The Big Sky (37 page)

He made himself hold still, made his gaze go to the grass, made his hands get out his pipe, made his face stiff and straight. His mind spun and settled and began to work at the way of it while each grass stem stood sharp and separate to his eye. After a while he had the answer. A man could travel many a camp, with a hunger in him and a hope, and find at the end that he had traveled for nothing, and so his hope went dead while the hunger kept on gnawing him. He could have a feeling in him that seemed right and natural and bound to turn out, and it could be a fool feeling all along, like it had been with him. A man and a squaw in a lodge meant one thing, just one thing. He heard his voice saying, "It don't matter, Poordevil. Tell him we leave presents for him and his woman."

His legs lifted him and turned him part way round, while his ears only half brought the Indians' palaver to him.

He heard Jim yell, "How, Teal Eye! How!" He heard Jim's horse walking up.

Poordevil plucked him on the arm. "Red Horn, him."

"It don't matter."

"Chief."

"We leave presents."

Jim sat his horse, his mouth open in a big grin and his blue eye bright.

Poordevil said, "B'long Heavy Otter."

"Best get out some tobacco and beads and such," Boone said to Jim.

"No got squaw," said Poordevil. "Squaw die. Two squaw die. Whole goddam squaw die. No got squaw."

"What you mean?"

Poordevil pointed. "Squaw b'long Heavy Otter. Red Horn b'long Heavy Otter."

Boone said to Jim, "This goddam Injun don't know what he's sayin', no more'n a crazy man."

Jim's face had gone serious. He sat thoughtfull, with the bristles showing red on his chin and his eyes puckered. "I do' know, Boone." Of a sudden he looked up, past Boone's half-turned shoulder. "Your man, him?" he asked. "Your brother, him?"
"Brother!" Poordevil let out the word as if he had been hunting for it. "Red Horn brother."

Jim's voice sounded again. "Hey, Teal Eye, you got yourself a man? Yes? No?"

Boone didn't look. If Teal Eye answered he didn't hear. What he heard next was Jim saying to him, "Go on, Boone! Go on! Time to ask."

He held in, so's nothing would show in his face. He saw his feet moving under him again, saw his fingers working at the pack, saw the rich painter skin, the vermilion, the tobacco. He saw in his mind, without letting himself meet it, Jim's eye sharp and curious on him. He led up the red horse. He noticed the interest rising in Red Horn's eyes as he watched, but what he noticed mostly, without fixing straight on it, was Teal Eye, with recognition in her look and what a man might take for warmth.

"Tell him the red horse is a present, Poordevil, it and the painter skin and the rest."

His tongue stumbled over the practiced words. "The white hunter wants the daughter of Heavy Otter for his squaw."

Red Horn's face went stiff and blank again, as if he had put the horse away from him and closed his head to what was said. Boone's gaze went down before that stony look and came back up and searched beyond and found the big eyes searching, too, and a softness on the mouth that might be meant for him. If only he could talk with Teal Eye, away from Red Horn and the rest!
 
 

If a man wanted a woman for his squaw he went to her father and asked how much the father loved her and what gifts would make his heart glad to have a son in the family. The father talked to the woman afterward and to her mother and then told the man what he wanted. If it wasn't too much, the man brought his gifts and took his squaw, and that was the way of it.

That was the way of it, except that if the woman's father wasn't alive, the man went to her oldest brother, and if she didn't have a brother, then to her nearest kin. That was the way of it, except sometimes things didn't allow for such doings and a man did the best he could, as Boone had done with Red Horn and Teal Eye.

Boone sat by himself on a gravel bank, watching the Teton flow by. It had been a full day since he had offered the red horse and the painter skin and all, and still he didn't know. Maybe Red Horn wouldn't deal with a white man, there was so much bitterness in him. Maybe he would say no while his eyes stayed hungry on the horse. Maybe Teal Eye had her head set another way, on some young Piegan who had just proved himself a brave warrior. Maybe she argued with Red Horn, telling him not to take the horse and the skin and the vermilion and the powder and ball. Boone had caught just one peek at her since the day before.

The water ran easy at his feet, talking to itself as it went. It was as clear as the evening sky over the mountains, with a brown clearness in it that came from fall and leaves the trees had dropped. Up to his right, where the Teton had cut into a bank and made a hole, a lazy trout lipped at the surface, sending out little spreading circles. A chokecherry bush hung over the hole, its green gone but with some berries hanging black and wrinkled on it. The mountains lifted blue in the west, cutting sharp into the quiet sky. High and far in them lay patches of snow. He could see the mountain like an ear and the notch by its side that the Teton ran out of, and southward he could see the canyon of the Medicine with a high reef of rock on one side and a sawtoothed mountain on the other. Between the two rivers were smaller canyons made by streams that maybe the white man hadn't put a name to yet. None of them could be as pretty as the Teton winding, busy but not hurried, with a mind and time to have a look at things as it went along. Clumps of cottonwood grew on its banks, and chokecherry and serviceberry bushes and wild rose and red willow that the Indians mixed with tobacco. No place could be prettier than this valley, with two buttes rising to the south and the tan hills ridged wide on the sides, and cottonwood and black birch and sagebrush growing, and elk and deer about and buffalo coming down from the benches to drink. It was a place a man could spend his whole life in and never wish for better.

Looking beyond the stream and over the first hills to others that rose round and pointed, Boone could guess how the Teton got its name. Some lonesome Frenchman, likely, had looked and been reminded of a woman. Some Bad Medicine, froze for squaws, had seen the hills, and it was like seeing a woman lying with her breasts arched and sharp at the nipples, and his hunger had nagged him and he had said tetons, tetons as if just the saying eased him.

Boone heard the water talking and the breeze barely stirring in the trees and a magpie cawing somewhere, and after a while he heard a footfall close by and leather moving and the sounds of sitting down and the sounds of breathing. He didn't start or turn or lay hold on his rifle. He had a feeling who it was. Things were turning out as he had had a secret hope they would. Things were turning out as he had wished when he walked by Red Horn's lodge and came down the game trail through the brush to the river's edge. He picked up a bright pebble and let his eye run over it and flipped it into the stream with his thumb. He saw it hit and shimmer down and lie white and liquid as the water flowing over it.

He felt her eyes on him. He saw them without looking, the melting eyes and the face young and clean-lined and the breasts swelling under the leather and the feet narrow in their moccains.

With another woman he would have made the sign of lying down and teased her with a hand of beads or a paper of vermilion, and afterward he would have got up and gone on and forgotten her, as he had forgotten a heap of squaws in his time. With another woman he would have acted like a natural man. His eyes would have been bold and his tongue limber and his hands forward. What was it made him hold back? What was it made him sit wondering, like a boy who hadn't had a taste of women? His eye slid to the side and saw her face quiet and her gaze fixed deep on the runing water, and too much thought in her ever to lay tongue to. Could it be she had been waiting for him all this time, saying no to others? Could it be, being as Red Horn had told Poordevil she never had taken herself a man?

He sat silent, feeling unsure and silly, and still it was like talking to her, like letting out how the idea of her had built up in him until he had seen her face in the sky and heard her voice in the breeze. He was that far gone that the flutter of the prairie hen put him in mind of her laugh and the bright pebbles that the stream flowed over set him thinking of her teeth and he never saw a wild goose headed north that she wasn't in his head. He wanted her to come to his lodge and be his woman and make his moccasins for him. He would raise meat aplenty; their lodge would have a galore of meat, and scalps hanging by it that he would lift from the enemies of her people.

Her breath said, "Boone. Boone," as if practicing the word, and then he turned to face her and his eyes met hers and looked into them, trying to see what lay beyond. "You fixin' to come to my lodge, Teal Eye? You aim to be my squaw? Reckon I want you bad." He pointed at her and at himself and brought the tips of his forefingers together in the sign for tepee. All the time it was like his eyes speaking to her and her eyes answering, saying things that couldn't be said with words or all understood by the mind, saying things that went back many a season to the first days on the Mandan and Jourdonnais talking of the little squaw with an eye like the bluewing teal. A quick, small smile came on her face.

Behind them the bushes moved and, turning, Boone saw Poordevil standing on the trail with his ugly face split into a smile and his tongue showing through the gap in his teeth.

His head jerked up and down as if to tell Boone he was a smart picker.

"Goddam you, Poordevil! Git!"

Poordevil came closer. His finger motioned at Teal Eye. "Punkin," he said. "Heap punkin."

Teal Eye got up. But before she dodged around Poordevil and ran up the path she crossed her wrists quickly and put them over her heart and brought one to bear on the other. Boone saw the soft breast yield and swell out to the side. The little smile flashed, and she was gone.

Boone turned back, seeing the trout still lipping at the water and the western mountains cutting into the sky and the rounded hills that had reminded the lonely Frenchman of a woman. He heard the voice of the stream and the stirrings of the breeze and Poordevil taking a step behind him. Over the mountains the sky arched clear and deep so that a man looking let himself be lost in it like a bird floating. Crossing the wrists and hugging them over the heart was sign talk for love.
 

A man could sit and let time run on while he smoked or cut on a stick with nothing nagging him and the squaws going about their business and the young ones playing, making out that they warred on the Assiniboines. He could let time run on, Boone thought while he sat and let it run, and feel his skin drink the sunshine in and watch the breeze skipping in the grass and see the moon like a bright horn in the sky by night. One day and another it was pretty much the same, and it was all good. The sun came up big in the fall mornings and climbed warm and small and got bigger again as it dropped, and the slow clouds sailed red after it had gone from sight. There was meat to spare, and beaver still to trap if a man wanted to put himself out. In the summer the Piegans went to buffalo and later pitched camp close to Fort McKenzie and traded for whisky and tobacco and blankets and cloth and moved on to the Marias or the Teton or the Sun or the Three Forks for a little trapping and the long, lazy winter.

If the beaver were few, buffalo still were plenty, for all that the Piegans slaughtered more and more of them just so's to have hides to trade. Boone had seen regular herds of them chased over the steep bluffs that the Indians called pishkuns and lying at the bottom afterwards with broken necks or standing or lunging on three legs while the hunters rode among them with battleaxes and bows and arrows, and then the squaws, chattering and happy, following up with their knives and getting bloody and not caring, and everybody taking a mouth of raw meat now and then and all feeling good because they had something to set by for winter. Boone drew slow on his pipe while his eye took in the meat drying on the racks and the squaws working with the skins and the lodges pitched around. A dog came up and got a whiff of his tobacco and made a nose and backed up and by and by went on. Off a little piece Heavy Runner lay in front of his lodge with his head in his squaw's lap. The squaw was going through his hair with her fingers, looking for lice and cracking them between her teeth when she found any. In other lodges medicine men thumped on drums and shook buffalo-bladder rattles to drive the evil spirits out of the sick. They made a noise that a man got so used to that he hardly took notice of it.

It was a good life, the Piegan's life was. There were buffalo hunts and sometimes skirmishes with the Crows and Sioux, or the Nepercy who came from across the mountains to hunt Blackfoot buffalo, being as they didn't have any of their own; the sun heated a man in the summer and the winter put a chill in his bones, so that he kept close by his fire and ate jerked meat and pemmican if need be and looked often to the western sky for the low bank of clouds that would mean a warm wind was coming. Life went along one day after another as it had for five seasons now, and the days went together and lost themselves in one another. Looking back, it was as if time ran into itself and flowed over, running forward from past times and running back from now so that yesterday and today were the same. Or maybe time didn't flow at all but just stood still while a body moved around in it. A man hunted or fought, and sat smoking and talking at night, and after a while the camp went silent except for the dogs taking a notion to answer to the wolves, and so then he went in and lay with his woman, and it was all he could ask, just to be living like this, with his belly satisfied and himself free and his mind peaceful and in his lodge a woman to suit him.

Boone didn't guess, though, that Jim ever would be shut of fret the way he was, maybe because Jim never had found a squaw that wore good with him. Jim was forever pulling up and going somewhere, to Union or Pierre or St. Louis. Boone had traveled a considerable himself, but not to places where people were; he went into the mountains or across to British country or north into Canada where the Gros Ventres lived when they weren't on the move. He liked free country, with no more than some Indians about, and his squaw.