Cheyenne Winter (19 page)

They ghosted ever south and west, ducking painted war parties, hunting parties, and once a whole village traveling along the south bank. With each passing day excitement built in Guy. This was not the Yellowstone so much as Fortune River! Somewhere ahead were his partner, his son, and numerous engages. Ahead was a post filled with a fortune in trade goods, paid out of his own pocket and last year’s returns. Back in St. Louis all these things were figures added in columns on foolscap, but here two thousand river miles away these things were palpable. He observed the passing landscape keenly; wondering if the brown grass lands above the bluffs would support life as white men knew it; wondering if these rich Yellowstone bottoms would support farms. Or whether, as seemed more likely, these vast steppes would forever be the dominion of wild Indians, buffalo, and mustangs.

They awoke one morning under a grim dark overcast, and felt an icy breeze out of the northwest cutting into their robes. All day they rode through it while the temperature plummeted. By evening Guy’s bones ached. How could this come upon them in early September? But to ask the question was to answer it: they were far north. Fort Union lay at forty-eight degrees north, just one degree south of the British possessions. That evening the air smelled of snow, and moist gusts slid around his canvas bedsheeting. Sometime in the miserable night he felt flakes of snow sting his cheeks. He burrowed under his blankets and canvas but it didn’t help, and he lay shivering in the icy black. The winds rose, driving icy granules of snow over him. He dug into his kit for an old wool shirt to wrap around his head but that didn’t help.

He rose and walked around, wrapping the blanket close to him, trying to stamp feeling into numb limbs.

“It is bad,
oui?
But a fire, it is no good in this gale. We will have to suffer.”

Chatillon’s observation didn’t help any. After the longest night of his life, a grudging dawn grayed the world, and Guy discovered an inch or two of snow caught in grass, covering cottonwood and willow leaves, and clinging to the northwest side of trees. Only a gray light penetrated to the earth from the low overcast.

“We will walk. We can’t make coffee now. Maybe I’ll find a little nook in rock somewhere. But walking, Monsieur Straus, it is the salvation of cold men.”

They walked, leading the horses, and Guy had to admit there was something to it. Briskly they walked upriver, covering the miles even faster than if they’d been riding, and the exertion warmed his body and drained the pain from his muscles. He felt grateful that he’d been hardened by these weeks of wilderness travel. But how would he ever get back to St. Louis in comfort? He felt the northern winter lurking just beyond the horizon like a hoary gray robber peering over a wall, ready to pounce.

But the next day summer returned; the last patches of snow vanished by mid-morning and the only difference between this summer and the summer before the storm was a coolness rising from the bones of the earth. They passed the confluence of the Powder and a few days later the Tongue, which cut out of the south from a country of odd spikes and wind-sculpted stone dotted with jackpine.

Above the Tongue, Chatillon studied a wide place where the Yellowstone braided through several gravelly islands. Sign abounded of a ford. A buffalo trace ran to the bank and was visible across an island, and evident on the south bank.

The guide sat his horse for ten minutes studying the surrounding hills, the wood flats across the shimmering water, the country behind him. At last he led Guy down to the riverbank and across a vast gravel flat that was actually river bottom when the flow ran higher. The water never stopped the pasterns of their horses en route to the island.

Chatillon pointed, and Guy saw the darker water of the channel beyond. The guide nudged his reluctant horse into the river again, finding good footing on more gravel. The channel dropped off swiftly. One moment the horses were hock deep; the next they were swimming, but they found bottom within seconds, and bounded in great leaps toward the south shore. It had been an easy crossing. The guide didn’t let the horses stop and shake; he kicked savagely until they had all reached a copse of cottonwoods, and there he let the dripping horses spray water.

They hugged the brushy shore, staying away from the worn trace that ran closer to the south bluffs. Late that day they crossed a grassy park that horseshoed into the river, and discovered a ruin in the timber beyond. A wagon.

Guy stared, recognition coming to him. One of his own Pittsburghs! It had been well concealed here, but not well enough. Tribesmen had stripped it of every bit of metal. They’d pulled the heavy iron tires off, leaving loose felloes and spokes on the ground. They’d stripped away the metal furniture, the hounds, the bolts that held the doubletree to the tongue.

The guide studied the wreck. “The iron, it makes good lance points and arrowheads. It makes awls and knives. It makes hatchets and axes. They have watched the smiths work the forges at the posts. They know how to heat and hammer and make things.”

Guy nodded. The Pittsburgh had cost a hundred fifty dollars. He wondered how it had ended up here, abandoned. Whether men had been killed here. The ruin filled him with dread. Was Maxim all right?

“Let’s hurry,” he said, tautly.

“We can risk the trace, I think,” said the guide. “Crows here. Mostly we are safe.”

They made swift time along the trace. The guide sensed Guy’s urgency and they raced ever south and west, passing stray Absaroka hunters once or twice, not pausing to parley with the curious tribesmen.

Then at last they plunged out upon a vast flat, a square mile of land dotted with innumerable lodges and scores of Indians, dogs, ponies, racing little boys, brush arbors — and beyond, the gray palisades and bastions of Fort Cass.

“Don’t stop,” muttered Guy.

“Are you sure? Here we pause at the posts. They have already seen us.” He pointed to a watchman up on the near bastion. The man’s brass spyglass glinted in the morning sun.

Guy studied the solid post, the silvery cottonwood logs, the Chouteau ensign flying over the gates, the hum of life around the post. He estimated a hundred Crow lodges there — at six or seven to a lodge, a formidable village. This is where the Rocky Mountain Company had intended to trade! This is where Brokenleg had planned to come! But Pierre Chouteau had gotten wind of it and had refurbished and reopened the abandoned post — and had captured the whole Crow tribe before Brokenleg even had a chance to open up a trading window.

“We’ll go on,” he said. “I want to get to my place.”

They rode past Fort Cass, even though a welcoming shot — or was it? — rattled through the valley. West of the post they found innumerable ponies grazing under the eye of Crow boys. They struck the Bighorn River near the confluence, and swung upstream. Excitement built in Guy. He kicked his saddler into a jog and yanked the picket line of the packhorse that followed behind.

For two miles they pushed through dense cottonwood timber that lined the Bighorn River. The trees thinned into grassy parks. This valley was broad, but not so broad as the mile-wide trench of the Yellowstone. Guy felt he was riding through the center of something, a crossroads perhaps, or a place of meeting and gathering for many tribes heading up or down the two rivers. A good place for a post!

Chatillon smiled. “Almost. Around the bend there.”

Guy hurried his saddler along, cutting the trace toward a point where the western bluff projected close to the river. Then at last he rounded the bend, beheld a broad open flat not unlike the one around Cass, and saw a low, rectangular building of graying cottonwood logs. A low, peaked earthen roof rose over the logs. The building formed the northeast corner of a stockade of cottonwood poles.

On a staff above the doors an ensign lazed in the slight breeze — their own ensign, with a gold RMC embroidered on a blue ground. A dozen lodges rose nearby — different somehow from the lodges around Cass.

Fitzhugh’s Post!

Maxim Straus had discovered sin. In all of his seventeen years he hadn’t thought much about it. But the events at Bellevue and Sergeant Bluff had changed that forever.

He brooded through the summer, his mind locked on the realities of an evil world, the evil staining his own family and himself. The evil surrounded him there at the post: it resided in the breast of Fitzhugh and the rest. The robe trade itself was evil to its core, a sin against God and man. Maxim knew he could atone forever and not wash away the evil he and his father had gotten into.

They had come to his father, these rough trappers, and bent his father away from the honorable business of Straus et Fils, a firm unstained through generations of Strauses. But there on the levee at Bellevue, the Indian Agent and Christian minister had stained him and the company forever, branding himself and the Rocky Mountain Company as lawbreakers and corrupters of red men.

He felt the guilt upon him and knew it was deserved. It didn’t matter that the casks in that hold didn’t belong to the company; a few dozen miles upstream the packet boarded even more casks of spirits that did belong to the company, and that broke the law of the Republic. His father seemed to approve. His father had fallen in with vicious men, in a business with dirty hands.

Straus et Fils had financed the fur trade, beaver, and now buffalo, but had never been a part of it, of the scandalous business of defying law and pouring spirits into savages to cheat them out of their robes and pelts. Maxim had felt, at first, a numbness, along with a terror that he would be caught and jailed by the authorities. But that had given way to a rancorous contempt of Fitzhugh and a raging anger toward his father for succumbing to these wilderness criminals, for betraying him, for violating the ancient standards of his forefathers.

He had taken to scrubbing his face and hands, pricking himself to offer a blood atonement, and refusing to do anything whatsoever to advance the enterprise, but it wasn’t enough. It was nothing. The weight of guilt hung on him like irons until he couldn’t bear to see the sun and couldn’t bear to sleep, and couldn’t bear the presence of these beasts and criminals and sinners against God and man.

The wrath of God was on him. Nothing would ever make life worth living again. He sighed, knowing he had been doomed at seventeen to a life of hell. He wished he could die, and crawl to the farthest darkness where he could hide from the divine light. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t go back, either. He’d been dragooned off the packet, kept a prisoner by a man who had no right to lay his bloodstained hands on him.

And so the summer had dwindled away, and Maxim Straus lived in a world without gladness under a cast-iron cloud of guilt and rage. At least Brokenleg had let him alone. If Brokenleg had made him labor in that corrupt enterprise, record each ugly transaction in the ledger, Maxim had intended to walk away. If some tribesman pierced his chest with an arrow as he walked down the river, all the better, for that is what life had come to. Let him die and rot away until not even his bones scourged the earth.

Thus he had endured, silent, a fierce glare in his eye, avoiding meals with the rest, loathing them all and Brokenleg especially — even more now that he was squandering his lusts upon four wives. Maxim had won his small battles, too. None could oppose his fierce glare. Even Fitzhugh’s blue eyes slid away, unable to meet Maxim’s unblinking ones.

Maxim was out sitting on the riverbank watching the clean river when two white men rode up; men he’d never seen before, no doubt as corrupt as the rest. And then, slowly, it dawned on him that his father was dismounting — Guy Straus! Tanned, thinned, muscled, hardened, but his father! And a guide, of course. Chatillon, the one who’d come upriver last winter. His father here!

Guy’s attention was riveted to the post, the visible manifestation of a heavy investment, and he didn’t see Maxim rise, panicked, not knowing whether to flee, whether to shout condemnation at his father — or whether to run to him, hug him, and weep. All those impulses fought within Maxim, tearing him to bits. In the end, he chose to do none of them. He would acknowledge his father, but coolly, from some vast distance across a moral chasm, and they would eye each other as utter strangers.

“Maxim! Son!” Guy’s keen eyes caught Maxim’s slow progress toward him, and the love in those words tortured the youth.

“Maxim, I’ve come!”

“So you have.”

“You look well, Maxim. We’re blessed by God. You’re safe. I never fathomed — in spite of all the talk, I never grasped how it is here, so far  . . . ”

“I’m not your son; you’re not my father.”

Guy pulled back as if smitten by a whip. He paused, collecting his wit. “But Maxim — ”

“Nothing you do will change that,” Maxim continued.

“But what have I — what has happened?”

“You know as well as anyone. But you don’t listen to your conscience or atone before God.”

“I’m so happy to see you, son. You can’t know how a father rejoices to see a son looking fine and strong, transformed from boy to man  . . . ” Guy stopped, his words falling helplessly to earth before Maxim’s stony stare.

Maxim stood still, rooted to the soil like a bitter shrub, unyielding.

“Hay! Guy!” From the door of the post Brokenleg Fitzhugh erupted, limping wildly, laughing and bawling. He grasped Guy in arms of iron, bawling like a buffalo calf.

“I came,” muttered Guy.

“Har!”

“I had to see it.”

“Solid as rock hyar. We’re making some headway.”

Maxim wanted to call it a lie. They weren’t making headway. The wrath of God lay on the post. But Maxim pressed his lips together.

Guy turned to Maxim, his eyes penetrating right through the youth. “Come along inside, sons. Show me everything. Show me the trading room and your ledgers and our goods and robes. We’ll tour, and then I want to hear all about your life — everything.”

Never had an invitation tortured Maxim more. Involuntarily he rushed forward to meet this paternal love, only to halt suddenly. “Go ahead,” he muttered.