Cheyenne Winter (16 page)

Fort Clark, near the Mandan and Hidatsa villages, rose upon them suddenly one twilight, and its factor, American Fur Company veteran James Kipp, welcomed them warmly and immediately put one of his gifted Mandan women to work on a pair of boots for Guy, actually moccasins with buffalo bullhide soles. Smallpox had demolished the Mandans and weakened the Hidatsas, but the post still prospered as a trading center for northern Sioux and their close cousins the Assiniboin.

“I’ve been expecting you,” said Kipp over some real Missouri whiskey that evening. “That’s a shame, what happened at Bellevue.”

“Expecting me?”

“I got word.”

Guy couldn’t fathom how Kipp could have gotten word. The resources of the giant company were phenomenal, he thought. “Peter Sarpy persuaded me it wasn’t anything the company would do,” Guy said, cautiously. “He thought it might be an engage, someone like that.”

Kipp poked a finger at Guy and lifted a scottish brow. “I’ll say flatly it wasn’t the company. That’s one area where we let sleeping dogs lie. This whole thing — your license hearings — threatens us, you know.”

Guy knew. “I lost my list of AFC engages aboard
The Trapper
, but I know the one I’m interested in. Raffin. Raul Raffin.” Guy said no more, letting the name sink into the factor’s thoughts.

“Raffin,” Kipp muttered. “A good beaver man. Free trapper. Sold his plews to American Fur usually. Got to the last four or five rendezvous over to the Pogo Agie and around there.”

That didn’t help Guy any. “Our friend at Fort Pierre, Marcel Charbonne, says he got off there — and vanished.”

“So I’ve heard. He was to go up to Union; Culbertson’s man.”

“Charbonne tells me Raffin knew Fitzhugh; he and Raffin were rivals for Little Whirlwind. Thinks maybe Raffin headed west, toward the Cheyenne villages from there.”

“I’ve heard the story,” Kipp said. “Raffin’s a moody one. Big, powerful, dark-spirited. You have any notion why he might have done it?”

Guy didn’t, really. “Hurt my partner, I suppose. Drive him out of the upper Missouri. Who knows? Malice? Revenge? Ah, Mr. Kipp — is he capable of planing something so artful as stashing the spirits in the hold and all the rest?”

Kipp nodded. “He’s bright. He’s cunning. We never trusted him much — he’s got some sort of dark life of his own we spotted. We’ve never given him responsibility, even after all these years as an engage. But Cadet keeps him on.”

“What do you make of it, Mr. Kipp?”

“Ambition, Mr. Straus. Ambition.”

Dust Devil watched knowingly as her man traded everything in his wagon for over three hundred robes. Good Tsistsista robes, too, softly tanned. Hadn’t she told him it would be so? Why had he resisted so much? He lacked the wisdom of the People, that’s why. She couldn’t fathom white men, who had so much things-medicine and yet knew nothing.

In the middle of the day, that other white man in the village, Raffin, strolled up to the wagon where her man was trading.

“I thought I saw you,” said Brokenleg between trades.

“I am here,” Raffin agreed.

“Workin’ for the Company.”

“Maybe, maybe not, Brokenleg. I am a free man. I am looking for a good life,
oui?”

He grinned but the corners of his mouth turned down. She had known him for years; and so had her man. They had trapped beaver, seen each other once a year at the rendezvous. He was a great, square man, like a black bear, with a wiry black beard and sad brown eyes that looked like two wounds. He had come to the village in the days when Brokenleg and Jamie Dance had come, and always with the soft, hungry look in his brown eyes. Hungry for her most of all; she sensed it. But hungry for any Cheyenne maid who wore the rope. The hungry look left his eyes when he gazed at a women with a lodge and man of her own.

She hadn’t warmed to him. He had a darkness of soul; his spirit-medicine came from a creature of the earth or the cave. Now he made her uneasy again.

“Odd place to come,” Fitzhugh said, shortly. He turned to his trading again, looking over a glossy split robe brought by old Never Run Woman.

Raffin lingered, puffing on a clay pipe, his gaze missing nothing, almost as if he were calculating Fitzhugh’s profits. Her man had never liked him much either. No one did. She remembered that this Raffin had often come to the village alone, left alone, his business private and mysterious.

Still, he seemed harmless enough. But she noticed that Fitzhugh peered furtively at Raffin between trades, and sometimes during trades, as if to fathom Raffin’s business there in the village of White Wolf. And occasionally Fitzhugh’s blue-eyed squint flicked toward her, and she realized Raffin had been studying her.

Later she found out he’d been in the village almost a month, doing ho harm, greeting everyone respectfully, bringing in a lot of game and giving it away. He was a great hunter, people told her. And he spoke the tongue of the People perfectly — much better than Brokenleg, they added slyly. He spoke many tongues of many Peoples, they added. He had made himself welcome, and most of the village women were sure he wanted a Tsistsista wife. They could see it in his furtive glances from those wounded eyes.

Fitzhugh traded away everything by mid-afternoon, and spent the rest of the day sorting robes, folding them and storing them in the big wagon while Raffin watched silently, puffing that pipe. Fitzhugh struck an agreement with Chief White Wolf, too: late in the Moon, When the Water Begins to Freeze on the Streams, he would be at the Greasy Grass with a wagon to trade agin; and later, during the winter moons, he would come to their village on the Powder River to trade once more. Raffin listened intently. Wherever her man went, Raffin seemed to appear as if by accident.

She shrugged. It was nothing. This Raffin was nothing to her. Nothing. She eyed her sisters, who stood about shyly, strangers to the man they’d been wed to. Now that was a triumph, she thought. At last she wouldn’t be alone in that post with only white men around, slaving. Her sisters would slave, too, she thought acidly. But at least she’d have company: Suhtai company, speaking the tongue of the People all day. It was good.

By agreement, they played a good Tsistsista joke on him that second night. They all settled into their pallets in the darkness, and none came to him; none took off her rope. He hardly knew what to do, all four wives there in the close dark, and he on his pallet, tossing and turning and muttering and not knowing what to do, or perhaps too embarrassed to do it. When Sun returned at last, and brown light filtered through the cowhide, they rose from their separate pallets, smiled at him, and vanished form the lodge.

She grinned. “See what a great blanket chief you are,” she taunted. He stared at her, dark hollows under his eyes, teeth gritted. “Way I want it,” he said, unconvincingly. “I hitched up with you.”

Maybe, she thought. But that would change when Sweet Smoke or Elk Tail pulled her dress over her shoulders some time soon. She giggled again. It would be fun to torment the white man. Four young, beautiful Suhtai women were more than a match for him. And they’d be merciless.

They rolled north that morning, and the parting filled her with sighs and foreboding, a certain melancholy she always felt when she left the People. Her parents watched them go, a large part of their family leaving with the white man. One Leg Eagle had daubed his face with white clay, a mourning face, but Antelope smiled. The Dog Soldiers gave them honorary escort for several miles down the river and then turned away with a parting shout. Some of them brandished fine new Leman trade rifles, which pleased her. She wanted all the trade rifles to go to her People, to use against their enemies, the Absaroka especially. She hated it when Fitzhugh traded one to the Absarokas. It was like betraying her.

They traveled under a rare summer overcast, unseasonable skies that troubled her. No one else seemed to notice. Her sisters walked beside the wagon or rode shyly and silently beside Fitzhugh, making no talk. It didn’t occur to him to teach them English as the wagon creaked and rattled over trackless land. He was acting strange. Instead of being her lion, with hair the color of autumn leaves, he had pulled into himself. She exulted. Four Suhtai wives were too much for any man! Especially three at once!

They made good time because the horses were friskier under the heavy sky, and by dusk they’d gone a long way from her village. Fitzhugh chose a good spot, a tallgrass meadow beside the river with plenty of cottonwoods and brush nearby. While he wrestled collars and hames, bellybands and breeching from six unruly horses, Hide Skinning Woman gathered dry wood, Elk Tail prepared a haunch of cow meat they brought from the village, and Sweet Smoke took a digging stick and walked the riverbank for breadroot, wild onions, and greens. She felt a chill breeze lift in the twilight. The days weren’t as long as before, and at night a good soft robe was welcome.

They ate buffalo tongue and root stew, and swiftly cleaned up. They had no lodge but they could crowd into the covered wagon if it rained. Her man looked tired and a little petulant but they would tease him again tonight. Let him wait! Let him lie there, thinking about all four of them! It would be fun. They poured water on the fire until its orange eye dimmed and died and the deep darkness engulfed them. Darkness was good; the hiding time. In darkness lay safety.

But she didn’t like the night, a black one because of the overcast. She thought of going to him and climbing into his robe and pressing her loins to his, but she didn’t. That would spoil everything. Let him suffer. It was such a good joke that she’d even make a Tsistsista husband suffer. But it was not a good night, and she realized, crossly, that she suffered, too. The night spirits and dead spirits kept her eyes open. She could see them everywhere. She didn’t really want to share Brokenleg, not even with her sisters. She thought angrily that Brokenleg should have slaves.

She awoke with a start at dawn and saw at once that it was too late. Hovering in the murky light, hardly visible, were many warriors, twice times the fingers of both hands. She could not imagine who they were or what they might do. Her heart raced; her stomach knotted. Her man sat upright knowing he’d been caught. Her sisters were rousing themselves. She peered hard, trying to see, trying to know who these dogs were. Enemies of the People. So many. Some with drawn bows, others with rifles. They wore little: loincloths, moccasins, medicine bundles at their breast. She did not see war paint. No great chevrons of white or ochre on cheeks.

Her man said nothing, keeping his hands carefully away from the rusted Hawken near his robe. One of the warriors spoke to another, and she knew instantly. Arapaho! Friends of the Tsistsistas! They could understand each other; her tongue and theirs weren’t so far apart.

“Friends, we are Tsistsistas,” she said.

But none replied. Instead, several sprang into the blackness of the wagon and began pitching out robes. Others trotted away and returned with the picketed drays and the saddler. Two pulled out knives and cut loose the wagon sheet and began hacking at it.

Even as light thickened and color seeped into the world, the Araphoes loaded prime robes into the wagon sheeting, making packs which they anchored on the horses by using pieces of harness, the bellyband and breeching in particular.

“You reckon on takin’ them robes?” Fitzhugh asked in English.

They didn’t reply but hastened at their task until they had the robes bundled and spread over the seven horses, burdening them until they could barely stand.

Then a powerfully built warrior, with war scars puckering his side and arm, stalked toward Brokenleg, picked up the Hawken, pulled the cap off it, and set it down a few yards distant.

“You workin’ for the Company?”

The headman’s expression didn’t change.

“You be working for the Company,” Fitzhugh concluded. “I got me a picture of your face in my mind, and I ain’t gonna forget it. Someday — maybe tomorrer — I’m coming, I’m coming. I’ll bring ye to medicine.”

The headman smiled faintly. His rifle never wavered.

Then the Araphoes trotted off, vanishing in the morning shadows as silently as they came, leading seven burdened horses with them.

“Raffin,” he growled. “I shoulda known.”

Rage built in Brokenleg. He knew he was in a fix. He couldn’t walk clear to the post on the Yellowstone, over two hundred miles on a bum leg. At least not without taking a month. He couldn’t buy and train another set of draft horses either — not with the harness pillaged. And he’d have to abandon this wagon, too. The company was whipping him every way he turned. Raffin! Probably hired by old Chouteau hisself back there in St. Louey, to wreck it all. Wreck the Crow trade and see to it that Fitzhugh’s Post didn’t get any Cheyenne trade either. A smart one, that Raffin. Fitzhugh thought about the Creole. Bile flooded him, and he knew what he’d do if he ever saw Raffin again: he’d kill him. Which was something Raffin would be prepared for.

His women stared at him solemnly in the quiet of the dawn. At last Dust Devil stirred. They’d eat and think on it. The wagon hulked uselessly, as helpless as a beached whale, its naked bows poking the sky. But it still held their chow, their possessions, the bridal gifts of three Suhtai sisters.

“I will go,” said Sweet Smoke.

Her sisters nodded. The girl simply began jogging westward at a relaxed pace. It dawned on him that she was running clear back to her village twelve or fifteen miles upriver. She would get help. At that pace she’d be there by noon. By evening  . . . he wondered what would happen. Something tickled at the back of his mind: having four Suhtai Cheyenne wives might just be a blessing in ways he hadn’t figured.

He watched her go and worried about her. A lone woman, far from her village, would be easy pickings. He scowled, wishing he could protect her, knowing he couldn’t. She was rescuing him, and it grated at him.

Three hundred seventeen prime robes, worth five to six dollars in New York if there wasn’t a glut, which there often was. Fifteen hundred dollars anyways. At least if them easterners snapped them up for carriage robes, greatcoats, belts for machinery. Buffler wasn’t much good for shoe leather; at least no one could make it work well. Fifteen hundred. Part of the reason Chouteau and Company hated opposition so much was that the opposition produced gluts, which dropped the prices for all fur companies. Alone, Chouteau’s giant released or withheld bales of robes to control prices. Fitzhugh knew damned well that Raffin was worth any price they paid him; that Raffin’s price was nothing compared to the losses American Fur would fetch when Fitzhugh’s company horned in. Old Chouteau had probably promised Raffin a thousand — and figured he’d save a hundred thousand by putting the Rocky Mountain Company out of business.