The Shirt On His Back (29 page)

According to
everyone in the camp, from the youngest engages on up to Jim Bridger, nobody -
even set afoot without weapons
would starve in the mountains in summer. Any number of the
mountaineers could tell of surviving such situations even if they were being
chased by Indians. By noon, January had come to the conclusion that these men
were either lying, or had arrived at some more favorable deal with God than he
had despite years of going to confession. 'I think the trick is, that you have
to not mind eating bugs and carrion,' offered Hannibal as they made a careful -
and rather fruitless - search around the feet of every lodgepole pine at the
timberline, when they reached it, and found no cone that had not been
thoroughly looted of its minuscule nourishment by squirrels.

'As long as we
don't end up carrion ourselves,' said January, 'I'll be happy.'

Where the trees
began, high up the tumbled land around the feet of the true mountains, the
river was visible for miles upstream. January could see no sign of habitation.
A few miles to the north of them the river bent eastward around a knee of
hills; water spread by last night's rise glistened in a wide bottomland where a
multitude of streams came together.

'If the Omaha
are following us down the river,' he said after a time, 'we've got a head start
on them today, anyway. We should be able to get some fish, there where the
river's spread.'

'At the moment,'
sighed Hannibal as he climbed stiffly to his feet, 'bugs and carrion sound very
good.'

During the
course of the afternoon, January had cause to be grateful for his own interest
in how other men made their livings, and for the loquacity of the mountaineers
in sharing the tales of their survival. As they came down to the pools left by
the flood, he recognized both cattails and camas, which had edible - if not
particularly appetizing - roots, and, though it was early in the year, several
varieties of berry. He cut a sapling and sharpened it to a spear, but when they
reached the first of the shallow river-branches, he and Hannibal took the precaution
of damming the moving water with rocks before going after the fish. They caught
four, mostly by hitting them with sticks or simply scooping them up on to the
bank, before a couple of bears ambled down out of the woods to investigate the
new fishing-spot.

'Aren't you
going to go after one of them with your bowie? Kit Carson would.'

'You go to
hell.'

They bore their
catch back up to the treeline. In the last of the daylight, January set as many
snares as he could manufacture from the string in his pockets.

'Will this
help?' Hannibal drew from his coat pocket a long, crumpled strip of black silk.

'What is it?'

'Pia was wearing
it as a sash,' said the fiddler. 'She said Moccasin Woman gave it to her. After
reading Bodenschatz
pere's
letter to you - during which we were so rudely interrupted - I intended to
visit the Delaware camp and ask her where she came by it, but I suspect it
belonged to the old man. That it was one of the bindings used to tie the splint
on to his leg.'

'That being the
case,' said January, 'it must have been Moccasin Woman who got his shirt off
him. Nice rolled hem,' he added, examining the silk. 'Tiny and strong.' With
his knife he slit the narrow roll of the hem free of the rest of the cravat,
fashioned three snares out of it - the delicate cord it yielded was about ten
feet long, all around both sides of the cravat
and tried to
recall everything Robbie Prideaux had said about where to set snares and how to
make sure their intended victims
rabbits and ground squirrels - didn't catch human scent.

Only when the
sun went behind the mountains did January
light a fire,
trusting the trees to disperse what smoke might be visible. He spitted the
fish, emptied his pockets of the remaining cama bulbs and buried them in the
coals.

On the higher
hills, not far away, wolves howled.

Closer to, in
the darkness among the thin-growing trees, gold eyes flashed - something small,
a fox or a marten - then abruptly bolted away.

January realized
that the night-chirping of the birds had silenced.

The thin woods
were utterly still.

The
fire was tiny -
they couldn't have seen
it
...

Everything in
him was shouting:
but they did .
. .

Don't we even
get to eat our fish?
But even as his soul cried out in
protest, cold readiness jolted in his veins. He nudged Hannibal's foot with his
own, touched his finger to his lips - saw the other man's eyes widen with an
unspoken:
oh, Jesus . . .

Too soon to be
the Omaha, unless they'd ridden like the wind and known exactly where to search
for them. Which meant the Blackfeet.

His hand slipped
down to his spear, and he tried to determine from which direction the attack
would come.

'Best you douse
that fire, Maestro,' said a soft voice from the darkness. 'Iron Heart an' his
braves is less'n three miles away.

At some point
about three-quarters of the way between noon and sunset, January - lying flat
beneath the carcass of a deadfall pine-tree, with brush piled up before him so
that he couldn't even see whether he was in danger or not - whiled away the
time by envisioning a debate between the greatest orators he could think of, as
to whether the worst part of this situation was hunger, thirst, not being able
to piss, or not being able to move. The Roman Cicero, arguing for the last
contention, eventually won, but the poet and preacher John Donne (sitting in
the imaginary audience) pointed out that the advantage in January's situation
lay that in being vexed with all four conditions, he must be considered
blessed in part by having one discomfort displace the other three in the
forefront of his consciousness, thus giving him three-quarters relief from
complete misery. The fact that the tree under which January had squeezed his
body had been dead for a considerable time, and had become a veritable
apartment-house for grubs, wood beetles, centipedes, ants and spiders of all
species did not improve either the situation or January's mood.

For fourteen
long hours, the world consisted of the green light that came in through the
heaped brush, the smell of dirt and rotting wood, the calls of birds in the
trees around him - ravens, jays, wrens and thrushes - and the consciousness of
how close he was to a lingering death by torture.

Those
things, and his memories and thoughts.
I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself
a king of infinite space
. . .

He ran through
everything that he remembered of
Hamlet,
of
Dante's
Inferno,
of
The Rape of the Lock.
He mentally
played each piece of music he had mastered throughout his lifetime: Mozart,
Beethoven, ballets, waltzes, operas. He turned over his memories of Rose:
walking beside him with her gray cloak belling out in the moist, spooky winds
of summer storms; sitting on the gallery in the stillness of twilight; lying in
his arms with her light-brown hair a silken river on the pillow. He tried to
deduce the species and natures of everything that he could feel walking across
the back of his neck of up and down his arms. He wondered if the patriarch
Joshua had returned to the earth again and had made the sun stand still in the
heavens, and if so, why?

Twice bears came
close enough to the log for him to see their claws through the thin rim of
space beneath one of the berry bushes that Shaw had thrust in over January to
conceal him; close enough for him to smell the rank feral mustiness of their
coats. Once - infinitely more terrifying - he heard the stealthy pad of
moccasined feet, and the murmurs of voices speaking some Indian tongue.

Hunger, thirst
and everything else had vanished, consumed in a white blaze of fear . . .

And returned
within an hour, grinding and tortuous as ever.

Several times,
he slept. From the last such nap he woke to find the light had faded, and the
whole world breathed of pine and the river. As soon as he judged it dark enough,
he moved the brush aside, with arms so stiff he could barely work them, and
crawled out, used a broken branch to dig a hole to piss into, and was just
covering the evidence when Shaw whispered from the gloom, 'Maestro?'

'Here.' Keeping
his rifle within instant grabbing range, he slithered out of his shirt, shook
out whatever it was that had been crawling around his skin for the past few
hours
it
was too dark to see what they were - then moved toward Shaw's voice. Only then
did he see him in the filtered moonlight. 'I never asked you: where are we?
How close to the camp?'

"Bout
twelve miles. We need to get ourselves acrost the New Fork River, then over the
ridge to the Green again an across it. From there it'll be about eight miles
'til we get to the first of the camps. We can probably make it by morning if
we're lucky. You tol'able, Sefton?' he added, for they had reached the rocks in
which Hannibal had been cached, and January made out the pale shape of the
fiddler's face against the shadows of the boulders.

January added -
from Hamlet - '
Stand and unfold
yourself
and Hannibal got to his feet, holding on to the rocks behind
him for support.

'Very funny.
You come most pleasantly upon your hour . . .
You
just missed the rattlesnakes. Three of them crawled into my hiding place with
me - to get out of the sun, I presume
and just left at
sundown. I've spent better days.'

'If you'd struck
at 'em, or made a noise,' remarked Shaw, 'you'd've spent a worse one.'

Hannibal started
to reply, then broke off to cough, pressing one hand to his mouth and the other
to his side in a vain attempt to still the sound. Even stifled, it sounded as
if his lungs were being sawn in half. 'I'm all right,' he said, as soon as he
could speak. 'A trifling indisposition only,
,
as Aristotle
put it. Nothing that food, rest and immoderate quantities of opiates would not
instantly cure. The former two can be found in the camp and will suffice.'

With Shaw in the
lead, they made their way through the scattered timber that cloaked the foot
slopes of a tall butte, three shadows in the deeps of the night. In the hills
to the east January could hear the howling of packs of wolves, fat with
summertime and no great danger to men. Pallid moonlight sketched the shapes of
deer in the open ground, trotting noiselessly down toward the valley below; of
rabbits in such numbers that all the ground among the bunches of grass seemed
alive. Water gleamed in the valley, and as they descended the side of the butte
January could both hear and smell it, exquisite after a day of thirst and
sharing sips from Shaw's water bottle at long intervals since sundown. From his
own weariness he could only guess at Hannibal's, the fiddler lagging further
and further behind and their progress slowed by frequent stops to let him catch
up and rest. With these Shaw was infinitely patient, only sitting a little
distance from the two of them and listening to the night with the wariness of a
beast. Once January went over to him and whispered, 'Are we all right?' and the
Kentuckian shook his head.

'We need to keep
movin'.' He glanced back at Hannibal, sitting with his head between his knees.
'Let him rest now,' he added softly. 'He's gonna need his strength later.'

There was less
moonlight beneath the trees. In addition to Clarke's rifle, January carried the
sharpened spear he'd cut, and he used it as a probe and a walking stick, to
test the ground before him and to balance as they descended toward the water.
By the sound of it, the New Fork River was very high. The thought that they
might get swept by the current back down to the Green again, and thence
downstream and lose all the ground they had gained, brought him a sense of
infinite weariness and futility.

'Ford's about a
mile up,' Shaw whispered. 'They'll be watchin'. River goes over a rim of rocks
a mile upstream of
that
,
an' that's where we're makin' for. But it's no ford, so it's gonna be rough.'

It was. The
river had gone down some, leaving the margin of the water - what in Louisiana
was called a batture - strewn with flotsam, from small branches up to
full-sized trees. Shaw and January found a young lodgepole pine about twenty
feet long and as thick through as a man's doubled fists. It was all the three
men could do to lug it to the river. Thrusting it ahead of them, they clung to
the upstream side of the rocks, snow- melt water pouring over and around them,
without the violence of the original rise but with terrifying strength. The
longest gap between any two of the rocks was about twelve feet; with the force
of the water holding the log against the rocks, it was possible to cross, but
every second January was positive that one end or the other was going to slip
and let him be swept away. Exhausted and famished, he knew his chances of
getting out of the river again, even if he managed to cling to the log, would
be nil.

The moon was
low, when Hannibal and Shaw reached down from the bank to drag January - who
was the last on the log crossings - up to shore. 'I do not ever,' he whispered,
shivering so much that he could barely get the words out, 'want to have to do
something like that again.'

'Don't say
that,' advised Shaw, "til you knows what the alternative is.' He was
already at work screwing the gun worm down the barrel of his Hawken to draw the
bullet and charge, swiftly breaking down the lock to dry it and replace the
soaked powder.

'And men do
this, year in and year out, summer and winter,' said January, 'for a hundred
and fifty dollars a year?' He reached for his gun to do the same, then let the
weapon slip from his grip and sat heavily on one of the flat boulders on the
bank, his hands momentarily too shaky to continue.

'Like I said -'
Shaw dug ball and patch from his pouch, poured powder from the horn, which he'd
carried wrapped in his shirt and tied around his head to keep it dry - 'all
depends on what you'd be lookin' at instead. Blacksmithin' in some town in
Missouri? Workin' a factory for thirty cents a week in Massachusetts? Or in
your case—'

Shots cracked
from the dark of the trees and January dropped behind the rock on which he'd
been sitting. Hannibal scrambled down beside him -
God damn it wet powder!
- and the next
second Indians broke from the trees, raced across the narrow band of riverside
pebbles. January whipped his knife from his belt, made a dash for the river,
and this time didn't make it.

Shaw had his
bullet rammed home and got off one shot before the Omahas overwhelmed them.