Rendezvous (23 page)

“It'll be easy to find your way because you'll be following Ashley. You can't miss the passage of so many horses and men. It's also the fastest route east. But I'd suggest you go with Bill Sublette's brigade up to the Snake. He'll be cutting north at Henry's Fork, heading for the Three Forks of the Missouri, but he'll show you where to leave the Snake—at a place called the Hoback. You'll end up on the Seedskedee, and from there you'll go over South Pass—the Continental Divide, but you'll hardly know it. The Wind Rivers are just to the north, a majestic range, and you'll be passing around their feet. This'd take you out of your way—you'd lose maybe ten days—but you'd profit by traveling with experienced mountaineers and learning their ways, which I strongly advise. And of course, you'd be safer while you're with them.”

“I'll do that, then.”

Smith peered at Skye solemnly. “I'm sorry you're not staying, but I understand. Let's go talk to Bill.”

Skye followed Smith out of the lodge and over to the partner's half-shelter. “Mister Skye's going east, Bill, and I suggested he go with you a piece to learn what he can. Head him for the Hoback.”

Sublette grinned. “Maybe we'll make a trapper of ye afore we get shut of ye. I'm planning on winterin' with the Crow—with the Kicked-in-the-Bellies. You want to spend more time under that blanket, you just stick with old William.”

Skye nodded. He shook hands with Smith, liking this man who had swiftly made himself a legend among those who knew him.

“Thank you. I'm in your debt. If you come east, look me up.”

“Not likely, Mister Skye. East makes me itch and sweat.”

Smith's brigade was the first to pull out, heading straight south toward unknown arid country. Smith intended to strike the old Spanish Trail between Santa Fe and California, but no one knew just where it was or how it ran.

Davey Jackson pulled out next, with a large group of free trappers and several women, a colorful outfit with lean, bearded men in gaudy buckskins, tough looking and sharp eyed. Every man had a mountain rifle and the skill to use it murderously. They were heading into the Snake country, looking for areas not trapped out by Hudson's Bay, intending to be a Yank presence in disputed land.

Then, midday, Bill Sublette's brigade abandoned the forlorn flat, with Skye riding along. His rested horse danced under him, and he had to relearn the horsemanship he had taught himself. He carried his warbag on his lap, but it didn't trouble him. He was on his way again, and that sent his spirits soaring.

Twenty-four veterans of the mountains rode beside him, including Bridger and Beckwourth. They rode without military discipline, each man in his own style, and yet these Yanks were fanged and strong, and could give better than they got from any passing band of Indians. They would have to be: they were penetrating Blackfoot country for the first time, and death rode with them. Some or all of these men would not return to the next rendezvous, and yet each had elected to head into the prime beaver country of the north, as yet untouched because the ferocious Piegans, or Siksika, or Bloods, barred the way.

Skye thought that the casualness of this caravan might not appeal to the lord generals or captains of the British army, who would have organized the company into formation and put vedettes out on the flanks. Perhaps Sublette would do that when they reached dangerous country, but Skye would be long gone. They would show him the path and send him on his way.

Thirty-one men; that was the strength of this brigade. There were enough, they said, to hold off a whole village of Blackfeet. Those mountain rifles, accurately fired, would keep even a massed enemy at bay. There were no women in this brigade; Sublette had forbidden it.

No one spoke. They had talked themselves hoarse in the rendezvous. That was the social time. This was the time to head leisurely north through shortening days and chill nights, mapping out beaver-rich creeks and rivers to trap later when the fur was prime. This was the time to enjoy summer warmth while it lasted in these northern climes, time to have fun, make buffalo meat and jerky, harvest strawberries and chokecherries and other wild fruit. Time to gird up for winter, fatten the horses, braid rawhide horse tack, tell tall stories. Skye had heard more than a few yarns, and realized that storytelling was one of the ways these men made time pass in a land without diversions or outside news. Adventure and utter boredom appeared equally in the lives of these mountaineers.

For several days they wandered north until they struck the Snake, and then turned upstream, traversing a flat country but never out of sight of towering distant ranges. Sublette often rode with Skye, gradually extracting from him the whole of his life in the Royal Navy and much about his childhood as well.

“I reckon an old coon like you'd think twice about returning to civilization, seeing as how you treasure your liberty,” Sublette said.

“I treasure it. And I'm counting on your Yank government to protect it. But life is more than liberty. A man needs purpose and a dream, and my dream is to finish what I started and enter commerce.”

Sublette didn't say anything, and Skye knew that his own preferences didn't sit well with these children of the wilds. The balmy days fled by one after another, hot midday, cool in the evenings, uneventful.

The river hooked around to the east again, and then one evening Sublette told Skye that they had come to the parting.

“Tomorrah we'll take Henry's Fork north and you'll stay on the Snake a while more, but not as far as Davey Jackson's Hole.”

He stooped on bare earth and scraped a map with a stick. Skye had to find the route that had been traversed by the Astorians early in the century. If he found the right one, it would take him over a pass and down to the Seedskedee. And then he'd face a long stretch of waterless wasteland until he hit a small creek at the western foot of South Pass …

Skye memorized the map in his head, knowing how hard it would be to translate to the real world what Sublette was scraping in the clay.

That evening, while feasting on a buck mule deer that Emanuel Lazarus brought in, the talk turned distinctly odd.

“Mr. Bridger,” said Beckwourth, “do you think Mr. Sublette'd give us a week off?”

“No, Mr. Beckwourth, Mr. Ranne, and Mr. Fitzpatrick proposed it, while Mr. Reed, and Mr. Daw objected because they want to make the beaver come.”

“A pity,” said Beckwourth. “How about you, Mister Skye?”

“I'll be taking my leave tomorrow, mates.”

“Mates? Mates? What sort of word is that? Call us mister.”

Skye smiled.

“Time we elevated the manners around hyar,” Bridger said. “Now, you ain't never to call me Gabe agin, though I'll accept Blanket Jim at rendezvous. From now on it's mister. High-toned, like Mister Skye hyar. Mr. Bridger, that's me.”

With that, they all pronounced themselves misters and said the brigade was mightily elevated by the courtesy.

“Tell us again why y'ar Mister Skye,” Isaac Galbraith asked.

“Because this is a new world,” Skye said, simply.

“Yep, it's that all right,” Beckwourth opined. “But mister ain't enough. Call me chief. Call me headman. Call me Lord Beckwourth, or baron or viscount or duke.”

Skye smiled.

“Now, Mister Skye, old coon, onct ye get onto that Astorian patch, ye got to watch for the petryfied forest. Everything in her's turned to rock,” said Mr. Bridger. “I saw me an elk turned solid rock there not long ago. And there's a marble grizzly rearin' up at the east end.”

“And beyond the petryfied forest is the Amazons,” said Mr. Beckwourth. “Two hundred seventy beauteous Injun women who won't let you pass until you pleasure 'em.”

They managed all this until the fire died and the stars blanketed the sky, and Skye knew he had friends, and they were feeling loss at his departure. And he knew as well that he would feel a similar loss for these wild Yanks.

The next morning, one with a chill on it, they rode an hour to the confluence of Henry's Fork and the Snake, and there they parted. In the northeastern haze loomed a range topped by three spiky peaks.

“Them's the Tetons,” Sublette said. “Snake runs right under 'em on the east side, but you won't go that far. All right, Mister Skye, keep your topknot on.”

It was the mountaineers' blessing.

“Thank you, gentlemen. Keep your topknots on.”

He rode away from them, a lone man in a wild, lonely land, with tears in his eyes.

Chapter 30

The Snake River divided itself around countless sandy islands and sparkled merrily through lush meadows or sudden patches of pine. It harbored along its banks more wildlife than Skye had ever seen, and in its transparent waters trout leapt and darted.

He found himself riding through an Eden that would have been the envy of Adam and Eve. He had little trouble filling his demanding belly now that July was fading into August and every bush brimmed with red, black, and silvery berries. He scared up deer and martins and elk, and once a yawning brown bear. He watched bald eagles circle above him and redtailed hawks dive for their dinner. Sunlight glinted off the cold complex waters, dazzling his eye. The screech of meadowlarks, kildeer, and red-winged blackbirds gladdened his spirit and told him that all was well.

The cheerful river ushered him across a golden plain and into somber mountains. Now the river pulsed through an intimate valley hemmed by vaulting pine-clad slopes, and Skye knew he must look for the vaguely described turnoff, Hoback River, that had been the route of John Jacob Astor's party heading for the Pacific coast in 1811.

He missed his companions, but the river had become his bosom friend, endlessly delightful to eye and soul. He was glad he had traveled a piece with Sublette's brigade, not only because it had cemented friendships but also because he had absorbed the ways of the mountaineers, an eager acolyte in the liturgy of survival. Skye had absorbed their innate, unspoken caution. Even though they might be talking to each other or seeming to pay no attention to the terrain, in fact they were constantly scanning horizons, studying dark blank woods, places of trouble and surprise. Without a word being spoken by Sublette or anyone else, they paused at defiles or river passages or at any place hemmed by brush or forest, and one or another would circle around for a hard-eyed look. These children of the wilds would not be surprised if they could help it.

He mastered their camp techniques, too. They grazed their animals until dusk and then hobbled and staked them close at hand. They built their small fires in hidden places, preferably under some branches that would dissipate the smoke. They scanned the heavens with knowing eyes, and prepared for a wet night if the omens told them to. They could thatch an effective shelter in a hurry, knew how to keep their spare clothing dry, and knew how to find dry tinder and build a fire where a drizzle wouldn't snuff it. Whenever they had spare meat, they hung it high and away from their camp, or jerked it if they had time. Occasionally they heard wolves, and constantly enjoyed the night-gossip of the coyotes, and sometimes counted their silences more important than the night-talk.

The wilderness and its omnipresent dangers had driven these men together; out in the wilds they were boon companions in a way that could not be replicated in the sullen cities. Skye had blotted up all of this during his brief sojourn with Sublette's men. He missed them so much it surprised him, and to counter his bouts of loneliness he focused on his future, examining his dream, over and over.

Boston was the great American seaport; there would be import and export businesses, very like his father's. He would apply at once, knowing he could be useful. Those matters had been bred into his bones and he had heard his father's talk at many a meal. He would clerk, and save his pence, and apply at the college. He would study political economy as his father had done, and English literature, as he wanted to do. Then, someday, with a bachelor degree in hand—albeit at a late age—he would start his own business, win a wife, start the Skye family, and settle into an abundant life.

All these things he rehearsed and rehashed as he rode up the Snake, almost to prevent the bewitching river and the golden wilderness from seducing him. The Snake took him deeper into the mountains, and now he experienced sharply cooler weather, especially at dawn. Summer still reigned, but the higher he climbed the closer he peered into the future. He would have to hurry east. Sublette told him it would take three months to make St. Louis, and by then the nights would be cold.

He almost missed the Hoback River, taking it for an inconsequential creek, but he spotted a prominent blaze in a tree. The mountaineers had left their own road map. He turned his lively horse eastward and rode through an intimate canyon that made him uneasy because he felt hemmed in, almost like being in a ship's brig. He saw no sign of recent passage, though plenty of evidence that man and beast had come this way.

He topped a somber alpine pass one day, and began descending into what he understood would be the drainage of the Seedskedee—he wondered about the origins of that name. Once he struck that clear, cold river he was to descend it until he reached arid plains. With a little luck he would find a trail that would take him across a waterless flat to Big Sandy Creek.

He descended into an alpine valley where a river whirled through swampy flats. It wasn't a welcoming land, and he hurried through it, wanting a dryer and more comfortable climate. Nature was fickle, joyous one moment and sullen the next. This was a valley choked with brush, a place where he could easily be surprised, and that made him itchy. He urged his reluctant horse across numerous creeks, around mocking bogs, and along the edge of fearsome dark pine forests. Moose lived there, and he saw one after another standing in bogs, eating what grew close to water. This was country where winter came early and stayed long, a land locked by snow most of the year.