Far as the Eye Can See (18 page)

“But not you,” she said. “You have no interest in gold?”

“I’m as interested as anybody else, I guess. But I don’t like working down on my knees. Nor staying in one place too long.” I put the lid down just right and started hammering the nails in. When I was done, I stood up and looked at the two of them. “Want me to help you push this under the wagon?”

They both looked at me kind of funny.

“It don’t matter to me,” I said. “We can leave it here, but if you have a day or two above freezing, and this sits in the sun, it might start to ripen a bit.”

“Go ahead,” Eveline said.

I started trying to shove the box under the wagon, but in the snow I couldn’t get a good purchase with my feet and I kept slipping down to my knees. The thing would not even slide very well on the ice. When it become clear I wouldn’t move the box by myself, the women helped me. We shoved it well under the shade of the wagon. The sun was high and dead in the sky and didn’t give off a lick of heat.

“It is hard to believe it will ever be warm again,” Christine said.

We stood there looking at the ground for a while, breathing steam. Then Eveline said, “What did you mean about working on your knees?”

I didn’t know what she was talking about.

“You said you did not want to work on your knees.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s what you got to do to find gold. I don’t want to spend my life looking through dirt nor digging holes, neither. I ain’t no miner.”

Eveline suddenly took my arm and leaned into me. “What if we can’t find a train in the spring? If you travel with us, we will treat you very kindly.” Her voice was husky, and by God it was clear what she was suggesting.

“How far would I have to go?” I said.

She smiled. “You want to go to Oregon?”

“Well, I guess not,” I said. “I might go as far as Utah.”

“That might be all we shall need,” Christine said. “For now anyway.” They both smelled like jasmine and maybe a little coffee mixed in. There wasn’t nothing soft about them, neither. Their faces, though pleasant to look at, was chiseled, skin hard as calluses. And they didn’t have no trouble when it come to shoving that casket under the wagon.

“Why don’t you try and sell that ox,” I said. “Or trade him for another horse. You can use the general’s horse and my packhorse to pull the wagon along the trail.”

“So you will go with us?”

“Let’s put it this way,” I said. “You got until spring to replace the general. June the latest. If’n you can’t, I’ll think about traveling a spell with you. But you got to join a train. I ain’t traveling with only one wagon.”

I don’t know why, but it made me feel grand to see how happy that made both of them women. I even thought I might actually do it. I did own half the wagon, even though I was willing to part with it for the right stock-in-trade.

Chapter 9

I signed on at Fort Ellis, just outside Bozeman. Both Eveline and Christine was real sad when I stopped in to say I was going out.

“Your dead friend is here,” Eveline said. “You must come back for him.”

“I’ll be back here before Christmas,” I said. “Come December.”

“Where are you going?” Christine asked.

“General Gibbon is sending a scouting expedition to find Indians that ain’t where they’re supposed to be.”

Christine wiped her eyes with a bit of white linen, but I didn’t believe she was really crying. It was a show. And Eveline? She turned away and didn’t even look at me.

When the expedition got started, the weather wasn’t changed none: it was still cold as frozen steel and the air like to hurt inside when you got it in there. A whole lot of steam left my mouth every time I tried to speak or just walk along. Counting me, there was twenty-eight of us, mostly just fresh troops right off the farm or out of the dirty cities east of the Mississippi. They was green as crab apples and ain’t none of them seen a real Indian, nor had to fight one except the fellow in charge, a officer named Bellows. He may of known what he was doing, by God. He said he’d been with Fetterman before that gentleman and all his troops got massacred by the Sioux back in 1866.

Bellows was under orders from a cavalry officer named Brisbin, who told him to go east until he found the Indians—Lakota, Cheyenne, Shoshone, he didn’t care. They was all occupying land that was no longer theirs and they was in violation of the treaty of 1865. General Gibbon, who was in command at Fort Ellis, wanted to know where the Indians was so he could take his army and go get them in the spring.

I led the small detachment southeast, toward the two Bighorn rivers. We kept the mountains to our right and on the left was hills and valleys to beat all, and every now and then flat prairie as far as we could see. And everywhere snow with reeds of grass poking up like whiskers. We crossed frozen streams that still had water trickling under solid ice. I took them where I known the buffalo had been, or the elk. Traveling with Big Tree all those years, I learned about the movement of the herds and where to look for them. Once you found the herds, you found the Indians. It wasn’t too long before I found snow beaten down until the brown earth showed through. I followed what looked like a long, winding scar in the whiteness, and by the time we got into Wyoming Territorry, we seen where other prints scattered up near the trail, and then we found blood and the spare carcasses of killed game. After that, you’re only looking for smoke.

Twice in our travels, we come upon a fair group of braves. When they spotted us they whooped and hollered a bit, but then, not being dressed for no battle, they skedaddled.

“Man,” one of the young troops said. “This is going to be easy. They’re afraid of us.”

“They ain’t afraid of nothing,” I said.

“Really.”

“There’s a reason they’re called braves. They believe a man is supposed to be brave and they learn to conquer fear pretty early in life. I don’t think they remember much about fear.”

Bellows said, “When they’re ready to fight, they’ll fight.”

“Do they know we’re looking for a fight?” the young trooper said.

“I don’t expect they do,” I said.

“I ain’t looking for a fight, neither,” Bellows said. He had a long, pointed nose and thick eyebrows. He was bald, and didn’t wear much more than a day or two’s growth of beard. It just looked like his face was dirty. He always had a fat jaw full of chewing tobacco that he’d spit, even in the cold. The black juice run down his chin and sometimes looked like a thin-cut goatee. I asked him how he avoided getting killed with Fetterman.

He said, “That was the year after the war, not far from here.”

“Where was you?” I asked.

“I was on a steamboat up the Bighorn River, getting a bad tooth cut out, when Fetterman and his men got killed. That was the war with Red Cloud.” He told me Fetterman was lured by a small party of warriors away from Fort Phil Kearny, and when he was far enough out in the open, the Indians attacked. “His entire command was massacred. Eighty-one men fell upon by fifteen hundred Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapahos. That’s the only battle these Indians ever won against the U.S. Army. And it was right over yonder, a few days’ ride north and east of this very spot.”

We was riding along the trail south of the Tongue River, bent over to keep our faces out of the cold wind. I looked back and seen the young troopers looking kind of dejected. I said, “I don’t think the young fellows in our little army like to hear you talk like that about a massacre.”

“Those fellows want to be famous. They wish they was riding with the Seventh Cavalry and Custer.”

“I heard tell of that general,” I said. “He’s a Indian fighter to beat all, ain’t he?”

“He ain’t no general. He’s a bloody colonel. He was a brevetted general in the war. Folks do him a favor calling him ‘general.’ ”

“I known a fellow who got a brevet rank. A Captain Cooney.”

“U.S.?”

“Confederate. He’s in a pine box right now, under a Conestoga wagon, waiting for spring so we can put him in the ground.”

We rode along for a spell, then Bellows said, “What happened to him? Injuns?”

“No, he got sick.”

“There’s a million ways to die out here,” Bellows said.

“I guess there is.”

On our tenth day out, late in the afternoon, we finally come upon a small canyon between two high ridges of ground. A stream run through there in summer, but now it was a white ribbon that snaked its way out of the canyon and further up into the hills. Next to the stream, on the north side of it, was nineteen or twenty lodges, and about thirty horses tethered behind them. Smoke from their campfires rose up from the tops of the lodges into the white sky. Dogs barked. I didn’t see no people.

“They might be having supper,” Bellows said. “Or they’re keeping warm.”

“It ain’t like they didn’t want to be found,” I said. “If they known we was after them, we wouldn’t find them that easy.”

The troopers behind us was real excited. The hardware in the bridles of the horses rattled and I heard several magazines click with new ammunition. I said, “Wasn’t we just supposed to find them? We ain’t just gonna ride down there and start shooting, are we?”

“We’ll be ready,” Bellows said. “But I don’t want to shoot nobody. I think we can talk them into going with us.”

“All the way back to Bozeman?”

“No, we don’t need to do that. We’ll escort them to Fort Laramie. That’s only three or four days from here.”

“I thought the order was to find out where they are. We done that.”

“We are going to transport these Indians to Laramie. I hear there’s a Indian village there. It will save them. You don’t know what’s coming.”

“You think they’ll go?”

“I intend to ask them polite.”

“I was at Summit Springs,” I said. “I seen how it can go. Them Indians was taking a nap and the cavalry just rode right down on them. I’d like it to be different here.”

“Like I said, I don’t want to shoot nobody.”

Bellows and me just rode down the hill and walked our horses steady into the middle of the half circle of lodges. We got to the center, and a tall brave poked hisself from a lodge to our right. Bellows raised his white-gloved hand and said, “How.”

Then some other braves come out. They moved to our left and behind us, but nobody said nothing. The first Indian that come out raised his hand and then he motioned for us to dismount.

We got down and handed the reins to the fellows standing around. It was a handsome bunch. They was Cheyenne and not from nowhere near Bozeman, so they wasn’t in violation of no treaty with the army up that way as far as I could see. The big fellow that first greeted us stood to the side of the entrance to his lodge and motioned for us to go in. It was warm inside, and there was lots of room. Drawings was painted on the walls, which reminded me of Morning Breeze. A hot fire blazed in the center. There was blankets all around, and two women and four children huddled in the back. It smelled like leather and smoke in there, close with sweat too.

We removed our hats and took a seat by the fire and our host sat down across from us. He signed that we was welcome. To show he meant it, he offered us his pipe and some tobacco. We all smoked silently, sort of staring at each other, then two other braves come in. One of them was tall and wore a long red scarf around his neck. He carried a long spear with white feathers hanging off of it and I didn’t see how it wasn’t the same Indian I seen chasing after Big Tree that time when he rode in amongst them. I tried to remember his name. He had to be a Sioux, but those two tribes traveled together a lot, so it wasn’t no surprise. Our host wore a single white feather in his hair, and when everybody was seated, he spoke.

“Netawnyay,” he said. “I am Saw-set.”

Bellows and I nodded. Then Bellows told him our names. “You speak English?”

“I can some,” Saw-set answered. He went on in Cheyenne, though. He signed that we were welcome again and wondered what we wanted.

Bellows told him in English that the treaty his people signed meant he must come with us to the Fort at Laramie.

“I signed no treaty,” Saw-set said.

“Your people signed a treaty that you have mostly honored until now. You know of the treaty.”

“We hunt,” Saw-set said, speaking very clear English. He pointed to the tall Sioux with the red scarf. “This is White Dog.” That was it. White Dog. I wondered if he seen me close enough to remember. I caught him looking at me. Saw-set said, “His people hunt with us. We feed and put skins on the people. We have no idea of war against the whites.”

White Dog said, “You make war on the people.”

“No,” Bellows said. “I come to offer you a place to keep warm and to be fed during the cold winter.”

“Are you not warm here?” Saw-set said. “There is plenty of game. We do not need your help, but we are grateful that you come to us and offer it.”

Bellows looked down at his boots that was facing sole to sole in front of him. He had his hands on his knees. He rubbed his knees for a bit, then he said, “I am sorry, but you must go with us to Laramie.”

It got quiet.

The tobacco was good, and when it was near finished, the pipe come to me and I smoked some and then offered it like it was a infant to Saw-set. He took it and just as gently set it down next to him. Then he looked at us. I seen real sadness in his eyes. He said, “Saw-set mean War Eagle in English. If you will make war, we will fight.”