Fair Land, Fair Land (22 page)

"
Don't be belittlin' him, Boone."

"
All right. Come along."

"
Don't reckon so. Let's talk a spell."
Summers made for a dead and drifted log and beckoned Caudill. Caudill
yelled to his men, "See to the horses. Make camp. Me and an old
friend got to jabber."

"
How come the wagon?" Summers asked.

"
Two of my pardners ain't worth a shit on a
horse, and the wagon might come in handy. The men can shovel, by God.
They'll shovel when we get to pay dirt."

"Heard you were huntin' hides?"

"
A man's got to live. What's with you, I done
asked once?"

"
I'm a settled man, married and everything."

"
You mean really married? By a preacher?"

It was time to let him have it, or some of it. "Yep,"
he said. "Me and Teal Eye."

Caudill jerked his head to stare at Summers. "Teal
Eye? My old squaw?"

"
She ain't old. Your boy's growin' up."

"
Not my boy, by God. You watch out, she'll cheat
on you."

"
She never cheated on anybody."

"
Like hell you say. Birthed a boy with red hair
like Jim Deakins. A blind pup to boot."

"You ever see a white buffalo?"

"
One time."

"
Could you pick out his pa?"

"
You talk crazy talk."

"
Trouble with you, Boone, you never knew what
real friendship was."

"
You speakin' of Jim Deakins, I saved his life
onct."

"
And took it for nothin' at all, nothin' but
what you made up in your mind."

Caudill's face was full-turned to him with such a
look of torment in it that Summers felt minded to say, "Now,
Boone. Easy. It ain't the first mistake ever made." But the look
of torment changed to black rage.

Summers, with his hand on his knife, thought he was
prepared. He wasn't, not for the heavy arm flung across his chest. It
knocked him backward over the log. Caudill rolled over and straddled
him. He locked his strong hands on his throat. Summers had his knife
out. He couldn't slash at the arms or hands, not with his upper arm
pinned by the great weight of the knee. The forearm was free with the
knife in it. He could jab it into a gut. He didn't, not yet. The
hands clamped tighter. His lungs churned for air. But even as his
sight dimmed and his senses blurred, he kept the knife by his side.
It wasn't a killing matter.

He thought he heard the crack of a rifle. He thought
he felt the big body lurch and then tremble. Then most of it fell
forward at his side. He squirmed out from under. There was a hole in
Caudill's head just under the hairline.

Panting, he looked up. Higgins stood a few feet away,
a wisp of smoke drifting from the muzzle of his Kentucky. Higgins
said, "He didn't mean nothin' to me."

Summers couldn't answer for the clench of fingers
still felt on his windpipe.

Higgins turned to the watching men. There he was,
seen dimly, a skinny rack of bones unarmed except for the unloaded
rifle. "You want to make something of it?" he asked.

One of the men answered, "It ain't no skin off
our ass."

"
Get shovels, then. We got to dig a grave. I'll
help."

The same man said, "Be a pleasure."

Summers just sat, his hand lying on Caudill"s
dead shoulder. He sat and watched the men and the hole growing
deeper. He tried not to think, tried not to remember how it was long
ago. He patted the shoulder and got up and walked to the men.

"
Time," he said and tried to clear the
squeeze from his voice.

"Time to be goin' home."
 

PART THREE

27

SUMMERS sat by the shore of the Teton and watched the
water flow by. He had a pole in his hand and a baited hook in the
water, but the hook had washed into the shallows and he let it ride
there. Below him near the tepees, almost out of earshot, were Teal
Eye and the boys and Higgins and Little Wing, talking a mixture of
Shoshone, Blackfoot and English. They sounded happy.

A log cabin sat by the tepees now, built by him and
Higgins because the womenfolk seemed to want one. It was chinked with
clay and had a tramped-earth floor, a sod roof and two real-glass
windows packed in from Fort Benton. In hot weather it was cooler than
the tepees, and in windy weather it was better for cooking because of
a mud-and-stick fireplace that didn't smoke. Not so good in cold
weather, though. Nothing like a tepee for warmth. It had gone a
little against the grain to build it. It seemed too solid, too much
there forever, as if it held them to one spot. Still?

The older a man got, he thought, the more he liked
just to sit and watch water run. The Teton was a hurrying stream, as
if it couldn't wait to join up with the Marias and empty into the
Missouri and go on and on just for the fun of running and joining. It
was a young buck, full of frolic and fizz, eager for the yonders, its
clean flow muddied, and would wind up in big and mixed waters that
lazed along to the sea.

A trout rose, but he didn't cast for it. Enough to
sit here and look while the soft summer afternoon inched along. A
spiky bunch of flowers made patches of yellow on the far shore, and
johnny-jump-ups grew in the moist soil near his feet. He picked one
and smelled it and chewed at the stem.

The Teton, it was mostly called now, though it had
borne and bore different names, given it by explorers, trappers,
stray visitors and traveling preachers and priests. Names like the
Tansy, the Rose and the Breast, which was just English for Teton,
meaning the breast of a woman to Frenchmen. Those Frenchies, good
with a boat but not worth a damn fighting Indians, the Frenchies,
coming up the Missouri or boating and hauling by way of Canada, and
all of them starved for women, so that every nippled butte put them
in mind of a tit, and every swell of land might be the swell of she
flesh. If he got up and looked back, he could see a butte like that
and the swell of land leading to it.

Wherever he was, whatever was in his head, worry
about the boys kept sneaking in. Lives lowed just as rivers did. But
how? And to where? What would happen to Nocansee without him and Teal
Eye around? He had grown big and strong like his blood father, but
not like him in anything else. He was a gentle boy, a good,
soft-hearted boy, with senses so sharpened that a man wondered. He
had a nose keen as a hound's, ears that picked up what other ears
couldn't, and such a feeling for touch that he seldom stumbled or
fell. But what good were they without eyes to see? No answer to that
one.

And no ready answer for Lije. How to shoot, how to
hunt, how to trail or lie patient, how to read footprints, how to
learn from the wind and the voices of birds — what good in the life
he would have to lead as the world changed? It wasn't enough that he
had a brain and was able of body. It wasn't enough that he knew a
little of numbers and letters. Somehow he would have to learn more in
the coming time of account books and ledgers and buying and selling
and the ways and the tricks of business. He must learn how to read
and to write.

It was hard to believe, the years flowed so fast,
that Nocansee was nineteen or thereabouts, and Lije a coming sixteen.
He sighed and put worry in the back of his head. The sun was good on
his back. Under it the fields to the east and the far bank of the
valley shone soft and green-yellow. A man might almost think they
were smiling. To his right, maybe five miles away, two craggy buttes
lifted, good enough to the eye to excuse the presence of
rattlesnakes. On their slopes antelopes would be feeding, curious as
cats, slender-legged, their rumps showing white when they turned.

He had put worry in the back of his head except for
one niggle. That was Higgins. He hadn't seemed quite himself lately,
pretty quiet these days as if some secret worked in him. A man with
wife trouble might act and look like that. Not likely with Little
Wing. But who could tell?

Such worries aside, it was a good life he was
leading, good in spite of hard winters and winds that beat a man
backward, good though travelers, Indian and white, rode up and down
and across the valley as they hadn't before. The Indians were no
problem. They shied off from the camp or came to visit polite,
remembering tales of Bear Friend and Bear Maker. The whites scouted
the land and went on, to where gold might be found or to the eastern
plains where the great herds of buffalo roamed. Gold-hunter and
hide-hunter, and nothing much for either one of them here, nothing
much for anybody except those who felt kin to mountains and flats and
liked to see distance too far to figure.

The past spring had seen a big party of whites,
though — men, wagons, teams and tackle — and some men sighted
through instruments and others held poles, and once in a while they
planted a stake, and Summers knew them for surveyors. It was
Blackfoot country, this country was, made so by treaty, but here was
the advance party of whites getting ready to parcel it out.

They had gone on, leaving no signs of their passage
except for a here-and-there marker, which Summers and Higgins tore
from the ground when they came on them.

Moon after moon, Summers thought, watching the
ripples and small sprays of water. Moon after moon since their return
to the old camping grounds — springs, summers, falls, winters, each
in its own manner and none quite the same as before, so that a man
could speak of the season and year of the big flood, of the long
drought, of the grandfather of winds. On a day like today he would
laugh at the winters that kept all hands inside, except for bringing
in more firewood or axing a chunk of meat off a carcass stowed
outside just as the real cold set in. A lazy time then, but not lazy
when a man could get out and had to hunt hard for meat, not lazy when
furs were prime and he waded in water that withered the skin and made
his legs blue.

He heard the soft crunch of grass and looked up, and
Higgins asked, "Just settin', lazy bones?"

"
Settin' and thinkin'."

"
Don't fag your mind. Thinkin' on what?"

Summers motioned toward the ground. "Have a
seat. My mind's on my boys."

"
Bein' a pa puts a weight on a man, on a man
like you least-wise. All the same, I wisht Little Wing and me could
come up with a baby."

Summers let his gaze follow the river, down to the
curve that it made. "Growed up, what would he do, Hig? Not live
like us, that"s for sure. You think this valley's goin' to stay
like it is? Some galoot with a plow will come along, or some bastard
will think, Jesus what a country for beef cattle now that the
buffalo's gone. You know there's cattle already down on the Medicine
and over on the Gallatin, too."

"Seems a shame, though, that a man with a good
wife has no young'n to show for it. If it was different, I bet me and
her would have a world-beater or somethin' close to it."

So there was no trouble between Higgins and Little
Wing. It had been foolish to wonder. Summers went on, still thinking
of the baby Higgins wished for. "You seen them surveyors, Hig.
It's notice of where at we're headed. We've both been to Fort Benton,
recent enough to know what it is. It's not just a fort anymore. It's
a stinkin' town. Boats on the river, freight comin' in, freight goin'
out, mine tackle and such for the west, buffalo hides for the east.
Beggin' Indians, drunk Indians, made that way by the whites who hate
'em. But, hell, you know."

"
No harm in wishin'," Higgins said. "You
talk true enough, but a man goes crazy if he tries to figure all the
ins and outs and whatever will come after he's dead. Besides, Little
Wing she wants a baby."

Summers gave him a smile and said, "Thanks from
your crazy friend."

No trouble between Higgins and Little Wing, and a man
couldn't call it husband-and-wife trouble between him and Teal Eye.
It was the difference between facing facts and balking at doing it.
They were lying together at night, and he had asked,

"
What you reckon is ahead for Lije?"

"
He will take a wife, not so long now."

"
I don't want him to be a fort loafer or to hang
around at some Indian agency. I don't want him to turn out a drunk
like so many."

"
You have taught him better."

"
It's a white man's world comin' up. Where does
he fit?"

"He will live with us like always, his wife with
him."

"
I'm afraid that ain't likely."

"
You mean he leaves us?"

‘
When the time comes. It has to be."

His arm across her felt the sudden spasm of grief.
She began to cry without sound.

"
I don't want him to leave, neither, little
duck." He tried patting her shoulder. "It's just that
what's what is what. What is bound to be will be."

She didn't answer.

"If I see straight, the old life's about over.
No matter if I don't like it, new times are comin'. I want him
ready."

"
You talk like a white man." Her shoulder
pulled away from his hand.