Charbonneau (25 page)

And the boys had a few stories to tell them. One green fellow asked Black Harris if he hadn’t been over a good deal of the country. Harris was a wiry man, hard and sinewy as a blacksmith, whose face looked like tanned leather with gunpowder burned into it. He was a specialist in the midwinter express—long trips from the mountains to St. Louis alone or with one companion, made in bludgeoning weather. He had been about the country more than a good deal.

“A sight this coon’s gone over, if that’s the way your stick floats,” he started counting his coup. “I’ve trapped beaver on the Platte and Arkansas, and away up on the Missoura and Yaller Stone. I’ve trapped on the Columbia, on Lewis’s Fork, and the Siskadee. I’ve trapped, Mister, on Grand River and the Heely. I’ve fought the Blackfoot, and damned bad Injuns they are. I’ve raised the ha’r of more than one Apach’, and made a Rapaho come afore now. I’ve trapped in heaven, in airth, and hell, and scalp my old head, Mister, but I’ve seen a putrefied forest.”

“A what?”

“A putrefied forest, as sure as my rifle’s got hindsights, and she shoots center. I was out on the Black Hills, Bill Sublette knows the time—the year it rained fire—and everybody knows when that was. If thar wasn’t cold doin’s about that time, this child wouldn’t say so. The snow was about fifty foot deep, and the buffler lay dead on the ground like bees after a beein’. Not whar we was, though, for thar was no buffler, and no meat, and me and my band had been livin’ on our mokkersons (leastwise the parfleche) for six weeks. And poor doin’s that feedin’ is, Mister, as you’ll ever know. One day we crossed a canyon and over a divide and got into a peraira [prairie] whar was green grass and green trees and green leaves on the trees, and birds singing in the green leaves, and this in February, wagh! Our animals was like to die when they seen the green grass, and we all sung out ‘Hurrah for summer doin’s.’

“‘Hyar goes for meat,’ says I, and I jest ups old Ginger at one of them singing birds, and down come the crittur elegant, its damned head spinnin’ away from the body, but never stops singin’, and when I takes up the meat, I finds it stone, wagh!

“‘Hyar’s damp powder and no fire to dry it,’ I says, quite skeered.

”‘Fire be dogged,’ says old Rube. ‘Hyar’s a hoss as’ll make firewood.’ Schruk! goes the axe agin’ the tree, and out comes a bit of the blade as big as my hand. We looks at the animals, and thar’ they stood shaking over the grass, which I’m goddamned if it warn’t stone, too. Young Sublette comes up, and he’d been clerking down to the fort on the Platte, so he knowed somethin’. He looks and looks, and scrapes the tree with his butcher knife, and snaps the grass like pipe stems, and breaks the leaves a-snappin’ like Californy shells. “‘What’s all this, boy?’ I asks.

“‘Putrefactions,’ says he, looking smart, ‘putrefactions, or I’m a niggur.’”

“Putrefactions?” asked the greenhorn. “Why did the leaves and trees and grass stink?”

“Stink?” said Harris. “Would a skunk stink if he was froze to stone? Nosir, this child didn’t know what putrefactions was, and young Sublette’s tale wouldn’t shine nohow, so I chips a piece out of a tree and puts it in my trap sack and carries it safe to St. Louy. A Dutch doctor chap was down thar, and I shows him the piece I chipped out of the tree, and he called it a putrefaction too. And so, Mister, if that warn’t a putrefied peraira, what was it? For this hoss don’t know, and he knows fat cow from poor bull, anyhow.”

Gabe added his story about the time he was alone in that same country and the damned Ricarees was chasin’ him and he got away from them by jumping his horse over a canyon half a mile wide, on account of the law of gravity was putrefied too.

Old Ed Rose, someone said, the half-black, half-Injun who’d gone under on the Yaller Stone, had ridden through that putrefied forest once on his way to Fort Atkinson. He picked up a couple of them stone birds and perched them on his felt hat to hear the singin’ as he rode. They done fine, but when he got to the fort, his buckskin shirt was covered with bird droppin’s—which war stone.

Baptiste found Bill sitting with three
mangeurs de lard
and Doc Newell around a stew pot and wagging his head at them like he had antlers. Baptiste knew this routine. Bill was explaining to them that when he went under, he would come back as an elk. He was teaching them the set of antler signals he would use to show them that what looked like an elk was Old Solitaire, so they wouldn’t shoot him. The greenhorns were laughing at Bill’s put-on. But Baptiste knew it wasn’t a put-on. When Bill shed his white religion, he picked up a lot of red religion to replace it. So he was serious about the signals, and pissed off at their ignoramus laughter.

These recruits of the Boston ice merchant were more than a little puzzled by what they saw at that rendezvous of 1832. The mountain country seemed to them majestically beautiful but savage. The mountain men seemed at least as savage. They had not started out as an elegant bunch—they were often enough men on the run for breaking some law, runaway slaves, runaway bound boys, freed blacks, half-breeds, outcasts, men disgruntled with the settlements. The man who had hired one of the first bands said that Falstaff’s battalion was genteel in comparison; the trappers had not gained any gentility in the intervening decade. Some of them, of course, were simply men with a taste for adventure. Of these quite a few were educated and more than one trapper carried a copy of Shakespeare, the Bible, or
Pilgrim’s Progress
in his possible sack. In fact, Tom Fitzpatrick was an Irish aristocrat; so was Bill Sublette’s partner Robert Campbell. It was a contradictory society, and Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, the half-breed trapper with the education and manners of a courtier, caught the contradictions succinctly. John gave the trapper jigs and square-dance tunes regularly on his harmonilea. One evening toward the end of rendezvous, when the men were tired of drinking and brawling, he improved their minds around the fire with a little
andante cantabile
of Mozart.

It was a good rendezvous for Baptiste, Joe, and Doc. All three were graduate mountain men now. And though Lucien Fontenelle never did show up at rendezvous with supplies, it was clear that American Fur would be competing with Rocky Mountain Fur for plews. It would pay a man to go independent, so that’s what the three decided to do.

Fur-trapping had its caste system. On the bottom were the camp-tenders. On the next rung stood the trappers who hired themselves to one of the companies, working for wages or giving a percentage of their plews for goods. These men had to take orders from the brigade leaders. Above these trappers stood the partisans or booshways (
bourgeois
), the men who commanded the brigades, and their immediate lieutenants—Gabe, Fitzpatrick, Frapp, Milton Sublette, and the like. But at the top of the heap were the free trappers, the men who traveled with brigades or rode off on their own as they pleased, answered to no one, and bargained for their plews at year’s end as independent agents. These were the cocks of the walk. So now Baptiste, Joe, and Doc promoted themselves to the rank of free trapper.

SEPTEMBER, 1834: Bill was nursing his Nez Percé pony, a fine new Appaloosa, slowly upwards. Baptiste, Joe, Doc, and Mark Head were easing along behind him with their pack mules. They didn’t know just what he was doing—he’d gotten quiet—but they followed without a word. Old Solitaire didn’t always travel with other trappers; when he did, he was the leader. Besides, they were on a fork of the upper Yellowstone, and he knew the country best. He swung away from the crick, made a wide circle for half a mile, and came back to it.

“Do ’ee hyar now, boys?” Bill squeaked. “Thar’s Injuns knocking around, an’ Blackfoot at that. But thar’s beaver, too, and this child means trappin’ anyhow.” He didn’t say what he had seen or heard, and none of them knew.

Well, they were willing to try their luck if Bill was. They camped that night without a fire.

The next morning Bill stayed to guard the camp and the others split up in pairs to trap. Baptiste and Mark Head set their traps in the dawn light, six each, spread out over a couple of little cricks. As they were riding back to camp, they saw three lodges on the edge of a meadow. Baptiste turned his horse back into the trees.

“Hell,” said Head, “they’s nobody home. They’ve left it to us.” And he kicked his pony straight across the meadow toward the tipis. When nothing happened, Baptiste followed.

Head reached into the pot and fished out a piece of meat. “A little feedin’ on the peraira,” he grinned. He looked at the medicine bag in front of the lodge, a piece of skin hanging from a stick tripod with the brave’s totem objects in it. “Shit, we’ll make this coon askeered to fight—askeered to live,” Head said. Baptiste stayed on his horse. Mark opened the bag. “Lookee here, a hawk’s claw. What you reckon this does for him? Wall, it…”

The arrow hit the lodge skin with a ri-i-ip just past Head’s shoulder. Baptiste saw the niggur who let it fly fifty yards off. There were three of them, and they were leading their ponies. He rode like hell for the trees. When he got there, he looked back and saw Mark whipping his pony the other direction with the damned Blackfeet right behind him.

Baptiste moved slowly on a roundabout route back to camp, not wanting to stir up any more. He was easing up on the camp when he heard a horse clattering up from the other direction and then Bill’s voice. “Do ’ee feel bad now, boy? Whar’ away you see them damned Blackfoot?”

Baptiste got close enough to see. Mark’s face was covered with blood, and an arrow was poking out of his back.

“Well,” Mark puffed, “pull this arrow out of my back, and maybe I’ll feel like telling.”

“Do ’ee hyar now? Hold on till I’ve grained this cussed skin, will ’ee? Did ’ee ever see sich a damned pelt, now? It won’t take smoke anyhow I fix it.”

Baptiste sat his horse forty yards away, unseen, while Mark waited and fumed.

While Baptiste and Mark were telling their story, and Bill was cussing Mark for being a damned fool, Joe and Doc rode up in a hurry with scalps swinging from the barrels of their Hawkens. Bill looked at the scalps and said, “This coon’ll cache, he will.” He threw his saddle onto his Appaloosa, tied on his pack, grabbed the lead of his pack mule, spurred up a bluff and disappeared.

The four didn’t try to keep up with him, as they knew he would cuss company. Forgetting the traps, they rode uphill, parallel to the creek, toward the distant ridge. Somewhere on the other side of this mountain would be safer. They kept down below the edge of the bank when they could. When the bed narrowed though, they kicked up the slope. On this exposed ground the horses walked as quickly as the grade allowed; the men touched them along the route most covered by trees; their eyes flitted about the countryside, picking up tiny pieces of information and transferring the pieces wordlessly into the movements of their hands on the reins and their knees on flanks. They rode like that all day, until well after dark, and made a flreless camp in a thicket in a deep cut of the creek.

Baptiste sat up, wide awake at the first yell, his Hawken cradled in one arm as he slept. A ball spewed tiny sticks into the air three feet from him. In one quick move he was sprawled behind a bush, peering up at the rock wall above. Doc was next to him. He heard Joe and Mark getting cover facing the other side of the cut.

From the yelling, Baptiste judged there must be a hundred of the coons, hot for blood and sure of counting coup. He waited. In the half-light he couldn’t see a single Injun up on the rocks, a hundred feet above his head. Flashes from their fusees showed that they were shielded by boulders up there. Fusees were lousy old guns, and Blackfeet got all excited when they shot, so Baptiste didn’t figure to go under from their fire. He did wonder how in hell the four of them would get out of there.

One niggur was stirring up the dirt around him and Doc pretty well, though. Before long the fellow overplayed his hand. He leaned so hard on the boulder he was behind that it toppled over the edge and left him open. Doc was quick and shot him center. He body came bouncing down the cliff and into the bottom.

Mark, who was a daredevil, jumped out, ran to the body, made a savage arc with his knife, and whooped as he held up the scalp. Half the Blackfeet must have shot at him, and a dozen exposed themselves in their eagerness. Baptiste shot one in the chest, and he came tumbling down. Doc got another. They meant to show the coons how to make shots count.

But taking a chance on getting shot was not the Black-foot idea of a fight. Suddenly they began to run like panicked sheep, showing their backs. All four trappers fired, and three Blackfeet dropped. Maybe that would keep them running for a while.

Baptiste walked over to the brave he had shot. The man was dying but not dead. He was hit in the lungs. For the first time Baptiste was sure that he had killed a man. He looked down at the face, an ugly face with a flat nose and unfocused eyes. He just watched it for a long moment, aware of Joe’s eyes on him. Then the brave saw him. The lips pursed to spit at Baptiste, but the man coughed instead and light, frothy blood oozed out. Baptiste knelt down, took the man’s top knot firmly, and looked the man in the eye as he cut a small circle around the knot. Then he put his foot against the man’s head and jerked the scalp off with a pop.

“Thar’s smoke,” Mark yelled. It was coming up through the thick bottom downstream. Ordinarily they would have set a backfire to stop it, but the wind was coming strong up the gorge, and they might not be able to put out the backfire. The flames were coming like a thirsty horse to water. They packed as fast as they could, rode a little up the creek, and spurred their ponies up the steep bank onto the open plateau above.

The Blackfeet were waiting. They charged on horseback and stampeded the pack animals immediately. Baptiste was nearly jerked out of the saddle by the lead line when his mule bolted. More Blackfeet were riding up from below.

“Break,” Joe yelled. “Break and cache!”

Baptiste drove his mare straight back into the smoke toward the creek bottom. When the smoke got thick, the mare fought him, twisting her head and tearing at the reins. He forced her to go forward. The water of the crick calmed her a little as they crossed, but she panicked from the fire smell on the far side and got her head enough to run a hundred yards upstream.