Boone's Lick

by Larry McMurtry

  “Then I’ll drown!” he yelled.

  We were tied up for the night—it was pitch dark when Joel went overboard. We heard one splash and then nothing—none of us could see a thing.

  “That poor fellow’s in the grip of a fit,” Father Villy said.

  “Yes, a love fit,” Uncle Seth said. “I doubt we’re rid of him, though. It takes determination to drown yourself in a river this shallow. I doubt he’s got that much determination.”

  Uncle Seth was right. Joel slunk back on board a little later, shivering in his wet clothes.

  The Platte River, which we came to the next day, looked just as muddy as the Missouri, but it wasn’t as wide. There was no town to speak of, just a few shacks. A boat was stuck on a sandbar, a half mile or so up the Platte. The men who were struggling to pull it off looked like moving gobs of mud.

  In the afternoon Ma told us to start packing the wagon, a tiresome chore. We had stuff scattered from one end of the boat to the other. Some of the utensils we had started out with must have been flung overboard, like Granpa. Many were never found, but we had a pretty full wagon anyway.

  Aunt Rosie decided not to get off in Omaha—her intention was to stay on board until the boat reached Council Bluffs.

  “What’s wrong with Omaha?” Ma asked.

  “The name—what does it mean?” Rosie asked.

  “Oh, it’s a tribe,” Uncle Seth informed her. “I’ve met several Omahas.”

  “Well, it’s not my tribe and besides, I’ve heard Iowa’s pretty,” Aunt Rosie said.

  “Any place can be pretty if the sun’s shining bright,” Uncle Seth said.

  Aunt Rosie’s decision to stay on board a little longer made at least one person happy: Joel.

  “I believe he thinks he can talk her into marriage between here and Council Bluffs,” Uncle Seth said.

  “I don’t think he’s aiming that high,” Ma said. “But he is aiming.”

  Ma was tapping her fingers on the railing of the boat. It was a habit she had—she tapped her fingers when she was trying to make up her mind. Father Villy and Charlie Seven Days were planning to get off at the Omaha docks, but none of us knew for sure what Ma was planning.

  “All right, Seth,” she said suddenly. “What’s the verdict? Do we get off here, or do we go on upriver?”

  I had never seen Ma look at Uncle Seth quite as hard as she looked at him then. If her eyes had been nails he would have been nailed tight to the boat.

  “It’s your trip, Mary Margaret—why should I be the one to say?” he replied.

  At that point people sort of melted back, toward the far side of the boat—all except me. I wanted to know what it meant that my mother was looking at my uncle that hard.

  “Because you know where Dick is,” Ma said. “Or if you don’t know exactly, you can get us in the neighborhood.”

  “How would I?” Uncle Seth countered. “I ain’t seen Dick in fourteen months—he could be anywhere.”

  But he seemed nervous, which wasn’t his usual way at all. Usually Uncle Seth’s words just flowed right out and kept flowing.

  “Because you’d know if he had a woman—an Indian woman,” Ma said.

  Everybody melted farther away—but Ma wasn’t whispering, and I expect they heard.

  “You better not play me false, Seth,” Ma said. “I need to know where Dick Cecil is. I’ve already lost my own father because of this. Don’t you play me false.”

  There was a silence so long and so tense that I considered just jumping in the river, like Joel had. Ma had Uncle Seth pinned to the deck with her eyes. He was going to have to answer her—there was no escape.

  Aunt Rosie couldn’t stand the strain.

  “Just tell her, Seth,” she said. “My Lord, she’s his wife.”

  Just then we eased up to the Omaha docks, and Uncle Seth answered Ma’s question by deciding to get us off the boat.

  “Let’s get this wagon off the boat,” he said. “Sherman, you take charge of the extra mules. October’s a fine time of year to be traveling on the Platte. If we travel steady I believe we can make the new forts by Christmas.”

  In only minutes we had the wagon and the livestock unloaded. Father Villy helped, plodding through the mud barefooted. Charlie planned to sell his canoe and buy a horse—he said he would meet us by nightfall.

  When it came time to say good-bye to Aunt Rosie, she cried, Ma cried, we children cried, baby Marcy cried, and the boatmen cried, even though she wasn’t leaving them. With so many of us crying the boatmen couldn’t keep from joining in.

  But Ma and Aunt Rosie hugged one another the longest—you could see that it was a pain for the sisters to part.

  Finally Ma crawled up onto the wagon seat, clucked to the mules, and we were all soon slogging through the Omaha mud. Aunt Rosie waved and waved, and we all waved back. When we went over the first hill Aunt Rosie was talking to Joel—they were both just dots on the river.

  Neva and I would have liked to spend some time in Omaha—we had never seen brick buildings before, and Omaha had plenty of them. G.T. was sulking for some reason. We did stop at a big general store long enough to get a few supplies and replace some of the utensils that had washed overboard. Uncle Seth bought G.T. and I good strong hunting knives—he said we would need them soon. Neva got a new bonnet, and we were each allowed a piece of sticky molasses candy. Uncle Seth wanted to buy Ma a lace shawl, but she just looked at him funny and said: “Lace? You want to buy me lace, when we’re going into the wilderness? A suit of armor would be more useful.”

  “Well, there’ll be balls and such,” Uncle Seth said. I think his feelings were a little hurt by her refusal.

  “Remember how you used to shine at balls, Mary Margaret?” he said.

  I guess Ma did remember—she softened to him a little, when he said that.

  “I was a girl then,” she said. “It’s been such a while since I was a girl, Seth.”

  “It don’t mean you can’t still shine,” Uncle Seth said—but he didn’t buy the shawl. Instead he bought several sacks, which puzzled me, because we didn’t have anything to put in them.

  Charlie Seven Days caught up with us just before sundown, which was a relief to Ma—she had come to put a lot of trust in Charlie’s judgment. The little sorrel horse he had bought wasn’t much taller than a big dog. This amused Uncle Seth no end.

  “My God, Charlie, that horse ain’t big enough to fart,” he said.

  “Seth, watch your talk,” Ma said.

  That night we made our first campfire in Nebraska, using driftwood we found along the Platte River. Father Villy sat up late, teaching Neva French songs, of which he knew a bunch. Uncle Seth would usually jump into any sing-along, but this time he didn’t. All evening, while the fire crackled, he hardly said a word.

  “The stars are brighter in Nebraska,” G.T. said. “Some of those stars look as big as rocks.”

  Ma kept her eyes on Uncle Seth—I think she may have felt that she had been too hard on him. At one point she offered him more coffee, but he just shook his head. I think that tussle of wills, between the two of them, had fairly worn him out.

  5

  I HAVEN’T seen a tree since Wednesday—nearly a week,” Ma said. “I never expected to be in a place where I wouldn’t see a tree in a week. It’s spooking me, Seth.”

  It was spooking me too, and Neva and G.T. as well. When we first left Omaha there were plenty of trees along the Platte, but after ten days or so they began to thin out. Then we seemed to have passed the last one. All we could see in any direction were little round, bumpy hills, covered with brown grass. There were bushes and reeds along the Platte—but that was all. G.T. had yet to catch a single crawdad in it, or even a good-sized frog.

  “Rest your mind, Mary Margaret,” Uncle Seth said. “There are trees farther west—plenty of them.”

  “How much farther west?” Ma wanted to know.

  “Six weeks should put us in some good thick trees,” Uncle Seth said. “Let’s just
plug along and get to Fort Laramie. Then we might need to study the maps.”

  “Do you think Dick will be there?” Ma asked.

  “No, but that’s where we can pick up some useful news,” Uncle Seth said. “There’s be somebody at Fort Laramie who can help locate just about anybody you might name.”

  Ma didn’t press the matter. After her set-to with Uncle Seth in Omaha they had soon got back on good terms—better terms than they had been on for a while, we all thought. At night Ma and Uncle Seth would still be sitting by the fire together, talking, when the rest of us got too tired to stay awake.

  That was how it had been at home, for most of our lives—the sound of the two of them talking was usually the last thing we heard before we went to sleep.

  What they talked about so much, I never knew, but the sound of their two voices made a good sound to go to sleep by—soothing, like the sound of rain.

  That night it came a hard frost—hard enough to freeze the Platte, not to mention those of us in the wagon. The ducks that had been paddling around on the river the day before were walking around on solid ice, quacking and complaining. That was the day we learned what the sacks were for, that Uncle Seth had bought in Omaha. He gave one to me, one to G.T., and one to Neva.

  “Turds,” he said. “Go gather them. I imagine you’ll be finding cow turds mostly, with maybe a pile of horse pods now and then. I’ll give a dime to anyone who finds a buffalo chip.”

  For ten days we’d been following an immigrant train—a large one, with more than one hundred wagons in it. Every time we topped a hill we would see it, way off ahead. Neva was wild to catch up with them—she thought there’d be boys to play with—but Ma made no effort to catch up.

  “When winter’s coming and you’re in country without wood it’s fine luck to be behind a wagon train that big,” Uncle Seth said. “A train that size will spew out droppings all day long. You three get to be our turd gatherers. Fill up your sacks and we’ll have a fine campfire tonight.”

  “You mean we’re going to burn turds?” G.T. asked. “We never burned turds in Missouri.”

  “You oaf, that was because we had wood, in Missouri,” Neva said.

  “This hard freeze will make your task easy,” Uncle Seth said. “The droppings will be froze hard.”

  He was right on that point. The three of us filled several sacks with frozen droppings, and it didn’t even take us much of the day. Once when we were a good distance from the wagon we heard a gunshot, which scared us good, but it was only Charlie Seven Days, who had managed to stalk a little antelope.

  Though it warmed up considerably during the day, the wind rose just before sunset and some rolling black clouds began to spit little pellets of sleet at us.

  “Ow, it’s like needles,” G.T. said. That was what the sleet felt like.

  “Get behind your mules,” Uncle Seth advised. “Let them take the brunt of it.”

  We huddled up behind the mules and crowded as close to them as we could. When the moon finally came up and the sleet stopped, the plains had a white, icy look—yet Father Villy was still walking around barefoot, indifferent to the fact that he was walking on sleet.

  I don’t think G.T. really believed that cow turds would burn, but they did. The priest and Uncle Seth banked the fire so skillfully that we were soon as warm as if we were burning wood.

  Ma cooked part of Charlie’s antelope, which was very tasty, but there was not much singing around the campfire that night. The hard freeze and the sleet reminded us that we were out in the middle of a bald plain, with no shelter except a wagon—and there was colder weather still to come.

  “I wish you’d left me at home, Ma,” G.T. said. “It’s too chilly out here.”

  “Don’t be a complainer,” Ma said mildly. “You’re safer with us than you would be at home.”

  “I guess I won’t be, when the Indians come and cut off my ears,” G.T. said.

  “You oaf, why would they want your dirty ears?” Neva asked.

  “Neva, stop calling him an oaf every minute,” Ma said. “It’s grating on my nerves.”

  “Mine too,” I said—Neva gave me a black look.

  What happened next reminded me of that day on the river when G.T. said he was a poor fisherman and then immediately landed a big catfish. He had no sooner mentioned Indians when twenty or more came riding over the nearest ridge, their horses crunching the sleet under their hooves. We had seen an Indian or two, as we came along the trail, but to have twenty or more suddenly show up, when we were alone on a frozen plain at night, was such a shock that my hair stood up. G.T. was so scared he couldn’t close his mouth. Neva was the opposite—she buttoned her lip. There were several dogs traveling with the Indians, barking and howling: the sound carried far over the prairies.

  All that saved us kids from panic was that none of our men seemed alarmed. In fact, they didn’t even seem surprised, though they all did get to their feet to greet the newcomers.

  “I believe it’s our Pawnee brethren,” Father Villy said. “I wondered when they’d be paying us a visit.”

  “Do you speak the tongue, Charlie?” Uncle Seth asked. “I have only a smattering, myself.”

  Charlie shook his head. He wasn’t pleased to see the Pawnees, but he wasn’t scared, either.

  Our menfolk may not have been scared, but our mules were—either the smell of the Indian horses or the howling of their dogs upset the mules greatly. They were snorting and straining at their ropes. Charlie and Uncle Seth went over to quiet them down, while Father Villy and the rest of us watched the Pawnees slip and slide down the sleety ridge.

  Ma had baby Marcy in her arms, wrapped up tight against the chill.

  “There’s no cause for alarm, ma’am,” Father Villy assured her.

  “I’m not alarmed,” Ma said. “What do they want, barging in this time of night?”

  Father Villy seemed startled that Ma would bring up the time.

  “You’ll not find too many red men who worry much about the time,” he told Ma. “Time is just of a piece to them. They don’t clock it apart, like we do.”

  “You’d think anybody could see it’s bedtime,” Ma said. “If those dogs don’t quiet down they’ll wake this baby.”

  “These Pawnee boys ain’t hostile, but they’re sly thieves,” Father Villy said. “We need to guard our goods.”

  “Good advice,” Uncle Seth said. “A quick Pawnee can steal the socks off a preacher—maybe that’s why Villy goes barefoot. Probably lost so many socks he decided to give up on footware.”

  A minute later we had a passel of Indians crowding around us, horses snorting, dogs barking, the whole crowd smelling pretty rank. Four or five Indians tried to warm themselves by our fire, but most of them were eyeballing our equipment, crowding around the wagon and examining what they could find. Baby Marcy soon woke up and began to howl, a development that annoyed Ma.

  Uncle Seth and Father Villy made an effort to be polite to the Pawnees, talking in sign to the skinny old fellow who seemed to be their headman. He wore an old black hat and had a string of yellow bear teeth around his neck. He chattered away but I had no idea what he was saying. Meanwhile, Charlie planted himself by our horses and mules and kept a close watch on them.

  “I’ve met this old rascal,” Uncle Seth said. “He was at Fort Laramie for one of the big pows. His name is Nose Turns Down. His notion is that we should give him a mule.”

  “He won’t get a mule, but he might get a piece of my mind if he doesn’t get out of here and let us get some rest,” Ma said.

  An Indian came up to me and felt the buttons of my coat—another did the same to G.T., and one even pulled a comb out of Neva’s hair. I guess he just wanted to look at it because he soon handed it back. I think Neva was startled that anyone would be so bold as to take a comb out of her hair.

  It seemed like the old Pawnee in the black hat went on jabbering at Uncle Seth for an hour, though I suppose it was really only several minutes. Although Uncle Seth was
perfectly polite I could see the vein working on the top of his nose.

  “I think we better give them a plug of tobacco,” he said—we had laid in several plugs when we passed through Omaha.

  “Why?” Ma asked. “I wouldn’t give you a plug, if you woke my baby.”

  “It’s the custom, ma’am,” Father Villy said.

  “That’s right—the custom,” Uncle Seth said. “Throw in a little coffee too, Villy—but I think we better balk if they ask for bullets.”

  I guess the Pawnee did ask for bullets, because the palaver went on for a good while, with the old headman doing the talking and the other Indians just prowling around, looking under the wagon and examining the mule harness. Finally Uncle Seth handed over the plug of tobacco, while Father Villy filled a little pouch with coffee beans.

  “Go light on the coffee, Father,” Ma said. “If I have to travel in a place with no trees without my coffee you’ll all have to put up with a cranky woman—Seth knows how I get when I don’t have my coffee.”

  “She’s a regular Comanche when she’s coffee starved,” Uncle Seth said.

  It was plain that the Pawnees had expected more in the way of presents than a plug of tobacco and a little pouch full of coffee beans, but that was all they got. The old headman grumbled, but once the warriors had fingered everything two or three times, they rode off toward the river, which was two or three miles south. Even after they slipped over the next ridge we could still hear the sleet crunching under their horses’ hooves.

  The plains were vast and white and gloomy, but at least the Indians were gone.

  “Think how cold your head would be if they pulled your scalp off in weather like this,” G.T. said, at which point Neva gave him the blackest look yet.

  6

  IT was such a relief to us children to have the Indians gone that we all started yawning and could have gone right to sleep, had it not been that the adults took a different view of the matter.

  “Now don’t be yawning, boys—you’ve got to help Charlie guard the mules,” Uncle Seth said. “I’ll help Mary Margaret keep a lookout on the wagon, and Neva and Villy can just be general guards.”