Lord Grizzly, Second Edition (21 page)

That was it, all right. An old brave left to die. With a few provisions to last out his days. And his favorite dogs left to watch over him, and maybe, gone wild, to eat him if the wolves didn't get him first.

Hugh waited another half hour before venturing out of his hiding place.

The dog in front of the old tepee took one look at Old Hugh's grizzly aspect as he emerged from the canebrake and ran howling into the brush behind the tepee. It made Hugh smile. “He ain't forgot about what this grizzly did to his companyero. No siree.”

Hugh waded on elbows and knee through the river, bum leg in the slape trailing after like a wetted plew of beaver on a sled, and boldly approached the tepee. Still no one in sight, still no wild war-whoop out of the yellow brush and the yellow grove to indicate the tepee was an ambush.

Hugh lifted the flap and peered in past a dangling medicine bundle.

He was right. An old one left to die alone. An old withered crone. She was lying prone on a fur beside the ashes of a fire in the center of the tepee. A striped blackred woolen blanket covered her. Her eyes were closed. But she was still breathing. She was incredibly old and wrinkled.

Somehow she looked familiar, Hugh thought.

Hugh crawled in for a closer look.

A white weaselskin amulet hanging from a stick thrust in the ground behind her head finally helped him identify her. Hugh sucked in a breath. Ho-ah. It was the old mother of Grey Eyes. Hugh's flinty eyes rolled. When the Rees fled their villages above the Grand on the Missouri, Pilcher's boys had been instructed to set fire to the villages. Just after they'd fired it, they found the old mother left behind in a mud-covered round lodge. Hugh clucked his tongue. The Rees must have snuck back into the burning village to save her from a fiery and ignoble end. And in their subsequent raveling over the country, they had managed to take her along this far.

His quick old eye fastened greedily on the paunches of food left at her side. A small bag of rich pemmican, soft enough so the toothless withered old lady could mouth it down; a cake of cornbread, also soft and easy on the gums; and a bladder of fresh water—all provisions for the rest of her journey here on earth and for the first of her journey into the new spirit world.

Hugh pounced on the pemmican and cake. Human food for his poor old stomach at last.

There was a quiver in the wrinkled oldpenny eyelids. The old woman's eyelids parted and old blackcherry eyes tinged with a deadskin-gray looked up at him.

Hugh held still, eyes furtive in bushy face.

Her old wrinkled leathery lips moved. “——face.”

The old word whispered out of an old throat gave Old Hugh a pause. The old word said in Arikaree he readily understood. He knew a little Ree—it was a cousin language to the Pawnee which he knew well. Face. Paleface. She didn't see him then the way the dog saw him. Paleface. Ae, with the long beard he now had he was a paleface sartain sure. Major Henry was right that it stuck out.

The old black eyes brightened and the dead skin on the eye slid to one side like the winking nictitating third eyelid of an old hen. One of the withered bony arms stirred under the striped blackred blanket. Her old leathery voicebox harsed low again. “Meat.”

The second old word jolted Hugh. He dropped the bag of pemmican and cake of cornbread.

Once more the old throat harsed an old word. “Water.”

Hugh's eyes filmed with tears. He couldn't help it. Poor old soul. He knew what it was to be left alone to die. Ae. He knew.

“So it's water ye want, is it?” Old Hugh's voice cracked. “Well, Old Mother, water it is ye'll have. This child can't begrudge ye that.”

He angulated his body and leg over and sat beside her. He cradled her old head in an arm and, with his other hand, held the mouth of the bladder of water to her lips. Her old black braids fell across his soiled leather sleeve.

She drank slowly. Some of the water pulsed down her throat; some of it spilled and ran down the wrinkles cutting back from her stiff leathery lips. When she finished, he laid her head carefully down on the tanblack buffalo robe again. Hugh had the feeling that if he hadn't been careful, her head could very easily have parted from the spine despite the old tangle of veins and sinews and leather skin holding them together.

She thanked him with filmy eyes; then her eyes closed. She puffed slowly, with long pauses in between. Sometimes the puffed breaths came so far apart Hugh was afraid she'd breathed her last.

“Poor old soul,” Hugh said, eyes tearing over again. “No, there's some things this child won't do, no matter how far his stomach's made him backslide. I can't skulp a live red devil, or desert a friend, or take orders from a tyrant, or hurt Indian wimmen. Pa'tic'ly old red-devil grammaws on their last legs.”

She heard him. Her old filmy eyes opened and cleared for another slowly brightening live look. “Meat.”

“Ae, an' meat ye shall have too, Old Mother.” He held up the pemmican. “This suit yer taste?”

She tried to shake her head; roved her eyes back and forth instead. “Meat.”

“Ae, so it's live meat ye want. Well, in that case, this child'll have to go back to the canebrake for that dog he killed.”

Saying it, it occurred to him. It was one of her dogs he'd killed. Unbeknownst he'd taken meat, and favorite meat at that, from a dying critter. All Indians thought dog meat a great delicacy. Unbeknownst. But yet done. “Ae, Old Mother, meat, live meat, ye'll have.”

He heard a noise outside the tepee. He jerked erect, tense, eyes fixed on the doorflap. Rees come back?

It was a sliding noise, a noise of something being dragged, slaped, over the sand. With a quick surging roll of a grizzly he lunged for the doorflap. He peered out.

It was the still-live dog dragging the dead carcass of his companyero dog. The live dog apparently had been trained to retrieve. Good. The live dog had saved him the trouble of getting the carcass himself.

Hugh was careful not to scare the live dog this time. The live dog might come in handy later on. But careful as he was, the live dog again bolted at the sight of him.

Hugh shagged the partly eaten dog into the tepee.

“Now, Old Mother, did your companyeros leave ye any fire-fixin's maybe?”

He searched and found flint and steel in a leather bag near her head under the fur she lay on. He also found an old knife, worn back almost to the haft.

Hugh rubbed his gnarled hands in joy. “Hurrah! Old Mother, good meat it'll be. I hope ye'll allow the cook a taste.” Old Hugh winked at her.

The wink wasn't lost on her. Her old leathery lips tried to form a smile; made what looked like a grimace of terrible pain instead. Hugh thought it one of the finest smiles he'd laid eyes on. “Ae, Old Mother, I'll bet ye was a merry lass in your day, wasn't ee? Ae. The pennyskin Rees was always said to be the best on the Old Missouri.”

Old Hugh found dry twigs; hustled up firewood; with flint and steel soon had a blazing fire going Indian-style. With the old woman's knife he skinned the dead dog. He impaled it on a slender green willow rod; placed it in the forked ends of two stakes set at either end of the fire; began barbecuing.

When it was finally done, the dog meat tasted wonderful. Hugh fed her first, fed her like he might feed a baby, mashing the flesh with a stone and giving it to her in thin strips. Between feedings he couldn't resist licking his fingers now and then.

Presently she indicated she'd had enough. She thanked him with another flowering of brightness in her old filmy black eyes.

“Don't mention it, Old Mother. I'd do the same for me own mother, God bless her, departed as she is from this valley of trials and tribulations.” Again tears popped in Hugh's eyes. He blinked them back, inwardly a little ashamed of his gullishness.

Sure that she had enough, Hugh pitched in himself. The meat had been turned to a fine brown faretheewell. It was crispy on the outside and tender on the inside.

The live dog outside couldn't resist the wonderful smell of singed browned flesh either. It poked its twitching cold black nose in through the doorflap, warily, irresistibly drawn.

Hugh smiled until his whiskers moved up his cheeks. He tore off a piece of meat and tossed it to the cold black nose.

The half-wild yellowgray dog slipped into the tepee and with a single vulsing swallow snapped it down. Its eyes begged for more.

“A friend it is I want ye to be, pooch. Me and the old lady here may have need for ee in time to come. One way or another.” Hugh tossed it another strip of well-done flesh. “Dip in, pooch.” Hugh winked at the dog.

Again the dog downed the browned meat in a single pulsing swallow.

When Hugh turned to see if the Old Mother was enjoying the humor of it with him, he found her dead. She'd been so far gone that the first stir of her stomach became a stumbling stone for her old heart.

“What? So soon, Old Mother?”

Hugh stared at her for a minute; then burst into tears.

“What? an' we just friends?”

Gently he closed her eyes, first one, then the other.

Eyes streaming, he stared down at her. “Ae, at least ye had the luck to ha' a human around to close your eyes. But who'll close the eyes of this old hoss when he goes? He ain't got nobody back in the States to remember him. My lads'll have long forgot their old man. Ae. The old she-rip'll ha' seen to that.”

That night, after the filling moon had come out, with all the land in silver shine, Hugh with his bare hands dug out a grave for her in the sand bar and held a brief but decent paleface burial service. He mumbled a few words from Job over her. “‘Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.'” As an afterthought Hugh also spoke over her as a good Ree husband might. “Now go, my child, go to the land of souls, go to where many of your friends and relatives are already waiting for you. Do not turn back, but look ahead, and soon you shall find them who love you and who are waiting for you. Go, do not turn back, look ahead, and you shall be happy.” Sadly he lowered her into a deep hole he'd dug for her. Waggling his old head at the sad turns of life, he covered her over with sand. Then, also Ree style, he took a handful of sage and rubbed it up and down his arms for purification against what had killed her.

A last look at the mound, and then at the tepee, and he was off, bladder of pemmican, corn cake, what was left of the barbecued dog, blackred striped woolen blanket, knife, flint and steel, and his own grizzly skin over his shoulder. He left the tanblack buffalo robe for the wolves to tear up and devour.

He whistled up the half-wild dog and started across the Moreau. The dog followed him warily, some dozen yards behind, yet always there.

He crawled hard all that night. He took the big creek straight south, away from the Moreau, holding his noddle steady on Rattlesnake Butte towering above the Fox Ridge divide, with Thunder Butte directly behind. The dog followed.

At dawn the next morning he came to where the big creek turned west. Ahead were the hills of the next divide. He ate heartily of the pemmican and corn cake and roast dog. He shared some of the roast dog with live dog. He went to sleep in a thicket of whistling willows.

He awoke late in the afternoon scratching like fury.

He sat up, still scratching. What in tarnation—? Had the live dog given him a batch of fleas?

He examined the seams of his leather clothes. And swore. “As I live, graybacks! Lice.” Ae, lice from the Old Woman. A giveaway present. Rats desertin' a sinkin' ship. Who'd clumb aboard one that was not going to sink yet awhile.

“Well, there's nothin' for it I guess but to find me an anthill.”

He found a tub-sized hill of lively ants. He carefully stripped down to the skin except for his bum leg. He laid his buckskins near the anthill. “Friend ant will carry off all the seam squirrels and the nits. Ae, afore I finish the rest of the pemmican and corn cake, I bet.”

He smiled. He remembered Clint his old companyero had once asked him how he could tell when the ants were finished with the job. He remembered too his reply. “When the ants start bitin' ee, that's when.”

The half-wild dog sat nearby. It whined as he worked on a piece of cold roast dog.

“Here, pooch, have a bone. Eat while ye may. Tomorrow it may be your turn.”

Presently the red ants began crawling over him, and he knew they were done with the cleaning job.

7

H
UGH CLIMBED
steadily toward Fox Ridge.

The country changed. It became smooth and rolling with league-long slopes, some rising, some falling, with a sky so high under sheep-white cirrus it made the breath short, and all of it cut in the far valleys with deep eroding ocher gullies.

It was shortgrass country: good soil, little or no cactus, very few stones; a minimum of wild salt. It lacked only rain, and rain at the right time, to become the Garden of Eden at last, the wild lily of the valley of men's dreams.

Between crawls, while resting in slanting evening sunlight, Hugh sometimes brooded on the lonesome country. While it might be a mite too wild for him at the moment, the condition he was in, the plains country was surely coming to a time when all of it would someday become settled too, just as the wild coasts of the Atlantic had at last become the States, just as the wild valleys of the Ohio had at last become settlements, just as the Indian village on the banks of the Mississippi where the Missouri came in had at last become St. Lou. It was bound to come.

It made Hugh sad to think on it, all the she-rips and their cubs coming in and destroying a hunter's paradise. The white queen bees would come in with their tame worker bees and build honeycomb towns and cities just as the real queen bees already were taking over the wilds just ahead of the oncoming settlements. Ae, the enslavement of both land and man was coming here too. Ae.

Hugh could just see it, the henpecked men coming in, still thinking they were men, and free men at that, and saying to each other as they looked over the virgin stretches for the first time, picking up a cloud of dirt and crunching it, and fluffing it in the palm of their hands and letting it sift out between the fingers: “Smart chance for corn here all right.” “Corn? Naw, not corn. I expect we hadn't ought to raise nothin' but wheat and rye here.” “Corn or no, it's still the biggest clearin' I ever did see.” “And no sour soil.” “Yep, I can't wait till we all start eatin' our own hominy and johnnycake raised right here.”

Between crawls, in the rusty dusk, Hugh also thought of the lads, cautious Fitz and the boy Jim. Where were they now? Probably snug and safe at Henry's Post on the Yellowstone and Missouri. He hoped they'd made the post safe. It would be a dirty trick if fate dealt out the cards so that Rees counted coup over them before he did. If the red devils got to them first, the lads'd die thinking they'd pulled one over on him.

Remembering how he'd been taken in by the lad Jim, Hugh shook his grizzled old head. “Crazy as a mule over a colt, I was. Yessiree. Jest sick for a colt of my own. I swear. Well, howsomever, I larned, I did. And it's never again for this old hoss. No siree. From now on, after I've had my revenge, it's me noddle in me own business and nobody else's. Strict. Hugh for Hugh.”

Between puffs, in moonlight as silver as a little boy's milk-blond hair, Hugh worried a little that Thunder Butte behind him didn't get any smaller. In almost two days of crawling south away from it the dull redstone butte still seemed to loom over him as lofty as ever. It just wouldn't recede and sink away into the horizon. Part of it he knew was due to his crawling up out of the Moreau River depression. The higher he climbed up Fox Ridge the more both Thunder Butte and the ground he crawled on was apt to stick out above the surroundings. But at the same time Thunder Butte should have got smaller in size. Distance should have shrunk it some.

The butte began to haunt him. Old Hugh was hardheaded and he knew it was puckerstopple to think of the butte as an altar of sacrifice, an altar such as Old Testament sages might have used for their offertories. Yet he couldn't help wonder why it hung so stubborn and high in the north.

Maybe it was the fever. Fever could have ruined his sense of distance. He'd known cases where sickbrain hope had completely addled a man's judgment. Maybe he wasn't crawling across the country as fast as he thought. Could be.

The possibility of an early blizzard worried him too. He'd seen a foot of snow in early October in the Dakotas many a time. A blizzard catching him before he got to the Cheyenne would put a bad crimp in his plans. Crawling across snow would be well-nigh impossible. His arms'd freeze. Let alone freeze his stilled leg in the splints. Ae, an early fall blizzard could wreck it all.

“Hugh, lad, best face it. Ye're in a fix if it snows. No two ways about it.”

He studied stubborn Thunder Butte; sniffed the slow wind drifting in from the northeast.

“But, Hugh, lad, ye've just got to last it. Got to. And ye've not only got to last, ye've got to get your work done.”

Ae, last. Get the work done. That was the end-all and the be-all of a man's whole life. His purpose here on earth. The driver that sat behind a man's stomach. And his driver had a whip. Hate.

“Lads, I'll get ye yet,” Hugh muttered, looking over his shoulder at looming omnipresent Thunder Butte. “Old Hugh will serve right and make ye pay for your wrong.”

Child Hugh crawled hard all that night. Always the wild dog followed him a safe distance behind. Using the North Star as his lodestar, Hugh bore hard on, going east by south, headed straight for coiled-up Rattlesnake Butte.

A great round moon followed both him and the ghost-yellow dog. It watched his wormings across drygrass country, first from its rising in the east and then from its setting in the west. The turning moon cast a thin fine fog of silver light over the sleeping sloping land. In it the rusty tips of the dead bunch grass resembled yellow day lilies. In it the dull red rock of Thunder Butte resembled a sunflower. The great round moon filled the silver valleys with rivers of milk.

He made up his mind not to look back at Thunder Butte for a while. Maybe the next time it would look smaller.

More and more he began to use his bum leg. The swelling around the cracked bone was almost gone. Tight splint fixed firmly in springy willow slape, he could bear part of his weight on it on occasions. He was beginning to crawl more on his hands than on his elbows, and more on his awkward slape and good knee both than just on the good knee.

What amazed him was the way his body had taken to going on all fours like any four-legged creature of the wild. Even with the leg in the slape he got around very handily, could even run a little if he wanted to. The run, when he tried it, wasn't just an awkward one either, but a run that coursed, a run that lifted him off the ground a little, that gave his carcass a coasting motion all its own, like some rowboat with four oars flailing water.

It gave Hugh a peculiar insight into how the four-legged animals felt as four-legged beings, an insight so sharp that his first impulse was to sniff at the thought of it instead of smile at it.

It also gave him a peculiar insight into the curse God had put on Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon. God had changed Nebuchadnezzar's heart from that of a man to that of a beast and had him driven from among men and made it his portion to eat of the grass of the earth like an ox. And God caused Nebuchadnezzar's body to be made wet with the dew of heaven till his hairs grew out like eagle feathers and his nails grew out like bird claws.

All that night Child Hugh crawled hard, and at dawn found himself at the foot of Rattlesnake Butte.

Time to sleep again. Also time to have a look back at Thunder Butte to see if at last it hadn't shrunk a little in the distance.

But it hadn't. When he looked back it loomed as holy, solemn, and high as ever. Looking to either side Hugh could see that he had crossed the crest of flat Fox Ridge. Crawling the last had been easier going too; so he knew the land was tipping down and away from the red rock altar, knew the horizon should have risen enough to have hidden it from view. But it hadn't.

Mirage, that was it.

Or else he'd gone loco at last. Maggots in the head as well as in the back.

“This child can't cipher it nohow. Maybe if he slept on it some, maybe it'd turn out to be just a bad dream.”

Thunder Butte.

“Well, howsomever, first we'll have us some meat afore we go to sleep.”

But the wild dog was gone. Sometime during the night it had drifted off, sometime during the interval when he'd resisted looking back at Thunder Butte, it had left him. Hugh missed the dog; could almost taste it as roasted meat on his tongue.

“Tarnation! Just when I needed him most.”

Hugh looked around at the countryside. Nothing but dry bunch grass. No cactus beds, no berry bushes, no twig tips of any kind. And no water.

“Fresh roast dog. I swear. Nebuchadnezzar had green grass, he had, but not Old Hugh. Well, I guess there's nothin' for it but to bite in and hold on until I hit water below.”

In the flooding light of a red-clover dawn, Hugh studied the fall of land below to the south. Once again he could make out far valleys angling from west to east, with the near one shallower than the far one, with a low hogback between them. The first was a big creek, he decided; the second was the Cheyenne River itself. The first valley had smooth grassy hills, with a few trees and shrubs that looked like chokecherries, with here and there a poplar. The big creek doubled around like the contorted flow of a stepped-on snake and finally joined the Cheyenne far in the southeast. The far valley had rugged stony hills, jagged horizons, and its flow was wide and deep and much more direct.

Hugh nodded to himself. The second valley was the Cheyenne all right. Get there and a man could float in to Ft. Kiowa.

To the left of Rattlesnake Butte a gullyhead began its cut in the grassy slopes. Hugh saw where it eventually ran into a dry creek. Here and there brush fuzzed out in its slow turns.

Hugh went on all fours to the gullyhead and burrowed out a flat place in sand and clay and snuggled under the bearskin and curled up to go to sleep.

It worried him that the wild dog had disappeared. He hoped it didn't mean red devils around. The dog might have sensed Rees before he did. Maybe a pair of daring young Rees were right now watching him curl up for the day's rest. Well, if they were, he would soon know it. He'd wake to shrill warwhoops and the crunch of a stone club on his noggin. And thinking about it, and his stomach rumbling with hunger, and the open wound in his back itching—whether from healing or from wriggling maggots he couldn't make out—Hugh drifted off to sleep.

A cold nose woke him.

For a second, lying on his belly with head to one side, as he rose out of the motherwort magma of the unconscious, Hugh was back on the forks of the Grand, thinking the cold-nosed wolf was back again. He screwged his eyes around at the blue sky expecting to see wheeling wrinklenecked turkey buzzards overhead too.

But the sky was clean. There was neither gaggling greennecked buzzard nor laughing red-tongued wolf. Instead there was a looming silvertip, a huge
Ursus horribilis
, a he-grizzly with a black piglike snout snuffling him over.

The shock came so quick he had no time to show fear. He just lay. And hoped he'd stay scared enough not to show it. A man lying down was medicine to the grizzly bear.

Old Ephraim stood huge over Hugh. One of his forepaws rested on the ground not three inches from Hugh's eyes. Hugh could see sunlight glinting on the silvertipped hairs over the great gray hooked claws. Hugh could also see, so close was the forepaw, skin dust and powdery dandruff in the deeper dark fur.

The huge creature snuffled at Hugh slowly, warm breaths pouring over Hugh regularly. The breaths had the faint decayed odor of dog's breath.

Old Ephraim snuffled at Hugh's grizzly hair, at his crooked hairy arm, at his grizzly neck, at the grizzly bearskin over his back.

Hugh understood it. Old Ephe had, at first sight, mistaken him for a dead companyero grizzly. But then it had got a sniff of man in the bearskin and had come over for a closer look.

Hugh smiled. The gray beard over his cheeks moved.

Old Ephe spotted the movement; quick sent a cold nose to explore it. The bull-huge beast shifted its weight to smell the better. It's forefeet moved with a soft heaviness. The ground under Hugh's ear resounded dully with the sound of it.

Hugh held the smile until his face ached.

Old Ephe cocked his great dog's head from side to side, watching.

It made Hugh laugh, a laugh he was careful to keep inside, and a laugh that was in part both a laugh of fear and a laugh at himself.

The idea of Old Ephe giving him a going-over, trying to make out whether he was a dead she-grizzly or a man in bearskin clothes reminded him of blind Isaac in the Old Testament feeling Jacob over, a Jacob in sheepskin pretending he was an Esau.

The thought of himself as a Jacob, Old Hugh didn't fancy too well. He wasn't a Jacob. The Jacobs were the Rebekah favorites, the mama boys, the she-rip sissies who stayed behind in the settlements to do squaw's work, the smooth men back home who ran shops and worked gardens and ran factories. No, if anything he was an Esau, a hairy man and a man's man and a cunning hunter, a man of the prairie and the mountains. It was the other, the man who'd probably married his old she-rip of a Mabel back in Lancaster County, who was the smooth man dwelling in a shingled tent. Ae, Old Hugh was Esau, the first, who'd come out red all over like an hairy garment. He was no Jacob coming out second and taking hold of an Esau's heel. Like an Esau he too had sold his birthright in Lancaster land to another, to the Jacob who probably right that minute was enjoying a ripping up and down his back by a she-rip Mabel.

Old Ephe apparently knew Hugh for what he was at last. For suddenly, with a single deft swipe of forepaw, the grizzly tore the grizzly skin off Hugh's back.

Hugh sucked in a breath of fear. Ripped up again?

But Old Ephe wasn't a she-rip ripper. Old Ephe was only a male curious about an odd smell coming out of Hugh's back. The next instant Old Ephe was licking Hugh's open wound.

The licking tickled Hugh, tickled him horribly. He wanted to burst out laughing. The terribly funny tickling almost drove him crazy. With all his will power, he held back hysterical laughter.