Downriver

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Her kin among the People told her to forget him. White men were like that. But she could not. She had sold the last few goods in the store and then waited as the summer faded into yellow leaves, frosts and bare limbs, and the winter howled, and then the sun burned away the snow and green grass burst through the drifts. Surely he would come with the warm tide of the sun, but he had not, and she knew that some bad thing had happened, and he was detained.

  She had subsisted as long as she could at the post, sometimes given a haunch of venison or elk by the Sioux, because her people rarely stopped by. The Cheyenne had moved south. But he didn’t come. She roamed the hills for wild onions and greens and edible things—but never fish, the unclean water creature. And still he had not come.

  “Ah, return to us, and some good Cheyenne will take you,” her friends said. But she had always shaken her head. She wore the rope, as she had as a maiden, so that she might remain inviolate; no Cheyenne man would touch her for as long as she wore it. She belonged to Simon, for all time, until they were gone from the earth and had become stars in the heavens. And she found in her children the proofs of his presence within her heart, and she bided her time.

  Simon had made her proud. She had been the wife of a trader, a man who brought precious and magical things to her people in exchange for something as ordinary as a pelt. By what mysterious power could white men conjure metal pots and knives and awls and hatchets? How did they make blankets? Where did Simon and his partner get these marvels?

  But that was only the smallest part of it. Cheyenne men ruled their women, and sent them away if a woman was not obedient, for it was a grave offense to defy him or the elders, and a woman faced unspeakable evils if she did. Simon was different. He was Hoah, a friend. What Cheyenne husband consulted his wife as Simon did? A woman kept the lodge and raised the children and answered his every beck and call. But Simon MacLees had been a companion and she liked that.

  She did not know of any other woman of the People who had a male friend; they had husbands and sons and fathers, but that was different. Their entire life consisted of visiting with their sisters and mothers and other women. So she considered Simon MacLees a treasure beyond price because he was a friend as well as husband.

  He was strange; all white men were strange. He had no medicine and worshiped nothing visible. He never sought the help of the Ma i yun’, the Powers who governed the fate of mere mortals. He never talked about where he had come from, or what his people were like back in the place of many houses. It was as if he had been born from a whirlwind, without a family. And now he had gone away as mysteriously as he had arrived one day at the village of Red Robe and opened his packs to show the People what he would offer them for beaver pelts, ermine and fox and deer and elk and buffalo robes.

  She had been standing right there, in a whitened doeskin dress with fringed sleeves, and high beaded moccasins. She had many suitors but was not yet taken and her parents had bided their time, wanting the best young warrior for their daughter. Like all Cheyenne girls, she had been a virgin, wore the sacred rope about her loins, and was carefully chaperoned. Nothing was worse for a Cheyenne girl than to be used by several men.

  Ah, what a moment that was, when his gray-eyed gaze settled on her, paused to see into her, and swept over her young figure, and then back to her face, where his warm gaze seemed to pierce right to her heart.

  Ah, Simon! She would track him to the ends of the earth. She would bring his children to him, and help him escape from the troubles he was in. It didn’t matter what the People thought: she would go to the place of many lodges. Even her spirit helper the raven Okoka told her not to, and old Four Braids, the elder with great wisdom and an eye upon the mysterious future, the keeper of a medicine bundle, had warned her sharply.

  And yet she had come because she had to come, and she would find Simon MacLees and joyously show him how the children had grown, and how much they had learned, and how beautiful they were, partly pale and partly brown like herself, golden children like sunrises in the Moon of First Frost.

  She knew all the news, for such things were cried to the entire village of Red Robe. She knew that the fireboat had come to the trading post where the Big River and the Elk River—the white men called them by different names—came together, and soon would go down to the place of many lodges.

  She had inquired how she might ride on that boat, though her father had told her not to set foot on it because it offended the evil spirits under the water. But she did learn that she might find the boat and board it if she hurried. She resolved to go at once. Nothing remained within the cottonwood logs of the post. She had nothing to sell, and Simon brought her nothing to eat.

  She packed the skins and robes she possessed on one of her two scrawny horses, one sore-backed with a cracked hoof, the other a sullen mare that would not move unless she lashed it. That was all she had, but that would do. She would go to the Big River and wait for the fireboat. She had no idea how she might obtain a ride; but she knew that white men traded almost anything for furs, and of furs she had a few.

  She did not think about the chance that the boat might have passed by. If that was true, and it didn’t come after many sleeps, she would walk down the big river to this place where white men lived. Simon had said the river would take him there; it would take her there too.

  It would be a hard walk. She would walk past the Arikaras, sometimes enemies of her people, but this was the land of the Miniconjou and Yanktonai, and there she would be safe. What power would a woman with two small children have against an enemy? And yet, most would respect her, for a woman of the People, traveling alone, was a wonder, and would be honored except maybe by the Pawnee.

  For Simon she would risk all that. She and Simon had talked of many things. He had told her about schools and buildings made of red blocks of fired earth; of wagons, and theaters and books. He had shown her some books, and the mysterious little signs within them had intrigued her. Now she would see where these came from!

  It was because Simon was a friend, and few other women of the People had a male friend, that she would go to Simon now. She was very proud to have a man friend; not just a husband who gave orders and expected much labor and then went off to smoke with other men, or pray to the powers together, or perform secret dances, or drum for victory, or ride away to hunt and fight.

  Once she had yearned for just such a proud husband; a slim, brown, sharp-eyed man with long braids, a man who would win great honors in war, count many coups, save his people, bring them plenty of meat, ride first in the parades, wear many eagle feathers in his hair, find favor with the elders and the shamans. Oh, how she had yearned for such a man, so she might be proud and looked upon as the most fortunate of the Cheyenne women.

  But then she discovered friendship. Simon made her laugh. He rarely forbade her anything. He showered gifts upon her; a new awl, a skein of beads, a blue blanket with black stripes and four bars on it, indicating the heaviest weight.

  Ah! What woman among all the bands of the People had such a friend?

  Now she hastened her reluctant four-foots eastward, toward the Wind of the Rising Sun. Sound Comes Back was always hungry, and she could not feed him enough. Singing Rain was docile, and sat quietly behind her mother, accepting whatever life visited upon her. Lame Deer made do with cattail roots, which she mashed to pulp and boiled into a white paste that filled the belly and sufficed for food.

  The Cheyenne River flowed lazily eastward through lonely steppes and grassy bluffs. At least there were willows and cottonwoods in the bottoms, and plenty of places for a small woman to hide from distant eyes, though no one tracking close or hunting her would fail to find her.

  The weather that moon of the ripe strawberries grew hot, slowing the horses, but she would not let them pause except for a while to graze, or lick water, or scratch themselves by rubbing against a willow to rid themselves of fleas and flies.

  The Cheyenne widened into a formidable river as its tributaries added the
ir flow, and then she descended long coulees choked with brush, and passed through a dense forest, and beheld the Big River, a vast expanse of shimmering blue water.

  There was no sign of anything or anyone, except some hard-used trails along its vast valley. She feared the fireboat had passed. She feared it might came and not see her. Or maybe the white chiefs who steered it would not accept her gifts; several robes for three passengers; some smaller pelts for the ponies.

  And so she made a small camp that sunny and quiet afternoon, and waited.

  thirteen

  Victoria saw the woman first as the packet rounded a bight, and motioned to Skye. His eyes weren’t as keen as hers, and he almost missed her. But the woman was making herself known to the crew by waving a red banner on a stick, the sweeping flourishes of crimson brightening the right bank across the dull water of late afternoon.

  “She’s got horses and some children,” Victoria said, and once again Skye squinted into the shadowed spit of land where she stood, until he could make out the small buckskin-clad figure of a boy, and a smaller child grasping the woman’s leg.

  “She wants something,” Victoria said.

  “Trade, probably.”

  “One woman? Trade? Dammit, Skye.”

  Skye nodded. The distant woman’s signaling was urgent, even violent, her flag on a stick describing great arcs, her whole body twisting with the intent of being seen.

  Skye touched Victoria’s hand, and headed up the companionway to the hurricane deck and the pilothouse.

  “We see her,” said Marsh. “Can’t stop for a lone trader.”

  “That doesn’t look like a woman trying to trade, mate.”

  “Squaw alone like that. A white man would be different. We can make another six, eight miles before dark. Boilers eat wood, Mister Skye.”

  “Six miles? Suppose you let Victoria and me off, with our horses. We’ll see what she wants, and then hunt along the way to your night anchorage.”

  Marsh said nothing. The riverboat was passing the woman, who waved her banner ceaselessly, almost furiously. Skye knew the woman was calling, maybe screaming; he could see it in her face, though the rumble of the paddle wheels and the rattle of steam from the escapement kept him from hearing anything resembling a woman’s voice.

  The pilot and helmsman were following the channel, veering toward the right bank. Below the left bank was a vast shallows dotted with snags and gravel bars, and the helmsman was cautiously edging the vessel closer to the steep bluffs of the right bank.

  They passed the woman, who leapt and jumped and cried out, and Skye suddenly felt bad.

  “All right,” Marsh said. He pointed to a place where the channel cut close to a sharp grassy bluff. “Get your horses; we’ll be six miles down. There’s a creek there with a good patch of timber. Bring us meat.”

  Skye heard the clanging of a bell as he raced down the companionway to the boiler deck. He motioned to Victoria, who had been standing at the rail, her small foot on the coaming, looking unhappy.

  “We’ll see,” he said. “Talk to her, make meat, meet the ship downstream.”

  That’s all it took for her to race to the pen, throw her small pad saddle on her nag, and fetch her bow and quiver. No Name circled restlessly, ready to go wherever his partners went. Skye saddled his ugly, roman-nosed grulla horse and led it to the gangway amidships.

  A few minutes later, the ship drifted into the right bank, bumped bottom, and pulled away. The gangway didn’t reach, but it wouldn’t matter. The crew dropped the far end into the river and Skye and Victoria rode down the incline and urged their ponies toward the steep bank, which the horses took with violent leaps that almost unseated them both.

  Marsh wasted not a moment. The boat was already adrift, the gangway drawn up, and the helmsman steering it back into the channel. With a shudder the paddle wheels engaged, splashing water, and the boat raced downstream again.

  In an amazingly short time, the world was veiled in silence. Smoke hung in the quiet air. The bluff cast a long lavender shadow over the water. The sinking sun colored the world orange and gold and dun. A streak of green filled the eastern sky.

  The woman came running. She was leading a saddled ewe-necked pony and a gaunt packhorse, dragging a child, and carrying a smaller one in the crook of her arm.

  “Cheyenne,” Victoria said sourly. Enemies of her Absaroka people.

  Skye always marveled that Victoria could read the tribe in a glance. He couldn’t, and never got the knack of it. They waited for the Cheyenne woman, and when she did finally stop before them, she was out of breath, and Skye sensed a wildness and despair and defeat in her.

  “Fireboat. I want to go,” she cried.

  This Cheyenne knew a little English.

  “Well, maybe so,” Skye said. “Who are you?”

  “The woman of Simon MacLees,” she said, half gasping it out between gulps of air.

  Skye knew the name. Opposition. A trading partnership. He sat uneasily on his restless, dripping horse. “You want to trade, is that it?”

  “No, go on fireboat. To …” she paused, searching for words. “Place of many lodges.”

  That surprised Skye.

  He would get the story en route. “Tell us. Maybe you can go. Fireboat’s going to stop a way down for the night. Wooded flat with a creek on it.”

  The woman gulped air and nodded. She handed the smallest child, a girl, to Victoria, and pointed to herself. “I am named Lame Deer,” she said. “That is the People’s name, as I am born. Simon MacLees gives me other name. This is Singing Rain, called Molly by him, and Sound Comes Back After Shouting, my boy, he calls Billy.”

  Skye beheld a solemn child clinging tightly to his mother’s hand, half afraid, half truculent.

  “I am Mister Skye; this is my wife Victoria, Many Quill Woman, of the Absaroka.

  “Aiee, those are names I know,” the Cheyenne said, suddenly wary.

  She lifted her generous velveteen skirts and clambered aboard the gaunt horse. The boy clambered behind her, sitting on the rump behind the high cantle of the squaw saddle.

  “We go to the fireboat?” the woman asked.

  Skye nodded. They followed a dusky and difficult riverbank trail, circling marshy flats full of sedges, until Skye found a way up to the tableland above where the going would be easier and straighter. They pierced from indigo shadow into golden light from a horizontal sun that raked the land and painted every bush and tree.

  “My heart is big with the dream of my man,” the woman said in a voice that sang of music. “He walks across the mountains; he fills the valleys. He comes into our lodge and brings meat and comfort. He has stars in his eyes, and he lights the night like a big moon. He smiles and all my fears fall away like the leaves of autumn. He floats high in the sky like an eagle, walking over clouds, seeing what is to come from afar, and it is so. He says one soft word, and it is stronger than a hundred men shouting. When he sings, the wolves sing too. When he laughs, the coyotes laugh too. He gathers the blossoms, and gives them to me, and my heart grows big. Now I am called to him, and I go.”

  Skye marveled. She had few English words, and yet she used them so sweetly, and with such lyrical power that he believed she was a born poet.

  In the space of a half hour, Skye got her story. She was going to find MacLees, who hadn’t returned after a trip east. She had a few robes and pelts to trade for passage.

  Skye suspected that if MacLees lived, and indeed, if he had reached St. Louis safely, he would not want to see his squaw. Traders and trappers had routinely formed temporary liaisons with Indian women, often serially, even bigamously. These were called mountain marriages, and many was a trapper or trader who simply abandoned his dusky bride and his breed children when the urge came over him to head back to the States. Many a mountaineer had married a white girl and never spoken a word about the half-breed family he left behind in the impenetrable reaches of the West.

  He had heard nothing of MacLees’s death, though the
names of all trappers and traders who were killed, or died of disease, or had vanished, were bruited through every camp in the mountains. He suspected the man lived. He suspected the partnership had gone broke, trying to buck the powerful attractions of Bent’s Fort, which had drawn the Cheyenne southward and had captured most of the trade with that tribe. He suspected that MacLees and … yes, Jonas, that was his partner’s name, had quit the mountains. And now this beautiful and poetic Cheyenne woman, probably in her early twenties, was determined to find him.

  But of all this he said nothing. He gauged Victoria’s sharp glances, and concluded that her thoughts largely paralleled his own. This ragged family looked hungry. Skye found some jerky in his kit and handed a fistful to the woman, who took it gratefully and gave each child a piece. Jerky was an unsatisfying food that left one hungrier than before. It took a while to soften in the mouth, to become edible, and then it vanished down the throat with one small gulp. But it could keep a body alive.

  They rode steadily into a descending twilight. The sun set, momentarily illumining the bowl of heaven with salmon and pink, and then they pierced through the long summer’s twilight, the heavens from north to west a bold blue band. There was light enough to travel; light enough to spot the vessel. Ahead a mile or so he discerned a dip in the hills and a dark patch at its base, next to the river. He could not see the packet, but it would be there.

  He felt cool night breezes eddy over him, the colder air rolling down the long slopes to the river bottoms. He heard terns and sandpipers, and watched crows gossip. He spotted the streak of a black and white magpie, and wondered whether Victoria had seen her spirit helper.

  Victoria had; her gaze followed the bird, and her face radiated serenity. The Cheyenne woman might be an enemy of the People, but sisterhood formed a stronger impulse.