by Peter Bowen
25
THINGS DON’T TAKE LONG to become routine. I spent the days guiding either the ladies or the chinless three, and the nights in my tent with Lydia, who arrived in the dark and left each morning before first light. I was beginning to feel a mite tired, but Lydia seemed to thrive on no sleep. Violet had taken up with Jack again, and Bill and me wondered when she’d drop him. I’d told Marion my worries, and the poisonous little dwarf was never very far from Jack. Marion blended well, he was about the same color as the prairie dust, except for the red blood in his kerchief.
One day I felt I couldn’t take no more, so I went to Bill and proposed that I take young Tom Horn and go for a quick look-see in the Tetons.
“Could you maybe tether a few elk and buffalo and grizzlies for His Lordship?” Bill asked. For the sorry truth had emerged. The Duke couldn’t have hit the ground with his hat if you gave him three tries. And everything that moved was a target—Bill had had to pay off several irate nesters who’d had their mules and milk cows and hogs and such blasted into eternity by his Lordship’s custom cannons. The Duke had even winged a camp-boy that was walking a bit too ape-like. Took him ten shots.
“I’m worn down to a nub,” I says.
“Maybe the blacksmith could help,” says Bill, “and I hear if you chew soaproot it’s almost as good as oysters.”
Tom and me left in a cloud of hurried dust. Free of his job as a wrangler, he had the whole wide world before him, and he commenced to explore, at top speed, country which was much the same for a hundred miles in any direction that you cared to point.
We did nearly thirty miles before we stopped to rest our horses and eat a little of the hardtack and jerky we carried.
“Next day we’ll be through South Pass,” I says, “and then we can turn north and head for mountain country.”
Tom looked hard over west. “I don’t see no mountains,” he said.
“South Pass ain’t a mountain pass,” I said. “I am never quite sure just at what point I’m over it. It don’t look any different than what we’re riding through now.”
Tom shook his head, in wonder or disbelief.
“I’m going to rest up a while,” I said.
Tom took that as an excuse to do some exploring. He took off with a whoop and a yell, and before long he was just a little speck on the endless brown plain.
He’d get his lesson later. Right now I was thinking ahead, to our evening meal, and so I hobbled my pony and left him to graze by a little spring, and took my 35-40 and climbed up a low hill that still had me gasping for breath by the time I had got to the top. I have never been able to really grab hold of the scale of things out here. I knew it was sixty miles to the horizon because I had been over it so many times, but I couldn’t see it.
Antelope are the fastest animals on the plains. And the most curious. To hunt them, all you have to do is tie a white rag on a pole. The fluttering white attracts them, and all that you have to do is sit and wait and not make any sudden movements. I put up a pole with a white rag tied to it.
In about an hour a young antelope buck come in sight. I pulled the hammer back on my 35-40 and broke his neck with the first shot. Dressed out the liver and the back ribs—we had plenty of jerky and dried fruit on the two pack horses—and left the rest for the scavengers, who were likely having a thin time of it. There was a few buzzards way up, and I did spot one coyote—rare you’ll see one; they are so shy of man.
“S’pose that they could run cows on this,” I said to my horse, “but it just ain’t going to be the same.”
I could see young Tom headed my way, so I knocked down the pole and took off my kerchief—I’d wrapped the antelope in oilskin and tied it behind my cantle.
“Hallelujah,” he says, reining up, his pony all lathered. “I never liked a place better than this.”
I just stared at him, my eyes narrow. Finally it broke through his wooden skull that I was displeased with him.
“What’s wrong?” he finally asked—and I’ll give it to him that he looked me right in the eye.
“Listen, you farina-faced little glob of puke,” I says, biting off the words like I was chewing jerky, “your horse is near windblowed and you pulled a tendon in his front leg. He’s lathered and blowing and up here in the wind. Now I strongly suggest that you get down off him, and rub him down with some of that bunchgrass over there—the reddish stuff—and then you walk him to camp.”
Tom got down and off-saddled, and began to walk the horse in a circle, and Tom’s head was hanging.
I grabbed the pack string and rode off.
He hollered, “Where’s camp?”
“You wanted to be a scout,” I hollered back, “so do some tracking.” I rode off, and managed to make it out of sight before roaring with laughter, but nonetheless I rode nearly twenty miles, because that was one lesson that had to sink in. You’re only as good as your horse out here—he’s dead or crippled, then so are you.
I made camp by a sweet spring that bubbled out of a gravelly hill. I doubted that there was any Indians in the hills at all, but still I cut dry willow and peeled off the bark, so that there would be no smoke. Saw to my guns, and made rope hobbles for the horses. They could graze in the meadow above the spring—plenty of grass, and the gravelly hill behind was too poor of footing to allow them to climb with two foot-hobbles on.
This particular spot was new to me, so I wandered around on foot, looking at the prairie flowers and the grass, almost to full growth. Soon it would be blistering hot, the grass would seed and go dormant until the next year—the only green would be in the little creek bottoms and along the river.
I found another spring, and sitting in it was a bone so big I wondered if I’d been napping and missed herds of elephants among the buffalo—and decided that I didn’t drink that much. The spring was cutting back into a clay-and-sand hill. There were several more bones poking out, and something looked suspiciously like the end of a tusk—gone all cracked and brown, but a tusk. I got a stick and scraped away what I could, and several teeth as large as a brick fell out. I scratched my head, and wondered about it. The bones were too big to pack, so I just took three of the teeth.
It was late afternoon by now, and I was hungry. I was going to save the antelope to share with Tom, whenever he limped in, so I had a can of sardines and tomatoes and made my customary rounds, memorizing bushes and boulders. If I was to see a new bush at night I would commence fire right then, as a few hours was too short a time in this harsh climate for a bush to grow that much. I had killed quite a few Indians who were creeping my way, bushlike, thinking how nice my hair would look on the war pole back to home. Learned that from Fergus McDonald, who was about eighty when I knew him—I was a kid in Oneida. Old Fergus had the most perforated hide I have ever seen—one eye, bullet wounds, one ear gone and the other sort of tattered, all manner of limps and staggers, three fingers missing off his left hand. (“I’s leein’ face doon,” he said, “while this Arapahoey is sawin’ off me fingers to get me rings. Rings is a bad idea out there. I was disinclined to protest at the moment.”)
It got dark, and the bugs commenced. I lathered my face with trade whiskey—makes the skeeters sing with rage and never come nearer than six inches—and began a fire to cook the back ribs. The meat began to sizzle and the first stars was coming out. Well, things looked the same up above.
About midnight I heard the jingle of harness—no offense, but I was into cover and circling, and it was Tom, walking in his socks with his boots under his arm.
“Luther?” he called, real hoarse. He pitched face down on the grass.
I walked over and took his pony off to feed and water, and dropped his saddle over a log. Then I drug his stupid young ass over to the creek and gently laid him face down in it, which brought him to right now. He sputtered and choked and reared up to his hands and knees.
Then he shoved his face back in the creek and commenced to suck in water like a shaft pump.
I shook my head and went o
ff to eat liver and back ribs and drink black coffee. I had finished my meal when Tom began to lose the ten gallons or so of water, dragonfly nymphs, bottom mud, horseshit, small minnows, frogs and salamanders he had swallowed. It went on for some time.
Finally a very pale young feller stumbled into the firelight and sat down heavily on the ground. He breathed hard for a moment.
“Kelly,” he said thickly, “you are the most copper-bottomed bastard I have ever known.”
“Some folks has mentioned that,” I says. “Have a nice walk?”
“OOOoooooohhh,” he says, and puts his head in his hands.
“Along with the horse,” I says, “I might mention that when you are as thirsty as that, it’s best to take four palmfuls of water, and wait a few minutes, and then take another four palmfuls. If you are really dry—and you don’t got the notion what real dry is yet—you keep taking four palmfuls till you can piss. Then you drink all you want. Horse gets six gulps. A Blackfeet would have just padded up and put his foot on your skinny neck and stood there, feelin’ virtuous for saving ammunition and a lot of washing time on your hair for his squaw.”
Moan.
“How’re your feet?” I says.
He peels off his socks and displays a fine and numerous set of purple blisters.
“Kids these days,” I snorts, taking the folding canvas bucket off to the creek for some water. I come back and he was lying on his back, eyes half open.
“Put your hoofs in this,” I says, and he looked blearily at the bucket, and put first one and then the other in. He winced from the pain, and then the cold took that.
“Aaaah,” he says, just as I poured the quart of trade whiskey in.
The next aaaah was of a different nature.
“You get infected, I’ll leave you out here for the skunks and the birds. Grit your teeth and keep them in there, goddamn you.”
He did it. Me, I went to sleep.
Next morning I was cooking the leftovers and coffee when he come to, looking a little pale. He tucked into the back ribs, and he left teeth marks on the enamel plate I served it on. He topped off his monstrous gut with four cans of tomatoes, two of peaches, and one of canned Boston Brown Bread, which was about the color and shape of a can of axle grease, and about the same texture, too.
“Lecture’s over,” I says.
He nods.
“I’ll get the ponies, and pack up. You can ride, even though on a horse you look like a turd hit with a club. We got work to do.”
I got us packed up and we started along.
“Mr. Kelly,” he says, about a mile along.
“Yes.”
“Did General Sherman get rid of the Plains tribes by lettin’ you adopt them?”
I had to laugh.
26
THE NEXT DAY ME and young Tom Horn did nearly forty miles, running off most of the grain-fed flesh that was on our horses. We could see the spires of the Tetons in the high haze to the north. Tom gaped open-mouthed at the pale silhouettes. I know of higher mountains, but they are tucked into windrows of lesser peaks. The Tetons are about the prettiest mountains I’ve ever seen.
Game was abundant—we were a long damn way from any mining camps or budding towns. I saw sign of another party that had been through maybe two weeks before. Other than that it seemed that we would have the place all to ourselves.
Tom had settled some—he would never again abuse his horse, I was sure of that—and he picked up on what I was doing as quick as any I have ever seen.
We had been five days on the scout when I decided to turn back. Tom looked wistful—he’d have kept on going north till he was out on the ice if it was up to him.
“We’re being paid to find game for the Duke to shoot,” I says, “and I don’t like it either.”
We rode hard for two days, and about midmorning on the third day I saw the dust from some wagons—regular wagon trains was a thing of the past if you were going directly west on the U.P. route, but most of the lands that were available for homesteading had to be approached the same as before the railroad.
It turned out to be Bill, Jack, and the rest, everybody but the ladies, coated with a film of dust—the trail was worn so deep that once the wagons was set in the ruts it was impossible to get the wheels out until you come to a wallow or some rocky ground. There was all manner of moldering furniture beside the trail, some of it thirty or more years old, and quite a few graves, covered with stones, the graveboards long since ground to dust by the endless wind.
This was the only dry camp—it was nearly another full day to the nearest good water—that there was on the whole damn journey. To hear the chinless ones scream you’d think we was in the middle of the Jornada del Muerto with our feet cut off and the sun rising. The Duke and the ladies didn’t let out a peep.
We had a cold supper, and then Bill and me walked out on the prairie, to confab a little about what was ahead.
“Violet’s still bangin’ Jack,” Bill says, “and Lydia has been sneaking out to the teamsters. Happiest crew I’ve ever ramrodded. The Duke has managed to hit several things, including two of our horses. You wouldn’t know anybody who has an out-of-work Gila Monster, would you?”
“It’s going to be a couple of months before the elk have any decent horns,” I says, “and the bears is all mangy.”
It was nigh onto dark. I was looking forward to a good night’s sleep, and by God if I didn’t get it. I was awakened only once by a chorus of enthusiastic cheers from the teamsters’ tents.
In order for the Duke to best have his sport, he decided, after some consultation with Oliver, to ride ahead carrying only a bedroll and a few thousand rounds of ammunition. The train would catch up in two or three days. The Duke was very bored with the available game here—prairie dogs, eagles and hawks, the occasional horned toad. He felt that something larger would be in order.
The next morning he announced his decision, spoiling my breakfast. He wished to have young Tom, myself, and Oliver for guidance and company. Bill nodded.
We set out, with Tom dragging two pack mules along back in the dust-eater’s seat, at the rear of our party. The Duke kept forging out in front. I was damn sorry I hadn’t come on any grizzly sign that I could steer him to. The damn bears was all the way up in the high country, digging up marmots and white pine roots.
With the horses fresh and all, we made the low hills to the south of the Tetons by nightfall, and made a pleasant camp close by a little stream that would one day meet the Colorado, and so flow to the Gulf of California. It was a chilly night, and in the morning there was a bit of ice in the water pails. The Duke had never slept under the stars before. He kept sitting bolt upright at every mouse scratch and bat fart.
“Egad,” he would say, “what the devil is that?”
“A bat farted, sir,” I would say.
“Quite so, quite so.”
We ate pan bread and bacon for breakfast. I told Tom to pack the mules another forty miles north to a spot we had camped at during our quick survey of the area. It was due west of the Tetons, in the foothills. A large grassy meadow with plenty of feed for the stock, ample good water, including a trickle spring near to camp that the stock couldn’t muddy up, and firewood just for the picking.
The Duke and me would take two days and describe a loop to the east, and I told him that with any luck we would find a trophy grizzly.
“Capital,” he said.
“I hope so,” I muttered. “Then we can hang the bear.”
The Duke was a fair horseman, considering his bulk and that silly pancake he was riding on. We had a good trail for the first twenty-five miles or so, and after that we had a choice of skirting the high country by following some old mountain buffalo trails—the mountain buffalo was taller and rangier than his plains cousins. There never was many of them to begin with and as far as I know they all went for meat early on, in the ’60s. Or we could zig-zag up the switchback trails and try to find Old Ephraim, what the mountain men called the grizzly.
The Duke had just the one rifle, a double-barreled big game gun, and I had just my little 35-40. Without his shotgun he was considerably less of a menace to the hawks and owls and chipmunks and such. We saw some mule deer far off, and when we did, the Duke would scramble down from his horse and wrench his rifle out of its boot and then look bewildered. The deer by this time were two miles away.
That evening we come to a trail that went up, over the top of the short hills, and it was the way up to Jackson’s Hole proper. I told the Duke that if he liked we could go on up and maybe get a bear. The Duke thought about it for a long time, and then he decided to wait until Bill and Jack and the rest of the party were nigh on. Since he was the worst shot any of us had ever seen, perhaps in some dim corner of his mind he knew that Bill and Jack were firing at the same instant he touched off powder, and that further I was probably not going to do the same. Jack and Bill wouldn’t have bought my letting a grizzly eat him anyway.
I knew the country well, so we traveled most of the night, north and some west, and come to the camp that Oliver and Tom were at a couple of hours before dawn. Oliver had packed several bottles of whiskey, and the Duke finished two of them and fell into a sleep so deep he wouldn’t have awakened if a pair of porcupines was fucking on his chest.
Oliver had adapted well to the rugged life. He had been sleeping with just one blanket since we left Cheyenne, and he was now used to the cold and slept comfortable without all of the truck we was packing for the others.
The three of us drunk coffee and chatted until dawn, and then Oliver turned in for a little sleep.
“I ain’t liking this much,” says Tom.
“None of us like it.”
“Sure is pretty country.”
I drifted off myself. The hot sun woke me in the late forenoon. Oliver was up and stirring the fire. The Duke was still out cold and would be for some time.
“I’m going to take Tom and search out some game,” I said to Oliver. “Jack and Bill and the rest of the party should be here late afternoon tomorrow. We’ll be back by then.”