The Way West Part 22

Tadlock spit out, "You're the captain."

"That's what they tell me."

Tadlock ground around on his heel and walked away. Evans saw Rebecca watching him from the fire she had fed some sticks to, and he wondered how much she had heard. Not much, likely, at this distance.

"That was the way, Lije," d.i.c.k said. "Stand up to that mouthy n.i.g.g.e.r -but still it takes a heap to set you off."

"Does it?"

"A heap."

"I kep' thinkin' maybe Brownie's part to blame."

"So you held in. Christ, it weren't the horses! Not them alone. That staggy stud horse can't get over bein' set down. One day you'll have to geld him, Lije."

"I keep sayin' I won't."

Chapter Twenty

THE HIGH SWEEt.w.a.tER, flowered along its banks. The Southern Pa.s.s. The b.u.t.tes now named for Oregon. The Sandys, Big and Little. The Green that trappers knew as the Prairie Hen or Seeds-kee-dee and, before that, as the Spanish River, winding wooded in the tableland of sage. High country, chill by night with the snow that patched the Winds, lonesome and good as when d.i.c.k Summers first had seen it but with the scar of wear on it, the scar of wheels that later wheels would deepen. The Winds rising, naked and bright in the sun, broody in the dusk, hiding the high valleys where he had set his traps, hiding the shame of no beaver where beaver once were plenty.

If he sniffed, he smelled the smoke of quaking asp, and, looking, saw the little fire and him and Jim Deakins and Boone Caudill seated around it while meat cooked on roasting sticks. If he listened, he heard the old voices raised at rendezvous, the hearty, young, old voices that laughed at age and change, the voices rich with strength and whisky, shouting over horse races or the Indian game of hand, the full and easy voices goodtempered by the squaws. Smoke of campfires lifting slow, hi-ya, Bill, and hi-ya, Buck, tepees white against the green, horse herds frisky in the mornings, coyotes singing in the nights, bright blankets on soft shoulders, held around young b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and young country all about, high valleys, beavered streams, good hunting, youth on the land, youth in the loins, and youth and youth and youth to youth, and who'd have thought then it would pa.s.s?

Deakins was dead and Caudill disappeared, and of the mountain men who had hunted and spreed and squawed with him, was there a handful left? He didn't want much to see them, with years in their faces and aches in their bones and the past in their heads so that all they could talk about, while whisky stirred dead fires, was this and that of long ago. Like with Joe Walker, a mountain man if ever one lived, whom the train had met on the pa.s.s, and he so changed that Summers hardly knew him, strong yet and able but with a half-sore sadness because his world was gone. Like with Tom Fitzpatrick, whom they'd met still earlier, guiding Colonel Kearny's Dragoons back from the divide. Tom wasn't one to hang his feelings out, but in his face were old rememberings. It would be the same with Jim Bridger and Old Vaskiss at their fort down on the fork.

He had given the fort the go-by, taking a short cut, hard as it was, to the Green and on toward the Bear, for the train had food enough and the oxen were harder-footed than before and the wagons mostly in fair shape, though shrunk and shaken some by the long, dry, sandy miles between Pacific Springs and the Little Sandy.

Still, he had been uneasy, for the desert of the Green was rough going even for hard-case hunters and horses lightly packed. Could wagons and oxen make it, and farmers and townlivers and women and their young? He had dragged the short cut back to memory, had hoofed again the forty-odd dry miles of it, over thirsty sagebrush and rifted gravel and down the harsh fall to the Green, the wind fierce in his face, the day sunstroke-hot or snow-cold, for desert weather seemed always one or other. But it was water that mattered most, or the want of it. Not any place was there a drink for man or brute.

"I do' know," he said to the council that Evans had called together. "I'm thinkin' we can come it, but it's hard and chancey."

Mack asked, "And if we do?"

"Save two days, at the least."

"And if we don't?"

"No don't to it. There can't be any don't."

"It's worse, I reckon, than anything before?" Evans said.

"A heap."

"Worse'n what we're bound to meet?"

"There's a lot of h.e.l.l ahead, Lije, beyond Fort Hall."

"'Bout time we were gettin' a taste of h.e.l.l then."

Tadlock agreed to that, saying, "We're not traveling for pleasure. Maybe we can cut ahead of that company that pa.s.sed us."

"If'n it's hot, we'll have to roll by night."

"We ain't scared of the dark, d.i.c.k," Evans said.

And so they had decided on the short cut, partly maybe because it was a dare, partly, Summers thought a little uneasily, because they didn't know how fierce the trip could be.

They had cut right at the Little Sandy and headed across the divide and rolled down to the Big and filled buckets there and kegs and barrels eaten empty and had waited until the day cooled, for the sun was hot as a blister. At four o'clock by the watch that Evans carried, Summers had led them out.

They traveled all night, b.u.mping over the sagebrush, grinding by the beds of old lakes, crunching in the rifts of gravel, dusting through the sand, while the moon came up and watched and tired of watching and went to bed, leaving the land so black Summers wondered if his sense of direction would guide him right.

As the desert lightened with the coming of the sun, they stopped and doled out water for the critters and turned them loose for what little bait that grew and breakfasted on dried meat and bread baked day before and yoked up again and went on, the venturesomeness of the night worn off, strain in the faces now, droop in the bodies, lag in the legs that pushed feet through the sand. And this was just the easier part of it! Behind them the sun fired up, making distance dance ahead. There never was such a day in his remembering, Summers thought as noon scorched close, none so hot or breathless, none that made a reach of miles appear so far. He rode ahead and back and back and ahead, hunting in old memories for the way, seeing could he help with team or teamster when the course was set. There never was such a day. None in which a trust had weighed so heavy on him.

Roll! he urged from inside. Roll, G.o.ddam it, roll! Roll, you graybacks! Roll or die, while heat smothers you and your hearts pound in your headsl Roll for the Green! Roll coughing in the dust! Poke the G.o.ddam oxen! Rol!

Think, Summers! Think hard! Left or right or straight ahead? How was it long ago? You can't be wrong. How was it now? Left, it's left it was, left by the bulge of hill. Point the party left!

The McBee girl looking sick, sweating pale beside the wagon. Up, young'un, and ride. You want to catch a stroke? Sand and heard cobwebbed on the face of Hank McBee. Sand rivered on the sweating other faces. The beat of blood in the cheeks. Emptiness in the women's eyes, the look of seeking for a piece of shade. One ox down, and it unanswering to goad or whip, its eyes big and sad. Kill it! Kill it out of kindness while the ravens wait and bring up another and go on. One ox don't count, Brewer. Not in this fix. Roll for the Green!

Fairman done in and laid out in his wagon and his woman crying, and the sick heat-flush in the fair-skinned faces of Daugherty and Byrd, and what's a cracked lip now? Go it, you hosses! Poke up the oxen that walk low-headed, bawling hoa.r.s.e for water. Come on, you women with your crosspatch pups! You wanted Oregon, didn't you? Pray, Weatherby, pray but plod, and no knucklin' under to the will of G.o.d!

By Jesus, Summers thought, these folks were strong, strong in purpose even when weak in body. Rebecca Evans walking stout, mettled like a good mare; Lije helping those he could, encouraging all, his broad cheeks grayed by sand; Patch, Mack, Brewer, Shields, and Tadlock -d.a.m.n him!- and their women, and the herders clouded by the dust. Judith Fairman driving while a tear washed down her face, Mack's woman stepping squinch-eyed, her chin hard to the west, and Daugherty unheeding the thumping sickness in him.

Strong folks, and strong for what? For Oregon and fish and farms, for wheat and sheep and nation. And now it came to him, while his own skull tapped to the heat, that that was what had ailed the mountain man -he didn't hanker after things; he had all that he wanted.

It was push now, pull and push and strain at spokes, for some teams couldn't climb a rise alone. Push or double-team. Push to the whistle of breath and the shower of sweat and the hammer in the skull. Push, Lije! You're a bull for work, I'm thinkin'. Push, Mack and Tadlock, Brewer and Patch and Shields! Stout hosses, you all. Push! It ain't so far now. Less'n I thought. Lead team needs some pushin', Lije. By G.o.d, there she is!

There it was, the Green and shade and rest for all and pasture for the ganted stock. It was still half a dozen miles away, down a long pitch too steep to drive and then across a humpy bottom, but the sight of it was like a double drink of whisky, and flushed faces broke into smiles and grainy voices joked, saying, "What was it you said, Summers? Chancey? The word ain't knee-high to it. We made it, though, good as ary mountain man." Women and children came from the line of wagons and stood chattering, the strain gone and the fret.

The men unyoked the teams and let the wagons down with ropes, made serious again by work under the punishing sun, grunting to the pull of lines against arm sockets while the sweat ran out of them.

When they were down and the teams brought up and hitched, Summers said to Evans, "Lije, these critters'll be a handful when they smell water. Run away, that's what they'll do, and dive in, wagons an' all."

"What you tellin' me, d.i.c.k?"

"I'm thinkin' we best drive on a piece and turn 'em loose and herd 'em forwards till they smell it. Plenty of time to get the wagons later."

"Thanks, d.i.c.k. Wasn't for you, I'd be a prize captain now, wouldn't I?"

"I don't see no flies on you."

"Cold water on hot stummicks ain't so good."

"No helpin' it."

"I'll get the oxen and horses and loose cattle scattered out some, so's they don't run over each other. What about Injuns?"

"No need to worry much."

It came out as Summers knew it would. Once they winded water, the critters wouldn't be held. They galloped crazy for it and plunged in. One ox he saw had just his snoot above the surface. Afterwards, with some of the sizzle gone out of the day, the men with strength left in them brought the wagons up. The cutoff hadn't been too bad but only close to bad. One ox dead ofthirst and one of water and quite a few thrown off their feed. No wagons lost. No people dead. Of the sick ones all recovered quick, even Charlie Fairman.

Now that the cutoff was behind them, Summers thought, he could torment himself some more by going back to days that had been. He tried to shy his mind away from them by making talk with Brother Weatherby, who rode ahead with him, "It ain't so far now to the Bear. Barrin' a breakdown, we'll git there a spell afore dark."

Weatherby turned his gaunt face on Summers. "I marvel at your memory. You remember every hill and turn."

"Ought to. I been over most of it, time and ag'in."

"I still marvel. There's so much of it."

"Looks just like it did." While he answered, Summers thought it was only the earth that didn't change. It was just the mountains, watching others flower and seed, watching men come and go, the Indian first and after him the trapper, pushing up the unspoiled rivers, pleased with risk and loneliness, and now the wanters of new homes, the hunters of fortune, the would-be makers of a bigger nation, spelling the end to a time that was ended anyway.

He didn't blame the Oregoners as he had known old mountain men to do. Everybody had his life to make, and every time its way, one different from another. The fur hunter didn't have t.i.tle to the mountains no matter if he did say finders' keepers. By that system the country belonged to the Indians, or maybe someone before them or someone before them. No use to stand against the stream of change and time.

Time, he asked, what was it that you couldn't bring it back? Where did it go to? It wasn't in reason that everything should pa.s.s and nothing remain to mark it by except old men gumming pipestems while memory worked in them. A man could think, almost, there was a great journal somewhere, like the journals he had known travelers to keep. Turn it back and there vou were again, high-spirited and stout, fresh again and free, and the earth fresh.

Like on the Popo Agie, as he remembered. Like with the Crow girl. Ashia, running water, back in running time. It struck him queer again that he should think so often of her, who was just one of quite a few, and of the Popo Agie, which was just one of many. They had come, somehow, to stand for all the squaws and all the hunted streams, for fun and frolic, campfires at dusk, fires in the keen mornings, rich lifts, high pa.s.ses, big doings, for the everlasting young time that was gone so quick.

There on the Sweet.w.a.ter he had wanted to cross over to the Popo Agie, which wasn't but a run and jump away. He had wanted to see the singing waters of it and the trees that had known him and the place where he had camped and the ground where they had lain, marked still, maybe, by the press of bodies though too little for the eye to see.

Weatherby said, while his gaze ranged ahead, "I keep thinking how different this land is from Indiany."

"Or Missouri."

"Or Missouri."

Not often did Missouri enter Summers' mind as he came again to places deep-set in memory -the pa.s.s, the first water west that emigrants had named Pacific Springs, the Sandys, the Green, the glimpsed peaks of the Uintahs, like snowy clouds, where Brown's Hole would be. It was as if Missouri never was, nor farming, nor Mattie and her fever. Those were the days of his giving up, of growing old before his time because his world was old. h.e.l.l, he wasn't old now except in mind, except by mountain reckoning. Forty-nine. And his limbs were strong and his eye keen yet, and he could answer to a woman. It was the way of thinking that made him old, the knowing that he had outlived his time. He could farm in Oregon and grow with the country, as Lije had put it, if only the thing seemed worth the try. If only he hadn't known the Popo Agie.

Day by day and night by night bits of the old years had come back to him, flashes out of the long-unremembered, out of the pushed-aside, out of the clutter of mind, brought to him by sight of hill and water, by doing what he'd done before. Drying meat -and he was with Jim and Boone again, fresh-crossed from the Powder to the Wind, eating old bull blue with winter while they talked about spring hunting. Topping the pa.s.s -and it was a soft day and the cactus was blooming red and yellow, and he had said, "Them's pretty now," and old Etienne Provot had spit and answered, "Pretty G.o.ddam p.r.i.c.kly, I'm thinkin'." Seeing the Wind Mountains, harsh-rising on his right -and the green then, unbelieving he rode on top of the world, asking, "Is this it, sure enough?" The Green again -and his first sight of it, and beaver so thick you could shoot them in the eye, and everybody gay like in a child's dream of finding pretties.

He lived in the now time and in the then time, pa.s.sing talk with people like old Weatherby, guiding, advising, hunting, joshing with Brownie or with Lije, while gone days and gone folks filled his mind. "Summers! Oh, Summers! You G.o.ddam old c.o.o.n! Ain't seen you since we stood off the Rees. How be you? Fat, I'm thinkin'." Voices calling across the years, mouths laughing, hands slapping him on the back. "Worth a pack of beaver to see you, you ol' b.a.s.t.a.r.d, and if you got a dry, here's whisky."

Weatherby pulled up, for below them, far below, down one ridge and another, ran Muddy Fork and, beyond it, the rich, green valley of the Bear. "G.o.d in His goodness," Weatherby half whispered as his gaze took it in. "In His might."

"It's mighty, sure enough."

Weatherby wagged his head slow. "I couldn't have believed it. I can hardly believe it now, seeing it."

"It's some."

Bear River. The wooded, berried Bear, smooth-running through the roughed-up land. It hadn't been named for nothing, for Weatherby's G.o.d had put bears there, black and brown and, king of all, the great white bear, feeder on ants and fish and berries, unknower of the feel of fear. There was the time Summers had lifted a trap, heavy with beaver, and stepped out and parted the willows and looked Old Ephraim in the face, and it was one or the other right then, the world too small for both of them. Summers' shot had struck fair in the chest, where a hand could have felt the beat of blood, and the bear whoofed it away and came on and knocked Summers over andfell on him. Summers wrestled for the knife at his belt, fur in his mouth and musk and blood in his nose and weight on him like a fallen horse, and then he realized the bear was dead. With a hole in his heart as big as a hoe handle he had charged. Old Ephraim, the mighty, the unafraid, the unforgiving, stouthearted with his heart shot out.

"Best wait for the train," Summers told Weatherby. "Got to angle down the slope and push the critters by some springs that it seems like I remember to be pizen. They're G.o.d's doin's, too, I reckon."

A cloud came on Weatherby's face. "They're there for a purpose, Brother Summers. You may be sure of that."

"Fer the purpose of killin' stock?"

"Doubt not the wisdom of G.o.d."

"What I'm doubtin' is these here springs."

Weatherby bent his head. "I wish you would see, Summers. You're too good a man to be lost."

"Past savin', parson. Best keep your wind for the Injuns. There's a heap of 'em in need of grace."

"But you think that's no use?"

"Don't recollect sayin' so. They're strong for medicine."

"Medicine. I keep hearing medicine, as if G.o.d and the way of salvation were just superst.i.tion."

"Maybe you can learn 'em that a cross has more power to it than a medicine bag."

Weatherby sighed. "Your lightness makes me sad. It saddens G.o.d, too."

"I didn't aim to damp you. You're all right, parson. As fer G.o.d, He don't have to stand between us."

Before Weatherby spoke again, the train rolled up, McBee in the lead. "'Y G.o.d," McBee said, stepping up to them and looking down on the sweep of valley while his hand worried his beard, "she's fair."

Summers saw the wagons down, slanting them one way and another so the pitch wouldn't be too steep, and rode back to the herders and helped with the stock, thinking about Weatherby and his notions as he rode. Was there a scheme to things after all, and the present just a little part of it, and a man so small he couldn't see it whole? Indians. Fur hunters. Farm hunters. What next? Was it all a stream that went somewhere, that had a sense too big to understand? Aw, the h.e.l.l with it. He was getting like Jim Deakins, who was dead now and maybe savvied how it was but, living, always wondered. If there was a scheme, it was messed up mighty sorry.

The bottoms were shank-deep in gra.s.s, and flowers waved, and chokecherries were ripening, and the women and children that weren't already down from the wagons got down, a sudden frolic in them, smiles on their faces and little cries on their lips, and the men studied the gra.s.s and kicked up the soil and followed the rimmed valley with their eyes and allowed this would be fine farming country if only it wasn't so far from things.

Far from things, from markets and stores and churches and soldiers and law and safety and all. Far from the way that was their way. Summers put himself in that time of first seeing again -the river and its branches swimming with beaver, and berries ripe, and Old Ephraim b.l.o.o.d.y-mouthed from the eating of them, and not a sound except the sounds of nature and no white face, and the sun great and the moon great, and the world his and no one to say him nay.

"There's trout in the river," he said to Brownie. "Trout big as rails."

He rode ahead and came to Evans. Evans raised his broad face, which was lighted as if by good news. "Now I can believe in Oregon, d.i.c.k."

"Good, ain't it?"

"Best ever I see, but I could do without these here mosquitoes. Becky's goin' to make a gooseberry pie and maybe find some greens."

"That's slick. An' there's wild onions if you like 'em. Figure we can go on a few miles, to Smith's Fork of the Bear, though there's a hill between."

Evans bobbed his head. "I swear, d.i.c.k, I thought I was tired of plowin', but a man wants to stick a plow in this country."

"Yep."

Summers pa.s.sed McBee and led out, traveling alone, for Weatherby had slid his old bones from his horse and was walking with the train.

The day was cooling off, or maybe it was just that the valley was cooler than the sagy ridges. Or maybe it was the feel of fall, with August just around the bend. Along the Big Horn, on the upper reaches of the Gallatin and Madison, a man could be thinking about the fall hunt, if there were any beaver to hunt and anything in hunting them. The sun swam golden as it westered, touched already by the moons to come.