Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher

by Vardis Fisher

  “I brought you some things,” he said, speaking cheerfully, doubting that she would understand a word. From his packhorses he took sugar, flour, coffee, salt, raisins; a roll of buckskin inside of which were pepper, needles, thread, matches; a roll of cotton cloth, inside of which were pencils and a notebook; and a buffalo robe. Here were pencil and paper, he said, holding them in full view of her stare. He thought she might like to write letters back home. Every time a mountain man came by she could hand the letters to him, and he would give to her the mail that came in for her. Sam had had the notion that she could be won back to a sense of the realities if she were to write and receive letters; but he knew, good Lord, he knew that she was far below that, or above it.

  He dressed out the meat, jerked most of it, roasted one tenderloin for himself and the other for her, and the next morning turned back up the river, He had not gone far when he stopped to think. Why would a woman, even a mad-woman, carry water all day long up a hill to water such a plant as the sage? Concluding that there must be a mystery in it, he decided to go back and spy on her. What did she think about all daylong, what did she dream about all night? The pile of wood he had laid by the south wall she had never touched; all around the cabin there was no sign that she had ever made a fire. She had never brought river mud to daub the hut—she must have almost frozen to death during the past winter, when temperatures dropped to thirty or forty below zero and winds colder than ice smote the walls. The more he thought about it the more incredible it seemed that she was still alive. On his way down the river he searched the bottoms but found no spot where she had dug for roots, no berry bush from which she had taken fruit.

  Hiding his beasts in a thicket, he went up the hills and turned north. Approaching behind one juniper and another, he drew within sixty yards of her and sat to make himself comfortable, and to observe her and wait. Peering between cedar branches, he had a good view of her and her yard. She was sitting. It looked to him as if she was sitting between the graves, and she seemed to be talking but he could not be sure of that. The sun was sinking; it would be dusk soon, and then night, with a full moon two hours before midnight. How simple it would be for a Blackfoot from the west, a Big Belly from the east, or a Crow from the south to slip in here and take her scalp and everything she had! He knew that redskins must have been tempted to the verge of frenzy. He knew that only fear of mountain-man vengeance stayed their hands. It had become a law of this country that if the redmen of any tribe were contemptuous or brutal toward any mountain man, or any person whom mountain men were protecting, word of it would go forth all the way to the San Juans, the Big Blue, and to Oregon’s Blue Mountains and beyond; and a summons to a rendezvous and vengeance, The vengeance would be so dreadful that survivors would turn gray with fear and flee to the remotest hills. Sam thought it unlikely that any buck would ever be fool enough to take the scalp of this defenseless woman.

  Because the wind was coming his way, down from the Bear Paw Mountains, he filled and kindled his pipe and breathed in the aroma of Kentucky tobacco. There was nothing much to see; she just sat there, and an hour passed, two hours, and she still sat, as though waiting for something or someone. When deeper dusk came he could barely see her. In the breeze moving over him he could smell her and the shack with its big pile of unclean bedding; he could smell the bleached-bone odor of the skulls and of all the deer bones mountain men had scattered roundabout. Putting his pipe away, he went on a wide detour and approached from the north. As she sat she faced the south by southwest. Taking his time, he slipped forward until he came to the shack on the north side; he then peered round the northwest corner. There she sat, between the bones of her children. He looked back to the hour when he had buried her loved ones; he saw the scene again and knew that her daughter’s grave was on her right, within reach of her hand; the grave of her sons on her left. The riddle was why she spent so much time there. For an hour Sam watched her and she did not move half an inch either way. He sensed that she was waiting for something but there was nothing before her that he could see, except a dozen sage plants that she had brought from the river bottom, and scrub juniper farther out, and the night dark of river trees.

  About ten o’clock the moon came out of mountain dark; it looked like a round piece of cardboard with pale paint smudges on it. But it cast a lot of light. He saw that at once there was a change in the woman; she moved a little and seemed to sit a little higher; she took something up from her lap; and then to his utter amazement she began to speak. Like a man who now found himself in a strange eerie place, he glanced round him and up at the night, and listened. Her back was to him but by the way her arms moved he knew that she had something in her hands that she was looking at. Her voice was surprisingly strong and clear. He heard the words, “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them.” Straining forward, he heard: “The Lord meant you, and you, John, and you, Robert—the wilderness and the solitary place, all around us here, it is for us. All this is glad for us, my darlings; you make it more pleasant in the sight of the Lord. John, my darling, Robert, my darling, and my darling daughter, do you all hear me? …”

  Sam heard her. He was rigid with astonishment. The moon had risen the height of four tall men in the sky, and Lou and John and Robert in the cocoons of their moon-gray sages were nodding softly, like flowers, and smiling, with heavenly radiance like a silken halo around them.

  Sam advanced from the corner, and stared and listened. In his wonderment he now realized that this woman had some education; he thought she had the accents of a schoolmarm. But he could see nothing to talk to. Soundlessly he advanced until he stood just behind her, and his amazement grew as he stared and listened.

  “We’re in the wilderness and solitary,” the woman’s voice said, clear and strong. “We don’t have much but we’ve always been poor people; all our people have been poor people as far back as anyone knows; but our Lord, he said to his disciples, ‘Blessed be ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger, for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now, for ye shall laugh ..,. ’ “

  “Almighty God!” Sam said under his breath.

  On her right the image of her daughter, so delicate that it seemed to have come from subdued light and the softest kind of cloud silk, moved as the breeze moved, and nodded gently and bowed, like flowers, and smiled and listened to her mother; and on her left the two sons, looking like pure soul divested of all its dross, smiled and nodded. Sam stared until his eyes ached but could see only the sage and the withered flowers. After an hour he slipped back to the north side of the cabin and there he pinched himself to be sure that he was not asleep and dreaming; looked out to the distant hills like piles of night dark; at the tree line of the river—at all these to see if they were still familiar, for he was feeling uneasy and queersorne. Everything looked as it had always looked, except this woman. He now returned to his position behind her and looked down over her head to see what was in her lap. Never would she know that this tall man stood almost touching her and stared at her gray hair and at the Bible in her hands. His eyes searched the earth before her and the plants, but except the plants and the woman and the cedars and the river trees he could see no sign of living image.

  To her dear ones and her darlings she was now saying, “Repeat after me the words, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.’ ” She told them that most men seemed not to want peace, but mothers wanted peace, for the good of their children. Sam strained his ear; but could hear only her voice and the flow of the river and the cries of night birds. He saw that here and there in the book she had put slivers of paper; she would lift pages, fifty or a hundred at a time, and move from one slip of paper to another; and then pause to read, ” ‘For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace; the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing.’ ” A little later she was telling them that the Lord called on the heavens to sing and the earth to be filled with joy, and all the
mountains to burst with song. She was saying, “Until he comes we will be solitary in the wilderness.”

  Sam slipped fifty yards out into the night, so that tobacco smoke would not reach her, and filled his pipe and smoked. There had been strange music in her words, strange soothing caress, as of a wild mother’s hand; he did not want to let this tenderness go from him. The mountains and the hills would break into singing? For him the earth had always been singing. Here in these mountains were fugues, arias, sonatas, the thousands and millions of them interweaving the harmonies of one another; and there was the other side of it, in Thomas Hood’s lines:

  There is a silence where hath been no sound,

  There is a silence where no sound may be.

  There was that kind of silence in the pathetic youngster hanging from the tree crotch. Suddenly there came to Sam an impulse to get his organ and at a distance from her, unseen and unknown, play soft music. So he went to his baggage and returned; and lying on his belly behind a mound of earth, with the night breeze moving across him and toward her, he made low musical tones, while wondering what he should play. His instrument was not generous enough for Bach’s organ music. The things that flooded his soul were the love songs he had sung and played for Lotus. “Have You Seen a Whyte Lily Grow?” He played that. He played a tender Mozart minuet, the soft notes floating away on the breeze to that dear mother’s ears. Almost at once she began to sing. The sound of her voice in mezzo-soprano song was so electrifying that for a few moments Sam was put off his music; he could only listen in astonishment and gaze up at the night sky, knowing that the Creator had a hand in this. The woman did not move or turn to look round her. He thought she was singing hymns; he began to improvise, mixing snatches from serenades, Corelli phrases, the themes of thrush, lark, and warbler, in a pleasing assonance all his own. After a while he understood that what he played did not matter at all, as long as it was in harmony with her mood, the moon, and the night. With her back to him she was singing to her children, and Sam was playing softly to the stars and his mother and Lotus. He kept the notes low, for he did not want to alarm her; the whole lovely thing would have been shattered if even a faint suspicion had broken through to her mind. He blew out just enough music from “The Mellow Horn,” bird arias, the theme so often repeated in Beethoven’s violin concerto, and other musical tidbits, to keep her singing. For two hours or longer she sang in a fair soprano, with a marvelously clear bell-tone now and then ringing from her throat; and the moon rose to the zenith and a thousand stars came out.

  When at last Sam slipped away into the night he wondered if his playing had been a kindness: if there was no music tomorrow night, the next night, and for weeks or months, how would she feel about it? Well, doggone it, he would return as often as he could, to play what she surely must think was heavenly music. She would hear it and she would sing to her children: deeper happiness than that there was none, for mothers anywhere.

  18

  BECAUSE IT WAS impossible to enter the geyser basins on horseback up the Yellowstone or over the Yellowstone Mountains Sam had to go south and up the South Fork and past Hawks Rest and down the Yellowstone to the lake. Across timbered mountains, black and beautiful with health, he followed the east side of the lake, going north, and then the north side, until he came to steaming springs. It was a marvel to all who had seen this coastline, for out in the cold lake were hot springs, some of them a hundred yards out; and there the hot and cold waters mingled, and steam rose from the surface. At the lake’s edge a man could find water of any temperature, between icy cold and almost boiling. Before going to the area on the west side of pouting and hissing paint and mud pots Sam stripped off and plunged in. He had known no experience more exhilarating than swimming back and forth through extremes of hot and cold. It was such a delightful and thrilling surrender of his senses to the caresses that, floating on his back and looking up at the blue, he said to the Creator, in Bill’s language, “No man alive ever made a bath pool like thissen!” What was it the woman had read from the holy book? “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them.” How glad he was to be here, solitary, alone, and safe in the wilderness!

  This evening he was entertained by the mudpots, which he thought of as mud mouths: they took him back to the blond neighbor girl, named Nancy, who had puffed her cheeks at him and then slapped them with both palms, pretending that her face had exploded. Another of her impish tricks had been to puff her cheeks as far out as she could and then insert a small reed between her lips. It was, she gravely told him, a puncture; as she forced air out through the reed her cheeks slowly collapsed, her blue eyes all the while soberly watching him. The hot mud mouths puffed their lips out and up; and sometimes the lips parted and a burst of hot steam-breath shot up; and sometimes the lips were expanded to astonishing fullness, without parting, like thin gray rubber or a toad’s throat. Now and then they sucked back and forth, as Nancy had sucked her lips in and pushed them out.

  Sitting on warm earth among the mudpots, he tried to write a letter to his parents. Unlike the great explorers Lewis and Clark, who had come through the rocky mountain land before Sam was born, or famous scouts like Bridger and Carson and Greenwood, Sam had had twelve years in good schools. With note pad on his knees and brows perplexed, he wrote the salutation; and then for ten minutes wondered what to say and what not to say. Should he tell them that he had taken up arms against an entire Indian nation and next spring would be on the warpath again? No, he would not worry them with that. Should he tell them that he had married a lovely and loving Indian girl, who only a few months later had been struck down by a pack of killers? Should he tell them that he stood chance of being dead within a year? No, he would tell them only pleasant things. He recalled how one morning his mother had looked out at a wide-spreading apple tree with five bushels of ripe apples on it and said, “This is the first time I ever thought of an apple tree as a mother.” His mouth watered as he remembered the sound fragrance and the juices bursting past his lips as he sank strong teeth in those apples. Waugh, if only he had one now!

  Well, he would tell them that the more he looked round the world the plainer became the glorious truth that the Creator was a great artist in all fields. His paintings, which included sunsets and mornings, mountain lakes in pure jeweled radiance, and the firmament with two rainbows across it after a rain, were Rubens and Rembrandt on canvas as big as worlds. What sculptor would dare set his puny and trifling creations beside the Tetons or the Black Hills or the Wind River range, or the vast acres of ruga in the lava flows over by the Snake? The Creator had more bird musicians, playing their arias with flute, piccolo, harp, and tiny horn, than any man could guess at—in any moment of the twenty-four hours there were millions of bird throats singing. In His stupendous orchestrations the Creator could overwhelm a man with His mastery of counterpoint in rivers and winds and thunders, or with the variations in His cosmic sonatas. Sam would tell his father he ought to be out here, for he remembered the man’s deep emotion when he listened to the conclusion of the second movement of Beethoven’s Third or the F-minor sonata. If only he could hear the music in this wild land—the horn calls of the loon, coot, crane, helldiver grebe, or the incredible music of the snipe’s tail feathers at dusk!

  He would tell them that snow was falling in winter blankets on the forests now but that he was sitting on hot earth, with hot water boiling out all around him. If they were here they might be looking at small puffs of steam above a stone basin and a few moments later see a million gallons of boiling water hurled a hundred feet into the air, to fall downward in streamers and mists as still other millions of gallons exploded from the world’s hot insides. Deep warm fog in subzero weather would envelop them. He would try to make them understand what a divine loveliness it was when, in heavy snowstorm, the millions of flakes, many as large as oak leaves, descended into the atmosphere above one of the steam vents; how, looking up, they would see the millions of them coming down; how they would see them vanish by m
illions, as in the winking of an eye they melted and fell in big fat raindrops; how they would marvel at this enormous chamber of heat within a circumference of pure white snow. In a hundred or two hundred steps from hot earth they would find snow six or eight feet deep. In only a few seconds they could walk from thirty-degrees-below-zero cold into such warmth that they could stand in comfort with all their clothes off. They could lie in a hot natural pool and see trees so cold that they were bursting open.

  He would spend the winter here, alone, thinking of his wife and son, without having to keep his eyes skinned, as Windy Bill would say, day and night. The snow all around him except in the hot places might be eight or ten feet deep; but the grass was tall and his horses would paw the snow away to find it. He would get two or three elk before the heaviest snows came, he would jerk some meat and hang up some hindquarters; and he might go south to the Big Snake where he would find whole mountainsides of berry bushes bent under their fruit. Like the red people, he might gather some acorns, pine nuts, chestnuts, hazelnuts; and of berries the service, elder, choke, thimble, as well as big juicy yellow currants and rich wild plums. Away down south beyond the San Juans was a tall sage plant, the seeds of which Indians pounded into flour. Jim Bridger called it chia; he said bread made of it was so strong that when washing his hands a man had to be careful or he would pull his fingers off. The Creator had put an abundance of food in the land and there was no tax on it. Had they ever heard of wild broom corn and balsam root? If they would come out for a visit their son would set before them such feasts as they had never known; and they could take home a bag of pemmican made of buffalo tenderloin, hump fat, huckleberries, and arrowroot jelly.