The Big Sky (19 page)

The boat got to be part of a man, like his pants or his shoes. Only Boone didn't have shoes any more, but moccasins bought from the squaws. Everybody was dressed like an Injun now, or half like one, with long hair and moccasins and hunting shirts and some of them leather leggings. Even his hair and Jim's, shaved off away down on the Platte, was beginning to come around the ears. He could make tails, almost, from the tufts they had left. He had got himself a slick outfit, trading glass beads that Jourdonnais had put up against his pay and a turkey tail that Summers had given him. It was something, the store the upper Injuns set by turkey tails to make headpieces with. Summers said it was because you didn't see turkeys, leastwise not very often, above Little Cedar Island. His outfit had been made by the Crows, the Mandans said, and had quills on it and some beads. A man could cut a figure in it.

Sometimes, lying out this way at night listening to Jim, he thought about home and Bedwell and the sheriff and the horse he had stolen and sold at St. Louis. Mostly, though, when he thought about things like that, he thought about home. Not that he wanted to go back. God's sake, no! Still, a man wondered about his ma and brother. And if he had it to do over again, he wouldn't be scared of Pap. He could handle Pap now, all right, even if he was still just seventeen. He had got on to a lot in a mighty little while. He brought his left hand over and felt the muscle of his arm. He could pick Pap up and shake his teeth loose without so much as taking a long breath. When he thought about leaving home and the tears coming into his eyes and the lump aching in his throat, he wondered if he was still the same body. It would take something to make him cry now. It would take something to make him worry, even, the way he had worried when he found he'd caught a case of clap. Summers was right; a thing like that kind of wore out after a while, and a man got so he didn't give it any heed.

It seemed like a year he'd been with the boat. Like his whole life. A body lost track of time. One day melted into another, passing into full summer and beyond, and no one took note or cared except Jourdonnais and maybe Summers a little, and even Jourdonnais was smiling, for it was as if the wind that had deviled them for so long  suddenly had got ashamed of itself. Past the Ponca country it had switched around. Day after day it had kept behind them, pushing them along, turning when they turned as if it was trained to it, getting ornery only once in a while and pretty soon giving up and working with them again. Jourdonnais shook his head, saying one time after another, "I never know it like this," while his mustache pointed up with his smile. They had passed a sight of country. It ran through Boone's eyes as he eased off toward sleep, as if he were seeing it for the first time again: the hills changing, some of them as flat as a table and others undercut and weathered off, looking like old forts or fancy places that kings had lived in long before; the wild currants and cherries and gooseberries above the White, where Carolina pigeons whooed and blackbirds rasped; islands run around with cedar or cottonwood, with little, secret meadows inside; the black veins striping the river bluffs, which Summers said was coal and sometimes caught fire, making the pumice stone that the river carried and that the squaws used to finish hides; dead Indians lying on scaffolds and some of them falling to pieces and littering the ground, making a stink, and the buzzards sitting in the trees around; Summers lying above the Big Bend with a handkerchief flying from a stick and an antelope dancing and circling and coming closer, out of curiousness, until Summers' bullet knocked it over; sandbanks and sandbanks and prairies and prairies and always the strange hills and the big sky.

Jourdonnais stood at the wheel, steering right by Fort Tecumseh, which belonged to the Company and hung to a bank the river was undercutting. He let the men answer the welcoming shots on the shore with a volley from half a dozen muskets, but steered on by just the same, the sail full and the flag whipping from the mast, while he looked dead ahead as if his mind was on trouble. The hills were easy and wooded at the mouth of the Cheyenne, and farther on cottonwood and a few elms and small ashes and buffalo berry and currant bushes made a lane for them. They saw elk -thirty of them in one bunch and white wolves chasing along the bluffs, and once Boone and Summers and Jim came on a little place fenced in with poles, which had a post in the center painted with fading red and a buffalo head raised on a small mound of earth. Summers said it was medicine, to make the buffalo plenty. They saw trees scarred high by the ice that had gone out in the spring, and beaver cuttings and beaver tracks galore. Summers looked hungrily at the sign, and explained that hunters let this country be because the Rees claimed it for their own.

The Ree villages sat round-topped on the west bank, the two divided by a stream and each closed in by a fence of stakes that had commenced to rot and fall down. The houses were made of reddish-white clay and each had a square hole in it for a door. And beyond the villages were the Cannonball and the Heart, and buffalo, pounding over the high ground, making knee-deep paths along the bluffs, swimming in the river. Summers killed a cow with a knife, jumping in the river and swimming to her and running the blade around her throat as she hit shore. How much fresh meat could a man eat? It went into the stomach and spread right out into blood and strength, leaving the belly ready for more.

Summers shot a deer, not a whitetail but what they called a mule deer, larger than the other and darker, with ears almost like a jackass. It was young and juicy, and the head that had been buried in the coals made Boone's mouth water, just thinking. The river went on, to the Mandans, to the Minitari, to the Knife River, to the Little Missouri, the brown neverending river, idling and tearing and twisting and gouging, the river that ran full of list and drift and rotting buffalo, leading up from the deep woods and the closed hills and the scrub grass of the down country to country that kept getting freer and bigger until sometimes, looking out over it from a rise, Boone felt he was everywhere on it, like the air or the light.

"Goddam, Jim!" he said.

"What?"

"It's slick, ain't it?"

"What?"

"This here. Everything."

"These pesky gnats-"

Jim's words got mixed with Boone's remembering. He thought back to the night that was closing down over the Ree camp. It wasn't dark yet, not so dark a man couldn't see, but the boatmen and the squaws didn't care. In the open grass behind the clay huts they made moving heaps, the men writhing over the squaws, rising and pushing and writhing and sometimes groaning like a stud horse as the stuff of them pumped out. Once in a while you heard a giggle from a squaw or a Frenchie, before they settled down to business. The dusk was thick and soft, like smoke you couldn't smell. Boone could hear the old squaws quarreling in their houses and the barking of the wolf-dogs that showed their teeth to white men, but they seemed far away, like echoes running across a stillness. Here there was just the single voice in a laugh or the throat in a groan and the grass rustling. By and by other boatmen would be coming along with their squaws. It was early yet.

Boone's squaw lifted her gown and sat down and lay back. There was no get-ready, no kissing or hugging or hunting with the hand. It wasn't that a man needed any, not with what was going on around him, and the heart big and urgent in the throat. The squaw lay waiting, thinking likely about the scarlet cloth her man had bargained for and taken only after he had gone back to her to ask if it was enough. She wasn't bad -straight and young and so lightcolored a man might take her for white in the dusk. The smell of her came into his nostrils as he got down, the smell of lodge smoke and warmth and meat grease and woman and the smell of bruised grass.

Afterwards he got up without a thank-you or a how-dedo, walking with the loose, easy fag of a man who had spent himself. There were a passel of dogs in the village and more blind people than a body would think for. He met Summers. The hunter's eyes studied him. "This child wasn't lyin', was he, about the Ree women? They ain't so many as before, but still good. The Rees are movin'."

"Why?"

"Sioux, mostly. The Sioux keep pressin' them. Likely they'll join up with the Pawnees. They're kin."

"They been oncommon friendly for folk you didn't trust."

"On account of the Sioux scalps, and on account of this nigger hisself. They remember me all right. Some calls me brother, from away back." Summers gave tobacco to two who came begging. "They're tricky, though, remember, and mean fighters. Meanest next to the Blackfeet, I do believe. Watch careful, or might be they'll take our hair."

"I'm bein' careful."

"I'm makin' talk with Two Elks. Want to come? Best to have a little 'baccy."

"I got a lookin' glass, too."

Buffalo robes were already spread around a small fire in the lodge they entered. An Indian put out his hand, saying nothing. They shook it and sat down while he filled a pipe. A squaw began to busy herself with a kettle, waddling to the fire like an old duck. Two Elks lighted his pipe and blew smoke to the sky and earth and the four directions. Holding the bowl, he passed the long stem to Summers and then to Boone. By the light of the fire the squaw had poked, Boone could see the white and welted line of the scar that ran along each of his arms and came together on his naked stomach. The vermilion on his cheeks was like streaks of old blood. His hair was heavy and longer than a man could believe. It came down from the sides of his head in plaits and lay in coils at his thighs like snakes.

In the pot that the squaw had fixed was a mixture of dried corn mixed with beans and cooked with buffalo marrow. It tasted good to Boone, putting him in mind of Ma and the garden in Kentucky.

Two Elks said, "How," and waited for a minute and went on carefully, like a man making a speech, talking deep in his throat. His eyes were small and deep-set. The little fire shone in them, behind the close banks of the lids. The squaw came to Summers and studied his buckskins piece by piece. She took an awl and a piece of split sinew from a bag and went to work on a rip in his moccasin. Two Elks kept talking.

"The heart of Two Elks is full," Summers translated as the Indian paused. "His brothers, the Long Knives, have brought the scalps of the Sioux who are as many as the blades of grass, whose tongues are crooked and whose hearts are bad. While the pale brother makes war on the Sioux, the Rees will walk with him."

The fire made a ball of light in the darkness, a red bubble closing in Two Elks and his squaw and Summers and Boone. Outside there was only darkness, and sounds that came muted -the growl of a dog, a snatch of talk, the laugh of a squaw or the deeper laugh of a boatman out in the grass.

The chief spoke again, and Summers translated. "Two Elks is a poor man. He has given his goods to others, for it is below a brave man to want riches. He is very poor and needs what the white brother can give him. What he has, his brothers may have, too."
Summers reached for the powder horn at the Indian's side and held it to the fire to see how full it was. It took most of Summers' horn to fill it. Boone handed over a twist of tobacco and the looking glass he had brought along in case he needed it with a squaw. Then, because they looked so little, he took some balls from his pouch.

Summers talked with his hands and mouth. The Indian sat back listening, his eyes steady on the hunter's face, sometimes nodding and sometimes just looking through his narrowed lids. To Boone Summers said, "I told him I heerd the Rees had blacked their faces towards us, but I knew it was not true, that I had lived with the Rees and slept in their lodges and hunted with their hunters, and we were brothers. I said we brought the scalps of the Sioux and some presents, too, to show our hearts were good."

The squaw's hands picked at Boone, looking for a loose thread or a tear. Her fingers lingered on the boughten shirt he wore, which was red-checked cotton and faded with the sun, and pretty soon began to tug at it while her eyes looked into his. After a while he took the shirt off and gave it to her. She made a pleased sound. Afterwards she barely brushed his head and jaw with her fingers as if to make out what he was. He sat still, trying not to notice her, as he reckoned a man was supposed to do.

The chief pointed to the robes they sat on, to show they were gifts. The squaw left the circle of firelight, clucking over the old shirt which she held in front of her. Boone heard again the sounds that came from the rutting back of the village. One voice rose high, a Frenchman's, speaking through a bubbling of laughter.

Two Elks heard and leaned forward, his elbows outspread on the knees that slanted up from his crossed legs. His eyes were direct and asking, and his old face in the firelight seemed as open as a child's. His voice came out in a question, which Summers seemed not to understand, for he said something short and Two Elks asked again.

Summers looked puzzled but nodded his head and spoke. Two Elks' gaze went down to the fire and thought made a cloud on his face. He was silent, as if trying to figure something out.

A dog was barking at the edge of the village. He set off the others until there was nothing but the sound of dogs out in the night. When they quieted the other sounds took up. By listening close Boone could hear voices in other lodges, where Jourdonnais and maybe Jim and Romaine were visiting. Above them he could still hear the sounds out in the grass behind, coming through the clay of the lodge.

"Two Elks don't understand," said Summers. "He wants to know, ain't there any squaws in the land of the Long Knives?"

As long as he lived, thought Boone as he squirmed for comfort on the ground, he would remember that question and Two Elks' open face asking it. "No squaws in the land of the Long Knives?" In a way it was so simple it made a man want to laugh.
 
 

Jim snored lightly, fallen away from his thoughts. Jim always seemed to go to sleep quick, and to wake up feeling good, with a glint in his eye. The campfire was a dying glow in the night. Across it Boone could see other figures, lying loose and all spraddled out as if the touch of the ground rested them. Most of them made noises in their sleep, sucking in their breath and blowing it out. Only Romaine was up, taking the first watch. It would be Boone's turn next, and then Jim's. Jourdonnais and Summers always took the early-morning watches, figuring they were the dangerous ones. Romaine went over by a tree and stood there a minute and then let himself down, his back against the trunk. It was a mighty poor way to stand guard. After a while he began to tip over, a little at a time, like a bag not set quite right. Boone knew he was asleep.