Lord Grizzly, Second Edition (30 page)

Old Elk Tongue continued to glare at Stabbed. Stabbed glared right back.

When Elk Tongue saw he could not cow the younger Stabbed, he slowly opened the folds of his gray blanket, dropped his breechcloth, and put his hand under his thigh, and said, “By my power, and by the power of my ancestors, White Grizzly is now my blood brother.”

The Ree braves in the lodge gasped. They clapped their hands to their mouths in surprise. Dropping the breechcloth usually meant grave insult. But here their old chief had turned it around to mean sacred power. The old chief had never before appealed to such great medicine.

Stabbed couldn't look Old Elk Tongue in the eye then. He sat down again.

Slowly Old Elk Tongue looked each brave in the eye, still holding his power in hand. Then, after a long solemn moment, Old Elk Tongue let go, and drew up his breechcloth again, and folded his gray mantle, and sat down beside Hugh.

But wily Stabbed wasn't through.

Later, when the council broke up in Old Elk Tongue's tent, as they were crawling out through the flap door, he invited Hugh to his lodge for a feast.

Hugh presented an absolutely calm face. But inwardly his mind raced. And raged. If he didn't accept the invitation, Stabbed as dog soldier and policeman would take it as an insult, and raise an uproar, and so throw the already mad-as-bees Arikarees out of Old Elk Tongue's control.

Hugh decided to put on a bold front. Bluff was sometimes exactly the right medicine with the touchy bird-brained red devils.

Hugh said, “Chief Elk Tongue is my blood brother. If Stabbed will invite Chief Elk Tongue, then White Grizzly will accept.”

Stabbed quivered with suppressed fury at Hugh's neat gambit. Hugh's request was an honorable one and Stabbed had to accept it, just as Hugh'd had to accept or suffer the consequences. Stabbed sulked audibly, like a male prairie grouse about to fight.

Hugh managed to suppress a sigh of relief within his beard. At least he'd gained that much. If Elk Tongue really honored him as a blood brother for having honored the dead mother of dead Grey Eyes, he had a chance to come out of it alive.

Just before Hugh crept into Stabbed's lodge, he asked permission to sign-talk with his men to tell them he was stopping for a feast. Stabbed gave assent, though he had to work at it. Hugh went to the rocky knoll that lay between the village and the river and wigwagged to Dutton and the others not to worry, that he was halfway finished with what he considered a successful council, but in any event they should remain armed to the teeth.

Once again Hugh crawled through a doorflap, and deposited his guns at the door with the others, and sat in a circle with select warriors, knees out and legs crossed at the ankles. Each man sat according to his rank, Stabbed and Hugh and Elk Tongue in the place of honor at the back. Ree police guarded the door outside.

Right from the start, while they smoked the red pipestone calumet, Hugh saw sign that this was one feast which was not going to end up with the customary full belly and sense of well-being. To whet the appetite, supposedly, Stabbed's young buckskin-clad squaw, Wild Lily, handed out tidbits of pemmican. The way she did it—eyes stiff and bugged in an immobile face instead of in the usual merry manner accompanied by a lewd jest now and then—was enough to set Hugh's teeth on edge. But it was the pemmican itself, full of hair and gravel and maggots, which told most. Even Old Elk Tongue had trouble getting it down, while the high-shouldered fierce young warriors glimmered at the joke that Hugh was obliged to eat rotten food at a feast that was supposedly in his honor.

Hugh next happened to notice that Wild Lily had not killed one of the tribe's best and fattest dogs for the feast. The dog he saw in the stewpot over the fire in the middle of the lodge was one of the meanest and scrawniest he'd ever seen.

Outwardly Hugh seemed calm enough as he solemnly chewed on the rotten pemmican. But inwardly his mind continued to seethe as he wondered how he was going to escape this new pinch.

The pipe of peace was making its second round, and Old Elk Tongue's mobile lips were curving and uncurving as he mused to himself—when Hugh heard a child squeal behind him.

Hugh turned his head just enough to make out that the squeal came from a stubborn two-year-old boy. The boy was persistent in wanting to join his father Stabbed at the feast. Hugh saw Wild Lily clap a hand over its little mouth; saw her bundle the child away. Hugh's eyes opened. Ho-ah. The decks were being cleared for action.

Hugh saw there was nothing for it but to make a break for it. There wasn't even time to jump up and quickly grab up his rifle and pistol.

Suddenly Hugh doubled himself up into a ball and rolled over backward. He kicked up the side of the leather lodge; rolled out; bounded to his feet. Then he leaned forward into a swift run, dodging in and out through the village, around and behind and beside various conical tepees standing between him and the low rimrock to the north and farther away from the river.

There was an immediate shout, then a great roar of voices, then a shot. Then came a great whoop of rage and fury and a flurry of shots.

Hugh threw a quick look back over his shoulder and, past the slant of a leather lodge, caught sight of Stabbed picking up a handful of dust and flinging it in the air. It was the ancient summons to battle. Hugh knew then it wouldn't be just his scalp and life they were after, but also those of his men still across the river. Most of the braves would be across that river like a shot, swimming or riding, and would have the men cornered and captured before they got a quarter-mile away.

A pang of anguish, of sympathy for the men, a pang not unlike a heart attack, gripped his chest so that he could scarcely breathe. It was terrible, it was too bad, but the way the dice rolled, it probably had to be. Hugh only hoped that the men had heard the uproar and the shots in time so that they could get at least a little head start on the Rees and so maybe miraculously escape them after all.

Hugh ran past the last lodge, then past the village middenheap, then hit for the nearest point of the low whitegray rimrock to the north. Hugh spotted a slanting hole some ten feet up. His heart leaped when he saw it. “If this child can make that afore a red devil comes around that last lodge, this child's got a sucker's chance.” Hugh leaped up with all his might; caught hold of the top edge of the ledge; chinned himself up with powerful gripping grabbing scrabbling hands and arms; got a leg over; climbed in; ducked down. Looking about, he spotted a slatelike slab of rock off to one side. He gave it a jerk; found it loose and lighter than he expected; pulled it over him and covered the hole like a cook might cover a pot or kettle.

Just in time too. The dirt had hardly stopped falling when, looking past the edge of the stone cover, Hugh saw a dozen whooping hawkbone braves led by Stabbed come legging it around the last tepee and heading straight for the low rimrock hellbent for revenge. Their paint-striped faces were horrible to behold, drawn up as they were into ferocious grimaces, mouths open with bared yellow teeth and uling, wide red throats screaming and shrilling, flintlocks and bows and arrows windmilling, and legs in violent run.

Hugh groaned. Stabbed had seen him duck into the slanting hole. He was gone under, sartain sure at last.

Hugh took knife out of shot pouch and set himself. He would bring down at least one of the red devils with him. Stabbed if possible.

But Stabbed and his braves bounded up the whitegray rimrock and right on past him.

Hugh gave a massive sigh of relief. Ahhh. Stabbed hadn't seen him after all. Stabbed must have thought he'd somehow climbed out of sight farther along the rimrock.

The dozen Ree braves were barely out of sight and hearing, when Hugh heard a curious whizzing underfoot. He looked down. There, in the darkness, on green mossed-over rocks, was a slowly writhing brown diamond-flecked design. Rattlesnake. Still too full of winter cold to rattle properly, or coil and strike, it was not too cold to be harmless if a man was careless enough to place a moccasined foot directly in front of its mouth. Hugh whirled; reached down; stabbed around until he sliced head from body. Before he was done cleaning out the slanted hole he found and killed seven others.

Again Hugh peered out from behind the stone slab cover. And what he saw then evoked another series of stabbing pains in his chest.

Three of his men had been captured, the laugher Marsh, and elegant Chapman, and misfit More. Some twenty Rees, led by the brave who accompanied Stabbed across the Platte for the parley, had quickly caught up with them. Marsh, Chapman, More, each of them, had their hands tied behind them and then had their hands tied to a horse's tail. The very first jerk had unsprung arms from shoulder sockets. That first jerk must have been terrible. The snorting ponies dragging the men half-turned about to look at the drenched half-drowned dirt-bedaubed things bouncing irregularly along in the dust behind them.

At the sight of the hated whites captured and bound, the whole village went into a wild joyous frenzy, the braves howling out their spite and vengeance like coyotes, the musicians beating drums and blowing eaglebone whistles and bangling medicine rattles, the squaws giving the tremulo. Dogs chased after the rolling bouncing forms of the men, dashed in for a bite, howled and barked. Little Indian boys ran after the victims too, target-practicing with their little boy-sized bows and arrows. Little girls and young squaws and old squaws also ran after, cursing, swearing, mouthing the foulest and the lewdest of insults, all the while gesturing what they meant with their fingers and hands. The squaw who had spat on Hugh was right up in front with the rest. She was in an ecstasy of revenge and joy.

Hugh couldn't find Dutton. It made him hope that Dutton had somehow managed to get away. Probably on one of the horses.

Then followed the most awful part of the victory ceremony dance. Three braves, led by Stabbed's companyero, stopped the horses, and with cries of savage triumph, went over and counted coup on the still live men, and then scalped them, cutting out the whorl or crown below which, as the Indians believed, lay the seat of intelligence, cutting it out with a single twist of the skinning knife and lifting it with a jerk. Once scalped, the braves turned the bodies over to the squaws, who promptly, with equally sharp knives, castrated them, disemboweled them, dismembered them, stabbing them endlessly, and doing it all so fast that life and consciousness hardly had time to escape before the mutilations were finished. And last followed the fearful awful blood-curdling coyotelike howl of the death whoop.

Gone was the laugher, Marsh. Gone was the cheerful dandy, Chapman. Gone was the haunted one, tall misfit More. And where Dutton was only God knew.

Hugh cried.

“Too bad Old Elk Tongue couldn't hold his braves. But I guess they was too much for even him.”

The braves, again led by Stabbed's companyero, held a dance of the scalps around the huge blazing fire in the center of the village. They two-stepped, they howled, they beat drums, they beat their chests, they recited their coups and exploits, they howled execrations at the hated white man. “Hay-ah-hay! Hay-he-ah-hay. Hay-ah-hay.” “Ow-owgh-he-a! Ow-owgh-he-a-hi!” “Hi-hi-i. He-he. He-he-a. Hay-a-hay.”

Hugh cried.

Meantime Stabbed and his braves, who'd missed finding him in his slanting hole and who'd run beyond the rimrock, at last came back. Stabbed cursed and ranted and raved that his prize, Chief White Grizzly, killer of his brother Bear Mouth, should have somehow got away. Stabbed was so mad he refused to join the scalp dance around the blazing fire where his companyero was parading about proud as an eagle cock with Hugh's gun and pistol. Stabbed howled and swore. The worst was Stabbed sat on the very slanting stone slab under which Hugh lay skulking.

Hugh didn't dare shiver, much less take a relieving breath of any kind. He thought to himself: “I'm just barely out of one scrape, when, wingo! I'm plumb smack in the middle of another. If that ain't somethin' to grind on then my name ain't Ol' Hugh Glass.” Hugh bit on his teeth. “My stomach may be empty but it's a dead cinch my brain ain't.”

When night finally fell over the village and the river and the rimrock, sulky Stabbed at last got off the stone slab and climbed down the rimrock and joined the dance.

Hugh breathed easier.

6

H
UGH HAD
himself a time penned up in the snake den.

He didn't mind eating raw rattlesnake meat—after eating it during his ordeal of crawling to Ft. Kiowa, it was in the way of being an old treat. He didn't mind the lack of sleep—like a dog he could make that up later. He didn't mind the lack of water—it wasn't hot out, and the little he did need to survive he got by licking a wet mossy rock on the shadow side.

But he did mind the tight narrow cramped quarters. The need to stretch his legs almost drove him crazy. Experiment as he might, he just couldn't find the room to get his legs stretched out straight.

The need to stretch his legs to the full became an obsession with him. He tried every position and angle imaginable. He scrounged around like a bitch about to pup and needing a comfortable nest to pup in.

He didn't dare allow himself the luxury of shoving off the stone cover for a few minutes in the dark of the night. As long as both he and Dutton were still at large the Rees were bound to have sentinels out and on the alert for the least movement.

Finally, three days and three nights later, the Rees, like a flock of unpredictable crows, suddenly took off one morning for parts unknown. At a signal from Old Elk Tongue, the squaws began to take down the lodges and load the ponies and dogs, and by high noon the whole village was gone. Hugh wondered if Old Elk Tongue hadn't probably guessed that he and Dutton were still in the area and had decided to give them a chance to escape by moving everybody out.

When Hugh was sure they were safely out of sight, he pushed the stone cover to one side and crawled out. And immediately stood up and stretched, high up on his moccasined toes. “Ho-ah! This child was about beat for stink. All alone in a tight hole a man makes mighty poor company for himself. Another day of it and I'd've been just another dead snake in a full privy.”

Hugh searched both banks of the North Platte River for sign of Dutton. But look as he might, and call out as he might, Dutton seemed to have vanished with the dew. Except for the dusty Ree trail, not a track led away from the area.

Hugh took stock of his situation. He'd lost his rifle and horse pistol, yes, and all of his plunder, but he still had his skinning knife and flint and steel. Looking at the three, a slow wise tortured smile moved under his whitening whiskers. “‘Tis so. These little fixin's still make a child feel quite rich, quite pert, even though he is two, three hundred miles away from anybody or anywhere, all alone among the painters and wild varmints.”

Hugh decided his best chance was to head straight for Ft. Kiowa, some two hundred seventy miles to the northeast. It was the nearest settlement, and it was some hundred thirty miles closer than Ft. Atkinson. Also, to follow the Platte down to Ft. Atkinson would have been suicide. The Pawnees, tribal cousins of the Rees and his one-time enemies and captors, still lived on its banks.

Ae, Ft. Kiowa it was. Hugh looked forward to seeing Bending Reed again. She would fix him up with a fresh supply of leather wear. And Clerk Bonner might just possibly let him have a little more credit and give him a new rifle and horse pistol. Then, too, he might just possibly catch an early spring boat going south to Ft. Atkinson where the downer Fitz was supposed to have gone.

Hugh once again took his latest miraculous escape from the Rees as sign that the Lord meant to preserve his life for a special reason. “‘Tis so. The Good Lord has something special in mind for this child. ‘Tis to get His vengeance on Fitz for having deserted this child on the forks of the Grand.”

Hugh trapped a rabbit and skinned it. He revived one of the dying Ree fires with a few armfuls of dead willow twigs. He barbecued the rabbit to an aromatic faretheewell. He relished it to the bone. He drank from the river. He washed his whitening whiskers, took a last look around, and set off.

The weather held steady and he made good time. As he'd done before, he slept daytimes, traveled at night.

Hugh had always been a great leg, and with his limb and seat and back completely healed, he once again could cover ground on foot like a tireless mule with the smell of home in its nostrils. Hugh was one of the few mountain men who could outwalk and outdistance any horse, wild or tame. He had a great chest, powerful legs, a tremendous reserve of energy, and when he set his mind on it, a will as tough as buckskin. He never gave up. It had been Hugh, more than Clint, who willed the two of them through to life on their weary ordeal walking up from the coasts of Texas to the Platte, where the Pawnees caught them.

He crossed the source of the Niobrara River; climbed over the Pine Ridge divide; unerringly hit the source of the White River. He followed the White northeastward. It wound about and meandered through rolling ochergray land with pines in the distance on the buttes and ridges. Cottonwood, ash, willow, chokecherry fringed the stream.

The farther he went down the White, the more chalky and dirty-cream white it became. He drank white; he shat white. And sour? The wild salt and alkali in it puckered the mouth to a bee-hole and crimped the gullet to a wasp-hole. It was like drinking salty chalkwater. Instead of assuaging thirst it increased it. Luckily a late spring snow fell, and for a couple of days Hugh could suck white snowballs for water to go with his red meat, mostly gopher.

Hugh followed the White all the way into a yellowwhite eroded country, an ancient open terrain, called the Badlands. The White dwindled, and thinned. Sometimes there was hardly enough water to connect the pools at the turns. Hugh said, “The way it looks here, the White ain't gonna have enough water to make the Missouri.”

A full moon followed him every step of the way. At night, the Badlands country was an eerie wonder world, silvered over with muted luminescence as if all were in dream and he a bearded bad conscience.

A south wind followed him, too, blowing up the valleys in long hooing drafts and whistling in the cedars on the yellowwhite cliffs. Sometimes the wind moaned in the rock crevices; sometimes it rustled softly in the first yellow grasses of spring. It was a lonely and an old land.

The sooing south wind was especially haunting. It made him cry sometimes. It played old harps in his head. It made him wonder at the good of it all. What did a man really live for? Today's meat? Tomorrow's journey? Or what?

It was a cinch there was no life if a child sat still and failed to eat and sleep. There was life only if a man was on the move, ae, on the run even. Crawling, walking, running. Journeying, journeying, journeying. Always on the go. Heading toward a Somewhere that always and ever in the end turned out to be a Nowhere. For what? For a God? For a Devil? For a Man? For a Beast?

Or was it merely for Mister Stomach and his ability to beget other Mister Stomachs?

“‘Tis so. Friend stomach has little patience with queersome notions. This child's seen it. Little patience.”

What about the Lord's vengeance he was supposed to be getting for Him? Or, for a fact, his own private revenge?

Hugh didn't know. Sitting in the moonlight on a rock overlooking a gutted saffron valley of a million acres, with Vampire Peak and Cedar Butte rearing up over the far wall beyond and the driving south wind playing organ music in the great pipes of the deep earth, Hugh didn't know.

“Maybe it's neither one that shines. Neither the Lord's vengeance nor this child's miserable revenge. This child feels queer, he does, like a buffler shot in the lights, thinkin' on it. I've knocked about these free mountains from as far north as Missouri's head to as far south as the starvin' Gila, and I still don't know. And if life deals fair a-tall, this child'll pro'bly never know.” Hugh slowly tolled his white hoar head in the moonlight. “Maybe the ants
has
the answer, as the Good Book says. Dig, eat nits, and hide in the dark when somebody steps on the mound overhead. ‘Tis so.”

The rock he sat on was perched on the very tip of the south wall. Wind and rain had honed it into the shape of a crude grampa's chair, with a high back and wide armrests, and a rough footstool beneath. A stunted wizened cedar, clinging to a crevice, rustled beside him like a nervous green parrot ruffling its feathers.

Overhead, the full moon moved through the silverblue skies of night. Below, shadows replaced shades, shades chased shadows; points of light replaced spots of white, spots of white chased points of light.

After a while the moon seemed to stand still in the fantastic valley, while the moonwhite peaks and the ghostly spires and the trembling pinnacles moved, began to sail by, all of them like silent icebergs lost in hard open land.

Hugh saw old ships, three-masters and four-masters, sail serenely by. Below and hard on the right, chasing a prize Spanish galleon, drove Pirate Lafitte's favorite ship,
The Pride
. Hugh shivered at the likeness. It brought back haunting memories of butchery and murder, rapine and looting. The fluttering silverwhite sails of
The Pride
seemed to be gaining on the ghostly sails of the three-decker Spanish galleon. The sea even rippled with whitecaps.

Hugh blinked, and in an instant the scene was no longer a sea but a city with gold-walled castles and delicate white minarets and soaring towers and serrated battle walls. The Seven Cities of Cibola at last? He could see priests and men, duennas and maidens, and all dressed in silver-trimmed black, strolling through the streets.

Hugh blinked, and in another instant he was looking upon a vast graveyard with a thousand kingly monuments of polished white marble. There were tombs for nobles and sarcophagi for popes and single lonely dazzling white pillars for virgins and lofty pyramids for long-dead Egyptian Josephs.

Hugh blinked, and in still another instant he was looking upon a sea of faces. There was the old she-rip Mabel, mouth wide in a bellow for him to take up the harness and support her and the lads. There were the lads themselves, still looking to him for a way of going in a woman-run world. And that crook Jacob and fair-haired Esau. And Pirate Lafitte dressed in black and his gang of scarred cutthroat buccaneers. And Clint, eating an antelope with a Comanche face. And Clint again, besplintered on the Platte and screaming the minute he became a flaming torch to the delight of the Pawnees. And Augie Neill and Jim Anderson, lips moving in soundless appeal for help. And sweet lad Johnnie Gardner, so full of holes he was made a riddle of before he was dead. And the laugher Marsh, with his neck broken and his head askew and hanging down his back, smiling ludicrously at his own fleeing. And the boy Jim Bridger ready to strike with his great fist again, at last a man. And blackhearted Fitz, still enjoying a life he no longer deserved.

“Yes, Fitz, enjoy life while you may. This child's comin' to get you.”

Hugh suddenly caught himself trembling and sweating.

“Whoa there, lad,” Hugh said, jumping up. “Steady as you go. You've got to hold your noddle steady on Reed and Fort Kiowa, lad, or by the bull barley it's over the hills and far away for you.”

Hugh climbed down from the high place, walked east along the rim of the wall.

“‘Tis a bad place for a bad conscience, it is.”

Walking, he watched the changing shapes and shadows, the lights and whites, moondaft and marveling to see still other mirages parading past.

“‘Tis a place where the Lord is likely to come to a man in a visitation. Or come to wrestle with a child and touch him on the hip and change his name from Jacob to Israel.”

Walking, he watched a certain draw rise and fall between the thinnest of parallel fluted columns, a column colored rose and a column colored cream and a column colored milkwhite. “‘Tis a church, it is. A church to stand silent in while waiting for the Word.”

He swung on, intending to cut away from the rim of the wall, yet not being able to, irresistibly drawn by the old shattered hulks riding at anchor in the graveyard of the Heavenly Shipwright.

“I feel clean,” he said, pulling on his whitening beard. “Clean.”

Walking, he watched another ship ride by, in full sail, jib flying, spanker rattling, mizzen royal popping, a triumph of building genius and a glory of the seas.

“Steady, Hugh. It's time to ask what's trump and whose the deal.”

Then, like an Indian at parting, he walked away from it without waving good-by.

One dawn, just south of White Clay Butte, where the Little White River came swinging in from the south, Hugh saw some fresh grizzly tracks. They were headed down river too.

That gave him pause.

He studied the tracks carefully. The prints were huge, and they dragged. There were no cub prints about. A he-grizzly. An Ephraim both old and huge.

The land about was bald save for a little patch of tufted buffalo grass growing on either side of the White. The grass was of a pale green hue and had short shriveled blades. Beneath the grass, in the roots, would probably be a few white grubs, perhaps a few ants, and maybe even a gopher or two. Ho-ah! That meant both he and the grizzly would soon begin eyeing each other as fair game, with the grizzly better armed. Lonely he-grizzlies rarely attacked man unless they were extremely hungry. But hard barren ground could have only one effect on the grizzly—kill the first thing it saw moving.

At the same time Hugh saw that he couldn't very well leave the White for, say, the Bad River to the north. He'd have to cross hardpan stone-cropped prairie every bit as cracked and dry and merciless as the hogbacks between the Grand and the Moreau, and the Moreau and the Cheyenne, and he'd had enough of that kind of travel, even if he did have full use of both his legs again.

Hugh decided to sleep on it. It was day; he had walked a full long night, and he needed a rest. So he drank a few swallows of chalky salty White, caught a gopher and roasted it, and crawled into a shadowy cave under the north riverbank.

He woke well before sunset. And he woke feeling queersome. Something had altered while he slept.

Cautiously he crept out of his hole. He looked up river and down river. He searched the opposite bank. He examined the bank behind him, casting uneasy glances toward White Clay Butte. There was nothing so far as he could see.