Heaven Is a Long Way Off (22 page)

Sam turned in his saddle, looking back.

Then he saw it.

A huge fir tree rampaged down the middle of the current, evergreen leaves dead and brown, roots pointed straight toward men and horses.

“Get out!” Sam yelled, pointing. “Get out!”

Everyone saw the menace. The roots looked like a madwoman's hair violently shaken. The whole tree raised and dived in the waves—it bobbed and sawed back and forth, an immense ramrod gone wild.

There was not one damn thing Sam could do to stop it.

He and Hannibal threw the lead lines away and slapped their packhorses on.

Luckily, some other horses followed. If they had seen the tree, panicked, tried to turn around, milled, done anything but charge straight ahead…

Sam turned Paladin and whipped her toward Tomás and Plácido. He shouted, “Go! Go!” Then he remembered.
“Vamonos! Vamonos!”

Beside him, Hannibal spun Brownie around, but the horse got his feet tangled and fell. Hannibal pitched into the water.

From behind the herd Sam saw Esteban spurring his horse right where Sam was headed.

Tomás whacked his mount with his hat. The pony leapt and cleared the root ball by a whisker.

The roots hit Plácido and his horse dead on.

The horse went down, the boy went up.

Tomás wheeled his mount, but the animal refused to go back.

Tomás dived off the saddle toward the tree.

Plácido landed right where the trunk met the root ball. He grabbed roots with both arms and stuck his legs in among them. He was riding the damn thing!

The root ball clubbed the line of pack animals. Horses screamed. Ropes snapped. Gear ripped in every direction—kegs broke and sprayed their gunpowder, a bundle of wrapped rifles split like twigs, packs of plews got dunked, boxes of beads, bells, awls, and kettles careened into the turbulence. Right below the ford the river narrowed a little, picked up speed, and emptied into a hole.

Tomás grabbed the upstream end of the roots and started heaving himself out of the river.

Sam hollered, “Get out of there! Get out of there!”

He whipped Paladin again with his hat. “Go!” he shouted at her. The tree was no more than twenty feet away and zinging along.

Paladin reared and whinnied. The current hit her or the bottom betrayed her, and she fell on her back.

Sam let go—he dropped The Celt. Paladin ripped her reins away. As he got his footing, a wave knocked him down. He righted himself and launched his body, swimming and wading, toward the fir.

Just before he got to the tree, one edge of the root ball nudged the sand where the river channeled.

The top of the tree swung straight at Sam.

He grabbed branches and pulled himself up. Arms, face, and neck got scratched, but he got on. He looked wildly toward the boys. They were on top, together, and holding on tight. Ride the damn thing—yeehaw!

Then the tree rotated slowly and majestically in the water, and they all rolled to the bottom.

Beneath was madness. Sand and gravel scraped Sam's head and back below. The branches poked and scratched his front. In this universe there was blackness, wetness, insanity, and no air at all. A whole tree, an immense, dead tree beat him down, away from life.

On the surface the tree's tip held, and the fir turned all the way, top downstream and roots upstream.

Hannibal managed, desperately, to get onto the tree. He saw Esteban on it too, nearer the roots. But the human beings were underneath…

The tip swung all the way until it hit a gravelly bar and hung up. Now the roots turned inevitably downstream. Serenely, the tree made its complete circle. Then it plunged through the rest of the channel and flumed into the deep hole below.

Hannibal felt it begin another grand spin, once more to…

He dived upstream.

From beneath the water, roots, branches, needles, and three people sailed back into the sunlight and air.

Sam's lungs sucked in a world of air.

The tree bobbed gently.

Sam started to claw his way through the branches toward the boys. Were they both alive? He couldn't get down there. Maybe he saw two figures. Oh, hell, Plácido's chest was bloody.

“Jump!” he hollered, and he did.

He came up between two other figures splashing around in the hole—Hannibal and Esteban.

Being in the hole with a dead fir tree about fifty feet long and a dozen kicking horses was like being in a closet with a buffalo herd. Sam got kicked in a dozen places and got clobbered in one calf. Hollering, he swam madly, one-legged, for the near bank. Then he remembered, got to his feet, fell down from the pain, and went back to swimming toward the bank with one leg.

He turned onto his back, craned his head up far enough to see the boys. Tomás and Esteban were pulling Plácido under the arms toward shallow water.

Sam crawled toward the bank, his face sometimes underwater. Coy dashed into the river toward Sam and then leapt back, over and over.

Horses were thrashing and whinnying insanely. Some were probably hurt. Equipment was scattered through the hole like leaves picked up by a dust devil and flung hither and yon.

All Sam wanted was to find out whether Plácido was bad hurt, and hug the hell out of Tomás.

F
LAT
D
OG TOOK
over. He dragged both boys onto dry land and started rescuing gear from the river, both what floated and what didn't.

Sam crawled to Tomás and embraced him. “You did great.”

Tomás was more interested in Plácido's wound. He watched while Hannibal felt it. The gash lay just under the ribs on the left side. “Can't tell anything about it,” Hannibal said.

“Bet he got punctured by a limb stub,” said Sam. He'd gotten jabbed by a lot of them himself. His arms and face were scratched and gouged, and his shirt was torn.

Plácido was only half-conscious. They didn't know if he had water in his lungs, if he was hurt in the vitals, or if the pain had a grip on him. Hannibal looked into Esteban's eyes. “Nothing to do but wait and see.”

Hannibal examined Sam's leg. Sam looked at Hannibal all over while his friend probed the leg. Hannibal was as scratched and bleeding as any of them. Sam didn't want to remember what it had been like, pinned by the tree on the bottom of the river, but didn't think he could ever forget—his dreams would be haunted.

“Not broken,” Hannibal said

Sam tried to put weight on it and fell down immediately. “Broke or not, there's no walking on it.”

While he was down, Coy licked him in the face.

Paladin stood nearby, and Sam gave her the hand signal to come to him. She did, and he rubbed her muzzle.

Flat Dog came up and handed Sam The Celt.

He had to resist hugging the rifle. “Thank you, thank you,” he said. He hadn't thought he'd ever see his father's flinter again.

For once Sam got the privilege of lying on the bank and watching the others work. He looked sideways at Plácido regularly. The boy wiggle-waggled his head from time to time. Sam didn't think his wound was mortal. Maybe he got thunked on the head by a rock when they were on the bottom.

Julia brought the infants up next to Sam. She nursed Azul while Esperanza played. Over and over the girl crawled across Sam's body, back and forth. Once she sat square on his belly, looked at him, and said, “Papá.”

Most of the gear came back out of the river. Some of the powder kegs had busted, and the powder was gone. Other kegs were hauled out and the powder spread to dry. Big twists of tobacco and bundles of blankets were laid out in the sun. Some strings of beads were lost, others recovered. Some bundles of butcher knives came out, some kettles, some awls, and so on. Somehow all the barrels of
aguardiente
survived.

“We can't shoot back,” said Hannibal, “but we can die happy.”

“We won't know what we've lost until we compare what we have to the master list,” said Sam.

“You going to do that?” asked Flat Dog.

“Probably not,” said Sam.

“It is what it is,” said Hannibal.

Two of the packhorses had broken legs. They struggled into shallow water and stood, heads down.

Flat Dog shot them. Coy howled.

Julia left the kids with Sam and set up two racks. Together she and Flat Dog butchered out the horses—women's work, but not in Julia's world—this was a new style, groping toward a new way to live for all of them, white American, Indian, and Mexican. She built a squaw fire, and they laid the strips of meat out to dry in the sun and wind.

Coy licked Sam's face. Evidently, everyone was reasonably glad to see Sam come out of the river. He was more than reasonably glad to be alive.

Tomás wandered by to look at Plácido. “What you did,” said Sam, “you were incredible.”

The boy beamed.

“I didn't think you liked Plácido.”

Tomás shrugged and walked off.

Sam could never quite figure the boy out.

Later that afternoon Sam swung up onto Paladin and found that the pain of weight on the stirrup was bad.

When he limped back to his lazing place, Plácido had started moving around. Tomás was sitting with him, talking. They actually acted like friends. Sam smiled to himself and plopped down.

Esteban sat on his heels next to them. “Tomás,” he said, “you saved Plácido's life. I thank you.” Now both boys were looking seriously at Esteban. Sam thought maybe Tomás was beginning to understand: When you travel with a man, he sides you and you side him. No matter how hard it gets.

“Tomás,” he said, “I want to give you something to show my gratitude. Something big. You think about it and tell me what you want.”

Man and boy looked at each other.

Sam was proud of Tomás.

As Esteban started to get up, Tomás said nicely, “I don't have to think. I know.”

“Just tell me,” said Esteban, and he squatted back down.

“I want Paladin's colt.”

When they headed north two days later, Tomás had the colt on a line, teaching him to lead. Esteban had surrendered some dollars of his wages for the colt. Sam also gave Tomás the pony he was riding, as a reward for what he did in the river.

Tomás grinned at him and spoke in English. He chose English whenever he wanted to be sure he was understood, or restate his point, as when he said from time to time, “I'm smart.”

Now he said, “I teach him like Paladin, come when I whistle. Later I teach you, come when I whistle.”

R
ENDEZVOUS
1828
FELT
to Sam like the doldrums.

Part of it was outside things. There was no main supply train that year. Smith, Jackson & Sublette didn't bring one—Bill Sublette had gone to St. Louis with last summer's furs and come straight back with supplies, which arrived in November and got distributed throughout the winter. Normally, when the train arrived, so did enough whiskey for a hundred and more trappers and several hundred Indians. That usually turned rendezvous into a carnival.

Also, Jedediah Smith didn't show up. Nor did any word arrive from him. Diah had left the door open—he might or might not get to rendezvous, since he was heading north out of California—but it worried Sam.

He thought back over his years with Diah and wondered what had happened. Fifteen men under his leadership got killed on the sand bar below the Arikara villages. Another ten lost their lives on the bank of the Colorado. In both cases, Diah escaped by the skinny-skin-skin. Sam had seen both fights, which were more like slaughters. He wondered if Jedediah's luck had finally run out.

Sam felt maybe the doldrums came from inside, though, and he didn't know why.

Everybody was fine, his own leg no longer sore, Plácido's chest healed. Mountain luck, when you thought of what happened to them crossing that river.

Business was good for the Morgan outfit, as the men called it. His tent and another small one run by Joshua Pilcher, the old Missouri Fur Company partisan, were the only ones open for trading. Sam, Hannibal, and Flat Dog sold most of the horses in their herd—the animals had walked for four months to get here—at good prices. The trade goods they'd picked up in Santa Fe sold quickly too, what was left after the river took its bite. What booze they and Pilcher had was quickly gone, and no trapper cared what he paid for it.

The talk of the trade blankets was what the Britishers were doing, or rather how the Hudson's Bay Company was poaching on American territory. The Oregon country, as everybody knew, was a joint occupation with the British—the whole Columbia River area, rich in furs. The Americans wanted to push that way. Those damned Britishers were trapping all the Snake River territory thin, so going west didn't shine for the Americans. Damn Britishers, they claimed everything by prior right, saying they'd been there first. When Americans saw HBC stamped on their property, they took to calling the company Here Before Christ.

When Sam and Hannibal closed the trade blanket for the day and were on their knees putting strings of beads back in their boxes, Hannibal said, “Smith, Jackson & Sublette are going to Flathead country. I want to go with them.”

Sam looked up at him quick. Coy lay down and squirmed into the grass, looking from one to the other.

“I want to see Flathead Post, the lake, maybe even work with HBC for a while.”

“Here Before Christ. O wise one.” Sam said, keeping his voice as light as he could, “You want to see everything.”

“That's true,” said Hannibal. “One day I'm going to take a trade caravan down the Chihuahua Trail, see the city and the copper mines down below, maybe even Mexico City.”

“You go, go, go.”

“Vidi, vici, cepi iucunditas.”

Sam knew
veni, vidi, vici
—I came, I saw, I conquered—but this was a new one. “What does that mean?”

“I came, I saw, I had fun.”

Sam chuckled, but he was pretending.

“So,” Hannibal went on, “I'll go to Crow country with you and then on to Flathead country.”

Sam nodded.

“Now I better check on Brownie and Paladin.”

With that he was off. Coy thumped his tail, looked after Hannibal, started to get up and go, but stayed. His eyes rose to Sam, uncertain.

“You're the only one has been on all of it with me,” Sam said.

When everything was put away in the tent, he just sat and petted Coy. “I am down in spirits,” he told the coyote. He mulled. Everything changed all the time. He'd lost Meadowlark and Blue Medicine Horse to death, Third Wing too. Gideon Poorboy had lost his leg below the knee and decided to stay in California. Just this season Sam had started to California with a score of men and left half of them on the riverbank at the Mojave villages. He'd fallen in with Grumble, Sumner, and Abby, but they were off in different directions now. Sam and Hannibal had picked up Flat Dog, Julia, Esperanza, and Azul, but Robber and Galbraith came and then dropped out. Jedediah had taken his entire brigade to kingdom come, or may be north to the Britishers, whichever he found first.

Sam was glad he had Flat Dog, Julia, Esperanza, and Azul, damned glad, but he was losing people, one after another…

He made himself get up and walk around, Coy at his heels.

The good part of rendezvous was seeing old friends, and Sam felt good greeting Tom Fitzpatrick, Jim Beckwourth, Jim Bridger, and a bunch of others. He and Fitz were mates from the first year, when they were in Diah's first brigade. Beckwourth spent a winter in the Crow camp with Sam, the winter he courted Meadowlark, still hard to think about. Bridger, well, Bridger got himself a bad name his first season in the mountains—went off and left Hugh Glass to die, even took his rifle and his possibles. But since that time Jim had proved to be a man who knew what way the stick floated, as they said, and had a reputation as the best storyteller of them all.

Hannibal fell in beside Sam and Coy, Tomás trailing him by a step. “Let's show this boy how much fun rendezvous is tonight,” he said to Sam.

“I am not a boy,” said Tomás. Since they got to rendezvous, he'd been speaking English all the time. “I am smart.”

“Let's find him some company,” said Sam.

The Delaware got a lascivious gleam in his eye. “Provide him some beads and vermilion, for the ladies?”

Tomás cackled. He'd heard about Indian women in the willows.

Sam blushed, and knew it. Blushing always made him self-conscious about his white hair. “No, tonight the boys will be telling stories, singing songs.”

“Dancing,” said Hannibal.

Tomás cackled again.

“Get your mind off that,” said Sam. “Or at least Tomás's mind.”

They squeezed in around a fire next to Jim Beckwourth. The big mulatto said, “You hear about our scrape with the Blackfeet just coming into camp here?”

“No,” said Sam.

“Them Blackfeet,” said someone. Everyone was sick and tired of the Blackfeet. Those Indians had been hostile since John Colter fought with them twenty years ago. The American beaver men had made friends with almost all the Indians except the Blackfeet, and were free to trap any country except Blackfoot.

“You want me to tell it?” said Robert Campbell. “I'll tell it straight.” Campbell was an Irishman and a brigade leader, capable and serious about his business.

“Straight ain't no way to tell a story,” said Beckwourth, and he launched in. “Just a few days ago we was camped maybe eighteen miles above the lake. Cap'n here, he finds the cook facedown and growing Blackfoot arrows out of his back, so he gets us fast up to a place where there's a spring and some rocks we can crouch behind. Me, I don't like hiding in any rocks, I like to go at my enemy out front and hard, but…We got to fighting, them shooting at us, us shooting at them. In the long run, though, it was no good, they being five or six hundred—”

“—maybe half that,” put in Campbell—

“—and us being maybe thirty. After about half a day I saw someone had to do something.”

“
You
did?” said Campbell.

“Cap'n, I'm just giving you a preview of how my grandchildren will receive this story, except maybe the grandchildren that are Blackfoot.” He threw a lascivious look around the circle. “I mean to top at least one chief's daughter in every tribe.”

Tomás giggled.

“The only thing to do, as I was saying, was ride like the hounds of hell to the main camp here and get help. So, me and Calhoun—”

“—it was Ortega and myself,” said Campbell—

“—we took two of the fastest horses and whipped them like banshee devils through the line of Blackfeet. Arrows and lead balls flew thick as hail—the angels themselves must have protected us—and in an hour or so we was here to the lake and roused the men, trapper and Injun alike, and back we rode like a gathering thunderstorm.

“When them Blackfeet saw us, they skedaddled.”

“Actually,” said Campbell drily, “they'd already left.”

“How many men were killed?” said Tomás, his voice throbbing.

Sam couldn't believe the kid had put words out in this crowd, English words.

“One of ours,” said Campbell, “and three wounded, and half a dozen horses dead.”

“About a score of theirs dead,” said Beckwourth with a grin.

“Three or four,” said Campbell, “and the same wounded.”

“Them Blackfeet,” Tomás pressed on, “are they bad Injuns?”

A handful of men said at the same time, “The worst.”

“Let me have a small…mouth of that,” Tomás said to Sam.

“Sip,” said Sam. “Or mouthful.”

“Thanks.”

He handed Tomás the whiskey cup, and the boy drank. “Thanks for the sip,” he said.

Tomás was serious about learning English, and he
was
smart.

“Give us a yarn, Gabe.” That was what they called Jim Bridger now.

Sam was glad Tomás had a chance to hear one of these stories.

Bridger began in an easy voice, “Me and some un the boys come up Henry's Fork one spring night, time it was nigh getting dark. I knowed the Yellowstone country some, but I got turned around and didn't rightly know where we was. So we stopped along a little crick and made camp in the dark.

“Come mornin', I woke up and saw as fine a place as ever stroked the eye. A big hole, with thick grass reaching off to timbered hills, and the prettiest little stream runnin' through her. Best of all, I seen a bull elk grazin' not a hundred steps off.

“‘Meat,' says I, and rises and throws up Betsy. I shot—and that elk didn't even notice, just kept grazin'. Now Betsy, she shoots center, sure, and I couldn't piece things together in my mind. I crept gentle-like mebbe fifty steps closer, lines up Betsy, and lets fly agin. Same result.

“‘Mebbe that elk is wearing armor,' says I. ‘It is sure enough deaf.'

“Riled up, I walks straight over to the elk, raises Betsy like a war club, and swings the barrel right onto the critter's head.

“Old Betsy bounces off harmless.

“Well, I'll be.

“I grabbed the damned elk by the antlers and was about to twist when I realized—these antlers is stone. I kicked the elk and like to broke my toes. Whole damn elk is stone.

“Then I recollects—Black Harris and his story of the putrefied forest. He took a piece of downed tree to Fort Atkinson, and a Dutchman scientist there told him it was putrefied, done turned to stone.

“Now I looks around and sees that our horses are nibblin' at the grass, but their knees are shakin'. I reach down and feels of the grass, and the blades are putrefied. I reach up and feel the leaves of a aspen, and the leaves are putrefied.

“Suddenly, I notice. There ain't no birds making music. I can see birds, but I can't hear 'em.

“I lifts old Betsy again and knocks the nearest jay right off the branch. When I go over and pick up the pieces, I find out even the birds is putrefied. And I can't hear 'em 'cause their songs is putrefied!

“‘Boys!' I holler out. ‘Get up! Let's go! This place don't shine!'

“Shortly we is packed up and headed out, afore the horses starve to death and us with 'em.

“But this country, it has ahold of us. We ride north and find the big canyon of the Yellerstone in our way. East, big canyon of the Yellerstone in our path. South, same canyon. West, same thing. We are surrounded by the wide, deep canyon of the Yellowstone River, and no way out.

“Then I gets an idea. Seems good, but I figure I better give 'er a try first, this idea being on the wild side. I backs my horse up a hundred paces, gives her a good kick, and when we get to the canyon edge, I lets out a war cry and reins her up to jump. She does, and pretty as a wildflower in June, we just floats over the whole canyon of that Yellerstone and sets down on the other side soft as cottonwood fluff drifting to the ground.

“Now all the boys get the idea. They back up, stampede the packhorses, and come riding behind 'em hell for leather. At the canyon rim they all sail into the air—horses like wingspread eagles, you shoulda seen it!—and they all light right beside me on the far rim.

“They was all happy to be out'n the trap of that putrefied forest, but they was a mite amazed. ‘Gabe,' they says, ‘that was right smart, but how did you figure it out?'

“Says I, ‘Well, everything in that place was putrefied, animals, grass, leaves, birds, and even the birds' song, so I realized—the law of gravity must be putrefied too!'”

The whole circle broke into appreciative chuckles.

Sam got up and wandered, Coy at his heels. Off somewhere he could hear fiddling, which meant dancing. He had no desire to dance, no desire for a woman, not when he felt Paloma so near behind him and Meadowlark's parents so close in front. But he wanted music, and he had his tin whistle in his hand.

Fiddlin' Red waved Sam over to the log where he was perched. “This old hand,” Red announced to the assembly, “last year this time he was starting to shine on that whistle. Give us a tune, Sam, what will it be?”

Sam said, “The Never-Ending Song of Jedediah Smith.”

This was the song Robert Evans and Sam and Sumner and all the men of the first California brigade had written together in tribute to their captain. It was a lively affair in 6/8 time, good to dance to, and Sam took it fast.

Lots of men sashayed Indian women around, but no one sang.