The Seekers (65 page)

“Because they have done what the great windigo does,” she said. “They have eaten the flesh of a human being.”

Jared’s throat felt thick. He fought for a breath of air in the foul-smelling shadows. The old half-breed woman looked at him, and he thought that she saw him for the first time.

“The Father-spirit in heaven made the windigo so man would be humble and thankful. When the great windigo walks, higher than a house, with fire burning here”—one hand touched an eyelid—“so bright it lights the night, an ordinary man knows the Father-spirit has showered him with love. An ordinary man is humble and thankful even if he is weak and evil, because no matter how terrible a man’s lot, he will bless it forever if he meets the windigo.”

In a whisper, Jared said, “Thank you.”

Her right hand lifted from her lap, her palm a cross-work of lines.

“Do you have a little snuff for me?”

“I don’t, I’m sorry. I wish I did.”

She became agitated. “Have you seen Langlois?”

“Lang—?”

Jared stopped. Did she mean her husband?

“He will be back by sunset, they say. I told him I would be waiting here.”

Jared stood up. Grasped her open hand and pressed it gently. “Yes, I heard he was coming back.”

She relaxed, and seemed to smile.

“You have heard that? I am glad. That means he is truly coming. I will go on waiting.”

Jared turned away, shaken and full of pity for the old Osage woman. But he understood why Weatherby had revealed his shameful secret.

Jared stayed at the Lisa warehouse the better part of an hour, speaking to several men. Then he asked directions to Ungerleider’s Hotel. He set off at a run, hoping he was not too late.

O
N THE FIRST OF
November 1814, Elijah Weatherby and Jared Adam Kent boarded a keelboat that would take them several hundred miles up the Missouri River with Weatherby’s assortment.

In the assortment were the standard twenty-five-yard bolts of coarse woolen cloth called strouding. The Indians fashioned it into clothing. There were several bolts each of calico, melton and cotton cloth; two dozen three-point Mackinac blankets, prized by the Indians for their warmth; and a collection of carefully packed kettles, needles, threads, axes, awls, hand mirrors, animal traps, shot and powder.

The assortment also included less utilitarian items which the Indians favored for personal adornment: cheap combs, a rainbow of ribbons, falconry bells, and white, red, gray, black and purple shells polished and strung to make wampum.

Weatherby had used the last of his funds to buy three dozen silver trinkets. There were gorgets and half-moons, some bracelets, and fifteen pairs of enormous silver earrings, which Weatherby said the vainer braves wore with great pride. Weatherby had also bought two horses and enough food for three months.

The keelboat pushed up the Missouri under a favoring wind. Jared stood at the bow on the twelfth day of November 1814. His new buckskins were stiff; sweat and exertion had yet to lend them the desired pliability.

The early evening was warm, unusually warm and dry for this far north and this late in the season, Elijah Weatherby said. But the sun was darkening rapidly, Jared noticed. Huge black clouds spilled out of the northwest. In the clouds, lightning flickered.

He gazed at the fast-flowing, muddy Missouri for several minutes. He was struck by the way his own fate and his father’s had been so closely linked with rivers.

A river had taken the older brother or sister he’d never known.

Another had flowed by the place where he was born, and where his mother died.

A third had meandered past the dreadful patch of ground where he and Amanda met Blackthorn.

He’d followed a fourth to St. Louis.

And still one more was bearing him toward an un-guessable future.

The west was growing chiefly because of the rivers. The seekers of escape and the seekers of dreams poured forth from the east, and the rivers in their silent, eternal power carried them, changing the nation, changing the lives of its people, including the Kents—

He lifted his gaze from the river to the land. He was spellbound by the vista. The prairie seemed to stretch away endlessly on both sides of the Missouri, broken only here and there by small groves of trees. On the starboard side, he saw bison—for the first time—two or three thousand, a great mass of hide and hair and horn moving slowly along the bank.

The majestic motion of the herd, the wind-lashed water and prairie grass, the turbulent, white-lit clouds folding in upon themselves as the storm advanced made him feel as he had long ago, times when he’d clambered to a Boston roof or dashed to the end of a pier and beheld sea and sky together, immense and breathtaking—

My God,
he thought.
How beautiful it is.

The wind blew harder now, flattening his hair against the top and sides of his head. He strained to keep the distant horizon in focus, no longer despairing, but thrilled, expectant—

In searching for Amanda, maybe he could find a place where he belonged—

A place where I can be happy.

I see what Weatherby meant. Out here, there
is
room for hope to begin again
—

His fear of the land had begun to wane when he had ceased to fear himself so much. He no longer felt contempt for the family he’d glimpsed at the ferry on the Illinois side of the Mississippi. He no longer pitied the men and women and tiny children huddled in wagons or riding on mules or horses—or walking—he’d passed on the trails up from Nashville. He understood them.

He was one of them.

The clouds had darkened the sky overhead. The keel-boatmen hauled down the sail and pitched the anchor overside, preparing to ride out the storm.

Thunder blasted. Lightning hit the river about a mile ahead. Openmouthed, Jared watched as the forked whiteness licked down a second time, striking the earth in front of the plodding buffalo. In moments, fire ignited.

It spread quickly, fanned by the wind until a monumental wall of scarlet rose toward the heavens. Even on the keelboat, Jared felt the heat.

The silhouettes of the frightened buffalo passed before the scarlet wall, stampeding. The earth shook. The sky turned black and so did the surrounding land. Only that towering rampart of flame lit the stygian gloom—

Marveling at the sight, Jared was unprepared for the slash of the rain. With a yelp, he headed below. He was soaked by the time he got there.

The rain lasted a quarter of an hour, then slacked off abruptly. In five more minutes it was over. He returned to the deck, the wind cool against his cheeks.

The clouds cleared. A gold sunset burnished the river and the wet prairie. To starboard, billows of smoke marked the site of the drenched fire. The distant reverberation of the stampeding buffalo blew along on the wind.

He felt a presence at his elbow.

“What you lookin’ at?” Weatherby asked.

In a hushed voice, Jared answered, “Everything.”

“Makes a man feel right clean again, don’t it?”

Weatherby had that sad, remote look in his eyes, Jared noticed. It brought something to mind, something that had needed saying for a couple of weeks.

“Elijah—”

“Uh?”

“You know one of the reasons I decided to come with you?”

Weatherby shook his head.

“I talked to some other fur men before we left St. Louis.”

“Did you tell ’em where you come from?”

Jared smiled. “I did. I said I’d come on foot and on horseback and by wagon and keelboat all the way from Boston. I had three solid offers to hire on.”

“Knew you would.”

No longer smiling, Jared went on, “I also asked about the windigo.”

The words seemed to crush Weatherby like a blow. But after a moment, he straightened up and faced his younger companion. “So you know the story I spun about my Frenchie partner was a lie.”

“I found out you had a partner who was French—”

“But he didn’t disappear because of no buffla dance. We was in the mountains last winter—”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“I want to. It was snowin’ to beat hell. We lost the packhorses with all the food. Then my partner, old Marcel, he”—for a moment it seemed as if Weatherby couldn’t continue—“well, there was a rock fall, and Marcel, he was broke up pretty bad under it. There was no way he could live, an’ no way I could carry him out. It was all I could do to keep myself alive. I had to make the filthiest, meanest choice a man could be asked to make. I’ll say this. Old Marcel, he helped me make it. I was ready to die with him but he wouldn’t have no part of that. He—finished himself with his own gun. Then I was able to walk out of those mountains seventeen days later. Alive because I had flesh to eat.”

Even now, Jared experienced the horror that had gripped him outside Lisa’s warehouse.

Presently the trapper said, “There ain’t much worse a man can carry on his soul, Jared.”

“I’d guess not.”

“Sometimes I can’t carry it all, so I frolic, like I did at Mrs. Cato’s. Now you see why I told you what I did? That any mistakes you made ain’t nothin’ compared to mine? But I swear—there
is
somethin’ of God in this land. I know it, dumb as I am. I can’t read nor write, but I know that much. A man’s born like a cracked jar, and livin’ don’t improve the condition. There’s never a way to repair the jar so it’s perfect. But somehow, it’s so clean and blessed beautiful out here, you’re—”

“Forgiven.”

“Yes. Maybe it’s because there ain’t many souls in these parts yet to see the crack in the jar. Maybe it’s because you’re so busy keepin’ alive, the crack ain’t very important. Even after last winter, I can stand up and start over.”

“You showed me how I could do that, Elijah.”

Weatherby managed a smile. “Then I’m good for somethin’, I reckon.”

“Listen, I’m counting on you to show me a lot more. I intend to make some money in this fur business.”

“Fair enough. I don’t guarantee it, but we’ll give ’er a Tennessee try. I do promise you one thing, though. A year or so out here, and there’ll be a fire in your soul like you never felt before. A fire to make that burnin’ prairie look like sparks in brushwood.”

Jared smiled back. “You’ve a poetic turn of mind—you know that?”

“Wouldn’t go quite that far. But a fur man spends a lot o’ hours inside his own head. Most times, there’s nobody else for company—”

“And what kind of fire is it that’s going to burn me up?”

“Why, the one that made me commit a great sin an’ leave my woman and my youngsters. You keep hankerin’ to see past the next hill, then the next, and one day it gets so bad, you can’t stay in the same place more’n a week without goin’ crazy.”

“I had a curiosity about new things once upon a time. Somewhere along the way, I lost it.”

“Well, you wait. The fire’ll stoke up hot and you won’t be satisfied till you’ve set eyes on the mountains—then the ocean—”

“You’ve seen the Pacific?”

“ ’Course I have. I’ve et and smoked with the Haidas on the very shore of it. I’ve been a while in the earth lodges of the Pawnee and I’ve worked trap lines in the country of the horse tribes, too—the Cheyenne, the Blackfeet, the Crow. You’ll see wondrous sights out where we’re goin’, Jared—”

There was silence broken by the whisper of the wind and the lap of the Missouri against the hull.

“Y’know,” Weatherby continued, “I really did mean what I said in jail. I think you got the stuff.”

“Kind of soon to tell, isn’t it?”

“Oh, no. I’ve had three partners and I reckoned their good points and bad points mighty quick. Old Marcel, he was the best of the lot, God keep him. But I’d be proud to call you my kin.”

Moved, Jared couldn’t reply immediately. Finally, very softly, he said, “The feeling’s mutual, Elijah.”

Weatherby clapped his hands. “By damn, I think we
will
make some money! You may even find an Injun girl you fancy. A lot of ’em are right pleasing.”

And start the Kents growing again?
It was an unexpected idea, but a warming one.

Rain-washed hills gleamed amber as the last clouds passed. A single shimmering star lit the pale blue far overhead. In his mind, he saw the passage from Ezekiel.

I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken
—

He had it in his power to begin the family anew. He must do it as best he could. Whether a hope of locating Amanda was justified was another matter—

Once again Weatherby exhibited his uncanny faculty for sensing what was in Jared’s mind, perhaps because Jared’s eyes were focused on the remotest point on the river.

“I think we’ll find her, Jared.”

“Sometimes I think so too. Other times, I wonder.”

“From all you told me about her, I’d say she’s got too much life in her just to lie down an’ die. I got a powerful feelin’ she’s still alive somewhere out yonder.”

“I’ve almost come to believe that myself.”

“Even if we don’t find her, you got to remember it’s the tryin’ that counts most. It’s the tryin’ that makes a man worthy of the name.”

Jared nodded slowly. His hand moved to his belt and touched the fob tied there by the raveling ribbon.

But his eye remained fixed on the horizon.

A
MANDA KENT OPENED HER
eyes.

In the first seconds of wakefulness, she noted details of her surroundings without recognizing their significance. She floated in a pleasant state of lassitude, fascinated by the colorful geometric designs daubed on the skin lining of the tepee. The lining stretched from the ground to perhaps a height of five feet.

Amanda was lying on one of three beds arranged around the tepee wall. Hers was positioned to one side of the oval entrance, which was closed. The entrance faced east, away from the prevailing winds.

On the other side of the entrance were the two beds for the tepee’s regular occupants. The head of one abutted the foot of the other. All three beds were similar in most respects: two poles had been staked parallel on the ground, and the space between filled with dried prairie grass, then covered with hides. But only one of the beds had an angled backrest of closely spaced willow sticks. The top of the backrest’s frame was connected by a thong to a tripod directly behind it.