When Sam was out of sight Bill said to Hank, “I’m awful oneasy about Sam. He jist didden act natural at all.” Hank’s marvelous gray eyes were looking in the direction Sam had taken and his mind was remembering that the big man had saved his life. He spat a stream of brown juice and said nothing.
32
SAM HADN’T FELT natural since the death of the youngun in the river. He was a fighting man and fighting had been his way of life for years but he felt pretty doggone weary now as he doubled back to the southwest and headed up the beautiful valley of the Gallatin. For the moment anyway he had a bellyful of it; he had had his fill, like old Bill. Barely entering his thirties, he wondered if he was getting old. Well, he would stretch out in hot water a few days and sweat the pisens out of him; and play and sing some arias and the songs he and Lotus had sung, even the songs he and Kate had sung. It would be nice to be alone and safe for a little while. He guessed he ought to go over to his father-in-law and see if he had a marriageable daughter, for in making him for the solitary life the Creator had left something out. In his mind he now and then had a picture of red devils swarming out of the northern lands like huge infuriated wasps, their stingers hanging long and sharp. They had made the boast that the Crows were too cowardly to take him but they could take him, and they would now do their infernal best. So for a while he would live with the birds and the beasts and take stock of his resources and reduce all of living to the simplicity of bird song and hawk wing and wolf call. He had three months before the next trapping season; perhaps he should go home to visit his people. He could go by steamboat down the river but if he returned this year it would have to be overland; contemplation of a journey of thousands of miles did not fill him with joy. He wanted to see his people but he didn’t want to see the kind of life they lived, He would never want to live in what was called the civilized life: “Here where men sit and hear each other groan; where palsy shakes a few last sad gray hairs, and youth grows pale and specter-thin and dies.” It was something like that the poet had written.
Neighbors and their children that were all energy and shrieks; debts and mortgages and policemen and funerals and taxes; out here, thank God, there were no funerals: a man died, the wolves and buzzards cleaned his bones, and that was the end of him.
Bill had brought news from Bridger’s post and it had depressed all the mountain men. This magnificent untamed country was rapidly filling with people. The immigrant trains came all summer now, headed for Oregon and California; the valleys would be poisoned by smoke-belching cities, and a man wouldn’t dare lie on his belly and drink from a stream. East of the Great Salt Lake were thousands of Mormons now; Bill said they professed to want only to get away from their persecutors and take as many wives as a man could use, but the basin would fill with them and overflow, and there would be only Mormon wives where today there were beaver, wild fruits, and peace. The polygamous dames would tramp down all the berry bushes and hack down all the trees; and at last all the Indians and all the elk and buffalo would be gone. There would be, Bridger said, only what was called civilization and the thought of it made him sick in his innards. How many wives did Brigham have now? Fifty at least, and five hundred children, Jim said.
The truth was that Sam Minard had been born too late and had come west too late. He had been here only a few years when Brigham came creaking and crawling across the prairies with his Mormon hordes; and now after him came people by the thousands, itching all over to find gold or tear up the country with plows; and to build jails, impose taxes, vote politicians into office, and play like children at being elegant and civilized. Good God, he guessed he ought to push north.
In Colter’s hell with its clean sharp odors of sulphur pot and steaming geyser, of vast black forests of spruce and pine and fir, Sam looked round him and wondered what it would be like after men with gold pans, axes, and plows were done with it. He tried to imagine it fifty or a hundred years hence. Why was the Creator putting so many people on the earth, anyway? Doggone it, there were hundreds of millions now; Sam thought a few hundred thousand would be enough. There were too many red people, so many that the sites of their old villages gave off foul odors for years and were stains of death on the earth. Let the red people settle for a year or two in a spot and everything under them and around them began to die and smell bad, like flowers soaked with wolf urine, until you could say, there on the Rosebud, there on the Bighorn, there on the Belle Fourche, the Chugwater, the Teton, the Snake, the Colorado, the Green—there and everywhere are the death stains where people blighted what they touched, and Nature no longer could do its housekeeping and replace stink with fragrance. There was something about people, Sam decided, and sniffed his hands. There were millions of buffalo, whole seas and oceans of them, and in twenty-four hours they dropped millions of their dung piles; but in no time at all the dung became odorless chips that were much like a handful of dried prairie grass. But a site on which people, white or red, camped for a few weeks stunk a man out of the area and over the tallest peaks. Man was, for a fact, such an ill-smelling critter that every beast and bird on earth was afraid of him because of his stink. This fancy made Sam chuckle. The Creator was slipping somewhere. To Sam it seemed that the time would come when all over the earth there wouldn’t be an unpolluted stream or a fragrant dell left; or a scented thicket where a man needn’t look round him before he sat; or a valley not littered and stricken with human ugliness. Sam would have been grimly amused if told that in another hundred years there would be agitation for wilderness areas, in these very lands around him, where persons from the swarming and overcrowded masses could for an hour or two fill their lungs with clean air, hear a bird sing, sense the meaning of peace.
In the primitive edens and gardens where deer looked at him with their soft eyes, where birds peered through spruce foliage and talked to him, and the highest peaks wore on their shoulders cloaks of white that the sun never drew away; or where on the south flanks he could lie in berry thickets and spill luscious juices down his throat—where he could gather the orange radiance of thimbleberries by the double handful and feed on them while the exquisite soul-scents of mountain fruits filled his nostrils and senses; where he could gather the gold-and-bronze gum of the big fir trees and chew its wood-and-l peak flavors while studhugging the tree to him, to saturate his leather clothing with its smell of mountains and eternity, drawn up from the deep earth and down from the tall skies; where he could climb with the aid of leather halters sixty feet up the golden wall of a yellow pine, taking only his rifle and harp, and find, high up, two or three big branches across which he could lie, and look up through a lacework of loveliness at pools of blue and piles of cotton, and play the waltz of the vineyard to the marvelous handiwork of God; where in a deep forest a hundred thousand or a million years old he could dig round him like a bear or badger, in the leaf-and-cone depths down through a foot or maybe two feet of it, feeling the clean earth-wonder of it in his hands and getting it all over him and breathing into his soul the earth-smells and infinite time of it, until he was filled with all the good unspoiled ancientness of the earth, forest, sky, mountains, and snows; and where he could stretch out full length in the hole he had made and cover himself over with the centuries-old accumulation of humus mold made of needles and cones and twigs, old bark, bird nests, snows, and rains, with only his face and arms out, his being enfolded by the ancientness and the peace, until at last he dozed and slept; and where with hot biscuits, an elk roast garnished with wild onions, a pot of coffee, a quart of blue-purple huckleberries he could feast not only on food that was free and divine but on the image of eternal beauty in everything around him, and then fill his pipe and smoke, and hum a few bars from Handel’s “Messiah,” and strain to hear a few faint notes from the infinite orchestras that he thought must be playing in the infinite blue capsule that enveloped the earth; and where at last when the day was done he could lie on the fur-soft of a buffalo robe, under the jewels that men called stars, with a cover of tanned elkski
n over him, drawn up to his chin so that its scent would mingle with that of fir, red osier, mountain laurel, wild grape, and juniper smoke, and with the odors wafted in from the hot mineral pots, geyser steam, and the sky and the night ….
He would have remained in the haven until October if he had not seen signs of an abnormally deep winter. After years in the mountains whitemen knew almost as well as the red, or the wolf, beaver, and mourning dove, Nature’s moods and auguries. Snow began to fall in the geyser basin in early September. That, for Sam, was warning enough. When a foot of snow fell in thirty-six hours he climbed the nearest peak to have a look around him, examining for omens all the things of the forest on his way up. He could not see across to the Bighorns east of him, or the Gallatin Mountains north. Where, he wondered, would he trap this winter? The Uintahs were still good but far away, and Bill Williams had been killed down there. There were spots on Bear River, the Snake, the Teton, but soon there would be ranches everywhere, and men building fences to keep their neighbors out. When there were no more open areas to go to, a man who loved freedom more than life would have to settle down, with a neighbor within twenty feet on the left, and on the right, and a whole row of them facing him across the street. Yonder, away down there, late immigrant trains were crawling along.
The next morning he packed and was off. Ten days later he again stood on a summit and looked round him; what he saw . was not black forests but the plains of the upper Sweetwater where it left the mountains. He was looking at the Oregon Trail about eighty miles west of Independence Rock, and at a wagon train creaking and squealing in six inches of snow. Another batch of greenhorns would be caught in the mountains, as the Donner party and others had been caught; or they would be if the sky suddenly opened and dropped a couple of feet of winter. Was it more Mormons down there? He wondered why any man was fool enough to want more than one wife. These people were still two or three hundred miles from the polygamous saints, and a thousand from the Dalles or Sacramento. They might have to eat their leather caps and their harness before they got through.
He felt an impulse to ride down and ask these people why they hadn’t stayed back east where they belonged. Did they believe, as so many had, that out west there were gold nuggets as big as melons lying up and down the canyons and streams? And soil so rich that cabbages would grow as large as kitchen stoves? What tales the jokers had told, who had been out west and gone back east! Two years ago Sam had ridden over to a train, and a woman, sitting in a covered wagon, had wiped at her eyes with a wrist gray with alkali dust, peered at him over red eyelids, and asked if all the men out here wore skins and married squaws. None of the immigrants seemed to have the slightest sense of the kind of world this was. What they sought was not the scented valleys, the clean sky the majesties and grandeurs, but a spot where they could all huddle together as neighbors and poison the earth. They made him think of the marching army ants and the seven-year locusts. There they had been, three hundred of them, with their beds and tables and crying children and bawling cattle, and their foolish notion that they would soon be rich and well on their way to heaven. Astride his horse, Sam looked at the long wavering line, like pencil markings against the white. Now and then he would turn his gaze from the half-frozen beasts, the cold wagon tires, the stiff dust-saturated canvas flapping. in the wind, and look north and west at the immense world of valleys, mountains, rivers, and sky. Soon there would be no trails left, no forests with berry gardens in their cool depths, no water ouzels dipping and diving at the feet of cascades, no larks singing their arias, no prairie movements that from a distance looked like dark flowing waters but were herds of buffalo, no wolf song, no cougar cry, no horn call of the loons. Over on the Big Snake not many hundreds of years ago there had been stupendous eruptions of boiling lava that flowed over the plains south and west for more than a hundred miles—a red-hot hissing and steaming death flow that had killed everything it touched, and made utter desolation, black and grotesque and dead, of hundreds of square miles. For Sam and men like him the immigrant trains were another kind of death How: looking east, he saw in fancy a thousand miles of them, as broad as a buffalo emigration, dust-gray and plodding and exsanguine and inexorable, coming in from the east to cover the earth. He recalled what old Bill had said: “Shore as shootin they’ll shove us up the peaks and offen the peaks into the ocean, and cover this whole land with their privies.”
Laramie had become an expanding assemblage of log huts and tents, surrounded by piles of buffalo hides as large as haystacks. By July 5 in only one season, 37,171 men, 803 women, 1,094 children, 7,474 mules, 30,615 oxen, 22,742 horses, 8,998 wagons, and 5,720 cows had passed this fort on their way west. In the past two years scores or hundreds of people and beasts had drowned while trying to cross the North Platte in their shrunken and rickety wagon beds used as boats. He hoped the Almighty knew what He was doing. It was not for a mere man to say that a thing was good or bad, which lay farther than he could see; but men like Sam would have preferred to join an Indian tribe and move north than live where neighbors made life a hell all around them.
Leading two packhorses, he crossed the trail and rode south, but turned time and again to stare curiously at the creeping wagons, tongue to tailgate and looking like hideous monster-bugs. In fancy he imagined their sucking mouths, like a locust’s; their legs like cactus spines for seizing and holding; their round unblinking opaque-looking eyes that sought in life only what the mouth could devour; and their long sandpaper feelers that nervously twitched and flicked and shook with eagerness when the creature sensed that it had touched an object that could be eaten. During the past hour he had built such a loathsome image of the immigrants and all that they seemed to hunger for that he felt a twinge of shame and was glad when the day lowered and opened its belly to spill out the big white flakes. He began to hum a Haydn theme.
A hundred and thirty miles and three days later snow was still falling when Sam sat in its lovely gloom and looked at the cabin. It seemed to him that many years had passed since he had slipped up to it to find what was left of his wife and child. His were not the kind of wounds that time could heal.
Dismounting, he went over and stood by the door; and when he looked at the spot where she had been murdered he felt, with almost no loss of intensity, the deep hurt, the anger, the injustice, the idiocy in the divine arrangement and the loneliness of bereavement that he had felt when he set her skull on his palm. He had looked at the stark white of the teeth, remembering the soft ripe lips that had covered them; at the empty caves, thinking of the marvelous eyes that had had their home there. He recalled now all the lights and living things that had been in those eyes; the gorgeous mane of her hair; the whole face and the whole delightful body; and all the living wonder of her that somehow, by a will stronger than his own, had become no more than a few bones and his memory of her. It was this kind of thing that wrenched a man’s heart loose and blotted the soul out of him: if only something could survive that was more than the least of what a thing had been! If, of a flower, there could be more than the dry dead petals; of man, more than bones bleaching after the wolves were done with them; of his child, some part somewhere of the brave mountain man that he would have been. Far north (it was eight hundred miles or more) he had three times removed stones so that he could reach in and thrust in an armful of flowers. Three times his hand had softly moved over the pitiable and absurd remains; and crushed petals and rubbed their essence over the two skulls. How utterly death separated the lover from the things he loved! Here by the cabin door he kicked the snow away, and sitting where she had fallen, he played a few of the melodies he had played during those few immortal weeks when they were man and wife.
33
ALL THE MOUNTAIN MEN men had known what kind of winter it would be; it was the second most paralyzing in the memory of the oldest Indians of the north country. It set in early and deepened fast. By mid-December the Missouri was frozen across at the Big Bend, and the Yellowstone at the mouth of the Bighorn. August w
as feeling the chills of September when Kate saw the first blight on her flowers. She did not know that it was frost; she thought her plants needed water, and daylong for a week she trudged up the hill. By October even the late bloomers were stricken, the primroses, asters, and gold stars. The nights were cold and clear, and when the moon was up Kate sat with her children until it went down.
During her years on the Musselshell she had not been conscious of a lost husband. She no longer saw Sam striding along the spine of high mountains, or heard him filling the heavens with deep organ tones. Her life had steadily drawn in to the heart of it, until it encompassed only her children and their flowers. Except in moments of fitful sleep or when chewing at food that was old and stale and tough she gave all her time to her children and their garden, watering and weeding all day, even when there were no weeds, and reading noble verses or singing old hymns half the night. She had been thirty-five when her family was massacred: she was not an old woman now but she looked as old as the hills around her. Bill had come by after the killing of the Indians and had been startled on finding her hair completely white. It was not gray but white, with the look of cotton. Her face was deeply seamed and the skin over it looked like leather. Her body had shrunk until she was barely five feet tall; and it was bent and misshapen, like aspens on northern hillsides after the deep snows of winter. It was not labor that had prematurely aged her but want of food and sleep: she had been so completely devoted to her children that for days on end she had not eaten, and she had slept only when too exhausted to read or sing. During these years she had not once lain down to sleep but had sat by the door. She had so little grasp of the realities and was so far gone to heaven that she did not understand that the moon was not capricious in its appearances but came at certain hours. She got the habit of sitting by the door because she thought the moon might appear at any moment, day or night. One dream she had dreamed so many times that she had only to doze and it came again. She was in heaven with her children and everything there was inexpressibly tender and beautiful. The river of life lay clean and holy and nourishing, and away from it in all directions were gentle hillsides, abloom with flowers and redolent of orchards; and over all of it was a blue sky as impeccable as God. All the people around her were mothers with their laughing and loving children, gathering flowers, eating berries, drinking from the river, and singing glad little songs of love and thanksgiving. Kate was so happy that she gave off little laughs and cries in her sleep; and on awaking she was so filled with the glory of it that it seemed to her that all her life she had fed on the light and love of the other world. Her world, the lonely hills around her, empty but for her garden, she was only dimly aware of, if at all; for she had been approaching heaven dream by prayer and was at last on its threshold, even when awake, and was ready to enter and be with her angels.
Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher Page 35