Cheyenne Winter (13 page)

“I have never seen such a thing!” she whispered. “You must pray to her spirit first! She has given her fortune to you!”

“I don’t figure I go to make prayers to dumb animal spirits.”

“You must! I will!” She stood before the still body of the white buffalo and sang to it, her arms reaching out to it, saying things Brokenleg couldn’t grasp and didn’t care about anyway. It was all just Injun stuff. He stood there favoring his bum leg and let her sing, wondering if the cow was really dead or whether she’d rise and fight. Some buffler did. The heifer he’d dropped still lived, or at least she pawed air slowly.

The wagon horses snorted and stomped, not liking the brass smell of blood. At last Dust Devil collected herself from whatever world she’d entered and nodded. He nodded, and began cutting down the brisket, wanting the whole hide. They’d have to turn the white cover over to do it, maybe with the help of the saddler. Dust Devil hissed and muttered, saying incantations known only to herself. Big Medicine. He’d heard queersome things about Injuns and white buffler; now he was seeing some of it.

It took a long while to sever the white head — Dust Devil insisted they take that, too — and peel one side. Then he tied a line to the saddle of their spare horse, and with a lot of grunting and shoving, managed to turn the white cow over. Flies had gathered, and he fought away the green-bellied swarms as he tugged and sliced away the clinging underflesh. But last he pulled the sacred hide free. He laid it flat and scraped flesh away swiftly, more to keep it from stinking in the back of their wagon than any other reason. He lifted the heavy hide, but she careened away from it, not wanting to profane it. Only a great warrior could handle it, he remembered.

A while later, after he’d cut tongue and humpmeat from the downed heifer, they clambered up to the wagon seat and hawed the horses south, ever south. The sacred hide, stored in the shadow of the wagon sheet behind them, transformed Dust Devil, filling her with utter silence. No longer did she chatter or disapprove; no longer did she scorn whatever he did. Instead, she peered furtively at him as if he were a conqueror, a sky-spirit descended to earth. She sighed now and then, with a voice that announced she was in the presence of an ineffable mystery. She wasn’t Dust Devil at all.

It bothered him. Where had the spitfire gone? How could a miserable cream-colored buffler hide do that? Were they going to fight about that hide? It was worth sixty robes and he intended to get them for it; make up for all his loses, at least a little. And he’d trade it off right in her village, too, since the Cheyenne were crazier than most when it came to a medicine hide.

They rattled south, up long grades that sweat the horses, and down precipitous ones that pushed the wagon into the breeching of the wheelers and threatened to set them all careening downslope.

“You are a great warrior,” she said once, a week later. She’d hardly spoken for days, but kept glancing at him, measuring him for something. A burial shroud, he reckoned.

The Bighorns rose majestically, a wall of mountains to the west arresting the great plains. They forded the Crazy Woman with less trouble than he had supposed and continued southward. The mountains shrank into a towering ridge, less majestic than the lofty peaks to the north, and he knew they were entering Cheyenne country.

“You know where your people be?” he asked one dawn, after they had hugged each other under a robe that kept a heavy dew off them.

“You call it the Powder,” she said. “Up the Powder, high, where it is cool.”

“You sure?”

“It is always so in the Time When the Cherries Are Ripe.”

“How come we haven’t seen nobody?”

“It is the sacred robe.”

“You figure we got robe-magic?”

She frowned. “I hear you mocking. Be careful. You scorn the greatest power of all. A thousand Absaroka dogs could attack, and not an arrow or bullet would touch us. A great grizzly, full of bear-medicine, could come to us in the night — and touch nothing. But if you laugh at the white cow-spirit she will desert you.”

“If you say so,” he muttered. He reminded himself to keep his Hawken ready and not listen too long to such folderol. It could git him kilt.

They curled southwestward along with the western mountains, had trouble fording the soft-bottomed north fork of the Powder, and finally struck the Powder out upon arid plains. Some excitement grew in her, as if she intuitively knew they were close to her village. He let her guide him. The Powder ran through such a deep trough, full of obstacles, that he kept the wagon half a mile north to keep from getting hung up. The land had grown harsh and red and arid — not Fitzhugh’s favorite terrain — but Little Whirlwind glowed and sighed and peered back into the shadowed wagon box to assure herself that the folded white hide still rested there, the cynosure of a thousand flies.

They rattled westerly for two days, past the recently abandoned sites of villages where grass had vanished and bones lay. “Tsistsista,” she said softly.

Then, one afternoon full of puffball clouds and summer-bluster, they topped a long rise and peered into a verdant flat of tallgrass, with copses of cottonwoods poking up along the thin, glinting river. At the far end lay a goodly village, over a hundred amber lodges. Brokenleg tugged the lines, letting the sweat-whited horses rest while he and Dust Devil watched the busy valley. Off to the left, herding boys guarded a mass of horses. Along the river, small specks of humanity, squaws, were gathering roots, poking their digging sticks into hard clay.

The Cheyenne policing society, the Dog Soldiers, spotted the wagon and swarmed toward them now, while Dust Devil bounced on the seat, exclaiming, little bird cries rising in her throat. A fiercer bunch he never did see: bronzed warriors, their thick muscles glowing in the hot sun, riding hell-bent toward them, their war cries racketing through the peace.

They pulled up around the wagon, setting the drays into a frenzy, staring at their brother-by-marriage, the Bad Leg, and Little Whirlwind, beautiful daughter of a great medicine chief. She stood on the wagon seat, jabbering in their Cheyenne tongue, and then whirled into the wagon bed and withdrew the medicine hide. Warriors froze at the sight. She unfolded the stiff hide, staggering under it, until she had laid it out before them.

Something changed inside of them and Fitzhugh fathomed this was no longer a family reunion but a victory procession. He hawed the drays, clattered down the soft slope, and into the tawny village where yellow dogs whirled and brown children scampered, and people of all ages lined their route toward the chief’s lodge, the visitors announced by the town crier moments before.

It was all so exciting he almost forgot why he’d come — until he spotted Dust Devil’s sisters, Hide Skinning Woman, Sweet Smoke, and Elk Tail, dancing about and crying to Dust Devil. And the stern, smiling visage of his father-in-law, One Leg Eagle. Then he discovered he was suffocating.

Guy marveled at the caution of Ambrose Chatillon. A worn trace followed the river, the indentation of thousands of hoofs and travois poles, but the guide didn’t use it. He did not wish to leave the imprint of iron-shod hoofs to tempt anyone. Instead, they pursued a harder route along the base of the bluffs, riding over deltas and spines of land.

“We are less visible here, Monsieur Straus. And in a moment, we can ride up the bluffs, out of the valley, and lose ourselves in a crease of prairie.”

It made sense to Guy. His life was in this man’s hands. Alone, pilgrim that he was, he wouldn’t last long. The Creoles called such a person a
mangeur du lard,
or pork-eater, because such a one ate salt pork and pea soup, and came and went. He smiled at the inappropriateness of it. As the days slid by his rebellious body ceased to torment him; the torture of the saddle lessened — somewhat. But no man who ever lived climbed into his bedroll more eagerly than Guy each dusk.

Through the high summer days they rode from dawn until night trapped them, rotating horses, their progress relentless because Chatillon would have it so. Guy had heard of the vastness of the land, its emptiness, its aching distances that ended at horizons and mysteries, its lurking dangers. But knowing of it from conversation in St. Louis and experiencing it were two different things. Increasingly they spotted antelope, grazing in singles and pairs this time of year. In the winter they would collect into giant herds. Whitetail deer vanished and mule deer replaced them. Once Chatillon pointed quietly toward the shimmering, mysterious river. Guy strained to see, and finally beheld a herd of mustangs, their tails sweeping the ground, most of them duns.

Often the guide rode ahead, or ascended a spine of land that would give him a good vantage to observe what lay ahead. The ninth day out, not far from fort Pierre, he suddenly dropped his horse down the ridge, staying below the skyline, and motioned to Guy, who spurred his chestnut toward the guide, along with the packhorses. Their picket line jerked him almost out of the saddle.

“A village,” Chatillon said, steering them into a long coulee that slashed into the western prairie. They rode up it for a mile or so.

“Who?” Guy asked, when they paused to let the horses blow.

Chatillon shrugged. “When you don’t wish to be seen, monsieur, it doesn’t matter. Friends or enemies, they are all unpredictable. I would guess Yanton Sioux, or Yanktonai. But they could be Ponca or Pawnee or  . . . ” He shrugged again.

They followed the watercourse another two miles until it shallowed into a green crease in the browning prairie. Ambrose slid off his horse. “Hold him, monsieur. I will have a look.”

Guy took the reins while the guide crawled out of the crease and studied the surrounding country, his head barely above the vee of the swale. Gently he slid back down again.

“The village — it has vedettes, outriders. One is near,” he whispered. He slid his rifle from its leather saddle sheath. “But we will not shoot unless we have to. If I must, I will use this.” He tapped the grip of the knife sheathed at his belt. “And you, monsieur, must keep the horses silent.” He crabbed his way up the low slope again.

Guy didn’t know how to do that. He felt his pulse escalate, until his heart hammered in his chest. What folly, coming here! He waited while time crawled.

At last Chatillon slid down to Guy. “The vedette — Ponca I think — he turned toward the river. Perhaps we are safe. He will cross our tracks, though.”

He led Guy another mile or so westward across unbroken prairie and then swung north, paralleling the Missouri. Guy felt utterly naked out there, visible for miles. But the sight was breathtaking. Above him rose a bowl of sun-bleached blue, capping incredible distances. The grass here grew short and in bunches, and most of it had cured to a silvery green. They rode quietly across this emptiness, ever northwest, the ditch of the great river sometimes visible, a blue streak in the east or north. He thirsted but they had no water. Chatillon never stopped and skipped the usual nooning. The necks and withers of the horses turned black, and then white with caked sweat and dust.

Not until late in the day, when the sun lingered above the northern horizon, did Chatillon suddenly turn toward the river. Guy didn’t sleep at all that night and wrestled with visions of a tomahawk splitting his naked head in two. He remembered the Psalm, “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil,” and recited it in the fearsome dark. Had he permitted his sons to walk into this? This?

Two days later Chatillon led him into fort Pierre, a square stockade on the west bank of the Missouri, a key post of Chouteau and Company, trading largely with Sioux. Civilization! His heart gladdened at the sight. They walked quietly through a village, passing brown lodges, smoke-blackened at their tops, most of them with the lodge cover rolled partway up to permit summer breezes to sponge away the heat of midsummer. He eyed the Sioux as curiously as they eyed him, his encyclopedic memory drawing up the thousand images he’d heard in St. Louis. All that talk helped him now. He could identify the medicine tripods before the lodges, with their strange bundles dangling from them; the secret and sacred magic of their owner. He saw buffalo hides staked to earth for scraping, and buffalo meat cut into thin strips and hanging from racks until they became jerky. He saw men with swarthy diamond-shaped faces, wearing notched feathers in their hair, and knew the notches and number of feathers spoke of the coups they’d counted in battle.

At last they rode in, the inner gates swinging open mysteriously as they approached. And within stood a man he knew, Marcel Charbonne, the bourgeois here.

“I am not seeing this,” Charbonne announced.

“You are seeing it,” Guy retorted.

“Haw!” Charbonne roared, embracing Guy with an enormous mountain hug.

The beefy bourgeois led Guy and Ambrose toward his quarters while engages scurried to care for the guests’ horses. Guy eyed them with a frown, knowing he was more worried than he should be, and a post’s hospitality toward the opposition was never violated out here — because mutual survival depended on it.

Marcel poured cognac into three snifters and handed them to his guests. “Dust cutters,” he said. Guy coughed as always on the fiery stuff, but acknowledged that the dust was cut indeed.

Guy got down to business as soon as the social amenities permitted. “Marcel,” he began, “I imagine you’ve heard about my misfortune.”

Charbonne’s openness vanished, and caution filled his eyes. He nodded shortly.

“I’m not blaming the Company,” Guy continued. “Peter Sarpy gave me good reasons not to. But I think it’s in our mutual interest — your interest,
mon ami
— to solve this mystery. Have you any clues?”

Reluctantly, Charbonne shook his head.

Guy realized the man’s attitude had changed swiftly. Sheer wariness had replaced the affable greeting. “Who got off
The Trapper
here, Marcel?”

Charbonne seemed to have trouble remembering, so Guy jogged his memory a bit. “I have Captain Sire’s list of American Fur engages on board. Emile Poudrier, Raul Raffin, Pascal Dorion, Louis Labone, and Alexis Dufond.”