Charbonneau (29 page)

When Baptiste stopped, Thunder Cloud sat still, eyes lowered, for a long time in respect for Baptiste’s medicine. At last he said that it was difficult medicine, elusive, perhaps beyond Thunder Cloud’s ability to enter and partake of. Thunder Cloud would think on what he had heard, and then dream on it, and return tomorrow. Then perhaps he could give Baptiste his name.

That night Sacajawea came to Baptiste’s lodge to eat and sat long with them around the lodge-fire. She liked to tell, as Mountain Ram did, the ancient legends of the Shoshone people, the stories Baptiste would have been raised on if she had not taken him to the Red-Headed Chief. This particular night she told another version of the origin of the dance of the buffalo calves, and a long story about the wily, pranksterish coyote god. Then she started telling the story of the first Shoshone.

He was a coyote, and he ran on the plains and hunted like the other coyotes. One night in a dream he saw a two-legged creature he had never seen before. He thought that having two legs was a disadvantage—clearly the creature could not run as fast as a coyote. The creature was also poorly armed, for he had no fangs and only short claws. Yet the two-legged creature stood tall and could see around him, over the tops of the sagebrush. He had hairless skin, and that seemed to the coyote very beautiful. The coyote himself wanted to be so beautiful.

In his dream then the coyote accidentally touched his own skin, and to his amazement it felt smooth. He woke up. He crawled out of his lair in the brush to go to the water, and felt that he was standing on two legs. Looking down, he saw the skin and long legs and arms of the creature in his dream. He was amazed. At the creek he looked into the reflection of his own face, a man’s face, and thought that it was fair.

“This Paump,” she said, “ran off the next morning to…”

“What did you call him?” Baptiste interrupted.

“Paump,” Sacajawea said.

Baptiste looked puzzled.

“First-born sons are called Paump after him,” Sacajawea said. “The one. The Shoshone. The head man.”

“So I was called after the first Shoshone,” Baptiste grinned. And then he laughed out loud.

“Your name is not yet revealed to me,” Thunder Cloud said the next morning. “I fasted last night, but my dreams were troubled, and I saw nothing clearly.” He paused and considered a long while. Baptiste, Running Stream, and Sacajawea waiting respectfully. At length Thunder Cloud went on: “You are a man of two dreams, a man split by two dreams. Half of you is white, and it has a white man’s dream to guide you on the earth. The other half is Shoshone, and it has a Shoshone dream to guide you on the earth. Perhaps you are as a man split, and that is why my dreams are uneasy and unclear.”

Baptiste let time pass to indicate a respectful hearing. “Thunder Cloud,” he began, “with your permission I would like to choose my own name.”

“Perhaps you alone can divine it.”

“I choose Paump.” The women shifted where they sat. “I know it is a child’s name, to be shed at manhood.” He thought for a moment how to angle his tiny deception. “However, it means the first Shoshone, and I am the first Shoshone white man. In the white man’s language it means the first man, who lives in a new and abundant garden. Such is this land. Thus I choose Paump.”

Sacajawea and Running Stream looked at Thunder Cloud for an answer, afraid he might think his medicine offended.

“I trust to your wisdom,” Thunder Cloud said, “and I shall tell the people your name.”

Baptiste said silently to the image of Old Bill in his mind, “By God, I am an Adam, you old bastard.”

JULY, 1839: Rendezvous just wasn’t fun anymore. Baptiste had trapped Snake country in the fall and the Three Forks in the spring with Gabe; but the brigade was half the size it used to be, the plews were few, and the Company had gotten tight with its wages and its liquor. Beaver didn’t shine, plews didn’t bring a price.

Black Harris brought the supply train in to Horse Creek on July 4—a pitiful sight, just nine men and four mule carts. Jim Beckwourth came riding with it.

“Wagh, John!” he said as he swung off. “These days be pore bull, don’t they?”

So they had a pipe together and swapped stories. Beckwourth had finally left the Crows because they turned on him. Their plews and their loyalty to the Company didn’t bring much beads and firewater any more, so they blamed Jim.

“Ye heerd the words of it?” Jim asked. “This child lost his job with the Crows so he come to rendezvous thinkin’ he’d jine these coons and set the old traps. But it won’t hold. Company ain’t gonna outfit any more brigades. They say the dollars ain’t in it no more. No more brigades, no more rendezvous. We is shot in the lights.”

“Unemployment comes to the wilds,” Baptiste said wryly.

“The fellers’ll shit when they hear tell.”

When Baptiste got to circulating, he found what he liked even less: The strangers Black Harris had brought to rendezvous were a preacher, a scientist, and something entirely new—a band of emigrants headed for Oregon and Californy. The sign was getting plain enough for the most buffler-witted to read: Ordinary folks—civilized folks—were moving west.

The camp simmered with grousing that night. Wall, the boys declared they weren’t ready to pack in their traps yet. They might not be able to thumb their noses at any war parties—they’d have to slip through the mountains in twos and threes, hoping that no Injuns saw them. They’d have to tote their plews to the forts which had been springing up, not only Cass and Union, but Fort Laramie at the mouth of the Sweetwater and Bent’s Fort down on the Arkansas on the trail to Taos. There wouldn’t be any more rendezvous. But on the whole they weren’t inclined to quit. In the mountains they were their own bosses.

Gabe wasn’t ready to knuckle under either. He wasn’t about to slink through mountains where he’d captained an army. He made up his mind to go back to St. Louy, collect his back wages, find some more money, and outfit his own brigade.

Paump and Jim were at loose ends. Well, hell, they knew plenty of places between them where they could lay hands on twenty packs of beaver. They’d just have to go higher into the mountains, up smaller cricks, into places a whole brigade couldn’t travel. They thought they’d give it a try down to Bayou Salade (South Park in Colorado) and to Taos for the winter.

SEPTEMBER, 1839: Paump, Beckwourth, Kit Carson, Long Hatcher, and two more trappers are riding south on the plains between the South Fork of the Platte and the Arkansas. It is a hot, dry, late-summer noon. Burned, dusty hills stretch in all directions to the horizons, as big and wide as the perfectly blue sky. Heat waves shimmer on the ground, blurring features and minds. The next water is nearly fifty miles away.

All the trappers seem to notice them at once—a band of Comanches on the top of a low rise, painted for war. Screeches cut through the dry air. There looks to be no cover, not even a deep gully, for miles. The Indian ponies start moving.

Carson is quickest; he jumps off his horse and drives his Green River into the neck of his mule. “Get the goddamn animals down for a fort,” he yells. In moments each man slits the throats of his horses and mules and throws them into a crude breastwork. Paump and Jim lie side by side facing the charge. The others spread in a circle. “You first,” says Baptiste. No one needs to say that half will fire, half hold, so that some Hawkens will always be loaded. Each man is focused on the Indians, coming forward at a trot. Each knows that he is likely to go under. Each thinks only of the job at hand.

At a hundred yards the Comanches break into a canter. The trappers wait. Finally, at thirty yards, three Hawkens jump. The front Comanche and two just behind him fall to the ground and are trampled. The column splits in two and sweeps past on either side of the smelly fort. The trappers say nothing at all. The Comanches are regrouping.

Twice more the same pattern—the charge, the center shots, the sweep by. The Comanches take time to talk things over.

“They’ll come straight over this time,” Carson warns. The dust is acrid in Baptiste’s nose and eyes. The stink of blood from the animals is thick and nauseating. Hell of way to go, he thinks.

The Comanches are coming straight over. At the last minute three of them drop, and their horses go crazy—rearing, whinnying, trying to turn back into the charge. For long moments chaos: Horses bumping into horses, braves hurtling out of saddles, men and animals screaming, a melee in which Baptiste can see almost nothing.

Then some riders skirt the mess and bear down on the fort. “Let fly,” yells Carson. Two more drop. Now all the Hawkens are unloaded. If the Comanches keep charging, rifles won’t help. Maybe the pistol fire will keep them off.

Four more get through the turmoil. Beckwourth and Baptiste stand up, exposed, and kill two of them with pistols. But the others hold fire: The horses are refusing to come closer. Ten or fifteen yards away the horses slow, turn off, and take the bits in their teeth, terrified. Some Hawkens are reloaded now, and the trappers drop two more. But chaos has changed to flight. The Comanche pomes are turning off and running away. In moments they’re gone.

Carson is shaking his head. “The blood,” Baptiste says. “The smell of blood is spooking the critturs.”

The trappers lie behind their putrefying fort all afternoon in the brutal sun, ready. The Comanches never come back. After dark the six of them, unscratched, pick up what they can carry and start walking to water. All make it. Four days later they hoof into Bent’s Fort. They have to buy new outfits, of course, mostly on credit. Each has lost nearly all his worldly goods. But hell, it’s all part of the fun.

Bent’s Fork was full of bullwackers and greenhorns on the way to Santa Fe or, sometimes, just out for a lark. The boys told them a few yarns, doubling the size of every war party and the length of every rattlesnake, and got on with them well enough, but they didn’t cotton to them. Greenhorns. Emigrators. Fellers as was safe back in Boston, Massachusetts, when the mountain men were living in the Rocky Mountains.

‘This child hates an American,” said Long Hatcher on the way back to the mountains, “what hasn’t seen Injuns skulped or doesn’t know a Yute from a Shian mok’sin. Sometimes he thinks of makin’ tracks for white settlement, but when he gits to Bent’s big lodge on the Arkansas and sees the bugheways, an’ the fellers from the States, how they roll their eyes at an Injun yell worse nor if a village of Comanches was on ’em, pick up a beaver trap to ask what it is—just shows whar the niggurs had their brungin’ up—this child says, a little bacca ef it’s a plew a plug, an’ DuPont an’ G’lena, a Green River or so,’ and he leaves for Bayou Salade. Damn the white diggins while thar’s buffler in the mountains.”

JUNE, 1840: Paump, Beckwourth, and Old Bill are camping in a grassy meadow in Bayou Salade. Running Stream and Yellow Leaf, Jim’s new squaw, are smoking deermeat over open fires and converting the skins into clothing. They pound them with stones, wash them, stretch them, pound them, stretch them. Bill and Jim heave big rocks into a small crick to block it and form a pool. Walking a ways upstream, they step in and clomp down toward the rocks, splashing as much as they can. When they’ve pinned the trout in the pool, Jim peers into the water and neatly grabs one with his hands and tosses it onto the bank. While he keeps catching them, Bill stands knee deep in the crick, splashing and cussing about how the cold makes his old bones ache.

Baptiste, having pocketed a quart of berries, walks on up high, climbing up from one basin into another narrower basin. Here the ground is covered with dandelions from rock wall to rock wall—thick, healthy dandelions a foot and more tall. From a few yards away the ground looks solid gold. He takes a drink from the litte stream—the water is cold enough to hurt—looks at the sun, and judges that he has three hours of daylight.

He wades on through the dandelions to the upper end of the basin, climbs the boulder field, and then starts clambering up the rocks on the west wall. Before long the going gets harder. He climbs on small holds for his moccasined toes and his fingers. Just below the spiny ridge the rock seems almost vertical. At length he grabs a rock with both hands, pulls up, lets his legs swing, and mantles onto the ridge.

For a while he sits and looks around. The looking isn’t purposeful. It is absorbing, smelling, drinking in rather than looking. A greenhorn would have thought it useless, wasteful. He sees a bighorn sheep over on the eastern ridge. The sheep seems to look straight at him for a while, unmoving. Then, with ease, it bounds up a vertical wall for twenty feet and disappears.

As the sun begins to set, Baptiste starts playing his harmonika. He has a new song, “Alpine Sundown,” that he plays two or three times.

The sun is almost down. Paump watches the red rock of the eastern ridge. In the last hour of daylight, when it catches the reddening sun, it seems to glow, as though it did not reflect light but radiated its own light, a soft, rose-colored emanation, the phenomenon called alpenglow. He has no thoughts. He simply absorbs.

In the twilight he hurries down the ridge and walks through the basin, gathering some dandelions to add to dinner.

They have a guest for dinner, a child who calls himself Elkanah. Elkanah has arrived at a good time, not only fried trout and fresh greens and berries for dinner, but biscuits made from flour Jim has saved for weeks. They swap news—who’s gone under, what plews will bring to Taos, where the buffler are, what Injun trails they’ve cut—and then they swap yarns. They recollect the old days.

Elkanah, sitting cross-legged in front of the fire, the light showing his browned and reddened face and his glints of eyes, nearly closed from years of sun, sounds the old theme:

“Thirty years have I been knocking about these mountains from Missoura’s head as far sothe as the starving Heela. I’ve trapped a heap and many a hundred pack of beaver I’ve traded in my time, wagh! What has come of it, and whar’s the dollars as ought to be in possibles? Whar’s the ind of this, I say? Is a man to be hunted by Injuns all his days? Many’s the time I’ve said I’d strike for Taos, and trap a squaw, for this child’s getting old, and feels like wanting a woman’s face about his lodge for the balance of his days. But when it comes to caching of the old traps, I’ve the smallest kind of heart, I have. Certain, the old state comes across my mind now and again, but who’s thar to remember my old body? But them diggins gets too overcrowded nowadays, and it’s hard to fetch breath amongst them big bands of corncrackers to Missoura. Beside, it goes agin’ nature to leave buffler meat and feed on hog. And them white gals are too much like pictures, and a deal too foofuraw. No, damn the settlements, I say. It won’t shine, and whar’s the dollars? Hows’ever, beaver’s bound to rise. Human nature can’t go on selling beaver a dollar a pound. No, no, that aren’t agoing to shine much longer, I know. Them was the times when this child first went to the mountains. Six dollars the plew—old ’un or kitten. Wagh! But it’s bound to rise, I say again. And hyar’s a coon knows whar to lay his hand on a dozen pack right handy, and then he’ll take the Taos trail, wagh!”