That night we reached the Gallatin, the easternmost of the three rivers that, join to form the Missouri. Next came the Madison, then the Jefferson farthest to the west; and beyond the Jeff, across the divide, were the Encantadas—the headwaters of the Río de Santa Buenaventura. Spybuck and Bar-che-am-pe said that White Hart Hollow was on the Garnet Greek, a tributary of the Buenaventura, between that river and the Jefferson; in short, quite a way upstream from the Three Forks. They debated long and hot over whether it would be better to go down the Gallatin toward the Forks and then work our way up either the Madison or the Jeff, easier going in terms of terrain, or to head up the Gallatin and then bushwhack our way west to the Buenaventura.
Spybuck argued that going up the Gallatin and across the mountains would take us around the flank of the Blackfeet, who were thickest at the Three Forks. But it would be tough riding, over the Spanish Peaks and right through the heart of the Madison Range.
Pine Leaf was for going straight down the Gallatin to the Forks, smack into the heart of Blackfoot country, devil take the hindmost. “Let’s be bold,” she said. “Fight it out with them if war is what they want. We are Grow soldiers, and we fear no one.”
My girls snuck worried looks at each other, their faces solemn.
“Bold talk from a coup-crazy lady,” Spy said, in English so that she couldn’t understand him. “But we wouldn’t last ten minutes against a concerted attack by a Grovan war party. She may not care if she dies, but I certainly value my scalp more highly. I say let’s proceed up the Gallatin, then cross over through the back door to Garnet Creek.”
“Yes,” Owney agreed, “and let’s proceed slowly. I would like to pan some of the riffles along this river, see if I can find color. All of these mountains look young enough to be auriferous, that is to say, gold-bearing. If we can locate a rich ledge or vein of it here, why, then we will not have to brave the terrors of those fearsome Big Bellies. I cannot help but think of them as cannibals, what with that awful name you gave them.”
Spybuck said, “No, they get the name in translation from the French. Gros Ventres. The first coureurs de bois who encountered the tribe must have seen them just after gorging on a fresh buffalo kill. They are not true Blackfeet either, merely their staunch allies; they even speak a different language. The Big Bellies are cousins to the Arapaho, whom they hate, but good friends of the Rees.”
That sealed our decision. I still had nightmares of my friends roasting on the wagon wheel.
And thus we went our way slow and careful up the Gallatin River. It seemed we stopped every quarter of a mile so Owney could grub around in gravel bars. He worked pan after pan of grit and sand in his search for gold but found none. His face grew longer and longer.
While Owen panned, I spent the time fishing. We had a packet of small fishhooks along in our plunder, so I clubbed a fool hen one day and tied up some flies from its feathers. I used a length of red wool from a blanket for dubbing the body, tied on the wings and tail with bits of feather stripped from the fool hen, using silk thread from a spool which Calf had swiped from Fort Cass when Tulloch and his engages weren’t looking, dabbed on a spot of buffalo-hoof glue to secure the whole shaggy concoction, and there it was, as pretty a trout fly as you could buy in the fanciest sporting goods shops of Boston, Philadelphia, or even, by God, New York.
The trout agreed. With a twelve-foot ash whip for a fish pole and thirty feet of greased string for a line, I was soon out among them, wading hip-deep into the riffles and swimming the fly down through the runs, a trout on every cast. These trout were different from the speckled natives we caught back home; bigger for one thing, some of them two feet long at least; and they had bright green backs with a red slash under their chins, like their throats had been cut by some underwater assassin before they came thrashing into the hand. The Daughters served as my ghillies, grabbing the trout when I worked them in close, then braining them with a rock and stringing them on a peeled stick. Pretty soon we had enough for a proper fish fry.
“Your pole and pretty feathers are a clever way to catch fish,” Plover said when we had waded back ashore. “Now I’ll show you how the Grows do it.”
She crept up the shoreline on her hands and knees, peering cautiously through the shrubs every few seconds, until she spotted a big trout lying in the slack water hard against the bank. Then slowly, slowly, with infinite patience, she reached down through the water until her hand was beneath its throat. Then with a whoop she reared upright, the great gleaming fish twisting and flailing with her fingers hooked through its gills. It was near half again as long as the biggest one I had caught.
“How did you get it to stay so still while you were reaching for it?” I asked her.
“Easy,” she said, grinning. “I tickle its belly—like this!”
And quick as a flash she tickled my own belly. I grabbed her and dragged her down into the weeds; soon the Calf was into the wrestling match, and sooner still the fray had turned into another double seduction. Oh, how those girls could gang up on me.
When we got back to the others, Owen was a changed man. His eyes were on fire, his face lit up, a grin stretching from ear to ear.
“Look at this!” he yelled as we came within earshot. He ran toward me like a kid who’d found a penny in the street. He opened the clenched palm of his hand and revealed … a nugget the size of a nail head.
“Taint much of a treasure,” I said.
“That’s not the point, idiot,” he said. “The point is that it’s here, in this mountain range. Oh, we’re way downstream of the mother lode. It may not even be at the head of this river. But it is in these mountains.”
He turned and looked up into them, the great crags brooding over our heads, the wind muttering up in the bald, gray peaks. Owen’s eyes were shining.
“All we have to do,” he said, “is go up there and find it.”
THREE DAYS UP the Gallatin and Pine Leaf, who’d been scouting ahead, came riding back to the pack train with her eyes shining. “Enemies ahead,” she signed as soon as she got near us. “Blackfeet … four soldiers.” She raised her bow and shook it. “We kill them.”
“Not yet,” Spy signed back. “Come in. We talk. Which way they headed?”
“Upstream.”
“Let them go; no need to fight right now. Maybe more soldiers with them.”
The Pine Leaf looked at him for a long moment, cold as Gallatin water, then spit on the ground and wheeled her pony. Off she went to battle, all by herself
“Goddamnit!” Spy yells. “Well, let’s go, then.”
“Stay here with the mules!” I yell back at the Daughters.
We gallop forward through the lodgepole pines and aspens, Owney beside me on the buckskin, thumbing a fresh cap onto the tit of his Hawken. My fusil is newly loaded with ball and buck; I loosen the tomahawk in my belt.
Pine Leaf is still a hundred yards ahead of us when we see the Blackfeet, riding upstream on Nez Perce horses, now wheeling around at the sound of her hoofbeats.
Immediately they scatter.
Pine Leaf’s bow twangs and the one farthest toward the river slumps sideways in his saddle with an arrow through his neck, then falls heavily to the ground. The other three Blackfeet abandon their ponies and quick fort up behind a fallen ponderosa, a big yellow tree-trunk log thick as a man to the waist, but not before she puts in another arrow; you can hear the whack of it hitting, this one into a buck’s shoulder. She charges full tilt at the pine tree fort.
Bang! a fusee roars. Pine Leaf’s pony stumbles, blood all down its throat, and she half falls, half leaps clear, dropping her bow now and pulling her battle-ax. She sprints toward the tree, ducks aside as an arrow comes whizzing, runs ahead. … Then Owney is pelting past me a-horseback, yelling and shaking his rifle over his head; and he jumps the log, reins around, fires the Hawken from the hip. I lose him in the bloom of smoke. …
Pine Leaf is over the log, ax swinging. … A chunk! and an ugly gurgle; then her war whoop. …
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Oh, it’s awful, just awful. … But by God ain’t it fun when it goes your way? Well, I guess so.
Then I see a figure on horseback riding back toward us through the popple. I raise my gun, but it’s only Spybuck. He had circled out and around us to cut off any Blackfeet that escaped Pine Leaf’s onslaught. With him he was leading two of the Indian ponies. His face was dark, angry.
“There was no need for that,” he said as he rode up. “No need at all to kill these men.”
“They are my enemies,” the Pine Leaf says. “They kill my people; they killed my brother.”
Then we see she’s bleeding from two holes, one in her neck and the other in her chest. Owney is off his horse in a flash, grabs her and holds her up.
“Get their hair,” Pine Leaf says.
Owney lays her down behind the log. Pulls up her shirt to see the chest wound. Her breasts are quite lovely except for the blood on them. The hole is above the right one, bubbling like a soda spring.
“Shit, she’s lung-shot,” Owney says.
“Get the hair!” Pine Leaf says.
Owen looks up at me. “Get it,” he says.
“But I never took a scalp before,” I say.
“You want Blackfoot scalps?” Plover pipes up. They had come up behind us with the mules. “The Calf, she has one already.”
I see the Calf just rising from the body of the first Blackfoot Pine Leaf had killed. Something long and limp and black dangles from her fist, and her knife is bloody. She carries it over to Pine Leaf and lays it on her belly.
“Here, Dill,” says Plover. “You take the reins; 111 cut the other scalps.”
She squats over the body of the dead Indian, whips out her knife, cuts a quick circle around the top of his skull. Seems to me the Indian winced at the cut. Then she works the point of the knife under the skin, kneels on his shoulders, and yanks upward, sharp-like. Pop! it comes free.
“Now give it to me,” Pine Leaf says.
Plover passed the scalp to Owen, and he offered it to Pine Leaf. “Good,” she said. Then she spit upon it and handed it back. “Now throw it in the river. That makes one hundred. At last I am done with blood-for-blood. Now at last we can sleep together like man and wife.” “Goddamn, I have had enough of this.” Spybuck explodes, sitting his horse with the Indian ponies in train. “Take these critters and tie them up good so they do not run. I must go after the others, lest they get to the Blackfoot camp and alert them. Kee-rist! She risks all our lives just to take a couple of scalps so’s she can sleep with her boyfriend! I would call that damn silly.” He wheels and rides off through the timber.
“SO YOU HAVEN’T actually, well, conjugated with her yet?” I asked Owney that night.
“Not quite,” he admits, a blush staining his cheekbones.
“What does that mean, ‘not quite? Either you did or you didn’t.” “We express our affection in other ways,” he says.
“Does she flail your wail?”
“Something like that.”
“Like, tootle your flute?”
“Umph.”
“Well, my girls do that all the time when they can. It counts for conjugation in my book.”
“Not with me,” he says.
“Aw, where did you learn about love anyway?” I rides him. “From Mam?”
He whirls on me and knocks me on my ass. “Now you lay off of that, pipsqueak,” he says.
I did.
But conjugation was on everyone’s mind that evening around the tiny campfire Spybuck built. Seems like killing will do that to people. The Daughters were all over me even though I had taken no hand in the slaying of the Blackfeet. Pine Leaf was already perky, the blood no longer flowing from the two buckshot holes in her. There was no sign of infection around the wounds. As they say, meat don’t spoil in the mountains.
As for Spybuck, though, he looked downright melancholy.
“What’s the trouble?” I asked him when we were alone for a minute.
“Trouble?” he snorts. “I’ll tell you what the trouble is. She shouldn’t have killed those goddamn Grovans. These men were part of a raiding party returning to its home base, totally unaware of our presence, intent on escaping with their horses and their trophies. Oh yes, they had Flathead scalps on their belts, and the Nez Percá ponies they’d stolen, but now, when they don’t catch up with the rest, their soldier friends will backtrack those ponies that got away, looking for vengeance, and they will find us eventually.”
“We’ll be ready for them,” I said. “But what I think is really bothering you is all this lovey-dovey stuff going on. When was the last time you had a woman?”
He laughs kind of bitter and says, “Long ago.”
“Take one of mine,” I say. “They’re too demanding anyway.”
“Well …”
“Which one do you want?”
“Neither of them,” he says, sighing and slumping some there by the fire. Then he looks me straight in the eye. “You see, I have a wife back in Kansas. Her name is Mary Ann. I love her dearly. She didn’t want me going to the mountains again, begged me to stay back with the tribe for once, learn the white man’s ways. Become a farmer. But I couldn’t do it. So I came west for beaver again, as I had so many a time before, hoping to to earn a little money. I knew the mountains; I could take care of myself. On a trip last year I even brought my son along, our only child. …” He choked up then and couldn’t continue. “But no,” he said at last. “Thanks anyway for your offer.”
EIGHT
WE MADE TRACKS early the next morning for the Spanish Peaks. Actually, we did not make tracks, not if we could help it; Spy insisted that we wade the horses and mules up the river to the next convenient ford. When we left the water, breaking uphill to the west, he rode behind us brushing out our trail with a pine bough. Owen fretted at leaving the river, but when Spy pointed out that there were many streams, indeed many more great rivers, ahead, all draining from this same mountain system, he cheered some. They could prove richer in gold than the Gallatin. Still, his face grew long again.
We followed game trails up into the mountains, walking ahead of the animals more miles than we rode. The timber thinned quickly and soon we were climbing steep switchbacks through bare rock and heather, always trying to keep in the lee or shadow of the big raw rocks that studded the slopes. High above we could see the square dirty gray curl-horned forms of mountain sheep lying in the sunlight, with their lambs frolicking about them.
“Mutton for supper if we’re lucky,” said Spy.
“Won’t the sound of a shot alert the Grovans?” Owney asked.
“I’ll borrow Bar-che-am-pe’s bow and arrows.”
That lady rode easy, her shoulders only bunched a little now and then at the twinge of her wounds over the rough spots in the trail.
We skirted south of the Spanish Peaks, raising a lone mountain high to the south and what Spy said was Gallatin Peak to the northwest. “Our road leads between them,” he said. “Then we’ll drop down into the Madison basin. But I think we should spend the night up here in the high country so we can see any Indian campfires down below.” He killed a young ewe just at nightfall, and we broiled mutton chops over a fire we built in the dark lee of a sheltering boulder. It was fine-grained, sweet meat, juicier than deer or elk or even buffalo. The horses and mules had only scant forage, but they were fat enough to suffer a day of short rations with no harm done.
That night when I went to relieve Spy on watch, he pointed out many pinpoints of firelight far away to the northwest. “Indians camped along the Madison,” he said. “A fairly big village; that means women and children. It’s not a Blackfoot war party. I doubt they’d bring their whole band along with them this far south. Gould be Flatheads on the way back over the pass from their summer buffalo hunt.”
“So where are those Grovans you fear?”
“Gould be anywhere, but I am hoping the main party continued straight on up the Gallatin toward Targhee Pass. From there they could drop down
to Henry’s Fork of the Snake. Rich pickings for a war party, with lots of fur brigades working that country clear on down to Green River.”
“You must have a map of this whole damn jumble, mountains and rivers and passes, all of them engraved somewhere in your brain.” “Well, I have been coming out here now for near ten years,” Spy said. “The country has its way with you. I could not tolerate what was happening with my people back east, so I headed across the Mississippi on my own hook, came up from Saint Louis with General Ashley’s expedition in 1824, along with James Glyman and Black Harris and Jim Beckwourth.”
“You said back at the fort that Tecumseh was your uncle. Who was your father?”
“Tenskwatawa, they called him.”
“The Prophet?”
“The very man. But he proved a false prophet. After Tecumseh was killed at the Thames River up in Ontario, the Shawnees disowned my father, stripped him of rank and title. The tribe decided to go the white man’s way.” He shook his head and laughed, a bitter laugh. “I guess I inherited my father’s inability to see the future clearly. I sure didn’t see the Rees coming to kill us in the Medicine Bows, and I surely did not see the future of this country here where we are today: beaver being trapped out from the Gila to the Columbia; buffalo killed by the thousands for their robes, even by the very Indians who depend on them for their lives. Next thing you know there’ll be wagon trains of white farmers rolling west, heading out into this country to grow com and wheat and cattle. They’ll plant towns and cities out here, with churches, schools, libraries, banks, factories, dram shops. . . . They’ll post a big sign in curlicue lettering just at the city limits: ‘Welcome to Deadville.’ Goddamn but I wish I had a swallow of whiskey right now. . . . Anyway, I’ll leave no progeny behind me to suffer the outrage to come.”
We were quiet for a moment, looking down at the faraway campfires. Off in the distance an elk bugled; early for the rut, but who knows what can happen in this high country?
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