Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher

by Vardis Fisher

  But there was something that they would never see and never know. It was in Sam’s face and eyes after he had gone fifty yards and had turned to look back.

  16

  HIS KILLING of the Crow boy chastened his male aggressions a little; but two days later he killed Wolf Teeth, without knowing who the man was; and a week after that he killed Coyote Runs. He sensed that he had an unexpected advantage in the fact that the hotbloods sent out to get him were competing with one another and taking foolhardy risks.

  It was while thinking one day of the pathetic form hanging grotesquely in the tree that Sam recalled an experience that had haunted his dreams. It had been two years ago. He and two companions, looking for beaver ponds, had surprised six Blackfeet warriors riding down a ridge. Because members of this tribe had recently killed one of their friends they gave the mountain man’s dreadful war cry and charged. Their first three shots toppled three redmen from their ponies. Reloading while they raced after the survivors, they fired again, aiming at the horses because of the distance; and the three beasts stumbled and fell. Two braves leapt up and fled. The third had a broken leg and was crawling away like a wounded badger when the white men overtook him. The Indian then struggled up to his sound leg and drew a knife. An expert with a Bowie, Sam at that moment had hurled his blade and knocked the Indian down. Leaping from his horse and rushing to the fallen man, Sam had drawn the knife out and plunged it through him, in the region of his heart. Gouts of blood had spouted from the wounds and from the mouth and nostrils.

  Sam had then raced after his companions, who were pursuing the two Indians. They lost them and returned to the dead horses. Fifteen minutes passed before one of them looked over at the warrior with the broken leg. His cry of amazement had brought Sam to his feet. The man through whom Sam had twice driven his knife had managed to sit up—even had managed to find his knife; and there he sat, a hideous figure, his whole chest red with the gore that streamed down from his mouth. The thing that had held Sam’s attention was the Indian’s eyes, staring at him through a red mist; they were filled with the deadliest hatred Sam had ever seen. But even more terrible to look at than the eyes were the hands, washed with warm blood and trying feebly to close nerveless fingers around the handle of a dagger. After a few moments the Indian had made a chilling sound, as from agony, mixed with the choking gurgle of blood in the throat; and as blood burst in a red vomit from nose and mouth the head sank forward, and the body, and the warrior was still.

  There was nothing in a man that Sam admired more than courage. More than once since that hour Sam had awakened from a dream about this man and had been too disturbed to sleep again; more than once he had been troubled, as now, by contemplation of man’s or beast’s helplessness before an enemy. Nothing else in life went into him so deep, or with such pain and pathos; nothing else drew from him such a cry of pity to the Creator. Man to man or beast to beast, when both were in lighting fettle, was one thing; to be helpless before a merciless enemy was another thing. He knew, he never for a moment forgot, that the Blackfeet tortured their captives with fiendish ferocities that few whitemen could have imagined. It was true that no one could believe, without having seen them, how savage the squaws could be. Were they mothers? Did they feel tenderness when cradling their babes? How was a man to reconcile such hellish cruelties with a courage, sometimes a valor, that brought cries of admiration from their enemies?

  Around camplires during the long winters tales were told of the red people’s nature and doings—such as the wager between a Sioux and a Cheyenne, both from a war·loving people. They had met unexpectedly one day, at a time when their nations were not at war, and the Sioux had challenged the Cheyenne to a game of hands. In this simple game one of the two players took a small pebble, and putting both hands behind his back, clasped the stone in one of them. Bringing his hands into plain view of his opponent, knuckles up, he asked him to choose the hand that held the stone. This was a favorite game with Indians; they were such inveterate gamblers that they would wager everything they had, including their horses, weapons, women, and sometimes their lives.

  The Cheyenne won everything the Sioux had, and that brave, sitting stark-naked and wondering what else he could wager, offered his coveted scalp. He wagered it against everything he had lost. It was the wily Cheyenne’s turn with the stone, and behind his back he took so much time changing his mind and moving the stone from hand to hand that his opponent cried out with impatience. Suspecting a trick, he demanded to see the stone, for sometimes a brave’s medicine was big. The Sioux took the stone and examined it. He could see no erosion caused by magic, but asked nevertheless that a bullet from his medicine bag be used instead. It was the Cheyenne’s turn to suspect a trick; he stared hard at the piece of lead as he turned it over and over in his hands. Though it looked all right he tested it with his teeth and he smelled of it. His sly mind was telling him that the Sioux was dull and unimaginative and could be deceived; and so he kept the piece of lead in his right hand as he examined it, and it was still in his right hand when he put his hands behind his back. It was still in the right hand when after five minutes of anguished searching of his wits and his magic the Sioux said it was in the left hand. The Cheyenne had guessed that the stupid fellow would get hooked by the notion that the bullet would be slipped over to the left hand.

  Without the slightest trace of fear the Sioux had folded his arms across his naked chest and bowed his head. Without the slightest feeling of mercy or pity the Cheyenne had taken up his knife and stood above him. With his left hand he seized the long hair and pulled the scalp taut, while with his right he cut through hair and skin to the bone, all the way around the skull. If the Sioux flinched the Cheyenne did not see or feel it. The customary way of scalping, both red and white, was to put a foot on the prostrate enemy’s neck or face and with a powerful twisting jerk snap the scalp off. The Cheyenne, without benefit of foot on neck, had to snap the topknot back and forth and at last with a swift movement jerk it off. The Sioux rose to his feet, blood streaming down over him. He had seen men scalped who lived; he knew that his skull would heal but that forevermore he would be a bald and disgraced one. He wanted vengeance.

  So he demanded that they meet again for another game of hands, after two moons. Feeling immeasurably superior, the Cheyenne readily agreed. He foresaw another triumph. He stipulated that they should bring to the rendezvous their finest horse and their finest weapons. They would meet on Owl Creek, at its headwaters, in two moons. All the time the two were making their agreement the Sioux stood with blood streaming down his front and back, and the Cheyenne openly admired his bloody trophy, which he held by the long hair.

  They met again in two moons, the Sioux’s skull as bright and smooth as sun-baked bone, the Cheyenne unable to keep the gloating out of his face. But either luck or cunning was against him this time; he began to feel after several losses that his opponent had stronger medicine; and with all the magic taught him by the wise men he prayed for and strove to summon, in moments of intense concentration, a power that could defeat the bald eager man who kept guessing right four times in five. But he lost his horse, his weapons, and every piece of leather on him; and he sat as his opponent had sat, two months earlier, stark-naked, with nothing left to wager but his scalp or his life. If he had wagered his scalp and lost the Sioux would have been satisfied, but the Cheyenne, like his people, was a proud haughty one. Besides, he now thought his magic was working, I and so resolved to wager his life against everything he had lost and everything the Sioux had brought with him. The impassive Sioux accepted the proposal. The Cheyenne lost. That moment, Sam had thought many times, must have been about as intense and electric as any moment had ever been between two enemies. How many whitemen would have run for their lives? The Cheyenne merely stood up and faced the Sioux. Had he begun to chant the Indian death song? The story said only that the bald Sioux faced the Cheyenne and drove his knife through the Cheyenne’s heart.

  It was a man’s country out here,
and not for tall boys called men. Sam had never known an Indian and had never heard of one who had begged for mercy. Mercy was not a word in their language. A white captive who begged for mercy—and most of them did—aroused in their captors such contempt that they could not devise tortures fiendish enough to degrade him. Every mountain man knew that if he were luckless enough to be captured the only way to face the red people was to hawk phlegm up his throat and spit it in their faces. They might then torture you and they certainly would kill you but they would admire you and they would treasure your scalp.

  Sam looked squarely at the fact that he might be captured someday. Few whitemen in Indian lands had lived to be as old as Caleb Greenwood and Bill Williams. Twice captured by the Blackfeet and twice escaping from them, Jeremiah Flagg had said, “I spect it’s time fer this ole coon to git back to his tree.” He said there had been a time when he could smell a cussed redskin ten miles toward nowhere but now couldn’t smell him unless he could see him.

  It was terribly beautiful country covered with violent life. The beaver was a gentle fellow who lived on bark; the milk-givers ate leaves and grass; but the flesh-eaters were all killers, and man was a flesh-eater. Sam had observed that most of the flesh-eaters were savage in their love-making. A favorite with some of the red people was the soup dance, in which the men and women in two lines faced one another across a distance of thirty or forty feet. A girl would coyly advance with a spoon (of buffalo or mountain sheep horn) filled with soup. This she would offer to the man of her choice and quickly withdraw, with the man pursuing her until she reached her line. He would then retreat, dancing to music, and she would come again; and still again; and from those watching there would be laughter or hoots of derision. When whitemen participated they substituted kissing for the spoonful of soup; but the Arapahoes, with whom, it was said, the dance had originated, rubbed noses, though now and then a couple would try kissing and seem to like it. The girls sometimes but not always wore a hair-rope chastity belt, with the ends tied around their waist.

  A story was told of Kit Carson in one of these dances. A huge French bully had proclaimed himself the favorite and guardian of all the more attractive girls. Half drunk and with his lusts boiling, he had chased a girl into an adjacent woods, and after catching her had been so eager that he had slashed with his knife back and forth at the chastity belt, opening deep wounds in the girl’s thighs and belly. She had then drawn a hidden knife and stabbed him and run away. According to the tale Sam had heard, Kit then challenged the bully to a duel, killed him, and took the girl, Singing Grass, as his mate, changing her name to Alice.

  Sam had learned that most of the flesh-eating males were brutal to the females. Possibly the cats, big and little, were the most ferocious of all, though no more cruel than some of the men, red or white, when filled with passion and rum. The way his Lotus trembled under his touch during the first days had told him things he had never read in books. The red lover was sometimes worse than the male bobcat: at one of the posts during trading time Sam had watched drunken braves mating with their women—had seen a Cheyenne cover one of his wives and then in a senseless fury stab her repeatedly with a long knife. He then embraced her a second time, after she was dead.

  Weariness with killing had turned Sam’s thoughts to love, and to John Colter’s hell. Why not spend a winter there? He could go deep into that steaming and exploding area and no Indian would dare follow him, for they thought that evil spirits were working their magic there. They thought a geyser spouting its boiling breath fifty or a hundred feet into the sky was an especially large devil showing off his powers. All the tiny hot—mouth poutings were, Sam supposed, the puckered lips of little devil-babies. It was a fearful land tucked away in the basins among densely forested mountains. No buffalo were there, but deer and elk were, rabbits and grouse, and ducks and geese on the lake. He could build a fire without having to feel anxious; soak himself in hot pools; eat hot food, play or sing, and think of his wife. He could study the loveliness of coruscant glitters and winkings of light in a coppice when a breeze was on it; and the empyreal elemental fires in the sunsets; and the fugues as choirs of birds sang around him. If tax collector or policeman or political boss ventured in he would chuck him headfirst into a big boiling mudpot.

  Yes, he would go there, to recover his poise and nourish his powers; but first he would go up to the woman to see if she was all right. He wished he could persuade her to come with him, for it chilled his bones to think of her alone in another winter, under the howling megalomania of the Canadian winds and the wild subzero blizzards. The mountain men might even move the graves down there, where she would always have heat and hot water and shelter, and lifelong security from her enemies.

  17

  HE RODE, by night, through Crow country, and four days later sat astride the bay on a hilltop, looking first at the cairn. Then he saw the woman sitting between the graves. God in heaven, would she spend all her life over the bones of her dead? Was this a typical mother? Before her tragedy imploded into his being he had never thought of the differences between the human male and female. While looking over at this lonely woman and thinking about her he recalled a dream about Lotus that he had dreamed many times. She had lain naked on his thighs and belly, as though on a big thick mattress of meat, her chignon of black hair snuggled against his throat, a slender bronzed hand reaching up to play with his beard. His beard had lain down over one side of her face like a covering of horse mane. She had liked to run lingers through his whiskers and yank gently at the hair over his chest, possibly, he had thought, because the redmen were so hairless. Then she had moved up through hair to his mouth and had kissed him.

  Now, looking over at the woman, he felt a surge of tenderness; in memory emotion flowed in lightning heat all the way south over the path they had taken, and to the cabin, and to the pitiful armful of bones that was all that had been left of the vibrant thing he had loved. He was hungry for woman but he had no hunger for the woman with white hair sitting by the graves. If she was anything for him she was a mother image, or female-with-little-ones image, like the grouse with her lovely darlings, or the female mallard webfooting it across a lake, with seven or eight soft little balls of fluff and down in her wake. This was a large soft hour for Sam Minard, goose-downlined, geyser-warm, antelope-eye gentle, mountain-lily white and tender, as he looked at the woman. Sentimental softening of his will and senses had not moved in such a deep current since he last reached in to touch the immured bones, his soul enfolding all that remained of one who in his dream of her and his plans for her would have been wife and mate and straight-shooting warrior at his side.

  Sam then rode off into the hills. Had this woman learned how to jerk flesh, catch fish from the river, dry wild fruits? Or did she sit there the whole time, except when bringing water to her small elysian garden? Suspecting that he knew little about the human female and her ways, he tried to summon a clear image of his mother and of other mothers he had known, in their pattern of living. His mother had worked hard for her children and work was about all she had had. This woman had time and that was about all she had. She would have years and years of time and she would grow old there and die, and like his wife, be eaten to her bones by wolves and ravens.

  He returned with two fine deer, gutted but with the hides still on, and went over to the shack. The woman had seen him coming, and now actually looked over at him as he drew near. Bill had learned her name and now all the mountain men knew her name; and so Sam said, cheerfully, “How are you, Mrs. Bowden? How have you been this long time?”

  Dismounting, he untied the deer, and taking each by a hind and foreleg, laid them on their backs, open bellies up. Looking round for stones to prop them, he saw that the northwest skull was not the one he had put on the stake. He walked over to have a look at it. Some mountain man had killed and beheaded an Indian and had brought the skull here. “Looks like they’re watching over you,” he said when he returned to the cabin. Because she had risen to her feet he
went over to her. He simply stared at her and she stared at him; after a few moments his gaze moved over her face and he saw that it was starvation-thin; and down over her body, noting the details of her garb. On her feet she had the tatters of a pair of shoes; her ragged dress looked to him like the one she had worn the first day he saw her. Her hair hung in uncombed snarls; her face and hands looked as if they hadn’t been washed for years.

  He went over to a pannier, saying, “The Crows don’t have feet as big as mine. Mebbe some of these will fit you.” He offered them to her but she did not take them. Again he looked at her eyes. He had never seen such eyes. He had not known that in human eyes there could be such glittering and chilling lights. Something like. horror ran along his nerves as he looked into Kate’s eyes and saw that they had no memory of anything not fenced in by this river and its hills.

  He went to the door of the shack and looked in. It was bleak with the first chill of autumn. He turned to look at her plants. She had quite a garden of sage and wild flowers, but the flowers were now withering in the freezing nights. Facing her again, he said he wished she would go with him to the region of bilings, where she could be warm in any kind of weather. He and Bill and some others could take up her loved ones and carry them down there and bury them by the hot waters of a pool; and she could have a much lovelier garden, almost the year round. But he knew after a few minutes that his words were not entering the small bleak world where she lived. He sensed that in strange ways that he would never understand it was a wonderful world, where a mother lived with her children, and the angels and God. He framed her thin tired face with his big hands and lightly kissed her forehead and her hair.