Lord Grizzly, Second Edition (18 page)

Deserted them, that's what he'd done. What a miserable coward he was. Maybe Mabel was a rakehellion she-rip, ae, but the boys were still his boys, of his own flesh and blood, that's a fact, and good boys too, boys who deserved to have a father. It hadn't been their fault that he and their she-rip of a mother hadn't been able to get along. Not at all.

Deserted them. Ae. Too cussed independent he was.

He said it aloud the first time. “Maybe that's how come it's this child's turn to be deserted. Bein' paid back in kind, he is.”

The saying of it aloud startled him.

Deserted? He deserted in turn? The lads Jim and Fitz desert him?

Impossible. Not his lads. Impossible.

He turned his head over and rested on the other cheek. He pushed the thought angrily from his mind.

He lay puffing.

The dark aftereffects of the dream persisted. It weighed down on him. It haunted him.

He couldn't get rid of the idea that maybe he'd been deserted after all. Thinking on it, a man could see how it explained everything—no dead bodies around, no horses, no gun or possibles, no hunter's or trapper's truck about.

Oh, but the lads wouldn't've left him behind to die the hard way. Impossible. He put it from his mind. There was work to do.

Crumbling with weakness, parched and cracking with thirst, cells sucking with hunger, somehow he found it in him to rise to his elbows and one good knee and crawl on.

Crawl on. Creep on. Nose on. Past stones. Around boulders. Through rocky defiles. Over cutting jagged outcroppings.

He stopped to rest. He lay puffing, ganting.

Deserted? could his companyeros Jim and Fitz have deserted him?

He considered the two lads, each in turn.

Jim now. Jim was too goodhearted to pull a stunt like that on his Old Hugh. Jim had good upbringing. Not Jim. No.

He puffed; rested.

And Fitz? Fitz, well, Fitz was a horse of another color all right. Fitz was hard, practical, cautious. There was no room for peedoodles in him. Fitz never laughed. Something wrong with a man who never laughed. And then all that book learning of his. Anybody knew that reading made a puffball lighter in the head. Reading filled the head with excuses on how not to be a man in a fix. On how not to be a brave buck. In a fix a bookman sat down and told over all his ideas afore he got to work and shot his way out of a fix. In a fix a man hadn't ought to have but one idea—and that was how to get out of a pretty fix pronto. Concluded to charge—did so. That was what true mountain men did.

Fitz? Yes, Fitz might think on it in a close fix.

He crawled on, crept on, nosed on.

Twice he scared up mule-eared jack rabbits. Another time he flushed up a herd of fleeing flagging white-tailed antelope.

Once he almost had a jack rabbit. The jack had cowered until he was on top of him. In the starlit quartermoon-lit night Hugh saw it first as a round gray stone. Its roundness in the midst of the tumbled coarse jagged rock attracted his feeler hand as something to rest on in relief. He put his hand on it. There was a giving of soft fur and flesh. And a startled squeal. And then before it occurred to him it might be meat to eat, before his hand could instinctively close on it, the jack rabbit squirted to one side and, in a huge shrilling bound, was gone.

“Meat,” he muttered, smelling his hand and recognizing the warm milklike rotted-clover smell of the creature, “meat.”

He rested, puffing, cheek resting on a hard cold rock.

The dark thought wouldn't leave him alone. The tougher and grimmer the crawl up the hogback became, the more he became convinced, even possessed, with the idea that his lads Jim and Fitz had deserted him, that Fitz had somehow talked Jim into it.

Deserted. The lads had deserted him. That Irisher Fitz had done it.

Damned Irish. Never was any good for anything except run away from a fix. A fighting Irishman usually meant an Irishman afraid of being called a coward. They could talk forward faster and walk backward faster than any other dummed two-legged creature on earth. He'd sensed it in Fitzgerald from the first. Too practical, too cautious. Hard front and soft back. And the boy Jim, though a Scotchman like himself, too young to know better. Damned Irish. That's what a man got for learning life out of books.

Deserted.

A wave of hate swept over him. If there was one thing Old Hugh hated, it was cowardly deserters. Amongst mountain men alone in a far wild country full of enemy varmint there just wasn't room for cowards, deserters, or they would all go under. In red-devil country mountain men had to stick together. It was the code. He himself had often risked his topknot to save some comrade left behind in battle. Many a time. He didn't deserve to have this happen to him. Especially not at the hands of his own lads, Jim and Fitz. Not after the way he'd saved their skin from the major's wrath.

How could his own lads have come to it?

He crawled on. Nosed on. Crept on.

But the dark thought was back again the next time he lay flat on his belly to rest.

Could they really have deserted him? His lads?

He couldn't shake the notion. He remembered too well how the lads had let him cover up their sleeping on guard, remembered how they had not talked up like men to say they were guilty of negligence, that they had indirectly caused the death of Augie Neill and Jim Anderson. If they could be cautious once, they could be cautious twice.

Cautious. Ae. Too cautious. “Ae, and you can lay your pile on it that it was Fitz's idee too. He talked Jim into it. Poor lad.”

But Jim was a coward to let Fitz talk him into it. The blackhearted bugger. Leaving him to die the hard way.

“If this child ever gets out of this alive, the first thing he's gonna do is track them cowardly cautious devils down and kill ‘em. Inch by inch. Slow torture ‘em. Skin ‘em alive. Fry ‘em alive. Punch pine needles and pine slivers in ‘em like the Pawnees did to Old Clint and make torches out of ‘em. At the same time, so they can watch each other go up in smoke.” Hugh ground his teeth; clenched and unclenched his fists.

Another wave of hate passed over him. The cowardly snakes. The cowardly squaws. Leaving him to die the hard way. Alone.

“Oily cowards. Someday this old coon will have a showdown with ee, lads.”

Those two devils who called themselves mountain men had a code all right. Deserter code. Ae.

Well, he had a code too. A code which said a man had a right to kill deserters. It was a crime before God and man both to desert a man in a wilderness full of howling red devils, taking his possibles away from him, leaving him without food, with nothing but his naked hands left to fight off the varmints. Leaving him without a last bullet to kill himself with in case of unbearable pain. Or in case of capture by red devils. The lads knew a hunter always saved one last ball for himself in case of a pinch. If he could help it, a hunter did all he could to avoid torture by Indians—like Old Clint suffered at the hands of the Pawnees.

Leaving him with a ripped-up back and a broken leg. Ae, he had a code too, and it said to kill deserters on sight.

Waves of hate flushed over him. He ground sand in his clenching fists.

“Them oily cowards. If it's the last thing I ever do, I'm gonna live long enough to kill the both of ‘em. The major is gonna know too. They're maybe laughin' to themselves right now, thinkin' they got away from it, not buryin' me, playin' me for a sucker, and runnin' off with the best rifle this side of the Ohio. But they'll have another think comin' someday.”

He got to his hands and knee and crept on. He crept until he couldn't anymore.

He stopped. He lay ganting in a long crack in the rocks. He watched the quartermoon sink orange then slow red into the gold-dusted black rim of earth.

“Meat,” he said, “gotta have meat. Or there'll be no sweet revenge for this child.”

The long crack in the rocks reminded him of the grave the lads had dug for him back in the gully.

He lay puzzling about the sandy grave. If he was dead, why hadn't the lads buried him? And if he wasn't dead, why had they dug it at all?

Open grave. His grave. Place for his old bones to molder in.

While they were at it, why hadn't they dug it at least a decent six feet deep? They didn't have the excuse that the ground was too hard or too stony. The sand was soft and deep.

The more he thought on it, the more he became absolutely convinced he'd been deserted. The lads probably began to dig his grave; saw he wasn't going to die after all; were in a hurry to catch up with the major; took to their heels. Ae. Took to their heels, grabbing his gun and possibles. The very lads he'd befriended and protected. Fitz and Jim. Lads he'd come to love. Lads he'd always chosen as his hunting companyeros. He could have chosen Augie Neill and Jim Anderson, but he had chosen Fitz and Jim. Jim had asked special for the privilege the first time and he had agreed. Augie and Jim Anderson didn't care. They were too full of fun.

Fitz and Jim. Why should they desert him when he'd never done them any harm? He'd never deserted them.

Lying in the long crack in the rocks, the rock edges cutting into him cruelly in the long lonely dark night, Hugh brooded on their ungratefulness. He turned it over and over in his mind. It burned in him. Seared. Ungrateful devils. And that after he'd stuck his own neck out for them.

He'd get them if it was the last thing he ever did. If the Lord didn't get them first.

He got up on his hands and one knee and crawled out of the long crack in the rocks and nosed on into the darkness ahead.

He crept on until he couldn't anymore; stopped.

He let his head hang heavy from his bulky shoulders, too exhausted and too tired to slip forward on his belly, too weak to weep.

When he found it in him again to look up, he discovered dawn was just beginning to gray the east. He also discovered that in the dark, while he'd been busy with dark deserter thoughts, he had crawled between and beyond the pair of teat mesas. Ho-ah! That meant he was over the divide, that he had nothing but downhill going until he hit the Moreau.

Something in the sloping and far resloped landscape caught his eye. It was the silhouette of a great butte. It came up out of the tar-dark earth and reared over the graying horizon and against the sky like some altar of sacrifice. Its flat top glowed faintly pink where the first shafts of predawn red caught the dark red rock. It glowed a little as if the coals and bones of some sacrifice were still glowing on its flat place of fire.

Hugh's old bleary eyes stared at it. Where had he seen it before? He was sure he'd seen it before. Sartain sure. Ae. The red dark reality of its rearing up before him and the vague red dark memory of it in his mind kept changing places, swinging around like a double-arrowed weather vane on a single pole.

Thunder Butte. Ae, that was it! Thunder Butte. Thunder Butte. Ae. He was seeing the back side of it. On the way up from Ft. Kiowa with Major Henry and the lads he'd seen the front side of it.

The seeing of it overjoyed him. The seeing of it brought Ft. Kiowa closer. What with downhill going ahead and good old Thunder Butte at last in sight, he was sure to make it now. Because once he'd crawled far enough to leave Thunder Butte out of sight behind him, he'd be on the Cheyenne and floating down on river currents.

He sighted down the long slope below him. The channel of a creek or a river angled off in front of him toward the southeast, angled just to the right and south of Thunder Butte. Was that the Moreau at last?

He looked beyond the angling zigzagging channel. Far over a low sloping he saw another channel. The second channel was deeper and wider, more pronounced, with a still further hogback ridge beyond it.

Hugh nodded. Ae. The first was probably only a good-sized creek and the second the Moreau itself. The creek probably joined the Moreau on the other side of Thunder Butte.

Hugh mapped out his trail. He'd take that gullyhead off to the left there and follow it down to the creek. The Thunder Butte creek would have water and wild roots and berries. Once on the creek, he'd cross it and follow it a ways until he got to that pass just south of the Thunder Butte, then crawl over the creek ridge to the Moreau. And at the Moreau he was sure to find a lot of water and good grub.

Dawn came up fast. It burst over the east rim of the earth in a vast racing explosion of pink then saffron then white clear light. The detail of the valleys stood out clearly in the strange zigzagging streaks of light and dark.

Hugh examined the rocky plateau around him. Nothing. Not a spear of grass. Not a stir of life. He'd have to go on without food again.

He found a hollow in the rocks and curled up under his silvertip bearskin.

His last thought was the hope that a rattler might crawl in with him. A rattler was dangerous, ae, but a rattler was meat. Sweet meat.

He woke by midafternoon in blinding sunlight. His first thought was of Fitz and Jim and of how sweet revenge would be.

His next thought was of his belly and of how hungry he was. “This child could right now eat the wild hairs out of a bear, he could. A she-rip at that. Gladly.”

And his next thought was of how refreshed he felt after the sleep. It amazed him that his old creaking beat-up body could come back like a young man's after a good sleep. “This child's been in many a tough fix, with his body all in one piece and no bones broke, and it carried him out on two legs. But I'll be dog if this don't beat all the way it's carryin' me out this time.”

To quiet his belly he jammed a piece off his buckskin shirt; pummeled the piece to shreds; chewed it until leathery juices revived his saliva buds. “‘Tain't exactly buffler boudins but it'll do until I catch me some.”

He made a final sighting down the long undulating rock-cropped slope toward the creek ahead with Thunder Butte as the mark to go by.

Compared with the day before, the going was wondrous easy. There were still many sharp stones and rockjuts the first ways, but it was all downhill, and most places he could slide and coast.