The First Mountain Man (4 page)

He had saved his old buckskins and now he cut them up to make socks for the horses' hooves.

“Why are you doing that?” Richard asked.

“So's the steel hooves won't scar the rocks and leave a trail,” Preacher told him. “Get that old ragged blanket off my pack horse and do the same with it. Quickly, people. Every minute counts.”

When the hooves were covered, Preacher led the group to the timber and told them not to move from that spot. Then he led the horses over, one at a time and had each one mount up.

“Stay with me,” he told them. “Don't snag a thread on a branch. If you do, holler and stop and pick it off. They'll find this trail, eventually, but let's don't make it any easier for them.”

Preacher led them deep into virgin forests, forging his own trail, the needles and leaves making only faint whispering sounds under the hooves. He pointed to a tree, which had strange markings some twenty feet off the ground. “Grizzly. And a big one. He'll stand twelve feet high and weigh damn near half a ton. If a grizzly gets after you, climb a tree. They're so big and heavy they don't climb. Usually,” he added with a smile.

Edmond looked up at the scratchings and shook his head, wondering what it would be like to come face to face with a beast that large.

It was a trail-weary and saddle-sore bunch that finally slipped out of the saddle just at dusk. Preacher had set a grueling pace. And he didn't make matters any better when he said, “Cold camp. No fires. Roll up in your blankets now and stay there. Cool clear night like this, the odor of food cookin' or coffee boilin' would travel five miles. This spruce and pine's got an odor to it, too.”

“Not even a little fire?” Penelope asked.

“No. See to your horses, rub them down good, and picket them careful on graze.”

“Tyrant!” she muttered.

Preacher slept well but cautiously that night, as he usually did in the mountains. He did not awaken at natural sounds. The sounds of a hunting owl seizing a mouse or rat or rabbit would not pull him awake. The lonesome call of a coyote or the talking of wolves would not alarm him. A breaking twig would pull him instantly alert, for deer or elk or most forest creatures would not step on a branch unless they were frightened and running. Man steps on twigs and branches.

The rain woke him several hours before dawn would touch the high country.

He quietly climbed out of his blankets and rolled them in his ground sheet. The others slept on, unaware of anything that was happening around them; they would have to learn the woods, or they'd die.

With it raining, he would chance a small fire for coffee, built under an overhang to break up the smoke. He checked the snares he'd set out the evening before and found two fat rabbits. He skinned them out and carefully scraped the meat from the skin and rolled them up from habit. They made good glove linings. He had the meat cooking before the others began stirring.

Melody was the first up. She completed her morning toilet and joined Preacher by the small fire, both of them waiting for the coffee to boil and the meat to sear.

“We're in trouble, aren't we?” she asked.

“It ain't the best situation I ever been in,” he acknowledged. “But it ain't the worst, neither. I get to my secret hidey-hole-and it is a hole—we can all get some rest and figure out our next move. It'll take Bum and them others some time to find us there. They might never,” Preacher told her, knowing it to be a lie.

He poured them coffee, both of them cupping their fingers around the tin, warming their extremities, for the morning was cold this high up. The others slept on.

Preacher met her blues across the fire. “Edmond's sweet on you.”

“I know. But I don't share his feelings. At all. He's not a bad person, really, Preacher. He's just far out of his element. And he's scared. Like all the rest of us. Except you.”

“I'd be scared in a big city like Phillydelphia. Too damn many people for my tastes.” He shook his head. His hair was long, hanging well past his ears, for he hadn't cropped it all winter. It helped to keep his head and face warm during the brutal mountain winters. “You don't act like no gospel-shouter I ever seen, Melody. Richard and Edmond, yeah, and Penelope, too. But not you. How'd you get tied up in an outfit like this one?”

“Through a society I belong to. We all thought it would be a grand adventure and we could help bring the Lord to the savages. I'm afraid we didn't think it out very thoroughly.”

“You sure didn't. No place for a woman out here. Not yet. Someday, yeah. Someday this country will be ruined with people.” The last was spoken with some bitterness.

Melody smiled at him across the flames. “It has to be, Preacher. The nation is growing. People want to build new lives, to explore, to expand. Do you know about the steam locomotives?”

“The what?”

“Locomotives that run by steam. It's true. We've had them for almost six years now. Soon the railroads will be running everywhere.”

“Not out here!”

“Oh, yes, Preacher. Even out here. A true visionary by the name of Doctor Hartwell Carver is proposing a transcontinental route.”

“A trans-what?”

“Coast to coast railroad tracks. You wait and see. It will happen.”

“Stars and garters! I never heard of such a thing. Why, I had a man tell me that no more'n five or six years ago, they wasn't but a hundred miles of track in the whole United States.”

“That's true. But I assure you, there are many, many more miles of track than that now.”

Preacher shook his head. “Makes a poor man like me feel plumb ignorant.”

She smiled. “No, Preacher. Never ignorant. You've just been isolated, that's all. When was the last time you read a newspaper?”

“I ... don't remember. I can read,” he quickly added. “I went to the fifth grade. But it's been so many years since I read a word I'd have trouble, I 'magine.”

“I understand that there is talk already of an expedition to chart a route from St. Louis to San Francisco, although I'm sure it will be several years before that happens. Can you just imagine that? A railroad from St. Louis westward all the way across the nation? It's mind-boggling. Preacher, the government will be looking for men like you to lead those scouting parties. Men like you who know the wilderness that so many of us have only read about. Ignorant, Preacher? No, you're far from being that. You've been to California?”

“Oh, yeah. I seen the blue waters a couple of times. I been to California and Oregon. Hard, mean trip from here. A railroad? That's
impossible!
You can't build no damn railroad through these mountains.” He again shook his head. “That's a pipedream, Melody. It ain't possible. You can't hardly get a wagon through. You can't even do that in most spots.”

“But you are going to take us to Oregon, aren't you, Preacher?”

“I shore ain't gonna leave you out here alone,” he hedged the question slightly.

She smiled and kissed him right on the mouth. Startled Preacher so bad he spilled the hot coffee right on his crotch and he jumped up, hollering and bellering and slapping at himself. The others thought they were under attack and went into a panic. Penelope got all tangled up in her blankets, shrieking like a banshee, and Richard jumped out of his blanket, the back flap to his underwear hanging down. Edmond flew out of his blankets and ran slap into a tree, knocking himself goofy—which wasn't that long a trip.

Melody and Preacher hung on to each other, laughing so hard they had tears in their eyes.

4

“Lost their tracks,” the renegade reported back to Bum. “He took 'em into that crick yonder. I don't know whether he went up or down. Down, if he was smart.”

“Preacher is anything but smart,” Bum replied, knowing he was telling a lie. Preacher was as wily a mountain man as ever tracked a deer, and as dangerous as any puma. He remembered that time down on the Poison Spider Crick when an ol' boy name of Jason Dunbar got to needlin' Preacher about his name. Preacher took all he could stomach and told him to lay off or stand up and get ready to duke it out. Dunbar was a good foot taller than Preacher and out-weighed him by a hundred pounds. But when Preacher got through with Dunbar and finally let him fall, Jason Dunbar didn't have no front teeth left him a-tall, couldn't straighten up for a week, and only had half of his left ear. Preacher had bit off the top half. Preacher had put a thrashing on Jason that was talked about for years afterward.

Bum shook his head. “No, Luke, I done told you a tale. Preacher's smart, he's mean, he's tough, and he's quick. And when we catch him—and we will catch up to him and them folks—he won't go down easy. We'll lose some people. Bridger and Broken Hand Fitzpatrick and Carson and Beckwourth all speak highly of the man. Them boys don't give praise lightly. Bear that in mind.”

“Two women out there,” another thug said, pulling at himself. “White women. Been a long time since I had me a taste of white women.”

“Hell, Slug,” another man said. “I ain't even seen a white woman in more'un two year.”

“Jack Harris was leadin' them pilgrims straight to us,” Bum mused aloud. “How the hell was I supposed to know a bunch of Arapaho was waitin' in ambush?” He cussed and kicked at a rotten branch and it flew into a hundred pieces. “Damn the luck, anyways.”

“And where the hell did Jack get off to?” another questioned.

“Runnin' for his life, probably,” Bum said. “He's probably settled down and huntin' our trail now. He'll be along. Come on, let's fan out and try to pick up Preacher's trail.”

“South?” one of his gang questioned, looking down the little creek.

Bum shook his head. “No. By now, Preacher knows we're trackin' him. He ain't gonna do this the easy way. George, you take a few boys and head south aways just to make sure. Beckman, you take the west side of the crick, Moses, you take the east side. You both work north. Rest of us will wait here so's not to crap up any sign. Take off. Adam, you build us a fire and we'll boil some coffee.” He bit off a chew from a twist and looked up the crick. “White women,” he muttered. “And them men with 'em is totin' gold, too. I got a good feelin' about this. A real good feelin'.”

* * *

Several miles from his destination, Preacher halted the short column and once more sacked the horses' hooves. He then led the group up a gently sloping hill to a jumble of rocks on a ledge. A towering mountain loomed high above them, snow-capped all year round.

“It gets right close in here, folks,” Preacher told them. “So mind your feet and knees.”

He led them into a narrow twisting passageway that was just wide enough for them to pass with not three inches to spare on either side. There was just enough light filtering in from the crack high above them to illuminate their way.

“Eerie,” Melody muttered.

With the sacking still on their horses' hooves, the party made very little noise as they moved along. The narrow fissure suddenly opened up into a high, huge, cathedral-like cavern with a bubbling stream running right through it. About a hundred feet long and several times that in width, the other end opened up into a beautiful little valley, about twenty-five or thirty acres of lush grass and a winding little creek.

“I don't think anybody else knows about this place,” Preacher said. “Them drawin's on the walls was done hundreds of years ago, I reckon. Lord knows, I ain't never seen no beasties that look like some of them animals yonder. If you was to talk to an Injun about this place, he'd tell you it was the People Who Came Before who done this. Sounds reasonable to me.”

“Is the way we came in the only way in?” Richard asked.

“Nope. They's another way. See that waterfall over 'crost the valley? They's another cave under that, leads into a blow-down on the other side.”

“A what?” Edmond asked.

“Long time ago, years, must have been a terrible storm struck here. Tore up several hundred acres. Huge trees tore up by the roots and tossed every whichaway. Piled on top of one another and flang willy-nilly about. The cave comes out direct into all that mess. Them chasin' us might look a little ways into that blow-down; but they ain't gonna give it no good looksee. Too wild a place. Now in here where we is, the smoke filters up through them cracks in the ceilin' and disappears somewheres else. I built me a roarin', smokin' fire in here one winter's morning and spent the rest of the day outside. I never seen no smoke nor smelled none. We're as safe as I can make us. Now what I want you folks to do is this: strip the horses and put them out to pasture. I'm gonna take my bow, go out into that blow-down, and kill us a deer or two so's we'll have some meat to go along with the beans and bread that you ladies is gonna make from the flour we salvaged back at the ambush site. They's fish in that stream in the valley that's mighty good eatin'. I'm gonna be gone the rest of the day and maybe the night. Don't worry. I'll be back if a rattler don't bite me, a bear don't tree me, a puma don't jump on me and claw me to death, and Injun don't kill me, or I don't die from phewmona after gettin' soakin' wet duckin' under that waterfall yonder.”

“I hate to be macabre,” Edmond said.

“Whatever that means,” Preacher said.

“But, what happens if you
don't
return?”

“You sit tight until your supplies is just about gone. By that time, if you don't eat all the damn day long, Bum and his boys will have given up and gone. Then you head west. That's the direction the sun sets. If you come to a great big body of water, that's the Pacific Ocean. You'll either be in California or Oregon country.”

“You don't have to be insulting,” Penelope said.

Preacher stared at her for a moment, then shook his head. He was muttering as he got his bow and quiver of arrows and left the cave and headed out into the meadow, walking toward the waterfall.

Melody stood in the mouth of the cave and watched him until he ducked behind the cascading water and was gone from sight. Penelope was lying down, exhausted from the travels, and Edmond was seeing to the horses.

“He's quite a man, Melody,” Richard said softly. “But not the man for you.”

She turned slowly and faced him. “Whatever in the world do you mean, Richard?”

“It's easy to see that you're quite smitten with him, Melody. We've all commented on it. But I urge you to think about what you're doing and to try and curb your emotions. The man is a wanderer, a will of the wisp. He'll only break your heart.”

“It's purely platonic, Richard,” she lied. “Nothing more. I enjoy his company, that's all. He's a fascinating man who has packed ten average lifetimes into one.”

“Melody, I don't want to appear ungrateful for all he's done for us. He saved our lives and continues to do so hourly. But the man is only a cut above a savage. I doubt he's had a fork in his hand in ten years. He eats with his fingers. The two of you come from different worlds.”

She smiled and patted his arm. “You worry needlessly, Richard. Come, let me change the dressing on your ear. In years to come, no matter where we might be, we'll look back on this episode and enjoy a good laugh.”

* * *

Preacher got his first deer within moments of entering the blow-down. He quickly but carefully skinned and butchered it, leaving the waste parts for critters of the forest to eat. There would be no trace of the animal come the morning. He put the eatable parts in the hide and using a length of rope he'd brought, he hung the meat high from a limb to protect it. It took him an hour to find, stalk, and bring down the second deer. He heard a rustling in the dense brush and knew that wolves had caught the blood scent and were closing. Three big gray wolves, a male and two females. Preacher tossed them liver, intestines, and other scrap parts, shouldered his load and headed back toward the valley. Lots of folks feared wolves, but most of that fear was groundless. Preacher had never known of a healthy, full-grown wolf ever, unprovoked, attacking a human being. But a starving or hurt wolf was quite another matter. And when any animal is eating a kill or hiding the carcass for a later snack, you best leave that animal alone. And they also get might protective when it comes to their young.

He left the wolves snarling in mock anger and tearing at the meat parts. “Enjoy, brothers,” he said.

Preacher rather like wolves. He'd had several as companions from time to time. They had not been pets, for a wolf cannot be domesticated like a dog. And if you're going to be around them, you got to know their ways. They don't conform to human ways; a man's got to conform to
their
ways. Once that's settled, a man can be fairly comfortable around wolves. You just can't never let them get the upper hand. For once they do, it takes a fight for dominance to regain it. And you ain't likely to come out in too good a shape fightin' no two-hundred-pound buffalo wolf.

Preacher figured he was packing close to a hundred and fifty pounds of raw meat, for the deer had both been sleek and fat. It had been an early spring, with lots to eat. But he'd carried more than that for longer periods of time.

He was back in the cave by nightfall and had some steaks sizzling moments later. “We'll smoke and jerk the rest of it,” he told them. “Tomorrow, I'll pick some berries and we'll make pemmican.”

“What in the world is that?” Richard asked.

“After the meat's dried, that's what we call jerky, I'll pound it into a powder and mix it with pulped and whole berries and the fat I saved from the venison after I cook it down. You mix all that up and it keeps for a longtime. I got some over there in my parfleche. Try some. It's good.”

“What is a parfleche?” Melody asked.

“Rawhide case yonder. Hand it here.” Preacher stuffed some pemmican into his mouth and smiled. “I ain't kiddin' y'all. It's really good.”

He passed the parfleche around and the others reluctantly tried some of the concoction. They all smiled as they chewed. “It really is good!” Edmond said.

“Y'all gonna bring Jesus to the savages,” Preacher said, “I reckon now is a good time to start your learnin'. You got to know something about these folks.”

“We were to be instructed in Oregon,” Richard said.

“Wagh!” Preacher said in disgust. “Them's coast Injuns. Klamath and Tillamook and Chinook and Spokan and Pomo and Chumash and the like. Hell, they all 'bout either civilized or whupped down by now. I'm talkin'
Injuns,
folks. Scalp-hunters and warriors and the finest horsemen on the face of the earth. Comanche, Pawnee, Ute, Shoshoni, Apache, Blackfoot, Arapaho, Crow, Kiowa, Flathead, Assiniboin, Dakota—that's Sioux to you—and Nez Perce. They's more, but them's the important ones you'll be seein', I 'magine. Most of the ones I just named is hunters and warriors. Only ones I know of that'll grow anything to eat to amount to anything is your Hidatsa, Navajo, Pima, Pueblo, and Papago. Most of them is down in the Southwest. Except for the Hidatsa, and what's left of them is scattered along the northern borders. Mandan and Pawnee will raise a few crops, mostly corn, beans, squash and pumpkin. They trade a lot with other tribes. You watch a Pawnee when you're tradin'. They're slick. Blackfoot, Crow and Comanche won't eat fish. It's taboo to them. Your desert tribes roast snake and insects.

“Richard, you asked me couple of days back about how Injuns cook and what they eat. You'd be surprised. I've lived with Injuns that could whup up a buffalo stew that'd leave you smackin' your lips for days. Injuns ain't like white folks in that they don't waste nothin'. And I mean nothin'. They break the bones and boil the marrow or just suck it out. They clean and scrape out the guts and make sausage cases out of 'em, stuffin' 'em with seasoned meat. They're good with nature's own wild things. They season with sage and wild onions and milkweed buds and rose hips. They peel the prickly pear cactus and add that to stews and soups. It was Injuns that taught me to peel fresh sweet thistle stalks and eat it. Tastes kinda like nuts.

“Injuns ain't got pots like we use, so when they make a stew, they use the linin' from a buffalo stomach. You get you four poles, secure the ends of the linin', dump in some meat and stuff like prairie turnips and wild peas. To make the water boil, the women drop in hot rocks. The pouch will last three/four days until it gets soggy, then you eat the linin'. They don't waste nothin'.

“Injuns use ever' part of the animal they can. The thick pelt from a buffalo's neck can be made into a shield. Animals killed in winter has a special use cause the hair is long and thick. They use 'em for blankets and robes. Rawhide is made into strings and ropes. Buffalo hair is woven into ropes. Buffalo horns is used for everything from spoons to gourds. Injuns used to make knifes out of buffalo bones. Injuns use buffalo hides to make their tipis. And a tipi is not only a home, it's a sacred place to the Injun. The floor means the earth that they live on. The walls, which is peaked, is the sky. They round 'cause that is the sacred life circle, which ain't got no beginnin' or no end. Get it? A circle. And Injuns will always burn something that smells good in their tipis. Sage or sweet grass. It's an altar to them. That's where they pray to their gods.”