by Peter Bowen
The seaworthy barrels of hardtack and salt pork and bacon disappeared downriver, and would get to where we wanted to go much sooner than we would.
I saw Bok’s head go under and then come up again—he had seen Doane go down and the boy swam to shore with the commander near unconscious and all cramped up from the cold of the water, which tasted of snow when you drank it.
There must have been a hell of a spring under that pool, because at the far tail end of it there was a cut through solid rock and the river was roaring like a huge engine through it.
I saw four men struggling wildly and screaming for help get sucked into that horror, and several more barely escape it, catching a backwash and drifting over to where Doane and I were. Bok was out in the pool, diving for the instruments.
“Shit,” says Gus. He was thinking of the next-of-kin letters he was about to write.
Gus remarked explosively on the last of the ration barrels as it shot into the grinder, and then allowed as how if God would like to step down here for a minute Gus Doane would punch the celestial spots offen him and anyone else he cared to bring. I grinned at him and remarked on the comforts of blasphemy.
Us sorry, wet survivors gathered and built a fire and dried off our clothes and we spent a hungry night slapping the mosquitoes that whined in clouds around us. I had gone out to see if I could bag a deer or moose, but the noise of our disaster had made all the game take a powder. I went out again in the early light, and shot a deer, an old buck who was tough as the soles of my boots, but it was food.
Bok had retrieved two boats when I got back—he was diving down to them with a line and the soldiers then pulled them in. Most of the gear had been tied down so we really lost very little other than four lives. All of this could have been avoided if there was just someone walking the banks ahead, a duty that I volunteered for as I was unlikely to drown walking on land.
The third day I rashly called Gus “Admiral” and he chased me about three miles waving his saber and hollering how I was going to feed the maggots. He’d forgot his bad ankle and when his bile ebbed it hurt so bad he let me walk him back to camp with his arm over my shoulder.
“I don’t think I’d have killed you,” he said, for his fit of temper over he was feeling ashamed.
“Hell, I knowed that,” I said. “We just blow off a little stink now and then.”
Gus was not going to turn back and the private soldiers said they would go on, even though their sergeant was one of the men drowned in the maw of the river cut. Too, Gus Doane was one of those rare officers who men would cheerfully foller right to hell. They actually gave Gus Three Cheers and Gus was so moved he had to walk away because otherwise his men would see him crying.
“To hell with the Quartermaster Corps!” Gus shouted, and that was to bring another round of cheering, since the soldiers had no fine feelings for the outfit that sent them pork full of maggots, biscuits full of weevils, and nary a drop of whiskey ever.
“No pissant trickle is going to stop us!” says Gus. Well, I thought that this pissant trickle had done a good job of that.
Hooray.
“On to the Columbia!”
Hooray!
“Why ain’t you cheering?” says Gus.
“I ain’t a soldier, I ain’t a fool, and I know what this country is like. We’ll be lucky if half of us is alive at the other end. I’ll go, but I won’t cheer. I ain’t the sort to do it,” I says, and Gus just nodded.
“Jesus,” says Doane. I didn’t know what that was for.
“Go shoot us some camp meat,” he says.
“There’s half a deer left,” I says.
“That’s an order.”
So I directed Gus to go piss a long ways up a rope. We was starved for amusement, you see.
“All right, all right,” I says, wishing I’d kept a horse.
I shrugged and took off toward a benchland I could see about a mile away that showed the purple of prairie grass. It wasn’t much of a walk and I wasn’t in much of a hurry. I come up a little rise one side of which was falling away and I saw what was about the most discouraged-looking buffalo I ever seen.
He was an old bull with three working legs, and he was still fat and heavy, so he must have busted his right front foot a short time back. The eye on the side I was looking at ran blood and had been gouged out in a fight or fall. One horn was busted off and his hide crawled with bugs and ticks. When I walked round to the other side, I saw that eye was clouded. His tail was broke. He had an advanced case of the limps and staggers and something wrong with his nose that made his breathing sound like a steam freight on a damp night.
This poor old boy was tottering and far gone, so I just walked right up to him and stuck my Colt in his ear and pulled the trigger, which gave off a small click and not one thing more.
The bull froze, tensed, and he sniffed, and he turned his head and he bellered and then he charged. I run like a stripe-ass ape for a scabby little juniper nearby and scrambled up it. The bull come lumbering along—nothing wrong with that right front hoof now—and he slammed into my tree and busted it off. I flew about fifteen feet and landed hard and the bull charged past me, one foot missing my head by a comfortable two, three inches, and mashing my hat about a foot down into the ground.
It took me a minute to get my breath back, and the bull had turned by then and was charging back. There was a little cave in a rock outcrop and I was about half wriggled into it when the whirring buzz of several rattlesnakes run me back outside again. I stood up and run to a rockpile and climbed up it and perched on one foot at the top, hoping that the bull would take me for a magpie.
He warn’t having none of that. He come up, sniffed, and began to climb up toward me, hooking with his one horn. The footing wasn’t good and I figured I’d run for the camp and so provide this monster with more targets, I was getting tired of being singled out.
I clambered down and run like hell smack into a thicket of chokecherry bushes, and damn near smack into a bear. It was a grizzly, and it stood up and said, “WWWWOOOOOOOOOOFFF,” utterly entranced by the sight of a man changing directions in midair. I turned at right angles and accelerated, humping my stumps along right smart and hearing hot pursuit behind me. I come to a downhill part of the trail and picked up speed. Bears can’t run downhill very well, so my hopes rose, but not by much.
There was a mighty thudding crash behind me as the buffalo and the bear collided. A beller of rage from the bear, a beller of rage from the buffalo, and when I stopped to look back the sonsabitches had joined up and was after me again, partners in killing poor Luther.
No time for sniveling. I gained a few yards when my pursuers got jammed up squeezing through a passage between two boulders only big enough to let one through at a time. I was pouring on the steam. I rattled across some wind-sorted sand near the edge of the rim, looked down and saw Gus and the troops looking up, saw a nice soft red cedar maybe thirty feet down and since my pursuers were only twenty feet behind I hollered, “SHIT!” and jumped.
I lit in the brittle tree and busted off branch after branch with my face, ribs, knees, and various other parts and I come to rest in great pain on a sweet-smelling pile of busted-off cedar branches.
I took a couple of painracked breaths when there was this godawful crash and I turned my head and saw the buffalo with its head buried about two feet into the slickrock. It was all quivering in the hindquarters and obviously dead.
“Christ!” screamed Doane. “Here comes a damn bear!”
Grizzlies ain’t awful good on the eyesight and the bear was descending clawing frantically for purchase on the desert air. It lit with a horrid thump on the now late Private O’Rourke and it rose up snorting and ran on to the river and jumped in and swam across and when it got to the far bank it went up the slope beyond, throwing gravel forty feet out into the river.
“Could I borrow one of you Colts?” says Gus, sitting down beside me. “To protect us from the meat you bring to camp?”
I to
ld him of course and suggested where he might put it. Further, I resigned from this piss-brained expedition and I hoped they all drowned, a not unreasonable expectation.
I handed him the Colt I’d landed on. The barrel was bent over but I assured Gus that he could shoot around corners with it.
“Oh, bullshit,” says Gus, tossing the gun into the river.
We was all starving and a couple of privates had quarried out a big lump of meat from the haunch of the bison and others was finding wood for a fire.
Various strange cuts of meat out of that poor buffalo were soon sizzling right on the coals on account of our cookware was under the river somewheres.
After an hour setting on the coals, the blackened lumps of meat was raked out and with a lot of grunting slabs of half-raw buffalo was cut off and handed round.
That meat was so damn tough I don’t think I could have got a tooth in the gravy. I chewed some and gave up for it gave me charleyhorses in the jaws.
“We got to tenderize it,” roars Doane, holding his jaw like it’s sprained.
Our fearless, peerless, brainless leader put a big chunk of meat on one of the flat rocks around the firepit, picked up a long hefty log, raised it high over his head, and brought it down with all his strength on that there meat. That there meat shot thirty feet in the air, like it was India-rubber, while the club backed up the way it come and got Gus square in the middle of the forehead, making a sound like a melon dropped on slate.
Gus stood there for a moment with a cross-eyed look and a dumb smile on his face, and then he fell over backwards, giving himself another mighty blow when the club fell on him. He didn’t feel a thing. (I been on a lot of expeditions. They all start out this way—For that matter, they go on like that, too.)
A couple privates carried Doane down to the water and put cold cloths on the purple welt that used to be his forehead.
When Gus come to he asked for volunteers to go to Fort Shaw for supplies. The volunteers took off right brisk, looking sort of bashful, and I was sure they’d just keep right on going. (They did, but mailed in a supply list and where the expedition was. I couldn’t blame them.)
We went back to building boats and about two weeks later the supplies come in, by mule train this time, since the desert was awful rough on wagons. We’d been living on anything that walked, crawled, or flew, and a few vegetables culled from the marshes.
We took off in calm water, rolling down the river, in a golden light past mountain sheep and deer.
For them, the Columbia; for me, Henry Plummer’s gold.
21
THINGS WENT SMOOTH FOR a few days, maybe even a week—hard to keep track when you’re riding water toward the sea. Then one morning I spotted Liver-Eatin’ Jack. He was standing on top of a cliff maybe a thousand foot high, pissing on a couple eagles below him. I waved and he give me an obscene Plains handspeak. Then the rock come in and the river bent a little and I lost sight of him.
We kept a look out for any of the four soldiers, but never seen any sign of them, I thought maybe there was a cavern under that horrible millrace where they had died, and they was stuck in it, forever.
The canyon walls was made of a soft, foamy lava that held water like a sponge. The rock was so soft that you couldn’t climb up it—whole chunks of the cliff would pull away under the weight of a man. We stopped for fresh cold water at a spring on the south bank of the river and found all manner of fossil bones in a claybank near it. The bones was dark brown and all the lime had been changed to rock. Gus set the troopers to digging out the skeletons, including one of a big cat with two fangs that was each a foot long.
About the time that the river really calmed down we had got good at handling the boats, just when we didn’t need it. Where the forks of the Snake come together we found a whole batch of Injuns on the banks, rooting around in some government issue ration barrels, for the last scraps of salt pork and hardtack.
“My, them Injuns look fat and happy,” I says. “I wonder how they come by them good rations?”
“Kelly,” Gus grated, “remember I know about you before you got here, and the army hangs deserters.”
We hove to in an eddy and set off a fine old Injun ceremony, for they mostly all began to hop up and down and yell, “Pork and Tallow, Pork and Tallow,” and I wondered who had read the ends of the barrels to them. (This was how Pocatello, Idaho, got its name—direct result of Gus’s naval skills. I never tire of reminding him of it, though he does.)
We tried to camp there but the Injuns tried to steal everything, which I thought uncommon gall on their part—why, we’d only stolen their land, shot their families, cleaned out the game, and otherwise reduced them to beggary. It soon got to where someone was going to get killed so we up and loaded the boats and floated away in the dark. Not one among us had the viciousness to shoot these poor people.
Gus chanced the dark—we could see white water ahead near the shorelines but the water rolled on black and swift in the middle. The boat business made me nervous because it would be such an easy matter for someone to be up on a bluff with a buffalo rifle and we had no cover short of jumping overboard.
There was a big island we come to just at dawn that had so many blue heron nests in it that they were beyond counting. There was peregrine falcons and golden eagles on the walls of the canyon, some of the eagle nests were the size of haystacks they’d been in use so long.
Now, I know my true accounting of this expedition, this farcical voyage of exploration, will enrage our jingo historians, but I’ve been on a bunch of them and they are all alike. After all, Columbus was thinking he’d found China at first. Explorers is a simpleminded lot, with only the one virtue. They want to see things first, in the way a little kid will light up a stick of dynamite to see what happens. They like being froze, drowned, shot at, gnawed by strange critters, raddled by new diseases, and all them other things, and if you’d my experience you wouldn’t lend them any more dignity than remarking these boys is combing the world for women who really are built sideways. (Teethadore Roosevelt was a prize example. I think he mashed his brain fooling with them Indian-club exercise things at Harvard.)
We come to another waterfall, a big one this time, and for a new twist Doane had a couple privates looking around down ahead. This was nice, as these falls was a hundred feet high and the pool below them was all jagged rocks. There was a couple hundred seagulls pecking away at whatever had gone over recently. The parts and chunks that was left.
Rainbows banded the mists the falls made and the muffled thunder of thousands of tons of water chewing slowly through the stones come right up through your bootsoles.
“Mild-mannered little thing,” I says. “Why don’t we just run it? Looks easy.” I was hollering to make myself heard above the noise of the water. Gus scratched his ear.
“Go fuck a lame coyote,” says Gus. “It’s a nice day. Fuck two.”
These noble speeches concluded I headed for the cliff by the falls and started down a goat path about as wide as this page, to look over the land and by the by peek behind the waterfall and see if Plummer’s gold was all stacked up behind it waiting on Young Luther, the greedy little shit.
It would take a couple of days to portage around this big booming monster, so I had plenty of time to edge up close to the thundering cataract and see if there was an undercut. There was. There was also a greenish human foot sticking out of it. I tossed a loop of rope around the foot and hauled out the rest of him. I guessed him to be a prospector from his clothes. I fished around in his coat and found a packet of papers and the odds and ends of a smoker, but no money or wallet or nothing. I kicked the corpse over into the cataract. The river’d take him or he’d bob up and the troopers could dig him a quick grave.
The oilskin packet had a few daguerreotypes in it—a woman and small, towheaded children, an elderly couple, a pale-eyed gent in Union Blue—some letters, unreadable for the water that had soaked them. It’s a lonely country and them as seeks their fortune here miss
their families hard. And a map to the Lost Bullfrog Mine.
(After a few years of troubles that map caused me I got real hung on shooting bullfrogs with buffalo rifles. I’ll tell you sometime.)
Since I was a humble civilian I tucked the packet in my shirt and said, “Yer secret’s safe with me,” to the corpse, wherever it may have fetched up. There was a good-sized cave behind that water, all full of spray and mist and very slick watery moss. I took a step and brought the other foot up. I felt a tiny stitch down under my bootsoles, and then my feet flew out from under me and I slid down a steep wet slick chute blind in the mist and darkness.
If the chute had gone out into the waterfall I’d have been pulverized food for the crawdads, but luck was with me and I only fetched up on the far side against a flat wall or rock that did not move overmuch. The wall was covered over by an inch of moss that evenly transferred the shock of my collision all over my body, leaving no joint still hinged.
“GODDAMNEDSONOFABASTARDINGBIT ...” I remember saying, just before thumping into the wall at a fast clip. I was sort of stuck there for a moment before slithering down like cowshit off a milking stall.
I rolled over to get my face out of the water on the floor of the cave, and fell off a ledge into deeper water. It woke me right up, as the pool was moving toward the white cascade of the falls. I swum like man never swum before. Didn’t work.
I was so damn scared I even prayed some, in unorthodox wordings, as I was drawn into the thunder.
The falls took me down and plunged me deep, I wouldn’t know how far. My ears hurt awful, and then I was popped right out over the fearsome curl at the front edge of where the falls hits the pool, and dogpaddling away from the mincer. There was a rock sticking up and I got a grip on it and dragged my sorry ass out on it and I lay there spewing water and wondering at still being alive.