Moontrap - Don Berry (39 page)

He was nearly at the end of his promises now. having
seen the sun rise and set on the Columbia River, having ridden
through the Wallowas, having observed the habits of the high plateau
people he had passed in the east, having seen his first tame Indians.

There were three things left, and as he drowsed he
regretfully realized that he would not be able to do them all; there
was not time enough left. He wanted to see the ocean, he wanted to
climb to the top of Saddle Mountain, which he had been told was the
highest peak of this range, and he wanted to see some of the men he
had known, who were now settled down on the coast: Ebberts and Trask
and Solomon Smith, all of them on the strip south of the Columbia
they called Clatsop Plains.

He would not have time for all that now. One of his
promises to himself would have to be broken, and it made him
uncomfortable. When he settled his mind to do something, it ate at
him if he could not do it. But he would have to give up the idea of
seeing the men. The land was more important, in the end.

He was beginning to feel the pressure of time.
Twenty-four hours was not really much, when you thought about it.
When you had to pick your spot, and make whatever preparations the
site seemed to require.

Though he remembered how much the Gros Ventres had
been able to do in Pierre's Hole, in just one night. After Godin shot
the headman they'd holed up in a cottonwood grove, the whole damned
village. He chuckled a little to himself, thinking about it. Some,
now, he thought sleepily. They must have worked like beavers all
night, because by the next morning they'd made a regular little fort
inside that cottonwood grove. And wa'n't Billy Sublette surprised
when he sneaked in there to look!

"
Him an' Sinclair an' that crazy Boston nigger
a-crawlin' on their bellies. Billy parts some bushes an'
wagh!
Ball catches ol' Sinclair right atween his eyes an' Billy hisself
takes one in the leg. Wéll, they come a-slidin' back with big eyes.
Nobody never did figure out how them niggers got such a fort built up
in one night."

Of course, there had been
a whole village of Gros Venutes to work that night in Pierre's Hole,
eighteen years ago. And he was alone. That made the whole difference
right there; he was alone.

***

He woke with the false dawn and was on the trail
again fifteen minutes later. By the time the first direct rays of the
rising sun touched him he was several miles from where he had slept.

He was now coming into country that suited him
better. With the ending of the flat land the ugly traces of man
ended. Here there were no scars on the face of the land where man had
cut and burned and ripped the earth with his filthy metal plows. It
was something he could not understand, this mindless violation of
what existed and was good; the insensate drive to make the world
conform to man's size and comprehension, the violent rape of the
earth by which he spread his ugly and diseased seed. It was a futile
thing, a witless viciousness, and there were times when the thought
of it made the old man sick. He did not understand any of it, and yet
he had seen that, for some, there was a meaning and importance that
escaped him, and that was frightening.

They gained something from all this ugliness and
destruction, something he did not know. They broke their lives
against the stones of the earth, and killed joy and freedom with
their grimness, and seemed to think their lives were good in
proportion as they suffered in destroying what was natural.

He shook his head, and the long black locks swung
beneath his hat. "Pack o' dunghead bastards, ever' one of 'em."
It made no sense, and it infuriated him that the insistent plague of
humankind should spread so quickly through this senseless massacre of
the earth. But here there was only the trail to mark man's passing, a
fragile thread that twisted through the hills that had existed since
the world began. They were all around him now. the timeless hills,
matted thick and black with forest, ahead, behind, on all sides. They
stretched away in endless marching ranks, and in the vastness of the
hills the trail was no more than the silken thread of a fallen spider
web. It served, briefly, and would be gone again with the new
morning; gone in the lifetime of a man. There would be other trails
to other destinations, as the whimsy of the spreading disease
determined. And they too would disappear, swallowed in the brush that
swelled in one season to fill up the scratches man had made. They
would all be gone. And man would be gone. And the hills would remain.

It was just after the middle of the day when he began
to think he had crossed the crest. It was a difficult thing to tell.
Hills towered ahead and behind, cutting off his view, but he thought
the trail was going down more often than up, now. It was a strange
thing, this mountain he was searching for, strange that the highest
peak should be so far from the spine of the range itself. He
shrugged, indifferently. Each range was unique, and this one no less
than the others he had known. He came out on a clear slope,
inexplicably free of heavy timber, solid-packed with brush chest
high. He looked across the little valley at the hills on the opposite
side. While the sides of the ravine were steep, there was something
soft about the peaks. They were rounded and somehow gentle. Like the
flesh of the earth, as the mountains of his home were like the bones
themselves.

Squaw tits, he thought absently, looking at the
rounded hills across the valley.
Les Tétons
,
old Pierre would've called 'em. But old Pierre called everything
tétons that had any faint likeness to a woman's breasts. And since
all mountains are somewhat like, Pierre was a happy man; the world
was full of tétons for his appreciation.

The thought made the old man obscurely unhappy,
reminding him of the only téton he gave a damn for, the range
between Pierre's Hole and Jackson's Hole; standing tall and awesome.
He had tried to climb the tallest of them, too, to stand on top and
look around; but he could not do it. He had tried three times and had
never found the right way to do it. It was one of the great defeats
of his life, and he had never forgotten it. But he was secretly a
little proud of the mountain for having resisted him.

"
Wagh!
That's a
mountain
, now,"
he said to the horse.

He glared across at the wooded slope of the opposite
hill defiantly, suddenly ashamed of the softness of its contours, the
gentleness of the peak.

"
Squaw mountains." He leaned over to the
side and spat deliberately on the trail. Roughly he jerked the reins
and started off again. As he passed beneath the trees, his vision of
the other hill was cut off.

"Goddamn bad country to go under in," he
muttered. "Soft,
wagh!
Men
soft, mountain soft." In some strange way he was humiliated for
the softness of the land, as though it were himself. Old Pierre was
dead now, damn his eyes. Never could trust a Iroquois, anyway.

Will gone under now," he said, chuckling to
himself. "Ever'one o' the dungheads." Damn good riddance.
He suddenly reined up, the abruptness of the gesture making the scalp
locks swing across his chest.

"Hya!" He wheeled the bony horse around and
drummed his heels into its ribs viciously, startling it into a
gallop. Reaching the open spot  on the trail again, he reined
back and slid off the saddle while the mouth-sore animal was still
rearing.

"Damn soft squaw mountains," he muttered,
throwing the reins on the ground. He walked to the very edge of the
trail and stood facing the hills with his hands on his hips.

"TEVANITAGON!" he shouted across. He waited
for a moment, but only the faintest of echoes came rippling back,
"Tevanitagon . . ."

"KAYENQUARETCHA! "

It was unsatisfactory; the echo was so small he could
hardly hear the names. He wanted the mountain to shout back at him,
but it was too soft.

"MIAQUIN!
"KARAHOUTON!
"
SAWENREGOl"

One by one he screamed the names of every Iroquois
trapper he could remember. When he had finished, he stood silent for
a moment, watching the waves of light roll over the peaks, molding
them in shadow and sun. All around him was a smothering silence, all
other living creatures frightened by his rasping, harsh voice.

"
They was men, by God," he said softly.

His horse had stood quietly through the whole of it,
accustomed through the long years to the inexplicable insanities of
the man. He picked up the reins and mounted again.

"We best move on right smart," he told the
horse. He wanted to have time to look for a decent campsite tonight;
he had not liked the blank anonymity of last night's camp. lt gave
nothing to remember. It was good to hear their names again, though,
he thought. He was glad he'd done it. Maybe he'd give this squaw
country somethin' to think on, hear the names of men like that. Damn
their dirty brownskin souls.

"All gone under now," he said to himself.

Worthless dungheads all, but he missed them. And
there'd be nobody to shout his name for him, nobody left at all. He
threw back his head and screamed into the sun.

"
WEBB! ME, WEBB!"

Then he let his head drop forward in silence. He rode
on, hunched over the saddle horn, letting the horse go on its own
toward the mountain where he would make his stand. He didn't care
about it any more, one way or the other.
 

Chapter Seventeen

1

The breakers rumbled in Monday's ear, and he thought
he could feel the vibration of them through the sand of the beach
itself. He shifted his position in the blanket cocoon, digging a
little hole for his hip in the sand. He glanced at the watch fire,
with its two lonely guards, and snorted. Right in the middle of
Clatsop Plains and they mount a guard, he thought. When daylight came
they'd be able to see two, three cabins around the little bay; and in
any case the Clatsops hadn't made any trouble for anybody for twenty
years or better, and then not much. They were good and tame.

He shrugged to himself and shifted again. He couldn't
seem to get comfortable, couldn't get to sleep. Around the fire,
dimly lit by the flames, were the blanket rolls of the other members
of the posse. They looked like the droppings of some monstrous dog
that had come out of the sea to foul the land.

God damn, he thought, that's somethin' Webb'd say. He
was even beginning to think like the old coon.

They were scared, all of them. Always scared. They
huddled around the fire, staying close together for comfort and
security, sleeping peacefully under the eye of the guards. He
wondered vaguely what the hell they'd do if something actually
happened. He was obscurely tempted to give a wild whoop or fire off
his gun or something, just to watch 'em run. Scared of the dark,
scared of the mystery in it.

And the trip down on the steamboat had been a farce,
more like a children's picnic outing to the beach than anything else;
a children's game he soon grew bored with watching. They weren't
really interested in chasing down Webb. For many of them he supposed
it was just a sort of holiday. Somebody told them they had to do it,
so they did it.

But they didn't care about Webb, they weren't
interested. They weren't interested in anything except standing
around the mill and predicting doom and disaster for the coming year.

It had been so easy to take the lead away from
Thurston in the morning. As long as you were one jump ahead, the
crowd was with you; always on the side of the man who could humiliate
somebody else. It was the one skill truly worthy of admiration,
because it was the one they all envied.

But there was no permanence to any of it, no real
malice. They shifted back and forth like seaweed swinging in the
tide, they drifted with the prevailing wind, soft, pliable. Because.
at root, they did not care. They simply needed somebody to follow.
like any other herd. As long as they did not have to be responsible
for their own actions they were content.

All that he could understand. What he did not really
understand was how there could be strength. How combining ten soft
men could make something hard. And yet he knew it was true. At some
point the herd, only contemptible, became the avalanche, which was
irresistible in its power. It was this transformation he could not
comprehend, could not visualize. The power of combination that made
it possible for the avalanche to swallow up a man like Webb, worth a
dozen of them.

And if it had been easy for him to take the lead from
Thurston, it was no less easy for Thurston to take it back, on the
way down. It was he who had given the long river passage its air of
holiday, digging up whisky some place, passing it around to the
eagerly outstretched cups, smiling, winking, conspiratorial. Monday
wondered vaguely how it came about in Thurston's mind that whisky
ceased to be Sinful when it became Useful.

He had watched with disgust, depressed and unwilling
to make the effort to do anything. He wasn't interested in a battle
of authority with Thurston, and in the end it was probably his own
indifference that would settle it. He had even taken his own pitiful
dollop of whisky, thanking the little man automatically, cursing
himself when he saw the faint grin of triumph on Thurston's face. In
the long run it didn 't matter. He had stopped Thurston from rolling
over him in the morning, and that was all he wanted. He was here.
There could be no backhanded rumors about the murderousness of
mountain men. He was here, playing the citizen, and the fact was
enough.