Far as the Eye Can See (14 page)

I didn’t feel bad for long, though, because it hit me we’d probably have much less trouble with them braves if I wasn’t stealing one of their women. That’s how I looked at it, never mind that her father and brother was there and the old man performed the ceremony. It just didn’t seem like nothing but stealing, and every white man I ever seen out there that had a Indian wife called her a squaw and always acted like she was some kind of booty from a raid. Like a squaw was no wife at all but more like a captured horse or dog. How could them braves let me get away with one of their own? Not that I’d take her with me anyway. But you know what I mean. Even among the folks that don’t have churches to marry them, it don’t look right sharing your tent with a woman who ain’t rightly yours. You’d think after almost six years in the big West I’d of figured it all out, but I didn’t. When Morning Breeze walked back over to me carrying the water, I realized nobody seemed to care. Big Tree give a short laugh and got down off his horse. “Dismount,” he said. “We stay awhile.”

“What’s so funny?” I said.

“She your wife,” he said.

“She told them?”

“She is very happy and proud. You are good catch.”

“For Christ’s sake,” I said.

She set the water down for me and then scooted into the tent.

We stayed in camp right next to them Sioux braves. Big Tree didn’t want to move on yet, and it was okay with me, because I had not figured a way to leave Morning Breeze behind. We hunted a bit with the Sioux and both them and us got a good-sized elk. Ours had the better rack on it, but they both provided a lot of meat. The Indians did a little dance in front of the firelight before we ate what turned out to be really good broiled meat. I went back to my tent and found Morning Breeze a-laying there with her leggings off, and when I laid down next to her, thinking I’d pretend I didn’t notice, she pulled at my drawers and before long we was doing the very thing I’d been trying to avoid. She got up on all fours when she was ready, and I went ahead and give it to her. I wasn’t that experienced with it, to tell you the truth, and it wasn’t never long before the whole thing was over. But it was powerful good. It made me sleepy and feeling all right about just about everything in the world. Morning Breeze held on to me then, all damn night. It was like she didn’t want me to get a inch away from her.

When I waked up in the morning she was outside, tending the fire, heating me some coffee, and frying up some sowbelly and biscuits. She didn’t know the first thing about making no biscuits, but there she was, giving it her all. Big Tree sat by the fire watching her. She looked at me when I come up out of the tent and give a kind of smile, but I could see she had tears in her eyes. I swear a Indian woman is the damnedest thing.

“Are you okay?” I said.

“Beech-i-lack,” she said, nodding her head.

Big Tree said, “She speak Crow. She think you will understand.”

“What’d she say.”

“She is grateful. Now she is your wife.”

“Really.”

“You have not been her husband until now.”

“Beech-i-lack,” she said again.

“What should I say?” I asked Big Tree.

“Just don’t look away. Say yes.”

I smiled at her, and then she jumped up, and before I could stop her she had her arms around my neck. She rested her head on top of mine.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

“You do okay last night,” Big Tree said.

“She say something to you?”

He got to his feet, a kind of half smile on his face.

“What?” I said.

“She don’t speak,” he said.

“Beech-i-lack,” I said.

We only stayed put a couple more days. Then nothing I said would of kept Big Tree still. So we packed up our extra meat and broke camp. The Sioux remained where they was. I’d of had to hit her with a flat stone and left her for dead to keep Morning Breeze from coming with us. So I let her ride behind me on Cricket. She didn’t seem to be too sad about leaving her people. They watched us heading out north toward the Tongue River. Morning Breeze kept looking back at them, but they only stood there watching until we couldn’t see them no more. The country opened up a bit in front of us, and we followed a small stream for a while, then turned a little more toward the west. The weather was cooling off during the day and damn cold at night. Big Tree wanted to stay out of the Bighorn Mountains with winter coming on, but we was headed for a trading post in Wyoming Territory called Redbird.

The first day out, Big Tree started drinking from his keg before we stopped for the night. He’d never done that before.

“Why you hitting that so early?” I asked him.

He didn’t even look at me.

We set up camp near the Tongue River in a stand of trees that looked down toward the bank of the river. We still had plenty of meat, and Morning Breeze set about cooking some over a fire. While I waited, I ate what was left of the oily biscuits she’d made that morning. I offered one to Big Tree and he waved it away. He was drunk and a goner for that night, and I could only hope he wouldn’t pull the same thing the next day. He had plenty of whiskey.

Morning Breeze come to me that night again, and this time I did a fair job of it. Having a woman to lay next to at night and the bonuses that come with that was downright pleasing, and I was no longer capable of saying no to it.

I didn’t sleep at all, though. I lay there most of the night listening to Morning Breeze and Big Tree snore. Sounded like a couple of elks going at it in a mud bog. I figured in the morning, before either one of them waked up, I’d try to find Big Tree’s store of whiskey and deplete it a little bit. I’d heard tales of Indians once they started on the juice. I missed his company in the evenings, and I didn’t like it that he’d started sipping the stuff before the sun went down.

Chapter 7

Weeks passed. We kept to the plains mostly, and I never did manage to diminish Big Tree’s whiskey. He did that. Each day, he’d start a little earlier than the next. He never got to where being drunk made him mean, but he sure commenced to talk a little more before he passed out. All during that time, I didn’t sleep the best I ever have. Things between Morning Breeze and me had started to cool somewhat. Gradually I noticed that she didn’t look at me like she used to or as often. I didn’t mind it that much, but I wondered what I had done to shift her eyes away from me.

Finally, one very early morning when I give up sleep, I decided to get outside and start feeding the fire. Morning Breeze was already up, so I rolled out of the tent and set there for a while breathing the cold air, trying to get my eyes to focus. The sky was dark still, and I could see the moon behind a thick bank of clouds in the south. It looked like there wouldn’t be no sun at all on this day.

I don’t know how long I set there before I realized I wasn’t hearing no snoring from Big Tree’s lodge and Morning Breeze was nowhere in sight. I got to my feet and walked over to the horses and they was still where they should be. I found my Evans carbine and put my boots on.

“Hey,” I hollered. “Big Tree.”

He come back down a little rise above our camp, walking stiffly. He wore his buffalo hat and had a odd look on his face. Morning Breeze was behind him. I realized she was almost as tall as he was.

“Where’d you go?” I said.

He signed that I should be quiet. Then he let me know that he was looking for trouble from the Sioux.

“Her band?” I said.

He shook his head.

I whispered, “They was grateful to us. Beech-i-lack.” I looked at Morning Breeze, but she was bending her head in a shy way and did not meet my eye. “What’s wrong with her?” I said.

“I am Crow,” he said. “Sioux pay me beech-i-lack when they do not kill me.” He paused and looked out toward the moon. In the dim light his face looked like the carved figure of a ancient god on the bow of a ship. “Morning Breeze go for water,” he said. “I follow her.”

I didn’t see no water. He looked at me and noticed that the water wasn’t going to back up his story. “She leave water when she see her people coming.”

“I thought you said it wasn’t her people?”

“They are Sioux. All Sioux her people.”

I said nothing. I might of turned a deep shade of red, though. Morning Breeze would not look at me.

Big Tree said, “They come to kill Big Tree.”

“They ain’t,” I said. “Not as long as I got this here.” I held out my carbine.

“They don’t kill you,” he said. “They take our horses and kill me.”

I got pretty irritable thinking about that. “Damnation,” I said. “You feed their folks—their women and children and old men—and keep them alive for more than two months, and now they come after you?”

“These are not her people. They are different band. Still Sioux.” He glared at me for a second. His face did not change, but I think he was embarrassed by what neither one of us was saying—with Morning Breeze standing there, looking kind of sheepish, and me knowing what they’d probably been up to. If I had of taken the time I would of finally come to see that he was a Crow brave; that meant he was like a statue of what God wanted when he dreamed up the creature he would call “man”—and he could speak her language. I was right puny in her eyes before long. But if the Sioux really were coming, it was just the wrong time for either one of us to even begin to mention what was going on between him and Morning Breeze. I didn’t understand, but I’d like to say I did.

He looked at my carbine.

I think I known his thinking. Maybe I did, but anyway I lifted it and slung it over my shoulder. “We just going to wait here for them?”

“No.” He turned from me and started taking down his lodge. I went ahead and started to fold my tent, but Morning Breeze pushed me away. She tried really hard to do it all herself. She could see I known what she’d been up to. She run around like if she got the whole thing wrapped up fast, without no effort at all from me, that would erase what she done with Big Tree. By the time we got everything packed, the sun had begun to leak a bit under the clouds. I still could barely see for the dim light.

Big Tree got up on his horse. In the gray light, he looked like a dark, towering shadow of death, with steam coming out of his mouth and his horse stomping the ground and a-moving his head up and down.

We’d gathered all the other animals and the two pack mules. We would be a slow train, but Big Tree wanted to get out of the open country. He had a feather attached to the end of his rifle. He raised the rifle a little and nodded at me, then he turned his horse and started out heading east, the pack animals following slowly behind. I got up on Cricket and begun to follow, dragging a line with my own animals, including the one Morning Breeze was riding on. Her legs dangled down both sides of that mule and practically touched the ground. The country was hilly and covered in saw grass, dandelions, and wildflowers. We moved at a trot sometimes, but mostly a slow walk up and down small hills and shallow ravines while the sun lit up the world on the other side of the dark clouds. When I could see the round white outline of the sun, it commenced to rain. A cold, steady rain that come on like a thing dumped from a bucket. I only had my leather breeches and a cotton shirt on, so it wasn’t long before I was soaked and shaking pretty bad. I stopped Cricket and got down in a stand of thick grass and pulled a buffalo robe out of my pack. Up in front of me, I could see Big Tree a-setting there, his head down, letting the water run off of him.

“Don’t you want something to keep warm?” I said, and then I seen him tilt his head back. He was drinking some of that whiskey.

“Well, I guess that will do the trick,” I said.

He did not turn back to me, he just waited there. The water beaded up and dripped in the thick buffalo hair of the hat he wore, and it made the horns glisten like black knives. I took another heavy buffalo robe out of one of the packs and give it to Morning Breeze. She still did not look at me. I said, “You may as well keep dry.”

I couldn’t stand the look of sad guilt on her face, the way she cast her eyes down. I wanted to tell her I figured it out. I known what probably happened. They run into each other in the cold morning. It was talk, maybe, at first between them. She understood him, and he was a god to her and he spoke her language. They was human. It wasn’t nobody’s fault and I would not blame no one. It was not okay with me. I did not want to accept it. But I understood it and it seemed like I should find a way to make her see that. So she wouldn’t feel so bad and mortified around me.

She covered herself with the buffalo robe and, without looking at me, she said, “Beech-i-lack.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Don’t fret about it.”

I don’t know if she known what I was talking about.

In a little while we was off again. I could see the land rising in front of us and off to the left, toward the northeast. It was a path up there and it led to a thick stand of black trees. Big Tree kicked his horse into a trot again, and I did the same. I didn’t look back and I had no idea if the Sioux was following us or not.

What I seen in front of us was a kind of mirage, because the land dipped way down into a bare ravine that stood between us and the trees. We wound around in the shadow of high walls on either side of us until we come to a place where things leveled out a little and heavy tree branches covered the whole sky above us. It was like a deep cave and the rain only dripped through the leaves. The path got too thin to keep riding on it, so we gathered all the horses and mules into a good-sized gulch that bent off the ravine. We strung the leather up in the low-hanging branches to tie the animals in place. They was all breathing so loud, I couldn’t hear nothing behind us. Big Tree scurried up out of the gulch and lay down at the base of one of the trees that leaned over the edge of the ravine. I followed him, not even thinking about Morning Breeze. When I got up next to him, he was wiping the barrel of his Sharps carbine with a piece of linen. When he was done, he handed it to me and I wiped mine down. I figured with his seven rounds and my thirty-four, we’d be fairly redoubtable. I could keep shooting while he reloaded, and when mine was spent he could time his load so he’d be able to keep firing while I done the same.