Ute Peak Country

by Lauran Paine

  “Why did you bring her up here, Frank? What’s she to you?”

  “Her maw died in the winter. I knew her fairly well, but she never once told me about Jed Shafter, and that’s odd, too, because I …”

  “Why did you bring her up here, Frank?”

  “I’m trying to tell you, doggone it.”

  “Never mind her mother. I can guess about that from knowing Jed.”

  “Well, hell, Jackson,” retorted McCoy a trifle sharply, his bushy brows rolling downward and inward a little. “She was plumb alone and, being as pretty as she is and all, there were some cowmen wanted her to go to work in one of the Laramie dance halls. To tell you the truth, Jack, I didn’t know what to do with her. I hung back starting into the mountains a week as it was. Then I figured I’d bring her along, try to figure out something on the way, and take her back out with me when I go.”

  Miggs turned, considered his old friend for a while, then said: “You aren’t going to stay in and hunt this summer, Jack?”

  “How can I, with her?” McCoy shook his shaggy head. “I tell you, Jack, it’s a real problem.”

  They stood there in gathering gloom with that enormous peak off on Jackson Miggs’ left, looking faintly disturbed, faintly perplexed, as their kind sometimes look when, out of their own element where everything that can happen can be roughly coped with, they were as lost and helpless and naïve as lonely, unencumbered men can be.

  Finally though, Frank McCoy said slyly, watching Miggs from the corner of one eye: “She sure can cook good. Even better’n her maw, and that’s saying a lot, because her maw kept house for me for close to seven years, Jack.”

  “You never mentioned the girl.”

  McCoy shrugged. “It wasn’t important. She was just a runny-nosed danged kid.”

  “You never told me the woman was Jed Shafter’s woman, either.”

  “I never thought she was that Shafter’s woman. There’s a big family of Shafters out by Laramie, Jack. I always sort of figured she was one of that bunch. Not that I ever cared, nor even asked her. And for a fact she sure never told me.”

  “What’d she died of, Frank?”

  Another shrug. “Lung fever, I reckon. She used to hack some now and then. I don’t rightly know. You see, I was over on Green River doing a little horse trading and whatnot most of last winter. Wasn’t home much.” McCoy ran a rough hand over his whiskery face. He was a lean-faced, long, thin man, roughly as old as Miggs was, but he had an air of cunning to him that Miggs entirely lacked.

  “Like I said though, Jackson, she’s one hell of a fine cook.”

  Miggs swung half around, his face—what could be seen of it between nose and forehead—puckered up. “Oh, no, you don’t,” he growled. “You don’t leave her with me as a housekeeper, Frank McCoy, doggone you.”

  “Who said anything about leaving her with you?” protested McCoy, looking astonished at such a suggestion, looking big-eyed and slack-jawed. “Why, where’d you ever get such …?”

  “Doggone you, Frank. You shouldn’t have even brought her up here.”

  “I told you, damn it all, I had no choice. You figure I should’ve left her down there for those stinking cowmen to paw and maul?”

  Jackson Miggs stood upon his widespread, mighty legs, looking from McCoy back down toward his cabin, where a warm, pleasant yellow glow of lamplight spilled out a window and fell upon the wind-scourged soggy earth. There was something totally unfamiliar stirring within him. He could neither dodge it nor define it.

  “That frying meat sure smells fine,” murmured McCoy, coiling a rope, holding it at his side, and waiting for his host to move out toward the cabin. “I’m hungrier’n a starved bear.”

  They moved out side by side. The wind was dying out. It was losing some of its bluster and most of its solid strength. A big pewter disc floated serenely up from behind Ute Peak. As they neared the squat log cabin McCoy looked back at that moon and said: “A man can get his share of elk on a night like this, Jack. Remember, nine, ten years back when those gold hunters come up here, and we sold ’em deer meat for elk, and they didn’t know the difference?”

  Miggs paused outside the cabin also to view that big old moon and how it lay its silvery light over everything, making the constant hush seem deeper.

  “I remember a lot of those big moons,” he mused. “Good ones and bad ones.” He came down out of his reverie abruptly, grabbed for the drawstring, and said: “Let’s eat, Frank.”

  The girl had scrubbed up and combed her raven’s wing tumble of wavy, thick hair. She seemed just as small to Jack but wiser now than she’d seemed an hour before. Wiser because she’d laid the food out exactly as a much older woman would have done, and wiser, too, because she looked straight into Jack’s eyes with the old wisdom of womankind, half understanding, half challenging.

  He could see her paw in her, too. He guessed the other part he saw, and did not recognize, must have come from her maw.

  She said to Miggs: “Do you want to shave now?”

  It startled him. He stood there, gazing down at her as though from an immense height, which was a way he had when something caught him unawares.

  “Because if you do, I put water on to boil and scrubbed the wash basin … and … Frank brought you a new razor.”

  McCoy looked up from over by the stove. There was a sly look to his glance. He looked down, though, and, instead of speaking, began stuffing shag tobacco into a little stubby old pipe he always had with him.

  “Now?” said Jack, fingering his big beard. “Before supper?”

  She smiled up into his eyes, her face turning girlish, turning sweet. “There’s plenty of time, Mr. Miggs.”

  McCoy lit up, puffed furiously, then removed his pipe to say: “Sure, Jack, you got plenty of time. Besides,” Frank chuckled deep down, “hasn’t anyone, including you, seen your ugly face since last September.”

  Frank drew something long-handled and shiny from an inner pocket, solemnly laid it over upon the washstand, and returned to his position by the stove, puffing away. The girl went back to her stove where elk haunch slabs sizzled.

  Jack went to the basin, tucked under his shirt collar, and minutely examined the new razor. “Mighty fine,” he said over his shoulder. “Thanks, Frank. It’s a mighty fine piece of steel.”

  He did not want to shave, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with delaying his supper. He had never before in his lifetime shaved before a female, and it seemed downright indecent to do so now. Over across the room, he could see McCoy standing there, grinning like an egg-sucking skunk, because Frank knew exactly why he was stalling.

  Beverly brought over the hot water, poured it, and went back to her frying meat. Jack dipped in cold water, tested it with a spatulate forefinger, sighed, and took down his shaving mug, shears, and comb. Every winter he let his beard grow for protection against the fierce cold, and every spring he shaved it off—and for two weeks afterward, he suffered every time a cold wind blew, the skin pink, tender, and unbelievably sensitive.

  Frank said: “From the north rim, we saw a herd coming up, Jack. It looked like maybe Tolman.”

  “Too early for him,” replied Miggs, working determinedly with the shears first, letting great swatches of hair fall floorward. “Hyatt won’t be in for another month.”

  “Well, it was someone, and they had a pretty big bunch of cattle.”

  “Coming on from Pagosa?”

  “Looked like. Pretty doggoned early, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Normally no one’s in this early. But this year it’ll be all right. Won’t be any more blizzards from now on.”

  McCoy ran this through his mind and agreed with it by nodding his head up and down.

  At the stove Beverly Shaffer said: “It’s ready whenever you two are.”

  Chapter Three

  Jack and Frank took three bearskins an
d two Hudson’s Bay wool blankets apiece and went outside to sleep near the horses that first night, but the next day they made a partition across one end of Miggs’ large, single-room log house for Beverly Shafter’s cot, and after that they’d bank the stove and sleep warm and private.

  For three days they went crevice mining for gold, which was one of their summertime occupations. It had never netted them a whole lot, but it was good to be out where the lupines were beginning to grow again, and the columbine, not to mention that deep down sunlight that beat with increasing warmth across their backs.

  Then they went hunting, which was for both of them more than hunting for meat; it was a release of the spirit to men cooped up too long by thirty-below temperatures and ten-foot snowdrifts. They went out clad in moccasins, armed, and coated in response to a powerful inner urge, for this primordial call was the last vestige in civilized man of what he had once been.

  They knew the elk grounds, the secret meadows, and tree-girted upland parks where snow-water freshets roared, white and bitterly cold, down through the first showings of rich green grass.

  It was toward the end of their second day out that Jackson, cleaning sage hens they’d ground-sluiced, squatted close by Frank’s quickening supper fire and said: “What’ll become of her, Frank?”

  McCoy showed no surprise. Neither of them had mentioned Beverly since leaving the cabin, but McCoy knew Jackson Miggs. Frank was by instinct a trader; he had every cunning, raffish propensity traders possessed, including the essential one that made him habitually read men.

  “Someday a young buck’ll come along,” he replied, breaking twigs for the fire. “They always do, you know.”

  “Not up in here they don’t. When you leaving to take her back?”

  Frank held his hands over the fire and shrugged. “Next week maybe. The week after. You don’t care when, do you? This sure beats doing our own cooking and washing, Jack.”

  “For us, yes, but I wasn’t thinking of us. Can’t be much fun for her … tending two old shag-backs. Cooking and all the rest, without getting out much.”

  Jack finished with the sage hens, handed them to Frank on a thick green willow to be balanced upon rocks over the fire, and said: “She might like it at that. She’s Jed Shafter’s girl.”

  McCoy made the spit and began turning it. As he watched the hens cook, he said musingly: “You know, I always wanted kids of my own. That’s a funny thing for a loner to want, isn’t it?”

  “No,” said Miggs slowly, gazing down into the coals. “I don’t think so, Frank. A man’s got more purpose in life than just hunting and filling his belly all the time. The trouble is …”

  “Yeah?”

  Jackson Miggs drew in a deep breath and audibly let it out. “Well, it takes time to do all the things a man ought to do, and if a feller’s busy all his waking hours just keeping alive, he doesn’t have much time for … other things.”

  “Shafter made the time, Jack.”

  McCoy made a wry face. “Now you’re talking about something altogether different, and you know it. That used to be the Indian way. You came back from a raid or a hunt, sat around putting on tallow, filling out all the shrunken places of your gut, then you rode off again, leaving behind a squaw carrying your child, but that’s not what you’re talking about at all.”

  “No,” murmured Frank McCoy, satisfied that he’d learned what he’d initially set out to learn. Jackson Miggs wasn’t thinking of Beverly Shafter as a woman, he was considering her welfare, her future, her happiness. In short, Jackson was thinking paternally of Jed Shafter’s girl, and that was succinctly, precisely why Frank had brought her into the uplands with him.

  He hadn’t lied a whole lot to Jackson. He had, however, known she was Jedediah Shafter’s child, and he had known what to do with her after her maw died—bring her to Miggs. A lonely man in his late middle years, after a winter of separation, was invariably hungry for the company of others. Frank knew all these things, and he also knew, or thought he knew, something else. The older Miggs got, the more money he cached away each year, the less survival mattered, and the more he wished for more out of life in these sundown years.

  “It’s hard on youngsters nowadays,” said Miggs as McCoy removed the golden brown, plump hens from their charred willow stick. “It used to be folks clove together … looked out for one another.”

  “That’s the truth,” agreed McCoy solemnly. “Watch out, that danged bird’s hot.”

  They ate with shadows crowding up close to their little fire, with their squatting silhouettes projected against the hushed, giant tree trunks around them. Above lofty treetops a purple sky embellished with ice-cold little flickering lights was night shadowed and velvety.

  “I expect it’s especially hard on young girls.”

  “Pretty ones like her, anyway. Why, Jack, you should’ve seen how those cowmen come a-rutting.” McCoy ate, wiped grease from his chin, wagged his head, and said: “I didn’t know what to do.” And this was the truth; he hadn’t known, until he’d thought of Miggs. “But I’ll take her back next week and see if I can’t find some widow woman or suchlike to leave her with. Then I’ll go on over to Cheyenne and maybe hire out driving freight for …”

  “Let’s head back in the morning,” interrupted Miggs, his face reflecting an inner decision. “We’ll pick up some meat on the way down, Frank.”

  “All right.”

  “And clean up around the cabin … take her mining with us. I know some pockets in the rocks where she can scrape out twenty, thirty dollars in flake gold.” Miggs smiled up around his dead-level gray eyes. “I can see her now … she’ll be tickled as all get-out, finding her very own gold, Frank.”

  McCoy smiled. He chuckled deep down. His glance was cunning, but it was also vastly relieved. “She sure will,” he agreed.

  “Unless you feel you got to take her back, Frank.”

  McCoy almost dropped his sage hen. His eyes grew large, grew round. “No,” he blurted, then checked himself. “Don’t have to go back at all, Jack. Hell, I don’t like driving freight … eating dust all day and cold beans at sundown. No, you know how it is with me, Jack. If I can scrape out a hundred, a hundred and fifty dollars in flake gold between now and September, I’m plumb satisfied.”

  They banked their fire, rolled into their blankets, and lay back for a long time, silent. There was, to Jackson Miggs, an ancient oneness to the feel of earth and pine needles against his skin. There was an old, old promise, too, in that overhead purple tapestry above stiff treetops where the serene moon rode and those winking, aloof stars faintly flickered.

  This was his kind of life. Lying like this in the womb of night surrounded by ageless mountains. Sometimes, in a man’s youth, he thought for a time of other things. Of a woman’s soft roundness perhaps and a family. But youth was a hurrying time, and in the early manhood of Jackson Miggs, there had been few women, indeed, unless one considered Ute squaws, which he never had considered.

  But no matter how fast a man hurried, life hurried past even faster until, like now, he was on the sundown side of fifty with a world of great memories—but also with an emptiness. There was no one now he could share those recollections with.

  “Frank?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How old is she?”

  McCoy brought up a hand, rubbed his nose, and screwed up his face. “I’d say eighteen. Maybe nineteen. No older, though.”

  “She seems older,” mused Jackson Miggs in a detached tone of voice. He was thinking of how she’d boldly met his gaze and softly smiled at him. Did they really mature at eighteen or nineteen? It was so awfully young. Yes, he told himself, they must, for she was a full woman. She’d had that ancient wisdom in her eyes, a knowledge of what life was. He sighed.

  “Frank?”

  “What?”

  “Can she read and write?”

  McCoy raised
up a tousled head, squinted across the coals, and said: “Of course she can. Nowadays they all go to school, even girls.”

  “Times change, don’t they?”

  Frank didn’t answer. He dropped back down, burrowed into his blankets, and heaved up onto one side. Somewhere nearby a horned owl hooted.

  Miggs’ loosening thoughts touched here and there in aimlessness until they closed down upon some recollections of her father. Jed had been a crafty, fearless, rough, brash man. He was the kind they worked up legends about, but that was the same kind other men, the ones who intimately knew, kept silent about, because for every legend there were other things best left unsaid.

  The laudanum incident, for example. He and Jed had been trapping up around the Idaho country years back. Jed had gotten a bad tooth, so they went down to Fort Hall, bought a big bottle of laudanum, and went back to the streams with it. Jed’s toothache left eventually, and they had a quart of laudanum left. Some Crows had come to camp one day, four of them on their way to the fort with their baled wintertime catch, $4,400 worth of prime skins. Jed had tried to trade them out of the furs with no success. He tried gambling and lost half a bale of his own skins instead. He then told them the laudanum was liquor, gave each Indian a tin cup of the stuff, and, when they’d toppled over unconscious afterward, Jed had loaded up all the furs and made a run for Fort Hall. Fortunately for Jackson Miggs, he had awakened before dawn, while the Crows were still unconscious. He figured out what Jed had done and also made haste out of that country.

  He didn’t see Jed Shafter for three winters after that escapade, but, when they eventually did meet, Jed had thrown back his head and roared with laughter, saying he’d always wondered who awakened first, but now he knew, because if the Crows had, Miggs’ scalp lock would now be hanging from a Crow coup stick.

  There were other things to be recalled, also, but Miggs pushed them out of his mind. He could imagine how Jed had gotten his daughter. He thought now that it was entirely possible Jed hadn’t ever known he had a daughter, for Jed Shafter was like that. He was a composite of man and mountain lion, renegade and boon companion.