The Yellowstone Kelly Novels

by Bowen, Peter

  “What are these?” she says.

  I’d killed a couple others. The toffs who come to hunt sometimes brought wolfhounds and mastiffs and sometimes they crossed with the buffalo wolves, not often, but when they did the pups grew big and mean.

  “My God,” says Alys. “Those are the largest canids I have ever seen or heard of.” She was breathing a little hard but other than that seemed fine. I looked at the skull of the one she’d killed. There was five holes in the brainpan.

  We was standing in a little dish of stony soil, with stacks of rock sticking up here and there, and it looked like ten thousand other places in this wasteland.

  Alys suddenly dropped her little pistol. She was looking down at her feet. There was something there, some sort of long funny-shaped rock, but I couldn’t make more of it than that.

  “Oh my God,” she says. She began to move, looking down. She walked slowly around in a tight circle and then she bent down and touched the rocks, brushing a little dirt away.

  “Can’t you see it?” she says.

  “No,” I says.

  “This is a pelvis,” she says, pointing.

  Pelvis it might be, if it was about ten feet long. I saw part of what could be a leg bone.

  I went to her and she pointed and made gestures and I finally saw what she was so excited about.

  One of them huge lizards, seventy feet long or more. She nodded as she walked, muttering under her breath.

  I may even have seen it first, and when I did I goggled. It was a skull, one with huge teeth in it, eight feet long.

  It was too big.

  I went over to it and Alys was so lost in her thoughts she took a few minutes to look over and see what I was standing on.

  “My God,” she says.

  Then she explained. Long ago this had been a sea, and this was the shore, perhaps the mouth of a vanished river. The big dinosaur was a plant-eater, and the skull was a meat-eater, and they had died together or perhaps apart and the river had brought them to this spot and there they were buried by mud and sand and slowly turned to stone.

  Washakie wasn’t around.

  We found him sitting by the fire, a shit-eating grin on his face, mug of tea in hand.

  “I thought you might like that, my daughter,” he says.

  Alys went over and put her arms around him and kissed him on his weathered cheek.

  11

  WASHAKIE’S PEOPLE BEGAN TO stir early, and so I dressed and went out in the sunless cold to see what was causing all the commotion.

  “Big party of Sioux,” says Washakie. “Long way from their winter camps.”

  It ended with Washakie and me going alone to see, them. Shoshones and Sioux get along, but warriors is warriors, and having all the young bloods facing each other could set off a fight the leaders didn’t want.

  Red Cloud himself was leading the party. His warriors was mobbed up behind him, all wearing the red blankets that gave the chief his name. He had had another name, but when a friend of his said that his warriors sitting on a hillside while Red Cloud parleyed covered it like a red cloud, he took that as a sign.

  Indians got their politicians, too.

  Washakie and Red Cloud hailed each other, and they got down from their horses and embraced. They was two great men and Red Cloud’s party stood down respectfully and so did I. There was plenty of Sioux I knew, but they were too dignified to notice me until the opening ceremonies had concluded.

  Finally, Red Cloud deigned to allow that I existed, and he grinned and said how pleased he was to see Stands-In-The-Fire-And-Argues. Make one mistake and it follows you forever. Then again if I hadn’t been so downright amusing, Spotted Tail and that bastard lot of thugs he roamed with would have killed me certain, so my dignity was a small price to pay.*

  The Sioux had swept down from their winter camp on the Tongue River to kill buffalo hunters. There wasn’t many of them working far enough north to threaten the Sioux, but Red Cloud wanted to let them know that he wouldn’t stand for it, and so him and his men had swept down through many winter ranges and killed every white man they came on. Several warriors were carrying the big heavy rifles the hunters used: some even had the brass telescope sights on them. You could kill a man at over a mile with one of these, if you could hit him.

  A young warrior looked familiar to me was carrying the party’s warpole, and it had maybe thirty scalps on it, and if the hunters was bald the Sioux made do and left the ears on. Oh, whites will wring their hands at the barbarity of it all, but what was being done to the tribes was pretty obscene, too. We weren’t going to kill every Plains Indian, but we were going to kill their whole world out from under them.

  Turned out Red Cloud had rode over to see if Washakie would like to come along and kill a few buffalo hunters. Red Cloud was a courteous man.

  “No,” says Washakie, “the Shoshones are few and the whites are near. And I ask you to kill hunters only far away from our hunting grounds, for the soldiers will fall on us like wolves if the hunters are killed here.”

  “The Sioux are many and we do not fear them,” said Red Cloud. “The Shoshones may come to the Tongue if they wish. We will keep them safe.”

  Washakie launched into a long speech praising the bravery of the Sioux and their victory against the whites that had closed the Bozeman Trail. He praised Red Cloud’s wisdom. This went on about an hour, and Washakie was about down to praising the hairs on Red Cloud’s ass but the answer was no and Red Cloud knew that before he come.

  They was both canny politicians and they both knew that they and their people was doomed but Washakie had a hold on his warriors that Red Cloud didn’t.

  I suddenly recognized the warrior with the warpole. It was Crazy Horse. He had his face painted entirely blue. Usually he wore no paint at all. He was canny enough to know that the simplest dress made him stand out more than the most paint and feathers. Well, there was something going on and I would find out or I wouldn’t.

  I was motioned over to the two chiefs and Red Cloud looks at me, eyes twinkling, and he says that he hears I have a beautiful woman so crazy she laughs at the sight of rocks.

  She laughs at the bones of Thunder Horses, I says. She is a wise woman with her own visions.

  “She’s crazy,” says Washakie. I could have hugged him, for if Red Cloud was convinced of that, Alys at least would be exempt from all attacks. Indians ain’t civilized like us whites, and them as is insane are honored and cared for. We, more civilized, put them in chains and cages and treat them as though they was plain evil.

  “Kelly,” says Red Cloud, “what do you wish from us?”

  “I got some crazy whites want to collect old stone bones,” I says. “They’re harmless.”

  “They will not kill more than they can eat?” Indians had real strong feelings about wasting the game the earth provided.

  “They will not,” I says. I would have to explain to Cope that there was to be no shooting just for the sport of it. You kill it, you eat it.

  I put my hand on my heart and gave my word. I had to keep it now, and if some idiot shot anything just for the hell of it, I had best kill them right then. We was going to be watched and our every move would reach Red Cloud, and if he chose to send his warriors, there wouldn’t be anything left of us but rotting corpses and burned wagons. The fellers I had hired would do it, but I had my doubts about Cope and his flunks.

  “Take your filthy hands off me!” yelled a woman, behind us.

  Alys. God damn it.

  I turned around slowly. Four of Red Cloud’s men had surrounded her and one had the reins of her horse and the others was dashing in and tickling her. Kitchy-koo. And Alys is in the center of these ugly bastards, laying around with her quirt.

  God, I prayed, please don’t let her start shooting.

  Then Alys let loose with a stream of cussing that flowed like a marvelous and burning river, describing the obscene acts their parents had committed giving them life, their horrible odors, their crossed eyes, and num
erous other insults and the fact that all was said in perfect Sioux first made the warriors goggle a little and then they roared with laughter and the one with the reins gave them back to her.

  Red Cloud and Washakie was about doubled over, arms around each other’s shoulders, tears running down their cheeks.

  I was pissed off, you bet. I strode over to Alys, still atop her horse, and I reached up and grabbed her coat collar and jerked her off and dumped her on her butt on the ground. I let her fume about ten seconds and then I jerked her to her feet and I raised my hand, and whispered, “Take out your gun and shoot around my feet,” and she did that right quick with no questions.

  So there I was dancing while she popped away, and we was the toast of the day. Warriors was laughing and falling off their horses, hollering to me that my balls was the size of mouse beans, let a woman treat me like that.

  Alys was a clever girl. After making me dance the pilgrim’s jig she tossed her delicate little pistol over her shoulder and she fell to her knees and picked up a rock and began to exclaim loud nonsense in a tongue never heard on earth, and point to this and that wonder in the stone. She placed the stone on her pistol and she ran around like a pecking hen, cackling and holding two up to the sky and yelling.

  The effect was wondrous.

  The warriors mostly put their hands over their mouths. Then they all backed away and bunched up a couple hundred yards off.

  Alys went to Washakie and Red Cloud. Those two old scoundrels was harder stuff. They wasn’t laughing but they was looking at her and shaking a little from held-back mirth.

  Alys shut up then, and she put her head close to Washakie’s and Red Cloud’s and what she said made these two whoop with laughter and look over at me.

  I stood on my dignity, such as it was.

  Red Cloud went off to his men and he swung up on his horse and they left, a stream of brave men riding the lands they knew, keeping safe their women and children and old folks.

  Alys had an arm around Washakie’s waist and his around her shoulders and they grinned at me like old friends got you dead to rights and there’s nothing worse than that. Your friends know you, you see.

  “Pretty good, huh,” says Alys. She looked like a little girl found with a busted cookie jar and crumbs all over the floor and so she’d brazen it out with beauty.

  “Didn’t know you spoke Sioux,” I says. It somehow didn’t surprise me.

  “A little,” says Alys.

  “You don’t mind,” I says, “what did you say to my esteemed chums, Red Cloud and that old bastard you are hugging there?”

  “Why,” says Alys, “I said you were a great warrior.”

  Right. But there was a disclaimer here somewheres.

  “I said you were a great hunter,” says Alys.

  I nodded. Yes, yes, yes ...

  “And I said we were fucking last night and your arse rolled into the fire and it was a great ride and I plan to do the same tonight.”

  I closed my eyes. I couldn’t remember when I’d been so happy.

  Stands-In-The-Fire-And-Argues.

  Now I’d be Burning Ass and the songs would follow me all the rest of my days.

  “I think I am going to beat you now,” I says.

  “No, Kelly,” says Washakie. “She’s tougher than you and a lot smarter. Quit while you can.”

  I walked off to my horse.

  *see Kelly Blue

  12

  I WARN’T ALL THAT put out with Alys, because I have noticed in life that if folks are laughing at you they generally don’t take the time to kill you. The Sioux had an opinion of me, and they was welcome to it. Small price to pay for my hair. Red Cloud and the other chiefs had some control over their young hotspurs, but not all that much.

  But I didn’t want Alys wandering off on her own anymore; she could have easy ended with her throat cut this morning. She was a damn bonehead, what she was.

  So I sulked. I give off visible black fumes and I didn’t respond to her jests.

  I was flat amazed. She folded up just like that, finally busting into tears and begging me to forgive her and promising never to do that again and ...

  I put on my most patient and long-suffering look and I says dealing with Indians is a complicated business and I would much appreciate it she didn’t muddy the damn waters again.

  She promised. Blubber blubber blubber.

  “Oh, quit,” I says finally. “Nice act.”

  “It’s not ... bawlllllll ... an act!” she whimpers.

  If I live to forty I will never understand women.

  Spotted Tail had told me long ago that women was lawless and a man was a fool to ever figure that he knew what they wanted.

  So here is Alys de Bonneterre, tough enough to boil her brother’s rotting corpse down, tough enough to shoot Pignuts’ ears, all gone to syrup and regrets.

  Something in me didn’t believe a word of it, but there it was.

  It did provide me an opportunity, though, since I did not care to spend the rest of the winter freezing my arse off while Washakie offered up more fossil bones. Time enough in the late spring, when the chances of being froze to death was only fifty-fifty instead of one hundred percent, which they was now.

  “Time we went back to Laramie,” I says, all puffed up with manly force.

  “Of course, Luther,” she says.

  “I ain’t getting out of that damn hotel till the grass greens up,” I says.

  “Of course, Luther. I am going to eat good and drink a lot and rest up. Of course, Luther.”

  All this submissiveness was making me real nervous, for I knew damn well it warn’t Alys.

  But she kept it up and so we packed our traps and wished all good things to Washakie and headed back south toward Laramie and the railroad. The weather was clear and not cold, the wind from the west was damp, I expected there was a hellacious blizzard tearing up the Plains farther east.

  It had been cold enough so that pelts was prime, buffalo to weasels, and trappers and wolfers and hide hunters would be out now until the end of March, getting as many skins as they could.

  I kept us close to the foothills and away from the main trail ’cause the Indians might attack anyone coming up from the south and I didn’t care to get caught in the middle. Oh, it sounds heartless, and most folks would say I was obliged to help my feller whites out, but the truth was it warn’t my fight. They was not supposed to be up here by the terms of the treaty, and what happened usually was miners and hunters went anyway and a lot of them got killed and scalped and then the Army got sucked in after ’em and there we were.

  The soldiers mostly hated fighting the Indians, not because they didn’t like fighting, but because they felt the Indians was in the right and the whites was in the wrong. The Army always got the shit end of the stick.

  One night we camped in a cave high on a ridge and we could see out over the Plains to the east. I had noticed there was a good-sized party of robe hunters off maybe five miles, maybe fifteen or twenty men.

  The Indians attacked in the dead of night, which they don’t usually do, and Alys and I watched. We couldn’t see anything but flashes from the rifles from the hunters—the Indians was using bows and arrows so the flames from the barrels of their guns wouldn’t give them away. The hunters was in a circle firing out, and then suddenly there was a part of the circle gone black and the other flames quickly went out and it was over, except for some screaming, the ones slow and stupid enough not to shoot themselves.

  We headed on, to get away from the noise. The starlight was enough to ride by and we had no quarrel with anyone. Scouts from the party down below had cut our tracks and they knew who we was. I avoided them coulees the Indians like to hide in, cuts in the earth six or eight feet deep, just enough for a horse, out in safe-lookin’ country. The Indians would come up out of nowhere. Like I’ve said, what folks mostly die of out here is attacks of the careless.

  Alys was plenty game and she was a good horsewoman and so I pressed us hard
and we rode all the next day, too, stopping to rest our horses till their wind was back and going on. A horse can go about forever if he has enough breaks at right times, and so we cut almost two days off the time it had taken to go north.

  Finally, Laramie was spread out below—damn place even had streetlamps now, and the windows of most of the buildings had a warm yellow glow to them.

  We come in a bit after eleven at night and the clerk at the hotel had our horses taken back to the stables and we went on up to my rooms—I’d rented them far in advance, for rail travel was uncertain and if the passes was closed to the west, then a lot of passengers could pile up before the passes opened again. Laramie was a great place to be a hotelkeeper. There was no fixed rates for rooms.

  I ordered up hot water and Alys sent a maid off to her digs for clean things, and I let her soak good and long while I sat sipping brandy and smoking a seegar, reading the papers that had piled up. The news was grim everywhere and I thought happy stories don’t sell no newspapers, but somewheres someone must be doing all right.

  “Do you know which Indians were attacking the hunters?” Alys called from behind the screen round the bathtub.

  “Cheyennes,” I says. “Too far south for Sioux.”

  “It was awful to watch,” she says.

  That stumped me, since all we could see was the lights going out around the circle.

  “It’s worse when you imagine,” says Alys.

  “Uh-huh,” I says, “if you think so.”

  She got out of the tub and I could hear her move while she toweled herself and then she just walked around the screen with nothing on but the towel wrapped ’round her head. She was a beauty, sure enough, and she knew it.

  “Don’t be as long as I was,” she says.

  A good look at her and that seemed fine to me.

  We had a good romp and then we was both hungry. The dining room was closed but the desk got us some sandwiches and a hot tureen of soup, oyster stew this time, and oranges from California, they was being shipped from there now.