Far as the Eye Can See (3 page)

She shakes her head, still chewing.

“You don’t think so.”

“It once made me sick. I’m used to it now.”

“I’d rather eat raw buffalo.”

We set there for a while without saying nothing. I watch her gnawing on the fat of that bacon like a small dog. I think it might make
me
sick. I could use it fried up in a pan, though. I could make fried dough with it.

“You really wanted to die?” I say.

“I was not worried about what was in front of me. Only behind me.”

“Well, you brought along that hunting knife.”

She looks away.

“And if you really wanted to die, I almost got the job done for you.”

I hear the sky rumbling again, a bit louder this time. I stand up and look beyond the rock and, sure enough, the sky darkens a little closer this way. Lightning flashes a few times. Ink smells of piss, so I ain’t all that unhappy about the rain. We could both use a good soaking. “I sure hope that rain is coming for us,” I say, settling back down beside Ink. “I could use a good rinsing off.”

It ain’t just the rain, though. I suspect one hell of a lot more than rain is heading our way.

Part One

Theo

1869

Chapter 1

I started out here by myself in 1869 on a damn train. Got to St. Louis riding in a coach. Then bought a big red mare—I named her Cricket—and a fairly new .44 Colt Dragoon sidearm. I bought a army pup tent, some blankets, and a few cooking utensils. I bought ten pounds of coffee, some dried beans, smoked ham, and five pounds each of sugar and salt. Sugar was near a dollar a pound back then, so I spent most all I had. I also got some sowbelly and molasses; stocked up with whiskey and two canteens of water. I figured I’d fill those canteens whenever I needed to. But the best investment I made was the Evans repeater. It’s right difficult to load and takes a bit of time, but once you got all thirty-four of them shells in there, you can fight a long time. I picked up a hundred rounds of ammunition for the pistol and a box of two hundred for the carbine.

I was ready to strike out on my own, but of course I wouldn’t head into this country by myself. Everybody said it was the place to be—with free land and open skies. Well, I’ll tell you: it’s beautiful. As pretty as anything you can find in your head, dreaming or awake. There ain’t nothing more beautiful. What folks don’t mention is the dry heat in summer, the long, cold, empty winters with snow falling and blowing sometimes for days at a stretch, and the ferocious storms all year-round. They don’t mention the clouds of locusts or the work you’ll do. Or who you’ll do it with.

Anyway, it was in March of 1869 I followed a small wagon train, led by a man named Theo, north out of St. Louis, and rode along with them for about three or four hundred miles or so. He had a Crow Indian named Big Tree as his wagon master on the train, and one look at that fellow and you known where he got his name. He was more than six and a half feet tall and solid as stone. His face was smooth as a butcher block, with dark eyes hiding in the lee of his great forehead. Big Tree almost never smiled, but every now and then he would let out a loud sort of harrumph that was clearly the first notes in a pretty qualified laugh.

I wasn’t with the train in no real sense, but I camped right in sight and helped hunt along the way sometimes. The women on the train cooked up what we killed and I shared in it when they invited me.

I was alone, but it wasn’t something I wanted for myself. I mean, I didn’t come all the way out here to be by myself. I thought I’d make it, though; maybe I’d have women and respect and land. Lots of land. I wanted a place I could name and it would be what I’d leave on the earth when I died. To tell the truth, I didn’t never know what I wanted, but I was sure that I was a man of destiny.

During the War of the Rebellion I joined the Union army seven times. I’d collect the bonus, then when I could I’d slip away, go back to some Northern city and change my name, spend the bonus, then enlist again. But eventually I ended up in a few battles. One or two is a lot of battles, to tell the truth, but you only need to see one to know you don’t want no part of no other.

The truth is, I lived through some of the worst fighting near the end of the war: I felt the heat of bullets slicing air and snapping right by my face. I seen men dropping next to me in rows like something cut down by a thresher in a wheat field. And I stood there a facing it.

I was a soldier off and on for almost three years. And when the war ended, I figured my future was going to be out in the open country where land was there for any fellow with the nerve to stake it out and call it his. That’s what I thought I was going to do. In such a big country, what could stop me? The government passed a law that said if I could stake it out, I was entitled to one hundred and sixty acres of free land.

I had no kin to speak of. Just a aunt who was already in her late fifties and too old to even think about travel and change. She lived in Philadelphia and that’s where she thought I would return after the war. My mother died of cholera and my father lit out in the same year. (You’d a thought he killed her.) I was nine years old. At the time we lived in Pittsburgh, but then I went to live with my aunt until the war broke out. She was a old maid that never married and I don’t think she liked men very much. She never once looked upon me with anything but impatience and disparagement. I don’t think she was sorry to see me go when the war took me away. I wrote her a few letters and got one or two back and that was that. When the war ended, I was stuck in Walter Peck’s brigade just outside Petersburg, Virginia.

I turned in my uniform and bought a few linen shirts and a pair of denim pants, and I hung around Petersburg for a little while. Then I went with some fellows out to the ocean on the Virginia shore and swum for days in the salt water. It felt like I was washing the war right off of me. The dirty sweat of fear and uncertainty. I was going to live, by God. And that’s when I got to thinking about going out to the big West. I thought about it a long time. Year after year I thought about it.

It was always something I planned to do, but I hung around Petersburg, working in a shop that made saddles and leather goods. I guess I did that kind of work for most of a year, then I spent some time working in the new ironworks in Richmond. I kept thinking about getting out, but I’d drink a lot of whiskey, work dawn to dark, have little of money in my pockets, and a warm place to sleep. Four years just went by with me living day by day. Then I got laid off at the ironworks. I didn’t even have much money saved, but I just said the hell with it, I’m a-going.

Folks called it “the big West.”

It’s big, all right, but what they forget is, once you get near it, you realize how small you are. Small and unimportant, like something squeaky in the hay of a big barn. You don’t know what might step on you.

It’s how I felt anyway.

You notice the sky out here. And land so far in front and next to you and behind you—as far as the eye can see. Hills and ravines, mountains and long empty prairies; forests that give way to long, deeply green fields of wild grass. Rivers that run down between draws and meet at the tip of great divides of land; rocks that seem to reach all the way to the sky.

You can feel so alone, though. Even a little wisp of smoke in the distance can seem to have the glow of a big city, even though it might be a Indian fire. Indian fires have to be avoided because you never know. You might wander into a Piegan camp and they would greet you kindly and with true hospitality—then, when you’re on your way, follow you so they can catch you. Then they’d have just as much fun cutting off small parts of your body and feeding it to you as they would chasing buffalo or hunting game. And you can’t really trust a camp full of white men, neither, unless there’s women amongst them. I had a friend when I first come out here that got tied upside down to a tree by white men who run off with his horse and saddle and all his belongings. It was Indians that saved him.

Towns and villages are scarce out here and nothing much to speak of when you find them. They’re really outposts.

There ain’t nothing luxurious or enlightening about this part of our country, and I don’t know why folks get so rapturous about it. You’d think people out and about in a place as barren and hardscrabble as this would be more friendly, but they ain’t. They don’t much like folks in need. They see most kinds of needfulness as weakness. They’re so all fired proud of their independence and strength, their will and endurance, they ain’t got time to worry about how others are faring.

Like those folks in Theo’s train that I traveled with when I first come out here. It was a small train—eight wagons. Twenty mules and nine horses. Seven families and two fellows, Joe Crane and Preston, with their own wagon. They said they was going to be men of destiny too. We crossed the Missouri River at Fort Leavenworth and started out on what they called the “Oregon Trail.” There was supposed to be more water that way, better rivers, and fewer Indians. We would go across Kansas, into Nebraska, and then on to the Wyoming Territory. We’d avoid, too, much of the Dakotas, travel north to Montana, on to Utah Territory, Oregon, and then down to California. That was the plan anyway.

Theo was a big fellow, almost as tall as Big Tree. He had a great mane of hair on his head and his face, with only a little skin showing, a small red nose, and two black eyes peering out from all that hair like a bat from a cave. He had huge arms, a terrific boulder of a chest, and almost no waist at all. His legs was long and lean, so he looked like he ought to be a strong man in a circus. He had a wife and five little ones to contend with. He was short-tempered and had a stern disposition, but he took gentle care of them kids and his wife too. He known where he was going and you could follow along or not. I know he had a agreement with the others in that train—that he would get them there and they’d all stick together—but it really was like he decided he was going and the others tagged along, hoping he wouldn’t notice they was there. In the first weeks on the trail, he didn’t say much to me. I can’t say he was even friendly in the beginning. His kids didn’t say much, neither. Even the little ones only got to caterwauling when they was hungry. And he could shut them up with a look.

His wife was hard boned and thin, with a kind of chiseled face—like she was carved from rock. She never smiled or frowned or had no expression on her face at all. But she governed the other women and they did most of the cooking for the train. Theo’s wife made the best biscuits I ever eaten in my life. Set them in a frying pan with a little salt pork and let them cook over a open fire until they was hot and crispy. It only took a few minutes per batch and she’d make several every morning—twenty biscuits in a big iron pan—and feed the whole camp with them.

The other women made soups and stews with the squirrels and wild fowl we killed along the way. Sometimes we’d get a doe or a elk but they’d stew that too. It wasn’t like they was trying to please. Eating was what you had to do to keep alive and moving and that’s how folks looked at it. We eat ourselves a few potatoes and carrots we found along the way now and then, but mostly it was just the biscuits, and the stewed meats with lots and lots of beans.

My first true introduction to the big West was a few days after we got into what folks said was Indian country. Theo kept us near water whenever he could. We followed a stream north for a while, then bent with it to the west until we found another one going straight west and we followed it until it turned north again. Theo took some time to find the best place to cross it so we could keep west. I didn’t know the territory we was in when this happened, but we had just crossed the river when we passed a place called Atherton’s Cut. Like I said, I was following along just a little to the side of the train, and we was riding along a slight rise of ground to the top of a green hill next to a small stuttering stream. At the top of that rise we’d been following, the terrain sloped gently down again and we come to a fork in two small rivers, and where the two rivers split we found a abandoned Indian village. I seen Theo jump from his wagon and walk down there. Big Tree rode over and got off his horse. The rest of the folks in the train had their rifles out and crouched by their wagons. I rode down to where Theo stood by a dying campfire. Big Tree was kicking the ground where lodgepoles had been. Fires still smoldered in several places. It stunk to high heaven.

“Probably Blackfeet,” Theo said.

I said, “Looks like they just left.”

“They stay until they can’t stand the stink any longer, then they move on.”

“What is that smell?”

“Over there.” He pointed to a small bend in the stream on our left, where water seemed to dig into the embankment. “It’s where they shit and piss. As long as the wind stays right, they tolerate it. When it shifts and it gets too bad, they move.”

It was really bad. “Jesus,” I said.

“Or if they’re following buffalo. That gets ’em going too.”

“I think it was the smell this time.”

“If there’s good hunting, they won’t move far. They’re probably a few miles up one fork of this river or the other.”

“Which way we going?”

“Well, I’m going to see if I can’t figure out where they went. I’d like to take the opposite way if I can.” He looked at Big Tree. The big Indian nodded and got on his horse and rode on ahead until he was out of sight.