Moontrap - Don Berry (6 page)

The woman impaled the steak on two sharp sticks
leaning toward the fire, and in a moment there was a sizzling as the
first drops of fat melted and fell.

"Mary, come here," Monday said.

The woman came to the table and sat beside him. He
put his arm around her shoulder and she leaned her head against him,
watching the fire. They sat with the warmth of each other and the
fire, without speaking. After a while Mary gently moved his arm, and
returned to the fire to turn the steak.

"
Who was it?" she asked, not turning.

"Tamahas and the rest of them. Everybody at the
mission was mixed up in it. About two hundred Cayuse and a few Nez
Percé."

"
Who did you bring back?"

"
Tamahas and four other headmen. Old man Kiami
says he didn't do anything, but he isn't afraid to die."

"
Five men," Mary said.

"Better'n nothin', ain't it?" He shrugged.
"Anyways, the massacre at Waiilatpu was better'n two years ago.
This puts an end to it."

"Nothing new, then? About why they did it?"

Monday shook his head. After a moment he said,
"How—how have things been here, Mary? You get along all
right?"

"
Yes. It was all right."

"
You didn't get too lonesome? Or anything?"

Mary turned from the fire and smiled slightly. "Peter
Swensen, that one came every day." She gestured toward the wall.
"He plow your field, you will see it in the morning."

"I'll be damned," Monday said. "What'd
he do that for?"

"He said his horses were forgetting how to do
it. Keep it in their minds."

Monday laughed. "He's got land of his own he
could plow, up on that mountain of his." Swensen had staked out
his 64o-acre land claim on the rough hill north of Monday's farm, and
it was generally known as Peter's Mountain. But he refused to live
there until he could build the right kind of place. What with the end
of the world coming and all, it hardly seemed worth the trouble, so
he simply squatted on the ownerless land on the river, and waited.

"
He says is all a waste of time," Mary
explained. "But he don't want his horses to forget. So he plow
your land, because it is closer."

"I just saw him and he didn't say he came by so
often," Monday said absently.

"I know all about the end of the world now,"
Mary said. "You ask me anything, I tell you." She was
silent for a moment. Then she said,

"
Is it true, what he says about the end of the
world?"

"
No," Monday said. "I don't think so,
anyway."

Mary nodded. She went to the cupboard and got down a
wooden platter, deftly forked the steak on to it. She put the fork by
the platter and sat down beside her husband. Monday reached the
butcher knife out of its sheath, wiped it off on his shirt front.

"
Much business down here now," Mary said.
"Joe Meek coming down maybe two, three times a week. See if
anybody making whisky or hiding niggers, he say."

"Fat lot Meek cares, even if he is marshal,"
Monday said. Suddenly he stopped, a forkful of meat halfway to his
mouth. He put the fork on the platter and turned to Mary. "Who
else was here? Just passing by, I mean."

"
Virginia came down to talk, you know Virginia."

"Sure, I know Virginia," Monday said.
Meek's Nez Percé wife, who never left home any more than Mary did,
and for the same reason.

"Who else?"

Mary looked at him, smiling. "Maybe I don't need
to tell you more."

"No, maybe not, " Monday said. He could
probably count them off himself: Meek and Doc Newell and Ebberts and
their wives. Smith and Trask, maybe, all the way from the coast.
Russel from down in the valley. Just passing by on sudden, unexpected
errands that took them on the long and inconvenient detour past
Monday's place. Stopping at Swensen's for a little chat, cursing one
another and telling lies. Men that hadn't seen each other, some of
them, since they left the mountains, suddenly meeting by accident
where the river turned and a woman waited alone for her husband.
Monday picked up his fork, turned it between his fingers, looking
down at the piece of steak.

"
Tell you something, Mary," he said. "You
meet a—funny kind of people in the mountains."

Mary smiled very faintly. "The Shoshone are
mountain people," she said softly. She put her head against her
husband's shoulder, feeling the cords of muscle roll as he drew the
knife through the steak again and lifted it to his mouth.

2

Early morning, the forests and hills of the valley
emerging slowly from the bottomless dark to stand against the graying
eastern sky, flat, without depth. The old man woke clear-eyed and
instantly, moving cleanly from sleep to waking, without transition.

The body of the doe was cold now, making skinning
difficult. The fleshy surface of the hide was cold—congealed,
clinging stubbornly to  the muscles below. The old man worked
patiently, holding the hide taut away from the body and drawing the
edge of the knife gently along the joining line to separate the
membrane. He took only enough of the hide to make a carrying bag for
the meat. He butchered out the rear quarters, regretfully taking only
the best cuts and piling them on the square of skin that lay beside
the stiffening body of the animal.

Two corners of the hide square ended in the long
projections that had been hind legs, and these he tied across the top
of the meat pile. Holding the other corners together over the top, he
slipped a cherrywood awl from the pouch at his belt and perforated
the skin. Deftly he incised out the tendon at the rear of the leg,
passed it through the perforation, and tied the bundle up securely.

He staggered at first, hoisting it to his shoulder,
but quickly caught his balance and shrugged the bulk of the pack into
a comfortable position. As he left the glade he glanced back at the
dismembered doe, regretful and disturbed that he was able to take so
little of her. He knew he was betraying her and his promises to her.
But there was no help for it.

"
Wagh!
"
he grunted. "Bad doin's when it comes to that."

He put the bag down on the ground and went back to
the carcass of the animal. "Nothin' for it, " he muttered.
He grabbed the forelegs and dragged the doe over under the tree near
which he had shot her. The next half-hour he spent laboriously
hoisting the carcass up into the branches, where it dangled suspended
by the tied front legs. He was panting when he was finished, but he
felt a little better about it. She wouldn't get flyblown anyway. He
tried to put the guilt away from his mind as he hoisted the bag again
and began to climb back along the twisted skein of trails to the
man-trail above him on the slope.

The light of morning was full when he reached the
trail and turned back the way he had come the evening before, back to
his new camp. He quickened his pace with the easier going, moving
along the needle-pack with the quick glide of moccasins that was more
like floating than walking. The weight of the meat was heavy for him,
and once he had to stop to rest, conscious of the stiffness in his
joints. For a few moments he squatted motionless in the middle of the
trail, his bony wrists thrust out of the too short buckskin sleeves
and dangling limp across his knees. He stared straight ahead,
breathing evenly, resting. Then he shouldered his meat again and
moved on, taking up his story where it had been ended the night
before by the need for silence.

"
Th' Gros Ventre headman rides out, wavin' some
kind of flag, might could've been Union jack or other. Didn't shine
with Godin though,
wagh!
'n' him half-froze for a little Blackfoot hair on account his pa.
That nigger rides out to meet'm with a Flathead riding flank 'n'
Betsy
on full—cock . . ."

The trail followed the contours of the hill,
gradually dropping lower on the slope. He was heading south now, down
off the mountain toward the river. Before the trail joined that road
that led toward Monday's place, the old man left it, cutting off to
the right toward the valley of a tiny stream. He entered a thick
stand of spruce, the light within it gloomy and cold. It was a trifle
less brushy, and a little easier going.

The spruce extended nearly to the bottom of the tiny
ravine, and as the old man listened he could hear the faint trickling
sounds of the stream. Near the edge of the spruce island, where the
forest suddenly turned back to firs, he stopped. Grunting, he heaved
the bag of meat off his shoulder and rested it on the ground. For a
long moment he stood silent, mouth open, listening. He was within
twenty yards of his camp, though he could not see it through the
trees. He picked out a faint rustle that he took to be the sounds of
his horse browsing, dragging its rawhide rope in a broad circle
around the picket. His mind separated and evaluated the sounds of
tiny animals in the brush, the swaying and creaking of limbs
together, the trickling conversation of the stream.

The pattern was full and rich and safe; the sounds of
the world went on as they should, except in a small circle of which
he was the center. He waited, still, until the birds near him began
to chirp again without the raucous excitement of their alarm call;
until the brush near him rustled again with the sound of small
creatures returning to life after their moment of paralyzed fear of
the giant intruder in the world.

He was satisfied. But still he lashed the meat bag to
the highest branch he could reach and set out again, making a wide
circle around his camp. He moved with difficulty through the tangled
brush, unable to follow even the animal trails. He watched carefully
as he circled, his eyes flirting over the undergrowth, caressing the
tree trunks. He lay on his belly near the edge of the stream itself,
peering upstream and down before he crossed quickly and disappeared
into the brush on the other side. Nowhere along his course was there
any sign that a creature of man size—or man clumsiness—had
crossed that circle.

The entire circuit took more than half an hour, but
when he reached the hanging bag of meat again he was content. He had
known to start with that he was perfectly safe, here in the middle of
civilization. But he also knew the names of men found dead in places
where they were perfectly safe. He did not regard the half-hour
scrutiny as wasted; it was how he had learned to live.

His camp was a small grassy patch, a tiny glade on
the outside of a bend of the stream, where he could see up and down
with comparative ease but would himself be hidden by the clump of
brush at either end of the clearing. The stream itself was tiny, not
more than six feet across and ankle deep.

He approached camp from upwind, giving the bony old
horse his smell so she would not whicker in alarm. She stiffened as
she heard his approach through the brush, snuffed at the air and
dropped her head back to the grazing, taking no notice of the old man
when he finally appeared in the tiny clearing with the skin bag over
his shoulder. It had now been over four hours since he had wakened,
and he was hungry. Regretfully he set the skin of meat to one side
until he could tend to the matter of food.

He stripped off the greasy buckskins and stood naked
by the edge of the water. The old man's body was thin and hard, and
very white. Sun marks began abruptly at the middle of his forearms,
extending down his hands as though he had plunged his arms into a vat
of dye only so far. His face and neck, too, were dark, and a deep V
of brown pointed down his bony chest; the rest was white.

He walked into the middle of the stream and sat down
in the swirling shallow water. Even when he sat, it barely covered
his hips, piling up at his back in a tiny cold wave that bumped and
rolled around his spine. He scrubbed hard in the icy water, purifying
himself and wondering how he was going to go about it. The problem
was one he had come across only lately—too often, lately—and he
was not settled in his mind how to deal with it; no ritual he knew
was adequate. In normal life it didn't happen. He had to devise
something of his own, and was uneasy about it because he was not
gifted in that way.

The deer spirit was angry at him, he knew. He had
sung the song before starting to hunt, and then again in his mind
when he first saw her. The doe had listened, had understood his need
and accepted his promise that the flesh would die, only to live
again. Understanding and accepting, she had permitted herself to be
killed; the bargain was immortality. But now the old man, through his
loneness, was unable to bring her back to life again, and the guilt
of it was strong. He could, perhaps, plead his weakness; he was old,
and could carry only part of the meat. The organs he had taken, but
much of the muscle and all of the intestines had been left behind.
They were wasted; they would never live again in the body of a man.
No arrow points would be made from her bones, no pestles, no medicine
sticks, no needles. Her tendons would never be used to make clothing,
to bind up new moccasins, to seam the edges of a lodge. Her brains
would never be used to tan skins. Her hide would never make shirts to
keep a man warm when the snows came.