by Peter Bowen
I had bought supplies at Fort Buford, where the Yellowstone meets the Missouri, and had then gone slowly up the Big Muddy. Any hostile bands would be heading for winter camps on the south bank of the Yellowstone, where there was saltweed for their horses. I had plenty of staples to last me until late spring. I had planned to loaf and hunt wolves and dilly-dally, and see Miles in April, when it was too muddy to do anything unhealthy, like picking fights with Horse Indians.
There had been some more bad news over in Idaho. The Nez Perces had killed a dozen or so settlers and then fled. General Howard pursued them, and Colonel Gibbon had fought a pitched battle with them over in the Big Hole. I supposed the same thing had happened that always happens. The government made a treaty with the Indians, and then land-hungry whites poured in, violated the treaty, killed some of the Indians (not even human, you know), and then the Indians got fed up and made paint and then made war. The rumor of gold was worst of all. Custer had found gold in the Black Hills, the holy Pa Sapa of the Sioux, and the army hadn’t enough men to stop the prospectors from pouring in. Someday the Indians would be pacified, all right: dead, every last one of them.
The Nez Perces was lost somewhere in a million square miles out there. Miles was playing checkers with Baldwin at Fort Buford, and Kelly was seldom seen and meant to keep it that way. Kelly was going to meet up with Buffalo Horn, my Bannock partner, and make a few thousand easy peaceful dollars off the wolves.
When things start to go wrong, it’s always some little goddamn pissyass thing, which when you look back on it was insignificant at the time. In this case, it was a willow thicket. I noticed that them willows was flailing around more than they should have in the light wind. Then they began to thrash about like a broom in the hands of a madwoman. I caught the rank scent of bear. I’d come up on a river-bottom grizzly, the worst kind of bear—so pale that he was almost white—and I’d done it from downwind.
My rifle was in my right hand, across my saddle. I whipped it up just as the bear stood up, and shot him high in the forehead. The bullet just plowed a furrow and whined off. That damn bear had a skull thicker than a Baptist’s. The bear let out a beller, and my horse decided he was Pegasus. The pack mules did a fast one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and leapfrogged each other till they was over the hills and gone. My horse went about fifteen feet straight up, and was gone like a puff of smoke. I sailed through the air and landed in a tangle of wild roses and moonseed vines. Big hornets’ nest in there, too. I couldn’t remember when I’d been so happy.
I levitated sideways about thirty feet and bounded up a big old cottonwood tree, leaving most of my fingernails in the bark. I sat on a limb about twenty feet off the ground and tried to catch my breath. The hornets had mostly gone after the horse, so I’d been stung only ten times or so. The bear was thrashing around in the bushes, bellowing in rage and pain, throwing around logs thirty feet long and three feet through like they was so much kindling, and sniffing the air for my scent. He soon had it, and found the spot where I had gone up the tree. The bear then began to tear the tree down. It was a big cottonwood, more than six feet through at the base. The bear was roaring and ripping at a rate I figured would have the tree down in half an hour or so. He was single-minded in his efforts. I still had my pistol, and I shot him a few more times. The bullets didn’t bother him any more than the hornets had, which is to say not at all.
Kayrist, Kelly, I says to myself, why the hell didn’t you become a dentist or something?
Some scout. The tree was shaking like a shot-tower in an earthquake. I run through all of the cuss words I knew in English, Sioux, Cheyenne, and Blackfeet, and was starting on Gros Ventre when there was a loud boom off to my left and the bear slammed into the tree so hard the trunk quivered like an arrow shot into an oak board. The grizzly screamed once, a high-pitched wail like a terrified woman’s. The scream trailed off into a soft bubbling moan as the bear slumped to the ground, dead. The shot had come from a blackpowder gun, a big one that left a great filthy cloud of smoke.
My savior emerged from the sulfurous mist. I looked down upon a living legend, one Liver-Eating Jack Johnson, to be precise. He was dressed like a mountain man of fifty years before. Buckskins and red flannel leggins, buffalo horn and wolf-hair hat, a Green River knife the size of a plow in a quilled sheath, and a Hawken 58 caliber cap-and-ball rifle with a couple hundredweight of brass tacks in the stock.
“Wall,” says Jack, “effen it ain’t the great Yallerstone Kelly, paused up in a tree. You stay there, chile, like Lewis an’ Clark, to jerk yer meat?”
“Waugh WAUGH WAUGH WAUGH.” Jack had a laugh sounded like a combination of a whale blowing and a scrap-iron wagon turning over in a tight alley.
“Much obliged,” says I, showing the impeccable manners of one who has just been saved and will never be allowed to forget it. “As a matter of fact, I was just preparing to put my knife between my teeth and jump down and fight fair when you done spoiled my afternoon’s exercise. Do you know how long it took me to find a bear the right size?”
Jack was near six foot eight, and had the bashfulness that you associate with giants around other people, especially women. He was hard to provoke, but I had once seen him crack the skulls so hard together of two drunk and quarrelsome keelboatmen everybody in the barroom was spattered with brains.
“I been down to the south,” he says.
Time I was down the tree he had reloaded his rifle and was up on a deadfall looking in all four directions at once. That was why he was still alive.
“You still scoutin’ for Miles?” he asked. He squinted at the hills across the river.
“I will be, soon as I can catch my horse,” I says. “Did you see which way he went?”
“He come lookin’ to me fer portection,” says Jack, in his barbarous plug-a-plew mountain man dialect. “I tied him to a bush over yonder an’ told him not to worry none. Yore mules got lonesome an’ are comin’ back directly.” Jack and Jim Bridger were the two scouts I knew who could look through the hills and trees as though the land and all that lived up on it were as transparent as window glass. They could smell enemies miles away. Eerie men, both of them, half in the other world.
“I got baccy and trade rum,” I says, standing spread-eagle on account of the shit and piss in my pants. “I got to go get cleaned up.”
Jack waited to fire his parting insult until I had waddled off twenty feet or so.
“By god,” he says, “I was full of the perplex for a minnit thar. Now I sees it. You was able to outrun that bar ’cause you had the advantage of runnin’ on dry ground, while that pore animal was slippin’ and fallin’ on that slick trail you done left.
“Waugh WAUGH WAUGH WAUGH.”
We made camp and built a quick fire of dead aspen with the bark peeled off. It don’t smoke. We never lit fires at night, unless we were waiting for company or in a group so big that the Indians would leave us alone.
Jack had a haunch of antelope and some fat backribs of buffalo—the marrow was as sweet as butter. He drank long draughts of the bottle of trade rum I gave him, and the second time that I refused he said, “You gone with the temperance? Come to think of it, I ain’t never seen you drink except in a town.”
I sighed. Well, he had saved my life.
“I never drink out here because when I drink a few days straight I have an attack of gout.”
“Gout?” says Jack, squinting one black eye at me through the gray shag of eyebrow—he only had one, and it went across his face in a straight and bushy line. I believe small creatures lived in it.
“Ever had it?” I asks, wondering just how the story was going to make the rounds after Jack had had time to ponder and embellish it.
“No, can’t say as I have,” says Jack. “Had an uncle to home that had it. He done shot off his big toe one time when he was hurtin’ by it.”
“Well, that’s why I don’t drink out here.”
“Nezzz Percies crossed up to Cow Island four days ago,” he said.
“Got a lot of ponies, more than a thousand, and their women and children and old folks. Gibbon caught up to them in the Big Hole, and they fought him to a standstill, even captured one of his cannons. Then they made away, went through Colter’s Hell. They’re tryin’ to make it to Sitting Bull up in Canada. Guess they ain’t heard the news, Sitting Bull is turning everyone back, even some Minneconjous.”
“Shit,” I says, “I’ll have to go back and tell Miles.”
“Naw,” says Jack, “I run onto Buffalo Horn three days ago and he hightailed it for Fort Buford. Miles likely will put all of the baggage on the Far West and run the pony soldiers and the cavvy hard till he cuts Nezzz Percies sign.”
It was maybe two hours till sundown. It was pleasant, there by the campfire. The early frosts had killed the mosquitoes, and the air smelled crisp and new (so long as Jack was downwind).
“I’m going to go get those claws and teeth and one of the paws,” I says. “Do you want them?” The claws was worth a hundred dollars; European collectors favored them, why I can’t say. There was a small and thriving industry over Seattle way—carving fake grizzly claws and teeth out of whale teeth.
“Naw,” says Jack. I knew he wouldn’t. His time with the Arapahoes had made him some Indian in his way of thinking, and the grizzly was his medicine. The Arapahoes called Jack Bear-With-Man’s-Face, and come to think of it I have seen quite a few bears would dust Jack right off in a beauty contest.
I cut out the claws and teeth and sawed off one of the paws. The bear would go at least twelve hundred pounds easy, I noticed. When I got back to camp the light was fading and the wind had shifted to the east, like it always does for a little time just before sunset and just after dawn.
“Luther,” says Jack, sniffing the wind, “we got company comin’. Horse soldiers.”
I scurried up the hill behind us and sure enough I could see half a dozen troopers riding ragged and exposed. I cussed and took out my long glasses and tried to see if there was anything coming on behind them. The Indians had been defeated but they damn sure weren’t all down yet—matter of fact, I am more concerned about meeting Red Hand when he ain’t blind drunk than I am about meeting that pissant Geronimo on his best day. Six troopers wouldn’t even whet Red Hand’s appetite overmuch.
“I am going to try to keep them from getting killed,” I says, tossing the saddle on my horse, “and us, too. God damn it, Jack, I am sorry.”
I was, too. I was sure that Miles had sent them to look for me. Buffalo Horn was likely following them—probably in front of them, but tracking them all the same. I wouldn’t put it past that Bannock son-of-a-bitch to recommend that they ride the ridges, in order to sooner attract my attention. I let my pony stretch out and took the straightest way—if they had been seen it wouldn’t matter anyway.
I come up over the top of the hill and saw them coming down the next slope, a steep one. They was all leaned as far back as they could and their stirrups was raised halfway to the horses’ heads and two of them had grabbed their horses’ tails for support.
My sudden appearance startled them, and one trooper fell off his mount scrabbling for his Spencer carbine with both hands. Bright fellow.
“GOD DAMN YOU IDIOT BASTARDS,” I yelled, while my horse twirled in a tight circle in front of them. The leader was a pimply Lieutenant, looked all of fourteen. “IF YOU BRING ANY GOD DAMN INDIANS DOWN ON US, I’LL KILL YOU MYSELF.” I went on in that vein for some time, though of course it was Buffalo Horn I would have liked to have seen. I’d have shot that bastard instanter.
When I had run out of breath and was occupying myself just being a deep purple shade of apoplexy, the Lieutenant managed to squeak out a few groveling words.
“Apologies, sir,” he stammered, his voice jumping from low to high like a goddamn ocarina. “Colonel Miles has sent several patrols to find you. He’s coming upriver on the Far West. The Nez Perces have crossed at Cow Island, sir.”
“How far downstream is Miles?” I said. “It’s that way, in case you’ve forgotten.” I pointed.
“He should be here about midday tomorrow, sir. There are woodcutting parties riding ahead.” The youngster’s face was white and drawn, his horse was salted white at the withers and damn near ready to fall over.
“You come with me,” I says. “Single file and no talking. Check your harness, I don’t want to sound like a god damn string of sleighbells.” They followed me to the camp, starting at every owlhoot and beaver fart, and they all near died of fright when a loon screamed from a nearby slough.
Jack was not in camp. He’d piled the claws atop the paw which he’d stuck on top of a beaver-chewed stump. My pony whinnied at the smell. I swung down and gentled him. I always ride geldings. Mares come in heat and stallions can smell them miles off—more than one fool has died not thinking that the Indians know that too.
“My card and compliments to Colonel Miles,” I says, handing the stripling the paw. I had sent a bear’s paw to Miles when we had first met, with my signature on the great pad. He was most taken with my little joke.
The kid looked at the paw—it was ten inches wide and sixteen inches long—and he croaked, “Is this a grizzly, sir?”
“A very young and undersized bear in extremely poor health,” I says, “and not wanting to waste powder or attract Indians with gunfire I rassled him to a frazzle and then stabbed him to death.”
“Waugh WAUGH WAUGH WAUGH.” The soldiers all went for their arms and their horses reacted to their fright by bucking and such. None of them was over twenty. One lame Nez Perce squaw could’ve beat them all to death with a gourd.
“Wh ... Wha ... What was tha ...?” the Lieutenant asks, trying to stay on his horse. He’d grabbed his pistol the wrong way round and was apparently going to beat his enemies to death with the hammer.
“A bird,” I says. “A Big-Assed Rocky Mountain Bull Buffalo Bald-Headed Peckerwood. A bird of foul habits and low character.”
“Waugh WAUGH WAUGH WAUGH.”
“I can’t believe that’s a bird, sir,” the Lieutenant says, exhibiting his first sign of sense.
“The Big-Assed Rocky Mountain Bull Buffalo Bald-Headed Peckerwood is so rare that hopefully it will soon be extinct. It shits exclusively on mountaintops, which is why they are white even in the summertime out here.”
“Waugh WAUGH WAUGH WAUGH.”
I was amusing myself watching six pairs of human eyes and six pairs of horse eyes go white around the edges.
“Liver,” I hollers, “they don’t think you’re no bird.”
Jack stepped out of the bushes. There was still plenty of light. Jack had gone to the grizzly and dug the liver out. The damn thing must have weighed fifty pounds. So there stands Jack, liver in hand, tearing out chunks with his teeth, and shaking the mess like a terrier does a rat. I have seen more prepossessing sights myself.
“BAR LIVER’S GOOD GRUB,” says Jack, loud enough for Miles to hear him over the steam engines thirty miles downriver. “WHEN I AIN’T GOT INJUN LIVER I LIKES BAR LIVER JUST FINE.”
Jack delivered himself of a belch sounded like a dyspeptic volcano, and by the by threw off a dense and heavy dark red cloud of spray.
“I’ll give Colonel Miles your message, sir,” the kid says, clutching his horse’s mane, his voice a screech. “Men, follow me!” The troopers had left some time ago.
God, I thought, this is mild behavior on Jack’s part. I saw him eat a rattlesnake once, on a bet. He bit the snake’s head off and spat it into the fire, and then swallowed everything up to the rattles and then bit them off and handed them to California Joe, who forked over two hundred in gold, or about ten bucks per rattle. Then Joe went off to the bushes to puke (along with most everybody else) and Jack had himself another quart sip of trade whiskey and wondered aloud about where could we all have gone to. And then what the hell was for dessert. A Gila Monster would go down nice for dessert, he said.
Once Jack had gotten caught by the Blackfeet, and some lucky brave managed to crown Jack w
ith a big rock, and when Jack woke up he was trussed up like a baking duck. He was under the guard of their best warrior, and the rest of the party was dancing around so as to work themselves up into a first-rate torturing mood. Jack bit through the rawhide thongs they had tied him with—he said he’d paid a dentist to file two of his teeth for just such emergencies—and when he had his hands free he slid the handleless knife he always carried in his leggins out and slyly undid his feet. Then he whopped his guard, and sawed off the guard’s right leg at the hip.
With his travelin’ vittles slung over his shoulder, Jack took off in minus-twenty-degree weather and hoofed it all the way to Lisa’s post on the Tongue River.
“And how was that?” I asks.
“How was what?”
“The Injun leg.”
Jack spat into the fire and took a long think.
“Wall,” he says, “it was kind of stringly, like an old bull buffalo. But if you should run onto any Blackfeet you tell them that I enjoyed it hugely. Yessir, hugely.
“Waugh WAUGH WAUGH WAUGH.”
3
I HEARD JACK SLIP off in the night; he moved as silent as smoke for all of his size. Maybe, I thought, he’s et somebody’s liver he shouldn’t of, and doesn’t want to see a lot of soldiers right now. They was the only law in the Territory, you see, and military justice is a quick and crude thing the world over.
Miles’s Crows was the first to appear, on the north bank of the Missouri—Minnishushu in Lakota; I have always thought it spoke prettier than my own native tongue—and they was moving fast. I saw several that I knew by their paint and feathers, and a chief I had often dined with—Old Bull Calf. I have always liked the Indians for what they are—I like their religion and I like the way they treat their children, too. They don’t think or act like whites, which is all that most folks judge them by.