Charbonneau (27 page)

Once every day Bazel sang prayers over the medicine bundle. He took the bag off the tripod in front of the tipi and spread the objects on the skin. There were several—a sacred pipe, four golden eagle feathers tied together, a bear-claw necklace, a small piece of onyx, a tuft of bear hair.

As a boy becoming a man, before his first battle, Bazel had sought a vision. He needed this vision as a guide to his course in life and as protection against his enemies. So in May, after the winter camp and when the tribe was preparing for its hunt and its wars of the coming season against the Blackfeet, he walked into the mountains alone to fast.

He went humbly, on foot, taking nothing but a bow and a few arrows. He followed a small creek up into the mountains. The first evening he heard a bear in the darkness, but it stayed away from his fire. The second afternoon he came into a small glade, with grass for some distance around the creek, then forest stretching away. It seemed a good place. He sat cross-legged by the creek that afternoon and all the next day, taking nothing but the clear, cold, sweet creek water for nourishment. He ignored the aching of his stomach, looked at the huge blue sky, and waited for the spirits to speak to him. That night spirits teased him nastily, but he could neither see nor hear them clearly. He wondered whether the NunumBi, the elfin men who waited in the rocks, were tormenting him with their arrows of misfortune. On the fourth day he felt listless and stupid. Instead of sitting, he sprawled on the grass by the creek; he forced himself to be patient for whatever might be revealed to him.

And that night the bear appeared to him, the magical bear that had visited his camp and must have watched him ever since. Though the bear seemed to say nothing at the time, he heard its meaning without words. Sometimes it had the head of an eagle, and he understood that he must emulate the eagle’s high-flown daring. And he understood that he must seek the stalwart fierceness of the bear. He was disappointed at the time that it seemed to teach him no dance or song.

But when he returned to his tribe, he purified himself and then called them together to tell them of his vision. He discovered then that he knew somewhere inside himself the dance that the bear meant him to have. The people joined in it solemnly. Then the shaman told him that he must kill a bear and eat its heart to gain courage, and eat its hair as well, and keep the hair and claws as sacred objects, and trap an eagle for its feathers. Then he must revere these objects for the rest of his life in tribute to these animal spirits who put their sacred power in his keeping. That he had done so, Bazel explained, was the reason for his good health and fat belly and many horses, and the reason he had not been wounded in battle.

The entire movement, the routine, the very existence of the tribe, bound, as it was, inevitably to the mountains, canyons, creeks, trees, grass, and the animals, was a kind of tribute to the powers of these creatures; for all were creatures and none inanimate objects. The band’s reverence expressed itself in ritual that governed every detail of their hunting, migrating, cooking, eating, and sleeping; it governed their lives as a slow and stately dance, a dance that embraced every waking and sleeping moment.

Baptiste found the ritual irksome and unnecessary in some ways; he thought it had more to do with airy magic than with concrete topography. But he found the spirit behind it, in a way, beautiful.

He imitated the sacred songs on the harmonika. His new friends were charmed and fascinated, but they wanted to hear his own songs, the songs revealing the magic he had learned from the white man. So he played for them his arrangements of some Mozart airs and Beethoven sonatinas and his own “Lone Mountain Song.” Though he could see that the music made no sense to them, they listened in rapt attention, with the deference due an appeal to sacred invocation. Then they promised, when the season came, to teach him the Wolf Dance, and the Buffalo Dance, and the Sun Dance, exchanging their greatest secrets of power for his.

NOVEMBER, 1834: The bands came in to Soda Springs one by one, setting up their lodges in tribes, in the sheltered places close to water, about a dozen tribes of two to four hundred people each. The people made Baptiste welcome. It was good that he was son to Canoe-Launcher, who had traveled with the Red-Headed Chief. It was better still that he was friend to Old Gabe, the Blanket Chief, whom they all knew and respected. Was not the Blanket Chief husband to the daughter of one of their chiefs, Hawk in Hand? Was not the Blanket Chief their son, and his children their children? Baptiste was an honored man in camp.

A cut of light brightened the tipi for a moment as the girl slipped in. She stood there, between the flap and the fire, looking shy and confused. Sacajawea realized that she couldn’t see in the darkness after the glare of sun on snow, and did not notice that the old woman was sewing in the shadows. The girl stooped and felt in the half light for Baptiste’s buffalo robes, put a pair of moccasins on them, and bolted out.

When he came back, Baptiste turned the moccasins over and over in his hands. They were quilled and beaded—Sunday-go-to-meetin’ moccasins. He looked quizzically at Sacajawea. He had never been proposed to before.

“Running Stream is set apart for Spotted Horse,” Sacajawea said quietly.

He hardly knew Running Stream. She was fourteen or fifteen, the late-in-life daughter of Mountain Ram, once a warrior leader and now a graying councillor. She was a tall girl, rangy, broad-shouldered, with the easy movement of a natural athlete. Report had it that she was envious of the boys’ duties and bored with women’s work. Baptiste was sure that Mountain Ram had taught her a proper Shoshone squaw’s obedience, but apparently she had a mind of her own. He grinned. She sure did—set down for Spotted Horse but proposing to Baptiste.

“Spotted Horse staked three ponies for her,” Sacajawea said, “at the start of winter camp. He heaped honor on himself last summer against the Crows. It is thought a good match. Mountain Ram will reply soon.”

It was just as well. She was comely enough, he’d watched her, but she wasn’t worth a feud. Besides, for a rover like him it wasn’t suitable to have a squaw in tow.

But Running Stream did have a mind of her own. Shoshone women were accorded more respect and independence than the women of other plains and mountains tribes, and Running Stream took advantage. She openly eyed Baptiste. Once she went so far as to smile at him. She lingered around Bazel’s lodge when she could find an excuse. Finally she topped it off by giving him an elaborately decorated buckskin shirt. It was downright embarrassing. And Spotted Horse was starting to fume openly, and to mutter obscure threats.

Bazel told Baptiste one afternoon that Spotted Horse was preparing himself—painting himself, chanting incantations, putting on his medicine objects. So Baptiste made sure to keep his Green River and his pistol about him.

He heard it just soon enough to duck sideways. Spotted Horse’s stone ax hit him on the shoulder. It ached like it was broken. Damn, so Spotted Horse had meant to kill him right off. But by this time Baptiste had spun off and was facing the bastard. Spotted Horse was screeching to whatever his medicine was. That meant he was scared.

“You are a child,” Spotted Horse cried. “Your bowels run cold as winter rain. You are a woman, you would rather weep than fight. You have the blood of a Shoshone squaw in your veins, but none of a Shoshone brave. The spirits scowled on the day you were whelped. I will spread your blood on the dust, and from now nothing will grow there. But I will not eat your heart, because it is yellow. I will not let my dogs eat it. I will throw your flesh to the ravens, and they will scorn it.”

Baptiste growled fiercely and faked a head-on charge. Spotted Horse jumped back. Baptiste had proven his point, and grinned mockingly.

Spotted Horse was ashamed. He marshalled his courage and charged, swinging the ax at Baptiste’s head. Baptiste jumped to the side, and the ax changed direction, hitting him on the left arm without force. O.K., Spotted Horse’s charge was wild. Baptiste grabbed his own arm with his right hand, as though hurt. Spotted Horse was quick. The ax arced toward Baptiste’s head. Baptiste grabbed it and used the momentum to pull it past him, closing on Spotted Horse. He kneed Spotted Horse violently in the groin. When Spotted Horse doubled up, Baptiste brought his fist and the shaft of his Green River down hard at the base of his neck and his knee up into his face. It didn’t work. The neck was not broken. But Spotted Horse crumpled.

Baptiste pounded on him, rolled him onto his back, and jammed the point of the Green River at his throat. It would only be decent to kill the bastard. They glared at each other. Baptiste moved the knife tip down to Spotted Horse’s chest. He made a long, thin cut down the breast bone. Then he crossed that cut low down on the ribs. “I have cursed you with the sign of the white man’s God upside down,” he said. And he walked away. Now the niggur would be afraid to come back at him. Running Stream, he saw, had been crying, and he heard her wail during the fight.

He walked to Mountain Ram’s tipi and took away Spotted Horse’s three ponies. Then he thought about it some. Sacajawea made the trip to Mountain Ram’s tent to summon Running Stream. The girl came in with her head down, still crying, and wilted to the ground far to Baptiste’s right. Sacajawea sat behind her in the shadows. Baptiste moved close to Running Stream and lifted her face so that he could see it in the firelight. She could not look at him.

“I fought for you,” he said. She cried more freely. “I fought for you to be my woman. You will go away with me.” The girl nodded yes. No one would deny his right to her now. He looked at Sacajawea, back at Running Stream, and added, “Tonight.”

“It is right,” said Sacajawea.

Later he thought what Joe and Doc and Bill would say, seeing him womaned. If they were aboveground to say anything. Well, hell, he could always trade her for a good buffalo horse.

The elopement was easy. Mountain Ram and his squaw were expecting it, so Running Stream openly tied her belongings into skin bags, said her good-byes, and waited at the entrance of the lodge a while after the moonrise. Baptiste brought his six ponies, two of them carrying jerky, pemmican, robes, and lodgeskin. He strapped Running Stream’s light pack onto a third, mounted without a word, and set out.

No one had asked him where he meant to go. Probably they figured that, since winter was setting in, he would pitch their lodge in one of the nearby Shoshone camps, more of a gesture at elopement than the real thing. But he intended to find Milton Sublette and the RMF winter camp up on the Salmon. In present weather that was ten sleeps away. With heavy snow, it would be much longer or—well, he didn’t want to think about it. Too many mountains between here and there.

It was a clear, cold night, the sort that comes after snowfall. The snow lay thin on the ground, crusted to ice, and the horses’ hooves crunched as they walked. The moon made the plateau nearly as light as day, and the cold hurt his lungs a little. It made Baptiste feel good. The girl said nothing at all. When Baptiste figured they had covered ten miles, he made a fireless camp in the lee side of a big overhanging tree, where the ground was bare.

He thought Running Stream would be withdrawn, shy, remote—still suffering the aftershock of the fight and the elopement. But as he watched her standing silhouetted against the white sheen of snow, she slipped off her buckskin dress and came to the buffalo robes with him naked. She teased him a little. Then she kept him awake for a couple of hours, dog-tired as they both were, making love and playing and making love. Damn, she has fun with it, he thought as he drifted off.

The next day he forced them thirty miles, and the day after that they made a freezing ford of the Snake River. Running Stream never complained, and did whatever Baptiste told her to do quickly and efficiently. The snow held off as they crossed the lava beds. When they reached the mountains and set out down a wide valley between parallel ranges, the snow was still not deep enough to trouble the horses, and Baptiste thought they would make it.

They made camp under the boughs of a big fir tree. Running Stream gathered wood for a fire and brewed tea from the needles. He drank it almost boiling hot. As they were finishing their pemmican, she told him the most obscene joke he had ever heard. While he was still guffawing, she reached out to play with him. He started to come over her, but she pushed him onto his back, held him down, and then showed him he could enjoy being passive. That night Running Stream demonstrated that she had imagination as well as enthusiasm in the buffalo robes. The next morning he told her that he must give her a Frenchwoman’s name for the other Frenchmen to use: Sophie.

The snow did fall for one day and one night, a windless time with huge snowflakes falling and drifting on the air like the leaves of maples back in Missouri. Baptiste took his leisure that day, noticing how snow curled over the lips of small cricks, watching two deer nibble at the ends of branches, listening to the big, soft silence that falling snow creates. He played songs into the silence, and Running Stream listened reverentially. The next day, though, he had to hurry on, to find graze for the horses.

He opened his eyes and caught Sophie leaning over him and examining his necklace. Her eyes fell. “It’s all right,” he said. “It is a piece of a star that traveled here from the far heavens, a stone of many stones. It came with me when I traveled far across the salt-water-everywhere. But I no longer travel among strangers.” She smiled like a child.

He came on Milton and the brigade just below where the North Fork flows into the Salmon, in the big canyon where the snow never stayed on the ground all winter long although the high ranges around were completely impassable. The boys didn’t remark much on his squaw, but they did seem to think she had a way with a story.

Baptiste had to sign some notes for what he wanted—a fine saddle decorated with silver brought clear from Taos for Sophie, and every sort of trading goods for Mountain Ram. When he finished bargaining, and trade goods were even more expensive than they would have been at rendezvous, he’d spent almost all of what Prince Paul had given him. Well, what did dollars matter in a country where there were no grocery stores anyway? He surprised Sophie with the saddle, and delighted her. The boys reckoned that Baptiste was a little gone on that squaw.