Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher

by Vardis Fisher

  Tongue in cheek, he would tell them that they might wish to sample red-ant cakes, made of the terrible big red ant, mixed with camas roots and onion bulbs. Or for breakfast with their pancakes they might like a hash of grasshoppers, or rattlesnake broiled on cedar embers, or a paste of castoreum. That was the orange-brown stuff from the beaver, with the strong wild odor, which trappers used as a lure.

  Above all, he would ask them to imagine the kind of winter he was spending, with its pure mountain streams, its deep white snows, its millions of acres of forest that an axe had never touched; its abundance of food, its cathedral quiet when the birds were hushed, its hot baths and chambers—all as free as a mother’s love for her child.

  After writing the letter he wrapped it in buckskin to keep it dry and safe from mice.

  He lingered a few days at the delightful hot springs by the lake and then crossed a low mountain range to the geyser basins. He was now in dense forest that lay before him in all directions for a hundred miles. Under a huge pine just south of the geyser that would someday be known as Old Faithful he made his camp. When it became cold enough to keep meat withoutjerking it he brought in both elk and deer, and the choicest portions he hung from branches of trees, loosely shrouded in buckskin sheaths. He had plenty of salt, sugar, coffee, tobacco, a fifty-pound bag of flour, a thousand rounds of ammunition, seeds and nuts and dried fruit, perfect health, and a mountain appetite. What more, he would have asked the philosophers, did any man want? And all of it was free.

  It was in his thankful moods, induced by thunder’s magnificent orchestrations or the witchery of high-mountain snowstorms, that he would climb to the spine of a range and stride along it, flinging his arms toward heaven and pouring song from his throat. The wonder of being alive and healthy and free was for him such a miracle that only in song could he express his gratitude. “Thank you, thank you!” he would cry, his red face and golden beard turned up to the storm. Then he would go on long strides, singing into, the thunder or the snow, or with his feeble music try to be an instrument in the cosmic harmonies. An empyrean glissando in the rolling chords of thunder might abash him for a few moments; but soon he would be exploding his loud cries in his eifort to develop his theme of joy-in-life over the theme of death-levels-all; and he would try to build his own crescendo, as though he were a bassoon or a French horn, all the while waving his arms to bring in other instruments, the whole ten thousand of them, for the celestial finale.

  Once by a slim chance Bill had seen this red-bearded giant striding against the skyline down a mountain’s back, and had said later to Hank Cady that he figgered Sam had been teched by the death of his wife. For there he was up yonder like a buffler bull full of mush and molasses, bellering his head off. Had Hank ever seen the likes of him? Hank said in his slow, over-deliberate way that he expected Sam was just happy. He hadn’t ever knowed a man loved life like Sam.

  Sam was writing a lyric in the only way he knew, or a paean of thanksgiving, for he thought that life was indeed a “wilderness of sweets” and his transports carried him now and then to bel cantos so wild that most men would have thought them pure lunacy. Sam was enraptured, enchanted, fascinated by the simple fact of being alive and healthy, with no clock to watch, no boss over him, no taxes to pay, no papers to sign, nobody to give an accounting to, except the Creator, whom he was glad to thank morning, noon, and night. He would have said that in an ideal world every man should have at least ten thousand acres on which to stride and explode and feel free. That was a puny spot, that many acres, but a man could turn around on it. He had heard McNees say that at the rate babies were being born all over the earth the time would come when no man could find room to stand on and blow his nose.

  It was Bill who told Kate about Sam Minard. He told her that Sam strode up and down all the mountain spines in the west, singing into the heavens and praising God. Thereafter Kate always saw him when she looked for him. She would look off in the direction of the Big Belt or Bear Paw Mountains, though from where she stood she could see none of them; and there in the sky was a stupendous range, and Sam striding along the crests, looking as tall as pine trees, a gigantic figure with flaming hair and beard, and a voice that could be heard halfway around the world. It got to be a habit with her to stare at him in the far blue mists and to listen to his singing.

  One of the best cooks among mountain men, Sam’s specialty was steaks. He had learned that steaks broiled over embers absorbed the flavor of the wood; and so he had used all the kinds of wood he would find: pine, fir, spruce, and cedar he did not like, for they were too strong; aspen and willow were better, alder was fair. The flavors of woods also appeared in tanning. Those squaws did the best tanning, in both odors and textures, who had the best wood for it. Sam could smell a piece of leather and usually tell what wood had been used. He wouldn’t wear leather for which the wood had been the poplar, willow, aspen, birch or plum.

  It took him five or six hours to broil ten pounds of elk steaks and to make two pans of biscuits. It was the steaks that took so much time, and digging the fat out of marrowbones. The embers had to be just right, and he had to hover over the meat, lest it absorb too much of the wood odor. Here in the geyser basin he had some pepper beans, which he powdered in a mortar. For butter on his biscuits he used marrow. He had wild honey, which he had robbed bees of; when his meal was ready he feasted on juicy dripping steaks, biscuits sopped with marrow fat and honey, and coffee. While eating he would look out to watch the geyser blow. He could have felt no safer from the redmen if he had been encamped at the entrance to hell. His chief problem was his appetite; he had to have three big meals every day, and if they were all hot meals, most of his time was spent cooking. The livers he ate raw, or warmed through and seasoned; and every day he ate a handful of rose hips, for the reason that Bill Williams said every mountain man should. He also ate uncooked the livers from trout and grouse; they were extremely tender and savory.

  One of his chief joys in wintertime was to walk in deep snowstorm when there was no wind but only the loveliness of movement and design, light and shadow, as the countless flakes like tumbling moths came down in such density and in such dodging, weaving, swirling grace that he found it amazing that no two flakes ever seemed to collide. They reminded him of the fantastically intricate dance of gnats when thousands of them in a tight swarm moved for hours in a pattern so complex and yet so perfect that no one man could believe it possible who had not seen it. He marveled at the flight of birds. He had watched redwinged lackbirds passing over him in early morning, on their way to feeding grounds, and he had guessed their number in the hundreds of thousands, possibly in millions, for they had been flying at a speed of twenty or thirty miles an hour, yet had darkened the sky above him for thirty minutes. All of them darted and bobbed and dipped and capered like birds out of their minds with joy, yet he had never seen two of them touch one another. He would lie on his back in soft new snow a foot deep and gaze at the myriad flakes until his senses swam, and never once had he seen a flaw in the constantly changing and infinitely complex pattern. It was as if every flake had eyes. He could never foresee where one would come to rest, for until the very instant of touching snow, earth, or water it was weaving and dancing and changing its course, yet it came to rest as if it had found the inevitable and perfect spot for its soft little cargo of frozen water. He would rise and walk again, and in the gentle wonderful world of white storm and dusk he would see wild things—his neighbors, the rabbits, birds, deer, weasels, bobcats—all acting as if they were as glad and thankful as he. A deer, ears pointed toward him, would stand and gaze at him, its coloring blending so perfectly with the storm’s gray dusk that it hardly looked alive; and then it would move soundlessly away and vanish, like a patch of slightly darker dusk dissolving into the storm. The rabbits were gentler, the birds tamer, in a deep storm; all wild things seemed to feel the grace of benediction. The melting flakes reached down over his face like tiny cold fingers; the snow on his golden hair sopped it and turn
ed it curly. He felt the damp against his moccasined feet, the chill down his spine.

  The geyser, to which he came now, was larger and angrier than the one by his camp. It exploded its furies only once in a while. He was lucky, for as he approached the geyser he heard the hissing and rumbling up its hot throat, and after a few minutes saw, first, a prelude of belchings, as of a throat being cleared, and then the immense quantities of boiling water vaulting upward, to spill downward like shattered water-falls. The geyser then seemed to pause, as if gathering the forces in the depths of its belly, and then vomited even more sensationally, with the steam devouring the storm over a wide area. Hot water fell downward in tumbling piles of vapor and flowed in steaming rivers toward him. This colossal eruption in the depths of a snowstorm was, Sam told himself, as beautiful as anything he had ever seen or heard. A man just about had to believe that Beethoven had seen it. Dropping to his knees, he swept the snow back and put an ear to the stone crust. He thought he could hear monstrous rumblings and heavings of subterranean waters, as though the whole earth might burst open in one self-consuming vomit. No wonder the redmen fled this spot. Sam backed away from it and into the storm, and watched, entranced, until the last furious pulls and snorts had been blown out of the throat and the underground angers had fallen back into the belly’s gurglings.

  In cupped palms he gathered hot water and drank it. Two or three hundred miles south were the soda springs, by the Oregon Trail, from which he had drunk. He liked those waters and their catharsis but these in Colter’s bilins tasted of alkali and bitter salts.

  After he had rubbed his horses down and eaten a big supper he spread his bed on earth that fire had warmed, and lay, snugly enfolded, and wondered about his future. He suspected, in these deeper moments of calm, that he had been a bit of a fool to fling a challenge into the beautiful white teeth of a whole nation; for as long as the vendetta endured he would have to be vigilant twenty-four hours a day, the whole year round. He had no wish to spend his life in a blood feud but he could think of no sensible and honorable way to withdraw. The red people loved feuds and warpaths and undying hates. They wouldn’t want him to ask for peace. And there were the Blackfeet and Cheyennes, possibly even the Sioux and Arapahoes, all determined to capture him. And every scalp he lifted would boost the ransom.

  It was not that he was afraid; he was as much a stranger to fear as the human male can be. It was not that he would feel sorry for himself if he fell under the redman’s weapons. It was that he knew a simple truth, that men who loved life were not men who liked to kill, He would never be able to put out of memory the shocked and paralyzed youngster who had looked at him or the ungainly pathetic body hanging from the tree. Besides, he wanted to trap and hunt, cook and eat and sleep, without having to be watchful every minute. He’d not mind too much staying on the warpath another year, if the hotblooded idiots would then wipe their knives and go home. They would never do that. He had begun to think that most men in the world wanted nothing more than any enemy whom they could hate and plot against. He did not pretend to know why this was so.

  He hoped the next summer to ride over to visit his father-in-law. He might take a gift of four or five gallons of rum; like all the redmen, Tall Mountain had an enormous thirst for it. Living in an area meager with game and pelts, he did not have much to trade that white men wanted. He would be transported to a red heaven if Sam were to make a long journey to see him—a white son visits his red father, and rides two hundred miles right through Blackfeet country!

  During this winter of reflection, with its many marvelous storms, there were tasks to keep him busy. He had garments to make. Because his hands were so large he was not nimble with needle and thread. Bear Paws Meek, fat and jolly and tobacco-stained, had large hands but he had a pianist’s mastery of them. There was nothing dainty or artistic in Sam’s sewing; he punched holes through the leather with a bone awl, thrust the needle through, and pulled the leather thread through one hole after another, to make his moccasins and leggins, trousers and jackets. While sewing he would wonder what kind of people they were back east and over in Europe who clamored to buy the scalps of the red people. Would they also be eager to buy testicles? He also made during this winter several pairs of moccasins for the bay; he expected next summer to be pursued not only by Crows but by war parties from the Blackfeet and Cheyennes. In certain dangerous situations two or three layers of leather over the stone hoofs of a horse were the difference between life and death. If he were to outwit the warriors the old chief sent against him he would need to be master of warcraft and woodcraft—equal to Kit Carson in the first and Jim Bridger in the second. He was pretty sure that he had got Wolf Teeth; two years earlier he had seen this brave showing off on his pony, and had marveled that a man could ride with such grace and skill. It was said that some of the Crow warriors could hit flying birds with a rifle; that some were so noiseless they could slip up to the sleeping wolf and take it by the tail; and that some could devise phenomenal deceptions in ambush. Sam was not at all sure that he would be alive when the next frosts came but he was a fatalist; a man, like the buffalo or elk bull, could only do his best, and when his time came let go his grip on life and slip under.

  As spring approached he put his weapons in perfect condition. A knife got dull and needed a lot of fine honing. He had two Bowies, so that in a tight place he could lay enemies open with both hands. In a buckskin pouch he had pieces of obsidian and filing whetstone, which he had saturated with hot goose oil to make oilstones, and hard and soft leathers. One knife, his finest, he kept wrapped in soft oiled leather; the other was his hunting and kitchen knife. His rifle and revolvers he kept spotless. He was not the kind of shot with a revolver that Bill Hickok would be a few years later, or with a rifle, as a man named Carver would be; but he felt that he was a match for the Crows, for the reason that his nerve would be steadier. The redmen in a crisis were notoriously bad shots. Bridger said it was because for the redman a gun was big medicine and all medicine was magic. If you were using magic you didn’t have to pay much attention to sights or wind drift or buck ager. Buck ague or buck fever the mountain men called buck ager; they meant the trembles and willies, when a man suddenly faced a charging grizzly or bull moose. The redmen, as Sam had sized them up, were pretty good nghters when running, or riding hell-bent in a pack, because the heat of battle and the presence around them of their own kind brought their courage to the fusing point; but alone, man to man or man to grizzly, without war cries and wild commotion, few of them had the heart for it. Now and then one preferred to fight alone for the glory of it. It was these, Sam knew, who would be sent against him.

  During this winter, when he lay snugly warm in the dark midnight of another dead day, he faced the possibility of capture and so thought of the squaws. Tom Fitzpatrick said they were red women, not squaws, but Sam knew that squaw was the word for female among the Massachusetts Indians. Most mountain men thought them too cruel and ferocious to be called women, much less ladies; for look at the way some of them beat their dogs. When the squaws of most tribes went for firewood they used dogs, with their travées or trabogans; the dogs of the Crows looked to Sam like a cross between wolves and rawboned shaggy mongrels. They looked mean and evil and they were lazy. When harnessed to the trabogans they were a sight to make the whitemen die laughing; they sank back on their haunches like balky mules, and with tongues lolling and crafty eyes half closed they simply sat. The squaws then would run shrieking at them, and the dogs would slink away toward the woods; but after the trabogans were loaded with wood the dogs sank not to their hams but to their bellies, and like the mother grouse protecting her young, pretended to be wounded. It had looked to Sam as if some of them had feigned sickness. Ungovernable furies then seized the squaws; screaming and wailing, they would grasp heavy cudgels, and running up to the dogs, almost knock their heads off. Sam had never seen his Lotus angry, or brutal with any creature.

  Sam had dug a bath hole in the earth, into which and out of which ho
t water flowed; and in the hole he soaked himself every day. What a land it was! All over its broad breast there were hot springs; Bridger said it was possible to travel a thousand miles and have a hot spring at every campsite. Since Sam had learned, with the Indians, to bathe in cold water, winter and summer, it was a delightful luxury to lie half asleep in a hot pool; and this, with the sumptuous meals, the magnificent mountain-winter all around him, the crisp purity of the air, and the wild things in the silence and aloneness, made him unwilling to leave the basin. With Lotus and his son he would have been content to live here forever. It seemed to him that in wintertime most people suffered a wintering of their emotions. And one other thing he had learned: that the folk in cities never got a chance to know themselves and one another: in this land, where enemies honed a man’s wits and the forces of nature kept him trimmed of physical and emotional fat, a person had to learn what he was and what he was not.

  It was late April before Sam reluctantly, saddled and packed his beasts, hung a revolver and knife from his waist, mounted the bay, and sat for ten minutes looking around him. He then went over to the lake and down the west side to the headwaters of Snake River, and followed the river to the broad valley of the Tetons. On one of the streams flowing past those magnificent sculpturings he expected to find Wind River Bill.

  19

  “WALL NOW, I’ll be cussed fer a porkypine!” Bill cried as Sam rode up to his cabin door. “If it ain’t the Crow-killer hisself I’ll be hog-tied and earmarked. Sam, whar in hell have ye bin?”

  “Out and around,” Sam said.