PRAIRIE
They passed into a shallow draw with saddle leather creaking, and were letting the horses drink when an antelope with high pronged horns burst from a wild-cherry copse. Not ten yards away it stopped and stood motionless, gazing at them with eager curiosity, its head thrust forward, its round black eyes brazen and bright. The frozen moment, the animal tight as a quivering spring, struck Frémont like a vision. He saw a vein throbbing in its white neck and he felt his own heart in cadence. Then the antelope sprang sideways and was off, sailing over the prairie like a low-flying bird.
“We’ll see buffler soon,” Louison Freniere said. “Antelope are always bold when buffler are about. Beyond that ridge, I wouldn’t doubt.”
Buffalo. Ahead the ground rose in a steady sweep to a long dominating ridge a half-mile distant. Frémont stared at it; his pulse had not slowed and he smiled.
Both men were well mounted and each led a fresh horse already saddled for the chase. They passed a prairie-dog village where hundreds of the little yellow animals stood yelping at them, their short tails jerking with each cry. A gray owl with white-ringed eyes gazed imperturbably at Frémont from a burrowed mound. It looked strangely calm.
“Yes,” Louie said, almost to himself, “I can feel ’em.” He glanced at Frémont. “You’ll be on your own then, Charlie. Pick you a cow and hold to her—you’ve got to run that horse like you was running on your own two legs. Never mind the breaks and draws and them damned prairie-dog holes. Think you can cut yourself loose like that?”
“I’m ready,” Frémont said. He took a deep breath. Ever since St. Louis, all the way up the Missouri to Fort Pierre on the fur company steamboat and out across the wide open country of the Dakota Sioux, he had been waiting for his first sight of the legendary herds that blackened the land. Buffalo—Freniere and the others on the expedition seemed to think of nothing but that thundering sport and princely food of the plains. It was dangerous—the galloping horse was half blind in the dust, and if you fell, likely you’d be trampled or gored—but the danger was half the fun.
“Hell,” Freniere said, “you ain’t never ready for buffler till you come up on ’em.” He was half-coaching, half-challenging. “You’ve got to run, understand? Horse is faster, sure, but a buffler can run all day, run the best horse right into the ground. Slap leather once and there goes your chance.”
On the first day out Freniere, himself a magnificent horseman, had caught Frémont grabbing for the big Spanish horn on his saddle and he never let him forget it. But Frémont had learned a lot in ten days. Now Louie was sitting slouched in his saddle, throwing quick glances at Frémont and talking in bursts.
“Horse is no fool, you know. And he don’t really give a damn if you get a buffler or not—he ain’t going to eat none of it. He’ll take you up and give you a shot, but he’s sure as hell got to know you really want to go. It ain’t no time to tuck your butt.”
“Tuck my butt?” Frémont said, suddenly nettled. “The day you see me tuck my butt, you can have my gold watch and pistols.” He wondered if he sounded hollow.
“Well, you ain’t never gone after buffler before,” the hunter replied. He grinned, wolfish and keen, and Frémont saw that he was nervous, too.
It was coming on noon and the sun was high in a white sky. Light burned over the ridge and pressed down against Frémont’s eyes until they ached. He tugged his hat brim low; he could see mile after mile of endless, unmarked prairie, rolling like a troubled sea. High overhead an eagle circled on motionless wings, a speck in the vaulting sky. It was a land to set a man free.…
They were halfway up the long slope. Grass grew in tufts and clumps, gray-green and stunted but strong enough to keep a horse going forever. Little puffs of dust rose under the horses’ hooves and blew instantly away. The dry air made the wind feel cool, but a trickle of sweat formed under one of Frémont’s arms and ran down his side. Louie, staring ahead, had lapsed into silence. His brass-bound rifle lay across the pommel of his saddle and unconsciously the web of his hand fitted itself to the hammer, ready to draw it down on cock.
Louie was about Frémont’s age, maybe twenty-five, a lean, tall man, dark face burned darker by the open, long black hair falling to his shoulders. Once Frémont had asked him why he didn’t cut it. “What,” he said, “and break the hearts of half the girls in St. Louis? It’s right purty, Charlie, when it’s combed out, and there’s no shortage of belles who want to comb it.” He was wearing blue homespun trousers over rough boots and a buckskin smock belted at the waist. It was nearly black with age and grease and was molded to his shape. Most of the fringed whangs that might once have shed water in the rain were gone.
It was nothing like the gorgeous suit Freniere had worn the day Frémont joined the expedition in St. Louis. That suit was of buckskin too, but clean, soft as glove leather, worked until it was almost white. Its whangs were all intact, rippling a full six inches, and the shirt and matching moccasins were brilliant with red-dyed porcupine quills and the beadwork of the northern Sioux. Some patient woman far up the Cheyenne River had made it—and doubtless given Freniere her heart as well.…
It had been sunny and warm in St. Louis on that day in early May. They had been lounging in front of Pierre Chouteau’s American Fur Company, where the expedition was outfitting. These warehouses of gray stone had supplied the western fur trade for three decades, but now the compound just off the levee was quiet. The men had assembled for a final muster and Frémont, who had arrived so late from Washington he’d nearly missed the expedition, was getting acquainted.
“They got buffler in the Smoky Mountains, Lieutenant?” Louie had asked. Frémont had been on two surveying expeditions into the western Carolinas and considered himself a woodsman. But no, no buffalo.
“I figured not,” Freniere had said. “Well, you got a treat in store for you, I’ll say that. Buffler is the biggest, fastest, goddamndest animal in the whole world, bar absolutely none. I’ll put it up against elephants in India for wonder and Spanish bull for power—”
“Grizzly is the baddest,” a swarthy man named Martineau had said.
“That’s right, and buffler is the best. He’s like a king, d’ye see, he’s a challenge: it takes a man to ride him down and stop him. ’Course they’re easy enough to kill by creeping up on ’em, but hell, that’s like sleeping with a woman in a bundling bed—it ain’t near the fun it might be.”
“God Almighty, yes,” the heavyset Bladon had said with an explosive laugh. He had a kinky black beard. “I spent a night in one of them years ago. Give me the stone ache for a week.”
“And eating,” Freniere had said, ignoring Bladon, “why you just ain’t et till you’ve had buffler roasted on a prairie fire, a few chips tossed on the coals for seasoning. Fat cow makes beef taste like putty.”
“God’s truth, Lieutenant,” Martineau had said. “Buffler will spoil any other meat in the world for you.”
The office door had opened then and Mr. Nicollet came out. Frémont had reported to him upon arrival the night before. Niccollet was a Frenchman who had come to America eight years before, in 1832, to explore the frontier; he’d been much taken by Frémont’s own French heritage and his command of the language. St. Louis, though American for nearly four decades, still felt itself a French city, and most of the men on the expedition were voyaguers from the old French fur trade on the northern lakes, as accustomed to the canoe as the saddle.
“Gentlemen,” Nicollet had said, smiling, and the men had fallen silent. The astronomer was in his early fifties and his hair was iron gray, though still thick. Frémont thought his eyes looked tired. His manner was gentle and the men had started to call him Papa Joe.
“All’s ready, then,” he’d said in a voice that sounded short of breath. “There’ll be nineteen of us and we’ll draw our livestock at Fort Pierre. The Antelope starts up the Missouri at dawn and every man had better be aboard. You’re free tonight to wind up your business here—just make sure you don’t wind yourselves so tight you miss the boat.”
Louie had winked at Frémont.
“Any of you who haven’t met Mr. Frémont should do so,” Nicollet went on. “John Charles Frémont, Second Lieutenant, Corps of Topographical Engineers, United States Army. As you know, the expedition is under the auspices of the Army, which is reimbursing the American Fur Company for costs. Mr. Frémont is the Army’s official representative. He’ll serve as second-in-command and will assist me in the scientific side of the expedition.
He paused, looking from face to face. “Bear in mind that the whole purpose—the only purpose—of this venture is to map the great stretch of terrain lying between the headwaters of the Missouri and the Mississippi. We’ll take six months, all told: here to Fort Pierre and across to Fort Snelling on the upper Mississippi, and we’ll be back in late October—well, say early November. Now, let me say again that there never has been a map made anywhere in America—or, I venture to say, anywhere in the world—of the quality and the particularity which we will achieve, nor one which employs the scientific methods we will use. So I’m counting on everyone to do whatever may be necessary to make this achievement possible.”
He had nodded to a dour man with searching black eyes. “You know Mr. Provost—he’ll serve as camp conductor and will be responsible for keeping us moving in good order day by day.” Hearing the name, Frémont had glanced quickly at Provost, who returned the look without expression. Etienne Provost was a famous name on the frontier. Frémont judged him to be about Nicollet’s age, but he looked harder. He was a mountain man and he trapped with Jim Bridger and ridden with Jedediah Smith; he had fought at Pierre’s Hole and year by year he’d brought his beaver down to the great rendezvous on the Siskadee.…
“And our friend Louison Freniere,” Nicollet said with a smile, glancing at the man in the glorious buckskins, “has signed on as a hunter and will keep us in meat.”
“We won’t have no food problems, Papa Joe,” one of the men called. “Buffler sees Freniere in his fancy suit and he’ll drop dead of shock.”
Freniere grinned and lifted the rifle he carried. “Never you fear, boys. If the suit don’t get ’em, my old Hawken will.” Made there in St. Louis with an octagonal barrel of soft rolled iron, brass-bound to a cherrywood half-stock, muzzle-loaded and fired with the new-style caps that were putting flintlocks out of business, the Hawken was as fine a rifle as you could buy in the world. It had cost a full forty dollars and all the way from St. Louis across the great northern prairie, Frémont noticed that the hunter watched over it as he might have a woman. Nicollet had instructed Frémont to spend his days with Louie and learn the feel of the land, and Freniere had promised to make him a hunter as well.
Now, as the two horsemen neared the crest of the long, dominating ridge, Freniere’s hand still rested on the Hawken’s well-blued hammer. Since challenging Frémont he had ridden in absorbed silence, his hat pulled low, ignoring the immensity of land around them. He reined up and dismounted, glancing ahead at the glare-struck sky, and dropped a slender rawhide loop over his horse’s head.
“Don’t never pay to top a ridge like you owned it,” he said quietly. “Never know who’s watching beyond. We’ll walk up for a peep and see what we see.”
At the crest he crouched and then flattened and crawled forward. Frémont followed, elbows grinding in white dust, the smell of sun-warmed sage astringent in the air. A stinging gnat lighted on his face and he flicked it away. Louie stopped moving and together they looked down into a vast bowl of open country. It dwindled to blue haze in the distance and in between it was rolling and broken, tawny-colored and gray-green with bunch grass and sage, and there were dark patches on it like timber where timber didn’t belong.
“What’d I tell you?” Freniere said softly. The patches were buffalo grazing, fifty or seventy to a herd, and there must have been fifty herds. He nudged him and jerked his head and Frémont looked to the left. There, just below the crest, much closer than the others, was a herd of nearly a hundred. A huge old bull was in command. The wind was blowing across the animals and no man scent reached them. They were moving slowly to the right, feeding as they went, making a constant grunting noise that Frémont realized he’d been hearing since he first looked. A pair of gray wolves skulked behind them, hungry and disconsolate. The old bull, though unalarmed, was watching the wolves. Frémont realized his hands were trembling slightly.
“Boys’ll be happy tonight,” Louie muttered. They had found no game but antelope and the men were grumbling. They hobbled the two horses they had ridden all morning and took their fresh mounts. Frémont’s runner was a big bay with white stockings, an intelligent, good-natured beast named Barney who worked without complaint. The girth was loose and Frémont cinched it tight, bracing with his knee. He checked the cap on his stubby plains rifle and examined the .50-caliber pistol he carried in his belt.
Louie swung to the left so that they topped the ridge behind the herd and started toward it. Frémont seized a breath. His lungs were not working quite right. The old bull saw them against the sky and threw up his head and bellowed. The herd lurched into a sudden gallop and the bull turned to meet the horsemen, head down, snorting and pawing the ground.
“Hi-yah!” Freniere yelled and his horse leaped away and Barney tilted into a gallop as if he were spring-loaded. The bull was not at all intimidated but when the last of the herd passed him, spreading and moving faster, he turned and followed, bellowing threateningly. The horses separated and Frémont forgot about Louie, for he had fixed on a cow. He gave Barney his head, reins high and spurs hard in his ribs. The cow could hear the horse behind her and she stretched into a dead run, but Barney had fixed on her too, and he was closing the distance.
Thunder filled the air, the horse’s hooves on the hard ground, the herd drumming in full gallop, cows bawling in anger and fear. Dimly Frémont heard the bull’s rumbling bellow and a calf’s piercing squall and his own loud voice. The cow galloped head down, throwing up clots of dirt, and dust clouds blotted out the other animals and stung his eyes. The horse was gaining and Frémont crouched forward, part of its flexing motion, reins in his left hand, rifle in his right, shouting encouragement. Another cow, a calf at her flank, blundered out of the dust on their left and Barney shied to the right as the strange cow reared backwards. Then Barney loosed a new surge of speed and closed with the cow, just behind her right shoulder, just where he belonged.
So close, she was stunning. Frémont had never seen an animal as awesome. Her hump was as high as his waist as he sat his horse. Her shaggy hair was matted, tawny-colored on her forequarters tapering off to black-brown on her rump, winter hair coming off in ragged clumps. Her little horns were polished hooks, her eyes shot with blood, her mouth open, tongue out, streamers of foam whipping behind her.
Staring at the great brute size of her, the horse matching stride for stride, the wind crashing in his ears, his own voice howling and wordless, he knew now what they meant by the sheer joy of the buffalo run. She cut sideways into a small draw, seeking its brushy cover, and Barney turned hard behind her. They crashed through low brush and Frémont heard it cracking under the horse. He felt Barney shift and twist as if he were dancing and he caught a glimpse of hole-pocked ground beneath him, but his mind hardly registered its meaning. The cow glanced over her shoulder, her bloody eyes glaring. Her big head rolled and she hooked a horn at the horse’s chest. In mid-stride Barney sprang sideways. Frémont lurched against the animal’s neck and his left foot lost the stirrup. The rifle slipped and he clutched it frantically against Barney’s wet flank and regained his grip. Cursing, he grabbed the saddle horn with his rein hand and that snapped the horse’s head back and checked him and threw Frémont forward again. He loosed the reins, fumbled his foot back into the stirrup, found his seat and rammed spurs into Barney’s ribs.
They closed again and Frémont dropped the reins and brought the rifle to his shoulder. He half-stood in the stirrups and the horse, confused by the signals, checked again. Before Frémont could fire he was thrown forward and he grabbed up the reins. Sweat ran in his eyes and blinded him, but his hands were full of reins and rifle and in a moment he forgot the burning. The big horse felt him take control and burst forward. The cow hooked at him and canted off in a new direction and Barney cut after her and closed again. Now, holding the reins in his left hand, clasping the horse with his knees, Frémont rested the rifle on his left forearm and fired at the two-foot range. Two hundred grains of powder exploded and drove a slug the size of his thumb into the cow’s side. She grunted but her stride didn’t break. Frémont stared at her. It was like an apparition. He had hit her a killing stroke and she wasn’t going to fall—she wasn’t even going to stop running.
He knew he could never get powder and slug down the muzzle on the gallop—never mind the easy way Freniere had described the trick—and he thrust the rifle into its boot and drew his pistol, thumbing back the hammer.
The pistol was his weapon. He was in good control, reins in his left hand, crowding Barney against the cow, pistol aimed across his left elbow, drawing a killing bead—when the horse dropped out from under him and he pitched forward, flying, falling. He heard Barney grunt as its chest struck the ground, and he threw up his left arm and landed on his face, sliding and rolling. The pistol fired and flew out of his hand. He lay there a moment, ears ringing, eyes closed on darkness, oddly conscious of a bitter yet clean grassy odor, and then he lifted his head and saw his cow disappear in the brilliant sunlight, her stride still unbroken. A half-dozen cows thundered by, hooves pelting his face with dirt, and a young spike bull leaped directly over him, a sudden dark bulk overhead and gone, showing no interest in attacking him.
Then the herd was past and he was conscious of the quiet; he heard hoofbeats drumming down, fading in the distance. Gingerly he moved his arms and shoulders and felt his neck and decided nothing was broken. He was still half-stunned and thought he might vomit. Then he discovered the source of the odor. He had landed in wet buffalo dung; it was in his hair and smeared on his face. He wiped it from around his eyes. Barney struggled to his feet and stood heaving for breath by the grass-filled little gully that had thrown him.
He heard hooves and turned to see Louie riding up with a look of concern. It occurred to Frémont that he was lucky to be alive. He wiped his face. This damned dung was all over him. He had a savage headache, but the ringing in his ears faded and he became aware of a new noise. The hunter was sitting on his horse and laughing out loud. Sudden rage filled him. Missed his cow, fell off his horse like a damned fool—
“Goddamnit!” he said, glaring at Freniere, his fists balling unconsciously. His throat was raw.
Freniere’s smile faded and he took on a wary, thoughtful look. He waited a moment and then said softly, “You been bathing in shit for some reason, Charlie?”
Frémont looked at Louie, and then he began to laugh.
“Life’s little blessings,” he said. “It broke my fall.”
The hunter nodded and his smile returned. “You get a shot off?”
“Might as well have thrown a stone. She took that slug and never slowed down. I couldn’t believe it.” He ran his hands along Barney’s legs. There were tender spots, but not the real pain that would mean broken bones. The horse was streaked with lather. His muscles were quivering. Frémont loosened the saddle and girth and pulled bunches of dry grass and began scrubbing him down, drying him and working his muscles. Barney sighed and gave several little snorts.
“Ran off her ribs, I expect,” Freniere said. “If you don’t hit ’em in the lungs or the spine, you won’t get ’em. It’s funny, the buffler’s so big and that vital spot so small. Did you aim on that spot, like I told you?”
“Aim? I was lucky to get a shot off.”
“Never knew a man to get a buffler first try. I run seven cows before I brought one down.”
Seven? Suddenly Frémont felt good. By God, he had run the buffalo and it was true, there was nothing else like it on Earth. And this land was full of them and he would run another tomorrow and the next day and the next, and damned if it would take him seven runs before he stopped one!
He let Barney graze a few minutes and then he tightened the girth and they rode together to Freniere’s kill. The two wolves were making a cautious approach. Freniere rushed them and they whirled and ran, their brushes tucked. They stopped a little way off, sat on their haunches and watched.
The cow lay on her side, blood still dribbling from her mouth. Gouts of it stained the ground around her. Grunting, Frémont helped Freniere roll her onto her chest, hindquarters cramped beneath her, forelegs spread and cradling her head. She looked as if she were asleep. She was huge. The top of her hump was level with his shoulder even when she was flat.
Freniere drew the long butcher knife he carried in a scabbard at the small of his back and sliced out her tongue with a steady, sawing stroke. Leaning against her rough hair, he made a long incision down her spine and laid the skin to one side like a table to hold his cuts. He began to butcher, explaining as he went along. He took the boss, that little hump on the back of her neck, and then the hump itself and what he called the hump ribs, which Frémont saw was a sort of extended vertebrae that supported the hump. He took the fleece—a rich strand of ungrained flesh between the spine and the ribs that was covered with a three-inch layer of fat. He laid the pieces carefully on the folded skin.
“Oh,” he said, straightening his back, “but this is a fat ’un. That fleece fat there’ll make your face shine with gladness.”
He unhooked a tin cup from his belt, lifted the massive head, rested it on his shoulder and cut the throat. Foaming blood poured out and he thrust the cup into the stream. When it was full he held it up, took a swallow and shoved it at Frémont.
“Drink that, Charlie,” he said. “It’ll make you a true son of the plains.”
Frémont took the cup without hesitation. Of course he would vomit, but better to fail trying than to fail for not trying. On the first swallow he began to gag, but then he realized that it was not so bad. It tasted like warm milk, fresh and very rich. His stomach held and he emptied the cup and handed it to Freniere.
“Not the best drink I’ve ever had,” he said evenly, “but not the worst, either.”
Freniere gazed at him with a look of open delight. “Hiyah!” he whooped, and fetched Frémont an openhanded clap on the shoulder that staggered him. “You’re all right, Charlie! You’re not just a stargazer. You’re going to make a first-class buffler man yet!”
* * *
The camp was in deep shadow when Freniere and the Lieutenant came in. Etienne Provost, crouched on his haunches mending a pack strap, watched Frémont unsaddle the white-socked bay, moving stiffly, favoring his left shoulder. The big horse went down on his knees and rolled, shivering with pleasure, scrubbing his sweaty back while Frémont studied him critically, hands on his hips; his hair and jacket were caked with cowflap. Provost smiled to himself and spat. Took himself a little fall. Well, wouldn’t be the last time.
“That one yours?” He gestured with the buckle toward the great raw carcass bulking on the meat cart, where Boucher and Peters were already at work.
Frémont looked at him—one quick, alert glance, measuring; then he shook his head. “No,” he said simply. “She’s Louie’s. I missed.”
Provost chuckled. “I wouldn’t wonder.”
“—This time.” The Lieutenant held up one forefinger, and again there was that intense flash in his eyes; hot, almost defiant. Didn’t like to miss, then; that was a good sign. Handsome young feller—looked too fine-spun for the wilderness. ’Course you never knew. Have to see how he salted down.
Frémont had the horse up now, and was rubbing him down. Small man, but quick and wiry; stronger than he looked. Nicollet said he was a good learner, accurate with all that stargazing folderol they sat up messing with half the night, but that didn’t prove nothing. Have to see how he did when the coffee and tobacco ran out, and his boots wore through, and the weather turned savage.
“Look as if you been wrassling one,” he said in quiet amusement, and someone over by the fire laughed.
Frémont grinned then. “Yeah,” he murmured. “I got into it with both hands.” He’d finished hobbling the bay, and he walked away quickly toward the little knoll where Nicollet had set up the instrument tent.
“Now don’t you sell Charlie short,” Louie called. “You boys should have seen him take off after that cow—like he by God planned to ride her…”
Several of the men standing around the fire had turned to Freniere, listening.
“I told him wouldn’t be no time to be tucking his butt—”
“That’s for sure,” Peters said, “and then some!”
“Got him a little hot, that did. But I want to tell you, old Charlie didn’t let any grass grow under that horse of his.”
“That so, Louie?” Provost said.
Freniere turned and faced him. “Shining gospel. He took his chances. He missed his cow, sure—but it wasn’t for lack of trying.”
Provost grunted, and ran his eyes over the camp. The spring-fed stream winding down a fissure in the prairie was small enough to step across in places but above, where he’d sited the main camp, it had widened into a shallow pool. The small bar oaks and ashes growing beside it had a stunted look. Later in the year it would be bone dry. The carts were disposed in a rough half-circle beside the pool, their shafts atrail; only a few had been unloaded. Boucher had hung an iron pot from a tripod over the fire and was fixing racks of buffalo ribs on sticks. The dry wood burned with little smoke and collapsed into ruddy coals; Martineau judiciously added buffalo chips to flavor the meat.
Provost sighed, set the strap aside and settled back into his saddle pads. He’d already posted guards: Terrien was with the horses, and he could see Menard above the camp, scanning the horizon for movement against the light. The Yankton Sioux were friendly, but with Indians you couldn’t never be sure; not with good horses in camp and night coming on. Peters was bringing wood for the fire, and on the flat below Dixon, the expedition’s guide, was working on a horse that had gone lame, cradling the hoof on his knee, digging at something jammed in that tender place between frog and buttress, while Zindel held the animal’s head. Sour, silent old Bill Dixon, keeping busy, trying not to think about Mr. John Barleycorn.…
Well, every soul had its demon, as Papa Joe said. Provost studied the knoll again; Nicollet was seated on a box writing in his journal, using the tailgate of the equipment cart as a desk; Frémont was standing beside him talking, one foot cocked on the spoke of a wheel. A movement on the rim of the hill behind Frémont caught his eye then—a wolf that ducked instantly from sight. Provost chuckled. Empty. He’d heard a fancy Virginia gentleman once. “I say, nothing but barren, lifeless spaces. Everywhere you look.” Damn fool—the whole land was humming with life! A million creeping, gliding, soaring things. But you had to know how to look, that was all …
“Aaaiii, festin!” Boucher sang from the big fire. “Come on in now!”—and there was a quick movement toward him from all points. A pale sliver of moon had appeared in the eastern sky; the west was still bright. The odor of cooking meat was overpowering. Martineau was cracking bones with a small ax and thumbing out rolls of marrow—trapper’s butter—which Boucher kept stirring into the iron pot. The soup bubbled viscously, marrow and molten fat and blood from the butchering, bound with pepper, its aroma swirling on the light wind.
“If it tastes as good as it smells,” Frémont said, “we’re in for one hell of a treat.”
“Tastes better than that, Charlie!” Freniere told him, and Boucher laughed.
All of them were around the fire now, throwing down their apishamores for couches, gazing at the racks of roasting meat, their eyes glinting; there was an air of contained excitement, like men gathering in a tavern. The meat crackled richly, and droplets of fat made tiny yellow flares in the coals, which now glowed deep red. Bread was rising in a Dutch oven, and a big coffeepot nestled at the edge of the coals. Later on, the luxury of bread and coffee would be only a memory, but now the expedition was young.
“Ribs are ready,” Boucher announced.
Provost cut close to the bone and with the first mouthful, dense and gamy and rich, it all came flooding back—his wild young manhood and the first glorious years on the plains, the buffalo in the vast surging seas and the dust whirling against the sun in a golden storm.
“Look at Charlie!” Freniere bawled across the fire. “Afraid there won’t be enough to go round … Didn’t I tell you buffler’ll make prime beef taste like putty?”
The sky was darkening and a single star appeared high overhead. A wolf drawn by the smell howled suddenly, hung close, and one of the men laughed. After that came yelps and snarls, and Provost knew coyotes had got up the spunk to join their braver cousins.
Peters fetched more wood, and the fire blazed high. The men ate rapidly with their hands, faces flushed in the firelight and wet with grease. They were ribbing each other, calling back and forth, roaring with laughter. Martineau, late to the feast, slid the crackling meat skewered on his ramrod onto his plate. Someone called to him and he turned, laughing; the ramrod in his hand bumped Bladon’s stick where meat was roasting. The stick fell and the meat dropped into the coals.
“Look out, Goddamnit!” Above his kinky black beard Bladon’s pale face went instantly dark. “Clumsy bastard!”
“Sorry,” Martineau said, “I was—”
“Sorry don’t cut it,” Bladon answered, his eyes bright. He slipped the point of his big knife under the edge of Martineau’s plate and flipped it upside down into the fire.
“Now wait a minute, mister…” Martineau dropped the ramrod and his hands came up. “You got no call—”
“Call? I’ll call you, sonny!” Bladon was on his feet like a cat, the knife weaving freely at his hip.
“All right,” Provost said from across the fire.
Martineau broke backward, his eyes on the knife. Bladon paused an instant, then came on in a rush, the knife held very low, and Provost saw Frémont, sitting next to Louie, set down his plate and stick out one booted foot. Bladon tripped over it and went sprawling, rolled over and came up facing Frémont, his eyes wild. The Lieutenant was on his feet now.
“You want some, soldier boy?” Bladon hissed. “All right, then!” He took a quick running step—and stopped. Frémont’s hand had gone to the butt of his pistol and rested there; his eyes were black as onyx in the flickering dance of the fire. Aside from that one swift gesture he had not moved.
“Just didn’t get my big clumsy feet out of the way in time. Did I?” he said easily, and then smiled; but there was a hard, forbidding edge in his voice. Bladon glared at him, confused.
“Put up that knife, Bladon,” Provost told him in the tone that had stopped a hundred fights from Natchez to the Devil’s Tower. “I won’t have a man cut over no damned piece of meat.”
Bladon turned toward him then, his face stamped with that deep, curious excitement. “Shee-it, Mr. Provost, I don’t need no knife.” He dropped the weapon on his plate with a clatter and in the same motion, wheeling, his fist came sailing up from the ground like a stone on the end of his arm and smashed into the side of Martineau’s head. Martineau fell face down as if his feet had been snatched from under him, and Bladon started forward.
“No boots, either,” Provost said; he was standing now, too. “You’ve settled it—that’s enough.” He stared at Bladon, studying him. One of Nicollet’s demon souls. Killed a couple of men in knife fights down the Santa Fe Trail. “You’re a troublesome man, Bladon,” he said. “We got no room for that kind of trouble here. Now you watch your step, hear?”
To his surprise Bladon grinned; Provost saw he was all relaxed now, the way you might feel after you’d had yourself a woman three-four times running.
“Right, Mr. Provost,” he answered readily. “You’re the boss.” Martineau was sitting up, shaking his head dumbly, and Bladon extended a hand. “Come on, Marty—no hard feelings, eh? What the hell: you done me a turn and I done you one.” Confused, Martineau put out his hand and Bladon lifted him easily to his feet. “Boucher, let ol’ Marty have that piece of tongue you promised me. No hard feelings, eh?” And he took his place by the fire, looking pleased, and started to tear at his ash-coated meat, though the glance he shot at Frémont was uneasy and sullen.
The camp’s happiness flowed over the brief trouble like balm: Provost sent two men to relieve Terrien and Menard, who came in whooping with anticipation. They ate slab after slab of the rich, grained meat, mopping their plates with steaming bread. And in the dark beyond the circle of carts the wolves and coyotes whined and yipped. When the fire flared up, their eyes flashed like gold pieces, savagely near.
Then came coffee strong enough to float a nail, and sugar sifted on bread dipped in buffalo grease. The men broke out rough shag tobacco and pipes they fired with glowing coals. The scent of tobacco blended with the roasting meat and they lay back on their elbows, cradling their tin cups, belching and joking, jubilant with the gorging. And Provost watched them somberly, his old eyes narrowed against the smoke; the quarrel, and the torrent of memories the buffalo meat had raised, had darkened his mood.
Nicollet had gone back to his seat at the tailgate of his cart; the tallowcandle lantern flickered bravely against the night. At the fire Menard and Freniere were talking about the buffalo and the miracle of their inestimable numbers, millions on millions of them drumming and rumbling across the endless plains, so you could hunt them for their hides and flesh to the very end of time.…
“Waugh!” Provost said suddenly. Their words had just reached him. “Wasn’t that way with the beaver. There was millions of them, too, and we killed them off. We trapped them streams dry.”
He lit his pipe with quick, nervous puffs as their faces turned to him. “Hell, there wasn’t never more than six hundred of us all through the Snake and the Siskadee, and Bear Valley, too. We figured the beaver would last forever. We couldn’t believe no different. But the time come when you’d bait your traps with prime castoreum and set ’em out, and day by day you’d come back and find ’em empty. Them beaver was gone.”
He wanted to talk now, needed to, his voice hoarse and low, and the men lay in the dark, smoking and listening.
“You want to know what happened to the fur trade? We killed it, that’s what. And by ’n’ by we was coming down to rendezvous with a handful of plews, no more’n a single horse could pack. Just about every one of us ended up in the partisan’s debt, just for powder and lead and a little foofaraw for your woman and whiskey for the pain in your knees.”
He stopped and belched, and just when the silence would have forced someone to speak, he added ruminatively. “You get the rheumatiz, you know, setting your traps knee-deep in water running right out of the snowpack. Makes a man’s legs ache like a poison tooth. Man needed a little whiskey…”
Peter said: “The beaver’ll come back, won’t they?”
“Maybe. But it don’t matter none. Folks won’t be wearing beaver hats no more. Silk hats. Can you believe that? Don’t seem like a flimsy piece of cloth would make a hat a man would want to wear; but then you can’t tell about city folk no ways—they don’t think like real people.”
They pondered that, the sky dark and the fire barbaric and leaping, the men’s faces red.
The rendezvous swept into his memory again. All the trappers coming in with their pelts and the partisans out from St. Louis with pack trains heavyladen with supplies and hawks bells and rings and mirrors and bright cloth and vermilion by the pound and tobacco to see a man through the year. And whiskey. Whiskey, by God. Horse races and card games and the Indian hand game on which a man could lose everything, lose his beaver and his horses and his woman—and if he really cut the fool and didn’t want to live, even his piece. And roaring drunk all the while, drinking whiskey until he was blind and puking. The Indians came and with them their women and a man could take him a wife or trade in a wife for a new one or just take a woman, using her hard and back in an hour for more, such a pressure of seed had he built up in that cold year in the mountains.…
“And in eighteen and thirty-two—let’s see, that’s eight long years gone now—that year we was at Pierre’s Hole and we heard that the Gros Ventres was coming on the prod. Now them is Blackfoot, you know, and there was never a meaner, tougher Indian than a Blackfoot. When they torture a man they keep him alive for hours, screaming every minute, and their women busting their nuts with every scream. So we rode out to meet ’em, and they sent out a war chief to parley, making a delay, you know. Big strapping fellow in a scarlet cloak, given him by the damned British for sure, and he was carrying the peace pipe like he wanted to smoke, the damned, cheating … and Antoine Godin rode out to meet him, with a Flathead. Blackfoot had killed Godin’s daddy the year before over on Big Lost River, and you know Flatheads all hate Blackfoots. So this war chief reins up and puts out his hand and Godin shakes it and hangs on and says, ‘Shoot,’ and by God but that Flathead shoots. And Godin pulls him close and they lift his scalp quicker’n you can say it and ride back waving the bloody scalp lock and that blood-red cloak. And then the fighting begun.”
“What happened, Mr. Provost?” Menard asked.
“At Pierre’s Hole?” Provost said irritably. “Why, fought all day, that’s what. And finally they run. We lost some men and the Flatheads lost some—they’re fighting men, them Flatheads—but the Gros Ventres lost a plenty more and they ain’t forgot it to this day.”
Frémont was watching him intently, scowling; and the aversion in the younger man’s face stung him all at once.
“You think that ain’t right, don’t you? Godin shaking that Indian’s hand? Well, you got a lot to learn, young feller. You going to get by on the frontier, you’d better learn right quick how hard things can get.”
But the Lieutenant didn’t look away; after a moment he nodded. “That’s true, Mr. Provost,” he said quietly. “I’ve still got a lot to learn.”
“Bet your boots,” Provost answered, but hollowly. The soldier had taken it well. He felt morose, and cross with himself for flaring up like that. I’m getting old, he thought sourly; old and cantankerous. Like Gabe Bridger. “Hell, it don’t matter,” he said in vague conciliation. “It’s all dead and buried now.… When we whipped them Gros Ventres that day we felt like kings. But there wasn’t no rendezvous this year and I don’t believe there’ll be another.”
Abruptly he threw the dregs of his cup onto the blackened coals. There was a sharp hiss. He rapped his pipe hard on his boot heel and the gray dottle fell to the ground.
“Man was free in the mountains,” he said. “Lived like he wanted, did what he wanted, killed if he had to. It was hard, but you was alive, d’you understand?”
He sighed and belched again. “Well, no use crying. No white folks out there and none going. Ain’t no reason to go. Most beautiful country God ever wrought, but you can’t eat that.”
There was a long pause and Louis Zindel spoke.
“But lots of folks are ready to go west, no?” He was a small man with a round, merry face and a sunny personality. He had been an artilleryman in the Prussian Army.
“Not a one that I know about.”
“The farmers back in Ohio—they lose their farms when the banks close, and they say Oregon is the place to be.”
“She-it! Ain’t nothing in Oregon but the Hudson’s Bay Company, the damned grabbing British. Them and a handful of Yanks gone there to farm.”
“In Ohio they talked about the Oregon Trail as if it’s the road to the promised land.”
“Trail? What’s the matter with you? There ain’t no Oregon Trail, least nothing a stranger could follow. I know what you’re talking about—the route that runs up the Platte to Fort Laramie and on to South Pass, sure, but it’s just a general route, it’s not a trail. What d’you think—that it’s a road? With a stagecoach running every day and the driver blowing his bugle polite as you please?”
“Well, but how did those caravans get to the rendezvous?” Frémont asked suddenly.
“Went up the Missouri by keelboat,” Louie said, “dragged foot by foot against the current. Hardest work in the world. Boucher manned them tow lines some, didn’t you, Boucher?”
Boucher grunted. Slowly he raised a massive arm and flexed the bicep.
“There’s nothing there, with the fur trade gone,” Provost repeated gloomily. “Or go to California and see how the Mexican’ll deal with you—he’ll show you the inside of his dungeons, that’s what. And the same in Sante Fe—they like the trade caravan that goes down every year, but that’s all.”
“Damned right,” Bladon said. “I walked a team down that trail five years in a row. They’re glad enough to get the goods, but it don’t pay to make no missteps around them Mex soldiers.”
“Nah,” Provost concluded, “nothing left. A few trading posts like Fort Laramie. But, God Almighty, there’s hardly a white man between Kansas Landing and Laramie, and damned few who even know the way. Just me and Ol’ Gabe and the like, who’ve followed the beaver. Some Ohio farmer was to set out on his own, he’d be lost in three days, vulture bait in ten. Hell, if a man wants to farm, he’s got his family, his stock—why, there’s never been a wagon gone through those mountains, don’t you understand? Never. Ol’ Gabe guided that missionary party out to Oregon three, four years ago—that doctor fellow, Whitman—and all they had was pack mules and they ate most of them and damned glad to have ’em. Huh-uh. Oregon Trail, my ass…”
“There’ll be one someday,” Frémont said from across the fire. “Someday soon.”
“How do you come by that?” Provost demanded, irritated all over again. “Why shoot, son, you’ve never even laid eyes on that country.”
“Not yet. But there’s going to be a wagon trail to Oregon because there has to be one.”
Provost snorted. “You’ll never live to see it.”
“Bet I do, Mr. Provost. My gold watch against that fancy silver bridle of yours.”
“Fair enough!” Louie crowed, and slapped his greasy hands against his thighs. “I’ll hold the stakes.”
“Hell’s bells, you won’t live long enough either, Louie,” Provost told him, and the circle of men laughed in chorus.
“Yes he will. We all will,” Frémont said softly. He grinned at Provost then—that quick, defiant smile—then got to his feet and hurried up to the knoll where Nicollet was already setting out the instruments.
The moon was high now, sharing the sky with a million stars. Provost smoothed out his apishamore, rolled himself deftly in one blanket and worked himself comfortable, dozing and waking, watching Frémont and Papa Joe working on the sightings, their heads together in the lantern’s flicker. Feisty young feller, had to give him that. No bag of wind, either—meant what he said. Pretty slick, tripping up Bladon like that; then the move to his pistol. No fear in him at all. Maybe—just maybe—he’d be the one to break trail through that Godforsaken country, you never knew. At least he wasn’t no Washington dandy come along for the ride.…
Copyright © 1983 by David Nevin
