Skye turned again to Ogden. “What took my mother?”
“Bilious fever. If she had lived six more weeks, Mister Skye, she would have known that her son lives.”
Beatrice Marlowe Skye, from whose womb he was torn, gone. “Is there any more bad news?”
“I should think it would be good news, a father restored.”
“I am a shame to him.”
“No, the company doesn’t see it that way. Our Honorable Mr. Leeds took it upon himself to visit the king’s privy chancellor about the matter, describing the way a merchant’s son was rudely abducted and ill treated, denied the rights of Englishmen or any recourse in the navy, reduced to abject servitude for seven years, which is two years longer than the usual enlistment. It was the failure of the Royal Navy, sir. Desperate men in unjust circumstances shall do what they will, and without blame.”
“And what did your company man find out?”
“The pardon is assured, but the navy is objecting and refuses to believe a word of the story. Frankly, it’s covering its abuses, hiding them from the Crown.”
“So no pardon is assured.”
“Not assured, no. But should you present yourself to the king’s court of equity, matters will go in your favor. The HBC has been assured of that. You can go home. You can see your father before he passes. You can see your sisters. You can go to London, get redress, and walk away from London entirely a free subject of the Crown. And you will not have to wait, either. HBC has that assurance.”
Skye felt torn to pieces. “Mr. Ogden, I’m not a subject. I’m not a piece of baggage to be shuttled about by merchants and bureaucrats. This is the New World, and I am a sovereign man.”
Peter Ogden measured his words. “You have the rights of all Englishmen, Mister Skye. Those Magna Carta and common law rights may have been abused, but they exist and your case is now well known and the Crown will make amends. We want you to go to London and then return to the Northwest. HBC wishes to make you a senior man with responsibilities equal to my own. You are a born and bred Englishman, sir. And unless I misunderstand you, a man whose allegiance is unshaken, even by the brutal treatment afforded you by officers who should have known better.”
“You know me all too well, sir.”
“Dr. McLoughlin sent me on this long passage to lay these matters before you, Mister Skye. We consider it a matter of utmost gravity. You may trust the honor of Hudson’s Bay, and we are sworn to do you no wrong. There is no trickery in this. There is not the slightest thought of capturing you and shipping you in chains to England and your fate. Dr. McLoughlin sees only a wronged man and a great talent he wishes to employ.
“You, more than any other Englishman, know the Yanks, their ways, their attitudes, their genius, their failings. Your knowledge would be invaluable to HBC. Your knowledge could help England control the whole of Oregon, now jointly claimed. Your expert knowledge would help England possess the Pacific coast of North America, from the arctic down to Mexican California, from the continental divide here in the Rockies down to the northern most boundaries of Mexico. Your employment by HBC would keep the United States from ever becoming a transcontinental power.”
“You have not spoken of my wife, Mr. Ogden.”
“We have thought of her. Dr. McLoughlin has a half-Cree wife, understands your sensitivities, and is adamant about protecting your union. If you wish to take her to London, HBC would undertake her passage. When you return, wherever we post you, she would be your helpmeet and be free to visit her people.”
“She doesn’t think much of HBC, mate. Your company arms the Blackfeet, her people’s enemies.”
Ogden shrugged. “We cannot deal with all the facets of this. We can only propose. Now, Mister Skye, think on it, but think quickly. It’s already too late to go with our voyageurs to York Factory and embark there for England. Nor would we want you to. Our governor, Mr. George Simpson, who resides there, is not persuaded of the soundness of any of this, and might cause trouble.”
“So there’s trouble, after all.”
“Dr. McLoughlin and I prefer another option. Fort Vancouver, you know, is resupplied by sea. Each year a schooner, usually the Cadboro, leaves Portsmouth, sails clear around Cape Horn, and works its way up the Pacific Coast to the mouth of the Columbia, there to disgorge the year’s supply of trade goods and necessaries, and take on the peltries our voyageurs are unable to canoe and portage and haul across the Canadian wilds. We want you to be on that vessel when it leaves about the middle of September.
“Come at least to interview the man who has done so much on your behalf, and caused you to receive news of your family.”
“I will think on it,” said Skye.
three
Victoria Skye, named among her Absaroka people as Many Quill Woman, loved the high sweet days of summer most of all. And especially the trappers’ rendezvous, when everything new and exciting in the world gathered together to insult the past.
This year she would not see her Kicked-in-the-Belly band, or her chief, Rotten Belly, or her father, Walks Alone, or her second mother, Digs the Roots, or her Otter Clan brother and sisters. They lived far away in the land of the Yellowstone, not here where the Salish and Shoshones hunted and fished. Here the waters drained into the Snake River, and emptied in the western sea somewhere beyond imagining. There, in the land of her people, the waters ran east into the great seas beyond the sunrise.
No woman worked much at the trappers’ fairs, so women could be as evil as they chose. She loved being evil. Somehow there was always food aplenty, elk and deer hanging from limbs high above the yapping dogs, and stew boiling in every kettle.
So it was a time for scandalous gossip, jokes, laziness, and sipping firewater while visiting the lodges of the tribes that had come to trade with the white-eyes. The finger-talk sufficed. She did not need to know the Snake people’s words to have a merry afternoon with them. She spent one whole day learning new white men’s oaths from cheerful trappers who delighted to demonstrate them to her. She marveled that they had so many curses, and wanted to perfect her use of them, so she had them repeat their mighty oaths over and over.
Already, though the rendezvous was young, she had bought yellow ribbons, jingle bells, Venetian glass beads, thread, a new awl and knife, a copper kettle, and a real pair of five-point, thick, warm, Hudson’s Bay blankets, gray with red bands at either end. Before she left she would add flannel to her purchases. That is, if Skye didn’t squander everything on his whiskey.
She corrected herself. Their whiskey. She enjoyed a good jug just as much as he did, but she didn’t indulge herself the way he did. Someone had to look out for him when he visited the other world, so she did. The elders did not approve, but she was young and reckless and willing to try anything. There on the great grassy flats, mountain men and tribesmen alike flouted the wisdom of their fathers, and relished doing it. Later, she would pray to the Above Ones and ask them to come back to her.
She had borne no children, and neither she nor Skye could understand it. But that was what the First Maker had decreed, and she bore this with patience and resignation. It had freed her to help her man during the hard trapping seasons when they sometimes ventured into the lands patrolled by the Siksika, the dangerous Blackfeet. If she could not be a mother of Skye’s children, she could be one more warrior and the medicine woman who could divine the future and nurse the ill and steer the grimy, awkward, and buffalo-witted pale men out of trouble.
She had often pondered the greatest of all mysteries: where were the white women? This alone consumed most of the gossip of the Shoshone and Salish women. Where did they hide? Why did white men not bring their women out to this beautiful land? No one could answer it. No one had ever seen a white woman.
Perhaps such women were frail and disease-ridden, or so ugly the men hid them in lodges beyond the sunrise and enjoyed lusty moments with the more beautiful and healthy brown-skinned women of the tribes. She smiled. Skye had enough lust for ten women. She wish
ed he would get another two or three wives so they could all share his manhood.
Once she asked Skye about white women, and he said they were kept away in towns with big houses in them, and they did not like to come to savage places.
That puzzled her. Was this sweet plain beneath the great breasts the trappers called the Tetons a savage place? No woman of the tribes had ever received an answer. But it was rumored that some Lakota, or Sioux, had once traveled far, far east and had seen the cities of the white men, and their women, all pale and so dressed in clothing that only their faces and hands were exposed to view. Something clearly was wrong with white women.
This white men’s year of 1832 was different, and she sensed that it boded ill for her man. For all the years they had been together, there had been only one band of mountain men, but now there were several bands, fiercely opposed to one another, and each determined to wreck the prospects of the other. Yet they were all present at this rendezvous, drinking, sporting, bragging, lying, and getting girls pregnant.
This soft evening she padded across the flats, past knots of horses, some of them guarded by Shoshone boys. The new jingle bells on her moccasins delighted her. The yellow ribbons bobbing on her black braids pleased her. She was pretty, though too thin. She wished she could put on some good weight, and be full and round like her mother and sister. She found Skye alone, silent, and lifting a jug, all of which were bad signs. She knew trouble when she saw it, and now Skye exuded trouble.
“You hungry?” she asked.
He stared at the blue band in the west, and nodded.
“I’ll make some goddam stew. You gonna get drunk alone?”
He nodded.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, Victoria. Got me a job offer from Hudson’s Bay.”
“An offer? We should not go to them. They put many guns in the hands of the Siksika.”
Any friend of the Blackfeet was an enemy of the Absarokas.
“I will tell him no.”
“Who?”
“Peter Ogden.”
“Him? He is a great chief.”
“The best they’ve got. And he came seven hundred miles to say they want me.”
“It is a bad thing. They will catch you and turn you over to the water men looking for you.”
“He says it’s not so.”
A chill ran through her. There was more to this.
“Give me that jug, dammit. I will drink with you.”
She sat beside him, took the jug, and poured the firewater into her throat. It burned like a river of lava as it went down.
“Aaaie!” she cried.
“I got news today. Ogden told me about my family.”
This was big doings. Skye had word from this place called London, the many-houses place near the great sea, this place she could not even imagine. This news had traveled far, for many moons, maybe many winters, and found its way to this summer festival.
Slowly, measuring his words, he described Ogden’s visit. His mother was dead. His father still lived but was frail. His older sister was fine, married, and had a family. His younger one remained at home. The Hudson’s Bay Company had verified everything that Skye had told Ogden long ago, during his flight from the Royal Navy. They had approached the elders, the ones who advised the great chief, the one called king, to see if Skye could be welcomed back to England. They were proposing that Skye return to London, receive his pardon and visit his family, and then work for HBC …
With sudden insight, Victoria saw her life with the trapper coming to its end. He would return to his own people. He would resume a life she had heard of but could not imagine, working in big houses, working where there were thousands of people, more people in one big village than in her entire tribe, at home again, happy to be with his own.
“You’re going away.”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“I’ll go back to Absaroka. It is a good land. I will find someone. You go back.”
“Victoria!”
Some animal feeling seemed to erupt from him, rumbling up his windpipe into a great roar. He had bear medicine, and now the grizzly in him roared. He stood, wobbled, roared at the quiet camp, and roared at the sunset, and roared at the Great Breasts.
“Give me the jug,” she said. She took it from him and downed another fierce swallow of firewater. It was eating her belly and stealing through her limbs.
“Go to your people,” she said, her soul leaden.
He stared at her, hurt in his eyes. “Is that what you want?”
“No, dammit. But you must do this now.”
He settled heavily onto the robe.
“Maybe I have to,” he said. “Maybe there’s things a man has to do whether he wants to or not.”
“I will go to my people.”
“I don’t want you to go home. You are my wife.”
“That was the past. Now your people call you.”
“I’m a free man here. I bloody well make my own choices.”
“Skye,” she said and clasped his hand. “No one is always free.”
He nodded. “If I go, it’s because of duty. My father’s old. He got word of me. He’s expecting me. Home, that’s what it is. I don’t even know what home means any more.”
“Home is where your people are.”
“This tears me up.”
“Wait, then. There is no need to hurry.”
“Yes, there is. They want me to meet the factor at Fort Vancouver—that’s not far from the western sea—soon. Before their supply ship leaves for England in two moons. They want me on it.”
She knew what was tearing at him, and she knew darkly that his decision was beyond her. She could only stand apart and watch and wait, not knowing her own fate. After six winters, was this how her life with the white man would end?
“Skye, we must talk to this Chief Ogden some more. It is dangerous. We must find out everything.”
He nodded. “If this goes awry, they’ll just pitch me into the gaol,” he said. “Hard labor, maybe send me to Australia.”
“What is Australia?”
“Another land across the western sea, where England sends it criminals.”
“We send bad men to other bands. Your people do this, too.”
“I have to go,” he said. “And I don’t want to. I can’t afford to take you. Maybe I’ll be back. Maybe not. Maybe I’ll never see you again. Maybe you’ll be standing on the hillside, waiting for me to ride in some dusk, waiting with the lodgefire lit, waiting for a man who has vanished across the seas. Waiting for your husband who had to do what duty required of him.”
She didn’t grasp all of that, but she understood all too much.
four
Skye detected a heaviness in the spirit of his Victoria that night. Sometimes she stared solemnly at him.
Sometimes she plunged into a leaden silence. He well understood her feelings. She was uncertain of her fate, and likely to see their union come to a painful end.
The fate of “mountain wives,” as the Indian spouses of the trappers and traders were called, was well known. Whenever a mountain man wished to return to the States, he abandoned his dusky lady and all his children with untroubled conscience, and they never saw him again. This was not a scandal among the tribes. These things were understood and dealt with. But often a woman who had enjoyed years of happy companionship with a white man suddenly found herself alone, with children and no support.
So Victoria imprisoned within her whatever she was feeling, and only the dour turn of her mouth suggested that this was a painful moment in her life. She had loved, and maybe now would lose.
Skye felt himself being torn to bits, tugged this way and that, unable to reach any shore. He knew that this opportunity cut to his very heart. Through the good offices of the Hudson’s Bay Company, he could become an Englishman again, restored to his birthright, his family, his people, his home, his traditions. He could abandon this rough life if he chose. He could keep or abandon Victo
ria if he chose.
But there was a dark prospect. He knew that she would find only torment in London, the object of vicious curiosity, made fun of behind her back, and regarded as a savage, far below the most brutish of the English. He doubted it would ever change—that the European assumptions about other peoples would ever evolve into anything kinder. It could be a terrible thing to take her with him if he should choose to return to England.
But did he really want to go?
He spent a troubled night, she beside him as always, but somehow separated by an invisible wall. He fathomed only that these things were momentous and could radically change both of their lives. He crawled out of his lodge in the depths of a moonless night, and found solace in the stars, which were always there like faithful friends. The North Star gave direction unless the world was clouded. The fragrance of woodsmoke drifted by. The great encampment slept. Not even the diehard gamblers and drinkers remained awake. Herders guarded the horses against theft, but he did not hear them or the horses. The air stood still, and the breezes told him nothing at all. He wanted decision to come on a breeze, but the air brought nothing upon it. He felt stupid and bewildered.
This encampment lay in a sunny plain in the warmest season of the year, but the mountains were mostly cold and cruel and tortured his flesh. Soon cold would numb his fingers and toes again, and a small buffaloskin lodge would be his sole protection against vicious storm and arctic cold. There would be no refuge from all of nature’s onslaught, or the onslaught of hostile tribesmen, or even the wiles of malicious Fate.
In London there would be.
But of course, if he accepted HBC’s offer, he would be bound to serve the English company for a time. He would become a top man in the fur trade, but a man with a country, a people, a tradition, a common language.
He didn’t have to decide for a day or two. He would see how Victoria felt at dawn, when vision and sun came together, pale and then bright. And he would again talk to Ogden.
He crawled back into his tent, and settled on his robe, upon the hard ground he had never quite gotten used to. Her small brown hand found his and pressed it.
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