The clerk who filled
my order for bacon, beans, flour, and coffee at the general mercantile, a goat-faced Scot named Kilmartin, informed me my best route to Canada from Deer Lodge lay along the Rocky Mountain Trench, a trough of lowland between the Flathead Mountains to the west and the Swan and Galton Ranges to the east. He traced the path with a thick-nailed forefinger on a map tacked to the back wall that might have been drawn up by Lewis and Clark.
“That takes me thirty miles out of my way, with the Rockies still to be crossed,” I said. “What's to stop me from cutting through that creek pass up north? After that it's all tableland.”
“That's Métis country. You know Métis?”
“French Indians. I had a transaction with one in Dakota a few years back. I never did work out if he was Christ or Satan.”
“That sums up the breed. Talk is they're fixing to go to war with Canada again over land. When the Mounties crack down, which they're bound to do anytime, the Métis will bolt back this side of the border to regroup. I would not want to be in their path when they do.”
“I heard it was the Cree making all the trouble.”
“Aye, them as well. Their aim is to stop the Canadian Pacific from laying track through buffalo country. If they attack at the same time as the Métis, there won't be Mounties enough to go around. You're sure you don't want to winter in Montana?”
“I'm sure I do. But I haven't put aside enough to retire just yet. How high is the creek in that pass since the thaw?”
“I've not heard. With luck ye'll drown. Them frog Injuns like to take their time with captured lawmen.”
I paid him for the provisions and the advice, loaded the gray, and struck out for the pass that led to the tableland.
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It was bone cold but dry. The sky was a sheet of bright metal, with the Rockies' white-capped peaks bumped out on this side as if an angry god had kicked in the sheet with his foot on the other. I'd brought along a small pot of lampblack and smeared it beneath my eyes to cut down on the glare. Tiny icicles pricked inside my nose, but there was no wind, and the sun lay across my shoulders like a warm shawl. I rode with my bearskin unbuttoned until dark, when the chill came in with the suddenness of night in the mountains. My fingers were numb, and my hands were shaking uncontrollably when I finally got a fire going. Every time I started a long trek in the northern winter, I had to learn all over again what I'd known most of my life.
Live and learn
, my father, the trapper, used to put it.
Die dumb
.
I got up at first light with every muscle in my body screaming, fed the horses, fried bacon in the skillet I'd been carrying for ten yearsâstolen, along with a couple of other things, from my last ranch job in lieu of two months' payâpoured boiling coffee down my throat, and picked my way through the foothills along Salmon Trout Creek, shining like quicksilver with splinters
of ice glinting in the swift current. The debris along the banks told me I'd missed a honey of a flood by a week or so, but it was still swollen. In places only a strip of level ground three feet wide separated the shoulder of a hill from the water and I got off and led the sorrel mustang and the shaggy gray to avoid a bath. I don't swim any better than the odd petrified stump. I reached the pass around noon, and by the time dusk rolled in I was in the tablelands with nothing between me and the Dominion of Canada but a hundred miles of Montana Territory.
I made good time my first day clear of the pass, but a fierce squall late the next morning forced me into the lee of an old buffalo wallow to wait it out. The flakes, flinty little barbs of ice, swarmed in the gustsâat one point I swore they were blasting from four directions at onceâand swept away sky and earth in a white wipe. I hobbled the sorrel and the gray to prevent them from drifting before the wind, turned up the bearskin's collar, tugged down the badger hat, tied my bandanna around the lower half of my face, and sat hugging my knees with my back against the wallow's north slope, breathing stale air and putting the devil's face on the cue ball that had shot me to this remote pocket of the earth. I fought sleep, but I must have lost, at least for a few minutes, because I dreamed that a blizzard hit Helena so hard and stayed on for so long that Judge Blackthorne was forced to chop up his billiard table for firewood.
By then the squall had passed, leaving me tented with snow to my knees. I stood and shook it off. The brief storm had spread a white counterpane from horizon to horizon; even the firs and cedars were bent like old men beneath its weight. The horses, stupid, pathetic creatures, had managed despite their hobbles to move a hundred yards away from the shelter of the slope. The ice caused by their own spent breath had pulled their lips back from their teeth to form death's-head grins. It fell away in sections
when I tapped it with the butt of the Deane-Adams. I fed them handfuls of oats to restore their body heat, stroking their necks and telling them in soothing tones that I was going to sell them for steaks to the first starving Indian I met. Only the mustang appeared to understand. Its eyes went hard as marbles and it snickered.
The rest of that day was an uphill push through drifts nearly as high as my stirrups. It was just a taste of the country I was headed for, where the snow fell twice as hard for days instead of minutes, and the wind struck with the force of God slamming shut the pearly gates.
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I came across my first fence the afternoon of the next day. It was four strings of barbed wire without a gate in sight, but I was pretty sure I had drifted off the road. I turned in what seemed a likely direction, followed it for several miles, and was beginning to think I'd made the wrong choice when I spotted smoke from a chimney.
The chimney belonged to a small cabin built of pitch-pine logs with a steep shake roof stacked with snow. Behind it, three times as large, stood a barn with proper siding, altogether a more expensive construction; but then, it was built to shelter wheat, not just people. A plank sign leaned against the post to the left of the gate before the house. I had to take one foot out of its stirrup and kick loose the snow to read the hand-painted legend:
DONALBAIN FARM
BUYERS WELCOME
TRESPASSERS SHOT
MARAUDEURS ETRE FUSILLE
I leaned down to unlatch the gate and started through, leading the gray.
“Turn right around, ye damn toad-eating savage!”
I drew rein and slacked off on the lead. I couldn't remember when was the last time I ate a toad, but since a greeting like that is generally backed up with something more substantial than invective, ignoring it did not seem the best course.
The sun was just above the log shack and square in my eyes. I shielded them with my forearm. There was a shrunken solid something under the overhang of the porch, a little darker than the shadows, vaguely man shaped; and it was holding something at shoulder height.
“This here's a Springfield musket,” said the man on the porch. “If ye don't turn around right noo, I'll put a fifty-eight-caliber ball straight through you and knock doon a barn in the next county over.”
Well, you have the idea. His Scots brogue was heavy enough to sink to the bottom of a peat bog. It's as hard to spell as it is to read, so I'll lay that part to rest.
“Hold on,” I called out. “I'm a federal officer.”
There was a silence long enough to make the horses fiddle-foot to stay warm.
“Say something more!” demanded the man on the porch.
“To hell with this. It's too goddamn cold to sit here and make a speech.” I started to back the sorrel around.
“Come on ahead,” he said then. “Ye don't sound like no frog I ever heard.”
Close up, he was a brown and gnarled fencepost of a man in a faded flannel shirt and heavy woolen trousers held up with suspenders. A black Quaker beard ringed his seamed face and bright, birdlike eyes glittered in the shadow of his shaggy brows. When he got a good look at me he lowered his weapon, which
wasn't a Springfield at all but a Henry rifle with a brass receiver.
“Whoever sold you that firearm was pulling your leg,” I said.
“I traded the musket for the Henry and a case of ammunition in '78. I made worse mistakes but not lately. If ye wasn't what you said ye was and ye'd known the ball wouldn't reach the damn gate, I'd be deader'n Duncan.” He screwed up his face, bunching it like a fist. “Ye got papers?”
“No papers.” I had the badge ready. I tossed it to him. He caught it one-handedâa surprise, for I had him pegged at past fiftyâlooked at the engraving, and tossed it back. “It don't mean much, but I'm satisfied you ain't one of them damn bloodsucking Métis.”
I didn't pursue that. “I'm bound for Canada. If you let me camp on your property tonight and cut through in the morning I'll thank you.”
He scratched his chin through his whiskers. “Feed you supper for a dollar.”
“I'll make my own.”
“No sense us both eating alone,” he said after a moment. “You can bed down your animals in the barn. Spread your blanket there. I'll fill the basin out back of the house. I got a pot of venison stew on the stove. That's my dollar's worth of good works for law and order.” He uncocked the Henry.
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“The sign means what it says. Buyers are welcome; the wheat or the farm, it don't matter which. I lost my taste for the life when my Marta died.”
The orange glow from the coal-oil lamp on the table filled the lines in Donalbain's features, increasing his resemblance to the young man in the sepia-tinted wedding photograph that hung on the wall behind him in an oval frame. We were drinking
sherry from an old green bottle, using barrel glasses with bottoms as thick as sadirons. The venison stew sat pleasantly in my stomach.
“Is that when you took up French?” I asked.
“I got it out of one of Marta's books. She was a teacher in Boston when I met her.”
All of the cabin's decorations, including the rag rug and linen shelf linings, obviously predated his wife's death. The air was a stale mulch of woodsmoke, tobacco, coffee beans, damp wool, kerosene, and rank male. Sooty cobwebs hammocked the rafters. Loneliness hung as heavily as the carcass of an old bull buffalo.
“You translated âtrespassers shot.' Why not âbuyers welcome'?”
“There ain't a Métis alive who's begged or stole enough to meet my price. And they're the only ones around who read French. I translated the one I needed.”
“They told me in Deer Lodge the Métis are getting ready to declare war on Canada.”
“They'll just lose their shirts like they did the last time. Then they'll come back down here begging and stealing and making life hell all over again for the honest. I've found it's easier to blow them out of their moccasins than talk to them at all.” He refilled our glasses from the bottle. He'd emptied his three times since we'd started drinking, and his speech and his hand were as steady as when he'd had me under the gun. “Don't tell me the government's taking an interest in them after all this time.”
“No, I'm chasing a couple of fugitives. You might have read about them: Lorenzo Bliss and Charlie Whitelaw.”
“I don't take the papers. They're full of lies. Murderers, are they?”
I nodded. “They've run out of laws to break in the United
States. The prevailing thought seems to be the Mounties need my help stopping them before they start on the North Pole.”
“Know them well, do ye?”
“I haven't had the pleasure.”
He drank, tipping the glass at a careful angle to prevent sediment from stirring from the bottom. His eyes never left me. “Ye'll not take offense when I say ye don't look like that such of a much.”
“There's more to me than meets the eye. Except when it comes to billiards.”
“Billiards?”
“It's a story I don't feel like telling.”
“Golf's my game, or was before I left Benmore at the request of the queen's soldiers.” He reached for the bottle, shook it, and thumped it back down with a scowl. “I'd not insert myself betwixt the Cree and the damned Metis and the railroad for all the wheat in Montana. They won't welcome ye, and neither will the North-West Mounted. Those redcoats have had the run of that country going on ten years. They don't answer to Ottawa nor the Colonial Office in London, though they'll no admit it. They'll take tea with ye Monday, push ye off a mountain Wednesday, and write a letter to Chester Arthur Friday with their regrets. But ye'll no have to concern yourself with any of that, because long before ye get on the hair side of them the winter up there will kill ye like spring grass.”