by Peter Bowen
But I’d taken the money.
So I walked on down toward the warehouse Cope had rented for the mounds of gear he was taking on the expedition. It was bustling when I left and now there was just one forlorn flunk there, sweeping the floor.
“Where is everybody?” I says.
“Gone,” says the flunk. “I’m staying to watch the goods.”
“Gone where?” I says.
“Marsh announced a fossil find yesterday,” says the flunk, “and he challenged Cope to a debate.”
I brightened considerably. I would not, after all, have to spend the winter months in the arse end of nowhere, icicles depending from my nuts. I could stay here in lovely Laramie, warm and well-fed, close to the whorehouse.
“You seen any of my men?” I says.
“Cope paid ’em off,” says the flunk. “Real generous-like. So I was lookin’ for ’em I’d try Rosie’s. They got money for a while, ’fore they’s back to bummin’ quarters for a drink.”
“Mulligan?” I says.
“Ain’t seen him.”
Mulligan would have flat disappeared to wherever it was he went.
The cut on my throat began to itch terrible, so I left and went up the street to a sawbones, who scrubbed it with carbolic acid and covered it with a bandage. Charged me a dollar.
Life was good. I went to the hotel and into the saloon and I set myself up to the bar and ordered a bottle of brandy and while I waited on that I went to the table with all the delicacies on it and filled a plate with buffalo tongues and anchovies and pickles and cheese and crackers.
Time I got back to the bar and had set my foot up on the rail there was a young hand there, in the sort of expensive English clothes that rich pilgrims wear out here. They was good clothes and the sort Sir Henry wore.
The hand was light-built, gloved, and had a big hat pulled way down, and high-tooled boots cost a cowboy four months’ pay.
I poured myself a big snort of brandy and eyed my plate, thinking on what to eat first.
The young hand turned to me, looking out from under the wide white brim of the hat.
“While big men fight great battles for scholarship in the East,” says Alys de Bonneterre, “little women get there first.”
“Shit,” I says.
“Watch your fucking mouth,” says Alys. “I’m a lady. And you gave me your word.”
“It’s going to be damned cold out there,” I whined.
“Trust me,” she says. “You won’t feel it at all.”
9
I’D BEEN IN THE West only a little over four years, and I had seen much, true, but I hadn’t been looking for bones in rocks. I had mostly been learning how to keep my hair and the lay of the land. I had had the best of maps—it was between Jim Bridger’s ears, and in my possibles there was the soft square of antelope hide he’d drawn me a map on, the mountain ranges, rivers, and passes. Everything was right that I’d actually seen, right down to the precise number of days it took to ride from one to another.
There was another feller who’d taught me much, and he was Washakie, once my father-in-law, till my wife, Eats-Men-Whole, died of a fever with our child in her belly. I hadn’t been the same since, and there was a coldness round my heart.
Alys de Bonneterre had a coldness there, too, and it made it easier for me. She was using me and that was that and I would not be surprised the day she no longer knew me.
But for now she needed me and so we left Laramie when the blizzard lifted with our mounts and two packhorses, headed north to the lodges of the Shoshones, on the Wind River. I hadn’t seen Washakie for a couple years, and it would be good to see him again. And he could tell me where to find the fossils.
Once some Cheyenne scouts come riding hard at us but when they got close and saw me they peeled off without a word and went back to stalking the buffalo hunters. There wasn’t many of them this far north, but there is always some bold souls who think death is for other folks willing to go someplace just to be first.
We found six of them. They’d been skinned alive and their hides pegged out like they did the buffalo. Their wagons was burnt and the stock gone, of course, and god-awful as the sight was I couldn’t really blame the Cheyennes.
Alys wasn’t no more bothered by this than she’d been by digging up her brother and cleaning off his bones. There was something very hard in the woman, as in many women, and it warn’t put on.
The ground was hard froze and rocky as hell and so we went on and left the burial services to the wolves and coyotes and ravens. It was the natural way out here, and I had never once expected anything else for myself.
It took eight days hard riding to make Washakie’s camp. He was in a bend of the Wind River, where the fierce blows come down out of the mountains scoured the grass clean, and there was cottonwoods thick on the river’s edge, so if the grass run out before spring the braves could strip bark and feed the horses that. Good patches of saltweed, too.
About two hours from the camp Alys looked back and gave a start—there was a couple young braves not far behind us grinning like mules eatin’ chitlings, and she hadn’t heard them come up. I had, but I hadn’t looked back either. The boys was only twelve or thirteen, and I didn’t want to humiliate them.
Even younger boys took our horses and traps when we come into camp, shouting “Kell—eee Kell—ee” and eager to open the sacks of gifts I had brought. And I had brought a fine little rifle for Washakie, a Holland and Holland single-shot breechloader I had found in a Laramie pawnshop. Washakie liked fine things and pretty women.
The old goat greeted me hurriedly, then turned the charm on Alys, and she fairly glowed. Washakie had such a presence at times I felt there was a light around him.
After about fifteen minutes of honey and needling me with veiled references to my Sioux name—it’s Stands-In-The-Fire-And-Argues—got from Spotted Tail, who come on me as a green pup waltzing across the Plains without a care, and ever after had told with glee how I’d argued in the matter of not having my balls cut off and I was so excited I was standing in the fire when I did it, and when my boots began to burn I hopped around and caused no end of mirth. Looking back, I was so pitiful that the Sioux decided not to kill me.* Folly’s usually bad but not always.
Washakie pointedly ignored me long enough to make his point—I could drop dead and he would care most graciously for Alys, but when it was apparent that I warn’t going to oblige, he greeted me formally and we embraced.
I purely loved the man. Have you ever known anyone from whom pure goodness shines?
Formalities over, a mob of kids and women and friends from years before piled into the lodge, just sort of accidentally with the bags of gifts I had brought. There wasn’t much, combs and little mirrors and packets of bright German dyes and tobacco and some candy for the little ones.
Washakie invited Alys to a feast, forgetting my miserable and inconvenient existence, and finally in the weariest of tones allowing as how I could come if she really, really wanted to have me around, but for his sake, it was a dull afternoon and maybe they could burn me at the stake or use me for target practice or ...
“You love Luther,” says Alys. “Enough of your bilge.”
Being fifteen hundred miles from the nearest fit place for a ship, bilge was a new word to Washakie, and he had Alys explain it to him at great length.
And then we were shown to the lodge we would have while among the Shoshones. It was the standard size, eighteen feet across the base, and already set up with piles of prime robes and waterskins and pitch pine for cooking or making coffee.
Our eyes met and so it warn’t long before we were between the robes, at least some of the time, and things was reaching a crescendo when one of the brats had his head stuck under the side of the lodge says to his pal:
“Your parents ever do that, Leaf?”
Alys stopped dead in her tracks so to speak and looked round and saw any number of friendly, grinning faces regarding her. Most women would have screamed
and dove for cover, but all she did was smile right back and come at me again. She was damned adaptable, I’ll say that for her.
We fell asleep, it had been a cold and tiring ride, and just before I fell off Alys stuck her tongue in my ear and whispered that I would pay and pay for that one.
After we rested we dressed and went on to Washakie’s big lodge, where a mighty kettle of buffalo stew was simmering, and women were making flatbread on hot stones. The lodge smelled of good food and sweat and fine feelings. Indians live close to one another, and to watch their families is a joy.
There was a great feast, and the two little mouthy bastards been watching us screw sang a song about us.
I offered to translate this bit of scurrility for Alys, but she said not to bother, she could figure it out. Well, that was easy enough, the little bastards were using hand signals that left nothing out. Our fellow feasters roared.
Old Washakie beamed. Nothing he liked better than making a fool out of me, not that it’s hard to do.
Then there was singing, and every time I hear Indians singing the old songs the hair on the back of my neck stands up, because there’s thousands of years in it and it speaks to old blood. Man had been around a long damn time, and most of the time like this.
Finally, we went off to sleep, and someone had lit a fire for us and the lodge was warm, smelling of pine pitch burning, clean and sweet. We held each other and for a time there was a great gentleness between us. We were much alike.
I woke in the night and went outside to piss and the stars was low overhead and I finished and Alys came out, too, and squatted with no more care than she’d been raised here.
“They are wonderful,” she says, when we were in the robes again. “You really love them don’t you.”
Yes, I did.
“But you fight them,” she says.
“Got no choice,” I says. I didn’t explain. There was clever men who had enough on me to hang me more or less anytime they cared to, and that was that. I didn’t like it, but I knew, too, that America was growing and it would squash the tribes within a few years, with war and with whiskey. The Canadians had done that long ago, with trade goods and trade rum and the sly grace of the British, who was used to subject peoples.
“How did you meet Washakie?” she asks.
“Jim Bridger,” I says, “and them two old monsters about killed me. Thing about Jim and Washakie is they got evil senses of humor and they liked nothing better than settin’ me up and knockin’ me down, for the joy in it.”
“I doubt it,” says Alys.
Cheap explanations wasn’t going to do for this woman.
She run a long finger over my nose and lips and made a line across my forehead and she kissed me real tender-like.
“You know there are books about you back East?” she says.
I nodded. Pulp tracts in which I rescued maidens and delivered long-winded speeches before vanquishing whole mobs of redskins.
“Ain’t a word of truth in any of ’em,” I says.
“Of course not,” says Alys.
“I just kinda like it out here,” I says.
“Enjoy it,” says Alys. “You can’t do that much longer.”
*The complete account is in Kelly Blue.
10
WE STAYED IN THE camp for a few days, and then Washakie himself decided to guide us to the fossil bones. He looked to be maybe in his forties, but he was nearer seventy, and the year before, I’d heard, the young men had said he was past his prime, fit only to sit in the camp, and Washakie had slipped off alone. He came back a month later with six Blackfeet scalps, traditional enemies of the Shoshones.
Warriors is always brave, but the damned Blackfeet was crazy to boot. One of them explained to me once that they lived out on the Plains where there was no place to hide and so they had to be meaner than their neighbors.
Smallpox hadn’t wiped them about out in ’37 and ’46, they’d have been a hell of a lot more trouble than the Sioux, probably.
It had warmed up a little, the Black Wind from the west had come, warm air from the Pacific, and it was pleasant to ride. There was plenty of game and Washakie tried out the new rifle I had brought him after wrinkling his nose at the little bullets, but the gun shot flat and fast and after a couple shots he carried it across his saddle and when an antelope ran hard away Washakie swung on him and broke his neck at three hundred yards.
We had fresh meat and Alys made up some rice we had, the first that Washakie had ever tasted. He wrinkled his nose. It had no taste at all, he says, white man’s food generally didn’t. He liked anchovies, though.
We got out on to the wind-carved Plains and Washakie pointed off toward a long wall of rock about half a mile away and we rode over and there was bones sticking out of a yellow-brown layer in the rock.
Alys laughed in delight. She said these was some of them big lizards, actually fairly small big lizards, and had only been about twenty feet long. She looked at them hard—we hand’t the time for excavation—and she made some notes, calling the things dip-lo-dicus or something like that. My Latin’s rusty. I keep it that way.
Washakie said the bones were often in that yellow-brown layer and if you saw it, probably there was something in it.
I’d traveled through the Big Dry, between the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers, and seen the head and horns of a critter had a huge helmet six foot across with three horns sticking out and a beak like a turtle. I didn’t care to bring it up at the moment, because it was about five hundred miles away and the country thick with Sioux, some of whom I got on with and some I didn’t. The huge head warn’t going no place and that would have to do.
Then Washakie took us to a spot where there was big whirled snail shells, some of them nine feet across, and Alys took a day to draw them where they was. She said they was ammonites, which sounded more like a biblical tribe to me than a clam or whatever it was. She said they was ancestors of the nautilus, them pretty shells you see cut in half in parlors.
Washakie took us to a bank of rotting stone had horse bones coming out of it, and, Alys said, camels, too. Well, all right, and I asked if there was any goddamned rhinoceroses about and Alys picked up a dinky little bone and said there sure was.
She took some of the horse teeth and camel foot bones and other little specimens and she carefully wrapped them and marked them and entered them in a little book she carried.
Washakie was a patient man, and he seemed to enjoy taking us round. I had been through the country many times, but my eye was always on the ridges and the country about, rocks was rocks and not likely to lift my topknot but there was plenty of Indians who would I got all careless.
I went out one morning to shoot an antelope and I did and I gutted it and cut the best parts out and headed back, and damned if Blue Fox wasn’t down there across the fire from Washakie. So I put on the sneak and come up quite behind and roped him from my horse and backed up sudden enough to pull him over and give his neck a burn but not enough to hurt him.
Then I walked my horse forward to let some slack in the rope and Blue Fox lifted the loop over his head and went back to talking to Washakie like nothing had happened. I joined them and Blue Fox gave me one of them dazzling smiles of his would fit a cobra good it had more teeth.
Alys was digging some bird bones out of a clay bank and so I sat down with Washakie and Blue Fox.
“Our necks are even,” says Blue Fox. “Want to move up to hair?”
“Oh,” I says. “Let’s leave it be.”
“Fine,” says Blue Fox, “for now.”
“He brings sad news,” says Washakie.
“There is measles in our winter camp,” says Blue Fox.
Measles was an irritation to whites, it flat killed Indians. Especially young children. They fevered and busted out all over in suppurating spots.
A thousand Indians died of white man’s diseases for every one died fighting, and that’s the truth.
“Missionaries brought it,” says Blue Fox, �
��along with their preaching.”
I didn’t ask what happened to the missionaries; I didn’t need to. Whatever they got they deserved.
Alys come over then, and she warmed her hands by the fire and damned if she and Blue Fox didn’t strike up a conversation—they knew some of the same folks back East. Well, I supposed Blue Fox was the sort of oddity people wanted to meet, at least if he wasn’t in a killing mood.
Seemed that a cousin of Alys’s, one David, had been in Blue Fox’s class.
“He was fairly stupid,” says Blue Fox. “What’s he doing now?”
“He got his inheritance,” says Alys, “and since he was working in a stockbroker’s office, he bought a lot of shares in silver mines in Nevada. He made so much money he’s retired.”
Blue Fox laughed and laughed at that.
“Well,” says Blue Fox, getting up, “I must go. You will be safe from us, Kelly, when you come, and so will Marsh and his people. I explained that men were coming to pick up rocks. Our elders declared you all broken in mind and therefore untouchable.”
“That’s fair,” I says.
Blue Fox swung up on his pony, after bowing to Alys, and he rode off whistling some air, not Cheyenne.
We slept short that night—Washakie wanted to get a move on—and long before dawn we was riding back west, the horses and us breathing plumes of white in the cold air.
That evening we made camp in a barren place, and it was not even a good camp, and I wondered what the hell Washakie was thinking. He sat by the fire drinking hot tea and smoking his pipe—a briar I had given him, and in time Alys got restless and she wandered off.
I thought it safe enough, hell, there wasn’t game around and the Indian trails was many miles away.
Alys screamed and Washakie and I was up and running toward the sound and it was plain luck she wasn’t far. There was a couple huge wolf-dogs circling her and they was about to move on in when Washakie’s rifle boomed and one of them fell flopping. I hit the other, a bad shot far back, and the dog snapped at the place the slug hit.