The High Divide (29 page)

“The good eating,” Magpie said, and he cut away the marbled hump as big as a man's head, then stripped off the heavy backstraps, two feet long, from both sides of the spine.

They skinned and butchered the four cows, a pack of skulking coyotes watching from the hills above, and by the time the sun was low they'd built a travois of cedar poles to carry the hide-wrapped meat piles. Leather Top rode ahead to scout the herd, while Magpie, Bull Bear, and Eli headed back toward Taylor Creek. On the way, they rode to the top of a high round bluff that offered a long view in all directions and above which hung a blue-tinged cloud. On the highest point of the bluff Magpie laid out the best of the four robes—the one taken from Eli's cow—and spread it out on a table of limestone and set rocks all around its edge to hold it in place.

They left it there and rode on.

At the camp above the stream, they rubbed down their ponies and hobbled them by the water. They built up a good fire, then feasted on hump roast and tenderloin, on boss ribs and boiled tongue, as they watched the lavender sky darken and the stars emerge by ones and twos, threes and fours, and finally by the dozens. Magpie took out tobacco and filled the redstone bowl of his wooden-stemmed pipe. He lit it, and they passed the pipe among the three of them, Magpie and Bull Bear laughing each time Eli tried to fill his lungs but coughed.

“Don't keep your lips closed that way,” Magpie told him. “When you draw in the smoke, open your mouth and take in some air along with it.” He nodded for Eli to try again. “Yes, like that, good,” he said.

They were silent as the night deepened. Finally, Magpie said, “I remember my first hunt. It was a small herd like the one today, and I was using a heavy, one-shot gun that burned the black powder and threw iron balls as big as this”—he held up a fist and wiggled the tip of his thumb. “It had a kick, too. It was my father's. I rode my pony up next to this fat cow, running hard, and when I shot
this
way”—Magpie rotated to his left and pretended to fire a rifle—“I fell off my horse
that
way,” and he jerked a thumb over his right shoulder. “My father had to ride through that running herd and pick me up.”

“Did you kill the cow?” Eli asked.

Magpie nodded, handing the pipe back to Eli. He said, “But you didn't fall off your pony.”

“And I wasn't shooting a black-powder rifle,” Eli said.

They all lay back and looked up at the sky, the constellations beginning to show themselves. Eli thought of his own father and wondered where he was, whether he was back at the permanent camp with Hornaday or out here somewhere, searching—or even watching. As the outermost star of the Big Dipper's handle twinkled into view, Eli couldn't help but wish his father had been there today to see him take down the cow. But it didn't matter, because he knew that Ulysses understood: to answer for a son, a son was required.

“Some say the buffalo have gone north across the medicine line,” Magpie said, “a herd of five thousand. That they're finding others there and getting fat in those mountain meadows, increasing themselves for the day when they can return to this country. Others, from down in the territories, they talk about a hidden cave in the great grasslands of the Staked Plains. A cave where the herds first came from. And how the mouth of that cave has been stopped up so the buffalo can't get out anymore. I talked to a man at the agency. He was a chief from the southern tribes, and he said he knows where this cave is. I would like to believe him. I would like to believe the story about the big herds north of the line. But I can't. My son, if he had lived, would have spent the rest of his life eating the skinny longhorns and the spotted weaklings they want us to raise on the agency land. He would have had to raise vegetables in that dry soil. And wait for shipments of food that never came.”

They'd finished smoking now, and all three were lying next to the spit and plucking at the tenderloin with their fingers when Leather Top came riding into camp. Bull Bear got up and took his pony for him, and Leather Top sat down directly and set himself to the task of eating. It wasn't until he was satisfied, belching and wiping his hands on his deerskin pants, that he gave his report, gesturing and pointing and nodding, his face in the firelight like an ancient pumpkin, all creases and shadows.

“He followed the herd until they found a place to graze,” Magpie explained. “They're in a box canyon just beyond that little butte, the red one between the two big ones.”

“The butte you call the son?” Eli asked.

“Yes, that one.”

“What's a box canyon?”

“A canyon with just one way out. Leather Top says there is good grazing inside, and a good pool of water, too. They'll be staying a little while.”

Eli was exhausted, his head so full of the day it was blurry inside, and he couldn't seem to focus his thoughts. His belly was distended, but he couldn't stop feeding himself. Even after he'd laid out his bedroll and climbed inside of it, he got up for another try at the backstraps, charred now.

“Tell me,” Magpie said. “Is it only the memory of the buffalo that your friend from Washington believes he can save? Or does he think he can save its spirit too by stuffing its dead skin to make it look real?”

“I don't know.” Eli shook his head. With the smell of blood in his nose, and with the grease that coated his lips and hands, and with the power of the running herd still moving inside his bones, he couldn't be sure of anything.

“What do they use to fill up their dried skins?” Magpie asked.

“I'm not sure. Sawdust, maybe, as my father said. Cloth and wood. Something, anyway, to take the place of their muscles and bones and guts. Something to give them some shape, make them look like they might still be alive.”

Magpie was quiet, thinking. Then he said, “Once the buffaloes are all gone, I'm afraid we'll be following after them. Will they skin us too and fill us up with sawdust and put us inside a building for people to come and look at?” He turned to his brother and spoke for a few moments in their own tongue.

Bull Bear uttered a quick retort. Then he lifted a finger, cocked an ear, and ripped a fart that echoed like a piece of canvas being torn in half.

“My brother,” Magpie said, “wants you to know that's for the man who tries to stuff
him
after he's dead.”

Eli rocked forward to a sitting position, then fell back on the robe again and closed his eyes. He was too tired to laugh and too old to cry. For weeks now he'd been living his father's life, living inside his father's dream. He knew he was close to reaching the end of his strength, close to waking into some other world entirely in which he was no longer the person he had been, his father's son, mother's son, his brother's brother. A world in which he might no longer recognize himself. He felt like he'd died and come back again, the life ahead of him no longer his own—although he wasn't sure whose it might be. Not his father's, certainly, and not Magpie's either. God's, maybe. Whatever that could mean. He lifted a hand to push the hair out of his face, and his fingers encountered stiff snarls caked with blood and grime from the afternoon of skinning and butchering. He tasted the blood on his fingers, not an unwelcome flavor, earthy and sour. Not unwelcome at all. Then he moved onto his side and made himself comfortable, turning his face toward the heat of the fire.

From Dream to Dream

H
e hadn't been sleeping much since they got here, but not because he was nervous or afraid or feeling poorly. The truth was, Danny wasn't tired. He felt as if he had new iron in his bones, sharp little spurs in his blood, and there was a swelling pressure in his muscles that made him want to lift things—heavy things like wagons and tables—just to celebrate his strength. Even better, inside his brain was a clarity and vividness that made him wonder that he'd ever been sick, that his head had ever caused him pain. It was nine o'clock in the evening, but he'd been lying here in bed since eight, sent by his mother who refused to let him stay up any later, despite his begging. She was downstairs in the hotel lobby, talking with May, and would no doubt come up to bed within the hour.

But he couldn't stand it anymore, and he got up and put on his pants and shoes and went over to the window, the one with the fire-ladder. The stars were bright, there was a quarter moon, and below him in the alley was the work he'd been doing for May. He opened the sash and crawled out on the sill, manuevered himself around backward and located a rung with his foot, descended. From the bottom rung, six feet or so above the ground, he dropped.

On their second day in Miles City, Danny had overheard May telling her bookkeeper that she needed to hire someone to fill in the old cistern behind the hotel and demolish the crumbling squatter's cabin next to it. “The cistern's a danger,” she'd said, “and that hut is a miserable eyesore.”

The next morning Danny had told May
he
wanted to do the work. Although his mother insisted that he lacked the constitution, not to mention the necessary physical strength, May provided the sledgehammer, shovel, and wheelbarrow, and Danny set himself to it, breaking up the stones that formed the tiny cabin's four walls and dumping them load by load into the cistern hole. Ten days later his blisters had turned to calluses, his frail arms and shoulders had thickened, and the aching in his muscles had given way to a quiet, humming vibration. It was as if they were unwilling to be granted even a moment's rest.

Beneath the starlight, Danny inspected his achievement, the old cabin down to its last row of stones now, and the cistern nearly full of busted rock and chunks of mortar. He took a deep breath, filling his chest with the freezing air. He stood up tall. He was proud to be grown up now, or nearly so, proud and happy that he was no longer the sickly boy he'd been, the boy his brother needed to protect and his mother had to cater to, the boy who lived from dream to dream. He walked back to the ladder, jumped to grab its second rung, chinned himself on it, and then did so again—and again and again, his arms burning, until he was ready, finally, to climb up and go back to bed.

Calf Creek

B
y the time he'd finally ridden into camp, they were all inside their tents and long settled in their bedrolls. It was well past midnight, clear and cold, rime coating every surface. Ulysses rubbed down his horse, staked it out by the creek, and sat down outside his tent with a cup of icy coffee and a few biscuits from McAnna's wagon. He was exhausted, spent, but there was too much to think about even to consider sleeping. He'd been in no mood to give an accounting of himself, either, and when Hornaday approached, the orange glow of his cigar shining in the lens of his spectacles, Ulysses put up a flat hand, told him they would talk in the morning.

“I'll give you the full report,” he'd said. “But not now.”

“Where's your boy?”

Ulysses waved the man back to his tent. “He's fine.”

“What about the Indians?”

“We'll talk after we've had some sleep. Go to bed. Please.”

Hornaday spat. “All right then, first thing in the morning,” he'd said, and reluctantly walked off.

The day before, when Ulysses had woken at first light to find Eli gone, he hadn't panicked, because he knew what his son was doing, and why. He was frightened, though, shaken, and he punished the gelding cruelly, riding it hard back to the camp by Taylor Creek and then following their trail west toward a line of three buttes.

After Magpie, everything had looked different to him. Whereas before, he'd convinced himself that his instincts were founded in good intentions, as he had ridden that morning for Taylor Creek, he had had nothing but questions. Had he been a coward for not telling Gretta about the Washita? Had she needed to know about it, even if she didn't want to be told? Had he been a fool for thinking he could help a man by putting a face on the worst wrong he'd ever suffered? Ulysses thought of the verse in Luke he had claimed for his own: “And when they bring you unto the synagogues, and unto magistrates, and powers, take ye no thought how or what thing ye shall answer, or what ye shall say: For the Holy Ghost shall teach you in the same hour what ye ought to say.” In truth, no words had come when he needed them. Still, Ulysses had no regrets about stepping into the glare of judgment. And if his confession had brought no relief to Magpie—if it was the act of selfishness Magpie said it was, there was nothing to be done about that. He was lighter and freer for having offered it. If only Eli had stayed put, though. And if only Jim Powers had waited longer, another year, before giving up.

His last long climb had given him a view of the hunt unfolding below, his son astride the mottled pony, riding with unbelievable confidence and with so much grace Ulysses knew it was right, this thing he was doing, knew it as surely as he'd known anything—although it wasn't entirely pleasing for all that, making Ulysses feel slight and corruptible. And yet fortunate, too, like an undeserving heir. He waited until the sound of his son's shots came rippling back through the day—one, two, three of them—until the cow had fallen. And then he'd swung around and started back toward Hornaday's camp, in no hurry now, taking his time and letting the worn-out gelding set its own pace, grazing where it chose in the shaded swales and picking its careful way through the rocky, broken places. He felt strangely at ease about his son, not sure just how things would go from here or what might happen, but he was nevertheless at peace. Through the long afternoon and evening, Ulysses's thoughts turned often to Gretta, wondering if she would ever have him back, wondering how she'd find the largeness of heart to forgive him. In his mind he saw her standing in full sun, hair shining, and though he tried to read her lovely face, she was always looking off into some distance, her head tipped back and trying to see.

Ulysses thought, too, about Jim Powers. He remembered their skittery way with each other after the battle, and then the evening at Fort Dodge, a month or so later, drinking with the old priest there late into the night, and how it all came out then, the whole story. When everything had been said, and they were all three sitting silent at the table, more or less drunk and hardly knowing where to look, Ulysses surprised himself by asking the old man for Communion. “I'm no Catholic,” he'd said, or something to that effect. “I'm hardly anything, but I think I could use it, I think it might help me.” The priest thought long and hard, slumped in his chair and scratching at his white skull, his hooded eyes drooping. Finally he shook his head and told Ulysses he wasn't permitted to offer sacraments to somebody outside of the Church. But then he reached down into his bag and pulled out two twists of tobacco, right from the store, uncut, and he pushed them across the table. “We'll do it like this instead,” he told the two soldiers. “Cut off a piece and have a go at it, both of you. And give me a piece too.” Which is just what they did. And it was the tin tag on that plug of tobacco that for years seemed to help Ulysses—at least help him some—in warding off the guilt.

There was no way of knowing how Jim sorted out his life with God, or failed to—although Ulysses had tried to learn what he could from Jim's widow. They'd talked at length, sitting in her front room, and then again that night in his bed, she having come to him unbidden, crawling in close against him and drawing out the pain of his secrets, taking hold of the tin turtle on his chest and insisting that Ulysses start his life over again, with her, insisting that she understood him in a way his wife could not. That she would be good to him. The toughest part had been turning down the soft warmth of her, which she offered freely.

Now, at dawn, as the first specks of light appeared in the ceiling of his tent, Ulysses got up and went straight to Hornaday, having decided to tell the man only as much of the truth as he asked for and only those untruths that were necessary. Hornaday listened keenly, puffing away, as Ulysses explained how he'd sent Eli back to Miles City, where he would catch a train home to his mother. That the boy had been gone from home long enough.

“He knows his way down there?”

“We rode south a long distance yesterday. Not much farther and he'll hit the Yellowstone. It's downriver from there.” Ulysses winced, uncomfortable with the lie. “Don't worry, he'll turn in the mare and the rifle at Keogh. And no need to pay him, since he cut out early.”

Hornaday waved a hand, dismissing this. “Did you find them?” he asked.

“The Indians, yes. Caught up to them the night before last, by Taylor Creek. Feasting on your bull.”

The man uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, elbows on knees. He took a deep pull on his cigar. “Well, let's hear it,” he said.

“There were three of them. Cheyenne. And one speaks English just fine. I explained what you're trying to do, about the museum, everything, but I can't say how they thought about it or what they'll do next. Mostly, they're just hungry. My guess is, they'll be heading south, back to the reservation.”

“You see anything more of that herd?” Hornaday asked.

“No,” Ulysses told him.

“Well, it doesn't matter anyway.” Hornaday leaned over and stubbed out his cigar on the ground. He sighed. “I had McNaney scouting the country to the north and west the last two days, all through the breaks up there. He talked to the ranchers, and to their hands too. There's nothing up that way. Nothing at all. And this afternoon a couple of Phillips's cowboys stopped over. They're on fall roundup, riding the tributaries of both the Big and Little Dry, which cover the best grazing between the Missouri and the Yellowstone. And of course you've been south and west. I think that herd we saw, if you want to call eight animals a herd—and that's before we took three of them—I think that's all there is left in this part of the world. As you know, my resources are limited. We're going to break camp tomorrow.”

“Maybe we should give it another couple of days.”

“And then there's McAnna,” Hornaday said. “He's worried about the weather. Wind shifted east this morning, and his bad hip's got him convinced the pressure's falling, a storm on the way. Look, the season's getting late. We don't need an early blizzard catching us out here. It's too dangerous.”

Hornaday looked up suddenly, his eyes scanning to the southwest. Ulysses looked, too. He could feel riders in the ground beneath him.

There were two of them coming over the nearest rise, and a third horse trailing. They were heading straight in, right toward camp. Ulysses stood up, watching them come on. It was Eli—
Thank God
—and Magpie. Soon the others were taking notice. Bayliss emerged from his tent, rifle in hand, and behind him Gumfield ducked out, too, squinting. Two of the troopers scrambled up from the creek, shaving soap on their faces. McNaney sat on a rock by McAnna's wagon. Still mounted, Magpie and Eli walked their ponies right up to the fire, the buckskin mare following on a lead rope behind them. Eli's hat was gone, and his hair was matted on his forehead. His coat and pants were black with dried blood and viscera. His face was dark and old, a different face entirely.

“Here's your son,” Magpie said. “Do you have my pouch?”

Ulysses laid a hand on the place inside his coat where he kept it.

“We'll trade, then,” Magpie said.

In the corner of his eye Ulysses saw movement and turned—Bayliss, coming forward—and he gave the man a look. Bayliss backed away. Ulysses loosened his coat and lifted out the beaded pouch, removed its strap from around his neck. Magpie's hands were steady as he reached for it, though an unmistakable pulse beat in his jaw. He looped the strap over his head and the pouch fell against the front of his chest where the blue and yellow beads winked and glimmered in the new sun. He looked over at Eli.

“Is your belly full?” he asked.

Eli laughed. Then he jumped down and handed the reins of his pony to Magpie and freed the mare from its lead.

“Remember what to tell your father,” Magpie said before clucking his tongue and leaning his pony around. The animal gave a little hop then started out in a slow canter that gave way to a gallop at the edge of camp.

“I'm going to get these clothes off and clean myself up,” Eli said, and together the two of them walked past Bayliss, who was scowling and rubbing his big stomach, and then Hornaday, who watched them hard through his spectacles, hands on his hips, unlit cigar jutting from his mouth. The others were retiring, Gumfield back into his tent, McNaney and the troopers to McAnna's wagon and breakfast.

They staked the mare with the other horses then walked down to a bend in the creek where the water pooled deep, and there on a spit of sand Eli removed his boots and stripped off his clothes—coat, shirt, pants—the cloth so stiff with dirt and dried gore that you could have propped them up and used them for hat stands. Ulysses stripped off his own clothes, too; it had been weeks since he'd bathed. In the presence of his son's supple strength, he was aware of the stringiness of his own body, sinewy where it used to be full, and bones showing through everywhere, at the shoulders and ribs and elbows and knees. He was aware of the ugliness of a missing ear. He was an old man now, and had never seen it coming.

They waded in up to their knees and waited for a minute, then up to their thighs and waited a bit longer, then finally and painfully to their groins, the water so cold it cut them in half. They slid forward and swam to the middle of the current, splashing and shouting from the discomfort of it, and stood for a time on the smooth pebbles, water to their armpits. The cold made the day seem brighter and bluer than before. Eli dove and sputtered, dove again and stood there, working his fingers into his hair, raking out the blood and the snarls, his face shining.

Ulysses smiled at him. “What is it you're supposed to tell me?” he asked.

“They're heading back to the agency,” Eli said. “They're finished hunting for the year.”

“Is that all?”

His voice shaking from the cold, Eli explained about the herd Leather Top followed to the box canyon, down beneath the smallest of the three buttes, a herd of more than a dozen animals, including one large, curly-haired bull. And how the grazing there was so good it would keep them for days.

They stayed in the river as long as they were able to stand it, up to their chests in water too numbingly cold to believe, Ulysses reluctant to lose this moment with his son, and entertaining a strange illusion he had—brought on by the cold, no doubt—that if he allowed himself to slip beneath the surface, submerge completely, he would come up again whole. Contented. Ageless. He gathered all the air his lungs could hold and let the water have him.