Rendezvous (35 page)

“And here, behold the blankets,” he said. The one called Sublette, leader of the brigade and a trader, handed the chief two beautiful green blankets with black stripes at their ends. Rotten Belly handed these treasures to his son.

“And these are for the beautiful wives and daughters of Arapooish,” Beckwourth said. The trader chief handed hanks of bright ribbon—bold blue, yellow, red, green, orange—to Arrow.

“And behold this, great chief of the Absaroka.”

This time Sublette brought forth a heavy rifle from his pack, along with a horn of powder and a bar of the soft metal.

“Ah!” The Absaroka warriors crowded close. This was a noble offering from the pale men. “Aieee!”

This gift the chief accepted with his own strong hands. He hefted the shooting stick, cocked it, examined its beauty, and smiled.

“My friend Beckwourth, we welcome you to our happy village. We are as brothers to you, and you have sealed our friendship with your splendid offerings. Together in battle we are a match for Siksika or Lakota even though they are many more than we are. May you enjoy your time with us, and may our lodges shelter you from the fury of the Cold Maker. The women will erect our council lodge for you, and it will hold many Goddamns. The rest of the pale men will stay with their old friends and share our lodges. But tell me, Beckwourth. When will the pale men bring their wives so we may see them and try them?”

Beckwourth smiled. “Maybe soon, Rotten Belly. We are far from them, and must bring them a long way.”

“Well, we await them. We are eager to see them, and often we wonder about them. I want one or two, and will give many robes for one. Come now, escort your headmen into my lodge, and we will smoke the pipe and counsel for a while.” He eyed the crowd. “You women who are hospitable and of good heart toward the pale men, put up the council lodge, that these friends of the Absaroka may find warmth. The Cold Maker roars.”

She watched the chief's lodge swallow the Goddamn headmen. Fitzpatrick, Sublette, Bridger, Beckwourth. She knew every one of them from other times. Arapooish's wives sought shelter in other lodges while the great ceremony of the pipe proceeded. Many women rushed to put up the poles of the council lodge, pull the massive buffalohide cover up the cone of poles, and pin its sides together with willow pins.

Now she was free. The sacred ceremony of the pipe might continue within the chief's lodge but all who were witnesses to the arrival were released. She sought Skye and found him beside a mare. He had cared for her, and she was fat, and so was the spirited little gray stallion at her side.

“Goddamn Skye sonofabitch,” she said joyously.

He gaped at her as if he were buffalo-witted.

“Don't you know me?”

“Victoria. Of course.”

“You come. I tell you so.”

Skye smiled wryly. “You knew better than I did.”

“You get many beaver?”

“No, I am a camp tender—I don't trap. Not yet. But how are you? Are you a warrior's woman now?”

The Goddamns were so ignorant. Anyone could tell from the way she wore her hair loose that she wasn't. The women who had men braided their hair. Couldn't he see that? “No damn good,” she said. “We talk. I like my name, Victoria. I will take it. Come.”

She beckoned him to her lodge and he followed, leading his horses. “Come, come, come,” she said, irritably.

Then she presented him to her stern father, Walks Alone, and stepmother, Digs the Roots, who waited before the lodge huddled in their robes. They had met him at the rendezvous and had steered her away from him—and all pale men.

“This is the Goddamn for whom I waited,” she told them in her tongue. “Magpie gave me the inner eye to see the man within the face-hair. He is from another tribe of Goddamns, across the Big Water. Skye is his name, like the heaven above us. What a great name, for the whole home of stars and sun and moon. He will be great among them in a winter or two.”

They nodded, reserved and curious. Then her father urged caution. “He is not great among them. He came near the end of the procession, one of the last and least. This is not good. We will ask Red Turkey Comb to see what must be seen, and I will make him a gift of a pony for it.”

Victoria pushed back her annoyance and responded dutifully, as befit her station. “Yes, that would be good. We will learn about Mister Skye. Nothing escapes Red Turkey Comb.”

Her father nodded, ushered Skye into the lodge, and performed the ceremony of the pipe with the man, while she and her stepmother, or little mother as one was called, and sister and brother observed silently.

Her father was welcoming Skye, but she knew that it was a formality. He had higher hopes for his oldest daughter.

Chapter 45

Skye marveled at the beauty of the Crow village. It nestled under sandstone bluffs, within an arc of a laughing creek, protected from the bitter winds that whistled across the rolling prairie above it. Each lodge was shielded by willow and chokecherry brush that further subdued the winds. The blackened peaks of the golden lodges leaked lazy smoke into a stark white, gray, and tan world.

Wherever Skye turned, he found the genius of these people making life bearable and comfortable. They had chosen a perfect site to winter. Cottonwood and willow forests offered plentiful firewood to feed the hearths of the lodges, while tawny bottomlands supported the village horse herd, and the sandstone escarpments on both sides of the creek corralled the horses.

They had put him and the other camp tenders and clerks in a sixteen-pole lodge made of twenty-seven buffalo hides sewn tightly together. It had taken a dozen women to raise the heavy lodge cover after they had erected the tripod and laid the other lodgepoles into its apex. After that they had spread buffalo robes on the ground within, layers of them until the icy earth no longer bit those who lay upon it.

Skye swiftly learned how to manipulate the leather ears of the lodge to harness the breezes and draw out the smoke of the small lodgefire. The women had hung an additional shoulder-high dew cloth from the lodgepoles within, which made the lodge so warm that a man could sleep without burying himself in robes. He had never seen a European tent half as comfortable.

Those first days he explored the village, examining lodge after lodge, admiring the artistry that brightened the lodges with figures of animals or geometric designs, or what he supposed were medicine symbols, household gods blessing those within. The veteran trappers had wintered with these Kicked-in-the-Bellies for several years, and had found berths in many lodges. Some had even been adopted by families or into the tribe.

He counted forty-one lodges, and using the mountaineer formula of eight to a lodge, calculated that something like three hundred and twenty or thirty persons inhabited this village. He felt its power and comfort and protection, felt its ancient knowledge of all the ways to find meat, or preserve food for emergencies. He felt the power in the bows and quivers of its warriors, and in the warrior societies that vied with each other for honor. He walked freely among these people, exchanging smiles because he couldn't talk with them.

He did not escape work here. As a camp tender he was responsible for cutting copious amounts of deadwood from the cottonwood groves, for the fires never ceased consuming fuel. He was also responsible for several horses as well as his own, and looked after them each morning.

Within a day or two after he arrived he felt a euphoria such as he had not experienced since boyhood. He could not explain this exultation, only that it coursed through every fiber of his being. Instead of cowering before a brutal northern winter and suffering its numbing cold, he found himself enjoying each bright day. The long nights bloomed into yarning and storytelling parties around hot lodgefires of the hospitable Crow. Most days, the sun warmed the intimate valley for a while, brightening the world of these cheerful people before vanishing midafternoon behind the western bluffs. But the winter didn't seem hard.

How could a man be melancholic in paradise? Yes, it was that, in its own magical fashion. He slept warm on three buffalo robes, and not even the presence of a dozen others disturbed his slumbers. He could not remember a happier time.

Each misty dawn, when the sun was rosing the bluffs, the village hunters, along with the trappers and mountaineers, saddled their winter-shaggy horses and rode out to make meat. It took constant effort to feed so many mouths.

In some ways, hunting was easier in the winter, except when the weather turned foul or bitter. The animals herded up, the mule deer and antelope forming into bands for mutual warmth and protection. The buffalo gathered into small herds in valleys where they could escape some of the wind. In heavy snow the buffalo could be driven into snowbanks, mired and surrounded, but these days, without much snow on the prairie, the hunting was harder and required more cunning.

The guns of the mountaineers contributed mightily to the village's larder that January of 1827, and that made them all the more welcome among the Absaroka. Massive quarters of buffalo hung from stout limbs, along with the carcasses of deer and antelope. Only elk were scarce this winter.

Skye heard about it all but was not free to hunt. Not yet. As the juniormost member of the brigade, he had the most work, and William Sublette did not neglect to keep him busy chopping wood for the brigade's hosts as well as the big lodge that housed the camp tenders. Even so, Skye had more free time than he had ever known. Time to explore, learn the ways of these brown people, master their arts and crafts and weaponry, and try to make friends even without the employment of words.

One twilight he pulled a buffalo robe around him and slipped outside for a breath of fresh air. Stars winked in the slate sky. He realized he was happy. He had never known what it was like to enjoy life.

He heard the wolves patrol the ridges. He often did. They boldly probed the camp most nights, the smell of meat drawing them in, but the frozen carcasses hung well above their snapping jaws.

“Goddamn Skye, I have waited for you to come, but you do not,” said a low sweet voice beside him. He whirled. She was there, wrapped in the black-banded gray blanket she had been wearing about the village, the one he had given her.

He had been avoiding her, and she knew it.

“Victoria—”

“You have given me a good name. I have told the seers that this is my name now.”

Somehow he felt snared by an invisible web that was spinning about him, and it troubled him. He had other plans, dreams spun in a ship's brig to keep him alive when he had no reason to live. He could not let this slim savage demolish them.

She studied him—one could take it as a glare, so intense was her gaze—from brown eyes that radiated irritability and love in strange harness. Jet hair framed her sharp features. The hair vanished under her blanket, along with the rest of her lithe figure. He had never thought of beauty in these terms—only in pale, blue-eyed English terms—and found her all the more intoxicating because she awakened something unforeseen in him.

It wasn't just Victoria that was intoxicating him. This wild sweet liberty, this coming to manhood in the mountains, this strange sovereignty over his own life and destiny, far from organized society—all these things had stirred something so profound that he was having doubts about everything he believed in.

She waited patiently for him to speak, but he could muster no answer. How could he tell her that he didn't want her attentions?

“Sonofabitch, Skye, I go now.” She turned to leave.

“No—Victoria—”

“I am cold. I came to invite you to the lodge of Red Turkey Comb. He is a seer and a man with great power and will help you find vision. Then you will know what you must do and what powers have been given you. He will see you if you offer him a gift. Have you something to give?”

Skye didn't. He could scarcely be poorer. “No…”

“Yes you do. He is old, and his fires need wood.”

“Wood?” Skye veered toward the council lodge and plucked up an armload of cottonwood limbs he had cut that day. He wasn't at all sure why she was taking him to a shaman, and it would probably offend his own beliefs, but he was curious. What could a savage mystic do?

She smiled and led him toward a humble lodge set apart from the rest of the village. There she scratched gently on the door flap, and they heard a muffled voice from within, which she answered in her own tongue. Then she gestured him in. He pulled aside the flap and penetrated into a dark lodge with only embers in its firepit. The shaman sat beyond the coals, silent and barely visible.

Skye set the wood down while she said something to the old man. He nodded, beckoned Skye to sit on his right. She settled herself across from the old man in the place of least honor according to custom, and loosened her blanket. She wore a white doeskin dress, brightly quilled in geometric patterns. She fed some of Skye's wood into the embers. In a moment they blazed and swiftly warmed the lodge, the flickering light playing off her brown face and glinting in her hair.

“Red Turkey Comb is pleased with the wood. He had none this night, and now he will be warm.”

Skye realized how much a simple gift could mean, and knew that he would leave an armload for the old man each day. As the light bloomed, he took the measure of the shaman. This one was not at all ascetic in appearance, but a heavy man with sagging flesh and a measuring gaze.

The shaman listened quietly to Victoria for a while.

“I tell him about you. I tell him you confused and don't know what to be. He think he help you be.”

That confounded Skye but he kept quiet. She would have to do the talking. He could understand some Absaroka words, but he couldn't describe his life or his hopes to this old man.

Time passed and the evening deepened, but the shaman didn't hurry. The old man touched Skye's hand and closed his eyes. Then he tamped tobacco in a short clay pipe, plucked up an ember with a leaf, lit the tobacco, and smoked.