Lord Grizzly, Second Edition (10 page)

It was a fine herd of ponies, Hugh saw. All the colors of a hunter's kennel of hounds were there: milkwhite, jetblack, sorrel, bay, cream, piebald, irongray, strawberry-roan, bluegray, chestnut, dapplegray. Despite the wear and tear of the long four-day grind from Ft. Kiowa, the ponies still looked fresh. They were all clean-boned, strong, fast, long-winded. Most were about fourteen hands high, light in build, with good legs and strong short back, full barrel, sharp nervous ears, and bright popped eyes.

When the horses finished their drinking, Hugh and the boys hobbled and staked them, allowing each enough of the sweetgrass for a good fill.

“Tonight, before we turn in, we'll snug ‘em up closer and set horse guard,” Hugh said. “There's always coyote about ready to snaw your rawhide lariat when you ain't lookin'.” Hugh waggled his old head sagely. “It's easier to count horse ribs than horse tracks.”

Horses secured, the three hurried back to the campfire. Except for a bite of liver, they'd had nothing to eat but hard biscuit with sowbelly since early morning, and they were blowy with hunger. The thought of freshly roasted red buffalo-cow meat made them ravenous.

The spot Major Henry picked for camp was in an open glade circled by slim willows and small cottonwoods. The stream in the sandy creek was clear, though thin, and in places it trickled cheerfully over pink and brown stones.

Pierre the cook and Yount and Allen built a huge single bonfire on a patch of sand near the creek. Soft green sweetgrass circled it on all sides. The hot fire with its roostercomb flames deepened the bronze hue of the mountain men's weathered leather faces, lightened the green in the ticking cottonwood leaves above.

To the south, behind them, the nipped teat of Thunder Butte stuck up just visible over a ride of bluffs, while ahead and below lay the open-shelved valley of the Grand River. To the west, in the glowing rosebrown of after sunset, a new range of blunt bluffs loomed up brownblack and foreboding. And to the east, the coyotes and the wolves, still wrangling with each other around the bony ruins of buffalo carcasses, looked like gray and white mice gamboling around reed hampers of cheese.

Green twilight swooped down from the slumped shoulders of the hills in the east; then came rusty dusk; and then the deep purple-dark of night with crisp sparkling stars.

Jack rabbits as big as dogs presently came out of hiding and made a circle around the fire some hundred feet back, sitting on their haunches, flicking their mule ears back and forth as if trying desperately to eavesdrop on the talk of the mountain men. Mosquitoes stayed discreetly away from the roaring fire, though the horses under the trees suffered.

Piles of meat, fleece, tongue, ribs, boudins lay on blood-streaked buffalo skins. Late evening flies and a few whispering mosquitoes buzzed over the red flesh.

Jim and Fitz, and wiry brown-eyed Augie Neill and slim slow Jim Anderson, sat on one side of the fire. Across from them sat scalped houndfaced Silas Hammond. Others around the circle included proud Yount and gaunt Allen and Major Henry.

Major Henry looked tired. He had doffed his blue cap and with heavy sighs was making some entries in a gray ledger. Every now and then his eyes swept the circle of men around the crackling blazing fire, then reached out into the darkness where the ponies stamped and flailed at mosquitoes. He had the half-listening half-waiting air of a man who expected catastrophe to come pouncing on him out of the circumambient dark—and who was inwardly steeled and set for it.

Swarthy Pierre the Frenchy cook officiated at the mess. He was dressed in a long leather butcher's apron, a leather Turk's cap, heavy leather boots. He wielded an assortment of knives and forks and kettles and bottles of condiment.

Laughing, smiling, joking, Pierre worked swiftly. First he cut short pointed stakes of green willow wood, then cut alternate steaks of meat and slabs of fine fleece and jammed them onto the pointed stakes, next leaned them sizzling over the fire.

Meantime Hugh officiated at the singeing of the boudins or the intestines. Hugh emptied out the chyme—half-digested lumps of greenish-black grass—and turned them inside out and tied the ends off to keep the fat from running out. He let them sizzle in the hot red coals until they puffed up with heat, until they began to spit crackling fat. The crackling fat dripped into the fire and raised little spuming blue flames.

The buckskin boys crowded against Hugh. They sat silent, piercing eyes intent on his turning of the boudins, one or another of them occasionally licking his lips, skinning knife wiped clean on a sleeve and ready.

The smell of roasting flesh soon drew the coyotes and wolves toward the fire, scattering the jack rabbits. One of the coyotes howled like a boy with a broken leg.

With a long green willow stick Hugh continued to turn the boudins.

Presently steam began to escape from little pouches. The pink boudins began to brown, then to coil above the red coals.

“Now!” Hugh yelled, and with his long stick he lifted them away from the fire. They hung above the gaping men like browned pink snakes. The men made wild beastlike grabs for them, each slicing off yard-long sections. The men gulped them down like children swallowing strings of hot sweet taffy.

For the fun of it, Augie Neill and Jim Anderson cut off a section a dozen feet long and had themselves a race. Each grabbed a puff end and began swallowing rapidly, sometimes in their haste poking it down with a prising finger. They swallowed; they choked back laughs; they swallowed so mightily their eyes sometimes closed. Once, Augie, with a prodigious swallow, made a gain of more than a foot on Jim Anderson—only to have Jim Anderson rear back with a choked snort and jerk more than a yard out of Augie's gullet. The mountain men roared; slapped their thighs in wild laughter.

Boudins down, it was time for the next course. Pierre the cook ladled out a spiced soup made of blood and marrow and prairie onions. The men sat on the ground around the roaring pluming fire, cross-legged, and each held up his tin cup. Filled, each man took out his little private pouch of salt and pepper, sprinkled in to his taste, and slupped at the soup with eye-rolling delight.

Next came the main dishes.

The moment the alternate steaks and slabs of fleece were lusciously browned, Pierre reached into the fire with his huge iron fork and hauled them out. He gave each man a pair, slab over steak. The men gorged, chewing with fatty smacking sounds. Grease trickled down both sides of their chins, fell onto their buckskin shirt fronts.

Pierre had also impaled tenderloin on the sharp-pointed green willow sticks near the fire, and when they were done he lifted them out of the flames and jabbed them into the ground, two men to a hunk. Knives flashed as each man began cutting himself bits according to his appetite.

Next Pierre took the great kettle off its hook over the fire and found a clean place in the grass and dumped the contents out; hunks of hump ribs, tongue, bits of liver. Again the men dug in like hungry hounds.

A few of the men, fancying they needed something like bread and butter, cut themselves slices from their store of pemmican and smeared it with marrow, the trapper's butter.

Gradually the men mellowed. First there were groans of ecstasy, then grunts of pleasure, then fine eloquent social belches, and at last a few remarks.

Scalped Silas said, “Well, Pierre, now that we've had the bait, how about servin' the main part of the meal.”

The boy Jim Bridger said, “Here's some more liver for ee, Hugh. Good for your beard, I hear.”

Hugh laughed from behind a hump rib. “Dip in yourself, lad. It's yours which needs the manure, not mine.”

Sly brown-eyed Augie said, “And I once thought pork prime eatin'. After this I'll always know it's against nature to feed on chops.”

Gaunt Allen said, “Lads, I tell ye, painter meat can't shine with this.”

Slim slow Jim Anderson said, “Best durn grub I ever stuffed down my meatbag.”

Scalped Silas shook his mournful hound's face. “Darn this way of livin'. A feller starves all day like a mean coyote. And then at night, when he does chaw, he stuffs himself fuller'n a snake crammed with rabbit. And ain't of any account for hours after. Like a tick full a blood.”

Hugh noticed his companyero Fitz hadn't said much. “Ho-ah, Fitz, bright up a little. Forget what them books ha' told ee. It ain't as bad as all that.”

Fitz managed to give Hugh a slow smile. He was gnawing his way into a lump of juicy well-done fleece. Grease ran down both sides of his chin.

Hugh laughed. “Yep, when a mountain man has plenty to eat, then he's a mite cheerful. But let him starve a little—whaugh! an old grizzly is better company.”

Pierre came up with some more steaming sizzling well-done hump-ribs. “Back up your cart, boys, here's another load. Bridger, my boy, come on. You ain't full growed yet and you need all you can get to catch up.”

Tears of gustatory animal joy came to Hugh's eyes; streamed into his greasy gray beard. “Boys, can you beat this? And I once thought of goin' back to mush and molasses in Lancaster.”

Major Henry, who had pitched into the meat with both hands, looked up at this point. “Lancaster, Hugh? Is that where you're from?”

Hugh swallowed and nodded shortly. He had made a slip. He looked down at his half-gnawed hump-rib. “I stayed there awhile onct.”

“Who had the mush and molasses there, Hugh?”

“Nobody,” Hugh snapped.

Major Henry cleaned his lips with the back of his hand. He smiled thinly, upper teeth gleaming white in the firelight. After a moment he nodded; gave up.

Between courses the mountain men licked their fingers and wiped their knives clean on their buckskin shirt sleeves. Soon all the buckskin shirts were stained dark with grease and blood.

The shirts smelled of campfire smoke and burnt wood. Body heat and fire heat stirred up odors of other times too—the scent of lovemaking with musky Ree maidens, fired gunpowder, Kentucky whisky.

Soon the coffee began to boil in a pot on the cookstone. Pierre served it, the men holding out their tin cups in turn.

For dessert, and as a special treat for good time made so far on the trip, Major Henry ordered Pierre the cook to break into the company's store of raisins and chocolate drops. Old Hugh for one savored the sweets like a grizzly delicately munching a handful of tasty red and black ants. The treat topped off the day complete.

Finished with the feast at last, the men jabbed their knives in the sand and wiped them on their buckskin clothes for the last time and then got out their pipes. They filled up with sweet honeydew tobacco from Virginia and lit up with brands from the log fire.

Each man fancied a favorite pipe. Major Henry fondled a brier with slender stem and a fine bowl. Quiet Fitz worked on a clay pipe with a stubby stem and blunt bowl. Proud Yount fingered a brier with a long slender stem and thimble-sized bowl. The boy Jim showed off a novelty pipe, a huge walnut affair with paired heavy blunt bowls the size of goat ballocks and a long rapierlike stem. Houndfaced Silas Hammond fancied a dudeen carved from hard maple—it resembled a twig with a cluster of berries at the end. Old Hugh fancied an old ceremonial pipe he got from Bending Reed's brother—a bowl of pinkred pipestone cut to resemble a tomahawk, with a willow stem from which dangled beads and amulets and other Sioux medicine ornaments.

They sat crosslegged around the jumping flames. Some leaned back, some leaned forward. Pipe either spuming or quiet, some listened with stoic Indian gravity and some with comical gravity to the yarning and to the rambling talk. A stranger happening on them would have had to look twice, and that close, to make sure the buckskinned longhaired men around the fire were not Indians but white men.

Behind them two coyotes yowled at the skies, each in turn, howled long and loud and lonesome. In the vague light from the fire the scattered jack rabbits eddied and played over the plains.

Somehow the talk got around to the lord of the American wild, the lonely grizzly bear. A single grizzly inspired more respect in the tough weathered mountain men than did a couple of savage Rees.

Grizzlies were unpredictable. One day a grizzly might amble away from a man with an indifferent air; the next day he might suddenly attack with a rushing roar.

Gaunt Allen said, “It all depends on how hungry Old Ephraim is.”

“No,” Hugh said, removing pipe from mouth and looking reflectively at the jumping flames, “no, not how hungry. Old Ephraim won't eat humans. No, it's more that he's curiouser than a cat. He just naturally wants to see what you're up to. I mind me of the time when I was with the Pawnees and the Pawnees off into the Rockies for buffler meat. One Old Ephe follered me a whole day trying to cipher a white streak of clay I had on one of me leggin's. I finally had to take the dag leggin' off and hang it on a twig and let him smell it over. Then when he had it ciphered, he ran off.”

“Then ye say Old Ephe warn't after your meat?”

“Not this old bull.”

“I bet you shivered,” the boy Jim Bridger said.

“Some. Though more from the chill in my game leg than from the bear. Course I admit that a grizzly love tap is about the same as a death blow. So I was careful.” Hugh smoked in silence for a moment. “No, it's the ma grizzly with cubs you want to watch out for. When you see her, watch lively and mind your topknot. Whaugh! She's doom, she is, especially when her cubs ain't bigger'n little pig puppies.”

Gaunt Allen said, “I still say around a grizzly it's best to shoot on sight and ask questions after. I mind me of the time when I was settin' beaver trap up a branch off the Big Sioux a couple year ago. Now that's one place you'd never expect a grizzly, let alone any kind of bear. But there was one. And was I surprised when he jumped me sudden from the rear. I hadn't seen hide nor hair of him. There he was sudden, on top a me. He fetched me a swipe and tore my pants clean off my behind. Bare as a monkey's behind, I was. I jumped for deep water fast, I can tell you. Soaked my primin', so I couldn't shoot. And there I sot, cold behind in colder water, waitin' for him to make up his mind if the water was too cold for him. And him wearin' his own fur too, and me with only my few hair. No siree, I say, shoot on sight and ask questions after. They ain't givin' you no chance either.”