Rocky Mountain Company (33 page)

She hadn’t expected this. She’d expected this great medicine man to welcome her joyously and share her disdain of the dogs she’d escaped from, and all the others, including the Omissis chief of the village. She’d expected him to conduct purification ceremonies that would scrape away the winters of life with Fitzhugh and renew her to the People.

“Crow-bird brought you safely through the winter to us. Yet you want new medicine. You want approving words from me. But when I listen to my voices, they tell me things you wouldn’t like to hear.”

“I trust your wisdom, Grandfather.”

“Then go back to the trader,” he said. “Go to the Omissis chief you disdain, and the village headmen and tell them I have spoken, and what your medicine will be. And live no longer without knowing.”

“Without knowing?”

“You live without knowing,” he said. And he dismissed her with that placid wave of his gnarled hand.

She stepped into a blinding light wrought by sun on snow and stood staring at her cold village, which seemed no longer hers. Not even her parents’ lodge seemed to welcome her any more.

She walked over well-trodden snow toward the great lodge of White Wolf and waited outside. A voice bid her enter, and when she stepped in, she found all the elders gathered and waiting, as if they’ d known in some mysterious way she’d be coming. They loved to gather and talk and augur the future, and pass the slow days when Cold Maker ruled the earth.

She surveyed their blank faces, and found the same distance among them she’d found in her own family, as if they all were waiting for something. For two suns she’d stayed with her mother and father and grandfather and relatives, and it was as if the hoop of family had been broken and she didn’t belong within it. She didn’t know what she’d done. She knew of nothing that condemned leaving a man if she must. She could put him away, and he could put her away. And she wasn’t running off with some other man, which might have caused a scandal.

“Little Whirlwind, what are your intentions?” the chief asked without preamble.

“I haven’t decided.” She disliked being grilled, especially by an Omissis. Every headman present peered at her through the smoky amber light, weighing her answers as if they had some right to disapprove of her. She wanted to snap at them, but such a thing would cause a scandal.

“The whiteman Fitzhugh who lived among us as a friend. He is a trader now? Has he many things on his shelves for us?”

“He has nothing on his shelves. He has no shelves. He has only a few men to build a trading house,” she replied tartly. Let them see how little it all meant. “They have wagons but nothing to pull them. They let the Absaroka steal everything or kill what couldn’t be stolen.”

“Fitzhugh is in trouble, then.”

“I think he will fail. He might not get his trading goods out of Fort Cass. Julius Hervey won’t give them back,” she said. “And he’s weak and they are hungry.”

“A post run by our friend Brokenleg is very important to us,” the chief replied coldly. “You left him in a time of his troubles.”

“I follow my medicine,” she said, her voice razored.

“Did he do you harm?”

She could not answer, and remained silent. They waited for her response.

“Did you learn his ways?”

“Yes, but they are strange.”

“You’ve told all this to Hump, a man we prize above all others in our village. And how did he reply?”

She hesitated. “He said I have not lost my crow-bird medicine. He said I must return to Fitzhugh. And he said — I lived without knowing.”

No one spoke. A stick in the fire snapped. She saw eyes turn inward in thought, their focus away from her face.

“Hump’s wisdom rises above the wisdom of us all,” White Wolf said gently. “We will go back with you. It’s best to travel in large parties in the winter. This trading house your man is making would help the Tsistsistas in several ways. It is closer. It would compete with Fort Cass and American Fur, and each would seek our robes and try to offer more than the other — and that would be good for us. But there’s more, Little Whirlwind. If we don’t trade for his robes, then he will trade with our enemies. The Absarokas would bring robes and take his guns and powder.”

She listened silently, discovering that her flight from Brokenleg had become important to all the Cheyenne. It annoyed her.

“Our friend Brokenleg needs horses. We have many, and some warriors who would gladly trade ponies for guns and blankets. He needs to have strength with him when he is ready to get his things from Fort Cass. We have strength; many warriors. He has nothing to pull his wagons. We don’t have horses that pull wagons, but we have horses that pull travois. We have thought about all of these things, the council you see here. Hump has told us that it would be a wise thing to go to Fitzhugh with ponies, robes to trade, and our warriors ready to help if Fitzhugh needs us. If he’s starving, we’ll hunt for him too, and some time he’ll pay us with tobacco and vermillion and copper kettles. If we don’t help him, Little Whirlwind, then we aren’t being loyal to our own — “

“But he says a post must be neutral! He wouldn’t let me bring the things here!”

The chief let this extraordinary outburst pass. “His plan was to bring trading wagons here to trade with us, didn’t you say? He was planning to trade with all the peoples, but he was also planning to come here and trade with us in our own village.”

She declined to answer.

“You’re our connection to this new trading company. Up at Fort Union, the traders are married to Blackfeet, Assiniboin, Mandan, Cree. But what great trader of the north ever married a Cheyenne, like Charles Bent in the south?”

“I’m Suhtai,” she reminded him.

“In two or three suns a strong party will leave for Fitzhugh’s Post, with many ponies and robes. And you’ll be with us, Little Whirlwind. Visit your family while we prepare, and then we will go.”

One by one, Ambrose Chatillon plucked treasures from the panniers he’d dragged into the post. Hinges! Nails! Bolts! Latches! Brokenleg gaped at the sight of iron implements, brought two thousand river miles from St. Louis on the backs of mules. These well-chosen items were the small makings of comfort and safety and convenience for the new post.

And three hundred selected, dried osage orange shafts, an ideal bow wood carried patiently up endless miles of river, past hostile villages, through storms and cold. Fitzhugh studied them, hefted them, admired the care with which they’d been selected and cut. A treasure in a northern land without a first-rate bow wood to be had. A gamble, perhaps. No trader had offered
bois d’arc
for robes, and no tribe had ever traded for the unfinished wood, though warriors of all the northern tribes treasured the orange bows above all others.

One by one the gaunt engagés stumbled into the fort, astonished at the livestock tied outside, and more astonished by the man within, who cut fat slices of buffalo tongue for each with a dapper joy, while joshing them all in voluble French.

“The tongue, it’s only a mouthful for these. Just enough so they aren’t so faint,” he said to Fitzhugh. “We’ll go kill buffalo.”

Brokenleg peered at his desperate engagés, who slumped hollow-cheeked and bag-eyed before the fire, warming themselves with a hardy tea brewed from Chatillon’s stores. A few mouthfuls of tongue hadn’t helped much; and some of them seemed close to collapse.

“We’ll start first thing,” Brokenleg agreed. “You know where they be?”

“This tongue, it is one day old. Tullock’s Creek, just over the divide and south a way. That carcass, it is in the belly of wolves now, but I saw lots — lots.”

Men peered at him, hanging on to each word.
Buffalo.

“You got a horse and pack mules. You reckon we could haul a carcass — “

Chatillon laughed, and crawled into his heavy white blanket capote. “Meat,” he said, collecting his powderhorn and possibles.

Fitzhugh watched him, puzzled. “What are you fetching to do, Ambrose? It’s killin’ cold out there.”

“Make meat. See the moon? Fat. See the snow? Blanc. I am a ghost in the night. I ghost past the villages on the river and not a dog howls. I’ll find the buffalo, yes?”

“Any of them mules I can ride?” Fitzhugh said, possibility blooming in his brain.

“Maybe, maybe not. Who knows?”

“I’m thinkin’ I want me some liver, hot and raw.”

So did six of the engagés, those who thought they’d find the strength to walk eight or nine miles through a December night so cold the snow would squeak under foot. The rest, including Maxim, stared helplessly, hollow-eyed, unable to muster the energy for such the nocturnal hunt. That suited Fitzhugh fine. He didn’t want them all, and especially the ones most weakened.

They plunged into a night bright and murderous, the vault of heaven glittering wickedly over them. Chatillon led on his shaggy horse, and the mules followed without tether. Three proved rideable but the fourth humped and rebelled with a human on it, so the engagés traded off rides. Fitzhugh rode one, while the unrideable beast was loaded with Hawkens and axes and rope and tarpaulins.

How strange it was, he thought, to have a wiry man and a few pack animals show up in their midst and instantly change everything for the better. His mouthful of buffalo tongue earlier had done nothing to appease the aching of his belly, and he knew the engagés walking patiently through a whitewashed world of open rough prairie had eaten even less. If they found no meat, they’d be in trouble.

It wasn’t a pleasant hunt, and yet every man was driven by the prospect of wild pleasure over the low divide and up the next drainage. Frost bit at his toes as he sat immobilized, his bad leg poking out. One of the engagés, Brasseau, clung to Fitzhugh’s saddle, no longer able to stand or walk without that crutch, but desperate for meat, and cradling his frosted mountain rifle in his free arm.

On a snow-gilded horizon, coyotes laughed. His fingers hurt and then numbed. The bony mule wobbled under him, weary and insulted by this extra unpaid labor. Chatillon hadn’t fed them or let them paw up grass from the thin snow.

After the Dipper had circled half way around Polaris behind him, spilling night from its lip, he realized Chatillon was slowing and peering into phosphorescent plains nestled below gentle hogbacks. Tullock’s Creek oxbowed along the bottom like a winter snake.

“Ah, my friends, you’ll wait here, yes? We are too many, and I am a wolf of the night, a beast of the blackness, dealing death under the white moon.”

It rankled Fitzhugh, but he knew starving men lacked a good eye and steady hand and a careful stealth. Chatillon knew it too. And in truth, some of the engagés could scarcely stand up. Bercier and Dauphin slumped over the mules, content to let the newcomer do the hunting. They watched Chatillon arc around to the south and approach a black mass not far away, a mass Fitzhugh was just beginning to under stand was a few hundred buffalo standing in the midst of brush windbreaks, asleep on their feet under a December moon. He stuck his numb hands into his capote, and under his armpits, and found only pain there.

Now the dead night seemed alive. He sensed the slink of gray things through light and shadow, and knew the presence of wolves. Stars trembled and shattered. The bottoms below rose and fell, a strange moon-mirage, giving motion to a world. Snowflakes plummeted, decocted out of a clear sky somehow.

A weapon boomed, the quiet of the night absorbing the noise and neutering it, as if a gelded rifle had fired a fruitless ball. It boomed again, and gray things checked and slithered.

Some small part of the black mass sagged, and a second part detached itself like a stray from swarming bees, and then stopped abruptly, diminishing in size. The black mass vibrated and fell to pieces, like pie wedges flying out of the pie in all directions and vanished over a hogback. Two bituminous lumps remained.

Thin on the heavy air came Chatillon’s high calling, and Fitzhugh kicked his weary mule down a draw onto the tufted bottom, while others followed, turning alive behind him. Then men stumbled past him, their breath hot in the air, stampeding foolishly, berserk with strange shrieking laughter and howling, like swinging apes gathering for a mating. They swarmed around a half-dead kicking buffalo cow, laughing when a trembling hoof flailed their number away. Cold knives bit her gut, sawing through steaming flesh and matted hair while the creature yet trembled. The rank smell of innards caught the air while blades opened her secrets to the cold universe, and hands tugged gray ropes of intestine, the boundins, out into snow where they steamed in protest.

Brasseau, a man renewed by opportunity, slashed toward the liver and found it, black in the night, vast and slippery and evil under the moon. He tugged it out with bloodied hands, and snapped his jaws over the oozing flesh, and then other hands snatched it from him and other mouths separated hot parts from the whole.

He hankered for some himself, this nectar of the plains. He saw how it was going there and rode, instead, to the second one, where Chatillon had dismounted, and in a few minutes he’d freed himself from his saddle, tumbled on his bad leg, dug up the liver of that young cow and bit into it, feeling hot wet flesh on his tongue and life begin in his belly. Chatillon stood amiably, smiling faintly, amused, his eyes scanning the horizons.

The livers vanished, and then boudins, gulped whole, inch by inch, and then rough raw tongue, blood-black while stars whirled. They sat in the cold, dumbfounded by the weight in their own bellies, while the buffalo cooled beside them.

“I think we maybe cut it up, yes?” said Ambrose Chatillon. He hefted an ax and began thumping it methodically across the back of one cow until bone severed and the animal lay halved fore and aft. Mules watched, their breaths steaming. Wearily, engagés clambered to their wobbly feet and began the harvest in earnest, chopping and sawing, separating hump and boss rib from neck and flank, salvaging bristly tongue, hoisting thigh and rump to the flanks of mules that accepted the outrage with flattened ears, mincing uneasily under the carnage they beheld upon them. They saved out Fitzhugh’s mule for his transport, but rigged a drag of canvas and rope which Fitzhugh would skid behind him, laden with hacked flesh and hide. All told, they could carry or drag less than one cow on backs of the mules, on canvas sleds, and on their own shoulders.