Rocky Mountain Company (30 page)

“You look all right to me. A little green.”

“Green! I can’t feel nothing. I should be froze up solid.”

“I’m starved,” Maxim said, unfeelingly. It angered Brokenleg. The boy was thinking of his stomach instead of the dying man before him.

Around them lay corpses, sprawled like victims of a massacre. Fitzhugh eyed them suspiciously. Daylight abounded and not a one of the engagés had reported to work.

“I’m going hunting. I’m so hungry I’d eat anything,” Maxim said. He picked up a company carbine, his horn and shot pouch, and walked up the river bottoms.

“Hey, you forgot your capote,” Fitzhugh yelled. The hollering started his head to throbbing again.

The boy turned and stared, and then continued on his way.

“He’ll fetch himself the lung sickness,” Fitzhugh muttered. He settled back into his robes to await death. Time had run out, he knew. Anyone who couldn’t feel the cold was on his way to hell for sure. He’d heard the last part of dying could be blissful.

Thus he lay for some while, feeling his head expand and contact like a bellows. It was plainly a part of his demise, this throbbing. He cursed the engagés, sprawled around him and craftily avoiding work. They knew. They all lay in their robes knowing he was dying, so they didn’t have to work. Worthless. He pitied the boy, who’d be the one in charge after he breathed his last.

He heard a distant boom rolling down the bottoms, and then a second. But it didn’t matter. Not even Dust Devil was here to comfort him through his last hours. He allowed himself a vast self-pity, dying alone, dying in the brutal cold, dying without seeing his maw and paw and sisters, dying defeated, not a robe traded.

“I need help,” said Maxim.

Fitzhugh turned, startled. The boy peered solemnly at him, his carbine cradled in his arms.

“Help? You want help from me when I dying?”

“I shot a cow elk. A fat one.”

Meat. Fitzhugh’s stomach growled and howled. “I’m a dying man, but I’ll help ye, boy.”

He lumbered to his feet, and stood dizzily, the throbbing wild in his brain, his vision blurry. He tottered around, hunting his Green River knife and sheath, and some manila rope, finding both along a wall. A vast, benign joy settled over him. He’d croak in the middle of this, but he’d do it while he’d make meat, and they’d remember him for it, making meat while he croaked.

“How come you aren’t in your capote, boy. You’ll catch a death of a — “

“It’s warm. Is this a chinook?”

Fitzhugh gaped. He stabbed the earth under him with his knife, cutting a furrow through mud.

“Trudeau!” he bawled. “Git ’em up. Git to work. Git them poles on and lay up a sod roof!”

Trudeau stirred, groaned, and stared.

“A chinook!”

“Monsieur, we are starved — “

“Maxim shot us an elk.”

Minutes later, three yawning, unhappy engagés followed Maxim and Fitzhugh upriver to butcher and haul the meat, while the rest guzzled river water and tried to subdue their nausea. By noon, the engagés had gorged on elk and were hard at work laying up poles and covering them with sedges cut from riverbanks, and then dragging tarpaulin-loads of thawed earth to the building, and wrestling them up to the roof.

They had this little reprieve, while benign westwinds held winter at bay, to finish their task. Each of them knew it, and worked furiously, some cutting and trimming poles, others scything sedge grasses, others digging up clay and sod, others hauling and lifting and tamping earth in place up on the roof. Fitzhugh toiled as hard as the rest, sweating the last of the spirits out of his carcass, limping along with tarp-loads of cold moist earth dragging behind him.

The early dusk settled but no man stopped. Maxim built a half a dozen fires for light, and scrambled around keeping them all fueled. In the midst of that he cooked a great haunch of elk on an iron spit, which the engagés devoured on the run. The night air bled heat swiftly, and Fitzhugh knew it’d reach freezing again.

When he reckoned it midnight, he called them off. In the flickering orange light, his men looked exhausted and gaunt.

“You’ll work better with a decent rest,” he said. “We’ll start again before dawn.”

Most of them cut cooling meat off the haunch and devoured it before rolling into the blankets.

Fitzhugh limped about, delaying his appointment with his blankets, reluctant to surrender to his tiredness. A fine thick layer of sod covered a third of the roof. But the other end was not yet covered with poles, and cold stars shone from where he stood within the walls. It’d be a desperate race, he knew.

He awoke without feeling rested, and with every muscle disobedient. A streak of gray in the southeast announced the next day. He’d come awake before the rest, some internal clock driving him now, when time was so precious. He limped toward the river, where they had mined the good clay and sod, and banged the spade into the ground. It bounced off frozen earth.

He rousted them all then, and set them to cutting poles while he and Maxim cooked. The westwinds stirred a little after the laggard sun finally poked over the eastern bluffs, and he knew this day would be warmer than the last. But it was close to noon before their spades cut easily into the cold earth and they could continue with the sodding. The work went swiftly, as men toiled in a mad rush to beat winter. Poles nestled into place, extending the roof, shrinking the open end; armloads of sedges nestled over the poles, and slowly the thick earthen topping crept toward the unfinished end.

He realized suddenly mid-afternoon that little remained of the elk; a dozen men had devoured it in scarcely twenty-four hours. Hunger loomed. He sighed, hating to stop his own labor, and gathered up his Hawken and possibles, and limped north into the bottoms again, worry gnawing at him. He trudged for miles, finding nothing. No sign. Not even a rabbit. By late afternoon, with dusk harrying him, he knew he’d been skunked. He hacked a stick from a willow and whittled a point on one end and angled back from the river, toward open prairie, hunting for the frozen hairy-leaved remains of the breadroot, the
pomme de prairie
of the French Canadians, a tuberous root that grew abundantly in the area. He found scores of them, and had no trouble unearthing the one or two-inch carrots with his digging stick as dusk settled. Those and the bones of the elk would give them an abundant stew that night.

They toiled by firelight again deep into the ominous night, until the earth resisted their spades and exhaustion slowed the work. When at last they surrendered, the final hewn pole had been lashed place, but a third of the roof lacked its sod topping. He didn’t sleep much; worry haunted him, along with some deep mountaineers’s instinct that the chinook had run its course. A different air had begun to eddy in, sharper and moister.

He reckoned it was only four or five when he rousted them out. The silent engagés had barely rested, but none complained. The air had definitely changed.

“Maxim,” he said, “build a bunch of small fires around the sod. That clay isn’t froze up too bad.”

He labored alongside the rest, feeling his muscles complain, measuring his weariness against the haggard faces he saw around him. The frosted earth yielded swiftly to the fires, even while a northwind eddied icy air into their valley. Two men sickled sedges, having to go farther and farther upriver for each load, while the rest greeted dawn with brutal labor, dragging half-frozen earth to the roof, and stamping it down. Dawn broke under an ominous overcast, the sun gold and bright for half an hour, painting the world with its last gasp only to vanish as King Winter ruled again. By noon of that raw, gray day, they jammed the last of the sod into place on the eave overhanging the far wall. Without stopping, they sawed and adzed frames for the small windows and the two doors. While the light faded, that bleak December day, they were hanging two crude doors held together with whittled pegs, on leather hinges anchored with horseshoe nails, and hanging thick shutters on the windowframes.

Inside, twin fires roaring in the wide fireplaces at either end warmed the long, weather-sealed room a little, but the long cold rectangle sucked up the heat. Engagés gathered around the merry fires, warming hands and backsides, grinning and joking, and pretending they weren’t starved when Maxim poured sugared coffee into their tin cups.

It was mid-December, not far from Christmas.

“Hyar now,” he cried. “We got something to celebrate.”

When dawn came Little Whirlwind walked along the Crazy Woman in her dazzling red capote, wanting to be seen. She feared the Absaroka, who might catch her here and torture or enslave her. But this land was shared by her people, the Tsistsistas, and the Lakota, their allies. Her people sometimes wintered here, on the northern edge of the world they made their home, because game was abundant, and buffalo often wintered in the bottoms of the prairie streams.

If she met Lakota, they would take her to their village and make her welcome, and some would speak her tongue and tell her where her own band had wintered. And if she met Tsistsistas, she would learn at once. So she walked down the cupped valley of the Crazy Woman, en route to its confluence with the Powder, and hoped to meet someone. She knew her strength had ebbed dangerously, and maybe the lung sickness would consume her. But she gained nothing staying still, so she put one moccasin ahead of the other, and pushed into arctic wind that quartered into her from her left.

For half a cloudy day she walked alone. But some time after she had rested her cold legs, she discovered two horsemen ahead of her, coming at a trot. She stood calmly, awaiting her fate, her scarlet coat a banner on a gray day. Two young men with broad faces and prominent cheeks, lightly dressed considering the weather, pulled up on shaggy ponies. They’d been hunting, and had a doe slung over the back of one uneasy pony. She studied them even as they examined her, and the knowing came from the style of their moccasins, the dye marks just below the fletching of the arrows poking from their quivers, and the quillwork designs. Her people. But they were slower to react, and she knew it was because she wore costly trader’s things.

“I am Little Whirlwind of the Suhtai,” she said in her own tongue, and they exclaimed. Who among all the Cheyenne people had not heard of this daughter of One Leg Eagle and Antelope who had married the white trapper?

“Ah, we did not know for sure. You aren’t dressed the way the People do.”

“I wish to be taken to my village, and the lodge of my mother and father.”

“It’s half a day’s ride. Our own is back where we were heading. You didn’t see it? This is a good thing. I am Lame Buffalo Calf and this is Laughing Coyote.”

The one who’d greeted her slid from his pony and helped her up, ahead of the slain doe. She had to hike her skirts to sit on the pad saddle, but her capote kept her legs warm. He trotted ahead tirelessly as they rode toward the village of White Wolf. She bounced along, feeling no hurt, because her spirits sang, and crow-bird had led her truly.

Near dusk the village wolf-police discovered them, and let the threesome pass, sharp interest in their faces. Moments later, the village crier swept ahead of them, announcing the arrival of Little Whirlwind and young men from Blue Heron’s band up the creek.

Oh, the joy of it! Here stood the lodges of her people, their cowhide sides golden with the fires burning within, their tops blackened and bleeding blue smoke, which drifted southward. They formed a crescent in a park on a wooden flat beside the creek, well shielded from the winds. Heads poked out of lodge doors, and the People watched as she rode by, eyes beaming, recognizing her in her scarlet capote. Some she knew, and she cried out to them as her shaggy pony clopped past. She would see them later, but before that she would greet Chief White Wolf, as custom required.

Furry gray dogs circled the procession, bolting around lodges, overturning medicine tripods thick with black-haired scalps, barking a welcome and begging scraps. But few people stirred because of the bitter cold of the Hard Face Moon, and the endless night. Only the village women braved weather like this, in their perpetual quest for firewood they cut with whitemen’s steel hatchets. She saw red and white quarters of frozen buffalo hanging from heavy tripods, and knew her village was fat this winter, and the sacred buffalo,
Pte,
had given their spirits to the People. The cottonwoods nearby were alive with ponies, making a living from bark and twigs.

The young chief did not keep her waiting in the cold, but beckoned her inside his lodge. Little Whirlwind enjoyed the smack of warmth within the cone, produced by a tiny fire at its center. In this relatively permanent winter encampment, the lodgefloor was covered with old buffalo robes, and sleeping pallets and mats lay well above the earth and its grinding cold. But she realized her people could not walk about their lodges in light clothing, as the white people in St. Louis did in the middle of winter.

He motioned her to the place in the lodge where women sat, and she settled herself beside the chief’s wife. He eyed her a while, saying nothing, studying her bright capote. “You have come to visit us, Little Whirlwind. And what of your man?”

“He is building a trading post on the Yellowstone,” she replied.

White Wolf nodded, saying nothing. “He has sent you,” the chief said at last.

“I have come to visit my mother and father.”

“Your man did not send you.”

It was her turn to say nothing. The sudden warmth was making her sleepy.

“Why does he make a post there, in the land of the Absaroka? It is far from us.”

“I asked him to come here to trade.”

“He will trade with the Crow, then. Will he trade rifles and powder and knives for robes?”

“Yes. He was going to make Fort Cass his trading post. But American Fur came back, and he is building one nearby.”

“It is where the Crows trade,” White Wolf said solemnly. “Does Brokenleg Fitzhugh no longer care about the people of his wife?”

“He said he would come with wagons to trade,” she said.