Beauty for Ashes (31 page)

 

W
HERE THE
B
IG
Sandy flowed into the Siskadee, below the Southern Pass, they came onto a huge and recent trail—two or three hundred horses, most of them shod. They knew it for what it was, Ashley's supply train, headed for rendezvous.

They camped that night at the river's mouth, where the general and his men had camped. The evening air was bright with possibility. A recent trail—maybe they could send ahead and get help from Ashley. They were worn out. Their moccasins were in tatters from walking. Catch the Ashley crew in two or three days maybe, and in five days have horses back here. A chance to ride. This country wasn't for walking, and mountain men were critters that belonged on horseback. Let's
ride
into rendezvous.

Within the hour, before the coffee pots were empty, Jackson called them together and said what every man hoped to hear. He and Clyman would leave the next morning, catch up with Ashley, and get whatever mounts they could. At the very least the brigade would get a rest for a few days, and the horses too. Men exclaimed “Wagh!” and “Hoorah!”

Late that evening Sam and James Clyman were walking Gideon. For three or four days they'd exercised the bear man morning and evening, supporting him on both sides while he clomped along one-legged. “That big body has to have some exercise,” Clyman had said. Coy pounced at the bottom of a sagebrush, maybe at a small critter the men didn't see.

Flat Dog and Beckwourth walked up. “We got a present for you,” Jim told Gideon. Flat Dog took one hand out from behind his back and stuck whatever it was toward Gideon. For a moment Sam didn't realize…A crutch.

Sam grinned. Gideon groaned.

“Maybe not today,” Beckwourth said, “and maybe not tomorrow, but soon.”

Gideon groaned again.

Beckwourth flashed his toothy grin at Sam. “You two are going to have to coach our friend through his healing.”

Sam looked at them, puzzled.

“We're going to meet my village on the Big Horn,” said Flat Dog.

“Him and this child both,” said Beckwourth.

“Do the big buffalo hunt. See my family.”

Sam felt betrayed.

“We'll be back for rendezvous.”

“Late, maybe, but we'll be there,” said Jim. “We got six weeks before it's supposed to start.”

They smiled like they were keeping secrets. It pissed Sam off.

Noting the forlorn expression on Sam's face, Beckwourth said, “Six weeks isn't long.”

When dark fell, Sam lay in his blankets rubbing Coy's belly and wondering if it was the amputation. For sure Flat Dog had a hard time with Sam's cutting off a limb, the idea of Gideon being a cripple.

Or maybe Flat Dog had just seen enough of white men.

The red man and the black man were gone the next morning before anyone else woke up.

T
HE FIRST COUPLE
of days Sam wandered around the rendezvous site half-addled, missing Flat Dog, and brooding about his situation.

A year ago he'd left rendezvous to go on a raid to get the horses he needed to win his woman. Since then, he'd gotten the horses, and lost them. Gained the woman he loved, and lost her. He'd gotten his best friend killed, Blue Medicine Horse. He'd lost another friend, Third Wing. He'd lost everything he owned, even his clothes, every stitch and every single possession except the knife he kept hidden in his hair. He'd gone through a powerful ceremony, the sun dance, which at the time made him feel like a Crow forever. Now he was banished from the Crows.

“Pup, I'm still broke.” The spring hunt he'd counted on had gone bust when the Blackfeet got the horses. He had very few plews to trade to Ashley-Smith here at rendezvous. If he wanted to trap on his own in the coming season, he'd need to use those plews to get powder and lead, and trade goods for the Indians. He couldn't afford a pack mule or two, a pistol, a capote, a keg to carry water, a tomahawk, a throwing knife…Hell, he couldn't even dream up a list of all the things he needed and couldn't afford.

“I don't want to hire back on with the company. Feels like a come-down.” True, they provided you an outfit, and offered the safety of numbers. The price was, you trapped where they decided to trap, you took orders, you wintered where the brigade leader chose, and at the end of the year you paid Ashley half your catch for the privilege.

“But we need an outfit. It's safety. That sticks in my craw.”

He rubbed Coy's ears and murmured again, “Safety.” Sam was glad, sometimes, to think that if he lost his hair, Coy would still be fine.

“Here it is, even bigger. I'm not white and not Indian, not any longer.” The beaver hunters he ran with, well, he fit in well enough with that motley crew. If you sat down to trade stories with a dozen of them, like as not four would be American backwoodsmen, three French-Canadians who were more than half Indian themselves, two Spanyards from Taos who were also half Indian, two Iroquois or Delawares, and maybe one mulatto. What man of any color could be left out of a rainbow battalion like that?

“I'm changed.” Changed beyond the braid he wore his white hair in, his breechcloth, his moccasins. He had the Indian's soft way of walking now, the careless but proud stance, the ever-watchful, ever-moving eyes. He would feel more at home at a Crow dance than a Christian church. To him the sacred pipe wafting its smoke up to Father Sky had as much power as the Bible, or more. “And my heart belongs to a Crow woman.”

He pulled on his chin. “I am a cast-out.”

He jolted himself out of his mood. “Hey, we're here to relax.”

The general had brought them into rendezvous a month early. In the mountains you never knew. Early, late—it depended on whether the plains decided to rain on you, or hail, or fill every gully with swift water and flood every river out of its banks, so you could find no ford and had to wait. It depended on whether the mountains decided to bring another snow or two, and block the passes. It depended on whether the Indians ran your horses off and left you no way to haul the treasured supplies to the men who craved them.

Since few mountain men were in camp, Sam decided to spend most of each day working with Paladin. He wanted to learn that trick Hannibal did, jump off one side of the horse, hit the ground, and bound up and over to the ground on the other side, then repeat until you wanted back into the saddle. Now that might impress some Indians, who were the best horsemen in the world.

He also set his mind on teaching the mare a little circle dance. He would have her go forward in a curvet, a leap where the hind legs left the ground just before the forelegs hit; then she would sidle sideways, curtsey, rear, turn, and prance back to him, flashing her forelegs high. She would go sun-wise, what white folks called clockwise, because that was the way everything should go. He could awe Indians with this trick, he thought. The Medicine Horse dance, he would call it, in honor of his friend.

He also decided to try to teach Coy a somersault. If Coy learned that, he might be able to learn to do it on Paladin's back. Hey, a fellow had to have some fun.

Sam talked Gideon into crutching over to the training ring with him. As Sam circled Paladin around the ring, Gideon yelled out encouragement, orders, or curses, depending on his mood. Coy watched, envious of the attention. Which meant he would give good attention to learning his own tricks.

After about a week Sam, Gideon, and Paladin wearied of the training, and Cache Valley began to fill with friends.

Two long hunting seasons since the 1825 rendezvous, two long hunts on the remote creeks with only a few companions and the wily beaver for company. These fur hunters were hungry for human faces and lots of talk. Rendezvous meant gossip, stories, and news. It meant a chance to hand over plews for needed supplies. It meant the raw taste of whiskey (Ashley had kept his promise), the sharp-sweet taste of coffee with sugar (lusted after almost as much). It meant a chance to buy new flints, powder, and lead. It meant tobacco, for chewing, smoking, and trading to the Indians. It meant everything else a coon needed to make himself welcome in an Indian village, especially the foofuraw the squaws loved.

This second rendezvous also offered something new, two circles of lodges of Snake Indians, or Shoshones, as they called themselves. Sam shook his head. Twice he'd had trouble with these Indians, and he'd lost a friend to them, Third Wing. But other trappers had made peace with them, and the Snakes had apparently decided to be friends. So be it.

Sam recognized a trapper sitting on a big slab of sandstone. This man was carrying on activity seldom seen among the mountain men, writing.

Sam clapped him on the shoulder and sat down. Coy tried to lick the man's paper, and he jerked it away.

“Potts. Glad to see you've got your hair.” They'd spent a winter together in Rides Twice's village, the winter of '24, Sam in Jedediah's camp, Potts with Captain Weber's outfit.

Daniel Potts looked Sam in the face. “I've heard you lost yours a couple of times.”

Sam laughed. The story of his walking seven hundred miles down the Platte River, and other stories, weren't going to get smaller over time. The added story of Third Wing demanding Sam's white hair in turn for releasing him—that tickled the men.

He eyed the pen, ink, and paper enviously. “You write down stories like that?”

“I'm writing my brother Robert,” said Potts. “I make the life out here sound good.”

“It is good,” said Sam.

“A mite more dangerous than I make out,” said Potts, and they shared a chuckle. “I can get poetic. Listen to this. I'm telling about Cache Valley:

“This valley has been our chief place of rendezvous and wintering ground. Numerous streams fall in through this valley, which, like the others, is surrounded by stupendous mountains, which are unrivalled for beauty and serenity of scenery.”

Sam couldn't resist. “Well, here at the first of June, it is full of waters. Come August, that will be a different story.” They laughed. Every man had seen the sere grasses that covered most of plains and valleys of the West during the summer and fall. Each plop of a horse's foot threw dust up to where you had to breathe it.

Potts gave Sam a merry eye and read on: “You here have a view of all the varieties, plenty of ripe fruit, an abundance of grass just springing up, and buds beginning to shoot, while the higher parts of the mountains are covered with snow, all within 12 or 15 miles of this valley.”

This time Potts corrected himself, grinning. “That fruit, well, the berries will be ripe in August. The grass is coming on strong, that's the truth, and the snow will last on the mountains another couple of weeks yet.”

He read. “The river passes through a small range of mountains and enters the valley that borders on the Great Salt Lake.”

He raised both eyebrows comically at Sam. “Which is a lake so salty that nothing grows in it or around it, you couldn't irrigate with it, and it will kill you if you drink it.”

Sam had heard all about the Salt Lake—everybody had—from Jim Bridger and Etienne Provost at the last rendezvous. Dared to go down the Bear River, Bridger went alone and found a body of water that tasted like pure salt. Everybody decided lucky Jim had come on the Pacific Ocean. Only when Provost saw the far shore, later, did the word spread of a huge, salt, inland lake.

“You been there?”

Sam shook his head no. Coy whined at the very thought.

“It's one crazy piece of lake, hoss. You can roll yourself up in a ball and bob up and down in the waves like a cork. You stand up and hold out your arms like Jesus on the Cross, and the water props you up. You can make any design with your body and hold it—you'll never sink.”

“Jedediah said he wants to circle in a boat and find the outlet.”

“Yeah, the outlet, that's the thing. That river probably leads right to California. That's what the maps say—Ashley calls it the Buenaventura. How'd you like that, coon?”

Something flickered in Sam's mind. California…Coy squealed,
Mmnn, mmnn, mmnn.

Sam regarded Potts. “So how come, when you write your brother, you just don't tell him the way this place is?”

“Don't you see, hoss? This ain't like no other place. It's bigger, uglier, more beautiful, higher, drier, more dangerous, more of a kick in the ass…Wagh! We got grizzly bears bigger and meaner than ten of their panthers back home. We got mountains make theirs look like pillows. We got deserts even the A-rabs can't imagine. And you know what? The books say Californy's got trees a thousand years old, as tall as the clouds, and wide enough at the bottom to build a whole town in.

“Not to mention we got boiling springs where the Old Gentleman hisself lives just under the surface, and hot water fountains that shoot two hundred feet high.

“Hell, you can't tell the plain truth about this place—no one would believe it.”

 

S
MALL PARTIES OF
men continued to wander in, about half of them Ashley men, half free trappers. The date set for rendezvous was July 1, but most men arrived early.

Sam and Gideon spent the days catching up with friends. Sam accompanied Gideon wherever the big man was willing to walk on his crutch. Mostly they walked from mess fire to mess fire, and there were plenty. Ashley and Jedediah had combined their outward-bound parties, about a hundred of them and twice as many horses and mules carrying thousands of dollars worth of goods—$30,000 Ashley claimed, as much as half a dozen ordinary office clerks, for instance, would earn in a lifetime.

Of the fur hunters, fifty were into rendezvous already, both Ashley men and free trappers. Ashley said half of his men were still out, and was willing to bet a cup of whiskey they'd end up with a hundred trappers and two or three times that many Indians. As he spoke, his eyes turned into gold coins.

Hundreds of animals, both American horses and Snake ponies, meant the camps were well spread out along the river, and the horses and mules herded even further out.

As Gideon hobbled from mess fire to mess fire, Sam and Coy kept him company. The big man ate and ate and ate—buffalo was plenty. With good food and old friends he seemed to be regaining his zest for life.

The trouble was, Sam was losing his. He didn't know why. Rendezvous wasn't fun. Or not yet.

Catching up with the news was the good part. Who had gone where, discovered what river flowing which direction, who'd come on Indians and fought 'em and made 'em come. Who'd lost his hair, who'd rode up a cold, winding creek and was never seen again. Who took a squaw. Who got a squaw, bought her all the foorfuraw she could wear, and had her run off. Who'd got how many packs of beaver, and where.

Beyond the news and the tales of what happened where, a new kind of story reared its head, the yarn, what some might call stretchers. Though these yarns might not be strictly accurate, they were something bigger and handsomer and more captivating—they went beyond the facts to truth.

Jim Bridger seemed to be the best storyteller. In fact, Sam saw the young Jim, who bore a bad reputation after the Hugh Glass incident, had developed considerable regard among his fellow trappers. Sam liked the fellow himself. He had a slow way of walking and a slow way of talking, an easy geniality, a serious face that hid a love of fun, and a world of pull-your-leg humor.

Bridger told one story, for instance, about a place he called Echo Canyon. Big canyon it was, so it had a big echo. Why, it took eight hours for a shout on this side to make the trip across and bounce back. So the booshway used the canyon as an alarm clock. At night when the men rolled up in their blankets, he walked the edge and hollered, “Wake up! It's time! Time to get up!”

Eight hours later, sure enough, here come the echo back—“Wake up! It's time! Time to get up!” And the boys rolled out slick.

Everybody's favorite, though, was Bridger's grizzly bear tale. “One evenin' I come back into camp soaking wet, clothes scratched and torn, no pants nor breechclout on my hind end.

“‘What happened, Gabe?' the boys asked, worried there might be Indians around.

“I was down along the river, and maybe I got between a sow and her cubs. Anyhow, all of a sudden, here comes a monster silvertip roarin' out of the willows right at me, a geyser of plenty pissed off.

“I dropped my rifle and scooted up a tree. But this old griz, she walks up, gives that tree a true
bear
hug, and tears 'er plumb out by the roots.

“Whooee. I got throwed and didn't know where I'd come to earth. Lucky, it was right in river. Quick I takes off downstream, swimming fast as a fish. That silvertip, though, she was
some
. She jumps in after me, and right quick, hell, I see she's catchin' up fast.