The Big Sky (43 page)

Boone looked back the way he had come, squinting for Jim and Peabody and the pack string. He took off his glove and rubbed away the water that the wind had brought to his eyes and looked again. Except for the trees bending stiff to the wind there wasn't a movement below. Jim was a piece back, or behind a shoulder or a bunch of trees. One thing sure, he hadn't run into trouble with Indians, for there hadn't been hide or hair of an Indian about, all the way to the divide. If there had been a sign of one Boone was sure he would have spotted it, careful as he was to watch. He turned and walked ahead and studied the land in that direction and saw nothing. Maybe he was wrong about Red Horn. Maybe the notion that had come up in him and grown as they traveled along, maybe the notion was a crazy notion. It was just that a man couldn't tell about Indians, no matter if he lived with them. They were prideful and easy to please or to anger and quick to act in ways a man might not look for and for reasons he might not think of.

Boone stood with his legs apart, braced against the wind. Here on the high hump of the world the wind rushed at him from every which way. It was as if winds from all over came together here, winds from the east and winds from the west and winds from north and south, all chasing wild up the canyons and meeting and matching their strength and making him catch for breath no matter how he faced. They made a sound that wasn't a whine or a howl but just the sound of movement -a rushing, torn, lonely sound.

The wind got to a man when he stood still, chilling his sweat and making him shiver beneath his skins. It filled him full; it blew into him through his eyes and nose and mouth and drove through his skin; it streamed into him through his ears and rushed around inside his head. It was something he didn't feel alone or hear alone but that he knew in every part of him as a man swimming would know the water.

Far off, the wind picked up a sound and brought it up the canyon and whirled it away. Then it brought another and another, all seeming part of the wind until something back in the mind separated it and shouted it out for what it was.

Boone wheeled. It could be Jim had jumped game. It could be that three of them had taken a shot at it before they brought it down. He knew better, though. He began to run, striding long and hard down the way he had climbed. How far was it back? A man didn't think about distance until he had to cover it quick. The wind came at him from the east, pushing fierce against his face and chest. He turned his head to the side and screeched in a long breath. His notion had been right all along, except that he had misfigured on Red Horn, thinking he would take the short cut and double back on them. Red Horn had out-thought him, that was what. Goddam Red Horn for a smart Indian! He screeched in a lung of air again, keeping running all the time, dodging the breaks of rock and jumping the fallen timber.

A raw branch whipped his face, stinging double because of the cold, and his foot slipped on the snow and caught under a root and he fell full length, saying, "Goddam it! Goddam it!" Back on his legs he held up to listen and to look. All he heard was the wind wailing. All he saw was the mountains and the timber and the creek again, and the snow blowing low on the wind. If there had been fighting, it was done now, and Jim and Peabody and the French were dead or else the Indians had been beaten off. They would have howled in retreat and the howling might have carried to his ears, but he hadn't heard howling.

Jim's face ran with him as he ran again, with a smile on it and the white teeth showing and the eyes blue under the short red hair. He would kill himself a chief if Jim was dead. He would stand Red Horn's scalp on a stick by his lodge no matter if Red Horn was kin to him by woman. He heard his breath wheezing in and out and felt his heart pumping and the sweat beginning to roll under his shirt.

From a rise he saw Peabody, standing stiff as a stick in his boughten coat and then bending stiff like a knife over something on the ground. Boone slowed. There wasn't an Indian around, or a horse or a Frenchman or Jim, but only Peabody in his long coat leaning over something.

Before Boone went on he studied the little open space in which Peabody stood and then sent his eye beyond it and to the sides. At the edge of the open space, half-hidden by a clump of brush, he made out a man lying sprawled in the snow. The woods to the side and the patches of timber beyond seemed clear of Indians, but a careful man would scout around before he came into the open and so made a target of himself. Boone began to run again.

The game trail he followed dipped into the trees and straightened out and led through more trees to the opening where Peabody stood. Peabody heard him coming and switched around, empty-handed, with fear and fight both showing in his face. When he saw who it was he called out, "Thank God! Thank God, it's you!" He moved toward Boone, and Boone could see now that it was Jim he had been leaning over. "Terrible! Terrible!" Peabody said with a choke in his voice and his mouth twisted. "The red devils!"

."Git away1 Let me see Jim."

Peabody followed along. "They rushed us, twenty or more of them, yelling and waving things and frightening the horses."

"How you, Jim?"

Jim lay with his mouth half open and his face pale. There was a bullet hole in his coat and a spot of blood on the snow.

"Jim! For Christ sake! Hurt bad?" Boone knelt by him.

Jim's eyes came over slow and looked at Boone for a while. Then his mouth closed and one corner of it tried to turn up. His voice was drained down to nothing, almost. "Hoss," he said, as he might have whispered something to a woman, never moving his eyes from Boone's face. "Hoss."

"The equipment's gone, the horses, everything. And poor Zenon lies dead over there," Peabody put in.

"I'll fix that Red Horn!"

Jim's fingers touched Boone's sleeve. "Warn't him, Boone."

"Who, then?"
It took Jim a time to answer. "Young Piegans. Soldiers."

"Let it go. No time to talk now, Jim."

Jim's lips kept moving, letting the words out small and each by itself. "They didn't aim to raise hair. Horses, they was after, so as to make us turn back. Then Zenon fired-"

"No need to talk now. You got from now on to talk, Jim. And you, too, Peabody. Get a fire goin', there!" Boone pointed to the spot. "Easy, Jim." He opened the shirt to see the wound.

"Beauchamp, the coward, ran away," Peabody said while he cast around for wood. "I almost hope they caught him."

"Missed your lights, Jim. They did, now." Inside himself Boone was saying it was a mean wound. Inside, he felt empty and alone, knotted up by a fear he couldn't let show. He unwound a strip of blanket from his leg and tore it across and went to the stream and wet the two pieces. "Keep some blood in your carcass and you'll come sassy again, I'm thinkin'." He packed the pieces of blanket over the holes the ball had made.

Peabody trailed by, dragging a dead log. "I never got a shot," he said to Boone, as if he were cursing himself. "I never got my rifle from its case."

"Didn't figure you would, but shut up now and keep workin'. Sure Zenon's dead?"

"The ball passed through his head."

"Time we get Jim fixed up we'll lay some rocks over him to keep the wolves off. Get plenty of wood first. And get that damn fire started, hear?"

Peabody let the log drop. "I'll do anything I am able to do, except take orders as you are giving them." Boone saw that the small, square jaw was clamped tight. After he had spoken, Peabody picked up the log again.

Jim's eyes still swam on Boone's face. "Feisty," he said, letting the word trail off.

"I aim to build a lodge around you, Jim, out of sticks and such, and the fire right at the door to keep you warm. We been in worse fixes. Hold still, now, while I lift you."

Jim was lighter than a man would think, and smaller. It was the look in his eye and the smile on his face and something inside him that made him pass for a big-enough man.

Lifting him, Boone could see his heart working in his throat. It was such a little piece, from being alive to being under, just the heart stopping and the breath, and then only meat left. Just the weak heart stopping, and no more smart sayings afterwards and no more fun, and something gone forever.

When he had stretched him out, Boone went to the creek again to wet the pieces of blanket. If he could get the bleeding stopped, maybe the heart would keep beating and the breath going in and out.

With night nearing, the wind had eased. The sky was a deeper gray and lay closer than ever on the land. As Boone dipped the bandages, snow began to slant out of it. By the time he stepped back to Jim the flakes were falling thick all around, cutting off the sight of timber and mountains. It was as if the gray sky had come down and closed them in.
 

There was no end to the snow. It fell all night and the next day and the night and day after and eased off as if to give the wind a chance and then closed in again and fell for another night and day. It angled down, small-flaked and dry, piling high in a rough circle around the camping place that was kept down by the heat of the fire and the crunch of their feet and the work of their hands. It sifted out of a sky as dull as lead and smoked low along the land, stinging like shot against the face and all the time piling up, piling up, so that a hunter first shuffled through it and then waded, lifting his feet high, until finally he couldn't get his moccasins above the surface of it and had to plow his way. It rolled back in his tracks after he had passed, and the sky and wind went to work on what path was left as if be damned if anything would leave a mark on what they'd done. It smothered the creek and filled its bed and smoothed it over, leaving not even the voice of it to tell that it was there. And it kept falling. Off a little piece a man wouldn't see the camp. He wouldn't spot it, it was sunk so deep, except for the smoke blowing blue out of it and the shots that Peabody fired now and then, hoping to catch somebody's ear.

Boone slid down into the circle and met Peabody's eye and shook his head while he leaned his rifle against the tree that Jim's shelter was built against. The bright, questioning look in Peabody's eyes faded. Boone plugged the muzzle of his piece with a stick and fixed a piece of blanket over the drum and tube. "How's Jim?"

Peabody gave a nod, saying by it that Jim was still alive. The want of food had taken the puff out of Peabody's face. The cheekbones showed high and wide in it now, and the bone of the chin. His eyes were opener and they seemed to look straighter, saying more than before, as if a real man was coming out of the flesh.

Boone stooped and looked inside the shelter and saw that Jim was asleep. He lay on the pine bed Boone had cut, with Boone's capote over him. One hand lay out on the capote, looking thin and weak. The freckles on the back of it stood out, as if full of life while the rest of the hand was dying. Boone could see the coat rising small and quick as Jim breathed. He backed away and faced around. "Where's Beauchamp?"

"Gathering wood. At least, I told him to."

"Son of a bitch." Boone spoke without any real purpose, saying just what had come into his head at the thought of Beauchamp. Peabody nodded slowly as if thinking how the name fit. Then he said, "Amen." He let thought work in his mind some more. "I wonder you didn't kill him, Caudill, over the rabbit you snared."

Boone grunted, wondering himself, seeing Beauchamp snatch at the carcass that was meant for Jim alone, seeing him jerk back and hearing him whine as Boone smacked him with his open hand. Maybe it was just that he wasn't worth killing.

"I'll never forget the way he sneaked back after the Indians ran off our horses. Not if I live I won't." Peabody's eyes fixed off in space as if looking at that time again, at the fire and Jim lying by it hurt and Boone and Peabody setting up a shelter around him and the snow slanting thick in the dark. At first Boone had thought it was an animal coming up on them -a painter, maybe, or a bear out after his season- and he had laid hold on his rifle and brought it up while he watched. Then Beauchamp had called, "
Non! Non!
Me, Beauchamp, come." He shied into camp like a dog that feared the whip but feared the night more. He seemed to feel their silence and their eyes bearing on him as he squatted, warming himself over the fire. He tried a smile on them. "
Graces a Dieu!
Me live, you live." It didn't matter to him that Zenon was dead and Jim wounded. He made a man want to spit.

Peabody's eyes came back out of space as Boone lowered himself and put his feet to the fire. They sat quiet. There wasn't anything to do, now the day was passing, but to sit and keep warm and try to hold the mind off the thought of food. Out in the snow looking for sign, a man could forget his stomach once in a while, anyhow; but just sitting by the fire he couldn't. He could hear the wind passing close over his head and feel the snow sifting into the camp hole and his feet prickling as the frost left, and all the time hunger gnawed at his guts and hunger filled his mind.

Peabody said, "I think all Jim needs is food. The wound seems to be healing."

"I got snares set. Can't be that was the only rabbit."

Beauchamp came to the brink of the circle, carrying an armload of dead branches. He dropped them and was about to climb down to the fire until Peabody said, "More! Beauchamp, more!" He floundered off then without speaking. It wasn't often he talked any more, knowing how little they prized him.

"Wood gets to be more of a problem as time goes on," Peabody said. "We've got it pretty well cleaned up close around. We need an ax."

"Might as well wish the snow would melt so's we could get to the dead fall."

"I can think of even better things to wish for."

"I done hunted this place up and down and sideways. Never seen such a country. Looks like a man would find something."

"I ought to take my turn hunting. It isn't right, your going out day after day and using up the strength that's left you while I putter around camp."

"I told you afore, it's because I'm on to it where you ain't. You tend to Jim and keep Beauchamp busy on the wood, and that's enough."