The Shirt On His Back (3 page)
Read The Shirt On His Back Online
Authors: Barbara Hambly
The
pack-train passed the camp of the American Fur Company, a big store-markee with
its sides up, and another - sides down - with a makeshift bar on trestles
across the front and a gray- coated man with the blue eyes of a defrocked angel
pouring drinks. Trappers and engages clustered along the bar and around the
half-dozen Mexican girls who lounged on rough- built benches along the front of
the tent.
'Hey,
Veinte-y-Cinco!' yelled Clopard, who had ridden with the train from Fort Ivy,
'you wait right there 'til we get set! 1 got a little somethin' for you!'
The
skinny whore gave him a dazzling, gap-toothed grin, 'Hey,
minino,
I remember how little it is—'
At
the female voice Hannibal looked up, roused from his nightmare of
barely-suppressed panic, and murmured,
"Malo me
Galatea petit, lascivia puella . .
.' a classical allusion that January hoped wasn't going to spell trouble.
The
American Fur Company was making a good showing: in addition to a separate liquor
tent, they had what amounted to a full-scale dry-goods store set up and half a
dozen canvas shelters - watched over by engages - to store the furs that their
trappers under contract had brought in already. These were not traded for by
weight, but simply handed over by the mountaineers in exchange for their pay,
as if the land they trapped through was the AFC's private farm, and they,
laborers in the vineyard. January couldn't help wondering if the Mexican girls
were also on the Company payroll.
A
quarter mile further upriver, Shaw drew rein before a small store-tent and a
couple of deer-hide shelters, which marked the camp of Gil Wallach, a
former-mountaineer turned trader. The little black-haired bantam came from
around the store's counter and held out his hand to Shaw as he dismounted: 'Tom
wrote me you'd be heading up the train, Abe. I surely am sorry about Johnny.'
Shaw
made a motion with his hand, as if to brush the name away like a cobweb. 'Ty
Farrell in the camp? Tom had a message for him.'
Wallach
tilted his head a little, as if he smelled trouble even in this simple request.
Ty had been a clerk at Fort Ivy.
He'll know Boden,
Tom had said, in the firelit office that first night at the fort.
They shared the room above this
one, up 'til last Fall. He knows him, better'n any man at this fort: how he
moves, how he talks, what he'd look like if he shaved off his beard . . . An'
he hates him. He won't go cryin' it around, like the engages will, if they
learn you 're on Boden's trail
.
Like
everyone else, Wallach would have heard that Johnny Shaw had been killed by the
Blackfoot. Like everyone else, he seemed to accept that naturally the middle
brother would leave his position as a Lieutenant of the New Orleans City
Guards, to take up his junior's responsibility of getting the supply-train up
to the Green River. But Wallach had been a trapper, thought January.
He can smell blood in the wind.
'Ty's
camped about halfway to Hudson's Bay.' Meaning, January assumed, not the actual
arctic bay, but the handsome agglomeration of tents that he could see another
half-mile up the trail on the far side of Horse Creek, ringed with the tipis of
its Indian allies. The British Hudson's Bay Company had established the fur
trade with the Indians long before the Americans had pushed their way to the
north, and ruled the trade from the Yellowstone to the Pacific.
'He's
fightin' shy of me,' Wallach continued wryly. 'Seein' as how he took an' sold
all his plews to that snake Titus that's runnin' the AFC camp here this year,
without a word about the salary we paid him or the money he owes us. He may
take some lookin' for.'
Shaw
said, 'Consarn,' in a mild voice and commenced unloading the mules.
The
Ivy and Wallach markee had been pitched next to one of those great granite
boulders that littered the riverbank, to discourage canvas-slitters in a
country where theft from one's enemies was a virtue among the tribes. January
helped haul the stores inside, and he saw that two sides of the tent were
further fortified with stacked packsaddles. Hannibal, a little shakily, carried
his and January's saddlebags down to an open spot in the cottonwoods just below
the store, where a shelter could be set up behind a screening thicket of
rabbitbush.
The
fiddler had attached himself to the expedition rather than endure alone the
black depressions and attacks of unreasoning panic that still plagued him,
though his last dose of opium had been the previous November, and had made
himself useful as a sort of valet to his companions. For his part, January was
grateful he'd done so of his own accord. After a winter of walking the French
Town 'til dawn to keep his friend from throwing himself into the river, he
still — at Easter — hadn't been entirely certain that he would return from a
six-month journey to find Hannibal still alive.
'That
a fiddle I see in your friend's pack, pilgrim?' A red- bearded trapper loafed
over from his own nearby camp to help with the unloading.
‘
Dieu,
it's been years since I heard fiddle music! You tell your friend from every man
in this camp, he's got only to put his hat down outside Mick Seaholly's -' he
waved toward the AFC camp with its various accommodations - 'an' he'll have a
stack of trade-plews higher'n his knee inside an afternoon. Name's Prideaux,'
he added, offering his hand as soon as he and January had set down their
respective bales of shirts and trade-beads inside the markee. 'Robespierre-
Republique Prideaux.'
'Ben
January.'
'Not
up here before, I think?'
'First
time,' said January, liking the man's friendliness. They returned to the mules,
pulling buffalo-hide apishamores from the animals' backs and stacking them in
the back of the tent.
'Clerk?'
Prideaux took in at a glance January's obviously store-bought clothing: calico
shirt, coarse wool trousers, battered corduroy roundabout. With a sly grin, the
mountaineer added, 'Or you care to try your hand at huntin'?'
'If
ever I lose my faith in humankind,' returned January solemnly, 'and wish to put
a period to my existence, I'll do so by taking an oath to eat only what I can shoot,'
and Prideaux crowed with laughter.
'Never
say die, hoss! You come out with me tomorrow mornin' - what kind of rifle you
got? A Barnett? Them's first- class guns . . . I'll have you shootin' the pips
outta playin' cards at three hundred yards by sundown, see if I don't! Waugh!
Why, sure as there's meat runnin', I once shot a bobcat as it leaped out of a
tree straight behind me, on a pitch-dark night, aimin' only by the sound of its
cry—'
'Maestro—'
Shaw appeared around the corner of the tent, quiet as the smallpox in his
weathered scarecrow clothing, his long Kentucky rifle in his hand. There was
another on his back - Mary and Martha, he had named them - and a knife at his
belt; he looked as if he had been a part of this world for years. 'Looks like I
need to go out an' hunt Ty Farrell, as he ain't like to come around here
anytime soon.'
'Check
for him at Seaholly's, hoss,' advised Prideaux cheerfully. 'I hear Edwin Titus
- that sourpuss Controller the Company's put in charge this year - hired him on
to the AFC for a hundred-fifty a year, plus
seven-fifty a
pound
for his
plews! Waugh! For that kinda wampum, he's gonna be plowin' through them girls
like a bull buffalo through the prickly pears. I never did see a child go for
the female of the species like Ty, 'ceptin' for a sergeant of the marines I
knowed down on the Purgatoire . . .'
'I'll
keep the store,' offered January.
'Obliged.'
Shaw looked for a moment as if he might have said something else - asked
Prideaux, perhaps, after Mr Hepplewhite, or queried for rumors about the
unspecified trouble that Johnny had thought serious enough to risk his life
pursuing. But January guessed how word of anything would fly from man to man in
a camp where there was nothing really much to do but trade, get drunk, copulate
and talk. Even the relatively short journey from Fort Ivy to the Green River
had brought home to him how vast was this land beyond the frontier, how endless
these mountains and how right Tom Shaw had been:
only this
one
chance to find him in that
one
place.
He'd
also learned that trappers, engages, and traders - whose survival depended on
observing the tiniest details of their surroundings - would gossip about
anything.
Only
in silence lay any hope of success. Silence, and Ty Farrell's willingness to play
Judas.
You
can kill anythin' with one shot. I seen you do
it
...
January
had, too.
Shaw
nodded his thanks, then set off down the trail afoot, in quest of his prey.
The
goods in the tent hadn't even been completely arranged - traps hung from the
frame Clopard knocked together from cottonwood poles, twisted brown plugs of
'Missouri manufactured' set out on a blanket-draped trestle- table, skeins of
trade-beads dangling temptingly from the inner frame of the markee - when
others besides Robespierre- Republique Prideaux came to shop. Ivy and Wallach
employed about six trappers full-time and some fifty engages, who for a hundred
dollars a year ranged the streams and rivers of the wilderness that stretched
from the Missouri to the Pacific hunting beaver. This wage was paid in credit,
and they spent this - and more besides - in the company tent. But the rendezvous
camp also included independents, who had had enough money to outfit themselves
and sold their skins to one company or another by the pound. These were the men
who came to see what Gil Wallach was offering, and what he wanted for his
wares.
And,
they came to talk. Inside that first hour, January discovered that the thing
the trappers wanted most to do at rendezvous - besides get blue-blind drunk and
roger their brains out at Mick Seaholly's liquor tent in the AFC camp - was to
talk. To tell tall stories. To trumpet their pristinely uninformed opinions
about what President Van Buren ('It is Van Buren, ain't it, now?') should be
doing to fix things back in the States. To brag of their exploits in the
mountains, in the deserts, on roaring rivers in flood or of how they'd
triumphed over a whole encampment of Crow Indians in the competitive swallowing
of raw buffalo entrails, waugh!
(Waugh indeed
, reflected January . . .)
To
hear their own voices - and the voices of others like themselves - after eleven
months of hunting prey that would flee at the sound of an indrawn breath and
leave them hungry or at least beaver-less that day.
Fortunately,
it was one of January's greatest pleasures to hear people who knew what they
were talking about talk about their work. Inside that first hour at the store
tent, he heard endless comparisons of the relative merits of French and British
gunpowder, discussions of the proper ways of dealing with Mexican authorities
if you happened to find yourself a little farther south than you'd counted on,
discourses on how to locate water in the arid stretches that lay between the
western mountains, or where the beaver could still be found as thick and
populous as they'd been ten years ago. ('Say, Prideaux, is it true that Cree
squaw of Clem Groot's showed Groot where there's a secret valley where the
beaver's the size of baby bears? You should see the pelts Groot brought in . .
.')
Indians
came as well. As a child, January had played with the children of the local
Houmas and Natchez bands, who occasionally camped on his master's land, but
even then he'd known that they were only the broken remnant of the people they
once had been. Since crossing the frontier, he had found himself in the world
of the Indians, where the tribes and nations were still strong. Shaw's little
party had travelled from Independence along the Platte with a trading caravan
bound for Santa Fe, for protection against the Pawnee, who still held sway on
those endless grasslands, and here at the rendezvous a dozen tribes and peoples
were represented: Crows and Snakes keeping company mostly with the trappers who
worked for the AFC, Flatheads and Nez Perce camped around the Hudson's Bay
tents, alliances mirroring the ancestral enmities of the plains. There were
Shoshone and Mandan, Sioux and Omaha. There was even a bunch of Delaware
Indians, who had fled the ruin of their people on the east coast two
generations ago, to take up a sort of vassalage with the Company as scouts -
'I'll take you down there tomorrow, hoss, they got a squaw does nuthin' but sew
moccasins, an' she can fix you up a new pair for fifty cents in twenty minutes
. . .'
January
had filled pages of Rose's notebook with jottings of their characteristic
designs of war shirts or tipis, and with unsifted gossip about this tribe or
that. Despite the fact that it was, as January well knew, completely illegal
for white men to sell liquor to any Indian, when the tall Crow in their beaded
deerskin shirts came with their packs of close-folded beaver skins, Gil Wallach
shared several tin cups of watered-down forty-rod with them before negotiations
began as to price. When they came into the store tent later - with the
variously- colored 'plew' sticks that represented credit for pelts - January
was given to understand that a water bottle filled with liquor was to be
quietly set out behind the tent for them as part of the deal.