The Big Sky (27 page)

By the time Boone had set four traps it had grown too dark to place the other two. He went back to camp with them, to find Summers and Jim and Poordevil eating boiled bull off pieces of bark, as the Snake Indians did. He found a chunk of bark himself and spooned meat on it and took the knife from his belt and ate. The spoon and kettle and one can, and the knives they wore, were all they had for cooking and eating since the Crows had paid them a visit in the fall.

"Beaver about," Jim said, and Boone nodded and went on chewing.

Summers was looking out into the closing darkness. He got up after a while, stiffly, and took his rifle. "Travel weather. I'm thinkin' we'll see Injuns any time. Best to bring in the horses and peg 'em close."

Poordevil said, "Medicine dogs all gone."

"Don't git to it afore it happens," Boone answered. "You mean medicine dogs'll be all gone."

"All gone. Goddam." He trailed along after Summers to bring the horses up.

Afterwards they all sat around the fire for a time, smoking and looking into it and not saying anything much. When his feet were dry Boone went into the lodge and laid himself down. He heard the others getting up and yawning and making a splatter on the ground before they came to bed, and then he didn't hear them any more, for the wind was flowing along with his dreams, flowing in the north country, rippling the grass, singing around lodges he had never seen till now.
 
 

The days were gone when a man could sleep as long as he wanted and get up lazy and eat some meat and lie down again, glad for warmth and a full stomach and even the ice that put the beaver out of reach. It wasn't quite sunup when Boone awakened, hearing the sharp chirp of a winter bird that spring was giving a voice to.

The others were sleeping, except for Summers who was sitting up and shivering a little. Poordevil was snoring a kind of whistling snore, as if the gap in his teeth gave a special sound to it. Every time the bird cheeped, he would stop and then start in again, maybe getting the cheep mixed up in his dreams. Jim's head was covered by his blanket. You would think he was a dead one, back in the settlements, lying there quiet with the cover over him from toe to scalp lock.

There was still some fire left, and some meat in the pot. Shaking in his buckskins, Boone threw some grass on the coals and nosed sticks over them. The flame came up, making him feel warmer just from the sight of it. The sun bulged up from the eastern hills, catching the Wind River mountains first and turning the snowbanks whiter than any cloud. Not a thing moved as far as Boone could tell, and not a noise sounded, except for Poordevil's whistling snore and the fire busy among the sticks. Even the bird had fallen silent. The wind itself was still now, blown over east and gone, and a man listening heard only his ears straining.

Boone set the pot by the fire and went to the horses, standing dull and patient, hobbled and tied to their picket lines. Blackie nickered and nosed Boone's shoulder as Boone bent over the knot. When the horses were watered he tied them up again. They would have time to graze later after the morning hunt was over.

"Fair morning," Summers said when he came back. "Good thaw, though, or a rain, and the streams'll be too high for huntin'." He was looking west, to the snowbanks that looked clean-washed on the mountains.

They set out after they had eaten, Jim and Poordevil downstream and Boone up, and Summers across to the Wind.

The pond lay quiet as a sheet of ice. There was no sound in it or in all the woods, except for the quiet gurgle of water finding a small way around the dam. A fish nosed the surface while Boone watched, and the water riffled and lay flat again. From the dam he could see that his stick was gone, the stick he had forced into the mud to hold the trap. Sometimes a man worked so quiet he didn't do right. Like as not the beaver lay drowned in deep water now, and he would have to wade out and maybe swim for the plew and the twelvedollar trap that held it. Only it wasn't once in a coon's age a beaver pulled loose on him, he sank his sticks that deep. He walked to the setting place, searching with his eyes for the stick floating and the ring of the chain around it. After a while he made out the float, lying free along the edge of ice, with the ring gone from it. A man couldn't tell where the beaver was, without he drowned quick, close to where the trap grabbed him. Boone waded out and looked into the water, following it while it got deeper and darker until the bottom was lost to his eye.

He straightened and shifted his rifle to the other hand, and stepped back toward shore to ease the ache in his legs, and then he heard a small noise in a clump of willows behind him, a bare whisper in the limbs. He looked around and saw the end of the chain, not knowing it for what it was, at first. He stooped and seized it and pulled her from the bushes, a young she in the prime. She crouched down when he had yanked her into the clear, not trying to run, but just crouching, looking at him while her nose trembled and a little shivering went over her.

"Got ye," he said, and cast about with his hand and picked up a dead stick big enough to kill her with. He saw now that she had been at work on her leg. A little bit more and she would have chewed herself free. There were just the tendons holding, and a ragged flap of skin. The broken bone stuck out of the jaws of the trap, white and clean as a peeled root. Around her mouth he could see blood.

She looked at him, still not moving, still only with that little shaking, out of eyes that were dark and fluid and fearful, out of big eyes that liquid seemed to run in, out of eyes like a wounded bird's. They made him a little uneasy, stirring something that lay just beyond the edge of his mind and wouldn't come out where he could see it.

She let out a soft whimper as he raised the stick, and then the stick fell, and the eye that had been looking at him bulged out crazily, not looking at anything, not something alive and liquid any more, not something that spoke, but only a bloody eyeball knocked from its socket. It was only a beaver's eye all the time.

He skinned her, and cut off the tail and knifed out and tied the castor glands so they wouldn't leak and rolled them in the plew and reset his trap and went on. He got two more beaver. The fourth set was untouched. It was a good-enough morning. Walking back to camp, he thought about rendezvous and after. Jim wanted to hunt the Bear or the Sick River and head on south for the winter, to Taos, which people sometimes called Fernandez. A man couldn't tell what Summers would do, maybe not even Summers himself. Boone wondered whether Poordevil would want to go back to the Blackfeet. Thinking about the north country, of a sudden he knew what the beaver's eyes had put him in mind of.
 
 

Trapping or traveling, Jim Deakins watched the country for dust and the buffalo for movement, as any mountain man would. Winter and summer, the Blackfeet were pushing south from the Three Forks to war on the Crows, and going on, a many a long camp from home, to rub out white men as they trapped the streams and made over the passes. It wasn't Indian sign he wanted to see, though; Bridger's men ought to come out of the north any time now, pointed for rendezvous. Allen would be with them, maybe, and Lanter and Hornsbeck and others that he had had himself a time with before.

Hunting was all right, and wintering the way he and Boone and Summers had, but a man got lonesome finally and hankered for people and for frolics. It was good to tell stories sometimes and to hear stories told and to brag and to laugh over nothing and play horse while the whisky worked in you, and to have the good feeling in the back of your head all the time that when you were through talking and betting and drinking and wrestling there would be an Indian girl waiting for you; and, afterwards, you would lie quiet with her and hear the coyotes singing and the stream washing and see the stars down close and feel the warmth of her, and the lonesomeness would all be gone, as if the world itself had come to set a spell with you.

Take Boone, now. He never seemed to get lonesome or to want to see folks, except once in a while for a squaw that he was through with almost as quick as he got her. He was like an animal, like a young bull that traveled alone, satisfied just by earth and water and trees and the sky over him. It was as if he talked to the country for company, and the country talked to him, and as if that was enough. He found his fill of people quick; he took his fill of whisky quicker, drinking it down like an Indian and getting himself good and drunk while another man was just warming up. Then one morning before rendezvous was more than half over he would wake up and want to make off, to places where you wouldn't see a white man in a coon's age.

Summers was the same in a way, but different, too, for Summers seemed to live in his head a good part of the time, as if it was the years kept him company. He would sit at the campfire and smoke or go about the horses or tend to the skins, and a man would know that he was away back in his mind, seeing old things, things that had happened long ago, before the
Mandan
ever put out from St. Louis, seeing himself as a boy maybe in Missouri or a young man down on the Platte. Summers liked company, all right, and liked drinking and frolics as well as anybody, but in a quiet way, as if nothing that happened now was as important as what had gone before. It was age getting him, likely; a man was lucky if he didn't grow too old and have to think that the best of what was going to happen to him had already happened.

God was mighty mean in some ways, letting a body get on to the point where he always hungered to turn back, making him know he wasn't the man he had been, making his bed cold but keeping in his mind the time when it wasn't. It was like a man was pushed backwards down hill, seeing the top getting farther from him every day, but always seeing it, always wishing he could go back. Sometimes God seemed pretty small.

Summers was in one of his spells now, just sitting and smoking and thinking, and saying only a word or two, and then only if spoken to first. Boone had dug a hole where the fire was and put a deer's head in it and raked the coals over. In the kettle there was meat cut small, cooking with wild onions that Jim had pulled, remembering food back in Kentucky.

"We might as well be gettin' on, with the water so high," Jim said. "Be rendezvous time before it goes down."

Summers asked "Reckon?" as if he wasn't listening.

Boone and Poordevil sat away from them a little. As Jim watched, Boone put his finger on his eye and Poordevil sounded the Indian word for it. Boone tried the word then, practicing with it until Poordevil smiled and bobbed his head that he had got it right.

Jim bent over the moccasin he was making, pulling a whang through the holes his awl had bored. Boone had got so's he spent a deal of time talking with Poordevil that way, learning the Blackfoot words for things.

The sun was coming down from overhead. They would eat and maybe sleep a little, and then it would be time to look at the traps again. Even with the water as high as it was, they caught a few beaver. It might be he would go out first and kill some meat. The cows were thin yet. Bull was better, or mountain sheep. There was a mess of mountain sheep on the shoulders of the Wind mountains -rams and ewes and lambs full of play. They leaped along slopes that would affright a bird, never falling, never hurting themselves.

Jim looked up from his work and let his eye go all around, and then he took to his feet and looked harder, at the buffalo running north of them.

Summers saw him and got up and looked, too, and reached over for the rifle he had leaned against a tree. He jerked his head as Boone lifted his glance. They stood watching, seeing the buffalo stream to the east, leaving a slow rising cloud behind them.

Without speaking Summers moved off toward the horses and so started them all that way. The horses snorted as they trotted to them, and tried to shy off, rearing and plunging with the hobbles but making a poor out at getting away. Back at camp, the men threw saddles on them and led them into a patch of brush.

Summers squinted through the branches. The cloud that the buffalo had left was sinking, and at the tail end of it Jim could see horsemen coming through. "Can't tell," Summers said. "Injuns or hunters. They ain't like to sight our fire at this time of day without they ride close."

"Long Knives," Poordevil announced. "No Injuns."

"Well see. Looks to be six or ten."

Except for Poordevil, who stood at the side of his horse without even his bow in his hand, they brought their saddle horses in front of them as the horsemen approached, looking over the backs of them and on through the branches with their rifles rested across their saddles. Summers' eye slid to Poordevil. "Can't figger how that nigger's lived so long."

If it was Long Knives it would be Bridger's men, Jim thought -Bridger's men making for rendezvous on the Seedskee-dee which some folks were calling the Green River now.

Summers relaxed. "Injuns don't carry rifles that way, I'm thinkin'." He stepped from the brush.

The horses pulled up short, and the riders swung their rifles on him until he shouted at them and fired his own weapon in the air. Jim fired his gun then, and heard Boone's go off next to him, and then there was a quick scattering of shots and voices shouting and hoofbeats thudding on the ground as the horsemen swept up.

"Dogged if it ain't Allen and Shutts and Reeson. How, Elbridge? How, Robinson?"

The men slid from their horses and shook hands around, yelling "Hi-yi," some of them, and strutting like Indians, making a show for all that their buckskins were worn and black with grease and the fringes down to nothing. One of the eight kept to his horse, though, a big, loose man whose slouched shoulders made a wide arch over his saddle horn. His eyes went around and fixed on Poordevil, as if Poordevil had done something against him. Still looking, he pulled off the handkerchief he had about his head, and Jim saw that a plume of hair grew solid white from a scar at the hair line in front.

"Ain't you gonna light, Streak?" Lanter asked. "Or are you gonna let your tail grow to that there mare?"