He then searched both banks, hoping to find a shelter in which he could sleep. But he found only an arbor, under a dense tangle of berry vines and mountain laurel, over which the snow had formed a roof; he crawled back under it, out of sight. After putting on his clothes he wrapped the robe around him, and lying on his left side facing the river, he put two fish on leaves a few inches from his face, hatchet and knife within reach, and in a few minutes was sound asleep. His first dream was of his wife; they were somewhere in buffalo land, and while she gathered berries and mushrooms he cooked steaks and made hot biscuits. It was a cold night and he slept cold, but for eight hours he did not awaken. It was the first solid rest he had had in a week.
When at daylight he stirred it took him a few moments to understand where he was. Then, like Jedediah Smith, he gave thanks to God; dwelt for a few minutes on the bones of his wife and child, yonder in the winter, and on a mother sitting in a pile of bedding looking out at an empty white world; and then ate the two fish. Yes, it had turned colder. On the eastern side of the Divide would be the wild storm winds down from Canada; there he would need more than a mouthful of frozen fish to keep him going. But he felt cheerful this morning and he told himself that he was as strong as a bull moose. He thought he was safe from the Blackfeet now. Ahead of him lay an ordeal that might be the most difficult he would ever endure, but he would struggle through it, day after day, all the way across the white winter loneliness, until he came at last to Kate’s door.
“Keep a fare for me, and a light,” he said, and faced into the sharp winds from the north.
25
HE HAD NO food, not even a seed pod or a root, when he reached the continent’s spine and looked across a frozen white world to the thin faint tree line of a river, fifteen or twenty miles distant. Beyond the river was the wintry desolation that lay all the way to Kate’s shack. The Missouri came down from the Three Forks area, and passing through the Gates of the Mountains, swung to the northeast. That was buffalo land, yonder. It was also Blackfeet land. It would be Blackfeet land all the way to the Musselshell. He could think of nothing to eat down there that a man could get hold of—even the rancid marrow in the bones of dead things would be lost under the snows. Breaking off evergreen boughs, he laid a pile on the frozen snow and sat on the pile. Taking the left moccasin off, he drew the foot up across his thigh. The trouble with foot wounds was that they never got a chance to heal; in this foot he had a dozen wounds; during his hours of rest or sleep they tried to scab over but when he walked again the scabs softened and came off. Both feet had wounds but it would do no good to worry about them. A mountain man did not worry about small wounds, nor much about big ones. He could keep going for years with arrowheads in his flesh, or for months with open thigh or belly wounds.
Sam’s problem was food. It would be a bitter irony to escape from torture and death only to fall exhausted on the prairie and be eaten by wolves. A lot of wolves and coyotes were down there and they were all hungry. They were all over that vast frozen whiteness as far as a man could see and a thousand miles beyond that; they would follow him, hoping to chew the buckskin off him, and to eat him alive when at last he fell to rise no more. The greenhorns back east told tales of ferocious man-eating wolves that in lonely winter wastes of northern nights trailed helpless voyagers and pulled them down; but Sam knew of no attack of man by wolves, and the mountain men knew of none. The wolves would follow him and trot around him all night and all day; and when he slept they would steal up close to see if he had anything a wolf could eat. Hunger, if strong enough, might force them to attack a man. Hunger had made more heroes than courage.
Sam was not worried about wolves or any other beast in the area before him. He was worried about food, and the woman yonder in the bitter cold. Male and female created He them, the book said; and there sat the female, a scrawny gray creature whose whole soul and being was fixed on her dead children; and here sat the male, starving to death. His hunger pains were about what he thought he might have if two rough hands inside him were stretching his guts and tying them in knots. While examining his feet he ate snow or searched the distant riverline up and down for sign of smoke. In the southeast he saw what he took to be the Big Belt Mountains. He didn’t think any mountain men were trapping there this winter. The Bear Paw Mountains were somewhere ahead of him but he didn’t think anyone was trapping there either.
He found it strange that in a land where the Creator had put such an abundance of things to eat there was nothing he could get his hands on. Even if he had a gun he had seen nothing to shoot, except the bear. He thought there were buffalo along the river, and possibly deer and elk; he might find a sick or wounded old bull or cow that he could outrun and he might find some marrowbones along the banks. He had heard of men who made rabbit and bird snares but he had nothing to make one with. Peeling off spruce bark, he rubbed the sap into his wounds and put the moccasins on. The outside pair of the three pairs was frayed in spots and in spots worn through, and the second pair was frayed. If he made it he guessed he would show up somewhere in leather rags and tatters, fifty pounds lighter and ten years wiser.
He was on the point of rising when he decided to wash his beard. Glancing down across it, he had seen stains, and though he was not a fastidious man he tried to be a clean one. With both hands he reached into snow under the surface crust and then roughed the snow up and down through the hair and over his brows and forehead and over his head and around his neck. After a while he pulled the beard out from his chin and looked over it and could see no bloodstains from the dead Indian. He guessed blood must have gushed from the guard’s nose but he had not been aware of it at the time. With the knife he sawed the beard in two close to his chin. The hair he cut off he left in a pile for the Blackfeet to find.
He rose and started down the mountain toward the Missouri. His feet hurt and the hands in his belly were tying knots but otherwise he felt pretty good. He thought he could make it to the river before midnight. Down steep ravines where there was little timber he tobogganed on the robe, using knife and hatchet to pull him along or to brake his speed. He thought snow was one of the Creator’s finest works of genius and he pitied people in hot climates who had never seen it. He had heard Windy Bill say that if there had been plenty of snow in Africa there would be no blackmen with thick lips and flat noses. Bill was full of such fancies. Sam loved snow as he loved rain, winds, thunder, tempests; people who said, “I don’t see how you can like snow,” or, “I don’t see how you can like a wind,” he thought unworthy to be alive. Yonder, far south of him, were the Wind River and the Wind River Mountains, and endless miles of eroded colorful formations that winds had made. Kit Carson said that somewhere down the Colorado was an immense area of natural bridges, monuments, and stone formations that looked like old castles. For centuries, for ages, ever since the beginning, the winds had been blowing there and they certainly were a better sculptor than Phidias. No matter where a man went, from the marvels in the Black Hills to the granite faces of the Tetons, from the Yellowstone’s canyon to that of the Snake and the Green and the Colorado, a man saw the wonderful parthenons that winds and water had made. “Ya doan like it?” Bear Paws Meek had said to a greenhorn sneering at the Tetons. “Wall now, I doan spect the Almighty cares too much fer ye either, so why doan ya go back to yer ma?”
Down from the mountains Sam stood on the white plains, looking through cold winter haze at the line of the river. Then he began to walk on long strides in snow above his knees all his senses alert, for he knew that moving against the white background he was as conspicuous as a black mole on the nose of a lovely woman. If there were Indians on the river they would see him coming but he had seen no sign of smoke. Dusk was filtering down from the wintry sky when the river, it seemed to him, was still ten miles away; it was two hours after dark when he reached it. There were trails in the snow but he saw no living thing and heard no sounds.
Here and there along the water’s edge he found bones, and choosing a couple
of thighbones and pieces from a neck, he sat hidden near river brush, while with sharpened green stick he dug marrow out. With tongue and lips he sucked the marrow off the stick. It was worse than rancid; it tasted like extreme old age, decay, and death. But it was food of a kind, it would help him to keep moving. After eating marrow until he was sickened he searched in river brush for wild rose, and gooseberry, serviceberry, and currant. He found hips and a few berries still clinging, and with a handful of them he returned to the bones. The pulpy rose pods had always tasted to him like old wood. He mixed them and a few withered currants and serviceberries with a marrow paste and devoured the nauseous mess, cheering himself with stories of men who had lived for days on such fare as this. He also chewed and swallowed some bone splinters, after he had shattered a thighbone to get at the marrow. The bones were tough to chew and had no flavor at all.
He spent about two hours making his supper. It wasn’t loin steaks and hot biscuits in hump fat, or roasted grouse basted with kidney butter, but it would do till morning. After eating he bound together pieces of driftwood with tough berry vines. With his weapons wrapped in the robe, and a long pole in his grasp, he shoved the raft out into the current, and on reaching mid-channel lay on his belly, chin on his forearms, to survey the moving scene before him. Though he knew that he might starve or freeze to death, or again be captured, he could not put away his insatiable delight in the astonishing world, from the majestic cordilleras to the smallest pouting mudpot. Under him was a marvelous panorama of color and light. The water on the bottom all the way across the river had been freezing, and the ice formations down in the depths were catching the light of a full moon and making patterns like some he had seen in caverns in the Black Hills. Because the current was bearing him north at about half a mile an hour the scenes under him, though similar, were never the same. When with the pole he moved his craft toward the eastern bank and came to a deep and gently swirling eddy he saw three or four feet under him a multitude of what mountain men called suckers, a species of whitefish, with absurd little round mouths that puckered and pouted as they breathed. If only he had a dozen of them, and his steel and flint to make a tire, what a feast he would have!
An hour later he stood on the east bank and looked east. Judith River and mountains were somewhere ahead of him but he could see no sign of them in the prairie night. For a hundred and fifty miles there might be nothing, except the wolves trailing him. A well-armed man, well-provisioned, with a couple of warm robes, might not have hesitated to undertake such a journey, even in below-zero temperatures, but one thinly clad, with one robe and no food and no way to get food, would surely die on the way. The mountain men would have said that, for even if he could walk thirty miles a day without food it would take him at least five days to reach the Musselshell.
These were Sam’s thoughts as he crawled under a snow-laden shelter of willows to wait for the morning. He did not dare fall asleep. When daylight came at last, gray and bitter cold, he searched up and down the riverbank. There was nothing to eat but the sickening old marrow, a few rose hips, shriveled currants on their vine. He drank a quart of river water and he looked into the southeast. “Sam,” he said, speaking aloud, “here’s where we find out if you’re man or boy.” He knew the words were pure bravado. He had no reason to think he could cross that vast white distance but there was no choice, except to float down the river and be captured again. After he had walked a mile he stood on a hilltop in the white waste, a hairy giant in tawny buckskin, a robe over his left shoulder, a useless knife in one hand and a, useless hatchet in the other. Gesturing at the heavens, with the knife flashing in pale cold sunlight, he cried out, “Almighty Father, You have helped me this far, now help Your son a little longer!” That was all he said; but he was thinking of the words in Crow language: Old wornan’s man her children their ghosts, there, in the blackest nights they are, in the sagebrush they are crying. Yonder she was, without a fire, huddled in her blankets in ten-below-zero cold, talking to her children there in the sagebrush crying. If a woman could endure such winters, for love, could a man endure less for a dead wife and son?
Tom Fitzpatrick had said to Jim Bridger, “I’ve never known a man who loves life like Sam. Every hour for him is a golden nugget.” That was pretty fancy talk for a mountain man but Tom had read a lot and had a way with words. Part of the force that sent Sam trudging across the white prairies was love of life, a gladness for health and youth that filled him as Mozart’s gayest music filled him; and part of it was his belief that the earth on which he walked had been designed by the greatest of the artists, and that if a man had the courage and fortitude not to fail it, it would not fail him. In Sam’s rough mountain-man philosophy those persons who became the wards of sadness and melancholy had never summoned for use and trial more than a part of what they had in them, and so had failed themselves and their Creator. If it was a part of the inscrutable plan that he was to live through this ordeal, and again cover the bones of wife and child with mountain lilies, the strength was lying in him, waiting, and he had only to call on it—al1 of it—and use it, without flinching or whimpering. If he showed himself to be a worthy piece in the Great Architect’s edifice he would live; in Sam’s philosophy that was about all there was to it.
He intended to call on all he had, to the last desperate gasp of it. He would walk and rest, walk and rest; and if there was nothing to eat, he would rest, and walk again. The sun’s nimbus told him that the temperature was falling. Cold might be better for him than falling snow, for if he had to buck deeper snow than this he would fail fast. Nothing wore man or beast down faster than wading in soft snow, crotch-deep. As he walked Sam sighted his course on a line just a little north of what he thought was the little Belt Mountains. It was about seventy or eighty miles to Judith River, where he might find berries and bones, or a rabbit at which he could hurl his knife, or the stiff hide of a dead old bull. To appease by a little the gnawing in his stomach he now and then cut a short tassel from the fringe up and down his trousers. A man could chew a piece of tanned leather for an hour, with no result, except that it would become a soft impermeable pulp that would ill his mouth. What Sam did` was to chew out the smoke and tanning fluids and swallow them. When he was far enough from the river to feel secure he burst into song; and what a picture he was, a tall tawny creature on a white map, singing at the top of his voice a Mozart aria to Lotus! He was remembering the times when he sang to her and played and the few times she sang with him.
Thinking of her reminded him of their feasts together, and so next he sang the Champagne Aria. Then he sang anything he could think of that at all expressed the miracle of being alive and able to sing. There were birds that sang half their time, and there were people who complained half their time. The birds were worthy of their loveliness and their wings. There were creatures like the wolverine that never sang, but went snarling and clacking its teeth through shadow-depths all day and all night. The bull elk sang, the bull moose; and the buffalo bull was often so full of life and joy that he would paw and beller and swing round and round, bugging his eyes at the wonderful prairies and the bear grass on long stems with their domes of white blossoms. A meadow lark would sit in a tree and sing exquisite lyrics all afternoon, a wood thrush would sing the variations of its little sonata until sleep overcame it, and a bluebird through a long golden morning would sit in a high tree and empty its soul to spring. The long-tailed chat talked morning, noon, and night, and despaired in his efforts to express the wonder of it; and the incredible mockingbird filled all musicians with, apologies and shame ….
Such was Sam’s mood as he passed through ravines and over hills. The old snow down under was frozen hard but on top of it was about a foot of new snow, which was soft and nice gainst his moccasined feet. Now and then he glanced back at the deep trail he was making. With the morning sun filling it an Indian on a high hill could see it but he would think it a wolf path. Sam had decided to walk without stopping, if he could, all the way to Judith River, but
when fifteen miles from the Missouri he saw the first wolves, and before long came to wet bones of the long-legged hare. He picked some of them up but they had been stripped clean. Even the hide had been eaten. Taking the larger bones with him till he came to an outcropping of stone, he smashed them with the hatchet and sucked up a little marrow fat and soft bone pulp.
Five wolves decided to follow him. He did not mind. Since he was not walking like a thing crippled or old he knew that they did not expect to eat him. They were curious and hopeful. Sam supposed they wondered why he was out here in wolf land, alone, and what he intended to do. A wolf knew when a man had a gun; he was more wary then. Some mountain men thought they recognized it as a weapon; others, that they smelled the gunpowder. Even the magpie was bolder when a man had no gun.
The five wolves trailed him at a distance of about thirty yards but now and then the boldest of the five, a big fellow that would weigh, Sam guessed, a hundred and forty pounds, would come trotting ahead of the others; and if Sam stopped and turned the wolf would stop, ears forward, mouth open, and look at him. His tongue lay between the lower canines, long and curved, but because the tongue was too wide for the space between the teeth it lay up and over their points. The eyes had large round black holes for pupils, and an iris that looked pale green in the snowlight. The face did not seem ferocious but only curious, almost friendly; but Sam knew that the long gaunt body was hungry and that in its animal way the wolf was looking at him as something to eat. “I reckon,” Sam said, “you’d taste a lot better than old marrowbones and rose hips but I’ll never know without you come closer.” At thirty feet he thought he could put his knife in the beast’s heart.
The wolf became so bold that he came within fifty feet but when Sam balanced the knife to hurl it the wolf suddenly slunk back. Once the wolf pointed his nose to the sky, and almost closing his eyes, opened his lungs to their full power in the chilling winter wolf-call. It was this mating cry that made greenhorns shiver all night. Why the Creator had designed the beast so that it mated in the deep snows of winter was another riddle; a lot of arrangements in the divine plan mortal mind could see little sense in. If, Sam thought, he only had urine from a male wolf a hundred miles away he could splash it on the first tree he came to, and this big lubber after snifling it would go out of his senses. The city dog and the country dog on meeting acted much the same way. If he had a trap and a rabbit for bait—but if he had a rabbit he would not be thinking of wolf meat for supper.
Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher Page 27