Dreams Beneath Your Feet (2 page)

Suddenly Sam knew something. It just popped up, like a bubble from the mud bottom of a pool. He wiggled his back and bottom against the ground, and the thought was still there.

“Coffee's hot,” said Hannibal.

Sam shifted around, scrambled to the fire, and held his cup out for the pale brew. The silence was amiable, as always, but Sam was holding back.

He waited until they'd finished the first cup of coffee, his tongue dissatisfied with the taste, his belly grateful for the warmth. He looked at his partner and had thoughts that hadn't occurred to him in years. They were a truly strange pair, an Indian and a white man partnered. Who would guess, looking at them, that Sam, the white man with white hair and blue eyes, had been taught to read by the Indian? And that Hannibal, half Delaware and educated by his classics professor father, was fluent in Greek, Latin, and the
philosophies of the world? Who would guess, really, what they had in common?

Sam couldn't have named it, himself, and Hannibal wouldn't. They loved the myriad and intricate ways of these mountains, here a spring, lower down a beaver pond, beyond that a wide meadow with a solitary bull elk feeding at its edge. Above the meadow a green reach of lodgepole pine, leading to a low divide, which framed the intense blue unique to the mountain West. From there a sighting of a hundred miles of lava plains, ending in a horizon of sawtooth peaks. They also loved the exhilaration of running buffalo and the heart-in-throat glimpse of a huge salmon leaping up a waterfall.

They were intrigued by Indian people and all the subtle byways of meeting them with proper ceremony, trading with them, being guests in their villages for days or weeks. Avoiding another tribe, even fighting against some. Sam had married into the Crow tribe and lived the tangle of having a red family.

Maybe the biggest attraction, the single, great, mind-blinding opiate, was the way that beauty and danger teeter-tottered. Every mile ridden, every trap set, every buffalo hunted, every stretch of desert crossed, every river forded was a dazzling diamond—and the facets of these jewels were wonder, hazard, miracle, excitement, and death. However hot, cold, or tired a mountain man felt, no matter how full-bellied, well-loved, or ready to hoot and holler, no matter how hungry, thirsty, or bowel-running scared, he always felt alive.

As Sam and Hannibal sipped their coffee, they knew such stuff, but they didn't talk about it. They were too busy living it.

Sam looked at his friend and his mount—his hunting trail family. He pushed his eyes over to the single pack of beaver they had, a pitiful taking for their entire spring hunt. Up and down the west side of the Yellowstone Mountains they'd trekked, up and down the valley of the Henry's Fork. Other trappers stayed away from this country, because of the danger of coming face-to-face with Blackfeet. After so many years Sam and Hannibal would have
missed the danger if they didn't smell it, and they were glad to have this country to trap alone. Once it was prime. Now it was paltry, but the best of what was left.

The irony was that the scarcity of beaver didn't matter. They started hunting the creature for its fur, which made the best hats. Except that over the last few years, silk hats became the style. A way of life done in by a whim of fashion.

Sam swallowed the dregs and chewed the grounds. Even that way, the coffee had no taste.

The way Hannibal was grinning at him, Sam knew his friend had the same experience.

It was time. “I got a thought,” said Sam.

This thought of his would change their plans. Last night they'd agreed that today was the time to start downriver toward Fort Hall.

“I want to go to the Smokes,” he said.

They went to the Smokes each year, but at the end of the fall hunt, not the spring hunt.

Hannibal said, “Why not?”

So the Smokes it was. Just that easy.

 

 

 

T
HEY UNSADDLED IN
the Smokes late that afternoon, with all the long twilight of a spring day before them. They hobbled the horses and munched on dried meat. Sam checked the ties of red cotton that held last autumn's sweat lodge together, and the footings of the limbs. He pursed his mouth, uneasy. “They're good,” he told Hannibal, “but I want to build a new one.”

“I'll hunt.”

Sam cut a baker's dozen of green willow branches, tore new strips of red cloth, and constructed the lodge in the shape of an upside-down bowl. He gathered a couple of dozen lava rocks for tomorrow's ceremony.

Dusk came the way water darkens white paper. Hannibal slipped into camp with an elk on a packhorse, and they hung it high. A low fire and soft talk held off the dark until they got into their bedrolls.

The last thing Sam remembered was the smell of the Smokes. It was named for a handful of sulfurous springs that gushed from the seam where the mountain met the meadow. The first fifty paces or so of each creek ran hot, and the narrow valley was soupy with steam. Doing a sweat lodge here at the end of each trapping year was one of Sam's rituals.

The next morning he didn't eat, just downed plenty of water. He and Hannibal built the fire and set the lava rocks on to heat. They covered the lodge with their blankets and buffalo robes. Sam built an altar, filled his pipe with tobacco, and set it facing the lodge.

Hannibal helped with this much and then started cutting the elk into over-sized strips to dry. The sacred pipe and the sweat lodge were Sam's red road, not Hannibal's. This understanding between them was as comfortable as everything else, and Sam found satisfaction in performing the ceremony alone.

When everything was ready, he carried a dozen rocks into the lodge with a shovel, stripped, and entered.

He performed the ceremony as the Crow medicine man Bell Rock had taught him years before. He burned cedar on the rocks. In the darkness of this womb of the Earth he prayed, pouring four dippers of water slowly onto the lava, pinpricking the black air of the lodge with fiery moisture, the breath of the rocks. He uttered the traditional prayer of the first round and then chanted a song in the Crow language.

Hannibal stopped cutting and listened to the song, for music was one of Sam's gifts.

Between rounds Sam smoked the sacred pipe and with the smoke sent prayers to Father Sky. He carried in more rocks, to roil up the heat. He poured a round of seven dippers, another of ten, and the last round without counting. He prayed.

All sweats were good—he felt a rightness in them. But this time he was searching for something. He didn't know what, and it didn't come to him.

Sam performed another sweat that afternoon, again good, again with something missing.

When a valley opened toward mountains to the west, as this one did, twilight came early and lingered long. Sam helped Hannibal finish butchering the elk. They performed other tasks, ate their supper of dried meat, and talked of this and that. Sam's last words before sleep were, “I'll sweat again tomorrow.”

“Sure.”

 

 

 

N
AMELESS
.

An hour before dawn Sam saw himself walking, stepping forward ceremoniously, slowly, into the steaming clouds of the Valley of the Smokes.

He was perfectly aware, in reality, that he was comfortably tucked into his robes and across the fire from his partner. Yet this other experience, this walking—it was more real than real.

Without words he knew—
I am seeing beyond
. Years ago, during the sun dance he gave, he had seen beyond.

Now he stepped, hesitantly, through the valley, blinded by mist. He was searching for something, and he had no idea what.

A jolt of fear surged in his blood.
Something I will never find.
The mist invaded his nostrils and filled his body and it was fear, wild, crazy fear.

He stood still and groped with one hand for something to hold on to. Fog wafted through his grasping fingers.

He brought back a memory. Several summers ago, at rendezvous, he had been taken over by a feeling this strong and strange. After hunting, he had walked to the edge of a cliff to spot the easy way down to the camp.

Suddenly, the feeling took over his body. It was a weakness in his knees, a yearning to take a single step forward into the empty air.

He leaned back against this inner force. Still the wild lure of walking into air held him. He shook. Finally, he threw himself backward onto his back and bottom.

Then he found his feet and his sanity and walked back to his horse. He shuddered, shook the feeling off, and for years thought no more about it.

Stop. Don't remember. Be here in this seeing beyond.

In the Valley of the Smokes he padded forward, feeling disoriented, stupid.
I am looking for something, but what . . . ?

He was half-blind, half-deaf, wandering. . . .

A huge snake appeared in the air in front of Sam, coiled. He had never seen a serpent like this. It was blue as a sapphire, and not smooth but faceted, like a gem. Even in this fog each surface gleamed, as though radiating its own sunlight.

Sam felt no pang of fear of the snake. It hadn't come forward to strike him. It cocked its head and looked into Sam's face.

Sam thought,
It is a messenger,
and now he felt fear wriggle up his back.

The snake squirmed, and flake by flake its facet-scales began to pop off its body.

Sam had seen dried husks of rattler skin hundreds of times in the West. He had always supposed that snakes let go of their old skins without noticing, whole, as an entire scab drops away without a pull.

That was not happening to Snake. He sent mighty spasms up and down his body. The scales bubbled up on his flesh like small blisters.
Up and down his length the surges ran again. Amazingly—it was beyond amazing—each new scale was a gleaming new color, red, yellow, green, orange, or purple.

As a few scales dropped off, a hundred new ones blistered. Snake was turning into a sunburst of colors before Sam's eyes.

Suddenly Snake drew Sam toward his own yellow orbs, divided by one black slit. Something in the look said . . .

Sam tried to see into the slit. He tried to ease his spirit out of his body and enter. . . . Fear quaked him, and he drew back with all his might.

Snake disappeared.

And Sam?

Stunned, disoriented, Sam shook in his robes. He reached around himself with his ears for the night sounds of camp and could not hear them. Wherever he was, it was not the Valley of the Smokes.

For a stabbing moment he thought he'd lost something important, something had drifted away like the steam of the hot springs. Then he remembered with a pang. Something nameless.

He wanted to be back on the earth, on the ground in his bedroll. An unaccountable nostalgia swooshed over him like a wave running up the sand, and he wanted the Yellowstone country. He loved this place. He decided to find it by reminding himself, like counting on his fingers, of some of the particular spots he loved. There was a lake in the heart of Yellowstone country that flowed toward the Atlantic Ocean from one end, to the Pacific from the other. A mountain studded with petrified stones, which always brought to Sam a sense of wonder. Another mountain of obsidian, good for making sharp blades and for trading to Indians. Yellowstone Falls, both lower and the upper, which seemed to Sam perfectly magical, gestures of a god bored by the practical and entranced by grace. Sometimes Sam imagined walking through the bottom of these long tumbles of waters, beyond the visible and into a trembling darkness.

The nameless feeling sloshed cold against the walls of his chest, but his mind knew no words for it.

Sam looked at the sky now and saw its stars, so clear they looked like clusters of shiny horseshoe nails. At lower altitudes they always seemed far duller. They revealed themselves only to people who rode high enough to see their truth.

Suddenly, he had a nutty idea. He would reshape the stars with his eyes. He would place them where he wanted and make words of them. Since he'd learned to read in his twenties, he'd grown very fond of it, and he even carried a volume of the verses of Lord Byron in his possible sack. The book was so much fun he could stand the word “Lord” in front of Byron.

Now Sam bent his mind hard to the task and pushed the stars around the sky until they formed words. He couldn't hold more than one word at a time in his mind, though. He couldn't tell what the words were, and none seemed to be the right ones. The nameless held itself aloof from words. He would start one word—he tried to shape “alone” from one herd of stars—but it seemed wrong. Then he'd rub it out in his mind, just like using an eraser on a blackboard, and start again.

He tried to make “hard times.” Those words sure spelled out the last couple of years. But the stars began to get fuzzy. He realized they weren't nearly so bright. He didn't have much to spell with.

Instead the stars said something to him. They turned into tiny animals. He could barely make out the shapes, but clearly they were humped buffalo, long-necked cranes, slinky coyotes, spry ants, and all the other animals of creation. And they started marching off. Step by measured step, they began walking off the black slate of the sky. They would need forever to empty out that slate—the stars were almost numberless, like the animals—but there they were, the vastest of herds, moving on.

Just then he heard Hannibal get up and step to the dead fire.

The stars were gone, and Sam didn't know the nameless.

He heard a clank from Hannibal. Sam was half in a magical world with a blank sky and half in the ordinary world. He squirmed. He opened his eyes and looked at his partner. He didn't
dare glance at the dark sky. He rooted himself here on the ground in the steamy valley.

Then he smiled at himself. Aha. Eureka. Whatever words applied—words were Hannibal's specialty.
I still don't know what the nameless is. Don't understand myself or the world. But by God I know what to do.