Far as the Eye Can See (39 page)

She don’t say nothing. She sets there watching me, and I realize she’s going to do what I say. We ride along the creek and down the side of the hill until we reach the trees at the bottom. We have moved closer to what’s going on at the top of the hill on the other side of the trees. When we get to a place where I think it’s safe to tie the horses, I move on foot through the underbrush so I can get to where I can see everything. Ink and Little Fox follow me. His eyes are big and focused. In front of me I see a lot of horses and two young braves watching them. They ain’t much older than Little Fox. I move around to the left of them, holding my carbine ready if I have to use it. We get to where we can make out most of the ground before us, even in the smoke, and what I see don’t fully register right away. Near the bottom of the hill a horde of Indians on horseback ride back and forth shouting war cries and waving spears and rifles high over their heads. They’re too far away from the soldiers, so they can’t be hit with no bullets or do no business with their rifles or arrows. In front of them, though, further up, the hill is covered with Indians moving around mostly on foot, shooting toward a group of maybe two or three hundred blue-coated soldiers at the top. The fellows on foot, moving steadily up the hill, drop down in the sagebrush to put a arrow in their bow, stand up to shoot, run a few paces, and drop down again. Hundreds of them, all around the hill. The ground is littered with dead horses and dead soldiers and a few Indians. The noise is deafening and the smoke begins to thicken and makes it hard to see clearly. I don’t know how long we watch. The fight goes on for at least a hour, maybe more. The Indians keep coming, more and more of them getting down off horses and starting up the hill. Most firing arrows. Some with pistols and some more with rifles. I’m just beginning to think we should run away from here when I realize the Indians have stopped firing arrows. I don’t hear their guns, neither. A strange and eerie lull sweeps over the field like sudden weather, and through the blue smoke I see one of the soldiers put his pistol to his head and shoot hisself. The soldier next to him does the same. Then another one. The Indians watch in amazement. Their yipping quiets a little when they see what’s going on. One soldier after another, some of them right at the same time, shoots hisself in the head. Some of them shoot the fellow next to them, then theirselves. It don’t take long and they’re all dead. I don’t know how many of them was left before they started killing theirselves, but after fighting so long it was a wild thing to see.

Ink looks at me when she realizes what they done. She says something I can’t hear in the noise of the Indian celebration, so I lean in close to her and put my ear in front of her mouth.

“White men are crazy,” she says.

“I’m white,” I say.

Them Indians killed maybe fifty or sixty of them soldiers on that hill before the bluecoats started killing their own selves with their own guns. It is the damnedest thing I ever seen in my whole life, and that includes Stone Mountain and Chickamauga. It give me the most empty feeling, like ain’t nothing under my skin but air, and I can’t get enough of that to keep on living.

Ink starts crying. Little Fox commences, too, but he don’t want to show it. “You both shut up,” I say. “We got to stay out of sight here and get the hell out when it’s dark.”

There’s still a lot of smoke and the Indians carry on, doing a little scalping and celebrating up and down both sides of the hill. They ain’t paying much attention to what’s going on in the trees at the bottom of the hill. I get the horses and we start off on foot, leading them into a deep ravine that runs down into the Little Bighorn River. We tie the horses in the deepest part of the ravine, then hunker down under deep-green branches and underbrush that covers us pretty well. I let Little Fox keep watch first and try to get some sleep.

I don’t know as I got much sleep, but Ink comes to me just as the dusk begins, and we start off again on foot, leading the horses. I’m in the lead with Ink behind me, and Little Fox in back with the horses behind him.

On the other side of the river we see hundreds of horses and a few more braves watching over them. I don’t know if they see us or not. We head upstream toward the place where the Little Bighorn River meets the Bighorn River. We can hear more fighting on the other side of the hill, in the trees. We stay on foot most of that way until it is completely dark. When we get far enough north of the massacre, we mount up and ride along the Bighorn until we see the Yellowstone sparkling in the morning sun.

We camp near the river and I sleep most of that morning. It’s early in the afternoon and strangely quiet when I wake up.

“We made forty miles or more, last night,” I say.

Ink don’t look at me. Little Fox sits facing her, eating what’s left of the deer meat.

“We can travel in the daylight now, I expect.”

“We can?”

“I think we’ve left every Indian and soldier back at the Little Bighorn. Ain’t no army up this way. Nor Indians. They’re all down in the valley, killing each other.”

That afternoon we cross the Yellowstone River and head west over some rough terrain. Traveling in the daytime, it’s easier to find the path, though. I don’t even think no more about who we might run into. The country is empty in front of us.

When it starts to get dark, we stop. I let Ink set up camp, and I go off by myself to scout the territory and figure out what we might do in the morning.

Chapter 28

Now it’s me that don’t have nothing to say. Every day we ride along in silence. We’re headed for Bozeman. It’s almost July now. I run through my mind all the things Eveline would say to me and what I might say back. All I promised was I’d try to get back to her, and I did do that. She would of done the same thing if she found herself in my predicament. Anyway, I never told her I loved her nor nothing like that. We understood the both of us what might happen if things didn’t go like we planned. I expect she’s happy, headed on to Oregon with a fellow a lot better than me, and after a while I don’t feel so bad about all of it no more. I go through this progression of thinking most every day, and so by dusk, when we stop to camp, I feel like I done my best and it’s okay. Only in the fresh evening sky, when light falls off the world, and we got to make camp and settle in for the night, I commence to get sad all over again.

And still we ride in silence. The boy don’t know English, and when he speaks at all it’s in a language even Ink don’t fully understand, even though he has no trouble helping her figure out what he wants.

We fight hot weather and scorching winds on some days, and in the night we rest under dry trees or as close to stones and boulders as we can get. The country rises and gets more and more rocky. We are near the Musselshell when I finally kill something larger than a groundhog. It’s a good-sized elk calf. And then one morning a week or so later a herd of buffalo wanders nearby and I kill one of them. They ain’t easy to kill, neither, not with a rifle like my carbine. But I fell one and then put a bullet in his brain to finish him off. We have plenty of meat and skins to boot. Ink wraps what we don’t eat in bloody bags of skin so it will keep. By the time we’re back near Bozeman, I’m ready for some kind of talk.

“You know,” I say, “them fellows on that hill was just doing what they was told.”

She says nothing. We sit by a fire, late in the evening, just before dark. The sky ain’t got much light left in it, and the moon gets brighter and higher. Little Fox is asleep on the ground next to Ink and she rubs his hair gently, staring at the fire. He sleeps most of the night now, and we both set our schedule from his waking and sleeping. We know when he wakes up we will start traveling again.

I clear my throat to let Ink know I’m about to say something. She don’t look at me, but I go ahead anyway. “I remember when I went to work for the army, the talk was you didn’t want to be caught by no Indian. Save the last bullet for yourself. Them fellows heard about the mutilations,” I say. “Some may of seen it.”

She lifts her hand from Little Fox’s head and lets it rest on her thigh. She’s got her legs crossed. She don’t look so scrawny no more because we been eating pretty good since we left the Missouri. Now when I look at her I can see how one day she will be a heavy, low-riding squaw. I don’t know, it’s a image I get suddenly sometimes. She’s half white, but she’s got a jaw that will be fat and round someday, and arms that will be heavy, and she’ll be worked to death from life on the plains. It ain’t no wonder she wanted to run away. She looks at me now and I see she’s thinking hard about something.

“What?” I say.

She shakes her head.

“You worrying again about Hump?”

“No.” She slants her eyes away.

“What is it?”

“I saw Hump. Back there.”

“Back where?”

“At the battle.”

“You’re gonna tell me you actually seen him in all that smoke and confusion.”

“I know his horse. He always rode a big painted horse. And he wore a full headdress in battle. It was him.”

“So he ain’t after you no more.”

“Maybe he never came after me.” She says this kind of disappointed.

“You feel bad about that?”

“His horse got shot out from under him. I do not know if he was killed.”

“Well, now he is for sure busy enough that he ain’t concerned with you no more.”

She looks at me like she’s a-wondering something of a puzzle.

“Or maybe he wasn’t never after you,” I say.

Her eyes glitter, but she don’t say nothing.

“You feel sorry about it, don’t you,” I say.

“I hope he was not killed.”

“Well, that’s a damn fine thing. You go on and hope like that.”

“I knew him for a man,” she says. “He was not cruel.”

“But you run from him anyway.”

“I ran from that life.”

I don’t bother to mention what Hump may of done to me and her if he was chasing after us and he caught up, but she knows it. All I say is,“Well, you got far from it, didn’t you?”

“Now I want to go back,” she says.

“Back to Hump?”

“No. Don’t be so loud. You’ll wake the boy.” She pauses for a second, then she says, “I do not want to live with white men. Not now. Not with . . .” She don’t finish, but she looks down at Little Fox and I know what she means.

“I’m a white man,” I say.

“You are not like other white men.”

“I’m just like other white men.” She knows it too.

“You won’t harm me or the boy. You will protect us.”

“Well,” I say. “You got me there.”

She actually smiles a little. Then she says, “Not like any other white men.”

“Maybe not.” It’s almost dark and we got to get some sleep, but this is the most she’s talked since she got took. I take a deep breath and say, “I guess we’ll be in Bozeman soon.”

She don’t say nothing.

“Probably tomorrow.”

She looks at me and I think she’s going to shush me, because the boy is sleeping next to her, but she bites her lower lip slightly, then she says, “You have done well.”

I look away, kind of on the spot. “Well, I . . . You know . . .”

She gets up and comes over to me, stands there looking down on me, and in the firelight her face looks eerie and cold, like she’s passed judgment and she’s about to shoot me to put me out of my misery. Then, by God, she sinks to her knees and sort of falls into my arms. She rests her head on my breast and I hold her again, like I did that awful day she bathed in the river and washed off the horror of what Treat and his gang done to her. She is crying again, and I pat the hair on the back of her head and don’t say nothing for fear she will move away. I know this must shame her somehow, because I’m a man and for what men have put her through. Still, it’s right generous the way she holds on and lets me touch her hair and all. It don’t occur to me what she might want, or what I want. We just stay that way for I don’t know how long and then she gathers her breath back and stops crying, but she stays where she is, thinking again.

“What?” I say.

She moves back a little and looks at me. Her eyes are soft now, and dark, and they sparkle from the fire and the moon. “We should go around the town.”

“Around it?”

“If we are going to the land of the Nez Perce, we can go around Bozeman.”

“If that’s what you want,” I say. “We got plenty to eat.”

She glances at the boy. “In Bozeman, they will not understand.”

“I know.”

It’s quiet for a spell, then she says, “We travel at night again, leave the day for camping.” Now she’s all business, but she’s still there in my arms, real close. It puts shame in my mind, and embarrassment. I start to move away, but she holds on.

“We don’t need to do that,” I say. “We’ll go much faster if we can see the trail by sunlight. And ain’t nobody interested in us no more.”

“I am thinking of the heat,” she says. “It may be hard on you.”

“I ain’t going to wilt in the sun.”

She seems to nod. It strikes me that for the first time she thinks of me in a way caring and womanly, and I am grateful for it.

“You know,” I say, “I should go into Bozeman by myself. I need some cartridges.”