Into the Savage Country (12 page)

“This is a road,” he said.

“What road?”

“I don’t know. A road.”

There was only one road for hundreds of miles. It was four miles long. It went between the infirmary and the north end of the bluff. I told him this.

“Which way to the settlement?” he asked.

We’d come from the south so it was hard to tell if we’d walked up the east or west side of the bluff. I looked one way and saw snowy wilderness. I looked the other way. Snowy wilderness. We could see about fifteen feet.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Guess.”

I was pretty sure if I guessed wrong we’d die. We’d been walking for twenty-four hours. Our beards were frozen solid. It had started to snow again. We could not survive another night.

“I think we came up the back end,” I said. “So this way. To the right.”

Ferris turned right. I followed. I tried to keep up and could not. He waited. We started up. Again, I fell behind. I stopped. He came back and I said, “Go on.”

“No.”

“We’re close. Bring help. Don’t leave the ridgetop.”

Ferris stood silently, judging if I could walk farther. After a moment he said, “Rest here. I’ll be back.”

I slumped in the snow and watched him walk off in that winter twilight. I closed my eyes. I was settling in the snow when I heard a far-off clink of metal. Maybe it was Smitts using an old horseshoe to knock ice off the iron railing at the entrance to the lodging house. Maybe it was a stirrup on a metal runner
of the doorstep. I only heard it once and it was very faint, but I heard metal on metal and it was in the direction Ferris had gone. I sat up. I crawled several feet then stood and staggered off in that direction. Five minutes later there was a pale glow in the snowy darkness that coalesced into an oil lamp. Then another lamp held aloft and the sound of doors opening. The distant call of voices. I saw the peaked shape of Smitts’s lodging house.

“Here!” I called weakly. “I’m right here.”

There was the sound of voices. Then Plochman took one of my arms and Smitts took the other. I was dragged toward the lodging house. Alene ran out with her hair uncovered and a knit shawl falling into the snow. Smitts stepped on the shawl with his snowy boots but Alene didn’t notice. I knew how I must look—face frozen and buffalo gore up and down my front. I tried to say the blood wasn’t mine, but my tongue wouldn’t work, so I just raised a hand in mute greeting and was led into the warmth of the lodging house. They lay me roughly on the floorboards alongside the fire. Alene hovered over me, rubbing my face, opening my jacket. She cut the leather strips at my ankles and pried my makeshift boots off and I heard her gasp when she saw my feet. I reached over and she held my hands in her warm hands and blew on them, and I said, “If this is what I have to do to get to hold your hand, then, damn, it’s worth it.”

“Quiet, William,” was all she said.

Sprawled next to me, Ferris, who’d saved my life, lay in front of the fire like a piece of wood, the ice frozen to his face just beginning to glisten.

In the morning Meeks gave me laudanum and cut into my feet and pulled the spines out. Afterward, I slept and that evening
when I woke I heard someone outside on the street yelling, “The damned crupper’s going up my ass, you corncracker.” That was Pegleg. I recognized his voice. I lay there, groggy, understanding that Smith, Branch, and Pegleg had arrived in the settlement. They had been trailing Ferris by several days. I lay back smiling and slept again and was woken by many footsteps on the cross planks.

A moment later the door swung wide and Ferris hobbled in followed by Pegleg, Branch, Bridger, Glass, and Captain Smith. Ferris had gray patches on his cheeks and fingers, but besides that, seemed to have recovered completely after only a day. I had not been inured to hardship by a full year on the march and I’d had my feet operated on. It would be weeks before I could really walk again. I sat up in bed and shook all of their hands.

“How are you, Wyeth?” Pegleg bellowed.

“Dandy,” I said.

“Well, you’re a hivernant now for sure. Shot up and half froze. We get you a squaw wife and you’ll have gone whole hog.”

“He’s working on it,” Ferris said.

“That so?” Pegleg said, and took a bottle from Branch and held it out to me. “Give her a horse and get on with it. You need any more romantic advice, feel free to ask.”

I’d just managed to pry the cork off the bottle when Branch said, “You take as long to shoot as you do to drink I’m surprised you’re alive, Wyeth. Let’s hear of the battle. And give me that bottle.” He snatched the bottle from my hand and tossed the cork aside, saying, “The battle and then the bottle.”

“Wasn’t much of anything,” I said. “We shot a bull on the ice west of the bend. Shot it and it cracked the ice and sunk—”

“Should’ve waited till it got off,” Pegleg said matter-of-factly.

“I would’ve but Ferris was hasty.”

“He’s been known to be so,” Branch said, and that set them cackling, as Ferris was the most laconic in the brigade. The flask was handed to me again. This time I tilted it immediately.

“You call that drinking?” Branch said. He took the bottle from me. “Go on, Wyeth.”

“I’d taken my boots off and stepped into the water and was gutting the bull when the natives stole our horses.”

“And your brogans,” Ferris pointed out.

“Yes. They stole my boots.”

“Let’s see those hooves,” Pegleg said, and pulled the blanket back. My feet were huge with cloth bandages. Pegleg prodded at the bandages with the tip of his knife. Ferris stood in the corner, an arm behind the back of his neck, inhaling deeply as the tip of the knife touched the bandages. Pegleg turned and looked at him.

“You got something to say?”

“If I did I’d say it,” Ferris said. Then, to me, “I’d have another drink, Wyeth. I think Peggy’s set to go to work.”

“I ain’t set to do anything ’cept see how the doc’s maimed him,” Pegleg said. “Shame old Peggy wasn’t here to help you out.”

“Well, you’re here now,” Ferris said. “Still a chance to hobble him.”

“Quiet,” Pegleg said.

Pegleg knelt at my feet and I felt him snip the tied end of the bandage with his knife. Very carefully he unwound the dressings, which came away white and then yellowed and red and stiff. I winced at the tearing sound as the last strands pulled away.

“Go on, Branch. Offer him a drink,” Pegleg said without looking up.

“No danger of him not taking it,” Branch said, and the bottle
was held out to me again. This time I took a full swallow. The bottle was taken away.

Pegleg peered at my bluish, bruised, swollen feet.

“Fine stitching,” Pegleg said. “You sure old Meeks did this? I’d think he’d be talking too much to manage it. I believe you’ll walk again.”

“Don’t know how you walked at all,” Ferris said.

“I was thinking of the alehouse with its bottles.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Branch said.

Pegleg wound the bandages back around my feet. When he was finished Branch produced another bottle from the folds in his jacket.

“Go on. Have a swaller, Wyeth. You deserve it.”

They stayed for an hour and by the time they were ready to go I was reeling. After they walked out Ferris lingered.

“I saw you groping the widow’s paws when we were dragged in,” he said. “Damn fine maneuvering, given the circumstance. I’d keep it up.”

I put the back of my hand to my forehead. “I see the darkness closing in.”

“I believe that’ll do,” he said. “My apologies for annoying you about her before we hunted. I could see it rankled.”

It seemed like three weeks had passed since that conversation. I’d forgotten it.

“You were right, Ferris. I waste time on hesitation and trivialities and mewling about my position in society. I need to make my intentions clear and be done with it.”

“Continue the assault. And whether you succeed or fail, recover quickly. I look forward to our hunt this spring.”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” I said.

Ferris wished me luck, then departed, and I tried to get up and see them on the road but a stabbing pain shot through my feet and went all the way to my head. I held very still until the pain subsided to a dull ache. The whiskey glowed inside, fatigue crept up on me bit by bit, and I slept, dreaming of those long hours when we trudged through the icy darkness, my mind replaying the memory of that march, not, I think, puzzling over the event so much as educating myself. I had pushed myself to the edge of what was possible for me and my mind was teaching itself the limits of my body’s endurance.

When I woke again it was dusk and there was a wicker basket on a chair near my head. I heard a rustle somewhere in the room and sat up.

“Hello,” I said.

There was no answer. A figure rose from the gloom.

“It’s me,” I heard someone say.

I realized it was Alene. She was at the door. She was leaving.

“Where are you going?” I said. “I’ve slept all day. Stay.”

She lingered in the doorway. I was struggling to sit up.

“Please, stay,” I said.

She hesitated, then came over to the bed and placed the basket on the bedcover and helped me sit. There was a blue-and-white checkered covering on the basket. I pulled the corner aside and saw the end of a loaf of bread. I raised my hand to touch it. It was still warm.

“Smitts gave me the flour,” she said.

“That was generous,” I said.

She sat in a bedside chair and arranged the checkered cloth, and as she did, I placed my hand on top of hers.

“Thank you for coming. And thank you for the sustenance.”

“You can thank me by eating it. We thought you’d perished.”

“You were probably praying for my demise, hoping to take over the tanning trade.”

“That was the first thing that went through my mind,” she said, a little shaky in her voice because my hand was still resting on hers. I waited for her to push my hand away, but she did not. Instead, she turned her hand upright so my palm was on hers. I thought if she pulled her hand away I’d just say, “I don’t blame you, shape I’m in,” and make a joke of it. But she didn’t pull her hand away and after a moment her fingers grasped mine. A few minutes passed in silence, without either of us moving, and in those minutes a great change was taking place within me and I believe within her, too. It was as if something that had seemed massive and immovable, an impossibly tangled problem, had suddenly shifted quite easily into a new and pleasing shape. After perhaps a minute, though it seemed much longer, I reached up and pulled her to me and kissed her. She withdrew afterward, flustered, and said faintly, “Don’t do that, William.”

“I’ve already done it,” I said. “And you did, too.”

“My mourning ends in three weeks.”

“I think it ended right now,” I said.

She tried to stand. I was still holding her hand and she was holding mine back. She looked as if she’d go but she did not go, and she did not let go of my hand. She sat back down. She started to get up again but didn’t. Then she turned to me and bent and her mouth met mine.

“I’m going,” she murmured. “In a minute.”

But it was much, much longer than that before she left.

• • •

I was in bed for a week. Ferris visited for the first three days, speaking of the prospects for the new season, of the possibility for fertile drainages farther west, and showing me the progress he’d made in his sketchbook. He had much improved in his ability to capture the men in action, and there were wonderful studies of the pack train on the move and of men wading through streams with traps in one hand and guns in the other. There were many quick sketches of the native villages with accurate details. Even with my limited knowledge of art I could see he had progressed in his ability to capture the life and spirit of that country.

Near the end of the week, when it was clear I was out of all danger, Ferris, Smith, and Bridger reluctantly continued on to St. Louis, where they were securing supplies for the following season. Glass and Pegleg moved into the barracks, and the mulatto Branch, who could not associate with the men of the brigade freely in the city or the settlement, rode off with a party of Mandan. After that I was free to spend every waking moment with Alene, which is what I wanted. She brought me books and fed me and read to me and pretended to tend to me, but as soon as we were alone she was holding my hand and kissing me in my bed and letting me brush her hair and draw her down to me and every day it was like some new and wonderful country was opening up a little more for both of us.

Three weeks later Alene’s mourning period ended and we were officially engaged. By the way the town congratulated us, with a hint of fatigue, I could tell they were surprised it had taken so long and thought me a particularly slow fellow.

It was a “western engagement,” which meant I could hold her hand, steal a kiss without reproach, and be in private with her with the door open. No one, except a few of the religious women
at the infirmary, even thought to disapprove. All this was wonderful for both of us. I think some couples are meant for courtship and others are more comfortable once the initial courtship is over. Alene and I had a rough, uneasy beginning but were content with each other as soon as we were formally linked. This is not primarily the story of our love for each other, but if it were, and I were concentrating all my meager powers of description on this great event in my life, I would not be capable of capturing how magnificent and wonderful I felt at that time, or what a monumental change it had on every aspect of my outlook and being. All who knew us thought we were a finely matched pair and saw me, in particular, as being fortunate. Alene was a strong, steady, reliable woman who would most likely receive a fortune. I had not wished for that fortune and if anything had resented it, as it meant I was the weak link in the match, though I knew if she received it I would benefit greatly. If there was any disturbance in our bliss it was not her past connection to Bailey but the unspoken prospect of the upcoming trapping season.

Alene and I had made plans to take the first keelboat out in the spring and to get married that summer in St. Louis, but she also knew that I had told Ferris I would join a brigade the next season, and in my heart, I yearned for that final season in the trapping country. I had come west to satisfy some restless craving, to sound the depths inside myself, and if I did not do the thing properly I feared I would never be content. I had pledged myself to Alene and I would have died for her, but if I did not make that final voyage there would always be a piece of me that felt I had not done the thing. Not really. Not the way I ought to have. I knew I was lucky to have joined myself to Alene, and yet I yearned for the western mountains.