Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher Read online

  A few minutes later he again put his pipe aside and took his mouth harp. In turn he played and sang. “Au clair de la lune,” a French chanson of the eighteenth century; “The Toubadour’s Song”; “Green Grows the Laurel” but in the middle of this he broke off to tell her that far south, in Kit Carson land, they were calling it lilacs. He would play a phrase, sing it, and play it again; and all the while she intently watched him, like a child determined to understand.

  “Flies in the pemmican, skip to my Lotus

  Flies in the pemmican, skip to my Lotus,

  Flies in the pemmican, skip to my Lou!”

  She gave him a marvelous smile for that: she knew the word “pemmican.”

  “You know, Mrs. Minard, I think I’ll send for a banjo.”

  “Ban—jo.”

  “Banjo.” While pretending to strum an instrument he made banjo sounds with his lips. When he left home the only banjo he knew was the long-necked fretless instrument, used in black-faced minstrel shows, English ballads, and popular Irish and Scottish tunes of the day. A letter from his brother David said there was now a banjo with five strings and frets in the fingerboard, and that the playing style was changing from chording to a developed solo. That all sounded good.

  “Hey, git along, git along Josey!

  Hey, git along, Jim along Joe!”

  She smiled at him. He brought her hands to his lips and kissed them, both backs and palms, and then the lingers. He thought they were getting along all right. When the moon rose above the trees he pointed and said, “Moon.”

  “Moon.”

  “A Mozart moon.” When the moon was round and melonripe, like the one up there, he wanted to make his mouth organ sound like a French horn, so that he could play a horn solo; he wanted to express the music in winds, the murmuring lullabies in flowing water, the exquisite bird arias, the great lovers’ sighs made by trees—for the Almighty, his father had told him, had the finest orchestras and the most magnificent symphonies in the world. It was his father who had told him that Knecht’s “Musical Portrait of Nature” had fertilized the soil for Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. On the pianoforte his father had striven to paint tones—to evoke mental images with auditory impressions; on his mouthpiece Sam could do a fair imitation of the flute, cello, and oboe, but he failed completely when he tried to bring forth the round golden bell-tones of the horn.

  “What fun we’ll have,” he said, squeezing her. “No taxes, no policemen, no government, no neighbors, no preachers—only the four of us, eating and sleeping, playing and singing.” He turned and lightly kissed her forehead, cheeks, lips, but she gave no response. He had thought that Eve was the same in all women. Did she know that some of the finest singers on earth were birds? On their long ride south they would hear them, the meadow lark, the hermit thrush, the wood thrush, the grosbeak, the oriole. He guessed he would have one more pipeful and they would roll in. Standing, he looked at the bluff above them and at the country roundabout, to be sure that the only approach an enemy could make was from the front. He then sat, and while he smoked and looked at his wife her gaze moved over his face, as though to fix it in memory, or as though marking the differences between red faces and white. He supposed she did not know what to make of Whiteman music, or of his kissing, for the redmen did not kiss their women. Perhaps she was wondering when he was going to take her, with the brutal and savage passion with which most of the males of the mammalia took their females. Poor little Lotus! She would have a few more days of peace.

  Yes, it was a Mozart moon. September was almost here; at this season the nights in the high northern mountains seemed to have been lifted off the glaciers. But he had plenty of bedding. Putting his pipe away, he rolled her into a buffalo robe as though she were a doll. Raising the part on which her head lay, he dragged pine needles and twigs under the fur so that she would have a kind of pillow, though he was not sure that the red people used pillows; and he put the revolver and knife within a fold of the robe, within swift reach of her hand. If enemies came, he said to her, he would get four and she must get two. He now wrapped a robe around him and lay at her side, with the rifle between them. A thousand stars were out, and the moon among them looked like a round golden note from a French horn. Sam was not a religious man in the sense of creeds and churches but he felt a powerful affinity to the earth and to the heavens and to all the living things around him, except the professional killers. He looked at the moon and the stars and began to talk.

  He told his silent and listening bride that the Almighty had created a beautiful world and that the Rocky Mountains, the cordilleras of the continental spine, or Stony or Snowy Mountains, as some men called them, were the marrow, heart, and soul of it. He had not seen them but common sense told him that by comparison the Andes were only foothills and the Alps were for children to climb. This conceit made him grin in the robe. Together they would explore the Gallatin and Madison and a hundred other valleys; the Tetons, the Bighorns, the Green River, Columbia, the Blue, the Big Belt; and a thousand peaks that any man alive and joyful wanted to reach the top of; and the rivers and lakes and the high white cascades against the snowlines. Why any man would willingly live in a city, with its infernal stinks and noises, he would never know. Why a man would live back there among the hummocks called mountains, east of the Mississippi, when he could come west to God’s finest sculpturings, both Greek and Gothic, and be his own lord and king and conscience, with no laws except that thc brave survived and the cowardly perished, and no asylums for crazy men who could no longer look at city life without shrieking—and no churches except this in which she lay, no priests except the larks and wrens and thrushes, no bible except this land’s language for those who could read it. This was the life he loved. This was where he would live until an arrow or a bullet found him, and when that hour came he would be content to let the wolves strip his bones clean and leave them upon this great map of the magnificent ….

  The girl lying at his side understood only a few of his words but she understood the emotion, for in its essence his mood was her mood. She was thrilled by both felicity and fright when his hand moved over to touch her, to squeeze her arm, or (once) to spread out flat on the robe over her navel. Strong emotion she understood, for her own people, all the red people, were supercharged; but she did not understand a man, white or brown, who for hours would do no more to his woman than to her. She would never know that for the pure glory of it a romantic man was falling in love.

  The next day her astonishment and wonder continued to grow.

  He tarried in friendly land, turning aside from his straightest course to camp by a mountain lake. He looked at the cold high-mountain water and told himself that he needed a bath. In his sly but human way he wanted to see his wife with no garments on her. He sniffed at his arms but the only odor there was the smoke essences used to tan buckskin. Like all the free trappers, whose lives depended solely on their alertness and courage, he had many times saturated his leather clothing in the smoke of burning cedar, sage, and stinkbush to overcome the human scent. The odor of smoke, tanned skins, and beaver pelt was about the only odor he had. But because he was a bridegroom and liked the smell of human hair and skin, freshly washed, he wanted a bath.

  After tying the horses and placing his weapons where he could swiftly seize them as he stripped off his clothing. He knew that his wife was watching him; he supposed she was wondering if he intended to strip her down. Poor frightened doe, did she think her hour had come for rape? He made a sign to her to take her garments off and in a few moments she stood naked; but he had already plunged into the cold waters and was swimming. Then he stood, treading water, looking over at her, with water running down the strands of his long hair. After she entered he swam to the shore, and using sand for soap, scrubbed himself. He then plunged in again and swam like a bull buffalo compared to his wife, who swam high and swift like an antelope. Standing in water to his waist, Sam watched her. As though to show off her skill she swam thirty yards to his left;
turned with such ease that she seemed to be on a towline and swam to his right; and then came straight toward him. He could have been no more enchanted if she had been a mermaid. She stood before him, the water almost to her chin, her black hair down her back in a wet tangled mane, her wet face as grave as a child’s as black eyes looked up at him.

  “You swim a lot better than your man,” he said. “I hope you shoot that well.”

  Moving close to her and reaching into the water, he put his right arm under her knees and his left across her back and brought her up. He waded ashore and stood in full sun, holding her dripping body, looking at the beauty of her bronzed Indian skin; at her breasts, which he thought perfect; at her lovely throat and shoulders; and at last at her eyes. What he thought he saw in her eyes he had no words for. It was as if he had lived for twenty-seven years within the prison of self, without communicating a single time to another living soul, to find now, in the miracle of this moment, that he was not alone. He guessed that was what love meant. Still holding her with one arm under her knees and the other under her back, he raised her, so that his lips could touch her, from her knees to her lips. Kissing over her, he moved her back and forth with such ease that she seemed to be weightless. He tossed her with a turning motion and in mid-air caught her, with his fingers now spread against her thighs, and against her chest just below her breasts; and he put his lips to her thighs and up her back to her nape and her hair. He tossed her again and with spread hands caught her at her waist and set her on her feet. With a tentative timid forefinger she touched him gently on the upper muscle of his powerful right arm. She had not known that there were men with such strength. She now would have been only a little surprised if Mick Boone had told her that he had seen this man, to whom she had been sold for good or ill, take two Indians of average size by their necks and smash their heads together with such power that they both dropped dead; that Sam could put a palm with fingers spread against her belly and lift her to arm’s length above his head with the ease with which most men would have lifted an infant; and that he could go under the belly of any beast in her father’s herd and with hands grasping his legs below his knees could put all four feet of the horse off the earth. Her eyes said that she knew he was a mighty one. She was looking at his hands.

  Taking the mouth organ from his medicine bag, he played here and there in a few things, trying to find what he wanted; and having found it, he began to dance, solo, back and forth across the lakeshore sands, and a bronzed girl, glistening with melting diamonds, her black mane covering her whole back, stood still and looked at him. He would never know whether the wonderful melody went like the hermit thrush’s song into her mood. For him it was like the scent of warm melting wild honey; like the spring song of the bluebird; like an armful of alpine lilies. He then put the harp away, sniffed the atmosphere and listened, and heard only the sweet low note of the water thrush. He then walked over to his bride.

  What he did astonished and frightened her. Bending over and putting his left arm behind her knees, he lifted her; straightened; gave her an upward thrust with his left arm and right hand, so that in the next moment she sat on his left shoulder; and walked over to her clothes. There he let her slide down to his left arm, and as she sat, like a big golden bird, staring at him, he looked at her eyes and smiled. Adam and Eve were measuring the wonder of one another. He then uttered words which, once spoken, he would find ten times as hard to say again: “Lotus-Lilah, I reckon this white nigger loves you.” She was his wife, his woman, his mate, his companion on the trail as long as there were trails for free men to ride on; through the valleys, until these were choked with cabbages and people; and up the mountains to the highest peaks, as long as men felt compelled to seek God.

  He set her down and they began to dress. He thought she was surrendering to his maleness but he was not ready to take her, not yet. There was a huge emptiness in him to be filled, and so little of it that could be filled with sexual passion. When they were both dressed he turned to her, where she stood waiting and looking at him, and putting his arms across her shoulders under her hair, he held her close to him, murmuring down at her, “Mine, all mine.” Then, putting hands under her arms at the shoulders, he held her straight out, at arm’s length, and looked at her. With her feet still off the earth, her wonderful black lustrous eyes looking at him, he fetched her close against him, from her toes to her face, and pressed his bearded mouth into her hair.

  “Well,” he said, releasing her, “I reckon we best be on our way. You won’t be eating bitterroots for a long time.” The bitterroot, which her people called spetlem, and boiled until it was like a fondant, was far too bitter for the whiteman’s taste. Because she and her people had not lived sumptuously, in the way of the Crows, he was eager to cook feasts for her on the long journey south. He hoped to get grouse for supper.

  “You like grouse?” he asked her. “Geese? `… Quai1?” He tried to imitate the calls of these birds. The song or talk of the prairie chicken was so startling and in ways human that it gave a man a queer feeling; and the quail and white-winged dove could lift the hair on his neck. He imitated the cries by pinching his nostrils and honking and whistling, and by fluffing his hair to make feathers and flapping his hands to make wings. He made her laugh for the first time. That for him meant that his marriage was getting along.

  7

  SAM HAD NEVER thought much about love. He had had good parents. He had never as a child felt unwanted and unloved. His father, a rather ineffectual giant whose chief passions were music and philosophy, and who was sometimes found reading Descartes and Locke and Tom Paine when he should have been tending his small general store, had far more interest in Descartes’ effort “to attain to the knowledge of all things” than he had in the family larder. Sam took his love of music from his father; his practical sense in a world where a man had to adapt or perish, and his love of adventure and freedom, he took from his English mother. His father was French and Scotch with generous measures of still other peoples: he had, Sam had concluded, so many strains in him that they were constantly at war with one another. But he loved learning while his mother loved life. Daniel Minard had a library, small but excellent, and a hankering to write a book someday. Sam thought he might write a book, if he ever left the West and went back home. Some of the mountain men were about as illiterate as a man could be—such as Kit Carson and Jim Bridger, neither of whom, it was said, could read or write. Some were educated. Some had written books about their adventures in the West.

  At nineteen Sam had told his parents that he guessed he would go out beyond the Mississippi and take a look around. He had intended to stay only a year or so but in the frontier town of Independence he had been fascinated by tales of Kit Carson and other mountain men. Then one day he threw a bully over his shoulders with such force that he broke both the man’s arms, and fled from the law, as many young men had before him. Long before his first vision of the Tetons he knew that the free trappers were his people and that these mountains would be his home.

  On his way out he had gathered all the tales he could of the men who had gone before him. There was Edward Rose, who, if still alive, was an old cuss now. Negro, Cherokee, and white, Rose had worn (said those who knew him) the most fiendish expression this side of hell, his face scarred with old knife wounds, a crooked lip pulled into a perpetual snarl, and eyes as cruel and cold as the falcon’s. Most of his nose had been chewed off; he had an ugly brand on his forehead that some enemy had put there with a red-hot iron; he had buckshot and bullets in both legs; and like Jim Bridger, he had for a time carried an arrowhead embedded in the flesh of his back. About thirty-five years ago he had come west and joined the Crows and had become a powerful chief, and because of his reckless courage in battle against the Crows’ red enemies his name had been changed from Cut-Nose to Five-Scalps. Jim Beckwourth, who had also become a Crow chief, said Rose was killed about the time Hugh Glass had his dreadful fight with the grizzly. But there were those who said that Beckwourth
was the biggest liar in the West next to Bridger.

  It was Caleb Greenwood, squawman, mountain man, and scout who had changed Beckwourth’s life and made him the Devil’s own brother. As the story came to Sam, Caleb and a few companions had unwittingly killed a couple of Crows, and still had the two wet scalps when half the Crow nation surrounded them. To save the lives of his men Caleb had convinced a Crow chief that Beckwourth was a Crow—that when a band of Crows had been captured by the Shians Jim was a Crow boy among those captured. Years later when Beckwourth and Bridger were fleeing for their lives Beckwourth was captured and taken to a Crow village. Having seen him with Greenwood several Crows recognized him as a brother; and so all the older women were summoned and told to examine this man, to see if they could identify a lost son. An old crone who had inspected almost every part of him said at last that if he had a mole over his left eyelid he was her son; when the lids were pulled down like two small rubber awnings, as pure as gumption there was the mole. During the next hours Beckwourth almost died under the welcome; the enraptured hugging and squeezing of him by scores of shrieking sisters and aunts and cousins had made him feel, Jim said, as if he had been rolled over and over in a ton of fresh bois de vache. But he survived it to become a famous Crow chief, and for years had his choice of both women and horses, their only recognized form of wealth. It was said that he became enamored of a girl warrior, who had sworn never to roll under for a man, but to give her life to the extermination of her people’s enemies. Jim boasted that he had won her but no one believed his story, for even Jim Bridger said that as a liar he had no peer. It was a sad day for him when, growing weary of women and horses, he wandered away; on his return to the Crows he was promptly poisoned, so that they could keep his brave heart, the house of his phenomenal daring.