The stars came out crisp white. The wind veiled black dust across his path. The gully became shallow; at last lifted up and became a low draw with thick clumps of bunch grass and occasional beds of prickly-pear cactus.
Gradually Old Hugh tired. His good leg trembled with quick fleeting cramps. His elbows quivered from the ache and pain of various stone bruises.
He rested, panting; slept awhile, ganting; awoke with a start, shivering; crept on, bad leg slaping behind; rested some more, puffing; slept.
He dreamt of dying alone in a gully, cold and blue and bloated with snakenecked greenblack turkey buzzards circling hungrily overhead.
He woke with a jerk; crawled a few yards; rested; slept.
He dreamt of Jim and Fitz sitting around a jumping fire and arguing about him.
Cold and shivering, he again woke with a guilty start; crept on a ways; rested; slept.
He dreamt of his two boys, the blackhead and the sunhead, dreamt of the old she-rip tearing him up and down his back.
And creeping along in the black night, he fell into a small washout. He was so exhausted when he hit bottom he didn’t bother to see if his bad leg had tumbled down with him. It was too cold to bother. “I feel queersome,” he murmured. He curled up as best he could, snuggled under the heavy grizzly hide, and fell asleep.
He slept through dawn and on through a sunny glinting day. Rusty dusk lay over the sloping land, and over the bald tan bluffs and small red teat mesas forming the ridge to the south, and down in the far valley of fall yellows behind him to the north, when he at last poked his head out of the small washout.
“This child’s slept a hole in the day, ‘pears like.”
He stared at the brown evening. He blinked bloodshot eyes. His bowels rumbled with hunger. “This child needs meat.” He began to puff just thinking of the work ahead. “And this child needs wadder too.”
Stiff-limbed, with one of the redgray monsters raging again, the one in his back, he clambered out of the washout.
One good look around and he knew he was doomed to go without either grub or water for that day—unless he ate rusty dead bunch grass and drank his own urine. There was nothing, not a bush or a tree or a trickle of water.
Like a dog digging for gophers, he scrabbled some dirt out from under a thick clump of bunch grass. Ae. Nothing but dry hard dirt. In digging, dirt packed in under his fingernails and he sucked them clean in his mouth. The dirt had a sour flour taste.
He pinched in his brain to help quiet down his growling stomach. He worked up some saliva to wet his throat and lips. He hoped the wind would stay down during the night. Wind dried one out.
Just before black night swooped down over the long swinging land he had a last look around. From the spot where the sun had set he plotted his course for the night. The course lay between two small red crumbling mesas directly south. He saw that his climb during the night previous had lifted him fairly high out of the South Fork valley. He also saw that the rest of the way to the top of the hogback divide lay smooth and undulating ahead of him. Even the incline was much more gentle.
There was no sign of redskin or varmint in the godforsaken dry-grass country. The land was clean of green grass and running red meat. The sky above was clean of flying flesh. There was nothing but himself and the twinkling stars above and the rustling dried bunch grass below. He was alone. Solitary. There was only himself to feel sorry for himself. There was only himself to tell he was himself. Only he knew that he knew. He was alone.
“These parts make this child so lonesome for company he’s about ready again for huggin’ with a she-grizzly.”
He shivered in the cold. “But I’ll say this for the frost. They won’t be any more mosquitoes this fall. Or green bottleflies.”
He found it in him to go on without food. Some little energy had seeped into his well during the night. For a little while there was enough to work the pump.
He laughed grimly to himself when he thought of the trail he was leaving across the country: two long tracks, a round dent, and a pair of wriggling marks—a three-legged two-tailed whangdoodle for sure. Ae, and maybe even Old Wakantanka himself at last come down to earth to play a Christ’s role.
He crawled on slowly like a three-legged dog dragging a stinking gamy leg and walking on sore pads.
Thrown stars moved across the black skies.
“Wadder,” Old Hugh murmured, “wadder. Got to have wadder.”
He looked up at the star-flying skies. “Don’t it ever rain in this godforsaken country? I’d catch me some fresh rain water in me bearskin.” He wetted his cracked lips; tried to work up some saliva for his parched throat.
“Wadder,” he murmured, “wadder. If I only had wadder I wouldn’t mind goin’ without meat.”
The closer he got to the two little red teat mesas the stonier the terrain became. Bunch-grass clumps became more sparse. Even the cactus beds became rare. Rough blackred stones began to shred his bearskin elbow and knee guards. Prickly brush tore at his buckskin shirtfront as he straddled over them. Old Hugh cursed the country. Much more of it and he’d have to cut up his bearskin for clothes and guards.
He stopped to rest on a long flat rock. Before stretching out he felt around first to make sure there weren’t any rattlers around.
He panted, mouth open, beard floofing in and out of his cracked lips.
He panted. It was hard doin’s, all right. Ae. And probably the death of him at last.
He thought of the gamy death smell that’d been hanging around him a bit stronger the last day. He explored his back under the bearskin. Some of the scab had come off the sinew-seamed wounds. In a couple of places he could pull out the deerskin stitches. The stitches came out easy, greasy, like old hairs pulling out of rotted follicles. He pushed his arm around farther to touch the open sore above the loose flap of flesh and bared white ribs. Still slippery with pus. He felt of it gingerly. His hand came away stinking. Bah!
He found the open wound hadn’t rotted through to his lung. He was done for if it had. Ae. He’d seen men rot away into slow death once the corruption got into their bellows.
He explored it carefully again. He felt the bare bone of one of his ribs. He felt the string of a loose tendon. Or was it a blood vessel? There were also odd squirming bits in the middle of it.
Squirming? Ho-ah. Maggots, then. Ae. So he was rotting away like an old down buffalo in a wallow like he feared.
He lay down flat on his belly. Just about dead before he’d even crossed the first divide, he was. With at least one more big divide to go and a long raft ride after that down the Cheyenne and then the great Missouri itself—and the raft ride probably the toughest part of the trip.
Why live? Ae, what was the use?
He wept.
He dipped into sleep and dreamt of campfires. There were many of them and they all were one. Around the jumping flames sat Jim and Fitz still arguing about him. He himself lay stretched out on his belly, his back blooming with little bloody plum trees. But once again he couldn’t make out what Jim and Fitz were saying.
He called out, “Jim? Fitz? Where be ye? Come clost so I can hear ee.”
The roar of his own voice woke him from the flame-jumping nightmare.
His head buzzed. A terrible headache cracked in his skull. When he looked up at the stars, they became streaks of light rushing from east to west, and when he looked ahead, the pair of red mesas blurred off into a dancing mountain range.
He dipped into sleep and dreamt again. This time he was back in Lancaster. Back with his white wife Mabel and his two sons, blackhead and sunhead. There was a final supper of some sort, a supper which for once had begun with jolly joshing, with the boys happy that Pap and Ma for once were getting along a little. It was the night he’d come home with a new hunting rifle, a Lancaster model, instead of coming home drunk as he usually did. The food was good, though somewhat skimpy. The talk was pleasant, though somewhat chaffy. Hugh was glad Mabel was smiling some again. He liked seeing his
boys happy. And Hugh had just begun to think maybe Mabel was actually having a change of heart, giving up her notion that he should get a better job, accepting his notion that they should move farther west so he could hunt for a living, giving up her airish notion of rising in the world—when somehow, he didn’t know just how, somehow it happened that he dropped a family heirloom of her mother’s, a prize hand-painted bowl, breaking it to a thousand smithereens. That set it off. To the sad horror of the lads, he and Mabel were at it again. She threw things at him: mops, pails, pestle, breadboard, coffee grinder. He might have accepted all that, but she spotted his new Lancaster gun. She picked it up by the barrel end and rushed toward him, intent on smashing its butt over his head. That was too much for Hugh. Let her break his new gun over his own noggin? Never. Not on your life. He jumped up and wrestled it from her. Enraged that he should dare show physical resistance, she slugged him. In a flash Hugh balled his own fist and hauled off and hit her smack in the face, hit her so hard she spun across the room and landed in the woodbox. There was a terrible silence. And in that silence it came to Hugh at last, finally, that he could never live with that she-rip of a woman. She was just too much for a man. There’d never be a living with her, of any kind, no matter how much he loved his lads, Blackie and Sunny. So he deserted. Deserted the lads even though he heard them calling after him, lone-somely, “Pap! Pap! where are you going, Pap?” But Hugh hardened his heart; pretended he didn’t hear them. “Pap! Pap!”
Their shrill boyish voices calling him woke him with a start from his dream. He looked around wildly as if half-expecting to see the lads themselves.
Again his head buzzed with a terrible cracking headache.
He shuddered. What awful dreams he was having lately.
He lay flat on his belly, possessed by the after depression of the nightmarish dream, lay possessed by a dark sense of guilt, so dark he shuddered again involuntarily.
Deserted them, that’s what he’d done. What a miserable coward he was. Maybe Mabel was a rakehellion she-rip, ae, but the boys were still his boys, of his own flesh and blood, that’s a fact, and good boys too, boys who deserved to have a father. It hadn’t been their fault that he and their she-rip of a mother hadn’t been able to get along. Not at all.
Deserted them. Ae. Too cussed independent he was.
He said it aloud the first time. “Maybe that’s how come it’s this child’s turn to be deserted. Bein’ paid back in kind, he is.”
The saying of it aloud startled him.
Deserted? He deserted in turn? The lads Jim and Fitz desert him?
Impossible. Not his lads. Impossible.
He turned his head over and rested on the other cheek. He pushed the thought angrily from his mind.
He lay puffing.
The dark aftereffects of the dream persisted. It weighed down on him. It haunted him.
He couldn’t get rid of the idea that maybe he’d been deserted after all. Thinking on it, a man could see how it explained everything—no dead bodies around, no horses, no gun or possibles, no hunter’s or trapper’s truck about.
Oh, but the lads wouldn’t’ve left him behind to die the hard way. Impossible. He put it from his mind. There was work to do.
Crumbling with weakness, parched and cracking with thirst, cells sucking with hunger, somehow he found it in him to rise to his elbows and one good knee and crawl on.
Crawl on. Creep on. Nose on. Past stones. Around boulders. Through rocky defiles. Over cutting jagged outcroppings.
He stopped to rest. He lay puffing, ganting.
Deserted? could his companyeros Jim and Fitz have deserted him?
He considered the two lads, each in turn.
Jim now. Jim was too goodhearted to pull a stunt like that on his Old Hugh. Jim had good upbringing. Not Jim. No.
He puffed; rested.
And Fitz? Fitz, well, Fitz was a horse of another color all right. Fitz was hard, practical, cautious. There was no room for peedoodles in him. Fitz never laughed. Something wrong with a man who never laughed. And then all that book learning of his. Anybody knew that reading made a puffball lighter in the head. Reading filled the head with excuses on how not to be a man in a fix. On how not to be a brave buck. In a fix a bookman sat down and told over all his ideas afore he got to work and shot his way out of a fix. In a fix a man hadn’t ought to have but one idea—and that was how to get out of a pretty fix pronto. Concluded to charge—did so. That was what true mountain men did.
Fitz? Yes, Fitz might think on it in a close fix.
He crawled on, crept on, nosed on.
Twice he scared up mule-eared jack rabbits. Another time he flushed up a herd of fleeing flagging white-tailed antelope.
Once he almost had a jack rabbit. The jack had cowered until he was on top of him. In the starlit quartermoon-lit night Hugh saw it first as a round gray stone. Its roundness in the midst of the tumbled coarse jagged rock attracted his feeler hand as something to rest on in relief. He put his hand on it. There was a giving of soft fur and flesh. And a startled squeal. And then before it occurred to him it might be meat to eat, before his hand could instinctively close on it, the jack rabbit squirted to one side and, in a huge shrilling bound, was gone.
“Meat,” he muttered, smelling his hand and recognizing the warm milklike rotted-clover smell of the creature, “meat.”
He rested, puffing, cheek resting on a hard cold rock.
The dark thought wouldn’t leave him alone. The tougher and grimmer the crawl up the hogback became, the more he became convinced, even possessed, with the idea that his lads Jim and Fitz had deserted him, that Fitz had somehow talked Jim into it.
Deserted. The lads had deserted him. That Irisher Fitz had done it.
Damned Irish. Never was any good for anything except run away from a fix. A fighting Irishman usually meant an Irishman afraid of being called a coward. They could talk forward faster and walk backward faster than any other dummed two-legged creature on earth. He’d sensed it in Fitzgerald from the first. Too practical, too cautious. Hard front and soft back. And the boy Jim, though a Scotchman like himself, too young to know better. Damned Irish. That’s what a man got for learning life out of books.
Deserted.
A wave of hate swept over him. If there was one thing Old Hugh hated, it was cowardly deserters. Amongst mountain men alone in a far wild country full of enemy varmint there just wasn’t room for cowards, deserters, or they would all go under. In red-devil country mountain men had to stick together. It was the code. He himself had often risked his topknot to save some comrade left behind in battle. Many a time. He didn’t deserve to have this happen to him. Especially not at the hands of his own lads, Jim and Fitz. Not after the way he’d saved their skin from the major’s wrath.
How could his own lads have come to it?
He crawled on. Nosed on. Crept on.
But the dark thought was back again the next time he lay flat on his belly to rest.
Could they really have deserted him? His lads?
He couldn’t shake the notion. He remembered too well how the lads had let him cover up their sleeping on guard, remembered how they had not talked up like men to say they were guilty of negligence, that they had indirectly caused the death of Augie Neill and Jim Anderson. If they could be cautious once, they could be cautious twice.
Cautious. Ae. Too cautious. “Ae, and you can lay your pile on it that it was Fitz’s idee too. He talked Jim into it. Poor lad.”
But Jim was a coward to let Fitz talk him into it. The blackhearted bugger. Leaving him to die the hard way.
“If this child ever gets out of this alive, the first thing he’s gonna do is track them cowardly cautious devils down and kill ‘em. Inch by inch. Slow torture ‘em. Skin ‘em alive. Fry ‘em alive. Punch pine needles and pine slivers in ‘em like the Pawnees did to Old Clint and make torches out of ‘em. At the same time, so they can watch each other go up in smoke.” Hugh ground his teeth; clenched and unclenched his fists.
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Another wave of hate passed over him. The cowardly snakes. The cowardly squaws. Leaving him to die the hard way. Alone.
“Oily cowards. Someday this old coon will have a showdown with ee, lads.”
Those two devils who called themselves mountain men had a code all right. Deserter code. Ae.
Well, he had a code too. A code which said a man had a right to kill deserters. It was a crime before God and man both to desert a man in a wilderness full of howling red devils, taking his possibles away from him, leaving him without food, with nothing but his naked hands left to fight off the varmints. Leaving him without a last bullet to kill himself with in case of unbearable pain. Or in case of capture by red devils. The lads knew a hunter always saved one last ball for himself in case of a pinch. If he could help it, a hunter did all he could to avoid torture by Indians—like Old Clint suffered at the hands of the Pawnees.
Leaving him with a ripped-up back and a broken leg. Ae, he had a code too, and it said to kill deserters on sight.
Waves of hate flushed over him. He ground sand in his clenching fists.
“Them oily cowards. If it’s the last thing I ever do, I’m gonna live long enough to kill the both of ‘em. The major is gonna know too. They’re maybe laughin’ to themselves right now, thinkin’ they got away from it, not buryin’ me, playin’ me for a sucker, and runnin’ off with the best rifle this side of the Ohio. But they’ll have another think comin’ someday.”
He got to his hands and knee and crept on. He crept until he couldn’t anymore.
He stopped. He lay ganting in a long crack in the rocks. He watched the quartermoon sink orange then slow red into the gold-dusted black rim of earth.
“Meat,” he said, “gotta have meat. Or there’ll be no sweet revenge for this child.”
The long crack in the rocks reminded him of the grave the lads had dug for him back in the gully.
He lay puzzling about the sandy grave. If he was dead, why hadn’t the lads buried him? And if he wasn’t dead, why had they dug it at all?
Open grave. His grave. Place for his old bones to molder in.
Lord Grizzly, Second Edition Page 17