Lord Grizzly, Second Edition (6 page)

By that time Hugh himself was in danger of missing the
Rocky Mountains
. He'd waited just long enough for the coffee waters to push him toward the stern of the boat. Hugh let out a mighty bellow. “Throw out a rope, lads. Here I come!”

Augie Neill, leaning over the railing with a dozen other feartight faces, and still gasping from his swim and dripping wet, saw him. “Hugh!”

Hugh volved past, grizzly face and nose and stroking arms awash in the chasing tan surface.

Quickly Augie caught hold of a punting pole and, leaning, reached out as far as he could.

Hugh lunged for the end of the pole; missed it; went under. And going under, felt his rifle slide down his back and into the legging of his one good leg, making both his legs useless.

Hugh gave it one more try. He dug his way to the surface. He clubbed the water with powerful arms. Arrows and balls pelted the water all around him; hit the gray sides of the keelboat above him.

Augie ran down the polers' walk and, once again, from the extreme stern of the punting pole as far as he could.

This time Hugh made it. He managed to get a good grip on the end of it and hung on with a bulldog's grimness. Slowly Augie pulled him over to the rungs and then helped him climb up, helped him up over the top into the hold.

“Thankee, lad,” Hugh grunted, as he slid down under the polers' walk and out of reach of arrow and shot, “thankee, lad. I was almost fishmeat that time, I was. Ye saved me me life. And at a risk too.”

“‘Twas nothin', Hugh.”

“Ae, but this old hoss wouldn't have made it to the other boat. Too old. I won't forget, lad.”

“Ye all right, Hugh?”

“Tolerable. Just ham-shot a little. By a small ball.” Hugh ganted for breath. “The worst was that swim. For an old man it was some, it was.”

“Ye'd best rest now, Hugh.”

Hugh nodded. His tangled gray hair and matted gray beard dripped water. Drops ran down his neck. His floppy buckskins were sopping wet and as viscous as chewed-over fatback. “I'll rest me a little after we've dug out the ball, lad.” Hugh breathed. “Lad, sharpen up me butcher knife on the hone, will you, and we'll get at it presently.” Gritting his teeth against pain and a faint coming on, Hugh slid down until his head rested on a smelly bundle of beaver plew.

“I'd best get the doc, Hugh,” Augie said. “I wouldn't trust myself with a butcher knife.”

“Who said ye was to do it? It's me that will, lad. As soon as I've had me that rest.”

“I'd best get the doc, old hoss,” Augie said.

“Aw, let the doc help them that needs it. I ain't hit bad.”

Hugh looked around after a while. To either side of him, propped up against barrels of gunpowder and stores of food and supplies, sat others who'd been wounded. They were bleeding; they were soaked through and through with dirty Missouri water; and they looked out at the world with bleary fatigue-gray eyes. There was mountain man David McClane, and Willis the Nigger, and pork-eater August Dufrain, and ned-hearted Joseph Monso. They lay staring vacantly at the golden morning sky arching high above them.

Hugh asked suddenly, “Where's Johnnie?”

“Johnnie who?”

“Johnnie Gardner.”

“He's dead,” Augie said. “Prayin' Diah Smith prayed powerful over him, but the Lord took him just the same.”

“I feel mighty queersome,” Hugh murmured. “Is my topknot gone, lad?” And then Hugh slipped away into a faint.

The anchor had been cut and the keelboat
Rocky Mountains
was drifting downstream past the point of the island, with the
Yellowstone Packet
just ahead. General Ashley had ordered a regrouping of forces below the mouth of the Grand River.

Old Hugh sat amidships, ball removed and bandaged leg propped up on a pack of prime beaver. A hot sun shone on him. In places his buckskins already felt dry enough to be shingles, had shrunk enough to pinch him over the back and along the thigh of his good leg.

Slow talk rose and fell around him. One of the nearby wounded groaned and moved a trifle and groaned some more.

Presently Hugh heard General Ashley talking to Rose the halfbreed interpreter.

The two of them were standing near the mast, with General Ashley a good head shorter than ugly horse-faced Rose. Pain and shock crimped the general's blue eyes. The general waved quick hands as his thin trembling lips mouthed the words. “I don't understand it. I don't understand it. Grey Eyes specifically promised me yesterday that there'd be peace between us, that he'd forget they'd lost a couple of their men at Fort Kiowa. That extra gunpowder I gave him was supposed to make up for that loss. Even though it was the rival fur company that did the shooting.”

“It did,” Rose grunted, looking at the wounded men. Rose's dark skin glowed bluish red in the sun.

“What?” General Ashley snapped. “Oh. Yes.” General Ashley's eyes flicked toward the wounded too. “Yes.” General Ashley looked at the golden sky overhead. “And anyway, what were they doing attacking Fort Kiowa, the fools? What did they expect, the other cheek?”

Rose's heavy guttural voice came in surges. “Never believe an Indian chief right after he's just lost some of his men. It's a disgrace for a chief to lose men, and he's going to be an ornery cuss until he's had himself some revenge.” Rose coughed up some Missouri water; spat over the side. “And he's going to be specially ornery when he loses ‘em over a slave squaw.”

“A what?” General Ashley's voice rose a little.

“A Sioux squaw. She was a slave of one of his men and she got away.”

“Oho! So that was why they dared tackle Fort Kiowa then.”

“That was why,” Rose grunted, thick lips drawn up in his usual habitual sneer.

“Good Lord.”

“Grey Eyes said they didn't mean to shoot at the white men at Fort Kiowa. They only wanted the slave squaw back.” Rose's eyes were evasive. He couldn't quite look the general in the eye.

“All that fuss over a squaw. A slave squaw at that.” General Ashley stamped around in blue indignity, gold epaulets glistening in the morning sun. General Ashley looked with grief at the wounded men underfoot. “And we had to get the hell shot out of us because of another Sabine woman raped and ravaged. Damn.”

“Grey Eyes said she was a good squaw. Grey Eyes said his brave was very sad he'd lost her, that he had to have her back in his roundhouse to cook and sew for him. He said the white man was wrong to hold her. Bending Reed belonged to him.”

Old Hugh jerked up. What? Bending Reed.

Old Hugh called out. “Gen'ral, did Rose there say her name was Bending Reed?”

General Ashley gave Rose a look. “Was it?”

“Bending Reed,” Rose said, sullen redblack cherry eyes holding Hugh's for a moment and then sliding off.

Hugh's gray eyes lighted up with joy. “You say she's at Fort Kiowa now?”

“That's what Grey Eyes said.”

“Whaugh! So!” Hugh's old eyes rolled. “But how in tarnation did she get in with them Rees? When I last saw her she was down on the Platte with the Pawnees. Well I never. That's some, that is.” Hugh shook his head in amazement. “Well, well. This child is going to be mighty glad to see her again.”

“You know her?” General Ashley asked, inclining his head in friendly manner.

“Know her? By the bull barley, man, yessiree! I womaned up with her for three years when I was a half-slave myself on the Platte. She's my wife. And there never was a better, white included. She cooked and made clothes for me with never a complaint or a sigh. Whaugh! Well I know how that Ree brave felt losin' her. She was some, she was. Graybacks or no.”

2

I
T WAS
the Moon of Cherries Blackening, July. The minute Hugh stepped into her tepee within the gates of Ft. Kiowa, he knew it wasn't the same Bending Reed. She was a changed squaw somehow.

For one thing, when she first spotted him, she didn't quick put a hand over her mouth and look at him for a while in dead silence, something the Indians usually did to show they'd been surprised. For another, after a quick flash of blackcherry slant eyes at his bleeding game leg, she refrained from looking at it again, which was most unusual, since always in the past she'd been very attentive to his aches and pains. In the old days let him but scratch a callus and she was not only johnny-on-the-spot with her bag of herb medicines but also with whatever hocuspocus chanting medicine men that were handy. Nor had she spread out the welcome mat, her best buffalo robe, for him to sit on when he came in.

Carrying his rifle, Hugh crab-walked past the small fire of pyramided sticks burning in the center of the tepee and selected a woven-willow lazy-back and threw a musty brown buffalo robe over it and leaned back easy. It was a cool day and the robe felt good.

He tried to sit crosslegged but couldn't. The bullet-torn thigh still hurt too much.

He got out his pipe, and with careful tamping forefinger filled up and then lit up with a burning fagot from the twig fire.

“Ahhh,” he breathed, puffing deeply on his old comrade pipe, stroking his grizzly beard, “ahh, doggone my skin if this ain't livin' again.” He patted Old Bullthrower, his flintlock, at his side and looked across at Bending Reed. “Good ‘bacca and a man's two best friends right handy.”

He savored the smoke puff by puff, all the while taking in the effects of the tepee with roving musing eyes. Clerk Bonner in the fort had told him how she'd begged him for the tepee. It was an old leather one that her band had once given in trade for gunpowder and it was almost in shreds. But she had taken it and patched it up with a couple of freshly worked buffalo-bull hides and had cut some straight willows for its upright poles. From the dump near the river she'd dug up a couple of old pots and pans. Next she'd made a broom with some bulrushes bound around a stout ash stick. Then she'd gone out and gathered up some herbs and trapped some beaver in Medicine Creek behind Red Butte. Somehow, perhaps by stealing, she'd managed to get her hands on a bladder of pemmican and a bag of dried fruit and a leather sack of dried berries. And last, she piled up some surplus wealth by selling dressed moccasins to the men in the fort.

The tepee was spic-span clean. Not a mouseball in sight—when mice were one of the plagues of the plains. Everything was in its place and everything had its function. A medicine bundle hung over the doorflap, from which came protection against evil spirits. The door itself faced east, from whence came the power of the sun. The base of the tepee made a perfect circle, from which came life magic.

The food and the supplies had their appointed place too. Two jerks of buffalo-cow meat hung from an upright in the rising gray smoke of the fire. Buffalo-bull hide for making moccasin soles also hung toughening in the smoke. The rawhide case of dried fruit and the skin sack of dried berries stood neatly beside a huge shiny iron firepot. A set of old beaver traps well-smeared with beargrease hung from another upright nearby. Four packs of beaver plew stood square against the leather wall of the tepee deep in the back. Farther still in the back, the place of honor in the tepee, spread a bed of aromatic dried sweetgrass covered with a buffalo robe.

All the while that he carefully surveyed the tepee, Old Hugh felt Bending Reed busy trying to ignore him. Her slant eyes glittered in the half-dusk of the tepee. Her redstone face she held impassive.

He wondered what had happened to make her so indifferent to him. Maybe she had changed her mind about the Ree brave and was sorry she'd left him. Or maybe Clerk Bonner had claim to her charms in exchange for the old tepee. Hugh remembered that Clerk Bonner had given him a pair of fish eyes while they talked about her. Or maybe she'd turned against her Old Hugh—White Grizzly, as she'd once called him—just on general female principles, like some women did after a lengthy separation. Some women made a man fight his way back all over again. Or maybe she was mad he'd left her in the soup when he escaped the Pawnees. Well, now, for that she had no right to blame him. Not at all.

“Let's see, how many years is it since I seen ee, Reed?” Hugh ciphered it off on his fingers. Last year he'd joined General Ashley. The year before he'd keelboated the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans. The year before that he'd hunted for a party out on the Arkansas River. And the year before that he'd escaped the Pawnees. “Four years. Four years.”

Bending Reed moved to the front of the tepee. Afternoon sunlight coming in through the open flap silhouetted her legs and lower body, while light coming from the fire and from the leather smoke-smudged chimney overhead illuminated her bosom and face. Hugh, looking her over with critical eyes, thought her as handsome as ever. She was a little fatter under the chucklychin perhaps. And the pout of her lips had deepened some. And her Siberian-slanted blackcherry eyes seemed set a bit deeper in the redstone flesh over her high cheeks maybe. And her hair sleeked-down with beargrease and hanging in two long braids was not quite so glossy blueblack as in the old days. And her bosom under the white doeskin dress wasn't quite so bunny-round as before. And her hands had broadened some, and maybe had picked up an extra callus or two. But otherwise she was as good as ever.

And like always, she had on good leathers. The best. Her dress was a tunic of deerskin which came well down below her knees, almost to her ankles. It had been worked soft with mashed deer brains and had been made white with a special kind of prairie clay. She'd ornamented it with gay figures done in blue and red and white porcupine quills. Long fringes dangled from the seams and hem. Fancy quill work also decked her ankle-high elkskin moccasins. White conch-shell pendants tinkled from her ears. A necklace of soft stones circled her neck.

Hugh nodded. Yessiree, the best, the best.

Bending Reed picked up her round broom of rushes and began sweeping up the dust and grass his dragging leg had shagged in. When she finished, the dirt floor was so clean it looked like flagging made of pale brown stone.

“Reed-that-bends,” Hugh said suddenly in a rough voice meant to be pleasantly gruff, “Reed-that-bends, sit at my feet. Your man, White Grizzly, wishes to have good words with you. Sit.”

Instead, Bending Reed darted for the door. The seashells at the ends of her heavy black braids clinked and bangled.

Hugh blinked. “Ho-ah! What's got into you, Reed? Why so contrary all of a sudden?”

Bending Reed stared dully at his feet, blackcherry eyes blinking uneasily.

Hugh said, “I suppose if I told ye to run away ye'd sit down instead. Like most contrary squaws. Red or white.”

And amazingly she did sit down. Folding her legs to the right under her dress. At his feet. Head bowed demurely. Bowed so far over he could see in the smoky light how well and how thoroughly she'd rubbed vermilion all along the parting of her black horsetaillike hair.

“By the beard of bull barley, ye are the contrary one today, ain't ye?”

She shook her head. Her heavy braids rustled on her shoulders.

“Oh, then you're of a mind to be agreeable maybe?”

Again she shook her head.

“Reed, cut out the peedoodles. I'm back. It's too bad I was gone so long, yes. But that I couldn't help. I'm back. That's it. Talk up like ye used to.”

She said nothing.

Hugh clapped out his pipe in a gnarled palm, dropped the crisp ball of burnt tobacco into the fire. The ball of tobacco wasn't altogether burnt up, and when it landed in the hottest part of the tuffing fire, it shot out one last quick spit of blue flame.

“Well then, shut up, if it pleases ee,” Hugh said.

Bending Reed immediately broke into a hurrying rattling chattering talk. It went on and on. Her pout lips and thick tongue couldn't fashion the words fast enough. She spoke in Sioux.

Hugh sat back astounded, huge brows lifted, gray eyes for once wide open and showing rings of fine-veined white.

The swift words didn't make sense to him at first. It had been some time since he'd heard her particular dialect of Sioux. And it had also been some time since he'd heard her peculiar kind of sentence-making. Had the young squaw bitten the bitter loco weed? Had herself one bite of the herb too many?

But then, listening intently, he got it. She was telling him everything that had happened to her since she'd last seen him.

Shortly after he had made good his escape from the Pawnees on the Platte River, a band of Arikaree braves came down from the north to visit their tribal cousins the Pawnees. The Rees needed horses, they said, and gunpowder, and they were willing to trade some of their new wonder seedcorn to get both. The Rees, already famous on the plains for having developed a new kind of green watermelon and a white squash and a yellow pumpkin, the Rees had worked up a great medicine for the growing of this corn. The medicine made the corn ripen early with the ears fully as fat and fully as mature as later corn.

While the friendly bartering was going on, one of the Ree braves spotted Bending Reed at work dressing some moccasins, a work for which she'd become well known among the Pawnees. The Ree brave took a shine to her; wanted her after he tried on one of her moccasins. The Pawnees were willing to sell her in exchange for some of the new corn with the great medicine in it. They were short of horses and were loath to get rid of the few they had. Also Bending Reed had caused them much trouble because lately she'd developed a balky streak. Her heart was sad that her brave, White Grizzly, had deserted her.

Bending Reed took one quick robin-shy look at the Ree brave, and instantly disliked him. The Ree brave had the soft hands of a dressmaker. And he gestured like a girlman. A soft-handed brave for her after having lived with her great bull of a White Grizzly? She wanted children. If White Grizzly couldn't father them on her, how could this girlman Ree? So she said, “I'll marry you when the pine leaves turn yellow.”

But the Ree brave especially wanted her, and she had to go. And shortly, along with a few mustangs, she went north with her new husband Can't Father.

Hugh broke into Bending Reed's telling. “What? Can't who?”

Bending Reed shut up on the instant.

“Who did you say, Reed?”

She looked down, tongue contrary again. Her darting blackcherry eyes flickered. She worked to bite back the words.

Old Hugh snorted. Then he laughed. “I forgot, Reed. Now shut up, will ee?”

Immediately she rattled on. Yes, her husband was a brave named Can't Father.

Once more Old Hugh couldn't help but break in. “You mean, Can't Fornicate, don't you?”

This time Bending Reed momentarily forgot her contrary set. “No, Can't Father. It is not the same.”

“How's that, Reed?”

She remembered, then, and fell silent.

Old Hugh let out a merry bellow. “Reed, if that's the way your stick floats, all right, shut up.”

Once again she chattered away. Except she didn't go on to explain just what the difference was between a brave who couldn't fornicate and a brave who couldn't father.

She said Can't Father was kind to her. He treated her well. Gave her the best of everything: mirrors, awls, ribbons, red silk from the Great White Father in Britain, porcupine quills, necklaces, woolen blankets from the English mills, all such fine things. Nor could she complain that he wasn't a brave man in battle. He counted many a coup, brought home many an enemy scalp.

“Not a coward then.”

She shut up.

Hugh laughed. “Shut up, Reed.”

“He was a brave man full of wise council. His tongue was short, his arm was long. But he was not a father.”

Then Bending Reed told Hugh something that made his jaw drop.

One day Can't Father came home from a hunt and fell upon her and almost beat her to death. When she'd recovered enough to crawl around again, Can't Father made her cut off some of her beautiful blueblack hair, shorten it until his own hair was at least two hands longer. A couple days later Bending Reed found out what it was all about. On the hunting party Can't Father and his friends had run into a small party of hostile Sioux braves. The Sioux braves were from her band and they, knowing her to have long braids, and seeing his were short, taunted him with not having as much medicine in his hair as Bending Reed had in hers. And if there was one thing Can't Father was touchy about, aside from his fatherlessness, it was his pride and glory, his glossy black braids of hair. When he wasn't hunting he was always busy preening his raven horsetail hair with a rough-cut ivory comb he'd gotten in trade with the English in Canada.

Of course a squaw prided herself on her hair too. And Bending Reed promptly fell into a pet. For dim in her memory and out of her tribal pantheon came a god called Heyoka and he took possession of her. The god Heyoka was a little old man with a short body and very long legs who went naked in the winter suffering intensely from the heat and who went about warmly clad in the summer suffering intensely from the cold. Suddenly after Heyoka the contrary god had taken possession of her, Bending Reed felt full of power and purpose. She could do anything. Defy Can't Father even if he beat her. Defy even the chief of the Arikaree tribes, Grey Eyes. Defy all of the Rees in fact. She had great medicine. The Rees were astounded by her conversion to a life of going about butt-first. But because they respected superstitions they respected her curious new religion. All day long the old squaws thought of things for her to do just to see her do the opposite. Many times too they had her do something they wanted her to do by telling her its contrary.

Strangely enough, shortly after the god Heyoka had taken possession of her, Can't Father changed subtly, both in person and manner. He could once more satisfactorily perform the role of the male. He was no longer Can't Father but Man-Who-Wants-Many-Sons.