Lord Grizzly, Second Edition (31 page)

Yet he was conscious that something had altered.

He thought on it awhile, watching the sunlight slanting lower and lower across the running dirty-cream water, and finally decided he couldn't wait on something he couldn't see. “What this child don't see he don't know.”

He elected to follow the river again and so willynilly had to follow the grizzly tracks. He hoped Old Ephraim had rambled on right lively during the night and so had left him far behind. Or else had turned aside, either north or south, across the country.

A mile down the river he came upon a prairie-dog village. It was all torn up. The grizzly'd had himself a feast. He'd cuffed and clubbed out about an acre of mounds. Gray dried pelts and dry clots of blood and freshly dugout mounds of pale gray dirt lay in every direction.

“Ho-ah! So Old Ephe's et, has he? Maybe now he won't have a hankerin' for this child's liver.”

Hugh tromped over the torn up sour soil. It was a small village and such live prairie dogs as were left were cowed and had skulked deep in their burrows. The yellow sun was almost down and each pale gray mound cast a grayblack shadow.

Off to one side he found a half-dead prairie dog that Old Ephe had missed. Hugh pounced on it. Meat.

He skinned it and built a small stinking fire out of driftwood cast up on the treeless shores. While he ate, the live prairie dogs behind him at last dared to come out of their burrows. They scolded him furiously. Their wifelike yapping made him feel uncomfortable.

When he set off for the night again he noticed that the grizzly's tracks led directly from the prairie-dog village to the river, and then vanished. Hugh crossed the river twice, going both up and down stream on both sides of the river, but still couldn't find trace of which way Old Ephe had gone.

Hugh decided not to worry about Old Ephe until he should meet him face to face. “What this child don't see he don't know. Reed's only four, five days away now.”

He tramped on. The earth turned away from the big sun, and yellow light became rusty dusk, and stars came out to belittle man and all his worming trails.

He tramped on. The earth turned toward the full moon, and soon darkness became silver luminescence again, and stars paled in the silverblue sky.

The riverbanks and the sloping sides of the White valley held bare. There were no trees, no bushes, no carpets of grass. If there hadn't been occasional Dakota prickly-pear cactus underfoot and the moon a hanging ball of pure silver in the eastern heavens, Hugh could easily have mistaken himself for that first interstellar traveler at last wandering across the face of the moon, afoot and musing in its lifeless valleys.

He'd had a good long drink from a fresh spring, miraculously spilling out of the north wall of the White valley, when he noticed it. And for a few seconds he thought himself back in the wind-hewn grampa chair overlooking the valley of the Badlands with its draws full of riding ghostships and its sea of phantasm faces. Because what he saw when he looked back was a silver shape walking along behind him in the silver light in the silver valley of the White. And the shape was only a score of steps behind him.

Bewitched and gone loco at last, he was. It was one thing to make imaginary ships and faces out of fantastic eroded land, ae, but it was another to have one of the silver shapes crawl out of the Badlands valley and follow him down the White. Ae, he'd gone loco, he had.

He wished for his rifle, Old Bullthrower. A flying pill from Old Bullthrower would soon settle whether it was a ghost or critter or companyero or what.

Worse yet, the shape resembled a silvertip, a grizzly the size of a great bull. Had Old Ephraim, who yesterday preceded him down the White and who plundered the prairie-dog village, had he got scent of Hugh and so taken to pursuing him?

Hugh decided to test his senses.

Hugh took a step toward it, and stopped. The silver shape backed a step, and stopped.

Hugh blinked. Who ever heard of a grizzly playing follow-the-leader?

“Best hurry to Reed afore it gets worse,” he murmured within his white whiskers.

He turned his back on the silvertip and once again headed for Ft. Kiowa.

A hundred steps later, Hugh looked over his shoulder. Companyero Old Ephe was still a score of steps behind him, following him slow step for slow step, a silver shape in the silver light in the silver valley of the White.

Hugh stopped dead. Ephraim stopped dead.

“‘Tis a mirage,” Hugh said aloud. “Like what this child and his companyero Clint saw on the Brazos after Clint helped himself to that antelope with a Comanche face.”

Hugh started up again. Gravel rattled underfoot. The shape started up again. Gravel rattled under its claws.

“Ho-ah!” Hugh said aloud. “Now I see a different light.”

Hugh took a dozen steps to his left, toward the whiteyellow cliffs to the north of the river. Old Ephraim took a dozen steps.

Hugh took a dozen steps to his right, toward the riverbank. Old Ephraim took a dozen steps.

Hugh stood facing the silver shape.

The silver grizzly stood facing him.

“What be ye? Shape? Critter? The devil himself come to haunt me in a bearskin?”

The silvertip lifted its flat snout and sniffed the air.

“‘Tis a critter,” Hugh said. He trembled. He preferred the haunt.

There was one other test. He could ignore Old Ephraim.

He tried it. Resolutely, without a backward glance, his back a continual shiver of flesh, he began marching down the river, the fringes of his elkskin hunting shirt threshing gently at each step. Gravel crunched underfoot. Sand crinched. He walked across bars of gray silt, and beaches of sand, and up banks of flour-fine loess, and across sunbaked flats of wild salt.

He looked back. Step for step, bar for bar, beach for beach, the silvertip—or was it a silver shape?—had followed him all the way, its front feet padding along dog-fashion and its rear feet lifting along grampa-style.

He shook. With all his talk of Lord's vengeance, maybe at that the Lord Himself had come down to make him a visitation, to teach him forcibly that he was not an Esau after all but a Jacob, that after he'd wrestled with the silver shape until break of day, against which he would not prevail, the silver shape would touch the hollow of his thigh and he'd be cripple again.

“Let me go,” Hugh cried.

“Go,” the valley answered.

“What mout your name be?”

“Be,” the valley answered.

Again Hugh faced ahead, and led the way down the White.

They came to a thick grove of cottonwood, brush, saplings, old boles. A stream of fresh water fed the trees. In the silver night the leaves tingled silver.

“Ah,” Hugh said, “maybe now I lose him.”

Ten minutes later he emerged from the grove. When he looked back, the silvertip—or was it a silver shape?—had vanished.

“Ah,” Hugh said, “he's run across a better scent. Good. May it be a dozen antelope so he'll have more than his fill.”

Dawn broke pink, and he supped on gopher, and drank fresh water from the stream, and went to sleep in a bed of leaves under a bullberry bush.

When he awoke in midafternoon, after he'd breakfasted on gopher, he found the grizzly tracks again. The tracks were headed straight for Ft. Kiowa.

Then Hugh had enough of it. He decided to kill the grizzly. He drew his knife.

He tracked Old Ephraim carefully, following him along the winding riverbank, across sand bars, through groves of cottonwood, skinning knife flashing in the evening sun.

At the third grove he lost all track of him. The claw prints trailed clearly up to a little spring, then disappeared as if tracks, grizzly and all, had been washed away into the White.

Hugh couldn't cipher it. The little spring poured out of a rock some forty feet from the bank of the White, and trickled flashing across a flat bed of gold sand and beneath a grove of stately cottonwoods, and dropped splashing a few feet into the river. No matter how often he surveyed both sides of the sparkling streamlet, he couldn't find a trace of where Old Ephraim had left the stream.

“Another Ascension, that's it,” Hugh said smiling to himself. “Or else a grizzly finally climbed a tree.”

He was about to go on when his eye caught movement ahead. Some twenty feet on the other side of the streaming spring lay the fat bole of a fallen cottonwood patriarch. The old tree was at least four feet through. Looking carefully Hugh noticed that the edge of the whiteocher bark along the top seemed blurred, as if somehow it had grown silver fur which a breeze was ruffling.

Fur?

Hugh stood puzzling.

Just then, with a snort, with a grunt like a laugh at having been discovered, Old Ephraim jumped up from his hiding place and galloped away down the river. Every now and then Old Ephraim tossed his big doghead this way and that as if he couldn't get over the humor of it.

Hugh said, “You know, to play a joke like that on me, Old Ephe must've liked me.” Hugh looked from the fallen tree to the flowing spring and back to the fallen tree again. “He must've jumped all of twenty-five feet.”

Fifteen days after he'd climbed out of the snake's den beside the Platte, in May, the Moon of Planting, Hugh reached Ft. Kiowa on the Missouri.

His moccasins were worn to shreds. He was gaunt. He was white.

When Hugh stuck his old hoar head into Bending Reed's tepee, Bending Reed clapped a hand to her mouth, slant Siberian eyes staring in surprise at the pure white of his whiskers. “White Grizzly,” she managed to get out at last.

“‘Tis white you see all right, Reed. White. But it ain't a grizzly robe like last time. It won't pull off. This child's still an Esau.” Hugh humphed to himself. “He hopes.”

“Heyoka?”

“No, not Heyoka,” Hugh said. “Esau.” Then Hugh added, “Reed, put on the pot. Tomorrow I catch me a boat for Fort Atkinson. I've been saved special again.”

7

“G
EN'RAL, MY MIND'S
made up. You're not going to talk me out of gettin' Fitz next time I see him.” Hugh banged a big hairy fist on a buckskin knee. “That's my right.”

“‘Right'? ‘Rights'?” General Ashley exclaimed, mild blue eyes suddenly snapping blue sparks. “The only rights you have are those I allowed you when I hired you.”

The two were sitting alone in the officers' brick quarters in the center of Ft. Atkinson. It was almost noon, and the sun coming in through the oiled paper which did for glass panes gave both their wrinkled brows a lardlike texture. It was also very hot and sultry out, and both men were sweating profusely. The general's blue Missouri state militia uniform was blotched with black rings, especially under the armpits, while Hugh's yellowbrown leathers were spotted with acid-edged dark brown rings. Ashley sat on the forward edge of a four-legged handhewn chair, facing Hugh, who also sat on the forward edge of a chair. Beside them on a table was a half-empty bottle of whisky and two tin cups still partly filled.

Hugh raised his white head as if he were a predator grizzly about to jump Ashley. “Then I quit your consarn. Here and now. So I can take that right.”

“But why?”

“Because I've a right to it.”

Outside a mule brayed on the parade ground.

“But why? Are you God or something?”

“No, not quite God. But I've had sign He saved me special to get Fitz.”

“Oh that's nonsense. Preacher's rubbish.”

Again Hugh lifted his bushy white head as if he were about to tear into Ashley. “Gen'ral, out here in the middle of nowhere, full of red devils and varmints, mountain-man code says I've got that right.”

“Wait, wait, Hugh!” Ashley held up a slim soft hand, blond face an anxious red and kind mild blue eyes crinkled with worry. Ashley moved forward to the very edge of his teetery chair. “Hugh, I know just how you feel—”

“Gen'ral, you're a liar. You don't know how I feel. Because if you did you'd take my part.” Hugh picked up his tin cup from the log table, and angrily swilled the brown liquor in it around a few times, and finished it off in a single throw.

Ashley jerked upright, sat back in his chair. “I'm a what?” A quick shrewd look passed over his blond face. “So you've quit my concern, eh? All right. If you've quit, then I'm turning you over to General Leavenworth of the U.S. Army.”

Hugh sat risen with whisky and hate. He hadn't wanted to talk to Ashley, knowing what Ashley would say. But Ashley had insisted, promising Hugh good whisky as well as some back pay due him, and so Hugh had consented. Hugh knew that Ashley would use every means in his power to block his vengeance.

A mule brayed outside on the parade ground.

Hugh set his empty tin cup on the table. He sat twisting his wolfskin cap around and around on his buckskin-covered knee. The white whiskers around his mouth moved as he ground his teeth together. His restless old gray eyes glowered stubborn at Ashley. Hugh knew what he was up against. Either a man belonged to a fur-trading firm or the U.S. Army had control of his movements. No unattached white man could hang around or travel in Indian territory unless he had a permit. If he killed Fitz as a member of Ashley's firm, Ashley would punish him. If he killed Fitz as a ward of the U.S. Army, the U.S. Army would punish him. Hugh cursed inwardly. He boiled at the thought of Ashley sitting in his way. Inwardly he railed at the whole business of interference by the settlements of the East and their laws. Until the big fur companies and the Army had moved in, he and his companyeros, the free trappers, had been free to render right as they saw fit, according to horse sense and the code of the free wild. Hugh wished now he hadn't shown up at Ft. Atkinson. Fitz hadn't been there when he arrived, and ever since everything and everybody had worked to forestall his and the Lord's vengeance. And rumor even had it that Fitz wouldn't be around until late in the summer, when he was expected to come in with the spring catch of beaver from both Captain Diah Smith and Major Henry. It meant a whole hot summer of lying around doing nothing. And yet, where else was he sure of catching up with Fitz but at Ft. Atkinson? He was trapped, blocked, crossed all around.

“Hugh,” General Ashley said, softening his voice and putting a soft small hand in friendly fashion on Hugh's leather-covered knee, “Hugh, like I've said before, why don't you go back up to Fort Kiowa? You'll be happier up there with Reed and hunting for the fort. And along with that you've got my proposition.”

“What proposition?” Hugh snapped, brushing the general's white hand aside. “That I spy on Astor's boys for you? Not this child. I wasn't meant for such skunk's work.”

General Ashley flushed. “I'll make it worth your while, Hugh.”

A great snort exploded from Hugh. “Hire Fitz for such work, why don't you? He's the kind of sneak who'd do a good job for you.”

General Ashley flushed very red and fresh beads of sweat broke out all over his fairskinned face. “Hugh, you've got Fitz all wrong. I don't know just what did happen on the forks of the Grand, but I'm sure Fitz must have his side of the story too.”

“Gen'ral, are you callin' this child a liar?”

“No, no. Not that at all. Just that I can't conceive of Fitz doing such a thing. Not my Fitz. Why Fitz's been like a rock to me. Without him and a couple of others I can name, like Diah and the major and Tom Fitzpatrick and the lad Jim Bridger, I don't know what I would have done. The whole concern would have flopped long ago without them. Fitz all alone brought in an important message from the major at Henry's Post on the Yellowstone and Missouri. Then last winter Fitz brought another message from Diah, south of the Big Horn, to the major, north of the Big Horns. And still later he brought me still another very important message from the major, all the way from the Big Horns there to me here on the Missouri. And then, mind you, and then he turned right around and offered to lead a pack train back to the Wind River Mountains for the rendezvous which the boys are probably holding right now this very minute.” General Ashley shook his head slowly, tollingly. His blond hair slid forward out of its smooth combing. “And then, there's all that book work Fitz does for me. Untangling accounts I just can't make head nor tail of. And that makes Fitz doubly valuable to me. He's a first-rate mountain man plus being a first-rate bookkeeper.” General Ashley took out a big white linen handkerchief and mopped his brow. “No, Hugh, Fitz's been a rock to me. Simply a rock. And all I can say is, he must've had his reasons for doing what he did on the Grand. And I'm standing by him.”

Hugh sat stubborn, swollen. Hugh hated the mention of Fitz's proficiency as a bookkeeper. He begrudged Fitz his education. “Why did he lie to the major then, Gen'ral, if he was so smart and had such a good reason to leave me die alone?”

“Oh, now, Hugh, be the bigger man in this. Maybe Fitz did make a slight mistake there on the Grand, but—”

“‘Slight mistake'? Fitz left me to die alone, and you call that a slight mistake?” Hugh exploded, white brows lifted, eyes wild.

“I mean,” General Ashley hastily added, “I mean, a man's allowed—”

“He deserted me, Gen'ral, and this child ain't forgettin' it. I'm killin' him on sight.”

General Ashley sat very still in his chair. “After all, Hugh,” he began slowly, “after all, Hugh, you left the party against orders when you went hunting lone. It was really your own neck after that. Everybody knew that. And certainly Fitz did. It was more or less your own fault when you got mauled by the grizzly.”

Hugh burned. The mahogany color of the skin over his cheeks turned black. “Suppose I did disobey orders, Gen'ral? Does that excuse a man for desertin' a companyero? When the night before the same companyero covered up for him when he and Jim slept on watch?”

General Ashley's mild blue eyes opened very wide. “He and Jim slept on guard?”

“Yes they did. And I covered for ‘em. There was no harm done, not much anyway, and so I did it. You know what the major would have done had he caught ‘em.”

General Ashley gave Hugh a long searching look. Slowly he shook his head. “Then maybe you're doubly to fault.”

“How so?”

“You should have turned them in. Another mistake like that and it might have cost you all your lives.” Ashley shuddered at the thought of it.

“But it didn't, Gen'ral. And Fitz and Jim owed me that much at least.”

Ashley sighed. He picked up the bottle of whisky and refilled their tin cups. “Hugh, have another on me.”

“Thanks. I will.”

They both drank up.

A mule brayed lonesomely out on the fort's parade ground.

Ashley licked his lips. He looked at Hugh soberly for a while; finally said, “Hugh, when are you going to shave off those whiskers?”

“When my beard turns black again.”

“Hugh. Hugh. What a stubborn mule you are. With that bush of white grampa bristle should also go the wisdom of a grampa. Hugh, act the forgiving granpappy to the boys. You came out of it alive. So what do you care?”

“And forget how I woke up lookin' at buzzards? Forget what it felt like looking at my own open grave? Forget how I burned and suffered crawlin' back to Fort Kiowa? Forget that Fitz stole my gun and flint and steel and knife from me? Forget how he deserted me and left me to die the hard way? Forget all that?” Hugh leaped to his feet. The little arteries down either side of his nose ran deep red. He towered massive and grizzly over gentle, mild General Ashley. “Gen'ral, what in tarnation are you askin' this child to do? Give up everythin' he is?” Hugh slapped his huge chest. “Gen'ral, this hoss has feelin's here!”

General Ashley's mild blue eyes held up to Hugh. “Hugh, those feelings you say you have, are they nothing but hate?”

“What?”

“Don't you have any feelings of kindness to go along with those feelings of hate? You have no forgiveness in you at all? You've never made a mistake you couldn't help?”

Hugh's eyes opened very wide. Hugh remembered a mistake he couldn't help all right. There was that time when he'd been a one-bite cannibal with companyero Clint. But Hugh pushed the memory down. And instead he said, “Gen'ral the trouble with you is, you didn't crawl from the forks of the Grand to Fort Kiowa like I did.”

“Hugh, it's too bad you never had boys of your own. Then you might have been more tolerant. Like a good father should be. Who'd know his boys were bound to get into some kind of trouble sooner or later.”

Then Hugh also abruptly remembered the two sons he'd deserted back in Lancaster—and, trembling, shut up.

General Ashley stood up slowly. He pulled down the coat of his blue uniform. The gold braid on his shoulders gleamed dully. “Hugh, I saw men die. My men. And what did they die for? For me. For me and my money. Just money, just me. I'll never forget that. Not till my dying day. My conscience is heavy with it. That's why I'm trying to save all the life I can. Fitz's life. Your life. The lives of all my men.”

Hugh swelled with an involuntary deep breath. The tremendous breath made him dizzy and he almost fell over. A pain like a heart attack exploded in his chest again.

Hugh righted himself by gripping the back of his handhewn chair. He checked a terrible impulse to pick up the chair and hit the general with it.

Suddenly he turned and clapped on his wolfskin and picked up his rifle standing at the door and went out.

Again a mule brayed out on the fort's parade ground.

Fort Atkinson was the largest military outpost on the Missouri north of St. Louis. It had been built on a high flat bench on the west side of the river. The north end of the high flat bench squared off into a cliff known as Council Bluff. The whole bench afforded a commanding view of the river.

The location was strategic both commercially and militarily. It was at Council Bluff where the Omaha and the Pawnee and the Dakota tribes already in old times met in council to settle their differences or to declare war, and where Lewis and Clark conferred with various Indian tribes early in the century. It was at the fort that General Leavenworth got the news of Ashley's defeat at the hands of the Rees on the Missouri just above the Grand. It was at the fort that trappers and hunters got their last provisions before striking out into the unknown, either north up the river or west to where the Platte came in from the Rockies.

The flat bench fell off sharply into cliffs on three sides: on the east directly into the sudsing tan waters of the Missouri, and on the south and the west into a draw called Hook's Hollow. The steep cliffs, along with a stockade across the north end, made the fort impregnable to all Indian attack.

A wagon way led up from the dock on the rushing Missouri, climbing up toward the southeast corner of the flat bench, going past a blacksmith shop and lime kiln on the right and a brickyard and the mouth of Hook's Hollow on the left. The wagon way headed directly for the gate between a commission house and a long soldiers' barracks, and once up on level ground, curved past a well, a flagstaff, the brick officers' quarters, crossed the parade ground, and ended in front of the cookhouse on the west side. The cookhouse and more soldiers' barracks formed a fine defensive angle on the northwest corner of the parade ground, and the artillery barracks and a hospital formed another excellent defensive angle on the northeast. Beyond to the north were the stables, and then came the stockade. The fort even boasted a school for the officers' children, and a library for the studious, and a confectionery for the sweettooths.

A mile to the west the land lifted into a considerable ridge, from which reared a flagpole above a lookout. From the lookout tower a sentinel could see many miles in any direction: west out to the endless flat tableland prairies along the banks of the Platte, north out to where the rushing tan Missouri came doubling and redoubling out of bluff-ruffled gray loess terrain, east out to where rolling loess lay cut by raveling streams, and south out to where the Missouri pushed relentlessly through more bluff-rimpled valleys.