by Peter Bowen
Oliver just nodded, his face flat. He didn’t like what this had turned into either, though he at least had known what to expect.
Tom and me rode up to the top of the ridge behind the camp, and from it we could see the Tetons rising up in the gold sun. White snow gleamed on the blue peaks, and the air was so clear the blue of a jay was visible to a half a mile, sapphire upon the dark green of the pines and spruce.
“Where are we going?” asked Tom.
“Up there,” I said. He grinned at me and we hit a fast lope. I already knew where the game would be, I just wanted to keep my contact with His Lordship down to a minimum. Oh, Bill was going to pay for this particular shit-covered biscuit, for certain.
They are sudden mountains, the Tetons, they rise off a plateau, blue and bleak and cold looking. Nothing but rock and snow, and jagged as a smashed bottle.
We rode right up to their bases, and Tom started up a goat trail. He made it only a few feet when his horse balked. The busted chunks of rock that the trail was made of was footing enough for a mountain goat, but no self-respecting horse would have anything to do with it. Tom just laughed, and got off and backed his skittish pony down. The trail was too narrow for the horse to turn round on.
There was a sort of lake just a bit to the north and west of the biggest peak—a bog, really, filled with old beaver dams. This area had likely been trapped out by 1825, but the dams had held in some places for over fifty years. There was even some fresh beaver sign—repair work on some of the smaller dams, and cut poplar and willow stems, peeled to the white wood.
“Goats and sheep will be up on those,” I said to Tom, pointing to the mountains, “sheep about halfway up, and the goats about three-quarters of the way up. Way to hunt either one of them is to get seven-eighths of the way up and hunt down. It don’t occur to them that anything can climb higher than them, so they never look up, only down.”
Tom nodded. I don’t think he ever forgot a thing I told him. I had been right, he took to this life as though it was his own.
We scouted a few bands of elk—the bulls was just beginning to bud their horns. In another month they would be rubbing the velvet from their antlers and fighting one another for cows.
We had come maybe ten miles north and twenty miles west from where the Duke and Oliver were parked, and I was thinking on killing three or four of the grouse that looked at us with their stupid eyes from perches in the spruce. Then we heard a rifle shot, and then another. The reports come from over the next ridge.
We rode quick up to where we could see the valley below, and it took a moment to spot the fellers who had been shooting. Two men in dirty buckskins was chasing a young Indian girl up the creek. She stopped for a moment at a little sandbar, and grabbed a handful of sand and then lifted her skirt and rubbed the sand in her crotch. Then she ran on.
“What the hell is she doing?” Tom says.
“Those fellers are going to rape her, and she’s spoiling their fun,” I says. “Indian girls learn to do what she’s doing real young. Course those fellers may be so mad about it that they kill her.”
Tom took off without so much as a word, and he was dragging his saddle gun out of the scabbard before he had made fifty yards down the hill. The men chasing the girl was so preoccupied they never even looked up our way.
The first feller got a slug in the small of the back. I saw him fall off his horse and then try to drag himself away, using just his arms. His legs had lost their usefulness.
The second feller heard the shot, and glanced back at where his partner had been. He reined up, unable to see back because of the willows. Tom come busting right through them and shot the man in the head at a distance of about fifty yards, no mean feat from horseback. He was dead before he hit the ground.
The exhausted girl was slumped in the grass a hundred yards upstream. I saw Tom dismount, and watched his hands make sign lingo, and he pointed back downstream. Then he got on his horse and rode back up to me.
“What did you tell her?” I asks.
“Where the feller with the broken hunkers is,” says Tom.
The Indian girl was walking deliberately downstream, and the sun glinted from a knife in her hand.
“I’ve had it with the Duke and such,” says Tom. “If a feller wanted to fight Indians and see some wild country, where would he go?”
“Arizona Territory,” I says. “Go and find Al Sieber. He’s the scout to learn from.”
“Obliged,” says Tom.
I flipped him a fifty-dollar gold piece.
“I figured we was just about even,” he says.
“We’ll be drinkin’ whiskey and telling lies someday,” I says. “Don’t worry about the horse, either, I’ll square that off.”
Tom nodded. He rode off to the south.
Terrible screams started coming from the valley behind me. I headed back to the camp.
27
THE DUKE WAS GETTING fidgety, what with all of the songbirds around to shoot, and him without a shotgun. I had told him about the mountain goats and sheep, and he muttered that he wanted to wait until the wagons come up, as he had a special gun for that sort of work. So to pass the time he went down to the creek and tried to shoot the trout, this with a gun designed for elephants and rhinoceroses and such. The cartridges was the size of a Havana seegar. When the bullet hit the water it sent spray fifty feet in the air. He killed some fish with the concussion, and we had them for dinner. It made a nice change from the bacon and pan bread.
The main party arrived just at dusk—they had sent one of the drovers up to make sure that we were where we said we would be—and the servants and the chef scuttled around and served a splendid eight-course meal in the big double Sibley tent. One of the odds and ends being packed along was a huge “Peerless” woodburning cookstove that took four of the teamsters to lift out of the wagon that carried it.
Jack seemed in decent spirits, so I assumed that the Lady Violet was still slipping into his tent of nights. The Lady Lydia looked right through me, which as you may well guess did not upset me one bit.
Jack had a badly sprained knee, got when he was helping heave one of the freight wagons over some hump or other, so I was detailed to guide the Duke on a hunt for sheep and goats.
The Duke had a special gun, the kind that is called a Mauser needle gun. It shoots a very slender, long slug at high velocity. He had had a telescopic sight fitted to it.
The two of us took off before first light. There was an outside chance that the sheep might be feeding low down, so I told the Duke to be as quiet as possible. It was hard to see. Wisps of mist were wandering this way and that, and the rising sun gave a back-glow to the fog. I had us halt by a big meadow. The wind was right, it was coming toward us, and we waited to see if when the sun burned off the fog, anything would be feeding out there.
When the fog burned off it did it all of a sudden-like. There weren’t any sheep, but there were a couple of moose gobbling up huge mouthfuls of water weeds. Just as I turned to tell the Duke we’d have to sneak up on them, he fired. The moose raised their heads at the noise, and then went back to feeding. We crept closer. I had tethered the horses back in the lodgepole, and we were creeping through grass that was waist high and soaking wet. Going on our hands and knees got us soaked clear through in the first ten feet that we crawled.
It was slow going. I inched my eyes up, and we was only about two hundred yards from the grazing moose—two cows, each with a little calf. The Duke shot all four of them, first the cows, and then the calves, who didn’t have the wit to leave their dead mothers. With his usual fine marksmanship, he managed to break one cow’s front leg, and she lurched and stumbled off into the timber at the far side of the meadow. The Duke fired a few dozen shots at the trees.
I followed along, and I stopped to slit the jugulars of the three dead moose. The Duke had gone after the wounded cow. I waited for a shot, and when I didn’t hear one I started after him, following the oafish prints of his feet.
I had gone maybe a hundred yards into the timber when I saw the Duke. I went up to him. He was lying on his face smack in the middle of a game trail. About an inch of blade and the handle of a Green River knife was sticking up out of his back, high on the left side, where the heart is.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
I whirled around, looking for who done it. He was standing maybe fifty yards behind me, arms folded.
“Luther, old chile,” says Liver-Eating Jack. “I been hearing about this sportsman you been guidin’. What Indians are left don’t think much of his huntin’ ways.”
Jack had a nasty scratch on the side of his face, and was missing part of his right ear.
“When he done shot me, chile,” he went on, “that was too much. Even if he didn’t mean to.”
The scene I was looking at sort of moved away, like my eyes was running back into tunnels in my head. Jack standin’ there lookin’ sorrowful, the Duke where someone should have put him long ago, the bright mountain light. I remember a Canada jay cussing from a tree.
If the Duke had shot Jack it was a one-in-a-million ricochet. Jack was a man the size of a Durham bull, able to hide behind small thises and thats and sometimes nothing at all. I suspected that Jack had sawed some of his face with his firesteel for my benefit; he was always sensitive to the feelings of other folks except when he didn’t like them.
Well, I owed Jack my life a couple of times and hadn’t had the pleasure of returning the favor, and truth to tell I didn’t mind the Duke in his present condition.
“Well,” I says, “we got to hide what’s left of His Lordship and then go straight up in the air.”
Jack walked over to the Duke and picked him up like he was a sack of bubbles and sort of casually tossed His Lordship on one shoulder.
I had this funny prickling feeling right in the small of my back, which only happens when there’s someone back behind me staring and thinking bad thoughts. I turned around slow, because I didn’t know just how bad the thoughts were.
There was eight of the ugliest Blackfeet Indians standing there—they was all ugly to me, on account of how they felt about whites.
Jack coughed out some words and they commenced to wiping out sign.
“Time we headed north,” says Jack. “All them other directions smell bad when the wind comes from them. I like north fine.”
“Sounds good,” I says, swinging up on my horse. “By the way, how do these Feet here feel about that little thing with the leg and all?”
“Wal,” he says, “these boys grew up hearin’ the story, but after a little palaver I convinced them that it were my big brother done it while I was still back in Iowa sloppin’ hogs, and besides they like the story so much that they are happy to know the brother of a man who could do a thing like that. They are curious as young folks are about ways and means of doin’ things. I has taught them a marchin’ song to ride by and a few things here and there. They’s plumb attached to me.”
Off we went, headed north through the old war trails, and one of the most striking experiences I have ever had is bein’ escorted by eight mean, ugly Blackfeet singing “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.” It had to be heard to be believed.
28
I WAS FAIRLY SICK of “Jesus Wants Me ...” before we were more than three days or so down the trail. Jack had stuffed the Duke down one of them black mudholes that goes down about a mile and is only three feet wide at the top. Jack cut a nice long lodgepole about six inches through at the base and poked the Duke down about twenty feet and then he pulled the pole out and washed it off good and carried it another ten miles before we burned it. I have always admired a thorough man.
We run the Duke’s horse up into a draw and shot it. We skinned it out and cut off the hooves, so that there wouldn’t be nothing but maggoty meat and no way to tell whose horse it was. In three days the carcass would be so bloated and stinking, no one could get within a half mile of it. We stuffed the hide and hooves and all of the Duke’s traps—his saddle and such—down another mudhole.
“Whar you thinking of headin’?” says Jack.
“I think I’ll cross the big water,” I says. I still don’t know why I suddenly thought that.
Jack grunted and went to sleep.
We headed north, crossing trails, sometimes seeing little clusters of houses where a few short years ago there had been a whole lot of open space. We kept to the doghair lodgepole, and crossed the Gallatin Valley in the night, for there were lots of farmers there. North of the Judith Basin we headed a bit east, and two days later we swum the horses over the Missouri.
The Blackfeet departed, headed west and then up into Canada, and Jack left the next day. He left like he come, and I never heard him slide off. I wasn’t to see him again for a long time. I headed east to Fort Buford.
I slipped in and out of town quite early in the morning and spread a little money over the factor, who was used to folks tipping him for the favor of not being seen. Honest man, he was. My ten thousand in gold made two nice solid ballasts in my saddlebags and I still had over five thousand dollars in currency that I hadn’t turned back to Oliver. So I dry-camped and slithered out of the good old U.S.A., loaded down and outward bound, as my crazed uncle, the retired sea captain, used to say.
He was the one who explained to me at an early age all I needed to know about the Westward Course of Empire. If the Americans sewed up the continent, they won. If they didn’t, they lost. Inconveniences like the Indians would have to be dealt with.
“History is a depressing avalanche,” he said, gulping Irish whiskey. “Make sure you stay on top. Don’t be a noble idiot.”
When I come to the border I turned and waved to him, though he’d been in his grave for a long time.
I rode about fifty miles up into Canada and headed out across the great Canadian prairie, eventually coming to a little town so small I have even forgotten the name. I sold my horse and saddle there and bought a train ticket to Montreal. The train chugged and puffed across the grassland, and then it come to be forests of birch and cedar, and after six days I found myself walking down the streets of Montreal, my ear picking up the French spoke like French, not like the pidgin Frog I heard in the mountains from the Crees.
I asked around, discreet-like, and bought a British passport in the name of James Adendorff, off a one-eyed sailor I supposed was a great friend of the late J. A.
“Hullo,” I says to myself in the mirror in my cheap hotel room. “Good old Jim Adendorff.”
From Montreal I took the train down to Quebec City. It was French, too, and a busy, bustling port. Oneida was down south a ways, and one good thing that came of the Duke’s demise was that I didn’t have to go see my damn family. Lawyers. Kayrist.
I spent a couple of days prowling the docks, looking for the right sort of ship, that being one that had a captain who wasn’t much of a mind to ask questions.
The second day, late in the afternoon, I saw a whole bunch of mules and oxen being drove down toward the docks. The drovers were a mixed lot of bullwhackers and British soldiers in red coats. The oxen and the mules didn’t want to go much, and the herd, which was bellering loudly, was finally got up to a makeshift corral and then one by one cut out and slung from a cargo boom and lifted up into a dirty, rusty steam transport, called the Forbes Castle. There was a red-faced Army Captain standing by the sling chute bawling something at a tall, coffin-faced feller in a black frock coat.
“Damme, man,” said the Army Captain, “we must make haste. Chelmsford needs these beasts and he needs them soon.”
“Hull have ’em when the Looooorrdd sees fit, Captain Reilly,” says the coffin-faced gent. “I canna have tha’ saylers carry them abooooorrrrdddd one under each arm.”
“South Africa is a long damn way from here,” yelled Reilly.
The coffin-faced gent waved at him patronizingly.
“By Jove,” says Reilly, “when in the name of Hades will we sail!”
“Faster if ye quit upsettin’ the beasts wi
th yer blaspheemin’,” says the Scot. “I am Master of this vessel and we’ll sail as soon as God wills.”
Reilly stalked off, to amuse himself by cursing the troopers, who were wearing thick wool tunics buttoned to the throat and white gloves. It was about a hundred degrees, and as I watched Reilly giving hell to a pale-faced, scrawny youth, the boy pitched forward on his face, making a squelchy thump in the manure in front of him.
“Have you a cabin?” I says to the Scot.
He pulled his long chin and looked at me with the palest blue eyes I have ever seen. He looked at my boots, and at my stained buckskin jacket, and then at my eyes.
“A-yuh.” he says. “Are ye to South Africa for the gold or the diamonds?”
“Diamonds,” I says.
He snorted and looked up at the decks of his ship.
“Be a hundred Yankee dollars one way,” he says. “If ye’ve the money ye can go up yon plank and seek out the purser, Mr. Tavistock, and he’ll see ye right. Or I could always use another hand, if ye no mind muckin’ after the beasts.”
“I’ll pay,” says I, sure in my mind that working for this gent would make slavery seem a decent career.
Tavistock was a small fussy man who constantly dug at things in his ears, which things I did not inquire about. He must have cut his own hair with nail scissors, for it stood out in tufts here and there and reminded me of grazed-on winter grass. I paid him in Yankee gold, one hundred dollars, which he didn’t bat an eye at. The coins—big double eagles—disappeared, and he didn’t offer me a receipt.
He showed me to my cabin, a cramped, smelly cubicle with a short bed built into the wall and a large basin and a water jug in a stout rack. Tavistock disappeared after saying to me that sailing time was “late the day after tomorrow or the one after that, if everything goes well, which it won’t.” The mules and oxen were bellering both on the docks and below decks.
I went ashore and passed the Captain, who stared at me for a moment and nodded. He stuck out a bony paw, which I shook.