Far as the Eye Can See (41 page)

“I ain’t in on it,” I say.

“We’re leaving this afternoon. We’re gonna kill every single Injun between here and the Missouri River.”

I think of where I left Ink and what might happen if I don’t get going pretty quick. Nate stands too close to me and seems like he’s waiting for me to say something. When I don’t, he says, “You say you was there?”

“I was. It ain’t nothing glorious about it. And them Indians did not have better arms. They hardly had any guns at all.”

“You know that for a fact.”

“It ain’t what it says here, I can tell you that.”

“How’d you get here?”

“I ain’t no soldier in  no man’s army. I signed on to help them find Indians. They found them.”

“I guess they did.”

“And the Indians was none too happy to be found.”

“They’ll pay for what they done.”

“They didn’t do much,” I say.

“What do you mean by that?” He’s got his dander up a bit. He steps closer and I smell whiskey on him.

“You folks can go on killing each other all you want,” I say. “I’ve had my stomach full.”

“What do you mean, the Indians didn’t do much? You on their side, renegade?”

“I ain’t on nobody’s side.”

“A renegade,” he says, happy with his conclusion.

“Them fellows in Custer’s cavalry was green and young,” I say. “Most ain’t never seen a battle. They fought a long time, but the truth is, in the end, most of them went ahead and killed theirselves.”

“Who done that?”

“Custer’s men. On the hill. I seen it with my own eyes.”

“You take that back,” he says. Suddenly his face is red. I think if I ever got angry that fast, everybody I know would be dead.

“It ain’t nothing against you,” I say.

“You’re a coward and a liar.”

“Well,” I say. “I ain’t got time for this.”

I turn to leave, but he grabs my arm. “You take it back, what you just said.”

“Sure,” I say. “I gladly take it back.” He waits there, looking at me. “Now let me go.”

“I think you skedaddled out of there the same way you done in the army during the war.”

I don’t know how he can know about that, but I see no reason to challenge him on it. Then I realize it’s a accusation—that he thinks I will be insulted if he claims this is what I done in the war. He has no idea he guessed my true history. So I step up close to him. He don’t back down much. I say, “I wasn’t born in the woods to be scared by no owl.” He’s looking up at me because I’m a mite taller. I see something behind his eyes falter. Then I say, “I’m leaving this here place right now. You want to try and stop me?”

“You get out,” he says, like it’s his idea.

He watches me walk out of the place. I go back over to the stable to see what that fellow got for my horses and the robes. But when I get there, ain’t nobody around. It’s late in the afternoon and hot. I can hear bugles and then men and horses at Fort Ellis. It’s a commotion that I know means I have to get out of this place and get back to Ink now. I can’t wait around to talk to nobody, but I don’t want to leave my horses there with them robes. So I get everything packed up again and ride out of there with everything I had when I rode in, and more. I got the two gowns from Eveline and Christine, and plenty of ammunition for my rifle.

Chapter 30

I don’t want to ride Cricket too hard, and the other horses can’t really keep up if I go too fast, but I keep them moving along. It ain’t far and in the daylight I can keep to good terrain. I know the army is behind me and we got to get our camp packed up and head north to miss them.

When I get back to her, Ink is laying on the ground with the boy behind her, and she’s aiming the Colt Dragoon right at my throat. When she sees it’s me, she gets up and lets the pistol drop to her side. The boy rushes up and grabs the reins of my horse.

“We got to hurry,” I say.

“Are they after you?”

“No. They’re coming though. I don’t want to be here between them and where they’re going.”

“Who?”

“The army.”

We get packed up and Ink cuts some tree branches and brushes the ground around our camp. She turns the stones away from where the fire was and buries some of them. In a few minutes you can’t tell we was even there.

We head north up the Gallatin valley toward Fort Benton and the Missouri River. On both sides of us is high, white-tipped mountains and good timber in the foothills. We push hard up that valley, and we’ll keep going until we get to the river, then we’ll follow it north and west.

On the first day, when I think it is safe to stop, we go into the timber a ways from the trail and set up another camp. We are near the end of the Musselshell River. We don’t build no fire yet; it’s getting near dark and I don’t know what’s ahead of us. I give Ink and the boy a bit of dried venison, and I chew on a bit of it myself. We got plenty of water. I watch the sun disappearing behind the trees and the shadow of the mountain begin to rise up on the ridge at the other side. We are in paradise. The blue water of the river and the high white clouds over the top of the mountains sparkle in the evening light; most everywhere it ain’t blue, it’s green, and the few stones that poke through look like the gray rocks of heaven. We can hear the water rushing in the river and not much else. We are very far from the army, and Ink knows it. She says she wants a fire. Even in the middle of the summer it can get pretty cold at night, and this close to the river you can almost believe it’s December, not July. I can see my breath.

“Nobody is following us this way,” she says. “We can build a big fire if we want.”

“I don’t like it,” I say. But I see the boy shivering.

“We are far enough in these trees, nobody is going to see us,” Ink says.

“I guess it’s okay,” I say.

It ain’t hard to find dry wood and brush to get a fire going. The smoke climbs high, though, and I know when it is dark anybody on the other side of this canyon will see the glow of it. The army went out east, though, I’m sure of that. Who would want to find us where we are?

I ain’t thinking too much about what was promised yesterday. I am glad to be here, was glad to see Ink when I come upon her, even though she had that Colt Dragoon pointed at me. Little Fox don’t seem near ready to bed down, and the three of us sit up against a fallen tree and watch the dark green climb the cliffs across from us while the light dies out.

“Where we going?” I say.

“To Indian country.”

“Idaho?”

“The land of the Nez Perce,” Ink says. In the weak firelight, with the sky turning gray, she appears almost ghostly. She looks at me, a half smile on her face. “They live in peace, and no white man is interested in their land.”

“It’s a long way to northern Idaho,” I say.

“It is not that far,” she says.

Little Fox tries to say “Idaho,” but all he manages is “Waygo.”

“Waygo?”

Ink says, “We go.”

The boy nods his head. His skin is brown as Ink’s and nobody will doubt he’s her kin. Next to them, with my red hair and pale skin, I might be taken as their captor before a body’d think maybe they was with me of their own free will. This makes me think a little more on the subject of where we might be headed.

“Maybe you should go to Idaho without me,” I say.

Both of them look at me with black, serious eyes.

“I’ll help you get there,” I say. “But I’m just as much a conversation piece among them Indians as you and the boy would be among the whites.”

She don’t say nothing. Little Fox, I see, don’t have no idea what I said. But he knows something is going on.

“That’s about the half of it and the whole of it,” I say. “Any way we try to go, there’s trouble.”

“Not among the Nez Perce,” she says. “They are friendly with everyone, even white men. You would be welcome around their fires.”

“How do you know that?”

“My mother was Nez Perce.”

“I thought you said she was Miniconjou.”

She shakes her head. “I will have family there. They will know me.”

“You speak the language?”

“Some. I will remember more when we are with them.” She looks down at the boy now and begins to pat his head. He yawns, and I think of what she said the other day about the next time we was together and Little Fox was asleep.

“There is no gold in Idaho,” Ink says. “The Nez Perce live in peace with the white man and all others.”

“Okay,” I say. “We’ll go to Idaho.” I smile at the little boy and rough the hair on his head. He knows me good enough now that he don’t duck when I reach for him. He only looks at me with them needy eyes and I know I will take care of him. I think he may know it too. If he don’t, someday I intend he will.

“We will be safe with the Nez Perce,” Ink says. “We can live our lives there and raise this boy to manhood. We can teach him not to hate.”

I don’t believe it for a minute. But it sounds so fine. I wish it was true as the movements of earth. So much of what folks want in the world turns out to be just a thing they say. Words change the way you feel for a small time and that just about goes as far as it can go toward being a true thing. Everybody says they want to live in peace; everybody says they don’t want to go to no war. Nobody wants to spend every waking moment looking to be killed or having to kill somebody to keep from getting killed. That’s what you would think. But what humans do is just that. All the time. So no matter how it makes you feel, no matter what folks
say
about war and killing, we’re all lying to ourselves and everybody else. It’s all one big everlasting lie. When I know this, it don’t feel right even thinking about a thing so far off as happiness. Something way down inside of me feels like it’s dripping and damp and completely evil. I know I am a animal that can talk and there ain’t nothing that will ever save me nor no one else. This is what we are, and until we die, it’s all we are. A savage animal that can talk.

But then after more than just a little while the boy falls asleep and Ink wraps him up tight in a blanket. She comes to me and puts her arms around my neck and says again, “You have done very well,” and it makes me feel like the whole world don’t exist outside the rim of this here fire.

“I done well getting to be with you,” I say, and I realize I mean it. Now something very different seems to take hold of my mind. It ain’t desire, neither. It’s a feeling of being saved from something dark and final.

“You shot me,” she says. “And now I say to you I am grateful for it.”

“We will travel in daylight from now on,” I say.

She don’t say much of nothing else the rest of that night. We lay in each other’s arms and I don’t understand words like “hate” nor “death” nor “killing” nor nothing at all nowhere but here, between us, in the blue night next to the curling fire and the white moon high over the silver tops of the dark mountains. Much later that night I say, “Diana. It’s a beautiful name.”

She laughs sweetly. “I am Ink now.”

“Yes,” I say. “I will take care of you and the boy. If that’s what you want.”

“With you,” she says. “That is what I want.”

“You won’t run from me, then?”

“I will be with you and no other.”

“I won’t have to chase after you someday, like Hump?”

She moves even closer to me, her head on my shoulder, her cheek against mine. “No. Do not say it,” she says. But she knows I don’t mean the question.

“Maybe this is all we need,” I say.

She is quiet. Sleep comes to me like a feeling of joyful remembering; like I ain’t never lifted nothing heavy in my life; like I been a boy all my time and the world ain’t at all what I come to fear it is. And in the bright, misty morning, we pack up silently, put out the fire, and load up for the long trek to the land of the Nez Perce—far away from all this trouble and slaughter—where Ink is certain we can be happy and live in peace.

A Note on the Languages Used in this Book

Aside from the dialect used on the part of the narrator, the language spoken by Ink and to some extent Eveline and her sister was the proper learned speaking language of the time. Speakers rarely used contractions in their speech, nor did they approve of double negatives or slang terminology.

In Indian languages, double consonants are almost always indications of the voice spending a longer time on that particular consonant than one would in English. In English we say a word like “normally” by pronouncing only one
l
sound. With double consonants in Indian languages, it would sound more like the sound we make when we say “will lie,” or “still left.” The same with the
s
sound. The
s
in “sentence” is shorter than the
s
sound in “yes seven” or “horse sense.” The same is true of the vowels. “Aa” is the same as the “a” in “above.” All of what I learned about Crow languages came from George Reed Jr. In the text of the novel, sometimes I tried to spell the language phonetically if I could. Most of the language is written the way it should be. Here I’ve listed the English phrases first and under them what George provided as the Crow equivalent: