Lord Grizzly, Second Edition (24 page)

2

H
EYOKA OR NOT
, Old Hugh was soon hot on the trail of the deserters Fitz and Jim. It was December, the Moon of Deer Shedding Horns.

Patron Joe Bush, bourgeois of the keelboat
Beaver
, decided to make a run for Ft. Tilton higher on the Missouri before the river froze over. Hugh offered his services as hunter. The
Beaver
was already full up, and Patron Bush wasn't too anxious to take on an extra mouth, let alone a trouble-making cripple, but Hugh's fierce insistence and his reputation as a centershot finally persuaded Bush.

The
Beaver
made good time up the Missouri. Cordelling, sometimes sailing, most times pushing with poles, the river roughnecks prowed it through tan waters, past dirtbrown banks, up around the Grand Detour, up past the Bad and Cheyenne and Moreau Rivers, up past the Grand River where the ferocious Rees once thrived, up past the Cannonball and the Heart, and at last came within sight of the Knife where the friendly Mandans lived and where Ft. Tilton was located.

Because he felt himself in the way, and because not once all the way up from Ft. Kiowa had he brought down any meat to pay for his keep, Hugh offered to hunt across the bend and meet them at Ft. Tilton.

Hugh and Patron Bush stood in the prow of the boat, looking up river. Bleak gray blanket clouds drove at them from the northeast. It felt like snow.

Behind the two, burly sweating keelboatmen groaned as they humped the boat up the river. A walk or passe avant ran along both sides of the
Beaver
and a dozen men worked each side. At the leader's cry of “raise poles” the men ran backward from aft to fore along the walks, and at the cry of “lower poles” the men jammed the poles into the river for a new purchase. Huge shoulder cupped around the knob-end of a pole, facing the rear, the men began shoving and walking toward the aft end of the boat again. Working in smooth unison, the keelboatmen literally walked the boat up the river.

Patron Bush was loath to let Hugh go off alone. Patron Bush was a heavy squat man with scowling features and a pessimistic air. Patron Bush hated frontier life and was going to get out as soon as he'd made a quick killing in the fur trade. “‘Tain't safe, Hugh. There's Rees about, I hear.”

“Who said?” Hugh watched the
Beaver
slowly gain on the dirtbrown shoreline.

“A runner told about it.”

“How kin that be when these old eyes saw them headin' west along the Cheyenne.” Hugh noted how rubber-ice was beginning to edge the shoreline.

“‘Tain't safe, Hugh. I don't recommend it.”

Hugh stuck out his stubborn chin. “It'll take your boys three days to get the
Beaver
around the bend. I can cut across in a day. Easy. Even with meat to weight me down.”

Patron Bush scowled up at Hugh. “What's the hurry?”

“Booshway, I can use them two days.”

“But why?”

“Booshway, send me and there'll be fresh meat waitin' for you at the fort.”

“Hugh, what's got into you? You out to make more trouble?”

“Booshway, it's December already, and the way I'll have to hump it to the mountains afore the big snows come will take the gristle off a painter's tail.”

“Hugh, you ain't ready for wear yet with that bum leg. Hugh, there's somethin' wrong with you. You act like you're out to get even with somebody. Or somethin'. Like the boys back at Fort Kiowa said.”

Hugh hid his eyes. He watched the keelboat swerve around a bobbing sawyer in the moiling tan waters.

Patron Bush's little brown pig eyes wrinkled up into two narrow slits. “If I had your excuse, you'd never catch me leavin' a warm fire and a lovin' squaw, let me tell you.”

Hugh hid his eyes. He recalled all too well the snug comfort of Bending Reed's tepee, a round nest snug in the snows within the fort walls. Hugh stared down at the backlash Heyoka stitch in the seams of his moccasins. Ae, a well-built tepee had it all over frame houses in the winter. It wasn't drafty; everything one needed lay close to hand; and it kept easy. It was truly, as Bending Reed believed, a world in itself, in itself a world in image. Ae, but what were all these advantages as long as certain white devils, two of them, were still loose in the world and their desertion of him unavenged? In Bible times vengeance might be the Lord's but not in Free West times. In the free mountains vengeance belonged to him as had a right to it and could get it.

Hugh said, “Well, does this child take the shortcut and make meat for you, or don't he?”

Patron Bush pointed to the low snow-dappled bench lying within the bend. “You'll break a leg crossin' that greasy stuff.”

Hugh abruptly stuck his gray bristle face into the patron's. The red rivulets down the sides of Hugh's big Scotch nose began to pulse a little. “Booshway, it's my life. Get out the skiff.”

“All right, go then!” Patron Bush suddenly said, eyes quailing, spitting a great gob of tobacco juice over the side into the tan Missouri. “And be durned to ee, too! I know I won't see ee alive again, that I won't.”

Patron Bush ordered the anchor dropped and the skiff readied. And a quarter-hour later Hugh found himself on the west bank of the wild Missouri, alone, all his worldly possessions on his back.

The northeast wind whistled in the riverbank willows and snapped the ocher twigs of the cottonwood saplings. The wind was cold and wet and occasionally streaked with a flake of snow. Hugh drew the hood of his thick gray woolen capote close up around his head and face.

Swinging his powder horn and bullet pouch within easy reach, and waving his rifle at Patron Bush to show he was all set, Hugh started northwest across the low bench.

A thin blanket of snow lay on the gray frozen ground and it made the going greasy just as the patron had predicted. In some places, around anthill breather holes and fresh badger mounds, the snow had melted away. Grass tufts poked through every few steps.

Hugh limped along steadily, choosing his footing with care. His just-knitted limb felt surprisingly strong. He swept the white horizon with keen gray eyes. His big nose reddened in the mean wind.

He looked across to where the Missouri curved off to the northeast. Low sloping whitegray bluffs pushed back into the same horizontal crevice from which the low streaking gray white clouds came.

Except for the brush close along the Missouri's bank, not a tree and not a bush was in sight. It was mounded monotonous country.

He limped across the highest part of the bench in the great bend without seeing so much as a field mouse. “A crow'd hafta carry grub to fly this godfersaken country,” Hugh growled to himself. “Howsomever, meat or no meat, walkin' it to the fort will be that much time saved.”

Dusk had just begun to sift down through the gray blanket clouds when Hugh started down the west side of the bench. Ahead the Missouri came curving out of the east again, coming around in a grand looping sweep and heading directly toward the base of a cutbank plateau. The bluffs on the far side looked like a coil of puffed-out bowels.

Then he spotted smoke rising from the plateau. Looking closer he saw certain blisterlike mounds on the plateau and recognized the first of the Mandan villages. Ah, fire and a little food. Tarnation with making meat that probably wasn't there in the first place.

He looked longingly toward the earthen lodges. Only a mile or so away, the sod-covered lodges had the appearance of huge kettles upsidedown. Above each lodge pricked spears dangling with skin pennants and medicine poles fluttering with scalps. Smoke rose from the many smoke holes in thin gentle wavering plumes barely discernible against the graywhite horizon.

Hugh hadn't yet seen many Mandans but he'd heard they were almost white the way they lived. And compared with the Sioux they were paleskinned. Some of the Mandans even had the blue eyes and the blond hair of Danes. To top it off, the Mandans also believed in the theory of a Great Flood and how an ark saved all living creatures.

Ae, with the bum leg stinging like a bee-bit finger it would be good to get in out of the mean wind.

Between him and the village on the plateau ran a little creek. Willows fringed it on either side. Hugh's wise old eyes swept it, swept it again, and came to rest on a curious gathering of gray in a thick clump on the side nearest the Missouri. In the cloudy gray dusk it was hard to make out just what it was. Antelope? Elk? It was grayish and could even be an Old Ephraim.

Just to be on the safe side, Hugh picked his flint, set his trigger, and crouching low, stalked noiselessly toward it, moccasined feet feeling out a safe course through the snow-covered sweetgrass.

The gray bunching became two gray whorls, then became two gray creatures, then became two squaws wearing weather-grayed leathers.

Hugh blinked to clear his old eyes. Mandans? Out to get some sweet creek water?

Just then the two squaws turned and saw him. And they recognized him at the same time that he recognized them. He was the feared Chief White Grizzly and they were Rees, the exact same Ree squaws that Augie Neill and Jim Anderson had diddled on the Grand.

Hugh dropped to the ground and tried to duck behind a low mound of dirt cast up by a badger.

Too late. The squaws set up a howl and began running toward the Missouri. The squaws were young, and with their deerskin skirts girded up, they ran like the wind.

Hugh glanced toward the willow-fringed Missouri and spotted what they were heading for—another red-devil village, this one with low mud lodges. Just like those he'd seen on the Grand last June. Rees all right. A whole nest of them. He was caught. “A shortcut always turns out to be the long way home,” Hugh groaned to himself.

Hugh's heart suddenly struggled in his chest. He panted. The single arteries down each side of his nose wriggled like lively red angleworms.

“There's nothin' for it but to see if these old legs of mine'll still run a little,” he said, and suiting action to the words, leaped up and forced his cracking old pins into a flailing spiderlike run. He grunted in pain each time his bum leg hit the frozen ground. He ran with a princing nincing run, hoping he wouldn't fall on the greasy terrain and rebreak his leg. He brushed through the willows; leaped the narrow creek; headed up toward the Mandan plateau.

The cries of the squaws roused the whole Ree village. Heads popped out everywhere. The chief of the village hit the bloodied pole and sounded the alarm. Warriors with paired hawkbone hairdress and naked save for gun and breechcloth swarmed after him. They gained on him swiftly.

Old Hugh saw the landscape dancing. Starlike spots before the eyes blurred his vision. “It's gone under for this old hoss this time for sure.”

But a sentinel sitting atop one of the upsidedown kettlelike Mandan mounds saw the commotion along the creek and he in turn sounded an alarm. Quickly two Mandan braves stripped down for battle, leaped on their ponies, one a spotted red-and-white mount and the other a jet-black, and raced toward him. Manes and braids and tails flagged out stiff as they came on.

Hugh scrambled along as hard and as fast as he could.

The running Rees formed a V as they gained on him. They came within gunshot of him. One Ree settled on a knee and fired a ball. It sailed harmlessly ahead of Hugh. He could see it skipping along across the frozen ground, kicking up little white explosions in the snow.

The Mandan braves galloped furiously toward him, pennants snapping from bow tips. The Mandan brave on the spotted pony gained on the other, and made a sweeping turn around Hugh, placing the body of the pony between Hugh and the pursuing, whooping, firing Rees. The Mandan on the jet-black pony galloped directly for Hugh; hauled up hard and short; helped Hugh clamber up behind him on the rump of the pony; beat the pony into a heavy encumbered gallop back toward the Mandan mounds on the plateau. The Mandan on the spotted pony meanwhile artfully and carefully kept himself and his horse between Hugh and the Rees.

Ree balls whistled all around them. The Rees howled with rage when they saw their hated enemy escaping them.

The Mandans galloped back to the plateau; shot through the opening in the picket fence; came to a jouncing halt dead in the center of the village.

When Hugh, panting, exhausted, got down from the horse, he found himself surrounded by a melee of laughing cheering Mandan braves, squaws, children, and barking dogs. Two feather-decked chiefs stepped forward and solemnly embraced him. They hugged him so tight he could scarcely catch his already gone breath. Vaguely in his mind Hugh remembered hearing that the Mandans believed in hugging friends so that the heart might be felt.

The elder of the Mandan chiefs invited him to a feast already in progress. Hugh accepted.

That night he heard that the Rees had ambushed the
Beaver
and had killed every man aboard. Patron Bush had been right that he would never see Hugh alive again.

Hugh murmured to himself, musingly, “‘Pears like the Good Lord had it in mind to save this old hoss for His revenge after all.”

3

T
HAT SAME NIGHT
too, after smoking a pipe of peace with the Mandan chiefs, during which they assured him their attack on Major Henry's party in August had been a mistake, that same night Old Hugh went on to Ft. Tilton a short ways upstream on the Missouri. The same brave on the jet-black horse who'd saved him, brought him in safely.

At the fort, Hugh made his report on what had happened to Patron Bush and the
Beaver
; asked for and got extra provisions—dried meat, pemmican, salt and pepper, coffee, a tin pot, a pack of tobacco, horse pistol, powder, balls, flint—asked for and got an extra gray woolen blanket.

Hugh also asked for a horse.

Bourgeois Tilton shook his head. In the candlelight his glossy black hair shone like polished black lava. “I've only got one. And that I have to use for the business. You know.”

Flintlock under an arm, restless eyes taking in the array of goods hanging from pegs stuck in the log walls, good leg itching to get going, Hugh said, “You say it's smooth humpin' all the way up to where the Little Missouri cuts in from the south?”

Bourgeois Tilton lifted amazed button-black eyes. “You fixin' to leave yet tonight?”

“Tonight.”

The candles flutted, and for a second the log-walled supply room darkened. Bourgeois Tilton's eyes darkened too, with concern. “Oh, Hugh, you don't mean it. You're only joshing me, I know.”

Hugh headed for the log door. “This child does mean it. Sartain.”

“Hugh, you've lost your sights! Get in a good night's sleep first. At least.” Bourgeois Tilton shook his head as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing. His long black hair lashed around. Bourgeois Tilton snorted nervously. “Hugh, you can't go it alone all that way! If the Blackfeet don't get you, the wolves will!”

“Booshway, them Rees'll know afore mornin' that I'm here at the fort. So I've got to leave by then. Otherwise I'll never get away. They'll watch this place night and day till they get me.”

“What's so all-fired—?”

Old eyes half-closed, Hugh looked back over his wide sloped shoulder. “I have to go. I've had sign.”

“What sign?”

“That I must a been saved special.”

“‘Saved special'?” Bourgeois Tilton snorted. “You must be teched. For what?”

“To get revenge.” Hugh let the door close behind him, and alone in the black night, he set off up the river. “Saved special I must a been. Otherwise why did He let everybody aboard the
Beaver
die and me live? To me that's sign the Lord saved me for special doin'. To get revenge on the lads.”

Hugh walked steadily all night long. He made good time despite his bum leg and the run he'd made earlier in the evening. When dawn came up pink and glorious over the slopes of crisp white snow, he found he'd covered some fifteen miles.

“Chosen,” he said to the sun. “The Lord chose me.”

He built a fire in a deep draw; warmed up the dried meat; had some coffee; had a pipe of tobacco; and, after a last look around, curled up in his capote and woolen blanket on a bed of willow twigs.

“Just so the snows'll hold off till I get to Henry's new post,” he said, nuzzling in the woolens. “Somewhere in the Big Horns.”

The sun rose and warmed him. He felt drowsy.

“Chosen,” he said. “And lads, best get your prayers ready and said. Ol' Hugh's comin' with the Lord's revenge. I've been chosen. I've had sign. I have.”

For twenty-five days, all the way into early January, Hugh trudged steadily west, crossing the Badlands at the mouth of the Little Missouri, crossing the mouth of Shell Creek coming down from the north, and had good luck with the snow and cold. The weather held fair and, for that time of the year, even warm.

When the provisions he'd bought from the bourgeois at Ft. Tilton gave out on the White Earth River confluence above the Blue Buttes, he shot and killed a ten-point elk and, after he'd had his fill, fire-dried some of the meat to carry with him.

“Chosen,” he said. “To help the Lord get His revenge.”

At the Little Muddy he awoke one morning to find a small herd of wild mustangs pawing the ice along the edge of the Missouri trying to get a drink.

“Ho-ah,” he whispered, “ho-ah, maybe this old hoss can ride the rest of the way.”

It was open country all around, making it tough for him to sneak up and catch even one of the slowest mustangs; so he tried an old stunt he remembered from down in the south country. Taking a bead on the leader, a grey-maned milkblue stallion, he creased it just above the shoulder. The milkblue stallion fell, just as Hugh planned, while the rest of the herd scampered and whinnied shrilly away.

Quickly Hugh made a halter out of his belt and a strap; sat astride the prone pony, fully expecting it to get up after a minute or two, as well-creased ponies always did. But when the mustang stallion didn't stir after some ten minutes, he examined the wound under the gray mane. And shook his head. Too bad. He'd creased it too close to the spine. He'd killed it.

Hugh stroked the beautiful milkblue coat a few times. A pretty critter if ever there was one. Ae, too bad. Hugh shed a few tears over the noble beast; then, with a sigh, left it to the wolves.

“For the Lord,” he said. “To get His revenge.”

At the fanning confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri, Hugh came across the abandoned fired remains of Major Henry's first post. It made Hugh curse softly to think that the major and the lads Fitz and Jim had once been on the spot. Well, just so Fitz and Jim were with the major in the new location in the Big Horns. That's all he asked. One chance to get his hands on Fitz. And the boy Jim too. For the Lord.

Hugh surveyed the land from a knoll on the north ridge. The major had picked a good spot for the old abandoned post all right. The site was on the first bench on the north side of the river and was clean of trees. The site not only provided a sweeping view of all the country around, it also commanded all traffic up and down both rivers. The Missouri, much tamer at this point, and also much cleaner, drove quietly out of the northwest, while the Yellowstone, rightly named for its flowing sands and clays, doubled on itself out of the southwest. Both rivers drove through wide flat valleys, with falling banks of gray clays and yellow gravels, with shifting gritty beaches and sand bars, with highlands behind them cropped with shortgrass and sage, and with finally a spear-shaped bench of yellow clay rising between them. The cutbanks of both rivers were sharp and fringed with cottonwood and willow and river ash.

All of it was crossroads country for the Indians: the sometimes friendly Assiniboins, the ever devilish surly Blackfeet, the usually shrewd Minnetarees, the mischievous humorous Crows.

Old Hugh wondered why hard-mouth Major Henry had left the site. It could only have been the pesky Blackfeet. That, and a lack of beaver.

Hugh trudged on.

“Chosen,” he said. “Lord's work.”

Below Blue Mountain to the east he shot and killed two small white-tailed deer. He came up on them behind a grove of dark green cedar, a whole herd of them, all of them watching two young bucks sparring. The sparring fascinated Hugh. The two bucks fought like tavern brawlers. Erect on their rear legs, front feet windmilling a mile a minute, soft bluebrown eyes one moment fierce and startled and the next moment half-closed and blinking, keening a little, they battled around and around in the snow, over sagebrush, into a little draw, beside a pyramid of red-streaked gray rock, against and through red willow brush, going it for a full quarter-hour—until Hugh remembered he was out of meat. With rifle and horse pistol he shot them down before they knew what happened. The rest of the herd bounded away like jack rabbits, gone in a wink, kicking up little puffs of dirt mixed in with snow.

“Lord's work,” Hugh said.

Opposite the mouth of the Powder River, Hugh ran across a small herd of buffalo. These too he ambushed, from behind a thicket of alder saplings; brought down a fat young cow.

After making sure there was no sign of Indians around—he was still in dreaded Blackfoot country—he set about having himself a feast.

From underneath the thin cover of snow he scratched out a handful of dry forage grass and screwed it into a nest. He lit his punk, made from a pithy bit of pine, and placed it in the nest. He closed the grass over it and waved it in the air until it ignited. Quickly then he placed dry kindling over the little spitting fire. When the fire was going good he added cottonwood branches, pyramid-style. He stood a moment to warm his hands over the merry crackling fire.

He skinned the young buffalo cow in the usual mountaineer fashion. The handling of steaming, bleeding flesh warmed his hands and face more than the fire did. All the while he butchered and nibbled, his roving restless eye kept a wary lookout for sign. It was noon of a clear blue day and, with the plains and low hills an endless expanse of snow, he could see for miles. The cow had fallen in an open glade on the west side of the Yellowstone, and the only cover for enemy was the fringe of alder saplings he himself had used to sneak up on the buffalo. He watched the alders carefully, the rest of the sloping and resloping white horizons carefully. Oddly enough, over toward the Little Sheep Mountains and the higher Big Sheep Mountains were what Hugh often called sheep clouds. It gave him a chuckle to think on it.

After he'd had his fill of freshly roasted hump rib and prime steak, topped off with a dessert of boudins, Hugh packed some of the choice cuts and set out once more for the Yellowstone and Big Horn, where he hoped to find some evidence of Major Henry and Diah Smith and their trapping parties.

“Vengeance,” Hugh said, smacking his lips, still savoring the crisp roasted flesh. “The Lord's chosen, this child is. Gifted special for it.”

He'd limped on but two miles with his burdens and his guns when he spied movement in the cedars on the second bench to the north. Quickly he scurried behind some silvergray sagebrush.

Wild eyes wicking, flicking back and forth like the searching eye of an albino, Hugh studied the clotting and unclotting dots on the far terrain. More buffalo? Could be. Horses? Likely. Blackfoot war party? Also likely. They'd probably seen the dark dot of his body moving across the white snow.

“Chosen,” he said, setting his triggers. “I carry a duty and've gotta get through in one piece.” Shrewdly, swiftly, he laid out a plan of defense. No movement until found—and then a centershot into the chief, with the horse pistol in reserve to put himself out of misery if need be. His gray old eyes wicked wild out of his bristly leathern face.

He knelt in the snow and waited, peering out from behind the sagebrush. They would see his tracks in the snow behind him. The ponies would smell out the blood and fresh cuts. Hugh nodded. Ae, he was done for.

When he looked up again he saw it wasn't Blackfeet at all. It was just a band of wild mustangs, some forty of them, of every color of the rainbow: blood bay, deep chestnut, nutmeg roan, white with black skin underneath and showing through a smoky gray, paint, sorrel with a white star and white stockings and yellow mane. The band was led by a pair of pacers, a stallion and a mare. The pacing stallion was blue, left foot stockinged, with a white blaze streaming down his face so that he seemed to be drinking it. The pacing mare was a dun, or a claybank buckskin, with a primordial streak down its back like a skunk stripe. The mustangs were big, much bigger than the mustangs he'd seen on the Platte and on the Sante Fe trail. These seemed to be almost fifteen hands high—an unusual height for mustangs.

Watching them from his covert of aromatic silvergray sagebrush, Hugh noticed something about the two leaders. The dun mare seemed to be as much queen or bell mare of the band as the whiteleg blue stallion was king. Also the dun queen mare had odd lines. She was more throwback than ordinary mustang. Curiously enough the whiteleg blue stallion resembled her somewhat, mostly in his motions, especially the way he paced. Looking closer, Hugh saw it. The blue whiteleg was a son of the dun throwback mare. Ae, that was it. That accounted for the two being boss together. As queen she was bringing him up to be king.

Though the band came within a hundred yards of where Hugh lay skulking, they never sensed him. The wind was from the south and in his favor. Luckily, too, they crossed ahead of him and not behind him where they would have spotted and scented his trail.

With a flourish of tails, with a directing whinny from both the throwback skunk-stripe mare and the whiteleg crown prince, they whirled over and down the cutbank and onto the sandy beach of the frozen Yellowstone River. Steam rose from the spot and Hugh guessed there was a breathing hole in the ice—probably from a warm spring. In the frosty air the horses blew breaths as big as spade beards.

The whiteleg crown prince ran down the stream a few yards, turned stylishly, and had himself a hearty and private bowel movement. Hugh smiled. It was the finest display of good manners he'd seen since he'd left white diggings.

He watched them take turns drinking at the breathing hole. They drank in an orderly fashion, each in his or her proper place according to an established nipping order, the dun queen mare and the blue crown prince standing guard and acting as police.

“If this child could only catch one of them critters,” Hugh murmured to himself in a low gruff monotone, “what fun he'd have ridin' in the rest of the way.” Hugh waggled his old head. “Yessiree. Somehow this old hoss's got to catch him one of them ponies.”

Even as he muttered to himself behind his bush, the dun skunk-stripe mare sensed something, probably his low voice, and with a great shrill yell almost twice human in volume, a great brood-mother call, she turned the entire band away from the bank. Nipping first one rump and then another, she got them thundering down the stream along the beach and then away over the cutbank, with herself and her son in the van, pacing, silver tails streaming and flowing, heads up, sharp nervous ears erect and flicking back and forth.