by Peter Bowen
“Did that murdering bastard talk much?” said the lieutenant.
“No,” I said.
“How was his mount?”
“Oh, looked like it just came from Kentucky and ate corn all the way. You’ll never even get near enough to see his dust,” I said—it was true.
“Shit,” said the lieutenant.
“Do you know where I might find Jim Bridger?” I asked.
“Thirty miles ahead at Fort Laramie,” he said. “Mount up!”
The soldiers got on and away they went, the fools. From what I’d seen of Mr. Black they was smartest not to catch him.
“Who’d Black kill?” I asked.
“Two gamblers and a sergeant,” said the lieutenant. He led them off east, with no hope of catching Black.
I decided to go down to water and camp and go on into Laramie in the morning. I found a spring looked reasonable and unpacked and hobbled my horses and put my bedroll out to air some.
I was tired of jerky and pemmican so I thought I’d go shoot a rabbit.
As I walked softly through the sagebrush I saw a flash of white off to my right and whirled and fired at the same moment the skunk did. I got both barrels at a range of about ten feet and a good batch in my eyes. It burned like hell, I was coughing like a one-lung donkey engine, I was blind and staggering, and I felt my way around looking for water to wash my eyes with. That meant that I fell over bushes and rocks and I pretty well beat up everything the skunk didn’t get.
Damn, what a fine night that was. I fell in the cactus and I found out later I had teetered on the edge of a thirty-foot drop and finally I got one eye to where I could see with it a little. Of course it was dark and I couldn’t see well enough with it to find my possibles, and that’s where the matches was. So I shivered and cussed all the damn night—the skunk oil sure burns your eyes—and finally I got to my kit and water.
It didn’t help worth a damn. I smeared some fat from a bag of pemmican on my eyes and face and that helped some. I thought I’d catch the horses and go on into Laramie.
The horses didn’t want anything to do with me. They ran and whinnied and crow-hopped and tried to kick me and rolled their eyes and finally the pinto got hung up in a sagebrush and I got a halter on him—him screaming the whole time—and little by little I got everything together and the other horse packed and made tracks down the trail to Laramie. I come on to the fort in the late afternoon. It had a scattering of tents and teepees around it and wagons parked a ways from the log walls.
The sentries at the gate let me in, nodding politely, until I got past when they commenced guffawing and coughing. It was not a dignified way to meet these folks.
God, was I ripe. I hadn’t had a bath for months and the skunk on top of that. A dog come out to me leading my horses and he was wagging his tail till he got a noseful and he run off howling.
I was desperate for a bath and clothes—new clothes—and I saw this tall gray-haired feller in a checked red and black shirt and doeskin pants tucked into leggin’s and moccasins walking along the promenade deck of the officers’ quarters. I turned my feet over to him and hallooed.
“I need a bath,” I said. He nodded, not even sniffing and coughing.
“Bathhouse is down that way,” he says, pointing toward a raw board building.
“They sell clothes here?” I asked.
“Outside,” he says. “Peddlers.” He’d come down off the porch, keeping well upwind of me. I noticed a huge goiter under his chin. The goiter was the size of a small melon. It hit me sudden who this was.
“You Jim Bridger?” I asked.
He nodded, and I told him I had a letter from Spotted Tail for him, and he got a real interested look on his face. I fumbled around in my saddlebags and found it, stained with horse sweat and the dye in the saddle leather. It was a longish, soft tube, something written on scraped white doeskin.
“Mr. Bridger,” I says, “I have money. I’d pay a lot for some clothes to make me presentable. If I don’t get a bath pretty quick I’m going to lose my hide. Could I give you some money? And could you go buy them while I try to soak off the skunk?”
Bridger looked at me—he had shrewd blue eyes and a smile almost beginning on his lips all the time.
“Go wash off the stink,” he says, “and no, you can’t pay me. But I’ll get you some clothes and canned tomaters. Onliest thing takes the stink out.” He took hold of my horse’s reins and he pointed to the bathhouse, sort of wrinkling his nose and coughing a little for appearance’s sake. Well, I was young and whiny and he was trying not to hurt my feelings, I thought.
There was nobody in the bathhouse but me, and there was big copper boilers full of hot water and a slab of yellow soap near a cedar washtub six feet across. I moved a hose from a boiler to it and filled it and got in and commenced lathering the hell out of me. That damn soap was so strong I could feel about the first six layers of skin come off and it burned worse in my eyes than the skunk oil had.
A woman shrieked and I looked blindly toward the noise. I couldn’t see a damn thing. The water in the washtub was so soapy I couldn’t use it to clear my eyes, so I just stood up and felt my way over to the boiler and I got in that and tried to wash out my eyes. When I stood and walked there was a lot more shrieks and the sound of feet moving away, and swishing skirts. I sloshed around for a long while and got the soap out of my eyes. The boiler was deep and I couldn’t see over the rim—I’d been dog-paddling and treading water—and I grabbed the lip and lifted and looked out and what I saw was this huge sergeant damn near flaming from his nostrils come stomping in the door.
“Wottinell’s goin’ on herabouts!?” he roars. I let go of the rim and sank beneath the waves.
A couple post guards come hotstepping along, and the upshot of all this is that goddamned Bridger had sent me to the washhouse instead of the bathhouse and a lot of enlisted men’s wives who worked as laundresses to fluff up the sixteen dollars a month their husbands was getting had come back from supper to find this naked feller sloshing around in their washwater, when he warn’t waggling his privates in their direction. The guards goosed me out of the boiler with their bayonets and flung a blanket around me and tossed me in the filthy, dank guardhouse. I was sitting there thinking on how much of a problem I was going to be to Bridger commencing when I got out of this.
Finally that pumpkin-throated son of a bitch had got his guffaws for the moment and he got me sprung. I still reeked of skunk, so he hauled me behind the barracks where there was a tub of canned tomatoes and fresh clothes. The tomatoes took the scent right off and I toweled off and got into some good, heavy, cheap clothes and boots. There was a brand new hat and a wide leather belt in the britches with my gun and knife already on it. Bridger was always like that, he’d drive you about half-crazy but never clear into the ground.
He fetched me as I poured the last of the tomatoes down the jakes. I squeaked along beside him, my new boots complaining at the work and my shirt and pants stiff with sizing.
He took me to the stables and showed me where my horses were—they was fat with water and had had their hooves trimmed and oiled.
“I’d nary spend a night under a roof,” said Bridger, “if it ain’t winter. Got a little camp nearby, if’n you’ll join me.”
I slipped off the nosebags and put my gear aboard the horses with Jim’s help and then I follered after him. His big bay horse was waiting for us at the gates. Bridger swung up on him—I saw he used an Injun rein, a loop knotted on his horse’s lower jaw. (I was to find out later that the horse came when Bridger whistled, if told to stand would stay there and couldn’t be spooked off, and that he’d let a stranger mount and wait until he could buck him off and stomp him, too. Jim trained all his saddle horses to do them things and if they wouldn’t he’d sell ’em. I was to adopt the same ruthlessness.)
Bridger had dossed down near a little spring and built a little firepit. He always used the least that would do, and when he selected a place to bed down you coul
d be sure just at evening a breeze would start up and blow the bugs off. He’d been out here now for more than forty years, and he knew so much he didn’t have to think about it anymore.
I slung my bedroll off to the side and unpacked the rest of my gear. I hobbled my ponies in a place with good grass and water, and went back to break up wood I gathered on the way. There was a cast-iron pot of stew bubbling on the fire and bread fresh-baked he’d got at the fort. I hadn’t had bread in a year, it seemed. There was a big blue tin coffeepot full of coffee, like I hadn’t had in months.
I et and went to sleep on top of my blankets. Some after midnight the cold woke me up and I burrowed under. I’d never seen stars this close.
5
BEING JIM BRIDGER’S APPRENTICE was a lot easier than you’d expect. He didn’t really, so he said, get no pleasure out of tormenting me, and I wasn’t very cocky what with Spotted Tail, the skunk, Oneida, the army, and all the rest of it. I’d been living mighty hard and fast but I was only fourteen and about ten times a week I felt like going home. Let them hang me.
I minded my manners around Bridger—it was hard, he could rasp on you so, and I watched everything that he did hard. He was a grand storyteller—best ever till I heard Charley Russell, the painter—and if he hadn’t come out with Ashley and stayed I’d easy bet he’d have turned a good hand to anything he done. He never wasted a motion or missed a shot all the time I was with him. He was a good blacksmith—been apprenticed in his youth—and for years he had repaired emigrant wagons at his little fort, till Brigham Young pestered him shooting his stock and firing his crops to where Jim just packed up and left. (Young kept sending them damn missionaries out to bother him, and Jim would make fun of him and of them, subtlelike, and the one thing no religious quack can stand is to be made fun of. It sends them purely crazy.) Now he was contracted to the army to find a good site for a fort to protect a portion of the Bozeman Trail. So three days after our introduction we went north from Laramie, supposed to find a right place for a stockade.
Now Bridger could draw them a map of all the Rockies and “X” the spots that would be good sites for stockades. His sketches was the most accurate maps of that country until the ordnance survey the army made in 1910, but that ain’t the way the army worked. They couldn’t pay him for what he knew, they’d pay him for going to look for what he damn well knew was already there.
I was gratified in my apprentice position and hoped I would be able to work my way up to scout. It seemed like regular work, and Bridger was being paid for a day what a lieutenant made in a month, and the absence of your employer while you were doing your work was a grand recommendation.
Jim was a quiet feller, set easy in the saddle. His eyes never stopped flicking here and there, here and there. He avoided places that might conceal someone. He noticed everything, both the things that shouldn’t be there, or the things that should but weren’t. So I watched him, not the country, since I figured that I couldn’t see it anyway, and besides I could tell it got on his nerves. I warn’t brimmed with the forgiveness for what he done to me at Laramie.
One day we crested a long rise and Jim got down and looked for sign, sort of grunting to himself. Then he stared off into the blue distance, counting the mountains.
“Wul,” he says, “there ain’t much point in this.”
“Beg pardon?” I says.
“Wul, I’ll tell ’em fifty good places to put a fort they’ll find another ain’t got nothing to recommend it ’cept I didn’t. Red Cloud and Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses and them will be raisin’ hell no matter where I put the damn fort, and the army will try to fight ’em like they’s Confederates and so the army will lose. I get weary of this time to time.”
I looked off to our left and damn near jumped ten feet straight up. There was three Injuns in red trade blankets strung out on a ridge a couple of miles away, sort of headed toward us. I choked and spluttered and pointed.
“Oh, them’s been with us the last ten miles,” says Bridger, unconcerned. “Oglalas by the looks of ’em. Think maybe Yellow Hawk’s the first one, Old Smoke in the middle thar, and Bull Waller on the far point.”
“What are they doin’?” I said, checking my guns.
“Wul, they’s waiting for a chance to lift our hair.”
“Are there others?” I said. My face got hot. I was some flustered, like a young turkey the day before Thanksgiving.
“Wul, there’s the six we been follerin’, sort of. They’s riding ahead, good way to trail a man, stay ahead of him.”
Bridger swung up and on we went, me so scared my teeth were clacking. I fell behind, my mind whirling. Then I goosed my horse a little and come up alongside of him.
“What was in that damn letter,” I says, sort of screechy.
“Wul,” says Bridger, “my wife was mortal fond of Spotted Tail and she used to make this here beaver tail stew that Spotted Tail was mortal fond of and he has writ all polite like to ask for the recipe.”
“Shit,” I snarled, dropping back behind. (Actually, I had opened the letter and unrolled it, it was covered with stick men and horses and sun symbols. Recipe. Shit.)
“Aren’t you going to do something?” I yelled. “Let’s get forted up, fer Godsakes, ’fore they all get here.” Bridger reined up and waited till I got up to him.
“Wul,” he says, “we got three to the right and six up front and three to the left ...”
“We got repeating rifles,” I says. “They won’t make it to us.”
“And about two hundred and forty-two right behind,” Bridger went on. “So I guess forting up wouldn’t do us all that much good. I’d admire to do it and I think the suggestion is excellent. Lessen you got a hot-air balloon in yer kit there I think we oughter wait and see what they want. So. ’Sides, scramblin’ into a hole ain’t dignified and they would think the less of us.”
I screamed and bellered and cussed for what seemed an hour while Bridger kept looking over the land, as unconcerned as if we was in Boston and in church.
We went on and down through a little gap in the stone wall of the breaks, and when I first come round the corner behind Jim I saw a sight burns in my mind to this day. Oh, I was to see lots worse after this, but it was the first.
There was three white men—you could tell only by the boots and the litter around them—and they was hanging by their feet from rawhide ropes strung up to the top of the cliff. Their heads weren’t but a foot or so off the ground.
The Injuns had slit them around the beltline, pulled the skin down like taking off a shirt, and tied the skin off over their heads. They cut holes for their mouths so they could get air. The blood was all clotted but red rivulets still ran down one of them. He was making a very faint eeeeeeeeeeeing sound, as high-pitched as a glasscutter’s tool on a pane.
Bridger slid off his horse, pulled out his pistol, and shot each man once in the head. He turned away, still chawing his tobacco, while I puked up my guts after falling off the horse. I finally got up to one knee and was trembling on it, running with cold sweat. I had a grip on the stony ground so hard that when I looked later my fingernails was broken.
“Wul,” says Bridger, “seems to be them three sneaked round the fort tuther day, headed for the gold fields. Wish ’em had stopped in, I’d have mentioned how it would likely end. Last shortcut they’ll take, I believe.”
For a cold moment I wondered how I had pulled the luck to stay alive. This was hard country and these was hard men. I started crying. I’d run from home, joined the army, been captured by the Indians, and now I was in the Rockies like I always had wanted to be (or the South Seas) with a man I had been reading about since I could read at all. And I wanted my mother. And nothing else. I sobbed some.
Bridger paid no more attention to me than he had to the three poor bastards he’d just shot. “Wul,” he says, “there’s a good place to camp up a few miles. I’m getting on hungry.”
I staggered up and hauled myself up to my saddle. My two horses were getting snuffy
at the smell of blood and my fear.
“Hungry?” I wailed. “Ain’t we going to bury them?”
“Wul,” says Bridger, “I always thought I’d rather be et by birds and coyotes, myself. This here ground’s stone. Take blasting powder to dig a grave and I’m fresh out.” Bridger slid down and walked over to the hanging corpses and quickly slashed the rawhide holding them up. They flopped down like so many sacks of guts. Bridger casually flipped an arm off his boot with his toe and then he remounted, riding in that slaunchwise way the old-timers favored.
Bridger rode past me and I followed, trying not to fall out of the saddle as I blubbered and blew snot and tried to wipe my face and I shook like a scared pup.
Bridger ignored me. He went on and I followed, and always his head kept moving as he flicked them pale blue eyes everywhere. By the time we had come to the campsite I had pulled myself up some. I felt thin and glassy, but I tended the stock and then I fetched some firewood and started making a fire in the three-stone pit.
“It can get purt near rough out here, time to time,” he said. “But she’s a purty place, that she is. Air so pure that meat don’t spoil. Water so clear ya cain’t tell how far it is to the bottom and the stars hang down so low at night you can lean up in your bedroll and light a seegar by ’em.”
He was tryin’ to cheer me up without much effect. For one thing, calling this vast place, this damn endless ocean of mountains and water and grass and blood and death “her” didn’t fit. At least then it didn’t. Course, over time, I learned that blood makes the grass grow green and fast and that this land was like a woman’s heart, big, mysterious, fold warm around you and make you suck in your breath with the beauty of it, and then turn cold as a black north wind in winter and leave you fighting for your life without much hope but a lot of habit.
I chewed some jerky and dried fruit in a peckish way and had some coffee. I was beginning to relax some and sweat a little less when three Injuns appeared like the damn air froze into them and one of them threw a knife underhand across the campfire. It buried itself in the log beside me with a nice, solid chonking sound.