Cheyenne Winter (29 page)

“Sacrebleu,”
muttered Trudeau. “We are prisoners.”

Maxim didn’t know for sure, but a dread had seeped into him.

Late that afternoon the post hunters — Brasseau and LeBrun — returned with a part of a slain elk. The pack mule carried two quarters; the hunters carried a little more. They rode unsuspectingly through the great encampment, past lodges belching cottonwood smoke, past the peaceful cones that shed light through their translucent covers.

Within the post engages ran to open the stockade gates. But the Crow warriors sprang into action. They grouped together and lifted their rifles and bows, some of them pointed toward the oncoming hunters, others covering the engages who had opened the gates. Brasseau and LeBrun halted, awareness flooding through them. Time stopped.

A powerful-looking headman with a great scar across his cheek motioned. Reluctantly the hunters dismounted. Paul LeBrun looked like a man about to die. Maxim caught his breath, horrified. He stood at the cracked-open post door watching. Crow warriors grabbed the bridles of the horses and then pointed. LeBrun and Brasseau realized they were being told to go into the post. Both ran swiftly toward Maxim’s cracked door and stumbled in, panting. Neither stopped. They raced into the trading room to replace the rifles and powder and shot they’d just lost.

Maxim slammed the door and bolted it. He heard the stockade gates slamming shut — and something else. The smack of arrows striking the door he’d just shut.

Prisoners! Hervey’s Crows had surrounded them. Hervey’s Crows were violating the traditional neutrality of the post. Hervey’s Crows would starve them all to death and keep other villages or tribesmen from trading — or helping. Hervey had struck back.

They raced ever south and east, as if trying to escape from Winter Man. But he had them in his clutches and he blew upon their backs, sending icy air across their necks. Sometimes he spat snow at them, swift mad flurries from earthscraping black clouds. But so far the snow didn’t stick to the breast of Earth Mother. Winter Man blew, and scraped the iron earth dry, and piled up the snow in ditches and timbered slopes.

They made good time, harried along by the breath of Winter behind them whipping through their capotes and buffalo coats. Little Whirlwind drew the hood of her scarlet capote over her hair and laughed. She didn’t mind. Winter Man was driving her toward the People. She and her man and her sisters would spend the whole winter trading with the Tsistsistas just as she’d always wanted.

No one pursued them. For a while her man and Abner Spoon and Zach Constable had watched behind, ready to fight, ready to run harder. But Julius Hervey never came, and only Winter Man deviled them. Ah, how it pleased her to see the captured horses and mules trotting along, as eager to flee Winter Man as their owners. She loved to watch the long string of them, twenty carrying what her man called the trading outfit; five more carrying their camp supplies. Wealth! She felt incredibly wealthy.

And more. At last her man had made himself a warrior. He had captured all those horses from the enemy and now he could wear two notched eagle feathers in his hair and show her village that he too was a fighting man, even with his wounded leg. That was worth more to her than all the wealth of the packtrain. Brokenleg was a true warrior! They would give him a new name soon. She would go to the shamans with a gift and ask them what Brokenleg’s medicine name would be. She favored Many Stolen Horses but she knew it would be up to the grandfathers to decide. She peered over the pack animals at her man and liked that name. Many Stolen Horses. The shame she’d always felt about him lifted from her.

How swiftly the pack animals raced ahead! It gladdened her that they took no wagons. Wagons were almost useless. Every little while the white men had to stop, get out with an axe or a spade, and cut through brush or dig a ramp down a cutbank. Wagons took forever. She thought they were clever — who of her people had ever seen a wheel? — but almost worthless. She loved these horses and mules that were trotting along with Winter Man breathing on their rumps, each carrying a heavy burden. They didn’t stop for ditches or cutbanks and they wove through sagebrush and juniper easily and splashed across creeks. They were traveling forty white man’s miles each day, Brokenleg told her. Fast.

The Tongue River stymied them. Clear ice skimmed over its top, too weak to support man or horse. They could see black water gurgling ominously underneath. Brokenleg kicked his horse to the bank intending to break ice, but the chestnut balked. The more Brokenleg kicked and cursed, the more the horse dug in. Finally it whirled away and refused to budge. Spoon and Constable had no better luck, and neither did Hide Skinning Woman, Elk Tail, and Sweet Smoke. Twenty-five pack animals milled on the bank, scattering at every effort to force passage. Angrily Brokenleg dismounted, dug an axe out of camp supplies, and began hacking some long limbs off of a box elder. The others watched, puzzled.

“Watch our back trail,” Fitzhugh growled at Spoon.

After he had cut and limbed four poles, he lashed them together into a crude raft. He slid it out onto the quaking ice and gently lowered himself onto it, having trouble with his bum leg. When he was prone he pulled out his camp hatchet.

“I’ll probably git me a cold bath,” he growled. “Gimme a line.”

Then he pushed out, using his hatchet to claw ice and pull himself and his raft forward. The ice complained and threatened and once popped ominously, but the longpoles spread Fitzhugh’s weight. The Tongue ran narrow, perhaps fifteen yards, and at the far bank where an inch of water lay over the ice, Fitzhugh wormed his way off, getting wet and cursing. But he had his woven rawhide line in hand — and it stretched back across the river.

“Tie it to my hoss,” he yelled.

Constable did, making sure the knot was firm.

Fitzhugh tugged and Constable whipped, and between them they forced the wild-eyed horse into the river. Its hooves flailed ice, shattering it into floes that slid beneath the surface sheet. Fitzhugh winched the chestnut along, sweating and muttering. The horse was soon out of Constable’s reach, and only Fitzhugh’s constant tension on the bridle drew it forward. It crashed through ice and then balked.

“Yell a little,” Fitzhugh commanded. Constable yelled and cracked his whip. The horse clawed forward again, up to its belly in icy water. It peered around and discovered Fitzhugh’s shore was closer than the one it had just left. It shrieked and bounded forward, crashing through ice, cutting its pasterns and cannons as it lifted its legs out of the ice-traps, and finally bolted out of the water. It shook itself violently, spraying stinging-cold water over Brokenleg.

The results weren’t good. The horse had opened a water passage partway but left the ice intact the rest of the way, except where hooves had broken through. Wearily, Fitzhugh prepared to drag another horse across. But he couldn’t undo the clammy knot that anchored his braided line to the bridle. Water and pressure had shrunk it beyond the clawing of his numb fingers. Angrily he cut it off and then pitched the weighted line across the river.

The next horse came even harder than the first, balking at every step. It peered wild-eyed at Fitzhugh, reared back, and crow-hopped, spraying its hooves in every direction. But at least its violent flailing loosened enough ice to open a water passage. After that they tied the line to a pack string and Fitzhugh reeled six unhappy packhorses across. Spray soaked the panniers, and she hoped nothing had been ruined. Little Whirlwind couldn’t make her mare ford the cold river and finally Zachary tied the line to it.

“She’s gonna buck,” he said. “If we get bucked in, stand up proper. River’s waist high at the worst. Don’t git sucked under that ice — or that’ll be the last o’ you.”

Little Whirlwind nodded and clamped her high-pommeled squaw saddle. From the far bank Brokenleg coaxed the mare outward. Little Whirlwind felt the mare’s back hump under the saddle and watched the mare’s ears flatten back. The mare minced forward, hating the icy water. In the middle it halted. Water swirled around its legs, teasing its belly, touching Little Whirlwind’s moccasins. Brokenleg tugged again. The mare bucked and Little Whirlwind clung. But the high water had taken the buck out of the little horse. It suddenly plunged forward, almost unseating Little Whirlwind. The mare clawed up the far bank and shook, while Little Whirlwind hung on, gratefully.

Her sisters forded more easily. Abner Spoon, who’d been watching their back trail, was last and his passage was easiest. It had taken the rest of that day, and they camped there on the south bank of the Tongue out of the northwind.

They had two small tents, but Brokenleg had never used them as they were intended. Instead, he and Abner and Zach had made two half-shelters of them cornering around a fire. They plugged the ends of the open-sided lean-tos with pack panniers, making windproof shelters open to the fire, a much warmer arrangement than crawling into the cold tents. As long as someone fed the fires through the night they slept tolerably well in their robes even when the nights grew bitter. Her man talked of zero, but she didn’t understand that, and when the white men talked of below zero, she laughed. How could there be anything below zero?

She supposed she and her sisters and Brokenleg would crowd into her parents’ lodge but she didn’t know what the other white men would do. They had to stay somewhere, and there was also a lot of trade goods to protect from Winter Man.

From the Tongue they swung east, racing over humped prairie with vast slopes pocked by drifts of snow. But only rarely did they have to fight through snow or break a trail. Winter Man’s icy breath had swept most of the broken prairies clean, giving them passage and brown grasses for the ponies to eat.

Late one afternoon they stood on a wind-whipped ridge staring down upon a great river basin black with naked trees. A certain lavender light lay over the prairies, a light she never saw in the summer, a light subdued by an odd blue haze in the air. Her heart lifted. Off to the northwest she saw a pall of gray smoke hanging in a sheltered place. A village! Maybe her village!

“The Powder and the Crazy Woman?” she asked her man.

He nodded. “You reckon that’s White Wolf’s village?”

“Let’s find out!” She heeled her mare, sent it racing downslope, upsetting the packhorses. She heard cussing behind her but she didn’t care. Not even the icy air stinging her cheeks and biting her ears bothered her. They still had a long way to go, several white-man’s miles, but she wouldn’t stop now, so close to the Tsistsistas!

Beneath her the iron-hard earth jolted the hooves of her mare but she never slowed. She felt wild and reckless, crazy as a magpie. She knew it might not be her village. It might be Lakota or Arapaho — or some enemy of the People. But recklessness engulfed her. She heard Fitzhugh yelling behind her but she didn’t feel like stopping. Instead, she smoothed the mare into a canter that ate up the ground and sent the clatter of her hooves echoing across the frozen prairies. She descended a gentle bluff into the Powder valley, and felt the wind surrender.

She threaded through naked cottonwood timber, never slowing, the branches black against the lavender sky. She got lost, struck the bank of the Powder and retreated, pushing north and east through woods pocked with drifts. Then suddenly, even as the light faded, she burst onto an open flat and beheld a village, amber light radiating from each of the tawny lodges. She wasn’t sure at first: she saw no people because they were all huddled around their hearth fires. But then the little things spoke to her; the way the wind flaps of the lodges had been fashioned; the way brush had been piled around some lodges to cut the wind; the way the village lay in concentric half-circles facing the river. And the way some lodges had been painted. Lodges she knew!

“Aiee!” she cried, delighted that she had caught the whole village napping. No dog soldiers had stopped her; no town crier raced among the lodges to announce her. She steered her heaving mare through the village streets, heading for the chief ’s lodge, something buoyant and joyous lifting in her breast, her heartbeat as fast as the mare’s.

She found White Wolf ’s great lodge, and sprang down even as a woman’s hands pulled the door flap aside and someone stared. She waited impatiently until she was summoned in, and then plunged into the sudden warmth and light.

White Wolf sat in his proper place at the rear with the hearth fire between him and the door, eyeing her curiously. And next to him, in the honored-guest place, sat Raul Raffin.

With growing relief Guy watched Ambrose Chatillon steer the pirogue through the bewildering ocean where the Missouri debouched into the Mississippi. The levee of St. Louis lay ahead. For eight weeks they’d sailed down the endless river, buoyed along on the current and driven by the trailing winds billowing out the square-rigged sail. A cast-iron overcast and icy winds marked this late November day, but they had escaped the bitter weather, sliding south just ahead of winter.

Excitement and sadness jostled in Guy’s head. He’d come home safely across a vast and hostile wilderness he’d come to love in some mysterious and poetic way. Whenever he thought about what he had seen his soul wanted to compose songs or write epic verse. Chatillon had steered the double-hulled craft deep into the nights, using moonlight when they had a little, to carry him ever southward. Guy had come to love the sturdy pirogue with its giant hollowed-out canoe hulls that had forty bales of buffalo robes in their bellies. Evenings, as they drifted downriver, Chatillon had cut poles and built a tiny cabin on the crossdeck, which he roofed over with the duck cloth that had pinned their gear to the naked deck. They’d anchored safely at islands when they could, shot game along the banks in the lavender twilights, and slept in snug quarters on the rocking deck.

Guy watched the familiar city rise upward from the river under those lowering clouds, and joy built in him. In an hour he’d see Yvonne and Clothilde! Return to his gilded salons to tackle a mountain of delayed business. And have two long talks — one with Pierre Chouteau
le cadet,
and the other with Indian Commissioner David Mitchell. He sighed. This long journey had been a failure. He had a name but no evidence.