Cheyenne Winter (17 page)

Which didn’t help him none. His women had sliced up the rest of the buffler tongue. That’s how they ate: buffler for breakfast, and supper. None o’ them nooned much. He wolfed down meat angrily, ignoring their piercing glares, and then limped around his prison. He still had his special saddle with one stirrup elongated. Harness — he had collars and hames and bridles and lines. Enough to salvage if he could git it all back to the post and put men to work fashioning bellybands and britching and the like outa buffler. But he didn’t know how he’d get that heavy mass of harness up there. That and a heal o’ wife-things stuck in parfleches, and a few camp items.

A quiet rage percolated through him. They’d lose all this stuff too, unless she showed up with a dozen ponies and some packsaddles. Behind him he heard the quiet babble of the sisters. Leastwise they had someone to talk to. He didn’t. He felt alone. No one on earth, in the whole universe, to talk to. That Maxim sulking up there, not talkin’. Maybe Abner and Zach, ol’ coons from the beaver days. But mostly he talked to himself because no one else on earth understood, except maybe Jamie Dance, down hell and gone on the Arkansas River.

He thought he’d better look to their defenses. About all they could do was skedaddle and hide if some outfit showed up. Without muttering a word to the women, he plucked up his battered Hawken and limped to the south bluff, aiming toward a knob there maybe a thousand yards distant. He’d sit up there and roast and keep a mean eye on the horizons.

And that’s how the day played out. He sat on his nob sulking and spending his bile on Raffin, thinking on a dozen ways to skewer the Creole. Maybe by God he’d git on down to St. Louey again and skewer old Chouteau hisself in his office on the levee. Cadet spun his webs like a black widder spider down there, hardly caring who got killed out here or why, so long as it prospered his monopoly.

Thus he spent the day. Late in the afternoon he spotted a commotion of dust off the west, and reckoned some Cheyenne were coming. What it would amount to, he didn’t know. He glared narrowly at the distant party. Wind whipped up the dust it made and blew it ahead, putting the horsemen at the rear. It had to be his village friends.

He rose, stomped the stiffness out of his leg, and limped down the knoll, arriving at the camp about the time the riders rode in. Cheyenne all right. About twenty Dog Society warriors, the village police; old One Leg Eagle, Sweet Smoke, and four ponies, three with squaw saddles on them.

He let Dust Devil do the talkin’ and she was saying a mouthful and a half. He caught words now and then, Arapaho, robes, ponies stolen, and the rest. He didn’t hear Raffin none. And didn’t see him, for that matter.

At last the shaman turned to Fitzhugh and spoke slow Cheyenne. “We will talk to our friends the Arapaho about this.”

“You might start with that Creole Raffin, there in your village.”

“He does us no harm. He has honored us with gifts and kindness.”

“He would. You better start with him anyway. He’s got some answering to do.”

One Leg Eagle didn’t seem to like Fitzhugh’s implications, but let it pass. “I have brought ponies for you and my daughters. I will trade for them when we meet again. A pony will bring good things.”

“All right. If we’re in business. Losing three hundred robes, horses and a wagon — it puts me at the edge of the cliff.”

“If you cannot trade, then bring the ponies back when you can.”

“I’ll do that.”

“I have woman-saddles for them. We will stay with you tonight.”

“You mind taking things to the village? Like the rest of the harness? And the things we can’t carry?”

“I will. But they will burden Antelope whenever we move.”

“If I can’t fetch them soon — moon or two — do what you want with it.”

His father-in-law nodded.

That’s how the long mean day ended. Except that those Dog Society warriors, tough veterans all, didn’t take kindly to him having so much beautiful Cheyenne womanhood doting on him, and stared at him quietly with unfriendly eyes. He could fathom what was percolating in their heads. Their friends and allies the Arapaho had stolen the horses and robes — but that didn’t cut ice with them. He was a white man. Still, he’d married into their outfit, and they’d do him no harm, maybe even help a little.

After another restless night, he and his women saddled up the four little ponies, two paints, two coyote duns. His women clambered into the high-backed, high-pommeled rawhide squaw saddles and adjusted their full skirts. He handed them each a parfleche and tied their rolled robes behind their cantles. He salvaged a little kitchen gear, a pot and skillet anyway, tying them onto the saddle of Sweet Smoke, who was the lightest. Then he fixed up his own pony, a mean-eyed dun, and said his goodbyes to his father-in-law, and the five of them walked north, while the Dog Soldiers watched silently.

Fitzhugh cursed. He was a poor man, owing debts even out here. He knew his in-laws had been kind, but it didn’t lift his spirits any. They rode north, making good time through a windy dry day, seeing no one. He didn’t want to see a soul — not with four vulnerable women and one rust-pitted Hawken. That evening they arrived at a branch of Crazy Woman Creek and camped in a sheltered meadow beside sweet water. He was oblivious of the black-forested mountains vaulting up the western skies, or the game trails through the sweet grasses, or the acrid scent of full-leafed sagebrush, or the gentle labor of his wives, who understood his misery and quietly produced a tasty meal of breadroot, wild onion, jerky, and greens. Neither did he see the brightness of their eyes, the kindness in their wide Cheyenne faces, their eagerness to heal his wounds and balm his spirits by doing everything for him from caring for the ponies to handing him his pipe and tobacco.

That night they made their pallets as usual, and he didn’t notice that the women gave him some distance, choosing places many yards away. In the fullness of night, just when he was drifting into oblivion, one of them awakened him. She stood over him in the whiteness of a gibbous moon and slid her full calico skirts down, and pulled the baggy white blouse over her shoulders. Elk Tail. He caught his breath. The moonlight revealed the lovely form of a woman, full-breasted and full-hipped. She untied the sacred cord. It encompassed her waist and was knotted at the front. The two long ends descended down and back to her buttocks, and then each end coiled around a thigh and was tied above her knee. She undid it all in the white light, and slid down beside him, tugging at his shirt.

He forgot his miseries that night, and life became easier and more promising and even joyous all the way back to the post.

Guy had a choice. He could follow the river up to Fort Union and then down the Yellowstone to his own post. Or he could save a hundred miles by cutting overland toward his post on the Yellowstone. The shortcut was tempting but his business was to talk to American Fur Company factors, and those at Fort Union, the company’s northern headquarters, were the most important of all. He set aside his yearning to see his son and his post and directed Chatillon to continue upriver.

The late August sun grew sullen and the land parched but at least the evenings were cool. They made steady progress through a land strange to Guy’s eye, a desert bristling with cactus and sparse browned bunchgrass, with the yellow bones of the earth poking up everywhere. Some white men would have called it a wasteland but he knew better. It supported some of the greatest buffalo herds on the continent — and those who preyed on them. One day they hid on a wooded river island while a vast Sioux village dusted by. Hunkpapa, Chatillon thought. Guy was too busy holding horses and keeping them from whinnying to notice.

The next day they encountered a buffalo herd crossing the river. On the far shore the herd snaked into the river, following some ancient trace and some ingrained wisdom, and proceeded to walk out upon a long hard-bottomed shallows in forty or fifty columns. He’d never seen so many buffalo, and not all the descriptions of the vast herds allayed his astonishment at the black river of animals, most of them larger than cattle, many of them bellowing and bawling until the crossing raised a low thunder that he found frightening. Chatillon held the packhorses nervously. Guy was aware that a herd like this sucked up horses as cleverly as a night raid by warriors. The herd snaking down the far shore never ceased, and eventually Chatillon gave up.

“It will cross for days, Monsieur Straus,” he said. He backtracked downriver to an island that would hold the horses and keep them out of the way of the herd, and made camp there in the middle of the day. Above them, the herd continued to thunder its way across the Missouri. Gray wolves gathered on the eastern bank, and some few swam the river as well, staying with the herd. Several dead buffalo drifted by the island, drowning victims, dark and slick in the roiling current. Chatillon waited for a young cow to slide by, and then waded into the river and snared it with a rawhide line. They would have delicious humproast and tongue that evening without firing a shot.

The thunder of the crossing rolled down upon them through the twilight and into the night, slowly unnerving Guy. It was as if a violent storm had settled over them and would not budge or abate. He could not shut the herd out of his ears; it invaded his head, his mind, his body. The whole river below the crossing had turned brown with mud and the feces of tens of thousands of animals, and the air swarmed with flies and fleas and the armies of parasites that lived upon the herd. Guy didn’t dare drink the river water and knew he’d be fighting insects all night.

And still they came in numbers unimaginable, robbing him of sleep or even rest. That incessant roar eroded his serenity; drove him half-mad.

“I do not see many like this,” Chatillon said. It seemed an understatement to Guy.

Guy crawled under a good Witney blanket hoping to think about other things than nature gone berserk, but he couldn’t. The roar became a throbbing pain, a headache, and the night stretched out endlessly. At dawn they were still snaking down the bluffs and across the river. Countless corpses still rolled by. Wolves and coyotes still lined the riverbanks, bright-eyed spectators. Guy rose along with a quarter-moon, and fought his way through brush to the upstream tip of the island where he could sense the motion of hundreds of thousands of the beasts. This had become a matter of theology, and he bowed his head and asked God questions: why had he made so many? How could nature be so improvident? He found no answers.

A little after dawn of the third day a silence settled on the Missouri; the water cleared to its usual opaque green, the dust settled, and the emptiness returned to that aching land. Guy’s headache lingered, and along with it an odd fear crabbing at his soul. He’d seen something too extravagant to be explained with words or counted with numbers. He had witnessed something more frightening than grand, that savaged his soul in ways he couldn’t fathom. He wondered if Chatillon had felt it, this prodigality of nature and God. He studied the guide for evidences of torment like his own, not wanting to say anything about his private terrors. But Chatillon was matter-of-factly saddling and bridling horses and breaking camp. Guy fought a powerful urge to turn around, go back to the world he knew and grasped.

“We must be careful, monsieur. Where the buffalo are, so are the hunters.”

They splashed across a hundred yards of gravel shallows and then out upon the riverbank. The smell of the herd lingered. Guy thought it would linger a thousand years. Fifty generations from now mortals would smell the herd there. They pushed upstream again, seeing nothing. The land lay dead, as if the herd had sucked into its maw every sparrow and mouse and snake. They made swift time, and with every mile from that place of psychic terror Guy’s soul eased. He would not describe this to anyone; not even Yvonne in the middle of the night amidst their nakedness. He could not bear to whittle what he had seen into miserable words.

The river turned west and south, and they saw only emptiness. Game grew scarce and Chatillon had a hard time making meat. One night they had nothing. The guide dug up roots known to Indians, and boiled them. They filled Guy’s belly at least.

Then they reached the confluence of the Yellowstone, a place where the varicolored waters threaded and mingled, a place as wide as a shallow sea, glinting in late afternoon light.

“This evening, Fort Union,” Chatillon said.

Eagerness consumed Guy. As last he’d see the place he’d heard of all these years, the crown jewel of American Fur, with luxuries unimaginable, carried clear up the river. They reached the post in the last of the sunlight. The long light burnt the top of the cottonwood stockade as if the post were ablaze. He saw nothing but a high gray wall with stone bastions at opposite corners, the post sitting on an uneven flat well above the diminished flow of the Missouri. A scatter of lodges surrounded it, Indians camped on raw earth where not a blade of grass and not a tree offered shade or firewood. The place was so hard-used, he thought, that the fort must have to import hay and firewood from vast distances.

The massive gates had long since been closed but now one of them mysteriously swung open to admit them, and Guy knew that the cyclops eye of the post never ceased to observe the traffic, no doubt through a spyglass. He and Chatillon rode into a village surrounding the yard. A village. Homes and shops crowded the walls; engages, some smoking clay pipes, emerged from barracks to see the newcomers. Chatillon hailed them in French; these were old comrades of the wilds, men he knew.

Striding toward him, down the porch steps of that famous factor’s house where the emperors of the North resided, was an old friends, and partner in the Chouteau company, Alexander Culbertson.

“Guy Straus!”

“Alec!”

“I heard you were coming. Come in, come in, Natawista is just clearing the table, but there’s plenty left.”

“Alec, this is Ambrose Chatillon — ”

“Of course, of course. Put up your kit and come in, Ambrose.”