Sam would have said that a full hour passed before a sudden movement in the bay’s head told him that the enemy had become visible. Sam now considered leaping up with his rifle and making a duel of it but he was not sure that his rifle would fire. Even so, his enemy would have the advantage of the first shot. If the Indian was as cool as ice—and some of the red warriors were—the second shot would mark the end of Sam Minard. Or if the second shot dropped his horse and the Indian had confederates Sam would be as good as dead.
He decided that his best chance was to play as dead as gone beaver.
The bay’s ears, eyes, nostrils, and whole face told Sam that the redman was advancing. Sam could hear no sound of feet. He had not expected to. His right eye was buried and could see nothing, but the upper part of his left eye had a clear view of the horse’s head, neck, and shoulders. The ears were now up and forward; the eyes were standing out a little in anger and fear; there were spasms in the nostrils and the neck muscles. By the direction of the beast’s gaze Sam knew that the Indian was coming in from the right and front. He felt a wish to examine the handle of his Bowie and the stock of his rifle, for he felt sure that the bullet had struck one of them. He could feel no wound, he had no sense of bleeding. What a lucky fool he had been! But as J im Bridger said, a man got real big luck only once.
Sam did not dare to make the slightest move, for the Indian’s eyes were almost as keen as the hawk’s. Knowing that the foe was slowly coming in and that the slightest movement would fetch a bullet into his back, Sam barely breathed. When he saw the bay’s eyes open wider for a moment, then return to their normal position, he knew that the Indian had paused. In fancy Sam could see him there, crouched, silent, peering, listening. What a hero homecoming he was dreaming of, when, waving The Terror’s scalp, he accepted the shrieking acclaim of his people! It was because the hero would want a perfect scalp that Sam knew he need not fear the tomahawk—for the hatchet, as old Gus Hinkle loved to tell the greenhorns, spiled the skelp.
For about five minutes (the horse’s eyes told him) the Indian stood and looked and listened. Sam knew that the redskin was studying the prone body for signs of breathing. He must have decided at last that his foe was not feigning, for the bay lifted his head suddenly a good three inches, flared his nostrils, and opened his eyes wider. These told Sam not only that the Indian was again advancing, but advancing more swiftly. That was good. Perhaps he was now coming at a fair walk, eager to lift the scalp and possess the horse. He knew that the Indian would stop again, when only twenty-five or thirty feet away, and again study the body for signs of breathing. If he saw none he would again advance, hoping to seize the bridle reins. If the horse backed away the Indian would pursue it, if he had no doubt that Sam was dead. Sam had his hands in such a position that he could draw a small breath without movement; it was his abdomen and not his diaphragm that moved a little in and out.
As he waited he could recall no time in his life when he had been more tense and anxious. He tried to relax just a little, for when the moment came to move he would have to move with what mountain men called greased lightning, which was almost as fast as the cougar’s speed when it leapt from the ledge to the shoulders of moose or elk. What disturbed Sam most was the fact that his enemy was behind him; it gave him a touch of gooseflesh. His left eye, strained and smarting and staring upward, and winking fast to keep the tears away and its sight clear, watched the bay’s head. He figured that when the foe was fifteen feet away, or surely no less than ten, the horse would bug his eyes and perhaps snort a little, and back off two or three steps. That was the moment when Sam would make his move, for in that instant the horse’s movements and its compulsion to flight would rivet the Indian’s attention.
Staring up, Sam saw that the bay’s eyes were growing a little wider all the time. They were an exact measure of the Indian’s movements and of his distance from Sam. But there were other registers in the handsome sensitive face of the bay—in the ears, the nostrils, in the nerves down the cheek, and in the neck. What a picture he made!—standing guard over his prone master, and staring in fright and anger and astonishment at the noiseless slinking creature in war paint and headdress, coming forward.
The sudden low snort came a little sooner than Sam had expected. The horse jerked his head up a good six inches and his eyes bugged with a mixture of ferocity and terror. In the same instant he backed off two swift steps. And in that instant Sam moved. His whole body shot backwards about three feet, propelled by his hands and arms; and all his muscles turned hard and tense for the leap that followed. In the moment of moving backwards he also came to his feet, his lungs filling with air; and he exploded a dreadful screaming cry that in the dry atmosphere could have been heard for two miles. It was such a fearful screech of rage that the Indian, only a few feet from the horse, his hands reaching out, was stricken; and before his nerveless right hand could raise his knife Sam’s powerful grasp was on his throat and the bones in his neck were snapping. As the bones snapped Sam’s right foot came up and with tremendous power struck the redman in his loins, sending him in a reeling spin. An instant later Sam was on him, to cut off the right ear and the scalp, and it was when drawing his knife
that he learned that the little finger of his right hand had been shot away.
After a second glance at his hand Sam turned away without taking the scalp and went to his horse. The beast had backed off about sixty feet, and there he stood, nostrils twitching, his whole body trembling, his bulging eyes looking at his master. Sam went up to him slowly, gently, saying “It’s all right, old feller, it’s all right”; and voice and hands tried to soothe him. Gentle palms caressed the head and neck; stroked down the flat hard cheeks; and down the forehead, a forefinger softly patting just above the upper lid of the eyes. Standing to the left of the head, Sam put his right hand under the chin to the right cheek, as Lotus had done with her pony that farewell morning; and while he stroked the cheek he searched the horizon around him and talked all the while. “You saved my life, old feller. Do you know that? You’re bettern the wren and the road runner and the magpie …. ” Looking over the horse, Sam saw that he was covered with sweat. So he went on talking and patting, until the bay no longer trembled and had a normal expression in his eyes; and not until then did Sam look at the stock of his rifle. A piece of it had been shot out, along with his finger. The bullet had taken his finger, hit the stock, deflected, and plowed a furrow across Sam’s stomach and up his ribs. Two inches back of a rib it had torn out a piece of skin and flesh as big as his thumb. Drawing his leather clothing up, he studied his wounds. They were nothing at all. He would have a long scar across his side and he guessed he would call it his lotus scar. He would fill the wounds with tobacco, and with balsam sap when he came to spruce trees. For a few moments he looked at the bloody bone stub of his finger and wondered if he ought to try to draw skin over it. He guessed not.
Going over to the Indian, he tried to make out the features but they were lost in hump fat and red ochre. The Indian braves, he was thinking, were only boys at heart; they simply must smear themselves with rancid grease and dance through a clutter of rituals and shriek like lunatics to get their blood up. Was this Eagle Beak? In any case it was one of the twenty. Sam looked into the medicine bag; pieces of the totem should be in it—teeth, claws, tail, beak, or something. There was a beak. Sam studied it and thought it might be the beak of the golden eagle. Had he slain the most deadly one of all his enemies? He hoped he had.
All the while scanning the world around him, he took off the moccasins, thinking that Kate could use them; took the scalp and shook blood from it, and hung it and an ear from a saddle string; chewed tobacco and rubbed its juice in his wounds and over the bone stub; and then mounted the bay. Farther north in Crow country he would hang the medicine bag above a well-traveled trail, for all the passing braves to see. Glancing over at the dead warrior, he thought it a pity to leave such a brave man to the vultures and ravens.
He sat, the ritle acr
oss his left arm, and looked round him. It was God-forsaken country all right, if it could be said that the Almighty had disowned any of His handiwork: as far as a man could see in all directions it was ravines, gullies, washes, eroded bluffs, alkali lime wastes, with only stunted plants. He didn’t suppose that the bones of Eagle Beak would ever be found away out here. Curious to learn how he had been so neatly ambushed, Sam rode in the direction from which the bullet had come. He found the exact spot where his foe had knelt and fired, and guessed the distance at two hundred yards. It was a fair shot at that distance. He remembered that most Indians preferred gut shots. A good gut shot might take time but it always killed, whereas a shot in the rib cage might not be mortal, unless it struck the heart or exploded the liver.
Sam now perceived how his enemy had got close to him. Below was a deep ravine that ran forty yards east, swung sharply to the south for about a mile, and then to the southwest. Two miles back Sam had crossed the head of this ravine. Eagle Beak, on his trail, had ridden swiftly up the ravine, to wait for him. Sam felt hopelessly stupid. Only a fool would ride up a long ridge, with a deep ravine parallel to his line of travel. He might as well walk naked into a Crow village and climb into the pot and tell the squaws to pour boiling water over him.
Descending into the ravine, Sam found the Indian’s pony in a thicket of scrub juniper. It was a fine horse. The twenty picked warriors had had their choice from large herds. Near the horse was a bedroll. Feeling over it, Sam could tell that inside were ammunition and a skin of pemmican. There was no saddle. After tying the roll across the pony Sam mounted the bay, and leading the pony climbed out of the ravine. The redman’s rifle he left by the stone where it had been fired.
He was hungry but his thoughts were on the Musselshell and back with the dead warrior. On his way to the Yellowstone he killed tive more warriors, three of whom, their horses and equipment said, belonged to the twenty. He was a little tired of killing these people; it was too much like knocking over fool hens. Two of those he killed were mere boys, with poor weapons, shaky trigger Hngers, and a childlike belief in magic. Perhaps he ought to go visit his father-in-law. He might find another Lotus there.
21
HE WAS THINKING of all this while riding across wolf country. During the deep winters in northern latitudes wolves roamed over the frozen world, looking for deer, elk, moose, even for mountain sheep and goat, that had become feeble from hunger and got stuck in the snow. When spring came, wolves looked for dead animals that had been buried by snowslides. The grizzly and other bears, ravenous with hunger after the long sleep, also searched along steep mountainsides, where the avalanches of melting snow swept down, uncovering the tender shoots of early plants, and animals that had died during the fall and winter. Sometimes wolf and bear met on these feeding grounds.
In the southern foothills of the Bighorns four big gray prairie wolves, the mother and father and two children, had found several deer that had been smothered by a snowslide. They had eaten and were making a cache of the remainder, at the base of a sheer ledge that rose above them, when with a movement as swift as any in the animal world the bitch turned, at the same time lifting her head and pulling her lips back to show her fangs. A deep warning growl came up her throat. The father wolf, alerted, looked over at his mate. The two youngsters also sounded a warning. Then all four, backs arched, ears forward, fangs clicking, looked off to the left, where an enormous male grizzly had risen to his hind feet, to have a better look around him. He had smelled the dead flesh. There he stood, a monster, his small eyes peering, his front furry paws hanging loosely. But for his sensitive sniffing nose he seemed to be in an attitude of prayer. Because the wolves were a hundred yards away it is possible that the bear did not see them, for like the buffalo’s, his eyesight was poor; but he smelled the meat and he thought he knew where it was. Sinking soundlessly to all four feet, he moved forward in an easy rolling gait of fat and fur. The wolves watched him come on and warned him with growls and snappings, and backs steadily arching higher. Even if the grizzly had seen the four of them he would not have paused. This male weighed eleven hundred pounds and was afraid of nothing on earth that he had ever seen, though he did try to keep sensibly out of sight when he smelled men and gunpowder. His only plan was to find the flesh and eat, and then stretch out for a siesta in the warm sun.
When sixty feet from the wolves he heard them and his dim eyes saw them. He then did what a grizzly bear usually did when faced by something whose nature and purpose he was not sure of. He rose to his hind legs, his front paws again in that curious attitude of prayer. He saw the four wolves—they now stood abreast, facing him, backs arched, mouths open, teeth snapping. He smelled the animal anger in them but he also smelled the flesh and he was too hungry to be prudent.
When the bear sank again and stood on his four enormous paws he seemed to consider his position for a few moments and then moved forward; and four wolves shot toward him like four gray lightning flashes. If a man’s eyes had been watching—and from the ledge above a man’s eyes were watching—they could not have followed the incredible speed and agility and grace of these four wild dogs. As the father wolf shot past on the bear’s right he snapped savagely at the sensitive nose; and on the other side the mother wolf snapped at it; and though the grizzly in a flash raised a paw and swept an area, long curved talons extended, the wolves not only were gone from his reach but had rushed past his flanks and turned and leapt to his back. Both mother and father had fangs over two inches long, and jaws so powerful they could crack the leg bones of an elk. Both nosed into the deep fur and sank their teeth in the upper flanks; and when the bear, astonished and burning with anger, made woofing sounds and awkwardly rose to his hind legs, the two wolves clung to him, fangs buried. The youngsters, obeying the knowledge that lay deep in their instincts, flashed forward the moment the bear reared, and tried to bite and tear through fur and hide to his ham tendons. The grizzly was covered over with tawny gray furies determined to kill him.
Most bears are by nature placid, good-natured, and friendly. if this grizzly had any power of thought in his small dark skull he must have wondered why he should be attacked merely because he wanted food. All the first sounds he made were of astonishment and wonder; then came exclamations of pain and anger; and when the parent wolves dropped from the back and gouged at the hams, eager to chew the tendons in two, the grizzly exploded with a roar of rage that shook the mountain, and sinking again to four feet, turned swiftly round and round, his front paws sweeping across great arcs but never touching his foes. It was now that the wolves showed their amazing agility and daring. Not a dog among them, not even the young ones, but knew that if the bear’s powerful paw struck them they would be ripped open from shoulder to ham. Yet with superlative courage they took their chances. The four of them were marvels of speed and light as they flashed in and struck, flashed out, burned in a lightning instant, and struck again. Never once was one found in the way of another. Time after time the bear’s long deadly claws came within an inch or less of striking dog flesh; but not once during the fight was wolf touched by fang or talon. The bear was so goaded, so out of his mind with fury and frustration, that he set up a bawling roar that became louder and louder, until the hills roundabout echoed it. For twenty minutes the savage fight continued, and not for a moment did any of the wolves pause in their lightning attack. The grizzly’s fur was too deep, his hide too thick and tough, for the dogs to be able to hamstring him. Besides, he kept turning, or standing up and coming down, or shaking himself like a monster in a great fur coat, or striking out with both front paws. Now and then the parents shifted their attack to his flanks or underbelly; and the father in an act of superb courage faced the monster and struck and furrowed the sensitive nose. This brought from the bear a cry that must have been heard for miles. The man on the ledge was wishing that a piece of great music could be played above this struggle—the tempest in the sonata in F minor, or—yes, indeed!—the choral in the Ninth.
As su
ddenly as it began it was all over. The bear had had enough. He turned back the way he had come and moved off in a rolling-gait lope, whimpering like a spanked child. After fifty yards he looked back across a shoulder. Then he did something that would have moved any heart but a wolf heart: he stopped and rose to his full height and looked back at his exhausted and snarling enemies, his small black eyes bright with wonder, red drops falling from his nose. After a few moments in which he saw little and learned nothing he came down soundlessly, and in his rolling gait went over the hills and out of sight.
On the ledge above the four wolves a tall man shook a clenched fist at the sky. Almighty God, what a fight it had been! He sang a few triumphant bars in his loudest baritone and then addressed himself to the four dogs who, mouths open and sides heaving, looked up at him. “Hyar, fellers! Shore as shootin that war no fight for greenhorns! I salute you, wild wolves of the mountains! This here critter knows a good huggin match when he sees one and that was just about the best he has ever seen.” To the panting wolves still staring up he said, “Hyar!” and waved a hand at them. “Good~bye, brave warriors! Keep your teeth sharp, and good luck!”
Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher Page 22