoiled for him. All the beauty and sweetness of the earth had been turned bitter for him in that moment when he grasped, in full measure, the loneliness and nightmares and stark insane wondering of a mother there with her dead children. He ate one of the rich boudins, a steak, a hunk of roast, and a half dozen biscuits; and he drank a quart of strong black coffee; but he was hardly aware that he was eating. He then folded one of the deerskins flesh side in, making a bowl of it; and in the bowl he put a skin of boudins, a piece of roast, a steak, and a few biscuits. He told Lotus to remain here, alert, hand on her gun, while he went back to the woman. If the woman were somehow to get away from him and rush at Lotus with the axe she was to shoot her, if she had to, or climb a tree, if she could. With his rifle he went up the hill with the hot food, and over to the woman, who now. sat between the graves; and he set the skin of food right before her, turning the folds back so that she could see what was there. He did not speak and he did not linger. He supposed that she would recognize the food and that she would ignore it or throw it away. What could he do or what could any man do that was any good for her? Was there in the whole world anything that could break through such grief as that? Perhaps the Almighty could do something for her; perhaps he was doing it in the only way that it could be done. Sam’s guess was that she would sink deep into sorrow, and from sorrow into death.

  But he did not understand her. He might reasonably have asked, What man could? He would never know of her frenzied assaults on the killers that invaded her small world, or that she had totally forgotten her people. If he had known about her visions in the sage garden and her reading and talking aloud to her dead ones he would have thought only what Bill was to say, that she was as crazy as a loon with three eagle babies in its nest. Kate on her side would have found it hard to understand the redmen and the mountain men, who month after month shot thousands of healthy beautiful animals and took only a few pounds of flesh, leaving the remainder to the wolves and vultures; who found delight in waging savage war against one another; who caught and killed lovely creatures, such as beaver and otter, for no more than their skins. She could hardly have understood Sam Minard—for on a high mountain spine he would beat his chest in a raging storm and call on the Almighty to look down on the world he had made.

  The next day Sam and Lotus brought three deer from the hills and built fires and jerked nearly all the flesh; and this Sam put in skin pouches and took to Kate’s door. He wanted to touch her hair a moment, with palm or lips, before going so far away from her, but her attitude told him that she wanted him to get out of sight. And so without saying another word to her he took his wife and headed up the river. The cottonwood and aspen were putting on their yellow cloaks, the chokecherry its scarlet; the river, done with its goaded spring torments, was a broad flowing of clear waters, borne down from the highest mountains. It was a beautiful day. A meadow lark was singing exquisitely in two octaves; mourning doves and owls foretold the coming of rain. When, having passed the big bend. Sam saw the far blue mists of mountains south of the Yellowstone, he told his wife that yonder were the Wolf and the Rosebud summits, and the northern most summits of the Bighorns.

  The ebullience of his emotions, spilling all day long into spontaneous enthusiasms, or into song, was new to her. Her people were emotional but they didn’t exclaim with delight over such things as flowers, the swift sudden dive of a dabchick, the strange dusk-sounds of the snipe’s tail feathers, the juicy ripe flavor of a wild plum, the wing markings on what he said was a swallow-tailed butterfly, a badger’s footprints. After they swam the Yellowstone they were out of Blackfeet country, and she thought her man seemed to feel that he had no enemies. He would burst into song. He would shout at her—to draw her attention to the things around her. “There!” he said, pointing to the blue and purple belt of peaks lying east and north of the Bighorns. She looked, and saw only mountains and mist and distance. A map of the whole vast sweep of it was in Sam’s mind—the Yellowstone, Bighorn, Wind, Powder, Green, Snake and a dozen other rivers, and all their valleys; and the Little Snake, the Yampah, the Uintahs, and a hundred more. He had decided to stop long enough to say hello to Bill Williams, if he could find the sly lean old codger, holed up in some thicket between Medicine and Bald mountains. From the Bighorn River, which he had been following upstream from its junction with the Little Bighorn, he turned east; and pointing to two peaks, he said to Lotus, “Somewhere between them, if he isn’t dead yet.”
Bill was not dead and he was not asleep. Early in the morning two days later Sam was walking and leading his beasts, as he pushed his way through tangles and thickets, when suddenly a high shrill voice cried, “Do ye hear now? I wuz nigh to givin ye hell, I was. If I didden think ye wuz a Blackfoot after my topknot I’m a lyun nigger, I shorely be.”

  A moment later there he came, tall, cadaverous, gangling, a rifle across his arms and his right hand on the trigger guard, his bright almost glittering gray eyes peering out under shaggy brows. The face Lotus saw had a long thin nose, lean bearded cheeks, and a narrow forehead with veins standing out in the temples. He had a high-pitched, almost whining voice that made some men think he was crying. Around his waist hung a lot of contraptions, including a queer-looking bullet mold, an awl with a deerhorn handle in a sheath of cherrywood, hand-carved by him, and a vial made from the tip of an antelope horn in which, in season, he carried his castor bait. Bill had begun life as a Methodist preacher in Missouri, but (according to his story) every time he appeared at the church door the roosters shouted, “Hyar comes Parson Williams! One of us goes inter the kittle today.” One morning when preaching at his fervent best a girl in a front seat got his mind so mixed up that he kallated he wasn’t born for preaching. He took his gun and l headed west.

  “Wall, tie up my boudins!” he said, ambling over. “If it ain’t Sam Minard. And who is this here red filly?”

  “My wife, Bill. Mrs. Samson John Minard, the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  “Wall now,” said Bill, squinting his small keen eyes at the girl. “If this nigger sees good she doan look bad a-tall. Where fer be ye headin?”

  “Uintahs. I need four or five packs, for I have a wife to support now.”

  “They cost, I’ve heard. Ye best spend a night with me, I reckon. I have some of Hank Cady’s huckleberry preserves and the best buffler hump ye ever tasted.”