Buffalo Palace

by Terry C. Johnston

  Here in his third winter, just as he had done for both of those before, from time to time Bass would ride his saddle pony or strap the packs on Hannah’s back—to keep the animals broken in. Enough contact every few days to remind these creatures of his touch, of his smell—enough so these half-wild creatures would be reassured in the presence of a white man here in the land of so many red men.

  Although … Scratch had to admit Hannah had been different almost from the start, right from that very first winter. Markedly different from those other mules he had known working at Troost’s Livery back in St. Louis, as well as those mules brought out of the Missouri country by traders to this far country.

  Thinking about Hannah and her affection always caused a spot inside him to glow not unlike his mam’s bed-warming iron, no matter how cold the land became around him with winter’s icy grip. Many were the times when the winds blew ferociously and the snow fell so deep that the animals had it tough pawing down to anything they could find to eat. From Silas, Billy, and Bud Scratch first learned he could feed his horse and pack animals a subsistence of cottonwood bark until the Chinook winds arrived to clear the land of snow … at least until the coming of the next winter storm.

  Astounded at first—and convinced the three trappers were having themselves a great laugh at his expense—Bass was genuinely amazed when they showed him just how a hungry animal would take to the bark they peeled from cottonwood limbs and logs. After chopping short, firewood-sized pieces, the men would set about drawing their large skinning knives down the length of each limb to peel away the tender, soft underbark. Most times it was a cold, tedious, and laborious process, where a man was forced to kneel in the snow to accomplish his task: Scratch would lock a short length of wood between his knees as he crouched over it, then pull his knife toward him in a shaving motion, with each stroke producing a thin curl of palatable bark. Once he had enough to fill his arms, he would lay that big pile before the mule and other animals the way a man might lay out armloads of alfalfa or bluegrass.

  One morning early their first winter together in the mountains Bass hadn’t been peeling near fast enough to keep up with just how rapidly Hannah could make the bark disappear. Without hesitation she eased over to where he was working, snatching up the curls of bark as quickly as he produced them. When he had stood momentarily to bend and flex the kinks out of his cold, cramped muscles, to his surprise Hannah moved right up to help herself. Putting one front hoof down on the middle of a branch to hold it in place, the mule bent low and began to rake her teeth across it, peeling the bark away each time. As he watched in utter amazement, she consistently managed to pull off short lengths of bark on her own.

  “You just remember that now, ol’ gal,” he had instructed her that first winter. “Hap’ the time I don’t peel fast enough for that damned hungry belly of your’n—don’t you dare be shy ’bout digging in for your own self.”

  As he stood there this cold morning, his head pounding with hangover and finding himself a full year older, Scratch came naturally to think that Hannah was truly meant to come to him, just the way certain folks had shown up somewhere along the path his life had taken. Women. And friends. And even a mule. Times were a hand had gently touched his life, nudging it this way, or easing it there.

  Mayhap it had been better in those younger days when he did not know enough to realize there was something greater than himself … better then than now with the nagging of this not knowing, with this wondering. Far better those days of reckless youth when nothing seemed of much import but the moment. Now, with each ring he put on every winter, Bass realized he knew less and less, so grew to sense just how precious was each day—for now he realized how those days grew less and less in number. Now he knew how each one might well be his last.

  He had to know: just the way he had come to learn the alchemy of fire and iron and muscle in Troost’s Livery; the way he had learned to set and bait and blind a beaver trap in those high-country streams and ponds. This was something that must not elude him: knowing what force had brought him here, then continued to watch over him, and ultimately plucked him from danger more than once already.

  Likely it had to be the very same force that had guided him north as he lay all but dead across Hannah’s withers. No, not just the North Star shining like some distant beacon, not only it—for he was certain something far greater than those tiny pricks of light in the night sky had steered him north to Goat Horn’s band of the Shoshone, north to Jack Hatcher’s bunch … and—dare he think it?—had guided him north right to that white buffalo calf … the animal that had saved his life.

  22

  “It true what they say ’bout that Three Forks country up yonder?” Titus asked the others at the fire one cold spring evening.

  “True that it’s crawling with more ways for a man t’ die than most ever thought of?” Jack Hatcher asked in reply.

  “Them three I was with,” Bass began to explain, “they didn’t want to go nowhere near Blackfeets.”

  “Damn them red-bellies!” Isaac Simms shouted.

  “No-account worthless niggers,” echoed Elbridge Gray.

  Scratch asked, “I take it you fellas rubbed up again’ them Blackfeets, eh?”

  Jabbing his sharp knife in the air, pointing at the others in the circle at that fire, Hatcher made his point. “Every damn last one of these here coons rubbed up again’ Blackfoot at least once.”

  “An’ for most—once be more’n enough!” Caleb Wood exclaimed. “Just ask Jack hisself there.”

  “Ask him what?” Bass inquired.

  Wood continued, “Ask him about Blackfoots—how they took his own brother.”

  Turning to look at Hatcher, Bass repeated, “They kill’t your own brother, Jack?”

  For a moment longer Hatcher sat swabbing the oiled rag on the end of his wiping stick up and down the bore of his rifle. “It be the church’s truth. Jeb were with Lisa … long, long ago.”

  “The Spaniard? Manuel Lisa?”

  “That’s him,” Jack answered Titus. “Took him one of the first outfits to the upper river.”

  With a knowing nod Matthew Kinkead added, “The Up-Missouri country.”

  Then Hatcher continued. “My brother Jeb weren’t ’sactly with Lisa, howsoever. Stayed on with Henry’s bunch what tramped over to the Three Forks.”

  “Long time back I knowed a man what was bound away to join up with Lisa out to St. Louie,” Scratch announced. “It were the summer just afore I left home for good. Long ago. Gamble, I remember his name to be. Damn if he weren’t a shot too: beat me good at the Longhunter Fair shoot.”

  “Jeb was the best there was in our country,” Hatcher explained, smiling with brotherly admiration. “Damn—but there’s times I do miss him sorely.”

  “Wait just a shake there,” Bass exclaimed. “You can’t be near old enough to have you a brother what went upriver with Lisa!”

  “Shit!” cried Rufus Graham. “Jack Hatcher’s lot older’n you think!”

  “Not near so old I cain’t whip your ass, Rufus!” Hatcher growled, then turned back to Titus. “Jeb was firstborn in our family. I was the babe. Ain’t really all that far apart in years, I s’pose. I was old enough to carry a rifle into the woods with him the fall and winter afore he left home for to join Lisa. It purely broke my ma’s heart when he left. And it broke my pa’s heart when Jeb never come back.”

  For long minutes none of them spoke at the fire, perhaps deep in thought on what had been left behind, those who had been left behind—the price paid to seize hold of this life.

  Night held back this season of the year, waiting just a bit longer each evening before it stole in to take possession of the day. Not like autumn, that other season of change: when night rushed in like a bold, brazen brigand. But for now night held off, and so did they, likely every man thinking of loved ones left behind among the settlements and places where people gathered shoulder to shoulder.

  A wet, cold spring it had become—almost from
the first retreat of the snow up the mountainsides. Streams swelled to overflowing with the melting runoff tumbling down to the valleys below while icy rains hammered the land until the ground could hold no more. Nearly every ravine, coulee, and dry wash frothed in its headlong rush for the sea. The beaver hunting turned poor there in the country that drained the eastern slope of the Wind River Mountains. During such spring floods the flat-tails simply did not live by the same habits. And if they did emerge from their flooded lodges at all, the beaver were much more wary, harder to bring to bait, more cautious than a long-tailed house cat trapped in a room filled with bent-wood rockers.

  One evening after it had been raining solid for the better part of a night and the following day, they sat by their smoky fire, broiling pieces of meat the size of their fists on sharpened sticks called appolaz. To his utter surprise, Bass heard that first yip-yip-yipping cry of a nearby coyote.

  “Didn’t think they come out in the rain,” Scratch said, sniffling as he dragged his wet wool coat under his red, raw nose.

  “That’s medicine,” Hatcher explained matter-of-factly as he poked a finger in his half-raw meat, then returned it to the flames.

  “What’s medicine?” Bass repeated.

  “That song-dog,” Graham said.

  Titus scoffed, “What’s the medicine in some lonely ol’ coyote singing to the sun as it falls outta the sky?”

  Clearing his throat, Hatcher said, “Scratch, ye damn well know I’d rather spit face-on into a strong wind than tell ye a bald-faced lie.”

  “You ain’t ever told me no bald-face what I know of,” Bass admitted.

  “Then ye damn well pin ye ears back and give Mad Jack Hatcher a good listen here. Some winters back I heard tell a coyote what comes out to howl in the rain—why, that coyote really be a Injun.”

  “You mean a Injun coming round to scout our camp?”

  “No—a coyote” Hatcher repeated. “A coyote what used to be a Injun.”

  Starting to grin, Bass was sure now he was getting his leg pulled, and good. “No matter you swore you’d tell me no bald-face … I can tell when a man’s poking fun at me—”

  “You believe what ye-wanna believe, Titus Bass,” Hatcher interrupted. “And ye ain’t gotta believe what ye ain’t ready to believe.”

  Solomon Fish declared, “He’s telling you the straight of it, Scratch.”

  “You mean you ain’t rousting me?” Titus asked.

  Wagging his head, Hatcher replied, “No. Just telling ye the truth of it, as I knows the truth to be.”

  For a moment he listened to that coyote wailing off-key out there in the soggy hills. “You mean to tell me that there ain’t no coyote singing out there?”

  “Oh, there’s a coyote all right,” Caleb Wood testified. “A buffler coyote.”

  “What’s a buffler coyote?”

  Hatcher said, “Scratch, surely ye see’d how coyotes toiler the herds.”

  Bass nodded. “Yep, them and the wolves. So that’s what you call a buffler coyote, eh?”

  “Yep.”

  Still grinning, Bass said, “So—what is it? A buffler coyote … or a Injun?”

  Wood wagged his head like a schoolmaster who had grown frustrated explaining some fine point to one of his thickheaded young charges. “Tell ’im, Jack.”

  “One what sings in the rain be a coyote what was once’t a Injun,” Hatcher said patiently. “Kill’t by a enemy while’st his medicine was still strong.”

  “You’re trying to tell me all that howling’s from a dead warrior?”

  Wood nodded eagerly. “I do believe he’s getting it, Jack!”

  “Wait a shake here,” Bass protested. “If’n his medicine’s so strong, how come he gets hisself kill’t?”

  “’Cause the spirits want that warrior and his powers,” Hatcher replied.

  “Why them spirits want the Injun for if he’s been killed by a enemy?”

  “Them spirits change the Injun to a coyote critter,” Hatcher continued, “so’s it can take some revenge for some wrong done those spirits.”

  Titus swallowed unconsciously, sensing a heaviness to the air about him as the coyote took up its cry once more. The rain continued to hammer the branches of the trees and the half-dozen nearby sections of canvas and Russian sheeting they had stretched over their bedding. Drops hissed into their fire pit that struggled to maintain its warmth.

  “So maybe there’s buffler near-abouts,” Scratch finally broke the long silence. “If’n that’s a buffler coyote.”

  “Don’t mean there’s buffler about at all,” Jack said. He pointed with the appolaz in the general direction of the coyote’s howl, then poked his finger at his browning meat. “All it means is that spirit critter got something the spirits want told to one of us niggers here.”

  “Now for sure I don’t believe you.”

  “It be the truth,” John Rowland testified.

  Bass wagged his head. “That coyote wants to tell something to one of us?”

  Jack tried biting into his meat, finding it still too raw, returning it to the flames. “Way I got it figgered—you was the only man here what didn’t know ’bout such spirit doin’s, Titus Bass.”

  “So I’m the one that coyote wants to talk to, eh?”

  Scratch waited a moment while the others fell silent, figuring that if he was patient enough, there was sure to come some gust of laughter that would prove to him the others were having their fun at his expense. But, instead, as he looked from face to face to face, the others stared into the fire, or regarded their supper, faces grave and intent.

  Finally Scratch said, “All right, you all heard that spirit critter afore. And if … if I’m the only one what didn’t know nothing ’bout such a thing till now—what you figger such a spirit critter’s got to tell me?”

  Hatcher shrugged slightly and said, “I ’spect we’re going to find out soon enough what all his song means.”

  With the first days of spring they had abandoned that country and slogged north by west, following the Wind River itself, then slowly worked their way through those mountains* they followed north as the days lengthened and the land began to bloom. Across carpets of alpine wildflowers they slipped over the passes—feasting mostly on the elk fattening themselves up as the herds migrated to higher elevations, following the season’s new grasses ever higher. Overhead flew the undulating black vees of the white-breasted honking longnecks and their smaller canvas-backed, ring-necked, or green-crowned cousins, heading back to the north. Late each afternoon it seemed the sky would reverberate with the racket of beating wings as the flocks passed low, circled, then swooped in—beginning to congregate near every pocket of water, there to feed by the thousands and rest those hours until morning when again they would take to the sky in a deafening rush of wings.

  As he watched the monstrous vees disappear to the north, slowly spearing their way across the springtime blue, the carrot-topped Caleb Wood always grumbled. “Headed to Blackfoot country—just over them peaks.”

  Wood’s sourness always made Jack Hatcher laugh, which invariably caused the legs of that badger cap he wore to shake on either side of his face. “Damned birds make fools out of us, don’t they, Caleb? Travel free an’ easy while’st we watch the skyline, made to keep our eyes on our backtrail—scared for losing our hair! All while them goddamned birds go flying off to see what haps with them Britishers up north come ever’ spring … then on the wing back here to spy on us come the autumn!”

  Running his dirty hand through hair so auburn it had a copper glow to it, Rufus Graham sighed. “Up there in that Three Forks land I hear tell beaver’s so thick, you just walk up and club ’em over the head, Jack.”

  “I got close enough to know that’s the certain truth,” Bass replied with a nod. “Beaver big and glossy—more of ’em on every stream than I’d ever see’d.”

  “A damned cursed country, that be!” Hatcher snapped. “A country I’ve vowed I’ll never set foot in for all the grief it’s cause
d my poor grievin’ ma.”

  All winter Solomon Fisn had been working on cultivating a beard with blond ringlets in it to match his flowing mane that reached the middle of his back. Turning to Bass, he agreed with Jack. “There be a reason why that Three Forks country crawls with beaver.”

  “An’ their name be Blackfoots!” Hatcher snarled.

  Elbridge Gray was the first out of the saddle that afternoon at the edge of a meadow where they planned to camp. With the beginnings of a potbelly starting to slip over his belt, he was constantly tugging up his leather britches. “By God, I’m a man what values his hair more’n all the beaver what’s in Chouteau’s warehouse!”

  Proud of his considerable mane, Solomon roared, “And my hair more’n all the beaver in the hull of St. Louie!”

  As the men slipped to the ground, the horses and mules began switching their tails and flicking their ears all the more. One by one the trappers began to slap at the back of a hand, swatted their neck or cheek—some tender and exposed domain of juicy flesh.

  Graham quit removing his saddle, his hands on the cinch. “Dammit, Hatcher—I say we find us a better camp!”

  “Skeeters bound to eat us up alive!” Gray agreed.

  “Ye two just get the fire started,” Jack commanded. “Smear some goober on—then haul out our sack of buffler wood.”

  “Why us?” Graham grumped, swatting at the insects buzzing right at the end of his nose.

  “It’s your night to tend fire, ain’t it?” Caleb asked.