Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher

by Vardis Fisher

  Though he felt that he was desecrating a holiness he pulled three stakes and on his belly crawled under the loosened skin, rifle in hand, Unable to see anything inside, he propped the edge of the tent up, to let daylight in, and then stood and stared for a full minute. On a bed of lodgepoles two feet above the earth lay a dead warrior in full regalia, his shield of buffalo hide across his loins, his tobacco pipe, adorned with eagle feathers, across his right arm, and his medicine bag on his chest over his heart. At the head of the bed, kneeling, was a woman in what looked like an attitude of prayer. Sam knew that she was the man’s wife. After carefully studying her position he guessed that she had knelt there and frozen to death. He sensed that the man was Elk Horns and he guessed that he had killed himself because his people had cast him out. Sam was deeply moved by the scene. He did not want to touch anything here, but because he had to know whether this man was the chief he gently moved her heavy hair back until he could see a part of the skull. What beautiful devotion in a wife! What a poem, what a symphony this picture before him was! The chief had been his deadly enemy but he must have had remarkable virtues to have won from a woman such love as this. Softly he-put the hair back over the skull and the face. The odor of human decay had turned him sick; dropping to hands and knees and grasping his rifle, he crawled under the tent and looked around him before rising to his feet.

  He guessed he had better be going. As he rode east it occurred to him that he and the mountain men had avenged not only his own humiliation but also the massacre of Kate’s family, if it could be said, in earth or heaven, that a wrong so monstrous could be avenged. If Lotus had lived would she have loved him with such holiness that she would have covered his shame with her hair, and have knelt by him and died in the bitter cold? All the mountain men had been impressed by the loyalty of red women to their husbands. They were wildcats in their jealous furies, and they often killed, when they could, the adulterous husband; but they would accept floggings and brutalities that would drive white wives from the door. Covering the unspeakable shame of a scalped head with their own hair, they would freeze to death by the man they loved.

  After crossing the Musselshell, Sam observed that winter had been in no hurry to depart. It was June, but on the north flank of every hill was a snowbank, molded to the hill’s contours and dappled with wind dust. No river flowers were yet in bloom; he wondered if Kate’s would be. He had with him twenty different kinds of wild-flower seed—enough, he expected, to sow an acre of prairie. Kate might not use them but she would be happy to have them: when building a nest, a woman, like a bird, was happiest when she had more materials than she could use. Except for the willows and shrubs the plant life hadn’t put on its spring dress yet; and the river grasses were barely looking out of the earth. Everywhere were signs that the Canadian winds had been here. Cottonwood trees riven by frost now stood with their bellies open; and aspens had been snapped off by the winds or torn from the earth.

  When he came to the hill where he had always paused to look at the shack and the garden he cried aloud, “My God!” and some part of him died. He saw it instantly and knew it all. He saw the second cairn of stones, standing close by the one he had built, and he knew that Kate was dead. The grief that choked and blinded him would have been no more intense if he had looked at the grave of his mother. The sky had darkened, the earth had taken on a deeper quiet. It was all desolation now: there were no flowers—there was only an old shack with a part of its roof fallen in, and two mounds of stones. Dismounting, he dropped the reins, and rifle in hand, approached on foot.

  The sage plants still lived and for a few moments he looked at them. Then he looked at the second cairn, observing how the stones had been laid, for his first thought was that a mountain man had passed this way. He had found Kate frozen to death. But he knew it was not that. Something had caught his gaze and he now circled the two cairns and looked down at the sage, most of which had been trampled and broken, and went to the shack to peer in. The pile of filthy bedding was still by the door. By the north wall with earth from the roof spilled on it was the heap of utensils and food. Stepping across the bedding, he went over and knelt to examine it. He found an old knife but no axe. Under the bedding was the rifle.

  Sam went out and looked south. Something had happened here that he did not understand. After walking twice around the cabin he knelt to examine footprints of man and horse. He went east from the cabin fifty yards. He swung north and doubled back to the south, and at the top of a hill found the incredible evidence that he had thought he might find. He knew now that a party of Indians had been here and that they were Crows. This seemed to him so utterly outside the plausible and the possible that he examined all the signs, over and over; stared again at the cairn, half expecting that it would not be there; and looked up and down the river and all around him. He knew it was true but he could not believe it, not all at once: a party of Crows had come here and found Kate in her bedding, dead, with a part of the roof fallen on her; and they had gathered stones and built a house to protect her; and they had taken none of her tools, bedding, food, not even her rifle! How could a man believe that?

  To be completely sure he searched over the area where they had hitched their horses; examined footprints of man and beast; studied from top to bottom of the cairn the way the stones were laid; found their campsite and inspected the ashes of their fire; and then for two miles followed the path they had taken eastward over the hills. The implications so overwhelmed him that after two hours of searching and study he could only sit and look and wonder. It was this way: they had come in from the southeast, perhaps looking for Blackfeet; and on the first hill from which they had a view of the shack they had sat on their horses, looking and listening. They had tied three of either seven or eight horses to a cedar and in single file had approached the cabin. When a hundred yards from it they had been able to see that most of the roof had fallen in, and that there were no flowers, no woman, no life. They had then moved nearer, and two of them had approached the door by going around the north wall. They had found her in the bed. Old woman’s man her children their ghosts, there, in the blackest nights they are, in the sagebrush they are crying ….

  Sitting by the bedding, his left palm resting on it, Sam smoked three pipes. He was trying to believe that far yonder in the pale haze in a small tent filled with death smell a wife was bowed before her man, her hair hiding his shame; and that here another wife had lived for years, alone, by the graves of her children. Greater love hath no man, but greater love hath the mother. Where was her Bible? He would know someday that they had put it in the cairn with her. Where was her axe? He would never know. Why had the Crows done this thing? It was an act of such gracious mercy and pity—or, if not that, of atonement—that he sat humbled before it.

  So this was why all the way up from the post he had seen no Crow!

  After the third pipe Sam patted the bedding as though it were Kate, and closed his eyes on loneliness and grief. Then he went to the cairns. On a ledge of stones shoulder high he rested his face in his arms and tried to say a prayer for Kate, or a farewell, or something. Prayers had never been a part of him, and he did not know how to say farewell. The opening of light in the last movement of the Fifth, that was prayer maybe, his kind. No matter: the Crows long ago had said the only prayer for her that need ever be said:

  Old woman’s man her children their ghosts, there, in the blackest nights they are,

  in the sagebrush they are crying ….

  But not crying now. Not any more.

  From time to time, he told himself, head bowed and tears falling, he would pass this way, to bring flowers and touch a stone. His wife and child would be here, and Kate and her children. There would be no olive-green sage plants any more, no marigolds and bluebells and gilias; no little gray woman in rags carrying pails of water up a hill all day long. There would now be only memory of her and the story of her; and after a generation or two there would not even be that. But as long as any of the mountain m
en lived there would be the footfalls of friends passing this way, and eyes looking over to the spot where the crazy woman lived ….

  Meanwhile he had a job to do. Leaving everything here as he had found it, for time and God to do with in their infinite patience, he mounted his horse, drew tight on the lead rein, and set his course into the southeast, straight for the Belle Fourche and the old chief of the Crows.

  35

  AFTER HE HAD crossed the Yellowstone he proceeded through Crow country without his usual vigilance. He shot game, and at night he made a fire and roasted steaks. He sat outlined by flame and smoked his pipe. Though he crossed fresh trails he saw no redmen.

  He decided to take the chief by surprise, and so slipped past the sentinels and sleeping dogs just before daybreak. He knew the chief’s tent by the size and position of it. At the entrance he drew the skin flap aside and put an ear to the aperture. He had heard that the old chief snored as loud as a shipload of sailors, and after listening a few moments he guessed he had the right tent. Glancing round him, he slipped inside and stood in the dark. He then threw the tent flap far back, exposing to early morning a part of the interior. Because the chief was an old man he made in his sleep the sounds of anxiety and unhappiness that the old sometimes make; and so for a few moments Sam stood above him and looked at the face and listened. Then, filling his lungs, he gave the mountain-man battle cry. Instantly the chief came bolt upright, and though drugged by sleep and shattered by alarm, he reached blindly for his weapons. Sam had placed himself so that the old fellow would see his face and recognize him; he stood with a finger inside the trigger guard of his revolver and the other hand on his rifle. The chief’s first recognition was that he was covered; his second, that the person before him was the dreadful killer of his people; and his third, that the killer was offering his hand and speaking.

  “Thought I dotta call on you,” Sam was saying. “It’s morning. How about some breakfast?”

  The old man rose slowly to his feet and stood, facing Sam, his eyes searching his face. He looked down at last to the extended hand. “Time we shook hands,” Sam said, and seized the old hand and held it. “I figger mebbe there’s too much killing in the world.” Outside, the village was in uproar, with dogs howling, mothers shrieking at children, and braves racing away to their horses. Sam stood his rifle against his belly, released the hand, and drawing his knife, offered it handle first to the chief. When the old man refused to take it Sam laid his rifle on the earth, unbuckled his revolver and dropped it, and expertly threw the knife so that half the blade was buried in earth between his feet and the chief’s. He offered his hand again, saying, “It’s time to be friends.”

  The old warrior, one of the greatest his nation had ever had, stepped forward, and standing above the knife, looked into Sam’s eyes. Black eye looked into gray-blue, gray-blue into black, for perhaps half a minute. Then the red hand came up to meet the white hand. Going to the tent opening, the chief called and a woman came running; he sent her for pipe and tobacco. In words and signs he asked Sam where his horses were, and sent a warrior to bring them in. Most of the braves had rushed away into morning dusk to find their horses, and now returned to stand in groups and look at the chief’s tent. Word had passed that The Terror was here, to smoke the pipe of peace. As among all impassioned and impetuous people, there were young hotbloods who wanted to keep the vendetta alive, and would go on dreaming of hanging a scalp on the medicine pole, high above all other scalps there. When full daylight was on them Sam and the chief, sitting in the places of honor in the village center, smoked a pipe, as Sam looked round him at hostile faces. Never in Crow country would he dare to forget the past, for to the end of his days one of the avengers might trail him.

  While the two men smoked and breakfast was prepared in the fires the chief looked at Sam with eyes almost ninety snows old and said, “Dua-wici?” Sam thought of Charley and Cy and tried to remember what these words meant. The chief now asked him in signs if he had a wife. Sam shook his head no. The chief gave a signal. A little old woman, crippled by arthritis and age, hobbled over to him and bent down to listen with half-dead ears; and then hastened away, to return half dragging by the hands a frightened girl. She looked to Sam like a child but she was slender and lovely and reminded him a little of Lotus. This, the chief explained, was his youngest daughter and she was not for sale. He would give her to Sam as a guarantee of that friendship and peace that must henceforth rest between Long Talons and the Sparrowhawks. Sam was touched by the offer. He knew it was a goodwill offering of extraordinary size—to give to the killer of his people the only unmarried daughter of the head chief! It was almost as if George Washington had offered his daughter to Cornwallis at Yorktown.

  It took Sam a few moments to sense the magnanimity of it. He then got to his feet and beckoned to the girl to come to him. She came slinking, shy and hostile, and stood before him, looking down. Stooping, Sam put his left arm under her rump and straightened; and there she sat in the cradle of his arm, her black eyes staring at him. One who read the human female more unerringly than Sam might have thought her stare a fascinated blend of hate and admiration; hate, because this was the monster; admiration, because her father had said that as a fighter Long Talons had no match in all the lands of the earth. “Wife for me?” he asked her, but she only stared. She was a little heavier than Lotus, he thought, and a little taller. He liked the womanly female of her on his arm and her pressure against his shoulder. He liked the intelligence in her eyes. He set her down but did not release her at once; with his left arm across her back and her black hair coming to the top of his shoulder, he looked round him at the braves; at the women and children in a large group beyond the braves; and at the smoke of breakfast fires. He did not want the girl but he did not want to offend his host. He now had to match the chief’s generosity, and this, it seemed to him, he could hardly do, unless he gave everything he had and walked away. But then he thought of the panniers bulging with stuff for Kate. That was it! The chief would think he had bought all these things for him and his people., So with words and signs he told him that he had brought gifts to the great chief of the Sparrowhawks; and clasping the girl’s hand, Sam walked over to his packhorses. There he released her and began to strip the panniers. A ten-yard bolt of cloth in brilliant colors he gave, with a slight bow, to the girl. He did not observe that she was rigid with amazement and joy. All the other things he gave to the chief, who almost melted with happiness, for he felt that at some trading post Long Talons had bought these things for him. During the hours spent with the chief not a word was said about Kate Bowden. But the chief knew that Sam knew what had been done, and Sam knew that he knew it. The Indian male was in fact a sentimental soul, but from early childhood there waited for him a pattern of life in which he would be brave, daring, ruthless, and conquering. The chief wanted to know if the pale people from the rising sun were going to keep coming until they overflowed the land and drove the red people out. Sam said he would fight for his red brothers before he would see them robbed of their ancient lands. That pleased the chief, and so they smoked another pipe. Sam had given him four pounds of tobacco, and to the young warriors around him he promised tobacco and rum. The chief said they were all friends now. His people had enough trouble fighting the Blackfeet and the Cheyenne; he wanted only peace with the mountain men.

  While Sam took breakfast with the chief the daughter stood back, her black eyes studying the whiteman. Perhaps she was trying to imagine what life would be for her as his wife. The Crow women were menials but they seemed fairly contented with their lot, and they boasted louder of their lords and masters than any other women Sam had known. This girl, he supposed, was thinking that she would gather the wood, set the fires, cook the food, tan skins, sew and mend garments, find forage for horses and berries and roots for her man, while in fringed and beaded buckskin he rode arrogantly away to kill an enemy or a bull. So far as Sam knew, no Indian girl had ever preferred a whiteman to a red. He didn’t know wheth
er he would ever come back to claim her or ever want another wife. If he could be at peace with all the tribes around him he would have the life he wanted—the free wide world of valleys and rivers and mountains, of natural odors and natural music, where the black currants and red chokecherries and red plums bent their boughs toward him, and his drink was pure water and his bed was the earth. If he were not slain by man or beast, someday he would be old, and like the old bull he would go off somewhere and be alone to wait for death.

  But he had before him, he hoped, twenty or thirty years of full living and millions of square miles to live them in; hot steaks and bird throats singing to him and mornings as fresh as the first alpine lily, and evenings as deep with peace as the earth under them. Turning on a hilltop, he looked back at the thousand Sparrowhawks watching him, and made a sign which said that he would come again someday; and then he galloped off into the southwest and a brilliant Rubens sunset. Maybe he would go down to see Jim Bridger, who was having trouble with Brigham Young and his Mormons.

  When a few days later he came close to the Oregon Trail he paused, as in former times, and looked at the scene before him. There they were, hundreds or thousands of them, as far back as he could see in clouds of dust, and as far ahead—a long gray line of bawling beasts and squealing axles and creaking wagon beds that hadn’t a drop of moisture left in them. There they were, pushing on and on like the armies of red ants; and behind them were other thousands, on their way or getting ready; and in the future their children’s children would swarm over this magnificent land, chasing to their death the last elk and deer, shooting the last songbirds, trampling the last berry bush; there and everywhere with their houses and hotels and saloons and gutters, their towns looking like gigantic magpie and crow nests; there and everywhere, proliferating, crowding, and making untidiness and stench of everything, a people bumping and stumbling to get out of one another’s way. Every Indian tribe was becoming more restless as the hordes poured in, and before long there would shorely be bloody war between the red and the white. During the hour that he watched the slow dust-saturated serpentine crawl of a wagon trail four miles long there filled him the realization that his way of life would someday be no more. For a little while there would be patches of it left up in Canada but here it would all be what Jim Bridger said it would be, swarming human masses, with the effluvium of their body smells and city smells and machine smells rising to the heavens and wash away the blue. Sam didn’t know if the Creator had planned it this way or if it was only the blind way of the blind. He remembered what a musician had written after hearing the Dan Giovanni overture: that he had been seized by terror as there unrolled the ascending and descending scales, as answerless as fate and as inexorable as death. Sam guessed he wouldn’t go on to Jim’s post now but would turn back to the bird wings and giddy roadrunners and bluebirds, spilling lyrics out of the clean blue loveliness of their souls. He would go back to the Breughel mornings and Rubens evenings, and see what Bill was doing and what Hank was doing; and he would find a bushel of wild flowers and lay them gently over the bones of two mothers and one child. And so after a last long look at the immigrants he turned and headed straight north, back into the valleys and the mountains.