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by Richard S. Wheeler


  The crowd had fallen into a holy vigil.

  Maybe they were waiting for the yellow cur to walk on stage, but it lingered beyond the camp, making its own way, perhaps an ally in life’s adventures but no friend of any living thing.

  At last the old man emerged from his hut, stood, stretched, and surveyed the great assemblage. Skye thought that the entire village had come for this event and now the Snakes stood in a great arc, the men in the first ranks, the women and children behind them.

  A signal from Tixitl drew the translators and Skye to him.

  “I have asked the winds for the name. I have asked the heavens, and the creatures under the earth. I have asked the creatures in the water, and the four-foots that walk. I have asked the before-people, and my own spirit-counselor, whose name is a mystery.”

  Skye waited patiently, wishing his yellow dog would show up. But the dog stayed well hidden.

  “They have given me no name for this dog,” Tixitl said. “The heavens give no name. And the winds give no name. And all the spirits give me no name. This dog must not be named. Hairy man, do not give this dog a name. As long as he has no name, his power will watch over you. If you name this dog, you will break him in two, like a twig snapping. Therefore he is No Name. The spirits have spoken to me, and I have spoken to you.”

  With that, the old man stood silent, letting these words sink into the assemblage, while the translators droned.

  “Thank you, grandfather,” said Skye, brushing off ants.

  He had a nameless dog who would not answer to his call, and yet watched over Skye.

  If the Snakes were disappointed they did not show it. Indeed, he walked through faces wreathed in smiles. Forbidding a name was as good as a naming, and maybe all the more medicine because it was so mysterious.

  Skye did not see the yellow dog that night and supposed that the cur had found a home among the village mutts and would stay on. At dawn Skye studied the quiet village, still searching for the dog, and missing it badly. His feeling surprised him. But he would be better off without the dog. He would probably have to leave it at Fort Vancouver anyway if he shipped to England. He had no idea whether a wild dog would be welcome on a merchant ship, but he doubted it. So it all was a blessing. He had surrendered a dog and gained a thousand ants in his britches.

  Nutmeg was dressed and ready, with his knapsack over his back and fat Dolly beside him, carrying her small pack. Skye yawned, pulled on his thick-soled moccasins, and hiked out to the horse herd under the watchful eyes of the boys who guarded it. His horses were skittish, liking the easy living and the gossipy society of the Snake brethren. He tried to catch the packhorse, but it sidled away from him. He did better with Victoria’s little spotted horse, sliding a hackamore over its nose and leading it back to camp.

  It took him until sunrise to catch his own wily horse, which dodged through the herd, stirring trouble. It angered him. He vowed he would spend more time with his willful horses and work with them until they were absolutely reliable. When he finally returned with his nags, the travelers were all awaiting him. The escort party of eleven warriors all had their mounts in hand, ready to go. Victoria was ready; the packhorse stood ready.

  Skye had had no breakfast but decided to forgo it. He had delayed his own departure.

  “All right,” he said.

  Most of the village was up, and people silently watched the party leave camp, riding beside the broad, purling Snake, carrying its burden of mountain snows to the far Pacific. It was a silent departure. Skye hunted for the no-name yellow cur and saw no canine other than Dolly, and was relieved that the mutt had made his home with this band where it could live to fat old age gorging on salmon and buffalo and the offal of a dozen other animals.

  This had been a good stop. In all of his years as a mountaineer, he had found hospitality and succor among friendly tribes.

  He turned to the professor, waiting beside Skye’s pony. “You rested, Mr. Nutmeg?”

  “Entirely, and ready for the next lap. And chock-full of ideas. I can put the Indians to work, Mister Skye! Those people brought me half a dozen items that were new to me; some simple variations, but two were wax-leaf desert shrubs I’d never seen. I hadn’t realized I can trade manufactured goods for these things. My work would go twice as fast. I wish I’d thought to stock up at the rendezvous.”

  Skye nodded. Professor Nutmeg’s mind ran one direction.

  Their Snake escort set a slow pace, pausing frequently to observe the wonders of their world: the diving eagle, the geese bobbing in estuaries, the track of a mountain lion, the flight of crows, and the ripples in the river that spoke to them of things Skye would never fathom.

  The pace at least was more comfortable for Nutmeg, who had time to meander, forgetful of safety and direction as his quest for knowledge took him from plant to plant. But Pokotel and Tisidimit kept an eye on him, sometimes walking their spotted mounts, the famous dappled palouses of the Nez Perce, as outriders well back from the river.

  Victoria had slipped into rare melancholia, her dark visions plain upon her sharp face.

  “You’re gonna find some Englishwoman when we get there, and then I’m no good for you anymore,” she said, after reining her pony beside his. “She gonna be like you, big and white, and blue-eyes, and she gonna talk your tongue, not like old Victoria. I don’t say things good. I listen to Nutmeg, him big wise man among you, and I know I talk no good, and he thinks you could be big wise man of the English, and then you send me back to the Kicked-in-the-Bellies and you take a young, pretty white woman for wife and make many children. I no damn good at making a baby, so you get none from me. You say so and I will turn around and go back to my people.”

  He had never heard her talk like that. Always, she had been adventuresome, ready for whatever life brought, fierce and determined. But now he heard despair in her voice.

  Skye protested but could not stop this outpouring of worry. There were a few grains of truth in it. He could not himself say how he would feel about her in England. Maybe the woman he loved so much in this great North American wilderness would strike him as alien in crowded London, and maybe he would regret trying to prolong the union.

  Skye had the sense that no matter how much he might vow to stick with her, giant forces, such as his cultural memories, probable condescension in London, future trouble within Hudson’s Bay Company, might conspire to tear his sweet, fragile mountain marriage to bits.

  He was a strong man, and yet he felt helpless.

  He reached over to touch her arm. She saw his big blunt fingers on the sleeve of her tradecloth blouse, and he saw a wetness in her brown eyes.

  eighteen

  The quickening light stirred Skye out of a dream-tormented sleep. He had won no rest that night. He pulled aside his robes and beheld the no-name dog, lying three feet away, gazing intently at him.

  He did not welcome the dog. He marveled that the dog would leave the paradise of the Snake village and follow him to this place, two days distant. He would have to betray the dog at Fort Vancouver, have McLoughlin lock up the mutt when Skye boarded that ship … if indeed that was to be his fate.

  He didn’t want any kin just then. Not Victoria, who would suffer in England, not the dog. Not his friends in the mountains. If he stepped aboard that bark, he would betray them all, exchange his mountain family for his English one.

  Last night he had decided, while tossing in his blankets, that Victoria was right: he had to choose. He could have England and his family … or her. But not both. There lay an ocean and a continent between them, and not just sea and land, but an ocean that divided white people, English people, from these tribes. As usual, she saw the things he didn’t see, the things he wallpapered over and tried not to see. She hadn’t seen England, but she knew she would wither there and pine for her free, sunlit prairies, shining mountains, and her people, who lived without fences and hedgerows, who went where they pleased and did whatever came to them.

  For her, even a one-year
visit would be an eternity that would end in a grave in some dank English burial field outside the yard of any church, for they would not bury her in sacred ground. She had vision; he didn’t. And he could see no way out. He could abandon England and citizenship and his father and sisters, and keep her. And the no-name dog.

  With daylight he banished the dreads that had bored through his soul all night, and now, in dawn’s light, things weren’t so bad. She could wait for him. He’d be gone perhaps a year and a half—if all went well. If the bark he sailed on didn’t founder at sea, if he didn’t sicken and die in London, if the Crown truly restored his name, if Hudson’s Bay kept its word, if the returning bark to York Factory in Canada didn’t founder, if he didn’t sicken and die canoeing and portaging from Hudson’s Bay over half a continent to Fort Vancouver.

  Would Victoria and the no-name dog wait?

  He and the dog were the only ones in camp who were awake.

  He arose, stretched, and found the mutt pressing its muzzle against his leg, an act of proprietary interest if not ownership. Gingerly he lowered his big hand and stroked the dog’s head. The dog let him.

  He didn’t know what in bloody hell he would do with the dog, and that made him irritable.

  They progressed along the Snake River, and he marveled at the fishing skills of his comrades. They could spear a salmon even though the water tricked the eye into thinking the fish was not where it really was. They had small throw-nets that settled over the fat fish.

  He also wondered about their utter lack of caution. They traveled without vedettes, scarcely paying attention to danger. If they had done this on the plains, they would be in mortal danger. But it was as if they had no enemies, and perhaps they didn’t, at least when they were getting along with the Nez Perce, which they usually did.

  They sang and sometimes danced to the thump of a small drum in the evenings, simply as a way to make the evenings pass. He gradually acquired some grasp of their ways. They had little public religion, other than a belief in a spirit-guardian from the animal world. That was a private matter: some of the Snakes had medicine, others never even sought spirit helpers and counselors. Skye thought they were not as handsome as some tribes, such as the Lakota, but he admired their honeyed flesh and cleanness of limb.

  When he sought to find out why they had come along on this journey, Victoria’s response was simply that they wanted to; it was adventure, and they loved adventure. They loved to honor the great white wise man who was making pictures of all plants on earth. They were celebrating such a wonder, and also honoring Skye, the greatest of the white fur men, and his fine Absaroka woman.

  And that was all the reason they needed.

  They came one evening to a point near a great bend of the Snake, and there the headman, Tisidimit, conveyed to Skye, by sign, that here they would leave the river and head westward along various valleys, and finally over the Blue Mountains beyond the horizon.

  Now they would hunt rather than fish. This was a land of fine hares, and the Snake people treasured the pelts of rabbits almost as much as the hides of buffalo.

  So they turned away from the Snake River and started overland through an arid land that gradually greened as it rose. Skye saw at once that this land would yield its wild grapes and berries, its small game, rich and verdant grasses for the horses, springs and creeks, firewood aplenty, yews and willows and cottonwoods for shade. But now, as they pierced into a wetter country, the mosquitos tormented them all, and Skye began dreading the nights when no robe or smudge fire would protect his vulnerable flesh from a thousand bloodsucking insects.

  The yellow dog didn’t mind. The horses did, and their tails lashed at the vicious clouds of insects. Victoria’s face puffed up with the bites she bore stoically, but they all endured, uncomplaining. For some reason the mosquitos barely bothered the Snakes, and Skye wondered what mysterious potions they used upon themselves.

  They made good progress. The Snakes did all the hunting and rarely did they make camp without fresh meat. The yellow dog ate and fattened and studied Skye with opaque eyes that hid the mystery of its origins. When was this ugly thing born, and what had it suffered to be so scarred, and how did it learn to hunt and fight and survive? And always, Skye came back to the great question: why had this miserable beast attached itself to him?

  Victoria knew the answer, and Skye stopped laughing at her notions.

  He did not know where the Snakes were taking him: only that they would go as far as they wanted, and then turn back, having made a lark of a summer’s moon. Maybe they would take the dog with them. The test would soon come at Fort Vancouver, and then Victoria would see whether the no-name mutt was Skye’s spirit-dog, or just a beast looking for a handout.

  They ascended the Blue mountains, traveling through open pine forest dotted with parks, rather more arid above than in the foothill country. Nutmeg found little to interest him; the vegetation was uniform, limited, and dull. He and Dolly roved wide from the plain and well-worn trail, and had nothing to report except an encounter with a black bear that was berrying under a bluff.

  “What are your plans now, Professor?” Skye asked one evening.

  “Why, wait for Nat Wyeth, I suppose. When his party arrives at Vancouver, I’ll go to the coast with them and board their bark, the Sultana, at the mouth of the Columbia, and head back to Boston via Cape Horn. If all goes well, I’ll land only a few miles from Harvard Yard. I’m sure there’d be passage for you, Mister Skye, if you wish it.”

  “I’ll see what Dr. McLoughlin has in mind, mate. This whole business is bloody mysterious.”

  “Why doesn’t HBC just make you an offer straight out?”

  “Because they know I’d never accept. They’re tied to the Crown, administer Crown lands, operate the criminal justice system in their territory, and unless I’m cleared and restored to my rights as an Englishman, they’ll never put me officially on their rolls.”

  They descended into a rich foothill country, and then a grassy plain. This was the Columbia basin, and Skye felt a change. The last of the Rockies were behind him, and this land looked westward to the coastal ranges and the great Pacific. Suddenly he felt wary. The Rockies had been his home for six years. The Yanks had been his friends and offered him the means to survive. Now, suddenly, this country, brooding in the sun, seemed alien, and his future loomed as a large question mark. The West was always the future; the East the past.

  They reached a large tributary of the Columbia, whose name Skye did not know, and there the Snakes went their own way. They wished to go up to Fort Walla Walla, the Hudson’s Bay post built to trade with the Nez Perce.

  Pokotel and Tisidimit clasped their white friends, sang songs, laughed, and started north across a great flat that showed signs of the presence of wild horses. The possibility of capturing some of the cayuses excited them.

  Just follow the river, they explained to Victoria, who translated.

  And then the Snakes departed in a long line, winding their way over the undulating grasses, leaving Skye, Victoria, Nutmeg, and their critters suddenly alone.

  Skye felt naked. He had no weapon. Only Victoria’s bow and quiver protected them. They had, at least, the food they had traded for weeks earlier, but it would not last them to Fort Vancouver, which lay a great distance to the west. Skye was struck, once again, by the vastness of this North America, its size unfathomable.

  “We’re almost unarmed, and we’ll be careful, mate,” he said to Nutmeg.

  They started down a pleasant stream, abounding with game along its banks.

  Now, suddenly, the professor found himself in a new botanical zone, and he worked furiously to harvest the treasures of this intermountain land.

  Skye rode ahead, scouting a safe passage, and soon spotted a fishing village. He could only hope its people were friendly. It would probably be Umatilla, Wallawalla, or Cayuse, but without a guide he doubted he could tell which.

  He rode straight for the village, hoping for the best.

&n
bsp; nineteen

  A sea of heavy-boned friendly faces greeted them as they entered the camp. Skye spotted some small, wiry horses picketed close, and thought these were Cayuse Indians, who caught just such ponies on the vast arid plains of the area. He also guessed that they were fishing the Umatilla River. He wished he had a guide to help him put names to places and people.

  They wore little clothing this summery day. They were a people of golden flesh, notably bad teeth, but silky straight hair which the women let hang loose over their breasts. Although a great fishery had been erected of poles out of the nearby mountains, including a framework above the river where spearmen could harvest salmon, no one seemed to be working much. Perhaps they didn’t need to.

  The place stank of fish offal, dung, and kitchen trash. Whirling clouds of green-bellied flies swarmed over everything and everyone, along with bigger and blacker horseflies. Sulky curs circled as Skye and his party rode in, and sniffed Dolly, who stayed beside the professor. Skye saw no lodges, but only a jumble of shacks and arbors thrown together from river brush and a few poles, not enough to slow the wind but enough to provide a little shade. These people might be fine fishermen, but they did not impress Skye, who preferred the rich culture and hauteur of the Plains Indians.

  Skye wondered what the ritual might be: did these far-west people follow the protocols of the Plains tribes? He dismounted, extracted a plug of tobacco from his pack and waited for a headman or chief. But none came and there was no official welcoming. Several old men held out their hands, plainly wanting the tobacco, but Skye tarried.

  Victoria took matters into her own hands: her fingers danced. But again, these people stared. It was dawning on Skye that even the universal sign language, which he had thought was known to tribes everywhere, wasn’t much used here. One young man stood aside, and from his bearing and an elaborate conch-shell necklace dangling from his neck, Skye thought him to be a leader of some sort, so he doffed his top hat, approached, and attempted by sign language to seek the welcome of the village.

 

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