The Yellowstone Kelly Novels

by Bowen, Peter

  Right in front of me was a short, squat, moon-faced Injun painted black and white stripes, like a zebra, across his face. To my left there was a tall, scarred customer looked like he et live wolverines without mustard. To my right there was two younger fellers holding sharp-looking hatchets and evil grins. Some polite soul behind the stump I leaned on farted so as not to surprise me with his being there.

  My mouth had gone all cottony-dry and I’m sure my eyes was the size of stove lids.

  “Whatever do you use for brains, young man?” said Zebra Face, in a plummy Canadian accent, sort of like my aunt Margaret’s. “Gopher shit? My young men would have killed you last night but they thought that you were so stupid that you might be crazy, and they didn’t want to offend the spirits. What did you have for supper last night? Steamed locoweed?”

  All this was God’s Truth. My eyes must have grown a few rings.

  The scarred booger to my left rattled off a bunch of grunts and wheezes, then laughed heartily.

  “Red Bear, my esteemed associate here, wishes to cut off your balls and make you eat them, prior to skinning you alive. He wants a new saddle cover.”

  Then there was a chorus from the two on my right.

  “Unimaginative,” sneered Zebra Face, “so I won’t bore you with their suggestions.”

  The one behind the stump farted again, I was glad to see he was holding up his end of the conversation.

  Farts-Behind-Stump lifted off my hat. My hair was cut short on account of the lice the fort had.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Zebra Face, “you call that a scalp? That’s an insult to civilized warfare, is what that is. It’s barbaric. Put the hat back on,” he went on, gesturing to Farts-Behind-Stump.

  The scarred one in need of the saddle cover rattled off some more suggestions and Zebra Face turned to him and rattled back pretty hot and sharp.

  “Get up!” Zebra Face snarled to me. He made a motion and my hat was jammed down over my eyes. I struggled to my feet. I saw one of my boots and picked it up and pulled it on.

  Even in the High Plains far north of where you’d think they would be there’s a nasty little yellow scorpion likes dark, smelly places and the one in my boot took offense at being smashed flat and it stung me right in the instep.

  “Yaaaaaaaooooooooowwwwwww,” I hollered, hopping around on the other foot and trying to get the boot off while the scorpion took a few more stabs. Naturally I fell in the water. There I lay on my back with my right foot in the air, holding a boot and hollering, while my hat floated generally toward New Orleans.

  I sat up, water running out of my clothes. There was a good forty braves on the bank, all laughing like loons and slapping each other on the back, except for Scarface, who was scowling and making unpleasant gestures at his crotch with his skinning knife.

  “Unbelievable,” says Zebra Face, holding his head like it hurt. Well, hell, it was pretty funny even to me, so I started in roaring away, and I got up slowly and staggered to shore. My foot hurt like hell and was already beginning to swell.

  “Take off your sock,” says Zebra Face. He looked at the welts, nodded, and then he went to the riverbank, pulled a plant up, peeled the root, smashed the white core with his knife handle on a rock, came back, slapped the mush on my stings, and stood up. The pain quit in a minute and the swelling went down in two.

  After shaking my boots out thoroughly I squeezed my feet into them and stood up. Some kind soul jammed my hat, full of water and weeds, over my head and everybody laughed hearty at the sorry figure I cut. I offered just no end of amusement.

  “Don’t try to run and don’t try to sneak off,” said Zebra Face, “because if you do you’ll be two or three days dying and a most unpleasant death it will be. And my name is Spotted Tail.”

  “Luther Kelly, pleased to meet you,” I says, fetching up my parlor manners and sticking out my hand. Spotted Tail looked at my hand like it had maggots in it and stank to boot. He shook his head.

  “Luther Kelly,” he said, shaking his head, “you are a goddamned fool. I wonder that you could live as long as you have.”

  “Thank you,” I says, meaning it. I figured if a few warriors had found me they’d have rubbed me out and gone on without working up a light sweat.

  “One more thing,” he said, still smiling. Even with the smile, I knew he’d cut my balls off. Especially with the smile. It was one of them smiles. He’d have made a great lawyer. “It pleases me to let the whites think I don’t understand English. You will be good enough to not let on? And keep your word. The man who keeps his word, keeps his balls.” (And I kept it till now. Spotted Tail is long dead, murdered at the request of a missionary bishop. I’ll tell you sometime.) We mounted and rode west.

  Up on the High Plains it was the middle of the fall, the weather gets colder the higher and farther north you are. It was time for the great Autumn Buffalo Hunt, to lay up meat and fat and robes for the winter. Spotted Tail’s people were Brule Sioux. (After I got some Sioux I asked him what language Brule was. It didn’t sound Sioux. “It isn’t,” he said. “Two hundred years ago a Black Robe, a Jesuit, came to convert us to Christianity. He was so eloquent, so filled with the Holy Spirit—so elevating, that we ate him, out of respect, and ever after we were called the Brule Sioux. He was, shall we say, commingled with us in a manner not often found with missionaries and heathen. We are still heathen.” Same smile.)

  There was about a hundred lodges going out to the buffalo country, and maybe five hundred Injuns of all ages, sexes, and sizes. It was like harvest time elsewhere, a joyful gathering for the long, cold, hard winter ahead.

  The Sioux and other Plains tribes lived off the buffalo, as us whites do corn and wheat. They gathered roots and berries and killed deer and birds, but the buffalo was the nail they hung their life on. The Sioux made over forty things from buffalo—from pemmican to glue and bowstrings, moccasins to teepees—and so of course it was a holy beast.

  My traps and such sort of melted away. It wasn’t exactly plundered or outright theft, just someone would take a fancy to something and take it and when they was tired of it they’d give it to somebody else. They was impulsively generous, just like they was impulsively cruel, and by and by I was down to clothes, boots, a hat, and a couple guns. Everything else disappeared and then turned up only to disappear again in the moving shoal of people.

  I slept in a lodge with about eight other fellers my age, and I et out of a common pot, puppy stew likely as not, and the worst discomfort I had was missing salt. Hell, I’d dream about salt.

  The Autumn Buffalo Hunt was about the biggest celebration that they had all year. The medicine men medicined away, painting signs on bleached buffalo skulls and building cairns of rocks to hold them to the sun, and singing and dancing around the buffalo horses. The hunters painted themselves and fasted and prayed.

  The band set up the making-meat camp near where the border of the Dakotas and Montana is today. The women commenced into building drying racks to make jerky and sewing up deerskin parfleches to put the pemmican in. A few exceptionally keen-eyed young hunters went out and scouted the herds.

  Early one morning, with the frost heavy on the grass, the hunters took off in a mob to hunt the buffalo. I went along, armed with my Navy Colt and Spencer carbine. I planned to watch the rest of them hunt, and maybe chase down a few cripples or strays. I sure didn’t want to get in the way.

  Then Spotted Tail grinned that awful, sunny, murderous grin of his and motioned for me to come along with him. We rode on and topped a little rise and looked out over thirty miles of red and yellow grass dotted with thousands of black buffalo, grazing in bunches, not herded up at all.

  The mob of Injuns was spread out five miles to the left and five miles to the right of us. I could see right off that buffalo hunting was not what you’d call a heavily organized sort of sport. For one thing, buffalos’ eyes are so far out on the sides of their heads that they can’t see the same thing at the same time with them. It makes them real erra
tic runners unless they are in a herd. Unlike cows and horses and most all four-footed animals, they pivot on their front legs, and can swap ends and directions so fast it seems magical, when it ain’t fatal to the rider chasing them. A bull can swap ends and hook a horse’s belly and carry horse and rider a long ways, if the horns has a good purchase up in the horse’s guts.

  Well, I reined up on a little knoll and folded my hands over my carbine and Spotted Tail turned and looked at me and nodded. He whooped and gouged his horse with his heels and off he went. They was after the young cows for meat and the bulls for robes, moccasin soles, and teepee covers. Some Injuns used firearms and some used the bone and Osage Orange bows, double-curved things of enormous power. Unless they hit bone, one of the bows would send an arrow clear through a bull’s chest, to bury itself in the earth. (When the settlers plowed the plains they found thousands of arrowheads, these people must have been hunting here a thousand years. We killed most of them off in about ten years.)

  Whooping, the Injuns chased the buffalo and the hooves drummed in the earth. I had a good view. I watched for two or three hours and then all that was left were the black dots that was dead buffalo and the warriors starting to skin the bulls. They did this by hitching a horse to the hide and then they slashed while the horse pulled.

  And that is all they did. The men get to hunt and make war, and the women do anything that looks remotely like work. Not a bad life. The braves whooped back to camp with buffalo tongues to roast on the coals, and they sat there for the next three days telling lies about how many they had killed and what great and impossible shots they had made.

  It was pretty much like any hunting party I’ve ever been on—Injun, white, or European.

  There was a few more hunts that fall, and I took part in them, finding that it was easiest to use the pistol on the cows and leave the bulls for the braves. The carbine couldn’t be aimed much from a moving horse.

  I still rode a saddle though I was chaffed a lot about it—an easy thing to bear when you don’t know the language so well. I picked a lot of good points up—how to find water and feed in the winter, and the saltweed that keeps horses close. Later on, when I was hunting down the Injuns, knowing where the saltweed was stood me in good stead.

  The life was good. I didn’t do much but eat and sleep. Once in a while I’d get a twinge and think I ought to maybe write my mother and let her know I was all right, but I was a long ways from a postal box. A couple pretty women started slipping into my robes—I found out later that goddamned Spotted Tail floated the rumor that my dick was so long I had to tie knots in it to hold the tip off the ground where I’d step on it, and though my anatomy proved a disappointment they did keep coming back.

  I was growing again, getting what would be my full height, and I shot up visibly if you stared overlong. It was April now and the rivers were starting to full up with ice and water and there was some green on the ridges—the little pasqueflowers all rowed in their hundreds, and snowdrops and little crocuses.

  Spotted Tail come one afternoon and he give me a letter to someone he called Big Throat, way on over to the west.

  I was to leave the next morning.

  All that evening this or that Sioux stopped with a gift for me. One woman brought a pale doeskin shirt all worked in colored porcupine quills. They brought bags of pemmican and moccasins and robes and soft underclothes made of deerskin. One gift that I was purely dumbfounded over was Scarface give me a scabbard for my Spencer, made out of rawhide. (As I lashed it on my horse the next morning I glanced at the back and saw MOTHER and two hearts entwined on it. Well, the thought was nice, so I kept it.)

  Next morning I headed to the south and west, trying to find the Emigrant Trail. Big Throat lived on it somewheres, in the mountains.

  Spotted Tail rode with me for a few miles. He was smiling and whistling and happy, no doubt thinking of especially satisfying past castrations.

  “If you need to,” he said, when he stopped, ready to turn back, “you can ask for Big Throat by his white name, Jim Bridger.”

  “Oh,” I says. I’d been reading about Jim Bridger and the Mountain Men since I was a pup. And now I was going to meet him. I commenced into thinkin’ on what I would say.

  I put heels to my horse. Him and the pack pony broke into a jog. Down there with the Black Hills on my left and a lot of badland between, there was the Bighorn Mountains, and Bridger lived right near the southern end of the range.

  Nothin’ to it.

  4

  WELL, THE RIDE I thought would take a few days took me a month. I had no way of knowing how big the land was out here, and it was unnerving to ride toward a mountain range all day and have it seem no nearer at dusk than it was at dawn. I drank only from springs had green in them—there’s arsenicals all over the West; cold, clear water in absolutely clean rock pools. If you drink it you die of convulsions an hour later.

  I sure as hell knew it when I come to the Emigrant Trail. There was a litter of trunks, chests of drawers, pianos, tables, rocking chairs, and such piled deep on the sides of the trail, where the wagon wheels had in some places cut a foot down into stone. All the metal had been stripped off the furniture, of course, since iron was as precious here as silver back East. It was far too late in the season for any trains of Conestogas, and I thought of the thousands of people who had come by here. Some of them stayed, under a grave marker cut from a wagon board.

  I’d run on to solitary freighters a couple of times and asked if they had seen Bridger or knew where he might be. ’Course they was all great friends of Jim, and swore he was in Hawaii, or up in Canada, or in Mexico, or “kilt and skelped.” This last came from a pair of pustle-gutted loafers riding the sorriest nags I ever seen. They had a bald-backed mule carrying a couple small kegs of whiskey, and that and their overhauls and greasy hats was their outfits, along with a couple of rickety trade muskets. They eyed me and my gear hungrylike. Fortunately they was pretty whiskeyed up and when they invited me to camp I wheeled my horse and took off. A musket ball follered after but came nowhere near me.

  I made a dry camp and was giving myself the congratulations when it occurred to me that that pair was going to kill the first folks they come to wasn’t loaded and aiming at them. So I got my carbine and Navy Colt and little derringer all tucked up good and tethered the pack pony and went back on my pinto. I could damn near smell the bastards fore I could see ’em.

  They’d throwed together a big fire—too lazy to cut the wood—and they was chawing on some raw bacon and drinking whiskey out of a tin cup.

  “That little shit give us the slip I liked his gun,” says one of them, reaching out his cup for more redeye.

  “Be nother’n,” said the other.

  “No, there won’t,” says I, squeezing the trigger on the carbine. The slug went through the man’s skull and into his partner across the way. The brainshot one stood up and walked till he fell in the fire and the other looked at the big hole in his chest and then the blood started to come out his mouth.

  “You’ve come a long way, Luther,” I says to myself as I rode back to where I’d left my traps. “You just killed two men because they needed it.” I wasn’t too happy, but I couldn’t think of another thing to do. Leave them alive to slaughter anyone weak in their path?

  If you wanted anything done out here you damn well had to do it yourself, even if it was things you’d hang for in New York. I began to take especially good care of my guns and my horses. Got to be a little fetched on the subjects and never come out of it.

  I knew vaguely that Bridger had been drove out of his home on the Salt Lake Trail by the Mormons.

  He had a place somewheres around the foot of the Bighorns, near the Wind River, wherever that was. I went west on the Emigrant Trail, figuring I’d run on to someone, somewheres who would know.

  Late in the afternoon of the next day I looked west and saw the dot of a rider moving pretty brisk. I pulled off figuring it was a courier or something.

  Pre
tty soon the man come up close. He was riding a great big Thoroughbred, which he slowed to a bare walk. From where I was you could see five miles down the trail.

  He was a weathered, whip-thin customer wearing two Colts tied down on his hips and he had two more in scabbards either side of his saddle horn. The handles was ivory polished by much use. A long gun’s stock hung out from under his right leg, looked to be one of the Sharps buffalo rifles, .45-90 or .45-120.

  “Good evening to you,” I said, touching my hat. His eyes flicked over me and he smiled and nodded. We begun to chat about this and that, the War, what pretty country it was. He got off and gave his horse a little water, and then checked its hooves. He swung up.

  We was both looking down the trail, at a blob of dust over a rise. Several riders were coming, hard. The gent with all the artillery took a pair of German binoculars out of his saddlebag and looked for a long time at the party coming this way. He put the field glasses away and checked his tack and girths. His horse could run to Chicago paced right.

  “Well,” he says, “much obliged for the talk. Name’s Black. Those gents down there and I have some differences and I’d just as soon not settle with them, it only makes it worse.”

  He clucked to his horse and they took off at an easy, ground-eating lope. He seemed to not have a care in the world.

  About an hour later some horses near blown bearing sweating soldiers come on up, led by a lieutenant. They reined up and the men started to walk their mounts to cool them, but it was too late. Black could outrun these mounts on foot, never mind that magnificent horse he was on and taking such good care of.

  “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.