A mile southwest of him an Indian rider appeared on the crest of a hill. In no time at all there were two, then three, and four; and at last there were seven. He could tell that it was a war party in full paint, well-horsed and well-armed. He supposed that they were all picked warriors. Pretending not to see them, he now followed the river path at a slow pace and studied the river bottoms. The river along here had cut deep in the earth and was fifteen or twenty feet below the top of its bank. Would his horse take a leap from that height? Would the packhorse follow? Most of his fixens were on the packhorse, as well as Kate’s rifle and food for her. The seven Indians had disappeared. Sam would have risen to an elevated spot and waited for them but there was none around him.
He now took a branch path leading toward the river, which was fifty yards from him; and leaving his horses, he went back to the main trail. When at the edge of the woods he peered out he had a good view of the country, except the river bottoms. The main buffalo trail here skirted the edge of the woods, with many paths meandering through them. He knew that seven Indians would not try to approach him on horses; some would detour and come in from the north, others would come up from the south; and somewhere they would have a lookout watching the river. He still had time to plunge in and cross, while they were scouting his position, but he had never run from a fight and he didn’t like to run from this one. There were only seven of them, he told himself, and Lost-Skelp would say they were only an hour’s work for a boy. He was thinking bravado and he knew it. He wondered a moment if the ordeal of captivity and flight had impaired his faculties, for he didn’t seem to be his usual self. Convinced that he was being stupid, he ran to the horses, led the packhorse to the edge and with one heave shoved him off. He then mounted, faced the river, dug with his heels, and with no hesitation at all the beast made the plunge to the swirling waters. The horse went under and Sam with it, except his right hand, which held his rifle high. The moment his eyes came up out of the water and he had shaken the wet off his lashes he saw something that so astounded him that he could only stare. On the high bank above him stood a naked Indian, with nothing on him but some kind of headdress, and nothing in his hands but an object that looked like a knife. If Sam was astonished by sight of the red youth he was utterly amazed by what the youth now did. He stood only an instant on the bank, tall and red and naked, when with the war cry of his people, he put the knife between his teeth and plunged in, and at once was swimming like an otter, his absurd headdress and the knife flashing above the waters. Sam’s horse was swimming toward the far bank, almost side by side with the packhorse. Sam hung his rifle from the horn, swung his right leg across the beast’s neck, and turned in the saddle to face the swimmer. The stud was a strong one but the Indian was gaining. As Sam watched the headdress coming closer he could no longer doubt the incredible fact that this brave, a mere youngster, was determined to count coup on Sam Minard.
Because it was not Sam’s way to shoot an almost defenseless enemy he loosened the knife at his belt. He then waited, eyes staring, his mind slowly grasping the fact that this was the most spectacular act of courage he had ever seen. As the Indian came on, the black eyes never left Sam’s face. Sam saw more than that. He sensed that this young one had been so outraged in his tribal and personal pride that he was resolved to prove that a Crow warrior could be a braver man than The Terror. If able to touch Sam he would in the next moment plunge the knife, and if he died in the next instant would that matter? He would be remembered by his people as the bravest warrior of them all, living and dead.
Wall now! Sam thought. Having decided what was in the youth’s mind, he moved fast. If this young brave wanted a fight with knives he could have it; and so Sam slid back over the stud’s rump and into the water. At that moment his enemy was no more than ten feet away. In the next moment the Indian’s chest came up, like an otter’s, and in a flash he flung himself on Sam. In that same moment Sam’s powerful hands seized the redman’s right arm and broke the knife from his grasp. The next move caught Sam unprepared. With fantastic speed the Indian came up and almost out of the water, and both desperate hands seized Sam’s throat. The move had been made like a trout’s, in an arc, and with such perfect timing that for a few moments as the hands closed his windpipe Sam could only bug his eyes and wonder what had happened. He was to realize later that the Indian could have seized the knife at Sam’s waist and plunged it through him.
Like a horror in a nightmare of memory Sam saw the grizzly with the badger’s teeth set in its nose. With all the strength he could bring to bear, from the position he was in, treading water, he took the Indian’s wrists and tried to break the grasp. In that moment he was conscious of the redman spitting in his face. In that moment he caught a dreadful picture of eyes so full of hate that they were like black molten steel; and of teeth bared back into the cheeks. Sam sensed next that blackness was about to engulf him, and with the last of his sanity he did the only thing he could do: he grasped the terrible knife at his belt and plunged it deep into the Indian just under the breastbone. When the hands did not instantly relax he drew the knife and plunged it again. As he then fought to remain conscious he saw the change in the black eyes, and that change he would remember to the day of his death. He was to think of it afterward as the kind of change a father would never want to see in the eyes of a son.
Sam thought he must have been unconscious a few moments, for he had water in his lungs. Coughing, he looked round him and saw patches of red. The hands were gone from his throat, and the dead Indian was floating down the current. Putting the knife in his belt and looking at the far bank where his horses stood, Sam began to swim, keeping his head under except when he turned his mouth up for air. Once through veils of water hanging from his brows and lashes he saw his two beasts moving toward a wooded area, a half mile from the river. While he swam the thought came to him that this intrepid youngster was not one of the seven he had seen, but a lone warrior, who had left his people to count coup or die. He was as brave a man, Sam was thinking, as any he had known; and after reaching the bank, exhausted and subdued and feeling a strange shame, admiration compelled him to look down the river, hoping for a last view of this brave youth. But there was no sign of him on the slate-blue waters; he was dead and he was gone. Sam drew the knife. The river had washed it clean except for a tiny spot that had rested between belt and buckskin. With a forefinger Sam wiped off the blood smear and then touched his skin over his heart. It was the only way he could think of to salute the valor of a foe who had been more than worthy of him.
After running into the woods he turned to look back. There was still no sign of the seven. Mounting the stud, he rode at a gallop west by north to the foothills and entered a black forest. He was feeling nausea, and a sadness that was not at all natural to him. Riding by night and hiding by day, he began to wonder about a matter that only now had occurred to him. Here he was, a human male, hunted by a thousand warriors from two nations; and yonder was Kate, a female, whom all befriended and no man wished to kill. If the old Crow chief would now come to him and say that his people were sorry for the murder of his wife and child, and that the braves who killed them would be punished, he would sheathe his l?ife and smoke the
pipe of peace ….
It was true (he told himself) that Kate had killed in a frenzy of hate and passion that no man could excel and few could equal but since then she had given her whole being to her children and their flowers. Sam doubted that she had killed anything, even a bug, since that terrible morning. She watered her plants, talked to her angels, and waited for the Lord to call her home; whereas he, who only now had slain a brave boy, would soon join a war party that would try to exterminate to the last man and dog an entire band.
He suspected that he was not thinking clearly. There surely were aspects of the matter to which he was blind. If the Crows had him in their hands there would be in their hearts no compassion and no mercy; and if the warrior in the river had been able to kill him he would have become a national hero, possibl
y the greatest hero in all of Crow history. It was an eye for an eye, the holy book said. It was not Kate’s devotion to gentleness that had made her secure; it was the mountain men who had set the skulls on four stakes at the four corners of her tiny world. If the laws of life, of weakness and strength, of timidity and courage, had taken their inexorable course, with no protection of the weak by the strong, she would have been scalped long ago and her bones would now be white somewhere along the Musselshell.
Just how, Sam wondered, lying in his robe, did the Almighty want it, anyway? Throughout the Creator’s world a man rarely, if ever, saw protection of the weak by the strong, except now and then in the human or in the dog family. When Sam was seventeen he had seen three bully boys tormenting a helpless youngster about their age and size, with a dozen men and boys watching the torture without lifting a hand. Sam had gone in and knocked the heads of the three together with such force that he had fractured two skulls, and had made the whole community hostile toward him. When he walked the streets mothers had come shrieking at him who had no interest, none at all, in the boy who had been tortured, but only in their own brutal hellcats. Sam had been glad to get out of the place and away from the hate in the mother-eyes. Of the mountain men he knew, he thought there was none who would take advantage of the weak or defenseless, much less torture for the hellish pleasure of it. In nature under the human level, as Sam had observed it, nothing killed except for food, or for mates, or in defense of itself or its kind. Human beings in what they called the civilized areas of life had brought killing down to such an ugly level that some men actually murdered for a handful of coins or for the simple ghoulish pleasure of it. The red people made of war a philosophy and a way of life, as the bullfighter made of bull-killing. It was not a philosophy and way of life with his country, which had recently jumped on a feeble neighbor and wrested from it half its lands, as stronger bobcats took the rabbit from the weaker. Jim Bridger said that back in Washington they were calling it Manifest Destiny. The Indians, warring against one another, seemed to be pretty well matched, man to man and nation to nation—or at least this was true of the more warlike ones. It seemed to Sam that the tribes that loved and sought war and made a philosophy of it, and killed in the full light and passion of heroism, when emotions were hottest; when a man hardly felt bullet, arrow, or knife; and, when, if mortally wounded, he broke into his death song and died in a clean way with his wings soaring—this, it seemed to him, was all right. Maybe the truth (he thought he saw it now) was that the youngster who flung himself into the river had died a wonderful death: in the last moments he had the enemy by the throat and was choking the eyes right out of his face; and his blood was boiling-hot and his hunger for glory was right at the gates of heaven. How many men in a century passed into death in such triumph? How many won such consummation of all their courage and powers in a last supreme blinding moment? All but a few of them died creaking and itching and complaining, scabbed and scarred over, half blind and half deaf, sick with loneliness and self-pity, and as remote from triumph and glory as an old robin skulking along in forest gloom with its wings dragging.
After thinking his way through it Sam felt a little better. It was pretty heavy moralizing for a mountain man, and after reaching a conclusion he felt tired. He did not perceive that his love of life was so inordinate and hungry that killing for pleasure was as alien to him as asceticism, its inseparable twin. He’d far rather sing than shoot; far rather lie on his back in a field of alpine lilies or an orchard of wild plum and syringas, breathing in the marvelous scents that filled the atmosphere and the earth, than ride away to kill some man who was coming forward with the hope of killing him. He’d rather stand on a mountain summit and shout into the heavens the concluding bars of Beethoven’s C minor than follow the bugles and Zachary Taylor to Resaca de la Palma and Buena Vista. In his moralizing Sam felt the outlines of a symphony. A day or two later he reached the core of it: he had lost a son and guessed he would never have a son now. He had lost one on the Little Snake and one in the river: Sam was unable to put away the face convulsed by passion and the black eyes hot with courage and hate; or the words which, among so many, his father had uttered aloud in troubled thought, “And where the slain are, there she is, the eagle-mother.” He could not stop thinking of Kate, for where the slain were, there she was, in another world and another way. Still, he guessed there was not much difference between the eagle mother and the human mother, the human father and the wolf father. But over Kate’s passions had fallen a heavenly light that was like the eyes of morning, the light of the living. It was this that perplexed and troubled him. God had said—but he could no longer remember of what or whom—that a light did shine, and eyes were like the eyes of the morning; and Job had said, “l have heard of thee by
the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee.”
After a week of hiding by day and making his way north Sam felt that at last his eyes were seeing Kate, as he sat astride his horse on a hilltop and looked over at her flowers. She had quite a garden this year; he saw that she had used some of the seeds he had given her. This indicated, surely, that she knew what she was doing, or that God was guiding her hand. Approaching, he thought her flowers lovely, though he preferred the wild ones—the columbines and lilies and gilias and a hundred more. It looked to him as if she had planted a few columbines; if she had, the glory of their spurred petals would look as out of place in this arid and lonely region as the blond curls and laughing blue eyes of a girl child.
Kate now came in sight out of the river woods, the pail in her hand. While she came up the hill he studied her garden. She surely was making a loveliness of bloom and fragrance above her children, with the tallest flowers to the north and the others stepping down to the south. On the north side there was an open spot; it was there, he supposed, that she sat when she talked to her children or read from the book. When she came up with the pail he called her Mrs. Bowden and asked how she was but she did not look at him. She was like a woman who, having only a small measure of awareness, gave it all to her Bowers and her children. Telling her that he had cleaned and oiled and polished her rifle, he set it by the cabin door. He then quickly framed her face and kissed her forehead, saying, “I’ll get this pailful”; but when he tried to take the pail from her hand she made a wild—female movement, and Sam stepped back. He studied her as she went down the hill; each year she looked smaller and frailer and grayer. When she vanished into river brush he looked over at the cairn; then at her sage plants and flowers; and at last at the long knife and heavy revolver hanging from his waist.
This evening while smoking a pipeful he saw the moon come up; soon she would be in the garden, talking to her angels. It was too bad she didn’t have some trees up there. He wondered if he ought to transplant a river willow or serviceberry or aspen. If she had a grove of aspens she could listen to the marvelous music of the leaves when the soft winds whispered over them and find the joy in their golds and yellows in the fall.
He guessed at last that he ought to go up and sit with her. She was by the flowers at the north edge, facing the sage plants, the book in her lap. Sam would have been amazed if he had known what she was thinking—for she was telling herself that not until this moment had she known how handsome her sons were, or how lovely her daughter. They had not grown at all since that night when they came out of heaven to kneel before her. But she had not thought about that. She might have said that angels did not grow but were always the same. Because the moon was full, and golden like a melon, her daughter was exquisite in her loveliness, as she smiled and nodded at her mother across the sage foliage. She wore a heavenly filmy stuff
as delicate as spider gossamer, that no one had ever seen on earth, for it was not there. Kate could not see the shoulders of her sons but she knew they were gowned in a silken radiance i that was not of the earth.
She read first to them Isaiah’s words, ” ‘… they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they
shall walk and not faint.’ ” All day while carrying water up the hill she had murmured the words over and over, for she was waiting on the Lord as well as she knew how, and she was not weary. In her soul with these words had been the others, “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.” Sam stood behind her, pulling his pipe and hearing her words: that the tongue of the dumb would sing, and in the wilderness, waters would break out and flow away into the desert. A path would be there and no killing beasts would be found there; and all sorrow and sighing would go away.
The daughter and the sons smiled at her, and all the flowers were softly nodding; and after a while the mother began to hum an old song that mothers in all lands sang to their little ones; and behind her a mouth harp was soft and low. Sam had backed away and now leaned against the cabin, his rifle at his side. Did she, he wondered, think the music was from heaven? Who could say it was not? After a few minutes he took the lead and played the simple themes that his mother had sung to her children; and in a low tired voice Kate carried the words to his music. For almost two hours he played and she sang, and not once did she turn to look at him or seem to know that he was there. He then slipped silently out of her sight.
The next day he thought to linger and play again for her but reflection told him that this would be an unkindness. If she did indeed think the music was from heaven it would be best not to overdo it, lest she find out that it was not. For the artist in him said that heaven had to be a thing that one could touch only rarely, and hope to touch once more. It would be best to slip away, for she now had an abundance of fruits and nuts, sugar and flour. He might come again this fall, after the Three Forks rendezvous, to lay in meat for the winter, and again open a heavenly window to let the music out, so that melodies of long ago could touch her soul in memory of her dead ones, hers and his.
Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher Page 32