Inside the cabin Sam laid wood on the fire and stretched out on his robe. When he next awakened he looked over and saw that Kate had come inside. But at daylight her pile of bedding was empty. Looking out, he saw her halfway to the river with the pail in her hands; and he knew now that all winter long she would carry water up the hill to plants that needed no water. Someday she would venture out on ice too thin and she would fall into the cold black waters and drown.
After a big breakfast he cleaned and loaded the rifle and went out to the hills for deer, elk, or buffalo. His first beast was an elk, and as soon as he had the belly open he pulled the liver out and ate most of it. This did for him what the old food in the cabin could never do: it dispelled the nausea and warmed him with vigor. He was still extremely weak; he took four journeys and six hours to carry the elk to the cabin, a chore he could normally have done in two. The hide he spread, fur side up, under Kate’s pile of bedding by the door. The next day he shot two deer and brought them in, and hung them from rafters in the cabin’s east end. He also ate their livers and hearts but he still felt so undernourished that he cooked one roast after another and ate them all.
The winds had gone south. The sky was frozen in gray-winter cold. After bringing in the elk Sam saw that during his absence Kate had been in the flour and raisins; he prepared plates of hot food for her but she would not touch them. To a cup of fragrant coffee under her nose she gave no response. When lying in his robe after supper, with hre snapping its flames through aspen and chokecherry and cedar, he would look over at her, sitting by the door, and he would think that she could have a little fire going all day and all night, if she would, and be cozy. He told her that he had to go south now but would be back next spring. Only God knew how many wolves had slipped up to the door to sniff at her, or whether after he had gone they would leap across her to get to the frozen deer hanging from the rafters. While making moccasins from skins he and other trappers had left here he wanted to talk to her, for he was lonely; and after the moccasins were made and laces for snowshoes he cooked roasts over two fires outside, and looked at the meat and at Kate, back and forth, and into the south and the west. He had intended to be gone before another night fell but when he looked at the cold empty world toward the Bighorns, and then into the cabin, smelling of roasted flesh and fire, he surrendered to weakness and decided to stay another night. At dusk he watched Kate move a part of her bedding outside, and a little later he looked out to see her sitting there, talking to her angels. Now and then she would incline her head, as though in assent; or seem to listen before speaking again. Down on the river was a hole where she had chopped through ice, with the impression of her knees in the frozen snow around it. He knew that she had knelt there to wash her underwear, for a piece of underwear was hanging from a tree limb, so ragged and patched that it looked as if it would fall in pieces at a touch. He would buy undergarments for her, and plenty of flour and dried fruits. If he were to lie on his belly back in the cabin and play soft music he wondered if it would frighten or please her. He would find out. He played a hymn and then another, very low and far away, and then heard her voice. It was a soprano and it sounded cold and cracked but it was singing the second of the hymns he had played; and he went outside and stood behind her and sang with her, in a lower and softer key than hers. It all seemed to him natural and right. After five days of silence and misunderstanding it seemed proper and fitting that she should be sitting deep in bedding in zero cold, more than a thousand miles from her people, and in a thin ghostly soprano sing old hymns of hope and faith; and that behind her there should be a tall lonely man who had lost wife and son, and who now looked down at her gray hair and sang softly with her. For two hours or more she sat and he stood in the cold and they sang together. He then picked her up, bedding and all, and set her inside; gently kissed and patted her gray head; and stretched out in his robe to sleep.
He felt like a thief the next morning when he took her rifle and most of her ammunition but he told her that he would return the gun as soon as he could, and he would bring her food and clothing and anything he could think of that she might want. When at last he turned away from her, the knife in his belt, thirty pounds of roasted elk slung over his shoulder, under the robe, and the rifle in his hand, he was unwilling to go. He felt that never again would he see this woman alive. Twice before passing out of sight he stopped to look back. There it stood, the little brown shack on the hill in a white winter; and there she sat, a woman about whom he knew almost nothing, yet whom for strange reasons he had learned to love. Leaving her there, so alone and defenseless, filled him with such pangs of remorse and pity that mile after mile he strode along thinking only of her. He wanted to go back but he knew it would be
senseless to go back.
A week later he skulked into a wilderness hiding place on the Greybull, twenty miles from its junction with the Bighorn, and stood at the rickety door of a cabin even smaller than Kate’s. He heard a movement inside and knew that the man there was reaching for a gun.
“It’s me, Sam!,” he called. “Open her up and let’s have hot biscuits and huckleberry syrup.”
The door opened an inch and gray eyes peered out and bearded lips said, “Sam, be it you?”
28
SOME OF THE mountain men thought Hank Cady had been baptized in the wrong vat. Sam Minard was a reticent man, but compared to him, Hank was dumb. Bill had calculated that in a year’s time Hank uttered no more than a hundred words, of which ninety were some form of yes and no. No man had ever heard him talk about his childhood and his people, but there was a rumor that he had hated his mother, who had made a nursemaid of him, the oldest, and forced him to care for a dozen brothers and sisters. Bill said the only thing some kids remembered from their childhood was diapers. Unlike most of the mountain men, Hank had never taken a squaw and seemed to have no interest in women. He had a fierce brooding love of freedom, and freedom was what he had had since he came west.
After asking for and receiving one of Hank’s old pipes and filling it with twist and sucking a cloud of smoke into his lungs, Sam said, “How’s trapping around here?”
Hank gave him a queer look; it was not yet the season for trapping, so what could the man mean? “Tolabul,” Hank said, meaning tolerable. He looked at Sam’s ride. “Hain’t yourn,” he said.
“Lost mine,” Sam said. The strong tobacco was making him feel ill.
Hank waited a full minute. Then he said: “Crows?”
Blackfeet, Sam said.
Hank looked again at the ride. “Whose thissen?”
“Kate’s, the woman on the Musselshell.”
“Yer handguns too?”
“Every damned thing but my life.”
“Mick’s bay?”
“Yeh.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Not far from Three Forks.”
Hank gave the matter some thought. Musta been Elk Horns, he said. He’d been snooping around down this way. When would the ronnyvoo be?
“When they all want it,” Sam said. He wondered could Hank lend him a little baccy and a pipe till he got to Jim’s? Hank rolled over to a pile of stuff by a wall and dug in. He fetched out ten inches of twist and gravely handed it to Sam.
“And a pipe?” Sam said.
Hank again dug and came up with a corncob with a broken stem. He was a chewing man himself and smoked only the quids after he had chewed the juice out. Now, making a clumsy effort to be sociable, he emptied his mouth through the cabin door and filled another pipe with a broken stem. With their pipes burning the two men sat in firelight, rifles across their
laps.
“How wuz she?” asked Hank.
Sam had been wondering if Hank could lend him a robe and if he had extra traps. Hank had been thinking of vengeance. He saw that Sam was a lot thinner and he suspected that he had endured many indignities and hardships. His handsome gray eyes, wonderfully bright and keen, had been studying Sam all the way up his frame.
“Still al
ive,” Sam said at last.
“What Elk Horns do?”
Sam removed the stem from his teeth and seemed to be trying to remember. Well now, he had been slapped around, by both hands and tomahawk; his face had been smeared with the stuff they coughed up from their throats; and he had been starved and frozen and told what the Crows would do with him.
“They figgered ta sell ya?”
Sam nodded. On finishing his pipe he said, “Got steaks, I’m the feller can cook um.” Jist roast, Hank said. After almost a full minute of silence he added, “Had supper afore ye come.”
Sam glanced at the man. Henry Cady was one to have on your side in a fight but he didn’t spend much time wondering what he could do for you. A cold hunk of anything would do, Sam said; in the morning he would find something. Were they still fat around here? If he went fur enough, Hank said. He put his pipe aside and filled his mouth with twist. A part of the brown juice he spat into the fire before him and a part of it he swallowed, It was his private opinion that tobacco juice was good for a man’s stomach and digestion. Bill said tobacco in his stummick gave him a hull bellyful of heartburn, and Powder River Charley said it gave him the droppins; Hank could find no words to express his scorn for such idiotisms. He now moved his bearded cheeks a little to slop the quid around in his mouth, his gray eyes looking without change into the tire. It was his way to suppose that if a man wanted food and there was any around he would find it. Sam did not mind. The smoking had appeased his hunger and he was ready for bed.
“How you fixed for buffler robes?” he asked, looking round the shack.
Hank ejected a noisy stream into the flames and wiped his tobacco-stained mouth with the tobacco-stained back of his hand. “Guess we’ll hafta sleep together,” he said. After warming a spot of earth and securing the door on the inside with a stout leather thong they lay side by side on their backs, the ride of each just under the bedding at his side. They faced the door so that on sitting up they would be ready to fire. They both snored but that did not bother them; they slept deep, without worries or bad dreams. Hank said he hadn’t seen an Injun since October, or an Indian trail as far as he had gone; and becoming almost garrulous, he said the winter would be cold and the pelts good.
They were up at daylight, and Sam with clumsy tactfulness had suggested a batch of biscuits to go with their roast and coffee. Hank had merely inclined his head toward the pile of stuff by the wall. He left the cabin and before breakfast was ready brought in a beaver, from the tail of which Sam rendered out a cup of hot fat to use as butter. They ate biscuits dunked in beaver fat, elk roast, and coffee, and then sat back with their pipes. From the moment of rising Hank had said nothing; nobody could have told by his face or manner whether he was pleased with Sam’s presence or wanted him to be on his way. The fact, unknown to all but him, was that Henry Cady was a very lonely man who turned warm and happy all over inside when another trapper came to visit him; but there was never any change in his gruff way. He had Sam’s affinity to all things in nature; like him, he loved the valleys and mountains, the skyline’s backbones, the vast black forests, the pure water and clean air and wide spaces. With gun and knife he would vanish into a mountain mass and spend days or weeks there, living on grouse and deer and wild fruits. Sam would slip up to watch a water ouzel dive deep to explore a pool’s bottom, or the downy baby-heads thrusting out all around the mallard mother, or a warbling vireo hang its clever pensile nest from a tree’s limb, and he would proclaim his presence with an explosion of life joy; whereas Hank would make no sound, and he might sit by a stream and watch the fish in the cold dark waters or an elk feeding in a clearing for hours with hardly a shift in his gaze. Hank would have been happy to have Sam stay with him all winter but Sam had no way of knowing that. After bringing in a couple of deer he looked south and said it was a long way to Bridger’s post but he guessed he’d better be off. It was, he reckoned, a hundred miles and more to Bill on the Hoback, another hundred to Lost-Skelp on upper Green River, and still a long way from there to Bridger’s. He needed horses, traps, bedding, weapons, tobacco, and the fixens.
Hank said nothing. He figured that Sam Minard knew his own mind. But when Sam picked up only Kate’s old rifle and the one robe Hank said, “Hyar now.” Sam would need more bedding than that, and some baccy and a pipe, some coffee and a pot, some salt and flour. Sam knew that Hank had only one pot. Did Sam have steel and flint, or matches? Sam said he had matches from Kate’s hoard. Hank hustled around in his slow way and came to Sam with a good robe, pipe and tobacco, a pound of coffee and the pot, and some flour. He tossed the robe across Sam’s shoulders and said, “Worse cold to come.”
Sam looked over the bedding in the cabin to see if Hank would have enough. He thought he would not. So he dropped the robe to the bedding, saying, “Might be too much to carry if I get in deep snow.” Hank knew that was not the reason but he said nothing. Sam also set the pot inside the shack. He would find something, he said; maybe Bill would have an extra pot.
“Watch your topknot,” Hank said.
“Watch yours,” said Sam, and with a wave of his hand was gone.
Hank entered the cabin and stood a few moments in its gloom, feeling the presence of one who had just been there. Then he turned to the doorway to look out. He looked down the river the way Sam had gone but there was no sign of him and no sign of a living thing.
29
IT WAS A LONG, cold, and dangerous journey but Sam covered it in seventeen days, stopping only one night with Bill and one with Dan. Outfitted at Bridger’s and several hundred dollars in debt, he was ready to trap, but the things he had just bought did not take the place of the ones he had lost. His rifle was new and a good one but it was not the gun that more than once had saved his life. The revolver was new, the Bowie, the packgear, his leather garments, his cooking utensils; but he liked none of it. Bridger told him that his mount, a sorrel stud, was one of the finest horses from the Crow nation, but Sam knew it would take a lot of training to make it as smart as the bay. Until he stared with dismay at his new fixens he had not realized that the Blackfeet had robbed him of things almost as dear to him as his own name and honor. Wall now, as Bill had said, Sam was now the sworn enemy of two nations; and it didn’t seem likely, said Jim Bridger, that he would live long. “You’re a big credit risk,” he had said, and he had urged Sam to trap up Black’s Fork and its tributaries, where he would be safe.
Sam spent two nights with Jim and heard all the news and it was all bad news. Brigham Young and his hordes of Mormons were busy building a kingdom in the valley of the Salt Lake; and west of them, across the alkali flats and the Sierras, a million damn fools were rushing around yelling gold, and towns were springing up like the ancient Babble. There had been a town named Babble, hadn’t there? Jim asked, casting an uneasy glance at Sam. The whole Western country, he said, would soon be overrun by criminals, religious blowhards, tin-cup greenhorns, and every kind of simpleton on earth; and there would be no buffalo left, no beaver, no clean spot where a man could stretch out and smell sweet earth—nothing but foul water and foul air, sewers, junk heaps, noise, and people. He was thinking of going to Canada.
Sam told him briefly, as he had told Bill and Dan, of his capture and escape. Jim had fixed on him his strange eyes decked with tiny glittering lights and had said Sam wouldn’t last long now. Elk Horns? Hank said. With Bloods and Crows after him Sam ought to get his prayers said and write a goodbye note to his mother. “I’ll try and be at your funeral,” Jim said. While Sam trapped on Black’s Fork news of his capture and humiliation spread over the area, from trapper to trapper and post to post; and not a mountain man heard the story but asked when the rendezvous would be. Most of them intended to be there. Those with posts, like Bridger, could not get away, or those like Rattlesnake Pete, who, thrown from a horse, was laid up with broken legs, or Bill Williams, crippled with rheumatism and holed up somewhere in the Uintahs. By the first of April it was known that the meeting would be at the Three Forks,
right in the heart of Blackfeet country. By mid-April, Sam came in with two packs of pelts and settled most of his account and then headed for the Laramie post. Bridger said that unless he was plum hankering to die he had better stay out of Crow country. At the Laramie post Three-Finger McNees looked at Sam with one black eye while the other gazed off in the direction of Powder River. Doggone it, he said, he intended to be there, but if Sam was to get himself captured again and again they could not spend half their time avenging him.
Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher Page 30