by Win Blevins
“You are all fools, you are blind, and cannot see; you have no ears, for you do not hear; you are fools for you do not understand. These men are our friends. The great Mormon captain has talked with our Father above the clouds, and He told the Mormon captain to send these men here to tell us the truth, and not a lie.
“They have not got forked tongues. They talk straight, with one tongue, and tell us that after a few more snows the buffalo will be gone, and if we do not learn some other way to get something to eat, we will starve to death.
“Now, we know that is the truth, for this country was once covered with buffalo, elk, deer, and antelope, and we had plenty to eat, and also robes for bedding, and to make lodges. But now, since the white man has made a trail across our land, and has killed off our game, we are hungry, and there is nothing for us to eat. Our women and children cry for food and we have no food to give them.
“The time was when our Father, who lives above the clouds, loved our fathers, who lived long ago, and His face was bright and He talked with our fathers. His face shone upon them, and their skins were white like the white man’s. Then they were wise and wrote books, and the Great Father talked good to them; but after a while our people would not hear Him, and they quarreled and stole and fought, until the Great Father got mad, because His children would not hear Him talk.
“Then he turned his face away from them, and His back to them, and that caused a shade to come over them, and that is why our skin is black and our minds dark. That darkness came because the Great Father’s back was toward us, and now we cannot see as the white man sees. We can make a bow and arrow, but the white man’s mind is strong and light.
“The white men can make this [picking up a Colt’s revolver,] and a little thing that he carries in his pocket, so that he can tell where the sun is on a dark day, and when it is night he can tell when it will come daylight. This is because the face of the Father is towards him, and His back is towards us. But after a while the Great Father will quit being angry, and will turn his face towards us. Then our skin will be light.”
Paump is tramping, this summer, across a steep hillside above the mouth of Middle Fork; he moves slowly and keeps his eyes roving after rotten logs. He walks over a mile, stopping at seven or eight logs, before he finds what he is looking for: Hidden in the decaying wood, on the shady side of the log in marshy ground, grows an alpine orchid, pale burgundy tinged with violet. He picks it gently. It is his second of the day—one for each squaw. He smiles at the thought of the speech he has long since stopped giving them, about how they are getting free what only queens can afford to buy.
1856: One of them does move a little—just the quick jerk from freeze to freeze that birds make with their heads—and Paump has them. He’s carrying his Hawken, as always, but he also has a four-foot club in his right hand. He stands still for a moment and watches them, three prairie chickens perched stock-still on the ground underneath a big fir tree. He wonders if, when he stands still so long, they forget he is there, or can’t distinguish him. Then he bolts. He clubs the first one before it moves at all, and gets the second after the short step it takes before it flies. The third sits stupidly on the lowest limb of the fir, not thirty feet away. But he doesn’t shoot it. It’s by not shooting often, and never missing when he does shoot, that he keeps his trips to the fort for trading down to once in two or three years.
1859: Spotted Deer raises up from the ground, the newly pulled camas roots in her hand, and freezes. A hundred yards across the meadow, green with spring, Paump realizes something is wrong, then sees what it is: A grizzly, probably not long out of hibernation, is inspecting her closely from twenty yards away. No telling what the damn thing will do. He walks slowly toward Spotted Deer, his rifle in one hand; he doesn’t want to shoot it, because he doesn’t need the meat. It still doesn’t move. He passes Spotted Deer, who retreats to hold the horses, and yells at it: “Hey! Horse turd! Wake up! Get out of here!” The bear just blinks. “Move your ass! Clear out!” The bear doesn’t budge. It is stupid. He looks back at Spotted Deer, who is mounted and has the reins of the second horse. All right, OK, he’ll see what happens. He slides his wiping stick off his Hawken. Slowly, step by careful step, he eases toward the bear, which is on its hind legs. It’s just a yearling. Maybe it’s thinking of settliing in with his little family and teaching them a new dance. He raises his wiping stick.
Just then the bear drops to all fours with a growl and charges. Paump drops the stick and the gun and runs. Shit, the bear’s almost on him. He zigs hard to the right, stumbles, rolls, and is back on his feet running. Damn thing’s on him again. He zags toward some rocks. Hell, no choice. He turns for the edge of the rocks, shouts “Goddamn it!” when he sees it’s twenty feet to the ground below, and jumps.
When he begins to get his breath, the damn bear is on its hind legs up on the rocks roaring at him. “Get out of here!” he yells. “You’ve got bad breath.” His damn shoulder hurts where he rolled on it. Spotted Deer comes up leading his horse, and nearly breaking in two with laughter. He gives her the evil eye, which only makes her laugh harder, and climbs on.
1862: No gifts had come to the Shoshones from the Great White Father for five years, despite many promises. Impatient with Washakie’s peaceableness and willingness to wait, the tribe was ready to fight. The long knives were not so many now, because most of them were gone to fight a war between the white men east of the Missouri River. Pash-e-co, who was warlike, won the hearts of most of the Shoshone and displaced Washakie as supreme chief. In March he mounted a huge and devastating campaign against the whites. It ended, the next winter, when General Connor massacred Bear Hunter’s band on the Bear River.
Paump and his son Paump are walking by the edge of a marshy place. Out in the trees they can hear a sow squirrel chattering as she hops through the trees. Her litter is squalling for food, sending its little shrieks from the hole of a tree twenty feet out into the slough left by the heavy rains. The sow squirrel flies from branch to branch and from tree to tree, ranging wide in her mission, all the while calling back that food is on its way.
The father points out to the son a black snake slithering into the water. It swims to the base of the slender tree and winds upward to the hole. The litter squawks a new signal—high, more piercing—just before the snake’s head slides into the nest.
The boy goes rigid before his eyes pick up the sow, charging through the trees in huge bounds. In instants she is at the hole, her hind claws dug into the trunk and her head ready to strike. Once, twice, three times the sow’s head whacks at the snake. The third time it holds, then cocks again, its teeth sunk just behind the snake’s head. The sow shakes it violently, shakes it again, and then lets the snake drop into the water. She disappears into the hole for a moment; then she darts down the trunk head first; holding on with her hind legs, she dips her nose and paws twice into the water.
The man and boy wade to the base of the tree and retrieve the dead snake. The man holds it against the trunk, slits it open, and shows the boy that there are no tiny squirrels inside.
1863: At the big treaty council at Fort Bridger in July, Washakie accepted the government’s terms for-peace with the Shoshones: The Indians granted safe passage to emigrants, the right to settlements as way stations for them, the safety of the mail and the telegraph, and permission for the railroad to cross their lands. In return they got a ten-thousand dollar annuity for twenty years, and their claim to the Wind River country was recognized.
1865: After the death of Aspen, Paump agrees with Spotted Deer that the two children must learn something of their people. The family joins a segment of Washakie’s band on a journey across the Bitterroots to the eastern side of the Continental Divide, where the buffalo are not yet so thin. Young Paump is given the name Mountain Goat by Sacajawea, and he kills his first buffalo. Paump gives his daughter to the brave of her choice, Three Hoops, and tells him with a grin that he may not find her as submissive as other squaws.
At Pier
re’s Hole, on the way back from the hunt, Mountain Goat asks his father for permission to join the tribe, and it is granted.
Paump, now with only Spotted Deer as a companion, returns to his winter home on Middle Fork. He is sixty years old. On the long trail ride home he and Spotted Deer scarcely speak, and he plays the harmonika for long hours.
1868: The Great White Father did not pay the dollars he promised to the Shoshones; the people were restless, and Washakie was on the verge of anger. At a great treaty council at Fort Bridger the Indians and whites made a new agreement: The Shoshones would give up their nomadic life, settle down in one. place, and learn to till the soil. For this purpose they were given a reservation in the Wind River Mountains; the head of each Indian family would be entitled to 320 acres of land, which he would own as long as he continued to cultivate it. It would be a sea-change in Shoshone life.
Washakie, though, did not look back enviously on the old way. He said instead:
“I am laughing because I am happy. Because my heart is good. As I said two days ago, I like the … Wind River valley. Now I see my friends are around me, and it is pleasant to meet and shake hands with them. I always find friends along the roads in this country, about Bridger, that is why I come here. It is good to have the railroad through this country and I have come down to see it.
“When we want to grow something to eat and hunt, I want the Wind River Country. In other Indian countries, there is danger, but here about Bridger, all is peaceful for whites and Indians and safe for all to travel. When the white men come into my country and cut the wood and made the roads, my heart was good, and I was satisfied. You have heard what I want. The Wind River Country is the one for me.
“We may not for one, two, or three years be able to till the ground. The Sioux may trouble us. But when the Sioux are taken care of, we can do well. Will the whites be allowed to build houses on our reservation? I do not object to traders coming among us, and care nothing about the miners and mining country where they are getting out gold. I may bye and bye get some of that myself.
“I want for my home the valley of the Wind River and lands on its tributaries as far east as the Popo-agie, and want the privilege of going over the mountains to hunt where I please.”
Paump also hunted as he pleased. He had opted out of the momentous struggle of the Shoshone against the white man. With Spotted Deer he lived the balance of his life in the wild and inaccessible Salmon River Mountains, moving with the weather, hunting and trapping and fishing, watching the seasons change and then change back, making his music. Later, the Shoshones, when they told tales about him, said that nothing happened to him the rest of his life. He would have said that what mattered to him happened every day of his life.
AUGUST, 1876: The old man awoke in the pre-dawn light. He felt it, sometimes, like this; he could sense that in a few moments the sun, like a bubble of air that has risen from the bottom of a lake, would burst silently over the ridge to the east. He got up quietly from the buffalo robe, not disturbing the two squaws who slept nearby, and walked to the flap that always faced the rising sun and looked out at the eastern sky. His sense had been right, as it had been right on most mornings since he had come to live here in this wide grove beside the Salmon River. He looked at the distant ridge across the river where the sun would appear, this time of year, to the right of three juniper pines just below its flat top. The sky was not yellow or red—the sun had been above the earth’s horizon for more than an hour already. The sky was instead the crystalline, cornflower blue of mornings in the mountains. The spot where the sun was aiming turned a brilliant white, and then the first edge of the yellow globule flickered above the ridge.
The old man stood facing it, as he did every morning, naked in the cool air.
Acknowledgments
My first and most pervasive debt is to an imaginative, stimulating, and discriminating editor, Ruth Glushanok. Thanks as well to Barbara Branden and Dennis F. Shanahan, who made seminal suggestions, and to other friends whose thoughts helped to sharpen my own.
About the Author
Win Blevins is the author of thirty-one books. He has received the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Contributions to Western Literature, has twice been named Writer of the Year by Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers, has been selected for the Western Writers Hall of Fame, and has won two Spur Awards for Novel of the West. His novel about Crazy Horse, Stone Song, was a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize.
A native of Little Rock, Arkansas, Blevins is of Cherokee and Welsh Irish descent. He received a master’s degree from Columbia University and attended the music conservatory of the University of Southern California. He started his writing career as a music and drama reviewer for the Los Angeles Times and then became the entertainment editor and principal theater and movie critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. His first book was published in 1973, and since then he has made a living as a freelance writer, publishing essays, articles, and reviews. From 2010 to 2012, Blevins served as Gaylord Family Visiting Professor of Professional Writing at the University of Oklahoma.
Blevins has five children and a growing number of grandchildren. He lives with his wife, the novelist Meredith Blevins, among the Navajos in San Juan County, Utah. He has been a river runner and has climbed mountains on three continents. His greatest loves are his family, music, and the untamed places of the West.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Winfred Blevins
Cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-4976-4984-2
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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