California Bloodstock (5 page)

Buckdown had cut the moorings of his life as simply as he cut loose the martin and beaver he found still alive in his traps. He put none out of misery, even as he found them gnawing through their own shanks toward freedom. He simply set them free and watched numbly as they limped away, dragging maimed paws and forelegs in shock. He ate the dead ones out of habit but left their pelts where they fell like so many bloody rags to stiffen in the weather.

When he wanted to talk he would go find Counsel's place, wherever it happened to be at the time, on the Great Salt Lake one year, back up on the Yellowstone the next. He would take months searching it out, wanting to talk out the string of his pathetic life. But then he would get there and have nothing to
say. Counsel had a Shoshone wife. That was part of it. And Counsel guarded her jealously.

The last time Buckdown visited Counsel it was winter, snowing at Counsel's new place on the Snake. He found the trader deep in conversation with Hippolyte Weed. They were talking about California, where Weed was heading.

Milk and honey and furs and fun
,

California, here I come.

Weed kept repeating his rhyme, while Counsel insisted that he couldn't care less.

Once again Buckdown could find nothing to say and left at once without even a peek at Counsel's wife. Tears froze on his cheeks and he was glad the falling snow was covering his tracks. He would be gone from the world of men. Yes. And women?

His wife was past him, he knew that, but her death pulled at him with each dropping moon. He couldn't think. He made up simple equations in his mind, but none of them balanced. He loved her, still loved her, and that was the terrible weight of his unbalanced reckoning. He had led her and that bastard Slant on an expedition that scouted too deep into the wilds of happiness. It was all his fault. He hated himself. The seasons rolled by around him. He lost years.

Buckdown became a wandering recluse, traveling aimlessly, talking only to animals. He was a strange
man and strange things happened. One day, staring over some nameless cliff….

Brother!

Buckdown jerked around to face a grinning collage of bones, feathers, and vegetation. It was His Own Ghost, the albino son of a minor subchief of the tricky Western Utes. As a child his unique opaqueness had marked him for a life of spiritual pursuits with no questions asked. He was considered gifted, a prodigy. At twelve he was recognized as a full-rank shaman, by fourteen he was experimenting with medicinal plants, and at fifteen he had hit the trail less traveled by. Now in his fortieth spring, as he put it, he was widely known as a keeper of the spiritual buckskins. He traveled from tribe to tribe, from the Colorado to the Klamath, spreading visionary insights and potent little peyote buttons that he gathered and processed in his own secret desert near Agua de Las Vegas.

In Buckdown he recognized a man obviously ajar with himself, but a man with a certain potential for mythic content just the same. He had been following the mountainman for several weeks, noting his peculiar behavior and intense sorrow.

I am His Own Ghost and I was born magic, he told Buckdown. Sit down and relax. I will put you straight.

Buckdown blinked. There he was, eye to eye with a pink-eyed Indian being offered salvation as if it were a piece of dog meat. His jaw dropped and His Own Ghost thrust a carved bone pipe into the gaping mouth. Why not? Buckdown figured, and puffed. His Own Ghost smiled and fired up a pipe for himself.
The wind rose. They sat down smoking, studying each other.

Buckdown wondered about His Own Ghost's outfit. His footwear had been fashioned from two large desert reptiles, lizards slit down the back and hollowed out to accommodate feet. The dragonlike heads and heavily scaled tails had been left intact. They wiggled at heel and toe of the shaman's feet as if about to take off in directions of their own choice. His loins were packed with some kind of elemental muck, wet and pliable, yet concrete enough to support an assortment of flowering twigs and branches that had been poked, or perhaps planted, into it. Over his shoulders he wore a cape of white feathers, ribbed with the delicate skeletons of tiny rodents and snakes. It gave off a hollow tinkling sound whenever His Own Ghost moved his arms. Hanging from his neck were a number of brightly colored pouches.

Good smoke, Buckdown said.

Tolache
, His Own Ghost corrected. Some people call it jimsonweed and ignore the white flowers that blow everywhere. Stupid and sad people, the Great Emptiness for them.

Buckdown didn't know what to think. He himself felt stupid and sad. Then he began to feel little feathers growing out of his head and he wanted to fly with the birds. His Own Ghost kept him on the ground.

I have seen you be kind to the animals, the shaman said, and that is okay as far as it goes. But you are not one of the Animal People so don't kid yourself. Live like a man. Have some fun. Otherwise your path will sneak up on you from behind.

Buckdown wasn't sure. He wanted to tell His Own Ghost a tall and outrageous lie. Say what a big shot he could be if he felt like it. Instead he held out the pipe for more tolache.

You feel like lying, His Own Ghost said, refilling both pipes. That's a sign. Tolache is clever. She will cure you for a while, but she can kill you just as easy, so this is all you get.

When his second pipe was finished Buckdown was nervous and sad. And mad. His Own Ghost grinned at him.

Now you're getting it. Men should be mad not sorry. Now go live with your own kind someplace and pay attention. Look for a sign. If you get shaky take one of these.

His Own Ghost removed one of the pouches from his neck and tossed it down to Buckdown.

What's this? Buckdown fumbled it open and squinted inside at a dozen hard little orbs.

Each one has a spirit. If the spirit likes you she will help you. Otherwise, watch out. Good luck, and look me up if you run out.

With that His Own Ghost took off, the lizards bobbing with his hurried steps, tiny vertebrae rattling in his cape.

Buckdown sank into a clear sleep, wondering why the afternoon sun was taking on a blue haze and what had happened to his feathers. Everything else seemed obvious. How long he slept remains a mystery.

When he woke he felt like someone had left his bones out in the rain. His joints ached. His muscles felt like saturated sponges. And there was something
else, a tingle, a not unpleasant shiver in his tired old body. He stretched and decided to head west, as far west as he could go.

California, here he comes….

It was 1835. Buckdown came careening into what he thought was Monterey. Wrong. Instead of gentle padres and coy señoritas he found a handful of foul-breathed Russians lording over perhaps a hundred wild Aleutians and a pack of expert pelt hunters from Kodiak Island. The czar had dispatched them to California to raise crops for his starving colony in Sitka and to satiate, if they could, the boundless hunger for soft otter fur that was gnawing at his economy from St. Petersburg to the Ukraine. They were also supposed to keep an eye on the Spanish, the French, the British, the Americans, and anybody else found pirating around on his Pacific Rim.

Before Buckdown realized his mistake, he found himself surrounded. The Russians put him through a round of suspicious pleasantries and insisted that he stay for a while.

Followed closely by several pellet-eyed Aleutians who grinned at him with wooden teeth whenever he turned around, Buckdown spent the afternoon sniffing in the fishy wind, checking things out. Bales of otter pelts were stacked about in great quantity as they overflowed from a rough log tannery, but the
crops on the small cleared plain behind the fort were withered and failing.

Buckdown walked north along the cliff. Kayaks needled in and out of the surf on the beach below, dropping off furry, wet bundles of dead weight. The tide churned like a reaper, sucking delicate and disturbingly childlike carcasses off what Buckdown figured to be the skinning beach. The next thing he knew it was dinner time. Somewhere someone was ringing a bell.

The Aleutians hustled Buckdown into a stuffy room, steeped with the smell of fish oil. He was eyeing the first course, salmon eggs and acorns, when one of the Russians mumbled something to the Aleutian at the door and another guest was led into the dining room. Buckdown had never seen anyone like him. The man's face was as flat as the moon, with razor slits for eyes, and no whiskers. His body seemed to have been somehow compacted, foreshortened from the top down by enormous pressure. Yet there was something almost elegant about him, and a jumping intelligence in his pie face.

And he was clean, exotically clean and turned out in such neatness as to appear to have no business whatsoever among his reechy dinner companions. While they were draped in ill-fitting skins and coarse wool, he wore silk. Heavy and somewhat faded silk, but silk nonetheless. Buckdown was so unfamiliar with such finery that he failed to realize that the man was, in fact, wearing a uniform.

To Buckdown's surprise the Russians seemed far more interested in himself than in their other guest.
They asked question after question, ignoring the strange little man except to grunt at him from time to time. He sat silently working his way through the food with an economy of movement and a total absence of emotion while Buckdown answered questions.

After dinner, the Russians drank themselves pragmatically toward stupefication. Buckdown excused himself and walked down to the beach. He watched the tide go out. Moonbeams glanced metallically off slick pink otter flesh tumbling skinless in the white-water. Time passed. He might have drifted into a daze. The next thing he knew, the Russians' other guest was standing next to him on the sand.

Help me escape from all this, said the strange little man.

Help me, Buckdown said, without turning.

Buckdown cleared the fort just before dawn. He rode north, through groves of redwood throwing century-length shadows toward the dunes. He did not stop until it was time to stare west, into the fifteen hundred and first sunset since his wife died.

Curious, no wind on the cliff. Just the forest ticking behind him as he watched the sun fall behind the ocean's flat horizon. The spookiness of the trees came over him with a scent of wet bark and a flash of vertigo that sat him down abruptly on the ground.

He pulled the small pouch from around his neck
and emptied it. The small grey buds spilled out. They reminded him of teeth. He ate one: bitter, but a trace of menthol, like a green pinecone. He ate another and mounted up. Hi-Ho Buckdown, riding a delicate passage north along the darkening coast.

At night, the eyes of furry little animals, now dead, are the blackest holes in the universe; but then what is the difference between Buckdown and the stars? This is what Buckdown wonders. And do the stars talk to each other? Only when he is not listening. Then what do the trees eat? The secrets the stars drop. Are the secrets pretty? Some look like rain. How does Buckdown know all this? He drinks some of the secrets when the stars aren't looking.

The balance of his mind is disturbed. Suddenly he wants to piss in the ocean. He has a definite need. It is very important to the stars.

He jumps to the ground and runs off over the dunes. The moon moves behind a cloud. Buckdown stumbles. Now he crawls, wiggling sinewy legs from his musky leggings. Up again, naked now to the waist, he prances into the surf. Foam swirls around his hips. The surge washes his stomach. He squirts his yellow stream beneath the surface. Invigorating. He throws his face toward the sky and whoops, but he might be sorry. Something tells him he is not alone. Dropping low in the dark salty water, Buckdown scans the surf.

The moon slides out again, like a beacon, and he sees some kind of beast, awash to the withers, ambling toward him out of the sea. Buckdown blows a long anxious breath from his lungs and sniffs back the onshore wind. He smells it, that sweet mush of
chlorophyll crystallizing to tartar on grazing molars, and green grasses rotting in a fat cud. Buffalo!

Buffalo swimming? Son-of-a-buck!

Buckdown bolts from the tide and sprints back to his pony. His trusted old Hawken rifle, unused for years, waits in its scabbard. He yanks it free and turns back toward the beach. Witness the hunter! Squinting down the cold barrel, he stalks straight away for the ton and a half of muscle and wet shag lowing ashore in the moonlight.

A peculiar game of chicken ensues. Step by step they come together on the sand. And when man and beast were almost close enough to count each other's parasites, something very, well, something very
odd
happened.

Don't shoot, said the buffalo.

Now there have always been those unable to believe any but the most documented of incidents, and in this case they may have a point. There were no witnesses. Who can truly know if the buffalo was who he said he was or, for that matter, if he spoke at all? Buckdown may have hallucinated the whole thing the same way a self-doubter might construct an elaborate future for himself once he tastes the sauce of official approval. But you never know. Maybe Buckdown tasted something that came from the belly of the land itself.

Anyway.

Anyway, what a brutal and woeful saga the beast unfolded. Classic tragedy, it stretched like a panorama of nobility undone by its own handsome strength. Buckdown listened, rocking in his own body like an infant in a mother's arms. It broke his heart, and the next morning Buckdown followed the buffalo on foot, swallowing gobs of guilt, hump filet memories from the great plains. Once he and Counsel had run maybe a thousand head off a gorge. When it was over they stood silently on the edge, looking down on a pyramid of braying, broken-backed, disjointed agony.