The Way West (23 page)

   Now that the cutoff was behind them, Summers thought, he could torment himself some more by going back to days that had been. He tried to shy his mind away from them by making talk with Brother Weatherby, who rode ahead with him, "It ain't so far now to the Bear. Barrin' a breakdown, we'll git there a spell afore dark."
   Weatherby turned his gaunt face on Summers. "I marvel at your memory. You remember every hill and turn."
   "Ought to. I been over most of it, time and ag'in."
   "I still marvel. There's so much of it."
   "Looks just like it did." While he answered, Summers thought it was only the earth that didn't change. It was just the mountains, watching others flower and seed, watching men come and go, the Indian first and after him the trapper, pushing up the unspoiled rivers, pleased with risk and loneliness, and now the wanters of new homes, the hunters of fortune, the would-be makers of a bigger nation, spelling the end to a time that was ended anyway.
   He didn't blame the Oregoners as he had known old mountain men to do. Everybody had his life to make, and every time its way, one different from another. The fur hunter didn't have title to the mountains no matter if he did say finders' keepers. By that system the country belonged to the Indians, or maybe someone before them or someone before them. No use to stand against the stream of change and time.
   Time, he asked, what was it that you couldn't bring it back? Where did it go to? It wasn't in reason that everything should pass and nothing remain to mark it by except old men gumming pipestems while memory worked in them. A man could think, almost, there was a great journal somewhere, like the journals he had known travelers to keep. Turn it back and there vou were again, high-spirited and stout, fresh again and free, and the earth fresh.
   Like on the Popo Agie, as he remembered. Like with the Crow girl. Ashia, running water, back in running time. It struck him queer again that he should think so often of her, who was just one of quite a few, and of the Popo Agie, which was just one of many. They had come, somehow, to stand for all the squaws and all the hunted streams, for fun and frolic, campfires at dusk, fires in the keen mornings, rich lifts, high passes, big doings, for the everlasting young time that was gone so quick.
   There on the Sweetwater he had wanted to cross over to the Popo Agie, which wasn't but a run and jump away. He had wanted to see the singing waters of it and the trees that had known him and the place where he had camped and the ground where they had lain, marked still, maybe, by the press of bodies though too little for the eye to see.
   Weatherby said, while his gaze ranged ahead, "I keep thinking how different this land is from Indiany."
   "Or Missouri."
   "Or Missouri."
   Not often did Missouri enter Summers' mind as he came again to places deep-set in memory -the pass, the first water west that emigrants had named Pacific Springs, the Sandys, the Green, the glimpsed peaks of the Uintahs, like snowy clouds, where Brown's Hole would be. It was as if Missouri never was, nor farming, nor Mattie and her fever. Those were the days of his giving up, of growing old before his time because his world was old. Hell, he wasn't old now except in mind, except by mountain reckoning. Forty-nine. And his limbs were strong and his eye keen yet, and he could answer to a woman. It was the way of thinking that made him old, the knowing that he had outlived his time. He could farm in Oregon and grow with the country, as Lije had put it, if only the thing seemed worth the try. If only he hadn't known the Popo Agie.
   Day by day and night by night bits of the old years had come back to him, flashes out of the long-unremembered, out of the pushed-aside, out of the clutter of mind, brought to him by sight of hill and water, by doing what he'd done before. Drying meat -and he was with Jim and Boone again, fresh-crossed from the Powder to the Wind, eating old bull blue with winter while they talked about spring hunting. Topping the pass -and it was a soft day and the cactus was blooming red and yellow, and he had said, "Them's pretty now," and old Etienne Provot had spit and answered, "Pretty goddam prickly, I'm thinkin'." Seeing the Wind Mountains, harsh-rising on his right -and the green then, unbelieving he rode on top of the world, asking, "Is this it, sure enough?" The Green again -and his first sight of it, and beaver so thick you could shoot them in the eye, and everybody gay like in a child's dream of finding pretties.
   He lived in the now time and in the then time, passing talk with people like old Weatherby, guiding, advising, hunting, joshing with Brownie or with Lije, while gone days and gone folks filled his mind. "Summers! Oh, Summers! You goddam old coon! Ain't seen you since we stood off the Rees. How be you? Fat, I'm thinkin'." Voices calling across the years, mouths laughing, hands slapping him on the back. "Worth a pack of beaver to see you, you ol' bastard, and if you got a dry, here's whisky."
   Weatherby pulled up, for below them, far below, down one ridge and another, ran Muddy Fork and, beyond it, the rich, green valley of the Bear. "God in His goodness," Weatherby half whispered as his gaze took it in. "In His might."
   "It's mighty, sure enough."
   Weatherby wagged his head slow. "I couldn't have believed it. I can hardly believe it now, seeing it."
   "It's some."
   Bear River. The wooded, berried Bear, smooth-running through the roughed-up land. It hadn't been named for nothing, for Weatherby's God had put bears there, black and brown and, king of all, the great white bear, feeder on ants and fish and berries, unknower of the feel of fear. There was the time Summers had lifted a trap, heavy with beaver, and stepped out and parted the willows and looked Old Ephraim in the face, and it was one or the other right then, the world too small for both of them. Summers' shot had struck fair in the chest, where a hand could have felt the beat of blood, and the bear whoofed it away and came on and knocked Summers over and   fell on him. Summers wrestled for the knife at his belt, fur in his mouth and musk and blood in his nose and weight on him like a fallen horse, and then he realized the bear was dead. With a hole in his heart as big as a hoe handle he had charged. Old Ephraim, the mighty, the unafraid, the unforgiving, stouthearted with his heart shot out.
   "Best wait for the train," Summers told Weatherby. "Got to angle down the slope and push the critters by some springs that it seems like I remember to be pizen. They're God's doin's, too, I reckon."
   A cloud came on Weatherby's face. "They're there for a purpose, Brother Summers. You may be sure of that."
   "Fer the purpose of killin' stock?"
   "Doubt not the wisdom of God."
   "What I'm doubtin' is these here springs."
   Weatherby bent his head. "I wish you would see, Summers. You're too good a man to be lost."
   "Past savin', parson. Best keep your wind for the Injuns. There's a heap of 'em in need of grace."
   "But you think that's no use?"
   "Don't recollect sayin' so. They're strong for medicine."
   "Medicine. I keep hearing medicine, as if God and the way of salvation were just superstition."
   "Maybe you can learn 'em that a cross has more power to it than a medicine bag."
   Weatherby sighed. "Your lightness makes me sad. It saddens God, too."
   "I didn't aim to damp you. You're all right, parson. As fer God, He don't have to stand between us."
   Before Weatherby spoke again, the train rolled up, McBee in the lead. "'Y God," McBee said, stepping up to them and looking down on the sweep of valley while his hand worried his beard, "she's fair."
   Summers saw the wagons down, slanting them one way and another so the pitch wouldn't be too steep, and rode back to the herders and helped with the stock, thinking about Weatherby and his notions as he rode. Was there a scheme to things after all, and the present just a little part of it, and a man so small he couldn't see it whole? Indians. Fur hunters. Farm hunters. What next? Was it all a stream that went somewhere, that had a sense too big to understand? Aw, the hell with it. He was getting like Jim Deakins, who was dead now and maybe savvied how it was but, living, always wondered. If there was a scheme, it was messed up mighty sorry.
   The bottoms were shank-deep in grass, and flowers waved, and chokecherries were ripening, and the women and children that weren't already down from the wagons got down, a sudden frolic in them, smiles on their faces and little cries on their lips, and the men studied the grass and kicked up the soil and followed the rimmed valley with their eyes and allowed this would be fine farming country if only it wasn't so far from things.
   Far from things, from markets and stores and churches and soldiers and law and safety and all. Far from the way that was their way. Summers put himself in that time of first seeing again -the river and its branches swimming with beaver, and berries ripe, and Old Ephraim bloody-mouthed from the eating of them, and not a sound except the sounds of nature and no white face, and the sun great and the moon great, and the world his and no one to say him nay.
   "There's trout in the river," he said to Brownie. "Trout big as rails."
   He rode ahead and came to Evans. Evans raised his broad face, which was lighted as if by good news. "Now I can believe in Oregon, Dick."
   "Good, ain't it?"
   "Best ever I see, but I could do without these here mosquitoes. Becky's goin' to make a gooseberry pie and maybe find some greens."
   "That's slick. An' there's wild onions if you like 'em. Figure we can go on a few miles, to Smith's Fork of the Bear, though there's a hill between."
Evans bobbed his head. "I swear, Dick, I thought I was tired of plowin', but a man wants to stick a plow in this country."
   "Yep."
   Summers passed McBee and led out, traveling alone, for Weatherby had slid his old bones from his horse and was walking with the train.
   The day was cooling off, or maybe it was just that the valley was cooler than the sagy ridges. Or maybe it was the feel of fall, with August just around the bend. Along the Big Horn, on the upper reaches of the Gallatin and Madison, a man could be thinking about the fall hunt, if there were any beaver to hunt and anything in hunting them. The sun swam golden as it westered, touched already by the moons to come.
   He climbed the hill and rode down it and came into the proper valley of the Bear and rode on toward Smith's Fork and saw an Indian village ahead. They would be Snakes, he thought. They would be the friendly Shoshones that he'd lived and traded with in his long ago. The Shoshones, paled by pale and unnamed blood, and their squaws fair to mountain eyes.
   He reined into the brush and found a game trail and followed it, wanting to make sure the village was Snake and not Bannock or maybe Crow or Blackfoot, who used to be far travelers. It was Snake all right. He turned into the open, his pipe in his hand, and dogs began to bark and faces turned, and a man got up from the ground and stepped out, waiting, and it came to Summers that this was White Hawk, White Hawk and years and weather, squinting to make out a face as altered as his own.
   "It is good to see my brother."
   A shout came out of White Hawk, a sudden, childish shout, and he ran up while Summers dismounted and held out his hand like a white man, saying, "Big Hunter! I thought you had gone to the spirit land."
   Summers had to hunt for the words that used to come so easy. "I have been too many moons away." Of all the Indians he had known, the Shoshones were the friendliest, friendly in a simple, trustful way, though they would steal you blind like any others. They were the friendliest and the gayest-spirited, and they gathered round him now, young men and old in pieces of leather and children bare as new-hatched birds, curious about the looks and manner and getup of the man that called them brother. Squaws eyed him from the lodges, and lean dogs came sniffing, as if agreeable to peace.
   "There is meat in my lodge and a robe to sleep on," White Hawk said.
   "White Hawk is good. I lead many white men and their squaws, to the big water."
   "Your squaw, too?"
   "My squaw is dead."
   "It is bad. It is bad for a man to have no squaw."
   "It is bad. Do you hunt the Green still and the Lewis River?"
   "And we cross the mountains for the buffalo. The Blackfeet used to fight. They do not fight much now. They are fewer." Summers nodded. "The big sickness."
   "I have meat and a robe," White Hawk said again. "You are my brother."
   "I will give you a squaw." Before Summers answered, White Hawk called out, and a young woman with deer eyes came from a lodge, her body upstanding and rounded under the leather
dress. "You will be Big Hunter's squaw as long as he smokes with us."
   She didn't speak or nod her head, but the look of willingness was in her face, as if he, old Dick Summers, was something under a robe. Maybe he was, he thought, maybe he would be after the long no-having, but it was still the mark of age that he should doubt himself. It struck him, in the little time before he answered, that doubts were age. Doubts of self, of the worthwhileness of living, of the purpose of things -they were age.
   The young didn't doubt.
   He said, "You are good. I do not know. It is many moons since I lived with the Shoshones. I have been a long time away, and I do not know. My medicine is weak."
   "Come and smoke."
   "I must lead the white party to camp, and then we will all smoke. Does it please you if we camp upstream?"
   "Tell the white brothers to come, and we will smoke and give presents and trade."
   The sun slid behind the westward hills, leaving high in the sky the blaze of its going, while wagons were set and tents pitched and Indian met white and the pipe passed and goods changed hands. Against the noise and movement of the meeting, the night fell gentle, dimming the sunset, drifting into groves and gullies to wait its time to claim the land. And then the moon swelled up, the red fires whirling in it, and whitened in its climb. In the still silver of it, Summers could see things plain -the faces of the smoking men, the clean lines of tree trunks rising, the Indian lodges pointing up, the caught moonglimmer of a blade of grass.