As abruptly as he began, Old Ephe left off licking, and with a tumbler's tremendous heave of body, turned to one side and ran off, hump high and rolling, small Indian-ball-sized ears flicking back and forth nonchalantly, grampa rear waddling along.
When he was sure Old Ephe was gone from the gullyhead, Hugh rolled over on his side and sat up. He felt around behind his back. And feeling, he found the last crusts gone around the wound and the center of it slick and clean. The grizzly had cleaned out the maggots just when their work was done.
Then Hugh did laugh hysterically. The grizzly, like all grizzlies with a sweet tooth, apparently had been fond of maggots and by God, dead she-grizzly skin with a man's smell in it or no, was going to have some.
An hour later, when he himself began to wonder where his next meal was coming from, let alone treats like sweet maggots, Hugh pulled an Old Ephraim himself. He'd often seen bears stick a forepaw in an anthill, wait until the angered scrambling ants covered it, then lick them off, obviously considering them a delicacy as well as good food. Hugh found an anthill, stuck his paw in it, held it in the hill even though the ants stung him a little, and then, paw and forearm covered, withdrew it and forced himself to eat ants. Surprisingly they tasted very good. Tart, sharpish, but curiously like salted sugar.
He was about to set off for the night's run down the hill, when, looking over his shoulder, he saw Thunder Butte was gone.
Gone. But not as if it'd never been.
8
W
ILD GEESE
were flying south in great trailing wavering V's by the time he reached Cherry Creek valley. It was October, the Moon of Leaves Falling.
The wild bullberries had pretty well dried up and gone. But the wild root crop was plentiful and the green glades abounded with squirrels and gophers. Old Hugh fed right well on them.
When he reached the deep stony valley of the Cheyenne, Old Hugh greeted the sight of the swift-flowing yellow river glinting in the morning sun with a shout of joy.
“Hurray, lads! Old Hugh's made it at last. As good as. It's all over but the shouting now. Best get yoursel's set, because Old Hugh's on the warpath. If the red devils ain't got your topknot by now, Old Hugh soon will.”
He unbound the willow slape from his bad leg, took off the splints, and gave himself a thorough scrubbing in the slightly alkaline Cheyenne River. He rinsed the bum leg gently, rinsed out his scalp, rinsed as best as he could the torn corrugations across his back.
He splashed in the shallow waters along the sandy shore, singing, shouting, for a little while heedless of lurking red devil and she-rip grizzly.
Flowing water meant life. It meant fish. It meant drink. It meant cleansing. It meant travel. Yes, land was important. Ae. But land was the given. Like a mother, it was there to begin with. It was water men craved, not land. Men loved land for the water it had just as children loved a mother for the milk she had.
He soaked his calluses, those along the bottoms of his forearms from the heel of the hand to the point of the elbow, and the broad warty one on his good knee. With handfuls of gritty golden sand for soap he scoured out the dirt.
Cottonwood leaves as yellow as buttercups fluttered high overhead. The morning sky was a deep gentian blue, was clean and serene. The stony bluffs to either side bulked up sharply. Here and there the bluff cheeks were bearded out with spine cactus. Far down the slowly twisting river valley perspective faded off into a hazy aven-blue.
He was dizzy with the joy of being alive. Dizzy with it. He rested beside the rippling, wrinkling, flowing yellow waters of the Cheyenne. He lay down on a grassy sward beneath a huge towering cottonwood. The smell of fresh waters and falling autumn leaves and green grass restored his soul. His cup ran over.
The spot beneath and around the great cottonwood tree was like a park, Hugh thought. Buffalo and antelope had kept the grass close-cropped. Buffalo and antelope had trimmed the lower portions of all the trees and bushes to an even height. Sitting under his tree Hugh guessed he could see more than a mile in any direction under the level line of trimmed-off leaves. Approaching friend or enemy would have been spotted on the instant. Late fall flowers bloomed in the short deep green grass. Yellow poplar leaves and pink willow leaves fell in showers.
God's park, he called it. And he Adam without an Eve.
One day he found an old Indian middenheap on a knoll. The moment he saw the low mound he got an idea. He found himself a sharp-pointed ash stick from amongst the driftwood along the Cheyenne's banks and began to dig through the heap. He found a few broken water bowls with angular black and white designs, a few broken potsherds, a few clay pans. He found a handmade bone fishhook. He found a broken stone hatchet. He found a small piece of flint. He found a smudged flat cookrock.
With the bone fishhook and his ash stick and a slender grapevine, he fished the Cheyenne. He caught channel cat almost as fast as he could throw in the hook.
With Old Mother's much worn flint and steel, and milkweed down for tinder, he built himself a small fire and fried the catfish on the cookrock.
He fished. He ate. He slept. He restored his soul.
He swam and it refreshed his torn corrugated body. His bad leg floated gently and easily and without pain in the swift-flowing yellow waters.
He fished. He ate. He slept. He healed.
It wasn't long before he tried standing on both legs. Holding onto the huge cottonwood to steady himself, he got up on his good leg and slowly shifted his weight onto the other. The bad leg hurt but it bore up. The knitted crack in the bone stung, yes, but it didn't buckle. Ae, in a month he'd be going around on two legs regular again.
He found a small ash sapling with a V-shaped fork. With his broken stone ax he cut it down, shaped himself a crude crutch out of it. From then on, taking his time, between frequent rests, he went about upright once more. He was a human critter again, not just a four-legged varmint.
Exploring the poplar-shaded valley to all sides, he one day came across a down cottonwood beside the river. It had a trunk three feet through.
The big tree trunk gave him another idea. He had been thinking of making raft out of driftwood and grapevines. But why not make a dugout instead? He had a crude hatchet, a knife, and the firemakings to do it with.
No sooner thought than done. He set to work. Firing carefully, he burnt out the insides. A couple of times the fire threatened to eat in too deeply, and he had to quickly roll the trunk over into the stream to put it out.
When the insides were too wet from the soaking, he chipped and chopped away on the outside. The chopping was the hardest. It went very slowly. A day's work at it hardly showed results.
After two weeks of steady firing and chopping he at last had himself a crude dugout some fifteen feet long, two feet wide, and a good foot deep. It wasn't a beauty, but it floated.
He loaded in his grizzly skin, his necklace of grizzly claws, the red-striped blanket he'd taken from the old Indian crone and which he now used to cover his back, his bone fishhook, his flint and steel, his crude stone ax, a supply of gutted half-dried channel cat, and a long poling stick.
He made a trial run the first day and found only one thing to complain about. And it was bad enough. The dugout was somewhat unstable. In swift rough water he had trouble balancing it.
He muttered, fussed about it some. “Must've dug it out on the wrong side of the log. A child has to sit exactly in the middle and breathe out of the middle of his mouth if he don't want to capsize the dummed thing.”
It was early November, the Moon of Deer Rutting, when he set out for the fort. It was evening and the sun had just set in the gorge to the west in pale jewelweed pallor. The wind was in the west too, a swift lifting wind that made a man breathe deep to get enough of it.
Hugh sat exactly amidships with the long pole balanced across his lap, ready to dip in on either side to keep the crude prow headed straight downstream.
The Cheyenne ran swift, steady, with a sound at times as of a low hissing skink and at other times as of boiling water. The Cheyenne swung right, swung left, playing through the stony yellowgray valley like a manipulated yellow hemp rope. Within the banks the main current followed a swinging course too, often a course of its own contrary to the bed, zigging when the bed zagged, sometimes hugging the shore on the left when the bed indicated right, sometimes agreeing with the bed to a point where it overswung it and undercut the bank.
In the falling rusty dusk Hugh watched the land go by: cotton-wood-studded points, rock-cropped headlands, flat green vales, thick groves of willows, shallow sandy banks coming down to streaming fords.
“This child's never had it so good,” Old Hugh murmured to himself. “After what me and my bum leg went through, this is paradise at last. I've been a keelboatman off and on all my life and I've floated down many a river I first pushed up, but never as sweet a river as this one. Never.”
The water flowed along and he floated down. He swung to the left. He swung to the right. He rode the swift main current. He watched the country go by, the stony land and the swampy land, the clearings and the canebrakes, the parklike pastures and the jungle groves, the dry gullies and the swift straight creeks. He floated down.
“Don't mind if I never see ee again,” Hugh said. “It's good-by for now and I hope for good. You may be home to some critters but not for this one. I'll be glad to get back to Reed and her pot.”
The Cheyenne churned through its winding channel. It boiled whirlpools. It spread calms.
“It's like I always said. Best to have a little grief first and much joy afters than the other way around.”
He watched the bluffs turn by.
“Lads, Ol' Hugh is comin'. He's on his way. Best prime your pans and set the flint. Ol' Hugh's a-boilin' along. It won't be long afore ye'll feel mighty queersome in your lights. It's six feet and under for the both of ee.”
Darkness flowed into the stony valley like a low black fog. Overhead the high tops of the spine-bearded bluffs and the headlands still glowed plantain purple.
“âTis a wonder. There's nothin' like runnin' water.”
He held his leg and ticked off the miles he saved crawling. He held his leg and watched the bends swing into view, come toward him, hold under his eye, swing past, slip behind and out of sight. He couldn't get over how wonderful it was that except for an occasional dip to the right or the left with his pole he could sit on a soft folded grizzly skin and let the river do all his crawling, all his walking, for him.
Ae, the birds were going south for the winter and so was Old Hugh.
Twice during the first night he had close calls.
Once it was a large Sioux village camped beside the river on the north shore. He saw the cluster of cone tepees coming. A fire glowed under trees ahead, lighting up the near shore and the tall cottonwoods and the near tepees, and limning the vague outline of the south shore. The Sioux were celebrating some kind of victory. A quarter-mile away Hugh could spot the braves bending and stomping and kicking as they danced around a set of fresh scalps up on spears off to one side of the roaring orange-titted bonfire. Circling them sat young maidens watching the show. Deeper in the shadows lounged old meditative bucks and collapsed old squaws.
Hugh ducked down flat in the dugout, hiding his long pole alongside his body. He hoped they'd be too busy whooping it up to notice the dugout floating past, hoped that if they did look his way they'd mistake the dugout for a piece of fat driftwood.
But not all the maidens were watching the show. Two were bent on cleanliness. They were wading in the shallows near the village. Light from the fire glowed brown on their naked supple bodies. They were chattering and laughing together, splashing each other, dipping in and out like pennyskinned mermaids, their faces open and gay, their titties as lovely as four full moons.
Then they spotted the dugout floating downstream across from them. They ducked down, only their heads showing. They watched with intent berry-round eyes.
The Cheyenne turned a little in front of the village and the turning saved Hugh. His dugout, without his pole to keep it headed downstream, slowly revolved in the turn, revolved just enough to present the blunt back end of the cottonwood dugout, the end which still looked a little like a round log. The maidens studied it; looked at each other questioningly; let it pass.
Hugh let out a great sigh once he was out of sight of the village. “They might have been friendly Sioux. Maybe even relations of Reed. But they just maybe might not have been either. A white man alone is fair game for even friendly red devil.”
The other close call came when, shooting through a narrow channel, where the just risen milk-silver full moon couldn't shine, he ran full tilt into a sawyer, a fallen behemoth of a cottonwood, presenting its sunflowerlike mat of roots straight at him like a vast maw. Hugh saw it in the dark as a gathering tangle of trouble. Quickly he volved the boat a quarter-turn around and then punched his pole into the matted roots. Ordinarily he could quite easily have poked or poled his way around it. But his boat was top-heavy and it took all his skill as an old seadog to keep the boat level and moving around the down cottonwood.
He was glad when morning came. Though for once he was far from tired. Just sleepy. He pulled for shore and hid his dugout in a thick canebrake at the mouth of a slow creek.
He fried a channel cat aboard the dugout; washed off the fish smell; drank long and thirstily; curled up on the grizzlyskin; drew the blackred striped woolen blanket over him; and slept the sleep of the justified.
The second morning, coming around a turn, coasting out through an avenue of arching poplar, the wild Missouri opened before him.
After all the barren bluffs and clay gullies and rock outcroppings and stony hogbacks he'd seen, Hugh thought the river a grand ocean. Majestic, sweeping wide, the tan sheet of seething water flowed eternally into the south. Anon and anon and anon. With occasional running whirlpools and sawyer eddies breaking its surface. With whole treesâmajestic cottonwoods and umbrella elms and gnarled fierce oaks and slender ash and delicate mapleâsurfboating along and bobbing up and down in the water like gigantic sea serpents armed like octopuses.
On the nearside, great dead snags with limbs thrust to the skies like praying skeleton hands rolled over and over, slowly, forlornly. In a backwater on the far shore some snags lay piled up two deep, broken, tangled, cracked off, looking for all the world like a dinosaur boneyard.
Squinting, narrowing his eyes, Hugh could just make out a herd of antelope grazing on the far bank. Behind them reared a sloping hogback where it came down into a long turn of the wild Missouri.
Gray haunted eyes burning silverish under tufted gray brows, bush of grizzly hair hanging down to his shoulders like a long gray parted mop, Hugh sat looking at it all until the sun felt warm, even hot, on his burnt black nose and high cheeks. The old seadog awoke in him for fair. There was challenge in the turbulent seething sheet of tan waters, and he liked it. With himself as both captain and crew, he was anxious to test his craft against the wild Missouri, even if he did have a wobbly top for a boat.
“But not for now,” Hugh promised the rolling brown flood, “not for now. Tonight maybe. After Ol' Hugh's had his beauty sleep. I'm rich now, I am, and can afford sleep and sailor's rest.”