The Adventures of Silk and Shakespeare (5 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

O brave new world

—
The Tempest
, V.i

The next morning, in the pre-dawn light, openly and defiantly, Tal and Hairy left the brigade and rode off for the forks of the Stinking Water, the Crow squaw Iron Kettle behind them.

“Besides, lad, it’s adventure,” Hairy cajoled. “It’s a chivalrous deed, it’s the stuff of heroic couplets.”

“What does trapping big, smelly water rats get you, anyway?” quipped Tal.

Tal had the orange and azure handkerchief flying from his wiping stick. Thus the blazon of the House of Jones headed into the land of the Absarokas, the people of the mountain raven.

“Getting killed will be something new,” Tal added.

Tal wished Hairy and Iron Kettle wouldn’t be so noisy about it. Their, uh, mating, that is. He didn’t like that word for it, but he liked the other words less. Love it certainly wasn’t. Love was…not all this braying, whickering, roaring, moaning…

Love meant more like what Tal had felt with Guadalupe in Santa Fe. Guadalupe. He’d watched her all evening. While her companion, perhaps her chaperone, danced with hidalgo and campesino and buckskinned trapper alike, arms bare, bodice daring, and skirts flouncing—while the older woman carried on thus wantonly, Guadalupe stood decorously against the wall and observed. She was slender, pale, and virginally beautiful in a white dress accented by colored silk handkerchiefs in her hair. When suitors came to ask her to dance, and then left with stiff, courteous smiles, Tal could see she was as tall as most of them. Though men pinched the bottom of her flirting, smiling, teasing companion, by common consent they treated the tall, demure Guadalupe with chivalry.

In the shank of the evening, a boozy shank, Tal turned and saw an hidalgo talking loudly and rudely to Guadalupe. She was casting her eyes about nervously, but the other woman was busy with a flirtation. Tal gulped, squared his shoulders, crossed the room, and wordlessly offered Guadalupe his arm. Without a backward glance she took it and steered Tal toward the musicians. She spoke a few soft words, and in a moment the music changed to a minuet. Guadalupe led Tal to the center of the floor, held his hand high, and began a measured, stately dance. Most of the others backed away to watch. Not knowing the dance, Tal took an occasional step with her, but mostly held her hand aloft while she danced to him. It made him feel honored.

After the dance the chaperone took them both by the arm and hustled them onto the patio. “What a beautiful, young Americano,” she said to Guadalupe, looking into Tal’s eyes playfully, “beautifully innocent.” She squeezed his arm. “I thank you on behalf of my sister, who has little English. That was gallant.” She made a little curtsy, as though taking leave.

“Perhaps the
elegante
Americano escorts us home,” Guadalupe said haltingly.

“Of course,” murmured Tal.

So the sister performed the introductions—they were Guadalupe and Carlotta Echeverria—and they strolled through the cool summer evening.

Taking leave at the door of their house, the sort of house common frontiersmen were not permitted to enter, Guadalupe reached behind her head, took off the orange and azure handkerchief in her rolled hair, and slipped the comb out. She shook her gleaming black hair onto her shoulders, charmingly disarrayed. Then she kissed the handkerchief and held it against Tal’s cheek. When he covered her hand with his, she slipped hers away, leaving the handkerchief.

Murmuring “
Buenas noches
,” she slipped inside.

Tal rubbed his cheek with the handkerchief, then held it away to see it. A lady’s colors. A banner to carry. Tal didn’t know what to do. He felt an impulse to serenade beneath her window. But he hadn’t the nerve. Wandering back toward camp, he hummed a minor-key English folk song that had been a favorite of his father’s:

Greensleeves was all my love,

And Greensleeves was my delight.

Greensleeves was my heart of gold,

And who but the lady Greensleeves?

After that evening with Guadalupe, he didn’t even know why Hairy would want these episodes of galumphing carnality with Iron Kettle. He himself had made a decision: He would forego casual sex. True, Tal had sexual urges, sexual aches. And in this world of Indians, sex was available enough. But he would wait for romance.

It was a decision that was unusual, that might make his fellows think him strange. He liked that.

One morning over coffee Hairy got to explaining. Iron Kettle was a woman and expected to be used as a woman—by her trapper mate, her buck, by Louie, by Hairy, by whatever man she was with. Naturally. (By Tal as well, Hairy hinted, but Tal affected not to understand.) Crows were like that. Most Injuns were like that. When in Rome, Hairy intoned, do as the Romans do. Which, to Tal, was all right for Hairy.

And it wasn’t that he didn’t like Iron Kettle. She was cheerful. She wouldn’t let either of the men gather wood or get water or cook, or do anything in camp but relax. She had a wicked sense of humor, and told the dirtiest jokes Tal had ever heard. She delighted in getting Hairy’s wig and aping his walk and his talk and all about him. She was willing in the blankets, clearly. Tal approved of her. But what was romantic about her? What was inspiring, uplifting, ennobling? Really, this avid humping did make Tal wrinkle his nose.

They’d struck north from the Sweetwater across dry, barren hills and come straight to where the Popo Agie flowed into Wind River, as Iron Kettle said they would. Down the Wind and through its narrow, Whitewater canyon into greener country on the north side of the mountains. They spent several days hunting antelope and drying meat and soaking in the huge hot springs there (and for some reason the river changed its name to the Big Horn). That was where the two of them started acting like honeymooners. On along the west side of this big basin they’d travel, Iron Kettle said. The people would be at the forks of the Stinking Water River, sooner or later. This was the land of the Absarokas, Crow country—filled with friends, with plenty of game, good water, warm days and cool nights—why rush? They rode up Owl Creek and over a low divide to a nameless creek and another to another no-name creek and pushed higher into the mountains to avoid the heat. Near the timber the days were cool, the nights nippy, hinting of winter. Tal saw a coyote already getting prime, and Hairy said it would be a hard winter.

In a fine, narrow valley on the Greybull River they stopped to take a few elk. Iron Kettle built six-foot-high racks and dried long strips over a low, low fire. She stretched and tanned Tal’s bear robe, and a couple of elk robes as well, to give him warmth for the winter. While Tal lay about reading his favorite passages in
Scottish Chiefs
, Hairy and Iron Kettle lay about in the little lean-to, enjoying each other. Even Tal began to smile about it. This was an idyllic time, a time such as Sir William Wallace had, in his mountain aerie, before his countrymen called him forth to bloody deeds.

In the evenings Iron Kettle told stories about bloody deeds, the sallies of the Absaroka people (whom the white men call the Crows) against their ancient enemies the Siksikas, or Blackfeet. She would not tell medicine stories, but she told of fights, horses stolen, scalps taken.

She thrilled in a way unbecoming to a lady, thought Tal, in talking of blood running down her arm from a fresh scalp—but then Iron Kettle was no lady. And Hairy said Injun women were more bloodthirsty than the men. They were a barbaric people, thought Tal, but not so different from the Scot clans fighting for their hereditary lands against the hated Englanders. Barbarism touched with magnificence.

“One of our warriors is a Long Knife,” Iron Kettle put forward one evening. She handed Hairy the social pipe and the plug.

“And one a woman,” added Hairy.

Iron Kettle gave him a strange look.

“A black-skinned Long Knife,” she went on to Tal. She adjusted the pot on the fire. “Antelope.”

“Jim Beckwourth,” Hairy said. He lit his pipe with some char cloth. “Lives with the Crows. I knowed him since ’25.” He blew smoke to the four directions, the earth, and the sky, and handed Tal the pipe.

“He fights like man of great medicine,” Iron Kettle said with a lusty smile, “and comes home painted black.” Tal drew deep on the pipe. Painted black meant being victorious, he’d heard. Iron Kettle’s broken English was pretty good.

“He ruts like one too,” Hairy said. “If you think this child likes the blankets…How he and that Pine Leaf have any time for scalping I don’t know.”

“Hairy!” Iron Kettle said sharply. “Pine Leaf will not marry until she has taken a hundred Blackfoot scalps. She sleeps in no man’s blankets.”

She looked at Tal, debating, but there was no way Tal was going to let Iron Kettle get by without telling the story of Pine Leaf now. A woman warrior—no one had heard of such a thing! On the way to a hundred scalps of the fightingest Indians on the Plains. This was martial music.

Pine Leaf had a twin brother, a teen-ager, Iron Kettle told it, who was killed by the Blackfeet. She loved this brother as a sister would, and maybe even more—her medicine, she said, was to avenge his death. She began to practice with the bow and the spear with the young boys. Soon she had a strong arm, and was more accurate than any of them. When the men would not let her go with the war parties, even to hold the horses, she left camp alone and came back with Siksika ponies. This would have been the most daring deed that any boy-warrior had ever done, to steal horses for the first time alone. For a woman truly extraordinary. Some of the people began to believe that her medicine might be for war.

Tal reloaded the pipe and lit it, keeping his eyes averted from Iron Kettle, so as not to look too eager.

The leading warriors, though, said that she could not go on the warpath. How could a woman share the warpath secret? Iron Kettle, like the other women, wasn’t quite sure what this warpath secret was, but it was of high importance, essential to the success of the party, and never under any circumstances to be revealed or even referred to after it was told.

“This child,” Hairy put in, “thinks they tells how they’ve been diddling each other’s women. They ’fesses up before battle.”

Iron Kettle gave him a disgusted look.

So, Iron Kettle went on, with a smirk of satisfaction, she went out alone. (Tal was thinking how he’d write this part down: The warrior-woman, denied her destiny by the conventions of the tribe, ventured forth on faith alone, encountered the enemy by stealth at night…) She stole more ponies—and this time came back with the scalp of the pony guard.

The counselors of the tribe scarcely knew what to do about such a woman, and such deeds. How could they praise a woman who behaved as a man? How could they condemn anyone who took Blackfoot scalps? “Old Jim helped them see the light,” Hairy said, chuckling.

“It’s true,” Iron Kettle went on. Tal stuck the pipe toward her and she looked at him like he was nuts before he remembered, and handed the pipe to Hairy. “It was then that Antelope came back to the people. He had been stolen as a child but now returned to his parents as a man.”

“Leastwise that was the story he give out,” said Hairy. “Handy, it was.”

Iron Kettle glared at Hairy.

“I think Antelope had big eyes for Pine Leaf right away,” she mused. “And he was taken with the idea that a woman could be a warrior. Maybe he wanted to be her teacher. From the beginning she was more a comrade. They dared each other, spurred each other to greater deeds. In winter I will tell you some—Antelope himself will probably tell you some. They avenged the deaths of many Absarokas on the heads of the Blackfeet.”

Since Pine Leaf refused him, Iron Kettle explained, Antelope took other wives, first one, then a second, then a third. Hairy was nodding happily.

Inevitably, Pine Leaf was accepted on the warpath, admitted even to the warpath secret. She became not merely accepted but admired, then followed, at last celebrated. Warriors old and young, of no coups and many coups, took the warpath under her leadership because her bloodlust was insatiable, her courage great, her judgment keen, her medicine strong.

“Antelope Jim is our most powerful warrior,” finished Iron Kettle, “except that maybe Pine Leaf is.”

She gave Hairy a wicked smile and crawled into the lean-to. Tal could hear her snuggling into the blankets. Hairy winked broadly and followed her in. Tal went to the water and spread his blankets on the warm, sunned sand. He fell asleep to the sound of elk bugling, which at least covered Hairy’s bugling.

He awoke the next morning to find their horses gone.

CHAPTER NINE

O most pernicious woman!

—
Hamlet
, I.v

It was a clean sweep—Hairy’s broken-down pair, Iron Kettle’s riding horse and pack horse, and Rosie.

“Why, you…,” Hairy began. “How could you be sleeping out there and not hear anything?”

“Big stupid,” put in Iron Kettle. “Between the bugling of the bull elk and the bugling of the bull Hairy, how could anybody hear?”

Tal was looking around for tracks. “What kind of moccasin is this?” he said in a deliberately businesslike way, pointing.

Hairy and Iron Kettle came and bent over it.

“Crow,” said Hairy.
“Crow?”

“Yah,” said Iron Kettle. “Is my moccasin.” She whomped Hairy on the back, only half-playfully.

“How we gonna catch them on foot?” muttered Hairy.

Tal was checking out other prints in the dust where the horses had been picketed. “I think this one’s different,” he called. He spotted several more like it, small fragments and large, twisting in all directions.

Iron Kettle stooped. Then she gave a little wobbling, dying cry, a cry that sounded like fear itself. “Blackfoot. So far into our country.” Iron Kettle was looking at Hairy. “Black-foot raiders. And me with a big stupid and a boy.”

Hairy was strapping on his belt, with knife and tomahawk. “Let’s go, lad, time’s a-wasting.”

“No!” cried Iron Kettle. “They are Blackfoot! They’ll kill us!” She clung to Hairy. Hairy gave a Tal a hard look, and Tal got his gun and his spyglass.

“If they were going to kill us, woman, they’d have done it last night.” He shook Iron Kettle off. “Probably just boys.”

“Is only one sleep to Stinking Water,” wailed Iron Kettle. “We walk there, my people help us.”

Hairy looked at her indulgently. “We ain’t going in empty-handed, lass.” He turned to Tal. “Let’s move.”

It was an obvious trail of a dozen horses, down the Grey-bull toward the Big Horn. Tal wondered if they were being begged to follow it. No, Hairy said, the boys just didn’t care because they thought they couldn’t be caught. Hairy meant to surprise them.

Tal thought he might do it. Hairy moved at a surprisingly fast lope for a big man, a lope that would overtake a horse that wasn’t being pushed. After two hours without a let-up, Tal was struggling to keep up, and didn’t think any critters on earth could stay ahead.

At noon the trail turned sort of back on itself, up a little creek that came out of the mountains. They drank quickly and moved on. Hairy was pushing now, grimly, and Tal was dragging.

By late afternoon they knew where they were headed. The trail went up the creek and took a turn back toward camp, straight over a divide. Hairy led them higher, so they could look into camp without being seen on the back trail. Maybe they slowed down because of the steepness, or because they were afraid of what they’d find at camp.

From their perch they could glass the entire valley of the Greybull, including the lean-to by the mouth of the creek. Still breathing hard, Tal recognized Rosie and the others staked beyond camp. He couldn’t see any people.

Hairy motioned down with his head and started contouring agilely around the side of the hill. Evidently he meant to stay high, where they could see.

But there was nothing to see. Now the lean-to was just a hundred yards away. No one was visible. The swoosh of the creek and the river kept them from hearing much. Suddenly a woman’s cry carried to them. Hairy sat and pondered. The cry came two or three times more.

“We gotta get her,” he said. “I think there’s only four or five of them, probably boys. Must be using her hard. Raping bastards. Good thing they’re so careless.”

He threw back his chestnut curls suddenly and rose to a squat. “Still, may be a guard. Best be cautious.”

He pulled at his nose, watching the lean-to. It was on the sand in a big bend, opposite a cutbank. Both the ropes that held up the front end of the lean-to stretched across the creek to a tree on the cutbank.

“I’m gonna sneak over and cut those ropes,” he said, pointing. “That’ll bring the front down and give them trouble coming out. May subdue them pretty good. You get cover over there. If they come out fighting, shoot their lights out.”

Tal nodded. He’s never shot a person before. Except Hairy.

“Keep your eyes open for a guard.” Hairy eased off.

Tal primed his pistol, checked the priming on his rifle, and moved downhill in the other direction. He didn’t like any of it.

It took Hairy a long time to circle and come out on the cutbank. Finally Tal saw him steal out of the trees. Immediately he reached out and slashed one rope, bounded over and slashed the other one.

The lean-to collapsed. Iron Kettle screamed.

Hairy stepped to the edge of the cutbank and roared. Roared like a griz, shook his fists, and jumped up and down.

The bank collapsed. Hairy crashed into the water on his back.

Iron Kettle was still screaming. And battle cries were coming from somewhere.

Three Indians, probably teen-agers, ran out of the trees and jumped down the cutbank and grabbed Hairy. Hairy was still on his back, maybe stunned. They held him down in the shallow water.

Tal dropped to his knees and lifted his rifle.

An arm circled his throat. A knife point pricked the underside of his chin. A woman’s voice snapped, “Put it down.”

Tal laid his rifle down. A foot went onto it. A hand undid his belt, let belt and knife and pistol drop to the ground.

“Watch!” the woman’s voice commanded in Tal’s ear.

Iron Kettle crawled out from under the lean-to. She was bent over, holding her belly. She pointed at Hairy and the boys, yelling something in Crow. Then the English words, “Scalp him, scalp the bastard.”

Heck, she was laughing, uncontrollably.

The arm around his neck dropped away. The knife backed off.

One of the boys made a sweeping motion with his knife, held up Hairy’s luxuriant brown wig, and yelled, “Hi-yi-yi-yi!” The boys were whooping and slapping their thighs.

Hairy’s scalplock hung pitifully beside his ear, and his naked scalp gleamed in the sunlight.

A hand grasped for Tal’s right hand. He faced a woman, young, handsome, teeth gleaming in a big smile, eyes alight.

“Hello,” she said. “I am Pine Leaf, warrior woman of the Absaroka people.” Stupidly, Tal shook her hand.

Now Hairy was sitting up in the water, feeling of his sticky, shaven head, and staring at the face of Iron Kettle, who was cackling.

Pine Leaf modelled Hairy’s wig, and said she had no intention of giving it back. “If you keep a guard so poor,” said Pine Leaf, “you deserve.”

She picked up a rib and started gnawing, enjoying herself hugely.
“Deserve?”
She looked at Iron Kettle. Pine Leaf felt uncertain about the English she’d been picking up from Antelope Jim. Iron Kettle nodded. “Deserve.

“Sure, if’n I have such horses,” Pine Leaf went on, “I beg the Siksikas to steal them.”

The four boys were gorging themselves, and making eyes about the wonderful joke. They still had the Blackfoot moccasins on their feet. “I take what I like from the Siksikas, moccasins included,” said Pine Leaf casually.

She was a tall, strapping woman with broad, blunt features. A scar made a vertical line from one cheek to the corner of her mouth—it made a pucker when she talked. Some men would have thought her plain, mannish. Tal thought hers a face of barbaric magnificence.

She flipped the wig back to Hairy. “What’s a scalp without blood?” she said. She tried to rub the glue off her hands.

The fire was popping with the fat dripping from a spit full of deer ribs. The evening light in the valley of the Greybull River looked lavender, and long shadows lay on the grass. Does and fawns grazed on the benches above the river. Tal would have been stupendously happy except for being embarrassed.

Pine Leaf was by turns vivacious, prickly, mischievous, proud, sympathetic. She looked great in the wig, and her smile was wondrous. Tal thought her scar pucker was very dear. The whole thing had been her idea.

She had taken these kids (they looked fourteen or fifteen, just boys beside Tal’s sixteen) to look for some Sioux to steal horses from, on the headwaters of Powder River. Boys need to learn. But for some reason the Sioux were not hunting buffalo there this year, and the North Platte was too far, so they were coming home disappointed when they found tracks headed up the Greybull. Didn’t take long to spot the lean-to and the Long Knives. They were delighted to see Iron Kettle.

But what miserable—is
miserable
the word?—camp-making. No guard, no caution, no nothing. Yes, it’s close to home, yes, Iron Kettle and the Big Long Knife are enjoying each other, yes, the little Long Knife must spend all day looking at his—book, you call it?—but is stupid.

Is life so bad you want to give yours to the Siksikas? So must have a little fun, teach a little lesson.

“We compliment you on how fast you trail us, but running men cannot keep up with running horses. And we watch you every moment. No good to have you get lost and sacrifice your scalps to maybeso Shoshone children.

“When you sneak on camp, and wonder where our guard is, all five of us are behind you already, sneaky watching you.” She slapped her thigh, laughing, and then snatched the wig from Hairy.

Pine Leaf took the wig and arranged it on Tal’s head. She tilted her head back and forth to get him to model it. “Is very pretty,” she declared, “I think I love you.

“Iron Kettle tells us about make-believe hair, so we make-believe scalp you. Hi-yi-yi!” She beamed at Hairy.

“You make it best—you fall in creek. Is wonderful, I salute you.

“We are victors,” she said to boys, “we deserve trophy.” She reached for Tal’s rifle, drew it across her lap, and spread the silk handkerchief with her hands. “Very pretty,” she said. She glanced wickedly at Tal. “Very easy to see from hill, so you make good target. I take it instead of scalp.”

She untied the handkerchief quickly and retied it around one of her braids, looking mischievously at Tal. He was transfixed on the colors of fire and sky against her long, bare, soft-looking neck. “Now you are my captive.”

She borrowed a mirror from Hairy and studied herself. “Very pretty,” she cooed. “Maybe I trade you something for it later. Now maybeso I wear it.”

“It’s a gift,” Tal murmured.

“No, no, Little Long Knife. No gift.” she chuckled. “You make gift to Pine Leaf, Antelope Jim he make gloves from your hide.” She wagged a long finger at him.

“Later,” she said, “I decide what to give you for it.”

Anything would have sufficed. For Tal was in love. He had a new lady as a shrine for his adventures.

And he wasn’t afraid of no Antelope Jim Beckwourth.