The High Missouri (32 page)

“I’m leaving you this wire,” he said, throwing down a coil of it, “to make snares. Saga says you’re good enough not to starve. You have knives, so you can skin what you snare.”

He paused. “You may get sore feet. You may have a bad time. You’ll have to walk into your lodges humiliated.”

He looked each of them in the eye. “If ever you raise a hand against me or mine, my partners and I will kill you, your wives, and all your children.” It felt surprisingly good to make this threat, like stating a law of nature.

Saga added, “I promise, and my brothers promise.”

“Next time you think of making a human being into a slave,” Dylan finished, talking to Chabono, “think again.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Saga came into camp about dusk. Red Sky acted like he should eat and get gone, which seemed rude to Dylan. For the first time since they’d known each other, over their simple dinner of soup made from pemmican, Dylan tried to draw Saga out. Worked hard at it. Saga was not only his partner, but maybe his friend. Hadn’t he trailed Chabono to save their lives? Hadn’t he helped defeat that miserable crew? Hadn’t he followed them all day, watching to make sure that Chabono and the others headed home instead of coming after Dylan and his women?

Cree said, “Tomorrow, you will follow them toward Red River?”

Saga nodded and chewed. He’d already said they walked tenderly on their bare feet toward the settlements half the day. After noon Saga had left off watching them and come back upstream at a jog. He just wanted to let Dylan know everything was fine. The nod meant he would keep an eye on the ruffians for another day, after he jogged far enough to find them.

“Do you like running across the plains?” Dylan asked. He always felt childish and foolish around Saga. The Metis just looked at him, not in an unfriendly way, perhaps amused, and kept eating.

Dylan had a romantic picture of it in his mind, Saga a lone pacer on these vast inland steppes, able to run lithely for scores of miles in a day, his shadow dancing ahead and slanted to the right, his lean, swift body a dark line above the golden grasses of autumn, only his handsome face caught in the sun, and that just on one side. So half the face was gilt and the other in shadow. Half white man, half dark man with scarred brow.

Dylan thought that’s how Caro would paint it. He felt a pang for Caro—he felt every day and every hour the emptiness where his passion for her once was. He looked at Saga’s face, beautifully formed, and for once felt no jealousy. All feelings to do with Caro were in the past, all except emptiness.

Saga never did join in the conversation. When he’d eaten, he touched a hand to the bandanna that bound his hair, nodded slightly, and disappeared into the night.

Red Sky looked after him like it was about time and went back to napping her obsidian. Dylan had no idea where she’d gotten the volcanic glass, or why she was making heads for spears and blades for knives.

Again Cree made her robe and blankets into one pallet with Dylan’s. He said nothing until they went to bed. Dylan let the women go in five minutes before he did. The center fire was out. Red Sky had melted into the shadows on her side. Dylan neither saw nor heard her, but he couldn’t help thinking about her nakedness there in the darkness. He cleared his throat and said, “Cree, move your blankets to the north side.” He said it in what he hoped was a tone of gentle command. He stuck out his right arm, pointing to the side of the tipi where he wanted her, a futile gesture, because he couldn’t see in the darkness.

Cree took his right hand. Her eyes must be adjusted to the dark, he thought. She nuzzled the hand against her cheek, and then put it on her neck. She stepped close to him, touched him from knee to breast with her nude body, put her hands behind his head, held him.

Dylan pulled away, opening his mouth to protest. She put a hand over his mouth, didn’t let him talk, brushed him lightly on the lips.

He said, “Cree, damn it…”

She pushed him and tripped him and he fell onto the blankets. He burbled something, but her laughter drowned it out. Then she was on top of him, her lips on his neck, one hand undoing the buttons of his shirt, the other on his cod through his pants, and she was playing and teasing and chuckling warmly, and murmuring, “Poor, sad Frenchman, poor, sad.”

The only dumb thing he could do now, thought Dylan, would be to play the virgin.

Up the Pembina River they went, across to the Mouse River, always upstream. He was looking forward to the Missouri itself, his river of enchantment. Dylan wondered what the Blackfoot word for this river meant, but Cree and Red Sky couldn’t say it in French. Soon the short portage to the Missouri. Soon his dreamed-of journey up Big Muddy.

The best thing happened on the trip—nothing. They were efficient but not hurried, up at first light, on the river steadily all day, in camp an hour before dark. In a week they would be onto the Missouri, and Red Sky said they’d get to her people’s country in another week or ten days. Dylan figured that would be mid-October. Red Sky said that the moon of leaves falling was the big autumn buffalo hunt, and the people might be anywhere, but right after the hunt they would go into their longtime winter camp on the Musselshell.

They talked constantly in the Blackfoot language. Dylan’s Blackfoot from his Fort Augustus days was rough, but he was smoothing it up now.

Every day Cree did a lot of work, cooking, taking the lodge down and putting it up, sometimes sewing. Every night she came joyfully to Dylan’s blankets and wore him out. She had a grand attitude, willing to serve without ever being servile, confident, womanly and strong in her womanliness, never weak but always saucy and playful. Dylan couldn’t help loving her body, full and plush. Not that he wouldn’t have liked Red Sky’s body. He didn’t always cast his eyes down as she dressed in the mornings, but sometimes teased himself with her youthful slenderness, her breasts small and light and perfectly shaped, like half lemons.

Red Sky participated in none of the domestic work. She snared small animals to supplement their diet. She asked for permission to practice with Dylan’s knives, and got it. She flaked her flint. She asked to be taught to shoot his rifle, but he said they could afford neither to waste powder and lead nor to make unnecessary noise. Then she acted sulky as a teenage boy.

Dylan wondered what Red Sky thought about the bedroom sounds every night. He tried to be quiet, but Cree was uninhibited. He decided Red Sky must have heard such sounds all her life. First from her parents, and then, Dylan thought unhappily, from Chabono and Cree.

He could hardly imagine that it was also Chabono and Red Sky. But he knew Chabono, and knew it must be. He wondered, then, why Red Sky kept her distance from him, held herself a little haughtily, avoided not only touch, but all familiarity, like she wasn’t family, wasn’t Cree’s sister but a guest.

Cree’s sister. Among the Piegans younger sisters were often second wives, he knew that. A white man—Frenchman in the Piegan way of speaking—a white man would be especially likely to have a second wife, being rich.

Cree and Red Sky were not his slaves—he’d set them free, he claimed no rights of ownership. He wondered if Cree and Red Sky expected him to make advances toward the younger sister, and wondered why he didn’t. He even wondered if they might be insulted that he didn’t, or think him peculiar. He supposed, after thinking about it, that he was expected to take Red Sky to his bed, or go to hers.

He knew, from body language, from sideways looks, that they expected it. As slaves, they assumed he would make whatever use of them he pleased. He’d be damned if he’d act like that. He felt bad enough about allowing himself to cavort with Cree, but he was a man, after all, and she an eager woman. He hated the damnable Yank institution of slavery, and he had to demonstrate some standards.

Sometimes he wondered whether the sisters had husbands at home. Cree was of marriageable age, Red Sky near enough. He didn’t permit himself to pursue that thought far. He was taking them home, and he would give them back. To whatever families they had. Period. Sod all.

They got into camp on the Missouri in the last light, and he could barely see the river of his dreams. Hurriedly he ate, lay down, made love with Cree, and had a dream. It seemed to last all night. He ached with it, he writhed with it, he was afraid he was keeping Cree awake with it.

In the dream, he and Red Sky were walking through the British Museum (he had never even seen an art museum), dressed like a well-to-do
bourgeois
couple and looking at the art on the walls. Which was not paintings or any other separate works of art, but the wall covering itself, silks with sylvan scenes depicted in silver and gold brocade. In these scenes he and Red Sky were represented making love in ways that were all various and looked elegant, esthetically beautiful. On the walls he was a Grecian hero and she Diana, goddess of the hunt.

Dylan and Red Sky walked slowly through the handsome rooms, in a stately fashion, looking at themselves in their mythological embraces, fully joined and enraptured. They strolled in complete silence, in a way that was curiously cool and impersonal. It seemed formal, a very proper dance with the steps set to grave and noble music. Dylan was drenched with erotic feeling.

They came to a room of frescoes showing their joinings, unions made in formal gardens, beside paradisiacal waterfalls, in lush forests of Rousseau, in refined gardens of Eden. The joined nudes were larger than life, still graceful, always of formal beauty, but sensuous and impassioned now—Red Sky’s breasts small but exquisitely shaped, legs long and alluring, Dylan’s muscles supple, strong, articulated in thrust, Red Sky’s hair flowing backward like shining black water, her mouth open in ardor, her eyes glazed with ecstasy.

Dylan woke up, trembling. Cree was shaking him very lightly. “Are you all right?” she asked.

The dream kept on, even now that he was awake. He was in the frescoes. He and Red Sky were making love with supreme passion. The music swelled and throbbed, still decorous but unbearably urgent.

He said softly and simply to Cree, “I am dreaming of making love with Red Sky. I can’t stop.”

“Go to her,” said Cree matter-of-factly. “She’s yours.”

Mesmerized, he did.

As he crawled to Red Sky’s pallet, he might have been dreaming still. He eased under the blankets next to her, their warm bodies in sensual contact He caressed her. Red Sky seemed wide-awake and perhaps half compliant Poor child, she was nervous. He kissed her gently.

Suddenly he felt her palm on his chest, pushing. “No,” she whispered.

Confused, he touched her breast erotically.

“No,” she said firmly, and loudly.

Dylan heard Cree sit up.

“I—” Dylan began.

“Please,”
said Red Sky, her voice raspy and harsh.

Dylan got up and went away. He stood in the middle of the lodge for a moment. He felt his foot in the edge of the ashes of the center fire.

Cree launched in and blistered Red Sky in Blackfoot. Dylan paid no mind. His mind was swaying in humiliation. Red Sky didn’t want him. He heard Cree remind her younger sister that he saved her from a cruel master, that she was Monsieur Dylan’s, that she must do as he wanted, certainly give him what her other masters took freely….

Red Sky answered in a wan voice. Something about her nature. Something about Monsieur Dylan a good-enough man…

“No,” said Dylan, loud enough that they both heard. Silence was in the lodge. His mind rang with humiliation, the reverberations going on and on, like a gong in a dream. Yes, she had let other men use her body, and yes, he was embarrassed. But certain things he would not do.

“Don’t reprimand her,” he said to Cree.

He got into his robes behind Cree. He could feel her body stiff with anger. Playfully, to ease her out of it, he stroked her ribs below her breasts. She relaxed. After a long time they both fell asleep.

The next evening, during dinner, Dylan watched Red Sky carefully. She’d been remote all day, scarcely taking notice of her companions, lost in thoughts or feelings, walling herself away from his gaze. He thought she wanted something and lacked the courage to speak. He wondered what. He felt benevolently ready, whatever it was.

After dinner she turned to them, took a deep breath, and said she wanted to say something. Dylan urged her on.

“If Cree sit by your side,” she said, “I willing sit in my place for now,” Red Sky began. It was her Indian way of saying she would be a second wife to her sister’s husband, a usual arrangement. That was good, until Dylan got them home, which was all he wanted to do.

She looked inquiringly at Cree. Perhaps she wondered how long Cree wanted this arrangement to last. Not long, as far as Dylan was concerned. A country wife among the Blackfoot for a season, yes, that was a custom of the fur men and the Indians. Not a real family.

Now she looked nakedly at Dylan. “I will be a good wife.” She hesitated. “I ask one permission, big one.” She seemed to verge on trembling. “I ask be allowed be alone in my robes for… I don’ know how long, weeks maybe. Entirely alone.”

Cree looked harshly at her sister, but Dylan silenced her with a raised hand. Dimly he saw Red Sky take a deep breath.

The gong of humiliation was sounding again, as in a dream.

“I like you,” Red Sky plunged. “I will be loyal. I may come to care for you. But…”

She could not bring herself to plunge on. Dylan waited, and asked Cree with a glance to wait.

“When we are at home,” Red Sky murmured shakily. “I will seek the counsel of Owl Claw.”

Cree gasped, then covered her mouth with a hand.

Red Sky looked frontally at Dylan, knowing he didn’t understand the significance of this statement.

“My dreams tell me…” She hesitated. “I will seek Owl Claw’s counsel to help me understand my dreams.” She spoke with courage. “I will go where they call me.”

He looked at Cree. She was more than angry, more than taken aback—she was truly shocked and frightened. She knew what Red Sky was hinting. He was sure she wouldn’t tell him.

Dylan sat on the bank in the early darkness, listening to the swish of the river, making its way downstream to the Gulf of Mexico. It said no words to him as it traveled, but was mute, impartially mute, magisterially mute. Doubtless, if the river thought, it would have thought words irrelevant. If communication was needed, its flowing, spinning, braiding, rollicking, playing motion toward the ocean was its song.

Dylan said no words to himself, not even that he would naturally honor Red Sky’s choice, whatever it was. He knew he was flotsam. He could feel himself borne forward, always forward, on a river vaster and darker and more powerful and stranger, far, far stranger, than he had imagined. It would drag him through reeds and cattails. It would slide him onto sandbars. It would jiggle and jar and even jolt him at its will. It would suck him into the whirlpool of its depths. It would float him among odd creatures, bizarre forms of life, fishes and crabs and turtles and snakes and other scaly and slimy and shelled creatures. It would even introduce him to monsters.