Far as the Eye Can See (13 page)

“Now what do we do?” I said.

Big Tree said nothing.

“What if their men come back.”

“We will not see them,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “That’s what I’m afraid of. We’ll be pincushioned with arrows before we see a damn thing.”

They followed us the next day, and the day after that. And when a mealtime rolled around, Big Tree give them more meat. I don’t mind telling you, I looked over my shoulder every second expecting we’d see their husbands and brothers coming back to find out what we might be up to with their women. We was heading north and west, generally, toward the Yellowstone River country. That big, ugly fat woman Big Tree first give the meat to started to warm up to him. The more food he let her have, the more she and the others wanted to be close to him. They even smiled a bit for him. And he’d feed them some more of our meat. But it didn’t hurt none. Hell, there was always plenty of game wherever we went. I never gone to sleep hungry.

I think I was getting to the point of a kind of contentment. This was at the end of our fifth winter in the fur-trapping business. It was our last year, but I didn’t know it. I didn’t think much about it. I figured we could go on just hunting our food and living off the land like the Indians did. It wasn’t that I give up the idea of being a man of destiny, or getting some land, or finally going someplace else. Them things just never crossed my mind. Sometimes I got to feel like I was in a kind of perfect heaven. You never get used to the sky so close to the white frosty tips of the mountains, or the blue rivers running down in valleys and draws, washing over white stones and swirling in brown rushes over silver boulders in the moonlight. There are canyons of blue and rusty rock, wide meadows of green grass and blue and yellow wildflowers. It was all just too colorful and wild and free to be nothing else but a paradise. For all that time with Big Tree I just about forgot what might happen to a fellow out in that wilderness.

After a week or so of them folks following us, we was a regular tribe. The women and old men and children camped right next to us, or just a little behind; when we stopped near water, they always camped downstream or behind us so they had to walk through where we was to get water. They hauled our water for us and then at night they’d come in—slowly at first, and one at a time—to sit around our fire. After a while, they helped make the fire, they fed it and kept it burning high and bright, and it seemed like it wasn’t our camp no more.

They ate raw sowbelly and offered it to us regular, but I wouldn’t touch it unless it was fried good and crisp. They made some boiled berries that was fine, and when they roasted a bird or a slab of buffalo meat over that fire, it was like we was all one big happy family.

Then, about the third week or so, a bit of trouble developed with Big Tree because he taken to hugging only the women he wanted to hug and leaving off the others. The women he give meat to come to expect it from him, and in the beginning he obliged. But then he developed preferences. Now we heard the women fighting pretty noisily at night and sometimes in the morning. It didn’t bother Big Tree a lick, but I known things like that for a source of trouble—it was like a spark in dry grass. I feared the consequences.

I drew some interest from a tall, pretty woman named Morning Breeze. When I say she was pretty, I ain’t exaggerating. She wasn’t classic like some of them women in Virginia Beach, nor nothing like that—just real tall, and a mite wide in the hips, and not that chesty. In fact, it didn’t appear that she had much a-going on in the chest area at all. In her buckskins, with her black hair all tied behind her, she looked like a young man. She had smooth, light skin—not nearly as dark as some of the others—and a wide, toothy smile. She had all her teeth and they was white as new snow. Anyway, Morning Breeze noticed the way Big Tree commenced to hugging some women and not the others, and she taken it to heart that the hugs meant something important.

Big Tree picked up the women he chosen and just squeezed for a little while. At first I think they liked it, but then after a time it begun to be clear that it wasn’t such a good thing no more. I could see that, but they didn’t want to let on, neither. As far as they could tell, it was Big Tree that killed every animal we skinned and ate in our travels. It was mostly true, I’ll admit, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t good at it. Just that Big Tree known where to look better than I did.

Morning Breeze took to standing in front of me with that wide smile on her face. She was a head taller, so she looked down on my face. She didn’t have no hope of Big Tree showing a interest because she was almost as big as he was, so she settled on me. The thing was, she had no hope of me hugging her, neither. I didn’t think I could pick her up.

She would speak to me in Sioux, but I could only sign that I had no idea what she was saying. Then one day when we was camped near a pretty swift stream, she come up from the edge carrying a big trout. She caught the thing with her hands. It wriggled in her grip but she carried it over and offered it to me. I’d been eating some fairly heavy meat for a long time, and the idea of a light, delicate meal of fried trout just got to me. I whooped and hollered to Big Tree that we was going to eat like kings, then I took the fish from her and laid it on the ground and give her a big hug. In the process I stood on my tiptoes and kissed her on the cheek.

That was a mistake, of course. She come back in less than a hour with her father and her younger brother. The old man was probably sixty or seventy. Her brother may of been ten or eleven. He wore paint and carried a bow and arrow.

“I think he wants to stick me good,” I said to Big Tree.

“She think you will marry her,” Big Tree said.

“No, no.” I said. I backed away a little. The old man said something to Big Tree.

“He wants to trade,” Big Tree said.

“So now I’m gonna get a wife,” I said. “What if I don’t want one?”

“Why not? She will set up every camp for you, cook, tan hides, and wash you. She will carry water for you.”

“You been hugging these women since they took up with us, and not one of them expects you to marry.”

“They are afraid of me.”

“And not me.”

“You more their size.” Big Tree said these things without a hint of a smile, but I could tell he thought it was damn funny.

“Why couldn’t one of them shorter ones with more womanly features be interested?”

“This one like you. Not others. Others already married.”

“It’d be nice to have somebody settin’ the fire every night, wouldn’t it,” I said.

Big Tree nodded.

“But I don’t want no wife.”

He said something to the old man, who looked at me.

“Tell him I am honored but I can’t do it,” I said.

Big Tree spoke to him again.

The old man smiled. Morning Breeze averted her eyes and sort of bowed to me.

“What’d you tell him?”

“I said you’d give him your gun for her.”

“No I ain’t,” I said. “Ain’t nobody getting that carbine from me.”

“That is what he wants.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “You tell him he can have anything else, but not my gun.”

Big Tree spoke to the old man again, then he looked at me. “You trade one of your pistols?”

I was so relieved not to have to part with my Evans repeater, I agreed about the pistol. Then it hit me what else I was agreeing to. Morning Breeze come over and stood next to me and the old man pronounced us man and wife. Then all the other women come out of hiding and surrounded us. They took Morning Breeze off to mess with her hair and get her cleaned up, I guess. I got my old army tent off the pack mule and set it up, and then some of them women crawled in there and started to clean up.

“No,” I said. “Get the hell out of there.”

They lay down a blanket and then poured some kind of oil on it. “Go on,” I said. “Get the hell out of there.” The oil smelled like feet. It was some kind of musk oil from otters or something. “Hellfire and damnation,” I said. The old tent was small—a regulation army two-man tent, white and leaky—and now I had that damn smell in it.

Well, it was a week of celebration, it seemed like. Morning Breeze went about taking care of me, and that meant I didn’t have to do a durn thing about our camp. I could hunt and fish, but that’s all I had to do. She cooked, set the fire, cleaned and tanned the hides, and cut up the meat. She laid down next to me at night, and if I wanted her to, she’d be ready for me to have a little pleasure of her body. The thing was, she ain’t never seen a bar of soap. Every day she wore leggings up to her knees, and a leather dress that hung down around there, and underneath was nature’s portal. I finally took her down to that stream and made her set in it a while. I went up the hill to give her privacy, but I left a fine cotton shirt of mine that was longer than her leather dress. She come up the hill with the shirt on, and I sent her back down to wash the damned leather dress and them leggings. She only had the one outfit, so I give her a bunch of my shirts and a few pair of breeches in case she got cold.

Now when she come into the tent, she smelled right clean and fresh as a daisy. It didn’t help the smell of that oil in there, but that wore off after a spell and it become fairly pleasant at night when it got cold, having Morning Breeze next to me.

I didn’t want to take advantage of her or nothing, but on some of them nights I have to admit I did some powerful inside debating about it. After a while, I got to thinking it don’t matter how tall she is. I had no truck with women since I first left them whores of Virginia, and the idea got me breathing fairly heavy. But I was afraid of what would happen to me when the men come back. And Morning Breeze always looked at me with a kind of smile that I just didn’t want to sully, if you know what I mean. She did for me, cared for me, and waited. I resisted a powerful urge to just take her and forget what might happen to both of us.

Big Tree said to me once, “She like you. That is always good with women.”

“I don’t want a wife,” I said.

“You sit by fire, look wise. Smoke. Eat. Hunt. She will do rest of it.”

“I never minded taking care of my own things,” I said.

It was just luck that I ended up spending those months with her. We traveled further west, toward the Bighorn Mountains, and didn’t see nothing of the rest of the men in her tribe. It was just me and Big Tree and nineteen other souls—seven women, four old men, and eight children. And the funny thing was, once I had myself a wife, I noticed a more powerful desire to take care of everybody. We really was a small tribe. The women set up their lodges—four of them—and then they’d set up a new one they made for Big Tree, and I’d set there and smoke while Morning Breeze laid out my old U.S. Army tent.

You know she liked being clean too. It was a feeling that grown on her. Or maybe she seen how much it pleased me. She kept herself real nice. I got to where I could sign to her and she’d pretty much know what I wanted. And she could let me know too. We was married, but we done well never doing nothing like married folks do except in the daily living. We got used to it. I wouldn’t have her in that way, and she didn’t seem to mind it much. Oh, one night or the other she might smile at me a certain way, and move over closer and all, and I’d begin to think about having a go at her—like I said, she wasn’t bad to look at. I had the devil on my shoulder every night with her, but I managed to say no, fretting what would happen if the men come back and seen us together or, if she got so attached in that way, what trouble I’d have leaving her with the tribe when the men did come back. And I known they would be back. I told Big Tree to let her know it was a temporary arrangement, sort of as recompense for us feeding her and her people and all, and taking care of them. He never said nothing back to me. He just stared at me for a spell, then turned away and puffed on his pipe.

And then early one spring day, maybe eight or nine weeks or so after our band of Sioux had commenced to follow us, the men come back, mostly naked and covered in war paint. We was in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains, camped by a small stream that run off the Powder River. Them tired, wore-out braves was not happy to see Big Tree and me.

It wasn’t like they was suspicious of our intentions; it wasn’t jealousy that made them so unfriendly to see us there. It was plain rage at their own selves for letting the army surround and capture them. It took them a while to escape and then they had to go in search of their families because we had been on the move. They was also angry because their women and children got so hungry they had to depend on a Crow brave and a wasichu.

In the first nervous minutes when the men rode in on us, the women kept raising their arms high and letting them down in a sweeping bow before the men and they chattered to beat all. Luckily, Morning Breeze had gone down to the stream to get some water, so it wasn’t like nobody could guess she was with me. And when she come back up with the water, I looked at her very sternly, so she carried it over to the side of the camp where the other women was a praising the high heavens that the men had come back.

Big Tree got up on his horse. He was still as a stone mountain just setting there with his rifle across his saddle. I got my carbine and mounted up myself. If we had to ride hard, we’d sure get away because the returning braves was clearly exhausted. Their horses was breathing hard and heavy, and they had white lather between their legs and all down their sides. The men got down and the whole group commenced to hugging each other. I watched Morning Breeze carefully, hoping she had somebody to hug, but she didn’t. She set the water down and praised with her arms like the others, but nobody went to her. I have to say that even though I’d only been with her a few weeks, and never had spoken to her without using my hands, I felt right sorry for her. She didn’t look sad nor nothing—she was happy as any of the others—but I felt like she must be alone.