Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher

by Vardis Fisher

  They spent the night with Bill. After supper the men and the girl sat by a small fire and Lotus looked at Bill most of the time, for he was spinning tall yarns and his facial mannerisms fascinated her. If Sam asked a question that touched Bill’s emotions the sunken face would turn grave, the eyes would narrow to slits of light, and Bill would knock the pipe out and fill and light it before uttering another word.

  “Ivar Carlsson, ye say? That be a sad tale, Sam. We wuz huntin lass spring, it was over on Shields River. Wall now, I dotta knowed better, I’ll be dogged if I shooden. That time a year the Blackfeet is all over the place. I tell ye, Sam, Ivar wuz as full of arrows as a porkypine, with one stickin plum through both cheeks, another stuck deep in his meat bag, and six or seven in his hump ribs. I tuk them out but it was like butcherin him almost; but he war a mountain man—waugh!—and he never give off more than one little grunt; and I’ll be dogged that wuz when I cut the arrow outta his boudins. That one was so deep I could feel the pint against his backbone. Of course the one stuck through his cheeks I jist whacked the head offen it and pulled it back out; but the one in his meat bag it was plum buried too, and that doggoned one in his boudins. I had to slice him open so I could git inside …. “

  Listening to Bill’s high-pitched words, Sam’s mind went back to a blizzard three years ago, when he had spent a night with Bill on the headwaters of Bear River, near Sublette Mountain. About forty feet from their fire had stood Bill’s old grayed-over and grizzled pack mule. Its guts filled with Western bunch grass and cottonwood bark, it stood, half dead with cold and age, and sound asleep over its picket pin, its limbs drawn a little under it, its rump in the blizzard, the stark bone of its back arched in the driven sleet, the whole weathered skinny carcass wavering a little from side to side, as, disturbed in its slumber, it opened its eyes a narrow slit to survey the storm. Now and then Bill had looked round him with piercing intentness at the driven white winds but always in the end his gaze came back to his faithful mule; and at last he had risen to his creaking legs and said, “I’ll be dogged iffen I doan think I’d best put a robe over Balaam. It ain’t as warm here as it wuz in Moab and he do seem to be shiverun powerful hard.”

  “Ivar live?” Sam asked at last.

  “I’l1 be dogged if he didden. But didden ole Hugh Glass live? It takes a lot, me boy, ta kill a mountain man.”

  For breakfast Bill gave them what the mountain men called French dumplings. After mincing buffalo tenderloin and hump with marrow and hump fat, and rolling it into balls and covering these with flour dough, he simmered and fried the dumplings in marrow. Sam swore that he had never eaten a better breakfast. The hot biscuits he spread with Hank’s huckleberry preserves, and with biscuit filling one cheek and dumpling the other he listened to Bill’s yarns and drank two pint cups of hot black coffee. He smoked two pipes before bringing his beasts in.

  “Bill,” he said, falling into mountain-man argot, “ye git down our way this fall we’ll set up sich a doggoned feast it’l1 make ya give up cookin.”

  “Wall now, I spect ye would. How about Christmas dinner?”

  Sam would not expect him for Christmas or for any other time. He knew that old Bill Williams was a loner who never visited any man, but took his solitary way from hideout to hideout.

  “Watch yer topknot,” Sam said when he was ready to take off.

  “Watch yourn,” said Bill.

  Three and half years later, when the mountain snows were beginning to melt, Bill was found sitting upright against a tree, frozen stiff, a bullet through his heart. His rifle was gone but across his lap was an old broken gun that his assassin had left in its place.

  9

  THE STORM foretold by the doves and owls came in shocking fury when they were still in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains. The moment the first drops kissed his cheeks Sam stopped and dismounted and stripped off all his clothes. He knew that this storm would be a champion. Seeing what her man did and knowing the reason, Lotus slipped off her horse and did likewise. The leather garments of both Sam put inside a rainproof pouch. The mountain men told stories of greenhorns dressed in leather and caught in heavy downpours who had then ridden into hot sun, only to find an hour or two later that the leather on them was tighter than their own skins. It had to be cut off. Looking up to study the sky, Sam was sure that this would be one of the Almighty’s finest thunder symphonies.

  As they rode along, both completely naked, with the first large raindrops caressing their skins, Sam began to sing, howling into the storm his admiration of the Creator, whose genius had wrought such marvels. Of a storm in Beethoven’s pastoral symphony a musician had said that it was more than a storm; it was a cataclysm, a stupendous convulsion of all the powers; but for Sam it was nothing compared to what he had heard in these mountains. Beethoven had hardly done more than whisper among the aspens. Sam’s spirit in such hours as this needed stronger music than any Beethoven or Bach or Vivaldi had dreamed of. He shouted his head off, knowing that once the conductor got the hang of things he would open with a prelude that would shake the earth. He thought of Blake’s words, that music exults in immortal thoughts; but at its greatest reach, when the heavenly instruments flung down the grandeur of their thunders, music was a lament over what Thomas Browne had called the infinity of oblivion—the lonely finality of death and the eternal night of the grave. But he was young today, and in love, and his naked bride was close behind him. He strove to improvise his mood, pouring forth wild baritone harmonies that dissolved into the winds. As the lightning’s voice roared in awful grandeur, like a gigantic orchestra of drums and percussion, the sheets of fire set whole areas of sky aflame, and Sam became so intent on trying to become a part of it that for a little while he forgot the girl behind him. When he turned to look at her he knew that the storm was sounding the depths of her primitive emotions, for he could tell that she was singing. Lotus could not hear his words, except now and then, but she could see his imperious gestures, like those of a man using a pine tree for a baton; and she knew that he was lost in wild raptures. At first he had been concerned with the blandishments of the early raindrops and with tuning up his throat, but when the first crashing chords came he opened his soul to the sky and sent it forth on wings. If Lotus had had knowledge of whiteman’s music she might have thought her man was improvising a rosalia: he was singing, “Rejoice, O My Heart!,” climbing from key to key until his voice cracked and he doubled over coughing. He was a handsome figure—a big golden fellow on a black stallion, wet with rain, his hair flowing out into the wind that was rushing over him, his arms gesturing to the horns to come in, or the strings, as in fancy he herded the harmonies into overwhelming crescendo. Bushes and trees along the way were in such convulsions of frenzied joy that now and then one tore its roots free of the earth and went off into the sky and the thunders like a huge shaggy bird. “Hear! Hear!” Sam shouted, drenched now, his hair sopped and matted, the rain moving in a thin cool envelope down over his whole body and over the glossy pelt of his horse. The rain was also stirring the innumerable scents of the sweet earth, so that all the harmonies of rain music were infused with fragrance. It occurred to him that an opera house ought to be drenched with sweet essences, instead of with the bad breath and body odors of a thousand overdressed creatures. Remembering again that his wife was behind him, he turned to look back; and her wet face and hair, her eyes shining like two black jewels, and her lips parted across white teeth were all such a picture of female loveliness that he stopped, slipped down, and went back to kiss her. “It’s beautiful!” he cried in her ear, and kissed the wet ear. Then he kissed her wet leg that was next to him, and drawing the wet foot up, he kissed it.

  The storm, he thought, was close to the climax of its overture. Lightning was now setting whole patches of sky afire; thunder was crashing in such chords that the earth trembled; but for him all this was only a potpourri of the themes, moving from allegro to vivace. He hoped it was so; no thunderstorm could be too violent for him. He now thre
w his arms wide, to embrace the whole wet world around him; again kissed his bride’s leg and her foot; and bursting again with tempests of song, returned to his horse. His girl-wife, fascinated, soaked, and shivering a little, looked at his broad naked rain-swept back and wondered in her innocent Indian way if he was actually a man, or a spirit. He frightened her but in his presence she felt safe from enemies; for what a fountain of energy and courage he was, bellowing praise to the Great Spirit as he rode on and on in the deepest and darkest and wildest rainstorm his wife had ever known.

  They rode on and on in the heavenly music of falling rain, and the whole atmosphere of earth was darkened to night. Lotus knew it was not night. Somewhere ahead the sun would be shining, and indeed it was shining just around and beyond the blue and purple belt. After riding for two hours in a downburst that seemed eager to wash all the mountains into the rivers they came to the outriding scarves and skirts of it, with sunlight making jewels of the countless raindrops clinging to trees and grasses. In this wonderland that was half rain mist and half sun glow they rode for another hour, and then were out of it. The storm was behind them, sweeping in a vast gloomy darkness across the Beartooth Pass. When Sam stopped, Lotus was the first to reach the earth. He went back and from the packhorse took their pouch of clothing; but then glanced at his wife, and finding her as supremely lovely as a caltha lily washed by rain and caressed by sun, he set the pouch aside and took her up, one arm under her knees, the other against the small of her back, and set her against his chest, with his lips to her shoulder. Then he held her away, so that she could turn her head to look at him; and for a few moments they looked into one another’s eyes, without smiling.

  “You know,” he said, “I think we should have a feast.”

  She tried to look round her, for berries and roots.

  After kissing over her body he set her down and looked off at the sun; it was an hour and a half high. After putting on his leather clothing he dug into a pack for dry cotton cloth to wipe his weapons. One reason he liked a storm like the one that had just swept over them was that then it was safe for a man to ride unarmed; no brave ever skulked around in such a deluge, but cowered in his miserable leaking tent while the sky raining dogs and cats scared him out of his wits, and every blast of thunder made him shake like a sick dog.

  Dressed, they rode again, now in pale golden sunlight, with Sam’s nostrils sniffing out the scents. He was as hungry as a wolf in forty-below weather and for his supper wanted buffalo hump and loin, though this was not best buffalo country. He might have to settle for elk steaks, or even antelope or deer. But on entering a grove of aspen he saw the kind of grouse that the trappers called fool hen, for the reason that these chickens seemed to have a little sense of enemies. He dismounted and ran among them with a long stick, knocking their heads off. They were plump and fat. Thinking that they would need at least eight for supper and a half dozen for breakfast, he kept after them, among the trees and up the hillside; and when he returned to the horses he had eleven. He saw that Lotus had hitched the beasts to a tree and gone. Was she after berries? No, she was after mushrooms, and in a few minutes she came in with a gallon of them. “Waugh!” cried Sam, looking at the white fat buttons. What a feast they would have! They would spit the chickens over an aspen or cherry fire; and under them in a kettle he would catch their juices, to use in basting them and to fry the mushrooms. While he was gathering firewood, Lotus, with revolver and knife at her waist, explored the thickets; returned with a quart of large ripe serviceberries; again disappeared, and came back with a dozen ripe red plums, wild onions, and a handful of fungus that she had stripped from a rotted tree stump.

  “And what be that?” asked Sam, staring at the mold. He knew that Indians ate just about everything in the plant world, except such poisons as toadstools, larkspurs, and water parsnips. It was a marvel what they did with the common cattail—from spikes to root, they ate most of it. The spikes they boiled in salt water, if they had salt; of the pollen they made flour; of the stalk’s core they made a kind of pudding; and the bulb sprouts on the ends of the roots they peeled and simmered.

  Lotus was looking at him to see if he was pleased. To show her how pleased he was with such a resourceful wife he put his mouth organ to his lips, an arm round her waist, and began to waltz with her. The elder Johann Strauss’s waltzes had been sweeping over Europe like an epidemic for years; in a letter last spring his father had written Sam that the younger Johann was even better, and was the rage of all the capitals. Sam found the three-fourths time just right for him, when in moccasins, with no floor but the leaf depth of an aspen grove. Around and around he went, his right arm controlling his wife, his left hand holding the harp to his lips. “Wall now!” he said, pausing at last; and lifting her as if she were a child, until her face was even with his own, he kissed her. “What a fine supper we’ll have.”

  But the fungus bothered him. He knew that Indian women boiled tree mold and moss with buffalo beef, as white women boiled potatoes and cabbage; but he had found them tough and tasteless. A brave would open the end of a gall bladder and use the bile as a relish on raw liver; and warriors with an overpowering thirst for rum would get drunk by swigging down the contents of as many gall bladders as they could tear out of dead beasts.

  Lotus went hunting a third time and returned with a few of the succulent roots that had saved John Colter’s life. These Sam tossed among hot embers; later he would peel them and slice them and simmer them in grouse fat. He set on a pot of coffee. When the supper was ready he spread a robe for them to sit on, with their backs against an overhanging precipice of stone. The rifle at his side, revolver and knife at his waist, and his gaze on the only direction from which an enemy could approach, he rinsed his mouth with cold mountain water and began to eat. What more, he asked Lotus, did any fool want in this world? She asked what “fool” meant. “The King of Eng1and,” he said. “The President of the United States. All fools, because money-or power-mad.” They had never tasted such grouse. They never would. The world, he said, before sinking his teeth into half a breast and tearing it off, was full of vanity and vexation of spirit, as the Bible said; as well as of persons who didn’t have enough get-up-and-gumption to go find their food, after their mothers had painted their nipples with aloes and tucked their breasts away. Feeding flesh and juices and hot mushrooms into his mouth, he told his staring wife that in no restaurant on earth could such fowl be found, or such mushrooms, or such odors of heaven in a place to eat, or such paintings as the magnificent sunset yonder, with two rainbows through it. Tomorrow they would have buffalo loin basted with boss; mushrooms simmered in marrow and hump fat; hot biscuits covered with crushed wild currants; and they would before long have buffalo tongue and beaver tail, and ilapjacks shining with marrow fat like golden platters. Waugh! What a life they would have! It was a fine world, and they would eat and sing and love their way right through the best of it, like Breughel peasants on their way to heaven.

  Pulling handfuls of grass to wipe his greasy beard, he turned to see how his wife was doing. He had eaten his third bird and taken up a fourth; she was still with her first. “Good?” he asked. Her eyes told him that it was good. What, he wondered, watching her, did the red people know about cooking? If hungry, they simply tore a beast open and shoved their heads in, like wolves; and after drinking the pool of blood in the bowl of fat under the kidneys, or burying his famished red face in the liver, as likely as not the Indian would then yank the guts out, and while with one hand he worked the contents of the gut down and away from him, with the other he would feed the gut into his mouth like a gray wet tube, which in fact it was, his eyes bulging ferociously as his ravenous hunger choked it down. As cooks the squaws—or the few he had observed, anyway—were filthy, by white standards. For the Indian nearly every live thing was food, including the flies and spiders and beetles that tumbled into the buffalo broth, or the moths and butterflies and grasshoppers, or even a chunk of meat that a dog had been chewing at. Sam would
have said that he was not squeamish, but his appetite was never good when he sat at an Indian feast. After he had paid for his bride his father-in-law had set before him the boiled and roasted flesh of dogs, and though Sam had heard that Meriwether Lewis had preferred dog to elk steak or buffalo loin he had had to gag it down, as though he were eating cat. Well, there were white trappers who thought the cougar, a tough muscular killer, the finest of all meats.

  Sam was aware from time to time that his wife was studying him. He did not know why. He did not know that Lotus felt there must be some fatal lack in her, or he would have ordered her to do the cooking and the chores. Among her people the husband was lord and king; he hunted and made war and beat his wife and that was about all that he did. Sam baffled her. At the beginning she had been suspicious of him, and a bit contemptuous, but his extreme gentleness in the intimacies, his thoughtfulness, his daily gathering of flowers for her, his making for her magnificent mantles to hang from her shoulders, his way of touching her and hovering like a colossus over her needs and welfare, had reached down to what was in all women, and found warmth and a home. He had fertilized and nourished in her an emotion that, if not love, was the next thing to it. She had even learned to like his cooking, as she had learned to like his embrace. When he looked at her now, holding his fourth bird, his eyes twinkling, she flashed a smile at him that parted over perfect teeth, wet with fool-hen grease. He ate five of the birds and she ate two, and they ate all the mushrooms and roots and berries, and drank a two-quart pot of coffee. With grass he wiped his beard and said he guessed he ought to shave the damned thing off, and then he filled his pipe.

  When she felt round her for grass he watched her. Throughout the journey he had covertly watched her to see if she ate bugs. The Indians of some tribes, notably they Diggers, ate every insect they could find; it was a wonder, whitemen said, that there was a beetle or stinkbug or longlegs left in all the desert of the Humboldt. The Diggers seemed able to exist for weeks, months, even years on nothing but dried ants and their larvae. Sam had seen the miserable starved wretches in their filthy coyote skins plopping live ants, moths, crickets, and caterpillars into their mouths. He had watched squaws build a fire around a hill of big red ants, thrust a stick into the hill, hold a skin pouch at the top of the stick, and catch every ant in the hill, as they crawled up in three or four solid lines to escape from the flames. He had never seen a Flathead eat a bug; their food was chiefly small game, fish, roots, and wild fruits. He also watched his wife for signs of illness. All the trappers had heard the tale of the missionary who had told Indian people that their way of worshiping the Great Spirit was wrong. The Indians then sent four chiefs to St. Louis to learn the right way, and there they had sickened on whiteman’s food and died. Lotus looked to Sam like a picture of perfect health, though one morning after drinking a cup of coffee she had slipped into the brush to vomit, and had returned looking faded and foolish.