They would not go as a war party, the few who were chosen, but singly and alone. Every one of them would have an equal chance to bring the mad dog down. The one who brought in the scalp and the right ear would win two eagle feathers; the one who brought him in alive would be made a chief. If this mad thing lied in craven fear, if it crawled into a dark cave to tremble there like the rabbit, or for any other reason was difficult to find and kill, the chief himself would go forth and find him. The honor, the heroism of an entire people were at stake. All the palefaces from the great salt water to the big blue, from the mountains far north to the rivers far south, would be waiting and watching to see how long it would take for a Sparrowhawk warrior to touch coup on this mad evil and bring its scalp in.
Even while the old man was haranguing his people a messenger came in with the terrible news that The Terror had slain another brave, just south of the Yellowstone; and two days later had killed a war party of three as they sat by their fire. These bodies, like those of the four, had been laid parallel with one another, their bloody skulls to the west; and from every skull the right ear had been sliced off. The chief was so outraged that his face turned the color of the red clays along the Yellowstone and his old body trembled. But for the arthritis in his joints and the blindness in his eyes (sun blindness and snow blindness) he would have put on his war paint and gone forth. His braves were not what they had been before the whitefaces came with their diseases and firewater. He must have felt as all leaders feel when, looking sharply at their people, they sense in them a moral degeneracy that portends the end of the nation.
He went ahead with the rites that would insulate the twenty warriors from harm. He personally saw that each of them had his medicine bag, his best weapons, and his choice of a horse from the large herds. At the encampment on Tongue River he bade farewell to each of them as he rode away, alone, into the southwest. The braves were garbed in their most colorful raiment, with a long headdress streaming like a banner in the wind. They were twenty handsome young men—twenty of the finest warriors from one of the most remarkable of all the Indian nations—all dedicated to a single and irrevocable mission; Rarely in human history had twenty such superb fighters gone forth to bring down one man, every one a specialist in certain skills, every one hoping that he would be the lucky and famous one. Within a few weeks news of the vendetta would reach trappers and traders as far away as the Rio and the Athabasca.
Jim Bridger gave the news to old Bill Williams. Bill’s long thin sunken face, looking as if it had been covered over with poorly tanned leather and was about to crack open in its deep dried-out seams, turned unusually grave. His small pale eyes with the abnormally small pupils looked into the north country, where at that moment, he had no doubt, Sam Minard with naked knife was slipping up to a Crow. The wrinkled bloodless lips sucked at a corncob pipestem. He took the stem away from his broken teeth and said:
“Ya said twenty?”
“Charley says. The best in the hull doggone nation.”
“How many has Sam got so far?”
“A few. I heerd only yisterdy he got the one called Mad Wolf.”
Bill sucked at his pipe a few moments. “Wonder if he’d like some help.”
“I reckon not. He figgers to do it alone.”
“He jist might at that,” Bill said, and went on smoking.
Jim Bridger at his post on Black’s Fork had been telling everyone who came along what Sam proposed to do. He knew most of the men in the West, for he had been a partner in the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, and after that had been with the American Fur Company, until he built his own post. Possibly no man in the West had a fuller knowledge of its mountains, rivers, valleys, passes, and trails. Thinking of Sam and the mad impossible task he had undertaken, Jim would recall that hour in 1832 when a redman shot an arrow into his back. The head of the arrow had remained in his flesh and bone for more than two years; it was then dug out with a knife by Marcus Whitman, a missionary to the red people. Jim shivered a little when he thought of all the stone arrowheads that would be speeding toward the fiesh and bones of Sam Minard.
When Three-Finger McNees came to the post and heard the story he fixed one eye on Jim while the other seemed to be looking off to the Bighorns.
“You say he got Mad Wolf?”
“So I heerd.”
In a hand-to-hand fight, McNees said, Sam was a match for any five redmen, and for any two white men, with doggone few exceptions. He was a holy rip-snorter. He would take care of himself unless they ambushed him or crawled up on him when he slept. Had the old chief put on his war paint?
“They say he’s clum his hoss fer the lass time. It’s the young bucks tryin ta take Sam off of the bay.” Mebbe they would, mebbe they wouldn’t, said Jim, who like all the mountain men was a realist. Today you were here and a-snortin with funk like a bull with his tail up, and tomorrer you were gone. If McNees saw Sam he might tell him that there was now a better rifle than the one he had; and the Colt revolver had been improved. As for the rest of it the mort, the note sounded on a horn at the kill would be ringing over the hull damn land.
Did any man know where Sam was pitching his camp? Right in the Bighorns, Jim had heard.
After shooting Mad Wolf while the reckless idiot was creeping up on him, apparently determined to make a coup, Sam had crossed the Yellowstone and gone north to see the woman on the Musselshell. He rode right up to her door, said, “How are you?” and in that moment observed that her hair had turned white. By her cabin he set food, buckskins, a pouch of flower seeds, and after staking his horses on the river bottom he gathered stones from the area roundabout and piled them a few feet from the graves. He said he didn?t know if she understood him when he spoke to her, or even if she listened. She had seen his wife last fall. Well, the Crows killed her and the baby that was in her and all he had now was their bones. He was going to build a stone cairn and put them in it. Having told her this, he waited, hoping that she would speak, but she was as silent as her dead ones. She was sitting between the graves, with her Bible on her lap.
On the river bottom this evening Sam smoked and brooded, and tried to see himself more clearly in life. Now and then he wondered if he was making a fool of himself. But when he thought of the vivacious Indian girl who had been his wife, and of the depths of his longing for a son, and when he contemplated again the bitter black cowardice of the killers, the old rage boiled up in him and he was eager to be off to the warpath. The next day he laid the stones, chinking them with river mud. It was harder than he had thought it would be to immure the bones—to say farewell to them, to touch them for the last time. He guessed he was a pretty sentimental fellow. He wondered if the mountain men would have laughed if they had seen him pressing his lips to the skull of his wife; holding the skull of his son in his two hands and pressing it to his cheek; and reaching in to touch them a last time before putting in the last stone. He looked over at the woman and her Bible, wishing that the bones in there could be blessed and delivered into the care of the great Giver who had set the rainbow as a guerdon to innocence; wishing that Beethoven’s choral finale on the “Ode to Joy” could be played softly, forever and ever, by this cairn, and for this woman and her children.
God in heaven, what a thin unwashed ragged forlorn poor critter of a thing she was, with nothing but her Bible and two graves! Life was a riddle, damned if it wasn’t: less than a year ago he had been holding his darling close and dreaming dreams—and now both darling and dreams were entombed in a pile of stones. Less than a year ago he had been singing madrigals with the birds and now he was on the warpath. A year ago this woman and her husband and children had been making the long trek to what they believed was fabulous land, an Eden or a paradise, their hearts and souls big with hopes and visions; and now four of them were slaughtered and she was lost by two graves among four whitened skulls. It was not the Father’s fault if His children were damned fools who couldn’t make decent use of the wealth and beauty He had given them, or get along with
their neighbors. Perhaps the Almighty had long ago rued that hour when He put Adam and Eve on a planet with larks and thrushes and mockingbirds, water ouzels and geese and squirrels and blue jays and the whole diapason of music; because all these things seemed so much more in tune with land and water and sky. Sam hoped that someday he would laugh again and sing and play his music. Someday, perhaps. Meanwhile he had his own private war, and a lesson to teach as only killers could be taught.
“I’m going now,” he said, standing by her and looking down at her white hair. “I’l1 be back before long.” He bent low to touch his lips and his fingers to her hair, and then he was gone. Kate did not look up. She did not turn once to look after him as he rode up the river and disappeared.
15
HE WAS RIDING up a long mountain flank of aspen when he sensed it. At once he stopped to get his bearings. He did not recognize this area but a man could not know every one of the thousands of aspen hillsides. There were mountains south of him and across the southwest; he knew them by sight but he was on a strange trail. All redmen except the cricket-eating Diggers and the fish-eating tribes on the lower Columbia were experts in the art of ambush. It was in ambush that one small immigrant train after another was perishing.
Turning, he rode back down the trail at a fast gallop. After four hundred yards he swerved sharply, and leaving the buffalo path, headed for a summit, hoping there to be able to overlook a wide area. In this he was disappointed; and so he sat, unable to see more than a few hundred feet, and sniffed and listened. The bay raised his ears to the direction from which they had just come. Sam was wondering what had warned him; there were so many things in nature that give signals—the kingfisher, redwinged blackbird, wren, bittern, chipmunk, ground squirrel, magpie, crow—the wild world was full of them and a man had only to learn their ways. Something had told him that he was in the presence of an enemy. Because he had hidden his packhorses and was on a very fleet horse he chose one of his favorite stratagems. He would make a run for it until he found a spot he liked; and so, going at full speed, he descended from the summit and took another path, his eyes looking for a hill with jutting ledges. His was the cougar’s trick, which he had observed three separate times.
The cougar—or panther or mountain lion—usually stalked his prey at their watering holes. If the hole happened to be on a stream that flowed close to an overhanging ledge of stone, the beast would crouch on the ledge and wait; and when the animals were drinking he would leap to the back of deer, antelope, elk, buffalo, or wild horse. Leaping to the shoulders, he would sink his claws deep into flesh and at the same moment reach for the throat with his long powerful teeth; and if it was one of the smaller beasts he might with a swift movement seize the head and wrench it backward, breaking the neck.
Sam was looking for a vantage point where he could leave the path, leap off his horse, and advance swiftly to meet the enemy. After two miles of forcing the bay at top speed he saw it. The trail rounded a hill. Barely past the point was a forest of trees. Rushing off the path and a hundred yards into the woods, Sam leapt down, and leaving his lathered beast to recover his wind, he ran forward and stood behind a tree. He was not surprised when no Indian came in sight. He now hastened through the woods and up the hill. On hands and knees, crawling swiftly, he went forward to a bluff above the path and looked down. Back there on the trail, two hundred yards, was a Crow warrior, the paint on his face glinting like gold in the noon sunshine. He sat on a tall sorrel pony, looking and listening. Having no doubt that this was one of the twenty, Sam watched him through a lattice of leaves. He could have shot him off the horse at that distance but on thinking it over he decided to walk out in plain view and give the man a chance.
The moment he was in full view he gave the Crow war cry and raised his gun. But he did not fire. His sharp eyes were watching the enemy’s movements; it seemed to Sam that the redskin was deaf or paralyzed. He would have sworn that for a full ten seconds the fool sat there, his black eyes staring at the giant who stood a hundred feet above him and two hundred yards away. Sam could imagine how the eyes shone, with a gem of light in their center; and the tenseness of the clutch on the gun, and of the thighs clasping the pony. suddenly the Indian came to life and brought his rifle up; in that instant Sam fired and the pony fell. Almost at once the redman was on his feet. Again with electric suddenness his long rifle came up but Sam had ducked down and back to reload. When ready he shot up into full view and the Indian’s gun in that moment exploded. In the next instant Sam fired and saw the man stagger. Sam dropped to his knees to reload. Knowing that this young warrior had momentarily lost his nerve and fired wildly, Sam doubted that he was one of the twenty: more likely he was a green youngster who had taken a gun and slipped away to find glory.
Running to his horse, Sam mounted and rode into the forest above the bluff. The pony was dead and the warrior had disappeared. There was nothing to do but watch and wait. If, as Sam imagined, this was a youngster, eager to cover himself with honors and an eagle feather, he was alone; but if he had been scouting for a war party the three shots would bring it in. While waiting, Sam wondered if he would not soon be weary of this night-and-day stalking; if he should have gone to the old chief and demanded the right to meet the killers; or if he should have gone back to his people for a visit. He had considered all these alternatives and rejected them; reconsidered and rejected again, for the reason that all the red people were fantastic liars and cheats. Anyway, the chief would have sworn by all his dead ancestors that none of his braves was guilty.
There was still another matter, Sam told himself as he sat in tall grass, looking out and down. The Crows were now claiming broader lands than they had ever occupied—all the country that bordered the Musselshell on the south and east. This included the woman and her graves and the cairn. So far as Sam could tell, it included lands claimed by the Blackfeet. If these implacable enemies, with their age-old feuds, were to go to war they might, when their blood got real hot, murder the woman; if they did that, half the mountain men in the country would march against them, and there would be enough blood to turn a river red. If there were only good trapping spots close to the woman he would live there and watch over her and someday take her back to her people. But there were no good beaver ponds within two hundred miles of her.
While looking down at a dead horse and waiting he also dwelt on the fact that warriors from other tribes would now try to capture him, knowing that the Crows would pay a fabulous price for him. Windy Bill had been emphatic about this two weeks ago when they puffed their pipes after breakfast and drank black coffee.
Sam, he said, would look worse than a stillborn child in a putrefied forest after they were done with him. Old Jake Moser’s nephey he had trapped on the Heely—wall now, the Comanches had wanted him, and so the Rapahoes they caught him, and when the squaws were done with him you cudden a-tole if he was man or coyote. Some people they were good at one thing, like sailing the sea; and some at another, like being a lying politician; but the Injuns they were the best on earth at torture. Bill could jist see the squaws slaverin as they looked at Sam, he shorely could. If Sam were fool enough to let the Blackfeet take him alive they ought to open his skull to see if there was anything in it.
“I don’t figger they’ll take me,” Sam said.
Had any man ever, who was taken? “Sam, I wisht ya would think it over, I shorely do.”
Bill had proposed that twenty mountain men should ride into the Crow village on the Tongue and demand the murderers from the old chief; they would tell him that if the killers of Sam’s wife were not handed over the mountain men would bring the Blackfeet and the Cheyennes against them, and the Sioux for good measure. Sam had refused to consider the proposal; this, he felt, was his own private feud. He felt that no life but his own should be risked. Doggone it, Bill had said, the Blackfeet would be trailing Sam day and night. As for himself, he’d rather face a grizzly or ten bitch wolves than a Blackfeet squaw with a knife in her hand.
; Sam hoped that the Blackfeet would not be on his trail, for he had dreamed of spending a winter in their beautiful country: of hibernating during the months of December and January, like the bear; of eating and sleeping and communing with the creator’s infinite, while playing a few themes from Corelli and Bach and Mozart; of enjoying the pure heaven of being alone, far from policemen and tax collectors and all the parasites who made up any government. Bill Williams had once said there actually were damned fools who spent a good part of their time in wanton romping with women; and other damned fools who thought it the supremest pleasure to stand at bars swilling gin and rum; and still others who thought the good life demanded a neighbor within thirty feet on either side. Nearly all the mountain men agreed with Bill. They were all rebels. Convinced after two hours that no other Crows had been in the area, Sam went down to the horse. It looked like a very ordinary pony but you never could tell about an Indian pony. A trail stained with blood led away to a thicket. Warily Sam followed it and soon came to a man lying on his face, stone-dead. Or a youngster, Sam saw, after turning the body over: not eighteen, perhaps not more than sixteen: a good-looking boy who had slipped away and gone forth to take Sam’s scalp. Poor dead young one! He had a rifle so old that it looked like one the first voyageurs brought down from Canada; and a stone hatchet with a broken handle.
For a full tive minutes Sam looked down at the brave youth, thinking that his son would have been much like him. He did not take the scalp or Cut olf the ear. If he had had a shovel he would have buried this brave kid; if there had been stones in this area he would have built a cairn. The most and the best he could do was to heave the body to the fork of a tree, eight feet up; there, on its belly, the corpse hung down, both head and heels, but it would be safe from the wolves. The old musket Sam tied to the tree just below the youth. If the Crows found this dead son they would know that Sam had hung him in a tree and they would know why.
Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher Page 17