Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher Read online

  A typical day for him had run like this. At daylight he had stirred in his blankets and robes. back under the low branches of a pine, and had crawled out until he could stand. He came out of bed fully clothed. He had had no such feasts as he had had on the journey with his wife; his meat was jerked venison, lean elk, beaver tail. muskrat together with flour and coffee. Sometimes a whole week passed with no fire. He was simply too busy. Working over the graining blocks and stretching frames took a lot of time. Every day he had to move his horses to spots where they could find forage—either along streams or in mountain meadows, where they could paw down through three or four feet of snow to old grasses. He spent hundreds of hours at the tiresome and painstaking task of dubbing—that is, of removing with pieces. of sharpened elkhorn or obsidian the fat, flesh, and blood from the pelts. He walked hundreds of miles back and forth on the streams. setting his traps and bringing the pelts in. Once in a while he made a fire and roasted a couple of beaver tails and made a pot of coffee. He took time to fill his pipe now and then. He had thought a great deal about his wife and had worried about her: he had had dreams about her that troubled him. As spring drew near his worry became so chronic that he almost burst from the mountains to learn if she was all right.

  When at last he fought his way out, along streams, over elk snowpaths, or over paths which he had to break for his beasts, he tried to think of something at the posts which he could buy for her. If she was like most Indian women she would want brightly colored cloths, beads, ornaments, and ribbons for her hair; he hoped she would prefer a handsome saddle, with bridle and trimmings to match. He had a picture of her dressed like a Crow warrior in the finest embroidered buckskin, with long tassels and fringes, and a gorgeous headdress, with its mass of feathers floating behind her in the wind. Their son would be in a saddle on her back, standing up, his bright fearless eyes fixed with astonishment on everything he passed. By the time he was four or five he would have his own pony and would learn to ride like a Crow; and he would have his own saddle, the finest, and his own buckskin clothing, with the prettiest beadwork the squaws could make. Sam liked to think of his son riding like a Crow not only because the Crows were the best horsemen in the world; they made excellent weapons and were the most formidable fighters on the plains. At leatherwork and embroidery there were no women to match the Absaroka—that is what the stupid French called them, the gens des corbeaux, the Absaroka, the Sparrowhawk people. The Crow warriors were so brave that they went boldly against any people who invaded their lands, including their ancient enemies, the Blackfeet; and they seemed to feel friendly toward the whitemen because the whitemen also loved to slaughter the ferocious Bloods and Piegans. The Crow nation boasted that it had never killed a white person or a friend of the white people; Sam was thinking of this boast as he followed the windbreaks down the canyons.

  He was to think afterward that he had had a sense of it miles before he reached the cabin. He called it his enemy-sense. His enemy-sense would have prompted him in any case to make a wary approach. As mountain man and fatalist he had known all winter that his wife might be killed while he was away; that she could be killed—and indeed that he might be killed, by man or beast. Riding toward her, he told himself that he might be ambushed for the pelts he carried; there developed in him a feeling that Indians had been through this country since he rode away. His guard was up, his senses were alert, and a nausea of loss and loneliness was sinking from his mind down through him, when a mile from the cabin he drew on the reins and then sat, feeling. He didn’t like it at all. He secured his beasts in an aspen thicket and went softly forward on moccasined feet, the rifle barrel across his left arm. On a hill above the river he came within sight of the cabin. There, well-hidden, he peered out, and held his breath. He could see the corral but no sign of the pony; the cabin, with its door wide open, but no sign of his wife. He was beginning to feel desperately ill. He felt that she was not there, and if she was not there he prayed to God that she had gone back to her people. If she was a red warrior’s captive she was now a slave in some village, beaten and cursed by the old shrews of the tribe. If she was a prisoner he would find her, if it took all the years of his life….

  His gaze searched the aspen hillside that sloped down to the cabin from the east; and the river bottomlands to the south and the north. He looked everywhere for a snowtrail. Convinced at last that his wife was not there, and with grief and rage rising in a hot flood all through him, he went forward, but instead of approaching directly from the west he flanked the cabin and came in from the east, a soundless stalker among the trees. When a hundred yards from the cabin he paused and tried to feel the situation. He prayed that she was in the cabin and alive but logic told him that Indians were more likely to be there, waiting for him. He went forward again, until he came to the rear wall, and put an ear to a seam between logs and listened. Then, his rifle cocked, his finger on the trigger, his knife loosened in its sheath, he slipped around a corner and along the north wall. He was peering round the northwest corner, for a glimpse of the doorway, when with a start that shook him clear to his feet he saw the objects before him.

  In an instant of recognition that convulsed him worse than illness or nightmare could have done Sam knew what had happened. He was holding his breath. He felt faint. There before the open door and scattered roundabout were the bones of his wife. Without moving, and without feeling now, for he had been completely numbed, he looked at them and all. around them for perhaps five long minutes. He saw bones that had been picked clean by crows and magpies; and when he advanced, at last, he saw, a hundred feet distant, the skull. The scalp had been so completely taken that there was only a little hair across the nape. He went forward until he could look down, and then stared at the eye sockets, at the holes that were the ears, at the marks of hatchet or knife in the bone of the skull. Then swiftly he entered the cabin. There was nothing in it. The murderers had taken everything.

  Still drawing only half breaths and still feeling faint, he knelt among the bones and saw what until this moment he had missed. As gently as if reaching for a butterfly he picked up an object, set his rifle by the wall, and laid the object across a palm. It was the skull of a baby. He now saw, on looking round, that scattered among his wife’s bones were the bones of his child. He took up one after another to look at them. His first glance had told him that his wife had been dead no more than ten days or two weeks. Sick with grief and remorse, he was telling himself, over and over, that if he had come in two weeks ago she would now be alive: she had been sitting there, on the log he had placed for her; the dear faithful thing had been looking across the river and into the west, for sign of his coming; she had been sewing leather clothing, looking and sewing, sewing and looking. Her rifle had stood by the wall at her left; her knife was in its sheath and the revolver at her waist; and the pony staked on the river bottom had surely been out of sight, or it would have given an alarm. She had been so intent on trying to see him, or on pushing the needle through leather, that she had not heard the soft footfalls; and around the corner had come a red killer and he had been above her before she sensed his presence. With one blow he had almost severed her head low on the neck. He had scalped her and stripped her of everything she had on; and she had lain there, dead, with the baby. his son, kicking and dying inside her.

  Lord God Almighty, this vengeance would be his! His deeply tanned face drained to a sickly gray, he looked north and northeast, knowing that the killer had had to come in that way. In a few minutes he would find a sign of him and he would know from what tribe he had come.

  Sam gathered every bone he could find—a few had been dragged fifty yards or more from the cabin; and he then sat on the earth, and putting them all in his lap, looked down at them. After a few minutes he knew that his eyes had blurred. He had not known that tears were so hot. He could recall no moment from all his years when he had wept. He pressed the skull of Lotus to one cheek, his son’s to the other, and sat, trying to think of what he should do. B
ut he knew what he would do.

  When at last he gently put the bones aside and rose to his feet he was dizzy with rage so blindly murderous that he reached for his rifle and failed to find it. He struck at his eyes but they were clogged with grief. Never before in his life had he felt such dreadful pain and loss and loneliness. He stood, trying to see, and began to wipe at his eyes; and when he could see, and had the rifle in his grasp, he stood still, letting his fury grow, until it filled his whole frame and made him ache to be on his way. As he sensed more deeply his loss and the fantastic cowardice of the killer he could think only of vengeance. The years before him became as clear as they would have been if he had had a time-map; but frst he had to gather what remained of his wife and child, and then search the area to determine which tribe was guilty.

  While walking here and there, around the cabin, over to the river and back, he realized that there had been a light snowfall since his family was slain. Seeing a mark like a shadow, he would reach into the snow and bring up another bone. From the thicket he brought his beasts and took from a packhorse a blanket; within this he put the bones, and wrapped and tied the bundle, and made it secure behind his saddle. He found a needle that Lotus had dropped. Had she been making a jacket for him, a shirt, or moccasins, or something for the child, at the moment the tomahawk fell across her neck?

  From what tribe had the killer come? Sam thought he must be from the Comanches, the ferocious varmints who had cut Jed Smith down with knives and hatchets. Round and round the cabin he went, inside and out, sniffing, but he could detect no Indian odor; nor could he find any sign in the cabin or around it. So he took their snowtrail up the river, and at the junction of the Little Snake with the Yampah he sat on his horse and looked round him. From this point the path went up the Snake. He hardly knew what to make of it: if it had been the Comanches they would have struck off to the east, south of Battle Mountain. He kallated it was not the Comanches after all.

  He knew it was not when, after a journey of two days up the river, he came to an Indian campsite that had been protected by heavy trees from the recent storm. It was on a U-bend of the stream, and on three sides it had such dense windbreak and snowbreak that the ashes of their tire had been undisturbed by wind and storm. A few moccasin tracks were in the clay under a high bank. Sam did not know the moccasin print of the Comanche but he knew that of the Crow as well as he knew his own. These prints seemed to have been made by Crows but this he found so incredible that he studied them with extreme care and searched round them for corroborating evidence. There could be no doubt of it: the redmen who had camped here had been Crows!—the Crows, who boasted that they had never harmed a whiteman, or his friend!—the Crows, who with the mountain men waged war against the Blackfeet. Sam was remembering now that for two or three hundred miles he had ridden with Lotus through Crow country; perhaps the one who had tried to steal his Bowie had trailed him; or perhaps it had been a war party of foolhardy youngsters, eager to count a coup and kill. Because there had been no trace of his snowpath of last November and no sign of him anywhere they had not known where to look for him, and so had slain his wife and fled with her horse, weapons, bedding, and food. One of them had her scalp, and would have it, until Sam Minard found him and cut him wide open, and flung his cowardly liver to the wolves. He would find that killer before he died, so help him, God!

  Over on his right, as he took his way up the river, were mountains, with peaks that rose eleven thousand feet above the sea. As he approached the mountains Sam studied their snowy summits and the forests blanketed with white, wondering how high up those flanks he could climb; for he wanted to swear an oath of vengeance, somewhere high above the earth. The snow up there in the pale sky haze might be fifteen feet deep but on the north side it ought to hold him. He would hide his beasts and fur packs in the foothills, and with his rifle and a little food he would climb as high as he could.

  From the base of the peaks it was only a few thousand feet to their summits but it might take a man a week to get there. While wondering if he should be so romantic and foolish Sam thought of the lovely flowers that would now be blooming on the southern slopes, below the snowline. He would climb at least that far. And when at last he stood far up, in a night world, silent but for the winds, with the scent of flowers around him, he held fragrant bloom to his face, remembering the hours when he had put lupine and columbines and roses in her hair, and hung a mantle of flowers from her shoulders. What a lovely thing she had been when her eyes looked out from the wreath that framed her face and her lips smiled!

  Half the night he waited for the golden lamp to rise out of the gray murk of the east. He was ready when his moment came. Standing on a crag of wind-swept precipice, his rifle at his left side, he looked up at the stars and the blue-gray of the first morning. When half the golden lamp was in sight he spoke. He asked the Almighty Father to look down on him in his trouble and his grief. Never in his life had he raised a hand against the Crow people, but had been their friend, yet when he was gone they came like wolves in the night to kill his wife and child.

  They had known that this girl was a whiteman’s wife. They had known that she was alone, a thousand miles from her people and a long way from her man. She never had a chance to defend herself. There she sat, a baby in her, sewing on a shirt for her man or her child, or looking into the west for sign of her man; and without a moment of warning they had chopped her down. And there she had lain in the yard, dead, with her babydying inside her—there for the wolves and the magpies and ravens.

  He paused there, wondering if he had said enough. There was more that he had wanted to say—to say that in the holy book it said that vengeance was God’s, but that in this case it was Sam Minard’s; to say that he intended to make war, singlehanded and alone, against the whole skulking cowardly Crow nation; to say, “From where I now stand until the day I die I swear upon the bones of my slain wife and child that I will kill every Crow warrior that crosses my path! “

  That was it. That was what he had wanted to say. Was there something else? There had been words from Job, that his father had read at breakfast one morning—that his eyes did shine, and were like the eyes of the morning, or something like that. He had intended to shake his clenched fist at the Crow nation and hurl into the listening night such words of power and fury as would make the peaks tremble. But after coming to the flowers and remembering the flower-hours, and her eyes and smile, a gentleness of the morning or of heaven had touched him; and so be stood on the crag, his face to the morning sky, and became aware of himself as a man who had sworn a terrible oath of vengeance. Never had he really hated any man, or wished to kill any man, but this had been forced on him, and only the coward would blanch from it and turn back. The eyes of the morning, that was all he would need, and a little help from devine justice in the right places. And so he stood, the male on the mountain peak, making his vow of vengeance; and eight hundred miles north the female knelt in her tiny graveyard, before the angelic faces of her slain ones, and uttered a prayer to the same Father.

  The sun was an hour high and the atmosphere a pale golden above the white when Sam turned down the mountain. He had gathered a whole armful of the lovely alpine lilies. On his way down he tried to lay his plans. He would take his pelts to Bridger and pay for the things he had bought; and the remainder he would take to the Laramie post, for that was close to Crow country. He would buy a faster horse if there was one, for there would be times when he would ride for his life. He would buy another Bowie, for there might be times in close fighting when he would need to lay their bellies open, right and left. He knew well that as soon as he had killed a few Crows every warrior in the nation would dedicate himself to his death. He would need a few of the toughest hides to make moccasins for his horse, to be put on when he approached an enemy camp; and he would need twice as much powder and ball as he had ever bought before.

  As he went down the mountain flank he came to other flowers, creamy white with yellow centers, that he though
t almost as lovely as the lilies. To make a basket he stripped off his leather shirt, and inside this he carried a bushel of flowers. On returning to his hidden beasts he took the bundle from behind the saddle, opened it, and literally wrapped and smothered the bones in flowers. The hair on the nape of the skull he kissed. Then, tenderly, with large clumsy hands, he folded bones and flowers within the blanket and made the bundle secure behind his saddle. During these moments he was thinking not of Loretto but of Milton Sublette, who in a fight with the half-breed John Gray had been stabbed so mortally that his associates, thinking he would die, had left him in the care of Joe Meek. Milton had got well and soon thereafter he and Joe had fallen into the hands of a party of hostile Indians. They would have been killed but for a chief and his lovely daughter, who in the dark of night had helped them to escape. Smitten by the girl. Milton not long thereafter had married her. Leaving her in the mountains, as Sam had left Lotus, Milton had gone east on a business trip and had died on his return journey; and within a year or two his wife was shot down by the Bannock Indians. This Indian girl, Meek had said, was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. But not, Sam told himself, as beautiful as Lotus.

  While riding northwest to the Bridger post Sam decided that if he were to live another year, much less five or ten, he would do well to map a plan of attack. This thought led him to a long and careful appraisal of the nature of his enemies. There were some curious advantages on his side. The whiteman was far more adult than the redman, who, in fact, was only a child in his emotions—impulsive, hotheaded, and by turns craven or reckless. The whiteman, faced with danger, decided instantly and acted swiftly; the redman was in some measure inhibited by his burden of superstitions, and had to wait on medicine men and propitious signs. The whiteman had no boss, no chief. The redman was the servile creature of ritual and ceremonial—he spent a part of his life in such monkey business as touching the earth with the bowl of his pipe and then turning the stem upwards to invoke medicine magic. Even so, the redman thought the whiteman as brainless and vacant as the fool hen, as slow as the turtle, and as gullible as the antelope. Why, he asked, did the whiteman put the centers of logs in his fires, instead of the ends? Look! There they were, hours later, with the centers burned out and the ends lying on either side of a dying fire. It was true, Sam had decided, that the whiteman was buffalo-witted in some ways.