Bendigo Shafter (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures)

by Louis L'Amour

  Turning sharply, I struck back with the knife again, barely hooked some flesh, and the lion fell free of me as I heaved myself up. Wounded, it sprang at me, and I had sense enough not to try to escape. To have tried to back away would have made me vulnerable, more so than I was, and I sprang at the cat, trying to get inside. I had my knife low down now, cutting edge up, and as we came together I drove my sheepskin covered forearm between his jaws, forcing it back so hard he could not bite, and then I ripped in and up with the knife, withdrew, stabbed again and again.

  With my forearm filling its jaws the lion could not snap or tear. Again I stabbed with the knife. The powerful hind legs doubled, the wicked claws trying for my belly, then I stabbed again, and the lion dropped away from me.

  Crouching, snarling, tail lashing in fury, the lion stared at me while I waited, swaying on my feet. Up on the slope I heard shouts, yells, and a crashing in the brush as my friends started down.

  The lion made as if to leap, but the crashing in the brush made it hesitate, and I took a step back, toward my rifle. The cat snarled, and I knew it was no good trying for the rifle. Slowly, carefully, I shifted the bloody knife to my left hand and reached back for my pistol.

  I drew it, not too fast, suddenly aware that my hand was bloody and wet. Lifting the gun slowly, I eased back the hammer, and the lion sprang at me. The hammer dropped and the heavy .44 slug caught the lion in the chest. Instantly I fired again, the power of the two hard-driven bullets doubling the lion up. It fell, and I stepped back, holding the gun ready, but it did not move. It was dead…quite dead.

  Slowly I holstered my gun. Blood was on my hand, and all at once my friends were around me.

  Ethan ran to me. “You all right?”

  I just looked at him. “You tell me.” Suddenly I backed up and sat down on the deadfall and began to shake all over.

  Bud Macken was staring at me, awed. Short Bull went to the lion and turned it over with a grip on a leg. There were a half dozen stab marks; one, which we decided was my first one, had struck right through the lion’s stomach, ripping a deep gash.

  “We got to get you home,” Bud said.

  “Build a fire,” I suggested, “melt some snow.”

  Ethan carefully took off my sheepskin jacket. It was ripped and torn, but without a doubt it had saved my life. The collar was bitten through and torn but the thickness had defeated the lion, as had my arm shoved back in his jaws too far for him to get the right leverage; and the thickness of the sleeve had protected me to a degree.

  Yet the teeth had gone through the sleeve and bitten into my arm, not deeply, but enough to start the blood flowing, and there were lacerations on my legs as well, partly protected by the thick shotgun chaps I was wearing.

  Ethan got a fire going and Short Bull and Bud put together a lean-to partly covered by the fresh elk hide. Then, with Ethan’s help I bathed the wounds in hot water. I knew that the teeth and claws of a lion are usually poisonous from decayed meat, but nowhere had they penetrated very badly.

  “They don’t often jump a man,” Ethan commented, “he must have seen the back of your coat, figured it was a part of the elk or that some other animal had jumped his elk.”

  When I was dressed again, the meat was cut out and hung up in a tree. We broiled some steaks over the fire, and settled down for the night.

  Bud had gone back up the hill with Short Bull and brought down the horses. We’d planned to start back, but there was no chance of that now, and I was shaking…I wasn’t as tough as I thought.

  Ethan looked around at me as we sat by the fire. “Folks back east would never believe that,” he said, “you whuppin’ a catamount. You should write it up.”

  CHAPTER 32

  * * *

  THE SHOCK OF the attack hit me later, and long after the others were asleep I lay shivering in my blankets. Finally I rolled over, put more wood on the fire, and decided trying to sleep was no use.

  The incident showed me on how short a string our lives were lived. There had been no way to prepare for such an attack. We had known the lion was about, but the idea that it would attack a man when others were close around had not occurred to us.

  It was a big lion…not the biggest I ever saw, but it weighed about one hundred and seventy pounds, we figured. This wasn’t the first lion I’d killed. I’d hunted them back east and killed a few, and I’d killed a half dozen, one time or another, since coming west. A lion stalking deer will try to get right up close before he makes his jump, often as close as four feet, and he likes to stalk a deer in thick brush, yet a big male, jumping downhill, would sometimes leap as much as twenty to twenty-five feet.

  Thinking of all that as I lay there awake, I suddenly recalled what Ethan had said about me writing it up.

  I’d read lots of writing, but had never thought of doing it myself. But I had thought of a newspaper, and that made me wonder if there weren’t papers or journals or something back east that would publish something about the west, or about wild animals.

  Maybe that was the answer. Maybe if I wrote some of what I knew I might get it published and then get a job on one of those eastern papers. It was a kind of wild idea, and I said nothing to anyone about it but started to think out what I’d say about lions, and the next thing I knew it was morning and the fire was burning, the coffee smell was in the air, and I was the last one to awaken. Even Bud was up before me.

  Yet when I started to move, I groaned. They all looked around at me, but it wasn’t the wounds. It was my back where that lion had hit me when he jumped…it was bruised, and badly. I didn’t need to see it to know.

  After a while I wrestled around and got myself up, tugged on my boots, and shrugged into what was left of a good sheepskin coat. I put on my chaps and eased up to the fire to partake of some fresh elk meat, biscuit, and coffee.

  Ethan watched me putting the meat away and commented sarcastically that being jumped by a lion surely hadn’t interfered with my appetite.

  Drinking coffee, I studied on my idea of the night before. In the clear light of day I didn’t shape up to have much chance, but I surely had access to the material. Between Ethan Sackett, Stacy Follett, and old Uruwishi I had men who knew as much about wilderness living, hunting, and wild animals as anybody alive.

  We had meat enough, so we packed up and started down the canyon. Climbing out would have been a struggle, loaded like we were, so we decided we’d try going down canyon, knowing all the while that we might run into a big fall we couldn’t go around and have to go all the way back. We lucked out, found a dim trail out of the canyon, and climbed out to a bench that followed along for miles.

  The snow was patchy, and here and there the ground where the sunlight could reach was soggy from melting. Ethan was riding point and of a sudden he pulled in, looking up at a tree.

  When the rest of us drew up and looked we saw the claw marks of a big bear…a bear stakes out his territory that way, standing up and reaching as high as he can before digging his claws into the bark. If a strange bear comes around and he can’t reach that high, he keeps on traveling. Well, the bear that made these tracks was big.

  Ethan looked at those claw marks and turned to us. “Either that bear was standing on top of a mighty big drift or I’m leaving the country!”

  Of course, that was what had happened. Some bear, disturbed in his hibernation or perhaps just restless and without a full stomach, must have come here when the snow was drifted deep. We all understood that, but Ethan always enjoyed telling about those claw marks. “Why,” he’d say, “they must have been seventeen feet above the ground! I’m tellin’ you, mister, I’ll never go up that canyon again.”

  We hightailed it down the side of the canyon, riding through patchy forest, weaving among tumbled rocks and clumps of dense brush. We saw an elk ahead, and his head came up. “All right, Bud,” I said, “there he is, and he’s yours.”

  Bud took out his rifle, stepped down from the saddle and Injuned up a few yards closer. The wind was right, an
d he made it. I was waiting, afraid he would get buck fever, but he didn’t. He squeezed off his shot.

  The elk leaped, ran a few steps, and dropped.

  We rode up, butchered him out, and while that was going on I went down to the stream to get a drink. The ice only fringed the banks; the center of the stream was running too fast to freeze. The water was so cold it made my teeth ache. I was just getting up when I saw something gleam down there on the sandy bottom, and I reached for it.

  When I pulled my hand out of the water I looked at it, and what I held was gold.

  It was a nugget, of rough gold, showing no sign of stream action at all, and it must have weighed an ounce or more.

  Now it could be one of its kind, but it hadn’t been under water long, and it hadn’t traveled far, or some of that roughness would have been worn down by batting around among the rocks.

  I stood up, dried my hands on my chaps a mite, then slipped that nugget into my pocket.

  For a moment I stood there, listening to the talk on the bank about thirty yards off, then carefully I studied the layout.

  That stream ran cold and fast where I stood, running over rocks polished smooth by the water, but upstream not more than fifty yards it cut through a ragged old ledge of crumbling rock.

  There was a good chance that gold had come right from there, but I’d no idea of climbing back up there. In the first place my back was badly bruised, and every twist it got hurt something fierce, and second I didn’t want anybody noticing or talking about what I’d done. I climbed back up the bank, then stopped and took in the layout.

  The west is littered with lost mines, some good, some not, but those lost were usually lost because the finder was so excited he didn’t find the right landmarks to guide him back. Everybody expects to come right back, but that’s rarely possible due to one reason or another, so I took far-out landmarks, then closer ones, trying to find objects and estimate distances that would not be the same from any other direction.

  We made it back to our town just after sundown, and sure enough, it turned into snow that night and by daylight the snow was eight inches deep on the level and drifted deep in every draw and canyon.

  To make matters worse, one of those claw marks developed some infection with fever, and it was several days before I could get out and around.

  One thing I did do. While lying in bed or sitting up I wrote a few pages on mountain lions. First, I noted down everything I knew about them, taking several days to recall it. I knew some people claimed a lion never killed except for meat, but that wasn’t true. I’d seen a lion kill a doe and two fawns in just a minute or two, eat part of the meat, bury the rest under branches and such, and leave it. Occasionally a lion would come back to a kill, but only rarely would he eat from it again though he might move it to a fresh place so the meat would not spoil as fast.

  When I had it all down I got out those newspapers I had and reread some of the stuff they’d published to see how others had done it, and then, trying not to be fancy for I didn’t know a lot of words, I wrote everything I knew about mountain lions. I described a couple of hunts, including the lion who’d jumped me, only I wrote it like it was somebody else.

  Stacy Follett dropped by Cain’s one night, and I started him talking. He’d known of two men, one an Indian, one a white man who had been attacked and killed by mountain lions, and when he had gone I noted down what he had said.

  Meanwhile I made notes on the location of the gold just as though it were material for an article on where we had killed the elk.

  So far no gold had been found in quantity in the area, although Neely had taken out a good bit over the past two years, and Webb had also made a fair living from his claims.

  Mail came through just before Christmas, and with the rest of it a bundle of newspapers, some of them dating from months back, but new to most of us. News came through by the occasional travelers, and it was rumored that by spring the telegraph wire was to come to our town.

  Finally I put together my account of the mountain lion and mailed it away. Without waiting for results I wrote an account of the cattle drive from Oregon to our town, including the stories of the gun battles, but writing it as though I wrote of somebody else. Then, suddenly filled with ambition, and having little else to do but rustle firewood and meat, I wrote an account of the rescue of Mae Stuart and the children from the Indians.

  Most of what I had read would lead one to think that Indians were all of a kind, and even before I heard about the first story I received a letter from an editor doubting that the older Indians would sit quietly by while a white man knocked one of them out. Well, Indians had their personal animosities as much as any white men, and that young buck needed taking down a notch.

  The long, cold days gave me time to think, and much of the work that needed to be done was the kind that was conducive to thinking. When a man is sawing wood his mind is free to wander, and mine did. So much was happening in the outside world of which I knew too little. The newspapers were telling me of it, and from a distance it seemed exciting, important, and filled with color. Yet even as I thought that, I knew that here on the frontier, what we were doing was even more important.

  At night I would spend hours reading the papers that had been forwarded to me, papers from New York, Chicago, and Omaha, mostly. They had started an elevated railroad in New York, on Ninth Avenue, and the American-made pianos, Steinway and Chickering, had startled the world by winning first prizes at the Paris Exposition.

  Nebraska had become a state. Jefferson Davis, who had been president of the Confederacy, had been released on bail put up by Horace Greeley, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Gerrit Smith.

  President Johnson had fired his Secretary of War, Stanton.

  A man named Sholes had patented a typewriter and sold the rights to Eliphalet Remington…whoever he was.

  They had even passed a law giving only an eight-hour day to government workers…it was getting so nobody wanted to work any more.

  There was no letter from Ninon.

  More and more I was thinking about that trip with old Uruwishi to the Medicine Wheel.

  More travelers were coming along, despite the cold and the snow. Business had more than tripled over the past year, and although other settlements around had trouble, the bad ones avoided our town.

  Colly Benson had built himself a dugout not far from Ethan and was snugged down for the winter. When I was out of town, he walked the streets and wore the star.

  When he pinned it on, he gave me a hard-eyed smile. “What you tryin’, Ben? You want to make an honest citizen of me?”

  Tipping back in my chair, I grinned at him. “Not you, Colly. I’m just trying to keep the others honest.”

  “What’s this talk about you going north come spring?”

  “Ever hear of the Medicine Wheel, Colly?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I heard some talk. Never knew anybody who’d seen it. Just a ring of rocks, isn’t it?”

  “It is more than that, I believe. It’s some sort of a religious symbol or shrine for some long ago Indians. I’d like to see it.”

  “Yeah.” Colly knocked the ashes from his pipe and began scraping it with a knife point. “You know, when I was a youngster I lived down along the Carolina-Georgia border, and Ma she went out one day and was washing clothes down by the river. When she came back she had a flat kind of dish, engraving around the edge. She’d found it stuck into the earth in the riverbank.

  “We went down an’ dug around some and we found ten, twelve pots, all the same kind. We washed them up and used them for years. It was better stuff than I ever saw among the fifteen or twenty Injun tribes I’ve had dealin’s with. Which reminds me. There was a man back yonder in our village who’d been a ship’s captain. He had him all kinds of stuff, spears, shields, pottery, baskets, everything like that. He’d picked it up in the South Seas or the like.

  “Well, he had him one basket there that had a thin strip of oak for the rim. It was tied fast with some other
strips, but it was a beautiful job. One day when I was talking to him a friend of ours, a Cherokee man, he came to see the Cap’n. He seen that basket and claimed it was Cherokee, but the Cap’n, he told him he’d gotten that basket in South America.”

  After he went away I sat for a long time thinking about the Indians. There were so many questions I wanted to ask, so many answers I needed, and I did not know where to find the answers. Worst of all, it was the old Indians like Uruwishi who had the answers, and so many times nobody asked them, and they’d never figure a white man to be interested. And of course, some of it was not to be told to any stranger.

  Ethan came in that afternoon. “Seen some pony tracks, over east of here,” he said. “They’ve been looking us over.”

  “Sioux?”

  “Uh-huh. Ben, I don’t want to worry the women-folks, but come spring we’re in for trouble. It’s in the wind.” He hesitated. “You know, the Sioux were pushing west when the white man interfered…they got themselves horses back there on the Wisconsin-Minnesota border country and they fanned out, their war parties raided south and west as well as north. They were headed toward conquering the whole country.”

  There was something in that. The horse had changed the Sioux from an earthbound people, hunting on foot and using only the dog for a beast of burden, to a mounted warrior, as fierce as any the old world ever knew. He was a knight without armor, fierce, indomitable…a conqueror.

  West there were the Crow and the Blackfeet, both tribes of fighting men, the Blackfeet in particular. What would have happened when they collided no man would now know, but in America as in Africa a conquering tribe met the white man face to face. In Africa the Bantu, migrating slowly southward down the centuries, had met no enemy they could not subdue, and then they met the white man coming up from the south. What was left of the Hottentot and the Bushmen was caught in the meat-grinder between them.