The Big Sky (47 page)

"She's there, all right, if only she could coax Red Horn into it."

"Same place?"

The same place, with the clear stream winding in the cottonwoods and trout feeding on the first frail-winged flies and the hills pointing up like a woman's breasts, and Teal Eye standing there again and crossing her wrists and bringing them over her heart so that the breast pushed out at the side, and Poordevil saying "Heap punkin!" through the hole in his jaw. South, the two buttes would be rising, and buffalo would be lazing down from the benches and the black birch blowing and the valley lying unspoiled and quiet between the ridges as if just waiting for a man to see. He had been a long time away, up the Marias and over the hump and down the Flathead and far along the waters of the Columbia and then back, up the River of the Road to the Buffalo and across the top of the mountains again and down the Medicine, past the sulphur springs that flowed warm and stinking from the rocks and gave the river its name. Everything seemed a long time away, Teal Eye and the Teton and all, with so much in between that it was as if he never could get remembered feelings back. Time lay between him and that other day, time and all the miles he had traveled and all he had seen and done. But once he was with her, everything would come right again. Once she lay by him, he would be himself. He could sit again and let time run on, not caring that it did, while the breeze played among the lodges and the sun shone yellow on the grass.

"Too nice to last," Jim said again, rising and stretching in his stirrups. "Enj'y it now, on account you'll have ice on your whiskers tomorrow."

"What makes you such a sorry man? You ought to take yourself a squaw, Jim, a good squaw."

"Maybe it's many squaws as has made me sorry."

"You ought to take one and stay by her, for a spell, anyhow."

"I'm thinkin' not. I won't never settle with one. Like a grasshopper, I am, jumpin' one place and then another, and no sense to know good from bad."

"You're too choosy, maybe. One's like another."

Jim looked at Boone and then spit over the shoulder of his horse. "You'd as soon stay on with them Flathead and Nepercy women then?"

"I got me a woman a'ready."

"Sure. Can't everybody be so lucky."

Boone let Jim's words turn in his head, looking at them one way and then another without fixing his mind sharp on them. It made him proud inside to know that another set store by his woman, but it made him a little edgy, too, like a dog with a bone. It was good Jim was his friend and Teal Eye was Teal Eye, else a man might worry himself.

The mountains fell away behind them, reaching high and jagged into the sky and the blue of distance settling on them. Gophers heavy with the young ones they carried piped at the horses and dived underground, their tails whisking, as the horses came close. A badger, surprised while he chewed on a dead bird, lumbered off to one side and halted on the mound of earth he had scratched up digging a hole and watched them with a slow blaze in his eyes.

To his right Boone caught a glimpse of the westward one of the two buttes, peaceful in the low afternoon sun. They would see the valley soon, the quiet valley of the Teton, half meadow and half trees, where Teal Eye had said she would try to meet him. Maybe she had birthed the young one now and would be slimmed down. Maybe her eyes reached out and soon would see him as just a speck moving down the ridges. He hoped it was a coming man she had and not a little squaw. Squaws didn't grow up to be fighting men with scalps on their leggings and gun covers. Squaws' lives weren't much no matter what.

The benches fell away in front and curved out at the sides, and in the cup the Teton lay just like before. They let their horses come to a stop while they took it in, neither one speaking until Jim said, "Ain't it a camp I make out, Boone? Yonder, in line with the hill that pushes out?"

"Wondered if you'd spot it. Red Horn's Piegans, for sure, like Teal Eye promised."

At the foot of the slope Boone spurred his tired horse to a trot. This was coming home again. It was like doing, awake, what was left from a dream. It was like doing what he had done before, as if he was just coming to the Teton and smallpox had scattered the Piegans and silence hung over the country. If he turned, he might see Poordevil and the red horse trotting proud. It was like that other time, except now he knew she waited for him.

When they were still a half mile from the village, some Piegans jumped on horses and came galloping. One turned out to be Heavy Runner, with his hair wild and his skins dirtier than before. Boone heard Jim making palaver while he sat his horse and gazed yonder at the village. It was a fair-sized camp now, Red Horn's was. Dogs ran out from it, making a racket around the horses as the Indians led the way in. Squaws watched and went to chattering as they went by, saying Strong Arm and Red Hair had come back. An old Indian raised his eyes from a looking glass and stayed the hand that had been plucking the hair from his face, lifting it after he saw who passed. A woman came out of a lodge, her eyes wide like a watching doe and her body slim as a girl's. Boone rode to her and dismounted, seeing gladness and trouble both in the face. Jim called, "How be ' ye, Teal Eye? Still purty as a pet bug, you are."

Teal Eye didn't speak. She reached out, almost as if afraid to touch, and placed the palms of her hands on Boone's neck and stroked them over his chest while tears shone in her eyes.

"Later'n I thought," Boone said while his gaze took her in, "but I come back." His eyes questioned her, but still she didn't say anything. He went on in Blackfoot. "Have you given me a son? Does Strong Arm have a son?"

Her mouth said, "Yes," but something waited in her face as if she had not told him all.

"I want to see him, Teal Eye," Jim said. "Let me git a peek, too: "

Her hand made a little motion toward the lodge. Boone stepped past her, inside. The lodge was thin and old and let the sun through, but still, coming from the shine, he had to wait to see. After a little he spied the baby on its holder, with a skin over its body and a hood drawn over its head so that nothing showed except a small and withered face. Boone bent over and laid the hood back.

From behind him Jim said, "Damn if it ain't got a touch of red in its hairl Maybe grow up to be purty like me."

Teal Eye breathed at Boone's side. The English words stammered on her lips. "Eyes no see. Eyes got sick. No see."
The baby stirred at her voice. The lids pulled open. Before they closed again, Boone saw the eyes swam shrunken and milky-blind.
 

When Boone had a mood on, there was nothing to do but let it wear off. He would be silent and grumpy no matter what, not answering to talk or laughing at jokes but going along with his lips tight and his eyes dark until the trouble in him eased. If a man understood, he just let him alone, knowing time would take care of him. Time would make him himself again; he would get used to his baby's being blind and so not have to take his hurt out on others as if it was their fault the young one couldn't see. Leave him be and he would get friendly sooner or later and take pleasure in things in his corked-up way. Boone never was one to let out what was in him, being a silent man, mostly, and too proud to show himself. Only it must be hard on Teal Eye, living with him now and him not speaking except to grunt and his eyes clouded and far away.

Jim flicked his horse with the tail end of his reins. He was on his way to Fort McKenzie, where he would drink himself some whisky and maybe lie around for a few days and earn a dollar or so by killing meat for the fort or interpreting for Chardon, the bourgeois. By the time he got back to Red Horn's band Boone might feel like speaking a word to him once in a while.

From the plain he could look down on the wooded valleyof the lower Teton. Magpies cried from down there, and a crow called, sounding like a hoarse whisper against the wind that flowed out of the northeast. Up on the plain, ground larks flitted from under his horse's feet and jackass rabbits leaped out of hiding and went bounding away, stopping to look after a while, their front feet held up dainty and their coats already turned from snow-white to dirty gray. Spring was coming even if the weather didn't know it. A week of good weather and the cotton woods would bust their buttons and the diamond willow run out leaves as narrow as snakes' tongues, and at sundown a man would hear the killdeer crying.

Spring made a man feel good and sad, too, and wild sometimes, wanting to howl with the wolves or strike north with the ducks or fork a horse and ride alone over the far rim of the world into new country, into a fresh life. Spring was a good hurting inside the body. It made laughter come easy, and tears if a man didn't shut them off. Come a soft night, and he could sit under the sky and watch the stars or moon and listen to running water, and he would feel a pushing inside of him, a reaching for things he couldn't single out -for a woman, maybe, who was all he ever could think up and more, for the quietness a man never seemed to have until he looked back and saw he had passed it by, never knowing. Old times came back to him then, so's he felt like crying over them, and old friends he had traveled with and parted from, never thinking that those times and those friends would come to be an aching in him. Jourdonnais and Dick Summers and Poordevil, and long days on the
Mandan
and nights on the Powder and that evening in Colter's Hell with the first people and the fine, high singing overhead and the air itself breathless, and all of them gone from him now except as pictures in the heart.

Spring made a man a little crazy. It gave him ideas he wouldn't want to own to -ideas like baying the moon or flying with ducks, sharp beginnings of ideas, like finding a certain woman willing, that he pushed quick from his mind. Anyhow, spring made some men crazy. Maybe not Boone. Maybe not a man that had a Teal Eye for his squaw and wanted nothing but to go on as he was. Maybe there was just one big hunger that other hungers grew from.

Jim rode down into the valley of the Teton where the stream turned north. He climbed the far slope and halted his horse on the high nose that separated the Teton from the Missouri. He saw Fort McKenzie below him, with only three tepees pitched about. Beyond it the Missouri flowed wide, shining silver in the sun. The valley would be green with leaf soon, and a man stopping on the nose would feel shriveled with the wind and sun and would kick his horse downhill to meet the cool breath of the valley. The breeze was still raw now, and the trees stood naked below. Cold had followed that first taste of spring along the Medicine, as Jim had said it would.

The feel of the country settled into Jim, the great emptiness and age of it, the feel of westward mountains old as time and plains wide as forever and the blue sky flung across. The country didn't give a damn about a man or any animal. It let the buffalo and the antelope feed on it and the gophers dig and the birds fly and men crawl around, but what did it care, being one with time itself? What did it care about a man or his hankerings or what happened to him? There would be other men after him and others after them, all wondering and all wishful and after a while all dead.

Jim tried to shake the miseries from his head. It was Boone being so sully that made his thoughts sorry, or the wound he had got and the long hunger. He clucked to his horse and rolled in the saddle to its downhill jolt. Where the ridge leveled off, he spurred the horse to a gallop and pulled up short before the outer gate. A Frenchman peeked through the pickets and swung the gate open to let him through and closed it tight afterwards. There wasn't an Indian in the store except for a couple of squaws that showed by fancy fixings of ribbon and red cloth that they belonged to the men in the fort.

"Where's the customers?" Jim asked.

The Frenchman gestured with his hands, saying only God knew. A clerk eyed Jim, his hands palms down on the counter. "Only customers we get these days are ugly customers," he said.

"They'll be liftin' your hair if you ain't careful, from what I hear."

The guard at the inside gate carried a good Hawken in the crook of his arm. He studied Jim as if to make sure he didn't need killing.

There wasn't much doing inside the grounds. Over by a shop three pork eaters were sorting and mending gear. They and the guard were the only men in sight except for Alexander Harvey, next man in line to Chardon, who sat in a doorway out of the wind sunning himself. The flag overhead snapped in the breeze, and the sun ran along the cannon that was kept aimed at the gate. Jim said "How" to Harvey and slid off his horse. He rested his rifle by the door and sat down in the dust. The horse nosed off, hunting for a spear of grass on ground that the company horses had picked bare while being kept up for fear of Indians.

"I got beaver in my pockets and my pipes is dry," Jim said. "None of your pizen, either, but good drinkin' whisky with some age to it and the taste of wood."

Harvey let his squinched eyes travel over him. "Particular, ain't you? We got plenty of whisky in the store yonder."

"I said good whisky."

Harvey got up as if he didn't want to and stepped inside and came out with a jug and two cups. "Just come from the Piegans?"

"Red Horn's band, up the Teton."

Harvey poured the drinks, his strong, thick face down-turned on the jug. "What kind of medicine they makin'?"

"British, mostly. Likely they'll go to Fort de Prairie for trade. You know why."

Harvey tightened his mouth. "What's their talk?"

"They're sayin' you and Chardon ought to have your black hearts cut out. Likely right, too. Where's Chardon, anyway?"

"Out. Can't stay in this goddam fort all the time."

"Takes all hands with him, don't he?" "Maybe needs to."

"What I hear true, that you aimed to rub out a whole bunch of Bloods? Loaded a cannon with trade balls and trained it from the blockhouse and got your riflemen set and asked the Bloods up to trade?"

Harvey said, "Red bastards! We only got five of them and no horses. Things went wrong. They run off without their furs, though."