As he dressed them out,
the thought was with him that the time had come to go. He would have
to talk to Teal Eye, but the sooner the better would suit him. To
gut-shoot a poor, goddamn horse!
* * *
By first light they had the tepee down and the horses
packed. Teal Eye looked at the bare earth where the tepee had stood.
The unknowing grass would cover it, cover where she and Summers had
loved, where Lije had been born, where the days, the happy days were,
and it would be as if they never had lived, never talked or laughed
or had friends or sat by the shores of the Teton. The air was empty
and torn where the tepee had risen.
But Summers was right. It was time to go, and she had
said a sad yes to him, and Nocansee, like Lije before him, had said,
"I do what my father says."
They were mounted and ready to leave when Summers got
off his horse. Teal Eye watched him gather twigs and branches and old
bark and carry them inside the cabin. Coming out, he laid a little
trail of gunpowder from cabin to ground. He struck a spark with flint
and steel.
The cabin was burning bright before they had gone
far. Looking back, Teal Eye said, "No one would know, not ever."
Summers nodded his head. "Best to leave it as we
found it. That's what I'm thinkin'. New — like but o1d."
36
IT WAS COLD in the village of Heavy Runner, cold
everywhere in the country of the Marias, so cold that the lungs hurt
with breathing and face and fingers turned white with frost if a man
didn't take care. When, inside the tepee at last, he put his feet
toward the fire, they caught fire with itch. People stayed close and
tight in their lodges, their bodies covered with blankets or robes in
spite of the fires they kept burning.
There was sickness in camp, too, smallpox, the gift
of the white man to the red. The village wasn't big — maybe twenty
lodges on one side of the river, eleven on the other. Its size didn't
keep it from being hungry.
Summers slapped his arms across his chest and made
and unmade fists with his hands. He had been lucky enough to get a
deer in his sights. He would divide it as far as it went if he could
get it to camp. His nostrils were narrowed with frost. Each pant of
his breath made a cloud.
Even so, he thought as he ordered his hands to make
use of the knife, his lodge fared better than most. He put out set
lines in the Marias, chopping holes in the ice when he had to, and
caught mostly catfish but often a pike or a trout. They were good
food, though they didn't stay with a man like buffalo meat. The
Indians wouldn't eat fish, calling them the underwater people, but
Teal Eye had outgrown such notions.
He looked up from the work of gutting the deer and
slapped himself again. The blood and the entrails had warmed his
hands, but soon enough the blood would turn sticky and freeze if he
left it on. The day was clear, the ground mostly windswept and bare,
but the sun was cold brass and the breeze had icicle fingers.
It had been different when first he came to the
Marias. High summer then, and the sun shone warm on a world without
limits, broken by the spires of the Sweetgrass Hills and the shadows
of western mountains. There were buffalo about, not too many but
enough for the Indians, and he had come upon hunting parties on their
buffalo horses, riding wild in the herds, shooting arrows or old
Hudson's Bay muskets when they came within range. The squaws pounded
the meat, mixing the flesh with wild berries and grease, making
pemmican for winter use. He wiped his hands dry on the hair of the
deer, slid the knife in its case and put on his cold mitts.
Once he had made a two-day journey eastward and south
and turned back when he came upon hide-hunters and heard the boom of
their guns. A good killing rifle, one man had told him, a Sharps, and
a bullet most anywhere would knock a bull down.
He led the pack horse close to the deer. It was a
good piece to camp, and some of the way was broken country. That was
how it was along the Marias, broken country, but once a man was out
of its gorges and channels the land swept away. Good buffalo country
come summer. Deer in the swales.
He took off his mitts, lifted the deer carcass to the
horse and lashed it on. The horse stood, patient and cold, and the
breeze played along its winter hair. The saddle horse was cold, too.
Its eyes seemed to say he was at fault for the weather. "Not my
doin's," he told it through stiff lips. He got himself into the
saddle. In times like this his leg acted up. Teal Eye would put a hot
blankets on it.
The village was silent, deserted, it seemed like,
except for a few skinny and shivering dogs, except for the smoke
rising from tepees. A dog could stand a heap of cold. So, far as that
went, could an Indian. So could an old mountain man.
He pulled up in front of his lodge, and Teal Eye came
out.
"
Go back in," he told her. "Too damn
cold."
"
You cold, too," she said. "You
colder."
He carried the carcass inside the tepee. "Back
in a shake," he said. His smile felt numb. "Don't let the
fire go out."
He led the horses away, freed one, and put the other
on picket, close at hand. When the snow was deep, he would feed it
chopped up cottonwood bark, They would keep it alive, barely.
The warmth of the tepee seeped into him. He took off
his heavy capote, his old coonskin cap and clumsy mitts. "From
here I can feel the cold of you," Nocansee told him. Nocansee
had a fine face and a gentle smile. A body learned to forget his
eyes. "I am making up a song," he went on. "I am
calling it "Coyotes on a Snowy Night". "
"
Sounds good, son."
Nocansee plucked at a string on his fiddle. He could
play it real good already, almost as good as Higgins. On warmer days
Indians asked him to play. They were kind to him. Indians always were
kinder than white men to people with miseries.
"
I am hunting for words, my father. What do
coyotes cry for?"
"
For full bellies, I reckon."
"
Those are not good words for song."
"
For mates, then." Summers was sorry he had
spoken. Blind men didn't find mates. He added quickly, "Or just
for the joy of singin', for bein' alive."
"
It could be. Sometime I think lonesomeness."
"
They ain't too often alone."
"
Maybe they sing for the sun, for the light."
Yeah, for the light! For the light. For eyes to see
with. But maybe Nocansee didn't make the connection. He wasn't sorry
for himself, not by any signs. Summers said, "I'm thinkin'
you're wrong. They got keen ears and fine noses, and you never hear
'em singin' to the sun."
Summers stepped over to help Teal Eye with the deer.
"We will give it to the sick," she said.
"
Savin'
just a bit for ourselves."
He felt gentleness for her. That was Teal Eye, to
give to the sick, to visit lodges where sickness was, unafraid for
herself. It was lice she couldn't stand. It seemed like she was
forever examining seams, combing hair and boiling clothes in the old
boiler he had picked up once at Fort Benton.
"
It went away from my head," she said.
"Heavy Runner, he came. He wants to talk."
"
What about?"
She shrugged.
"
I feel trouble," Nocansee said, raising
his head. "Bad trouble."
"
No trouble, son," Summers answered, but
there was a shade of doubt in his mind. Sometimes Nocansee, without
eyes, saw farther than others. "We will eat first. No hurry."
"
No," Teal Eye said. "First we warm
your leg. It hurts. I can tell."
"
Later, little duck. Later."
Heavy Runner and his two wives were inside his lodge
when Summers showed up. After greetings, one of them said, "We
go visit your woman. It is all right?"
"
She will be happy."
He and Heavy Runner sat by the fire and smoked, not
speaking until Heavy Runner said, "I think sometimes to take a
new squaw, a young one for the hard work. My women grow old."
Summers puffed smoke.
"
I do not know," Heavy Runner went on. "Two
sons I have, good boys, good hunters one time, and much meat was in
camp. They are gone."
"
It is the way of the young."
"
Gone for firewater, so I am thinking. Gone to
the camp of the traders. They not here anymore. They go always."
"
It is too cold."
Heavy Runner spit into the fire. "Cold. What is
cold? Never cold with hot fire in the guts."
"
They will come back. They are not wild."
"
Wild with drink in them, wild for more of it,
so they will steal and make mad the white chiefs. That I think I
see."
Summers hitched nearer the fire, easing his leg. By
and by Heavy Runner would come to what was first in his mind. At last
he spoke. "My friend, it is said a man by name Malcolm Clarke
has been killed."
"
It is in the wind. Him that worked at Fort
Benton. By Blackfoot name White Lodge Pole or Four Bears. This much I
know."
"
It was not my people and not my sons who made
him dead. It was young men from Mountain Chiefs band."
"
You know them, my friend? You know who?"
"
If I know, I do not say."
"
Not your business, you say then?"
Heavy Runner added wood to the fire. A louse crawled
at the end of a hair, and he saw it with sideways eyes, picked it
off, cracked it with his teeth and spit it out.
"
They came today. Two. Word-bringers. What you
call — "
"
Messengers?"
"
Messengers from the white chiefs."
"To say it is your business?"
"
All Blackfoot chiefs called to meet at the new
agency."
"
Who were the messengers?"
"
Two men, I have said. They know Indian talk.
They carry papers."
"
You know the men?"
"
Maybe so, maybe not. It does not matter."
"
My mouth is tired with questions. Tell what you
want to tell."
"
Messengers do not say what for to meet, only to
be at the new agency on the Teton. They tell me so and go quick to
tell other chiefs."
"
You have not said the time."
"
Soon. What you call the first day of the new
year."
"
Jesus Christ, that's soon enough. Meet in the
dead of winter!"
"
So it was said. Cold trip, my friend."
"And not short. three sleeps, I figure."
"That many. Maybe little more. Maybe not."
Heavy Runner sighed and looked up. His voice sounded
humble. "So now I am needing you. So now we are needing you."
Summers waited.
"
Now you will speak for us. Yes, my friend?"
Summers stretched out one leg and tried to rub the
ache from his knee. three sleeps in the cold and a bum leg to boot,
all for a parley that wouldn't get anywhere.
"
I do not know for what good," Summers
said, "but yes, I will speak."
37
BREATHING and snorting white, they and their horses
paused at the rim of the Teton valley. They had reached it from the
north and east, and on this clear and biting morning Summers could
tell just about where his old camp was.
Beyond it the great range of the mountains reared
sharp and white against the blue of the sky. Closer, a mile or so
downhill, lay the few buildings of the new agency. They looked rough
and raw, as if they had not come to peace with the land, if ever they
could. A flag flew there. And farther, downstream, he saw a building
or two, the beginnings maybe of a new town. At his side Heavy Runner
pointed to the boldest of the mountains, the one Summers felt almost
kin to, and spoke in Blackfoot. "It was there, on top, that I
learned and I saw. There, long ago. I was almost a man, and I looked
for my medicine. I climbed to the top. I went without water or food,
and I waited and waited, and my strength left me, and I fell to the
ground. Then came the great white bear and helped me down."
Heavy Runner patted his side where, under his wraps,
Summers knew, his medicine pouch hung. A man didn't ask what was in
one.
The trees stood bare, winter-dead, in the valley. It
would take the big medicine of spring to lift them and drape them
with life. The ground was dead and bare, too, except for a
here-and-there snowdrift. No game moved. No tracks showed. The only
animals were some horses hitched close to the agency. And here, once,
was the purest valley of all.
They rode down to the agency, four chiefs with two
head men each and Summers himself. Troopers waited for them, troopers
so bundled up that only the light blue stripes on their breeches
showed what they were. All of them carried carbines. "Tie your
horses up here," one of them said and pointed to a hitch rack.
"Leave any weapons at the door."