Rocky Mountain Company (35 page)

Chatillon smiled and shrugged.

“We hooted and hollered through many a rendezvous, Ambrose. The beaver men was always true.”

“That was years ago. The beaver, they are worthless. Trapped out anyway. We get buffalo robes, now, yes?”

Fitzhugh pondered that, his mind boiling like a teakettle. “Well then I need ye all the more, Ambrose.”

“Be careful. Don’t let Hervey kill you. And don’t kill him.”

“I’d as soon shoot him first chance I get.”

“My friend, I think Hervey would like that.”

Chatillon turned to his preparations, wrapping the bulging boudins in oilcloth and stuffing them into a pannier of his pack. Fitzhugh reckoned the man had cured or cooked about fifty pounds of buffalo meat and tallow. Not enough to get him to St. Louis, but enough to get him to any post along the way — Fort Clark, or Pierre, or even down to Bellevue. He’d forcefed his horse and mule for days, even cutting some tall grass on the opposite side of the frozen river with a sickle.

Fitzhugh attacked the rest of his letter savagely, feeling a need to defend himself to Straus. He hadn’t lost a man. He’d raised a post out of nothing. Maxim had been sick but was hardening now. He’d fetch the trading outfit from Cass. He’d bring down good returns in the spring. He’d wagon out to the villages and trade. The osage orange bow wood would help. The ironware brought by Chatillon was perfect.

He couldn’t think of a thing more, so he scratched Robert Fitzhugh across the bottom, waved the foolscap to dry it, and folded it up. He had no envelope.

“Put this in oilcloth,” he said. Chatillon took it wordlessly and snugged it into a waterproof portfolio, beside Maxim’s letter.

“Have you any message to him you don’t wish to entrust to paper, Brokenleg?”

“Yeah. I’m bringing down a mess of robes next spring. If I don’t get my outfit peaceable from Hervey — the whole thing — I’ll steal his robes. But I’ll bring robes.”

Chatillon grinned wryly, and said nothing.

“And tell him you wouldn’t stay here long enough to help bust the outfit loose from Hervey, even after I asked.”

Christmas cheer. In the early dark his engagés settled around a feisty fire to feast on succulent meat around the bossribs of a cow buffalo. And to sip the gill of pure grain spirits mixed with riverwater as slowly as possible. And to find things to say to men who’d heard everything they had to say, many times over. Larue, Bercier, Lemaitre, Brasseau, Dauphin, Trudeau and the rest. Men he knew now; men who toiled like mules, starved and froze and bled for Dance, Fitzhugh and Straus. Their sweat had yielded them twelve dollars a month, which they would spend entirely on items from the trading room when it was stocked. There were things about life he couldn’t fathom, and brute labor for almost nothing was one of them. And yet, they’d come here not for the wage, but for the tantalizing something that set men of the borders apart from all other mortals. Perhaps they were paid in memories, he thought. Tomorrow, Christmas day, they would toil again.

Scarcely had they devoured the buffalo hump than Ambrose Chatillon slid into his hooded white capote and began saddling his pack mule and horse out in the unheated warehouse area, where he’d kept them nights. The men turned silent. Not many of them would venture into an arctic void upon a seven or eight-week journey. Moments later he led his burdened animals toward the front door, bid his hosts adieu and
joyeux noel,
and slid like a gliding owl into a moonless dark that would stretch ahead of him unchecked by reason.

It shocked them, and a foreboding lay upon the barracks, not just for the fate of Chatillon, but their own. Not a one of the engagés bantered further, but turned his thoughts inward so that men peered toward the fire, testing the flames for comfort and finding none. Chatillon would not follow the Yellowstone northeastward, but cut overland across a naked emptiness to the Missouri somewhere near Fort Pierre, and then ever south and east, tiptoeing like a soul past the devil.

Maxim looked stricken. The boy was obviously regretting he had chosen to stay.

“It’s not too late, boy,” Fitzhugh said.

Maxim didn’t reply, but sank into his private anguish.

The raw stone room seemed too full of stinking mortals, so Fitzhugh pulled himself up and stomped life into his bad leg. Then he twisted into his fringed elkskin coat and caromed out into the night. He found the air quiet and mild, friendlier than the warmth he’d left. He liked the stillness, the dead-winter hush that let a man think without being hounded by babble and hate and conceit and stupidity. Chatillon had vanished into a moonless velvet void. Fitzhugh sucked torrents of air into the bottoms of his lungs, savoring its purity after the rancid odors inside.

He enjoyed this place they’d ransomed from nothing, though he couldn’t say just why. Perhaps because he’d bought it with his blood, sweat and experience. The way things had gone, maybe he was the dumbest ole coon in the woods. From this very doorjamb, terror stretched in concentric circle outward, and he understood that in a way that would elude city-bred people. It sharpened his eyes and smell and hearing. People back in the settled world didn’t know how a free land like this honed a man’s instincts, turned him cunning and crazy. This post would be his passport to the unmapped beyond. He’d turned wild, like some dog joining a wolfpack, and he couldn’t live any other way. He couldn’t bring the beaver days back, but this — this was a tolerable imitation of them, and it gave him the thing he wanted most: a few more years, a few more decades, of living free as an eagle riding the unfenced sky, before it all vanished beneath the wheels of Conestogas.

He didn’t care much about money, but this — this was almost as fine as plucking fat beaver out of snowmelt streams, skinning and stretching the plews as if they were round dollars, hoorawing the cynical stars, and buying all the fixings a man might need at rendezvous. Oh, the ambrosia of scented pine and balsam on a sundrenched alpine slope; oh, the carpets of lupine bluing a meadow and the whistle of an elk at night. Oh, the senses multiplied and grafted by wilds, the alchemy turning smoke into incense, and every mountain brook a vintage wine, a fountain of youth. Oh, where’d the beaver gone, and the beaver men, and the high times around a thousand joyous fires whipping into a spark-lit black, and the wild walks across the top of the world? Gone, and nothing but the slaughter of buffalo to pinion the memory in his skull for a little while before it all ebbed away.

The void beyond his vision lay dark and evil, and he sensed its menace. It held the terror of total possibility. Nothing here kept Hervey from killing him or him from killing Hervey. He hoped it’d always be that way; as empty a century hence as it was now. It elated him, this triumph of possibility. A man had to turn half wolf just to deal with it. Maybe, just maybe, all the timid souls back east would quit coming this way, just quit, and leave all this to himself and the few who braved this life. Fancy notions on a Christmas eve, he thought.

He grieved on the doorjamb while the stars rotated, and then thought of Dust Devil and he missed her. She of the almond eyes and apricot flesh. She scorned everything not Cheyenne, and among her Cheyennes scorned everything not Suhtai, and among her Suhtai, scorned everything not her clan and medicine. She despised him, plain as the pride on her face. And he loved her for it, the way a man might love a bobcat or stroke a porcupine. And perversely, she loved what she despised. He missed her in some well of soul where she’d festered into comfort. He wanted her, scorning and snapping and teasing. He knew she loved him, in spite of his affliction of being born white.

Fitzhugh studied the silent night, and decided then and there what he would do. Tomorrow, Christmas Day, would hold some surprises — for his men, and for others.

They harnessed the three crafty mules Chatillon left them to a frostbit Pittsburgh wagon with naked bows. The mules had known packsaddles, but not harness. Not even whip and blasphemy could move them much, but at last the wily Trudeau attached halter lines to their bridles and discovered they led easily, trained to come with the slightest tug. That would do. A man would walk ahead of the team and wagon.

“Leave your pieces in the wagon,” Fitzhugh told them. “This hyar’s a Christmas visit.”

He added a crockery jug filled with two-hundred proof grain spirits to the small items in the wagon, and they left, all of them except Bercier, who professed to be ailing, but was well enough to tend the fire. What better time than Christmas to share a cup with Hervey’s engagés and — he hoped — enlist them all in a peaceful transfer of the outfit from Cass to Fitzhugh’s Post.

They rolled north easily over small crusted snow, the wheel hubs stuttering around cold iron axles, scaring up magpies along the way. The weeping snowblind mules considered these affronts just cause to sulk, and had to be whipped. In a while they found Fort Cass belching sour cottonwood smoke like a dragon, but otherwise benign on a warm day.

Brokenleg saw no lodges at all pitched outside the post, and its gates lay open. A good sign on a day given to peace and goodwill among men. Within they’d find camaraderie. All fur posts hallowed Christmas, and made a great feast of it to break the monotony, and remind them of nobler callings than the commerce of skins. Even Hervey’s post, he thought. He hoped that by the time sunset severed the solstice afternoon in this latitude, all his outfit would rest snugly in his own trading room.

“Drive on in and park the wagon next to the warehouse,” he instructed Samson Trudeau. “We’ll have us some doin’s and then get busy.”

They drove the team and wagon through the toothed jaws of Cass, under a log blockhouse perched over the gates, and wheeled the wagon around in the yard, while Fort Cass’s men watched amiably. He counted about twenty of them, bearded Frenchmen like his own, gaudy in bright-dyed wool. Even as he watched, Trudeau and the others were greeting each other in voluble French, reminding him that the gallic fraternity of fur company employees was a closed society. English-speaking engagés were rare. The Indians themselves knew French better than English.

Hervey emerged from the comfortable trading room, adorned in blue Christmas finery and fresh-trimmed black beard. He surveyed the arrivals and the wagon, bright mock behind his beard, enjoying the sight.

“Ah, the Opposition. Stiffleg and young Straus and their bravos.”

“Merry Christmas, Hervey.”

“Come to share the feast and guzzle the spirits and holiday a while. With an empty wagon.”

“Brung us some spirits,” Fitzhugh said, waving his jug.

“The better to stupefy,” Hervey said.

“I thunk to celebrate.”

“Indeed, and brought your wagon to celebrate with.” Julius Hervey beamed effusively. “Well, come on in and we’ll pull the cork.”

At one end of the comfortable window-lit Fort Cass barracks a cast-iron barrel stove radiated warmth upon the fort loafers, among them Abner Spoon and Zachary Constable, sprawled amiably on benches. Winter birds. Most forts collected them, and as long as the loafers earned their keep with a little hunting or work, no one objected. Meat cost nothing more than a ball and powder.

“I declare, it’s the beaver times all over agin,” Constable bawled. “A reg’lar rendezvous.”

Fitzhugh limped over and clamped an arm around the trapper, and then Spoon. “I brought us some spirits, if you got the cup.”

“I never guzzle water before breakfast,” Constable said, while Fitzhugh poured.

Engagés drifted in, both Cass’s and his, and Fitzhugh poured a couple of fingers for each. The French settled into their own circle, the language effusive on their tongues, while Hervey, Fitzhugh, Maxim and the rest gathered on the other side of the stove.

Fitzhugh lifted his Fort Cass tin cup. “Well, hyar’s to you all, and the holy day, and lots of skins,” he said.

Hervey grinned. “Lots of skins,” he echoed. “Yours in particular.”

“I reckon they’s robes for all. Lots of bands hereabouts that haven’t been traded with since the beaver days.”

“With osage orange sticks,” Hervey said, strange light flaring in his eyes. “Sticks for robes. I admire the Opposition. When it’s got nothing else to trade, it comes up with sticks.”

It troubled Fitzhugh. How the hell did he know that? Was his outfit riddled with gossipers or worse? He sighed. He’d have only this trading season to try out the bow wood. If it worked, American Fur would have its own supply.

“What’s that about?” asked Spoon.

“Bois d’arc.
Osage orange. A bright idea from the devious mind of Jamie Dance,” Hervey said. “How many will get you a robe, my dear Stiffleg?”

Fitzhugh felt himself denuded by the man’s knowledge. Where had it come from? Who knew it had been Jamie’s idea? He glared darkly at Hervey, who yawned like a cat. “We haven’t tried it yet. Maybe after the first of the year.”

“If anyone comes,” Hervey said. “You can’t count on the Cheyenne any more with Dust Devil gone.”

“Bois d’arc.
I think that’d go a finished bow for a robe, maybe three sticks for a robe,” Constable said. “They like that wood. I never figgered they had much of a shootin’ tool with juniper or chokecherry or willow.”

“I had enough arrers whip into my hide so’s I dissent,” Spoon said. “I don’t reckon a osage orange bow’s going to pain me more than a juniper.”

“More distance,” Hervey said. “Maybe thirty yards.”

They argued it while Fitzhugh fumed, feeling naked before the spying of his powerful opponents. The whispering must have started in St. Louis, where someone knew Jamie Dance had thought up the idea. Still, this was Christmastide, and he settled back to bragging and hoorawing like the rest. A man could get right ornery worrying it around.

A roasted haunch of buffalo hung near the stove, near a stack of wooden trenchers and a butcher knife. Men fed themselves that sunny day, sawing off thick slabs of tough meat to chew between their sipping. Fitzhugh felt minutes slide by, minutes when he could be loading up his outfit and hauling the first of it back to his post. But Hervey seemed amiable for a change, watching his guests with bright amusement, and Fitzhugh thought that with each passing sip of spirits, the chances of trouble lessened. So he bided his time. To be sure, Hervey played a catspaw game, sliding his barbs home the whole while, hoping to rile Fitzhugh. But he refused to be riled, and Chatillon’s warning hung in his mind, along with his own caution. Hervey would love to murder him.