Fair Land Fair Land - A B Guthrie

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by A B Guthrie


  Heavy Runner considered before he spoke in words and signs. "It is the hunting ground of nobody, so of everybody." He drew on the pipe. "We were smoking with the Arapahoes, our friends, but the young men got to fighting — "

  "It is the way of young men."

  The head men were silent, waiting on the chief' s words. Heavy Runner passed the pipe. "You are my friends. My camp is your camp and my lodge your lodge."

  "And my tobacco your tobacco." Summers took two plugs from his pocket and passed them over. From the smell of the pipe, he reckoned their tobacco had been kinnikinnick or red-willow bark, for lack of the real thing.

  "Tell me," Heavy Runner said after he had put the plug on a board and got out his knife, "the Great Father try to say this land is your land, that land those men's, and another to another. I am friend of the paleface, but I do not understand."

  "I live the red man's life, and I do not know."

  "So the land is ours, but the white man still comes. He builds his own lodges where we are owners. He kills our buffalo. Sometimes he kills us. He moves on our land, scratching for the yellow metal. It is part of the land. Yes? It belongs to us. I cannot understand?"

  The chief had the pipe going and took note with it of the four directions before passing it on.

  Summers thought God himself couldn't answer the questions, much less the Great Father. "The white men are many," he said, "and I do not know what the moons will bring."

  Lying with Teal Eye that night, Summers thought he was anyhow partway a liar. He knew what the moons would bring, if not the all of it. But if there was no all — out answer, there was a downright fact. People. All of them wanting land or riches or maybe just a handhold on life. Come down to it, he thought and grinned a sour grin inside himself, he was a mite greedy himself, wanting the land kept open and free just for his sake.

  22

  THE SWEETEATER and the Oregon Trail, winding plain to the eye but untraveled yet, the season being early. Independence Rock and the Devil's Gate, just as Summers remembered them, and then on to South Pass, with the Wind River mountains rising high to the right.

  It would be good to poke along the Popo Agie or the Wind, thinking to be setting traps again and each one sprung soon, each lift heavy with beaver. The water was cold enough to paralyze a man's privates, but who cared? Who cared when the spring season was good and rendezvous just around the corner, where a man could drink around campfires and trade lies and find squaws? Who thought of age then? Who gave a damn? Who saw. the end of a life?

  But this thinking was wrong, this remembering, this hankering. Would he trade the life he was leading for the life he had led? Would he give up Teal Eye and the boys and Higgins in order to turn back the years? Not by a damn sight. Teal Eye had changed him, he thought, Teal Eye and family had changed him. If his mind was rich and sad with remembering, it was rich and good with what he had. Sure, things would change. But change, for better or worse, was the damned order of life.

  He hitched in the saddle to make sure the string was all right. Yep. People were coming. He couldn't fight that. Every man had the same rights that he did. Let every man make his mistakes, as he had done when he was young. Looking at the wooded hills, at the mountain meadows thick with grass, both empty now of all but wildlife, he figured there weren't enough whites in the country to ruin it all. Something would remain. A great deal of what he saw in the shimmering distances would remain, hardly touched and unspoiled. Teal Eye had softened him all right. Whatever fret he felt he would keep to himself, knowing how useless it was. The buffalo would go. That seemed likely, but the hills would still be in place and the streams flowing.

  South Pass, an easy climb and drop with Pacific Springs at the end of it. Sublette's Cutoff to the Seeds-kee-dee or Prairie Hen River, which people were calling the Green. A long haul and dry, that cutoff, but easier with saddle and pack horses than with oxen and wagons. Discarded stuff along the way — an anvil, a big cherry press, bins and boxes, an earthenware crock — the plunder that made loads too heavy for sore-footed pullers.

  One thing stuck in his gizzard, too heavy to pass through his system. Jim Deakins dead and Boone Caudill the killer. He had pieced the story together, from Birdwhistle there on the Columbia's banks, from Higgins who told him the talk at Fort Benton, from Teal Eye when she would speak of it. Caudill, the sudden and unthinking man, had shot Deakins out of suspicion with no hold on fact. He had killed his friend and deserted Teal Eye and the boy and not set foot in Blackfoot country again. He had to be told the truth somehow and somewhere. He had to live with his mistake. That was fair. All men should live with the wrongs they had done.

  It pricked him a little, thinking of Teal Eye sleeping with Caudill. But Teal Eye was Teal Eye. Nothing could spoil her. She had shut Caudill out of her mind, or tried to. When Summers pushed her about him, she talked little and then in a half-strangled voice.

  Now down to the Bear, down the steep slope of it where Oregon wagons had had to be wheel-locked and lowered with ropes.

  "Shoshone country," Summers said to Higgins. "You'll be took by surprise. They're lighter complected than you would expect, nigh light as Mandans, them as was all killed off by the smallpox. Watch out you don't flush up a bride."

  "Should I take a pot shot or shoot her on the wing?"

  "Just smile a pretty smile."

  "I'm thinkin' brides is as skeerce as buffalo in this country."

  "We'll trail up Smith's Fork. Time was, maybe still is, that White Hawk liked to camp around there."

  They came to an old camp where fires had burned, and the grass grew different where tepees had stood. A couple of miles farther on Summers spotted a horse herd on a hillside and two men standing watch. The trail led down into a basin. In the center of it tepees rose, rusty white in the sun. "I'm thinkin' we reached the end of the trip," Summers said.

  He led down toward the tepees, making the peace sign as he went, and dogs barked and faces turned, and a man came out of the biggest tepee and faced them, squinting.

  He was White Hawk, Summers made out, White Hawk with years on him and many moons in his face. Summers slid from his horse. "White Hawk, my brother," he said. "I bring tobacco and beads."

  A slow look of knowing came into White Hawk's eyes, and time seemed to shed from him.

  "My brother," he cried out. "Dick Summers, my white brother." He stepped forward to shake hands and, as if the shake wasn't enough, took Summers by the arm.

  The Indians gathered around, men dressed in patches of leather and cloth, women in their shapeless sacks save for a couple in calico and children bare-assed as the day they were born. They set up a clamor, merry as birds in a fresh-turned field.

  White Hawk said, using signs but words, too, "All belong you. The camp. My lodge. Meat in the pot." He kicked lightly at a dog that was sniffing Summers.

  "I have my wife, my sons and my good friend. Higgins his name."

  "We are happy. Come."

  "Packs first, and the horses."

  White Hawk turned to a couple of young men and spoke in Shoshone. To Summers he said, "They take care. No steal from you. I have spoken."

  Seated by White Hawk's fire outside his lodge, they ate deer meat seasoned with sage and other flavorings Summers couldn't name. The chief' s two wives bustled around, making sure the men were well fed, watching the fire to keep the pot hot. With them was a young girl, pretty and uncommonly fair, who was too young to be wife to old White Hawk. But maybe not. The sun winked out behind the hills, and a mild chill came on. A coyote, singing, set the camp dogs to barking.

  "We are too many for your lodge, brother," Summers said. "We have lodges. All right to set them up next to yours?"

  "Where you want. Me, I say the camp is yours." He rose to his feet, his legs stiff and awkward with age. "Come. We smoke."

  Inside the lodge, where a small fire was taking hold, White Hawk loaded the pipe, lit it with a twig from the fire, pointed it in the four directions and passed it to Summers, who puff
ed and handed the pipe to Higgins.

  "You hunt the buffalo still? Across the mountains?" Summers asked.

  White Hawk bent his head. His voice was low. "For these moons I think no. It is bad. Bad medicine last hunt."

  Summers kept silent, sure the chief would go on.

  "My son." He rubbed the fingers of one hand in the palm of the other. "He is with me no more."

  "He fight?"

  "His horse stumble and fall in the hunt. Buffalo pound him."

  "My heart is sad for you," Summers said, noting how much English the chief had picked up.

  "His woman I take into my lodge. His little squaw, too."

  "His daughter?"

  "My — what you say?"

  "Granddaughter."

  The chief made the sign for yes, bowing his body as well as his head.

  "By the fire I see her?"

  Again the chief signed a yes.

  "You have learned much white man's talk."

  "By the Bear. By the trail. They come. Many come, and I talk. Has the white man no hunting ground from where he come? How many is he?"

  "Like the blades of grass. Like the leaves on the trees. They come to shoot. No buffalo on their range. They come to plow. The new soil in Oregon, it is better."

  The chief sighed a sort of spent sigh, then straightened and asked, "Why you come?"

  "To see my brother."

  "That is good. That is all?"

  Summers turned a thumb toward Higgins. "Here is a good man. They call him Friend of the Great Bear. He has no woman."

  "Say to him he will have one. I make sure."

  "Not that way, my brother. A wife he wants. One to keep. He is not rough man, but kind."

  For a long moment Chief White Hawk studied Higgins, who shifted under his stare. "He is too old. Old. No teeth."

  "Not too old." Summers figured, knowing Higgins, that it was fair to lie. "He take tomahawk in the mouth. A Sioux it was. He killed the Sioux, Higgins did."

  "And his mouth broken?"

  "Yes. Broken mouth and all."

  "What woman he want?" the chief asked, looking with more favor at Higgins.

  "He does not say yet. He is just come. But I see many young women in camp."

  The chief sat as if heavy with thought. "Our women good, no?"

  "It is true. Good-looking women. Good wives, I say."

  "I will think."

  Now Summers dared to say, "That one I saw and think how pretty, there by your fire."

  "Little Wing. Granddaughter?"

  "If she has no man, I say to you, Higgins is a good man, he is. He not be cruel like some. He be kind."

  The chief smoked and looked at the wall of the lodge as if into distance. What went on in his head didn't show in his face. At last he said, "We are poor."

  "You know the yellow metal?"

  "Paleface, he love it. I know."

  Summers held out the last three pieces of gold he had earned as a guide. "For a wife?"

  "It is not horses."

  "It buy horses. It buy eight, ten, twelve. That is enough, yes, my brother?"

  For a long time White Hawk gazed into the bed of coals that had been a fire. He tossed a stick on them. "It is true. My Little Wing has no man. Many want her, but they have not the horses. I will ask her, but if she say no?"

  "I will ask my friend, too. I do not know how he feels."

  White Hawk let a little smile come on his face. "No man say no to her."

  After they had left the lodge, Higgins asked, "Now what in the hell was that all about? I just catched a word now and then."

  "I was dickerin' for a wife for you."

  "Just any old wife, huh? Just anything?"

  "You seen her."

  "Who? Where?"

  "That pretty filly by the campfire, that one with the two older women."

  "Jesus Christ! She wouldn't go for the likes of me."

  "Women don't have much say in this business. The father or grandfather or brother decides, dependin' on how many horses he gets."

  Higgins stopped Summers in his tracks. "I won't have it, by God! She has to be willin', more'n willin', or it's no go with me. Got that?"

  "Simmer down. We got Teal Eye to make sure. You just play your fiddle and sing."

  23

  HE CAMP came alive early. Squaws were bringing in I wood, building fires, filling pots and kettles while children played. Their voices sounded in steady, good-natured chatter. Mostly the men sat at the flaps of the tepees, doing nothing but wait.

  "The bucks sure got it easy," Higgins said to Summers. "Like as if it would hurt them to do some of the chores."

  Higgins had gathered wood for Teal Eye while the men watched, their faces showing so little that they showed much.

  A man doing squaw's work! Summers had seen to the horses and fetched water. Now Teal Eye was tending a pot. The boys were in back of her, Lije holding to Nocansee's hand. It had been Teal Eye's doing that they had their own fire and fixed their own food. "We come to visit, yes," she had said. "But not to sit and eat their meat."

  Higgins was watching the chief's fire and the girl who busied herself there. He said, "It won't work."

  "What?" Summers asked, knowing the answer.

  "Me'n her, that's what. Damned if I push."

  "Who's askin' you to? We got Teal Eye."

  "I tell her about you," Teal Eye said to Higgins. "I find out."

  "Why the all-fired hurry? Could be I won't like her."

  "Could be," Teal Eye answered, making a grave face.

  The night chill was easing off as the day lightened. Soon the sun would be up. On the hillside the horses were frisking, running and kicking up to get the kinks out or to welcome the light.

  "I'm puttin' you on for tonight," Summers said.

  "Who said you could?"

  "For fiddle music and singin'."

  "Jesus Christ! I got no say, huh?"

  "Nope."

  Higgins shook his head, saying, "I just might get balky."

  "Cheer up. After we've et, we go huntin'."

  "They do their own huntin'."

  "Yep. But not a rifle in camp. just a few old smoothbores that ain't accurate for more'n three or four jumps. Them and bows and arrers."

  "We all the same as camp hunters?"

  "It don't hurt to bring in meat. I'm bettin' the hunters will stick in camp, waitin' to see how we come out."

  They ate and went to bring in their horses — two for saddles and three for packs. Hobbled, the horses weren't hard to catch. Back in camp, they threw on the saddles. Summers said to Teal Eye, "Back before you know it, back with much meat."

  She gave him the smile she smiled for him alone and came forward and touched his arm. "I wait for you. All the time."

  They mounted, rifles held crosswise in front of them. Passing White Hawk in front of his lodge, Summers said, "We kill meat. What your mouth say?"

  "It is long time since sheep. Long time since bighorn. Maybe you find one. My hunters have hard time. Far for the arrow."

  Little Wing came from the lodge. She threw a look at Higgins, who sat stiff as a stick, holding his rifle.

  They rode out of the valley into the hills, Summers saying,

  "Sheep he wants. Sheep in this country. I don't know. Plenty elk and deer, though."

  They followed a game trail, winding uphill. The horses, not pushed, snatched for wild berries and the crowns of bull thistles. The sun, barely up, was at their backs, the breeze in their faces. Overhead the sky was deep, but a man couldn't see its far rims, not with hills and trees closing them off.

  "Hell of a place to hunt," Higgins said. "Brush and stuff all around, and any game, spottin' us, be lost to sight before we could aim."

  "Game trails lead to somethin', to a lick or an open meadow. That's where they're like to be."

  "Or lyin' up somewheres, their bellies full."

  "You're as cheerful as a hell's fire preacher. Buck up. Fine day today."

  No use, Summers t
hought. Higgins' lips were set in a tight, crooked line.

  Through the trees Summers caught a glimpse of a clearing.

  "Let's tie up. Goin' afoot is the ticket now, I"m thinkin'."

  It was as he had figured, a small park in the trees with a pool of water close to its middle. They approached, stooping, and lay down at the edge.

  The meadow was green, with hardly a bush in it, only grass and more grass, spotted here and there with a flower of some kind. Nothing moved in it except for a crowned jay, dark blue, that flew over it and perched in a pine. Nothing moved but little butterflies, mosquitoes and a swarm of gnats. There was the voice of silence, the far thrum that sounded deep in the ear.

  "It ain't a good time of day," Higgins said.

  "Who knows, savin' the critters themselves?"

  They waited while the sun rose higher. It didn't have much heat in it yet. Summers chewed on a grass stem. Half of hunting was waiting. Higgins had put his head on his arms. He might be sleeping.

  The mosquitoes buzzed thick. They didn't bother Summers much. His skin was too old and leathery, he figured. He waited, unmoving, his Hawken lying in front of him. His eyes hunted for movement. Sure to God there was game around here. Elk and deer at the least. He had seen their tracks on the trail. Mountain sheep maybe. Across the divide they were plenty enough, and mountain men, froze for good meat when buffalo were scarce, had found sheep tasty and good in the belly.

  On a ridge beyond the meadow he caught a flicker of action. He squinted. three, no, four gray-white blobs, moving slow, coming down to feed and to drink. He nudged Higgins and pointed with a finger. Higgins raised his head and stared and finally nodded. He didn't quite have the hunter's eye.

  The sheep stepped dainty down the ridge, on guard but not spooky. Two looked like good meat. They came within range of the Hawken but not of the Kentucky. He said, low-voiced to Higgins, "Ho1d up. Aim at the small one to the right. Fire when I say go."

  Careful in his movements, he planted the ramrod, held it with his left hand and laid the gun across his arm for a rest. Higgins had the lighter rifle at his shoulder.

 

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