Into the Savage Country (5 page)

Red Elk was five foot eight and stocky rather than lithe, with no native artistic flourishes on his body. He carried a wooden cudgel and a Northwest trade gun and was accompanied by eight or ten arrogant men, who paraded and bragged and jostled their way through the other natives, but I noticed Red Elk was reserved in manner, and rarely spoke unless he was spoken to. He struck me as a cautious, stern man, not given to sociability or jesting, and mostly avoided by the other natives.

By mid-afternoon we’d left the encampment, and all the men, native and trappers alike, had spread out in an enormous ring around some white, clayey hills. Ferris, Pegleg, Bridger, and I were waiting with a mulatto named Moses Branch, who had wintered with the Crow and had casually agreed to sign on with our brigade as a translator, trapper, and scout.

Branch was six foot three and all sinew and muscle, a marvelous physical specimen. He dressed like a native with feathers dangling from his beaded hair, but he spoke in a half-cultured St. Louis accent, and could read and write better than most of the men.

As we waited, Branch twirled and caught his Sheffield knife and threatened to roast a weasel that Bridger was trying to tempt
from its den. I sat back on an elbow and recorded my observations. Ferris sketched.

After an hour idling, there was a high keening from the direction of the encampment, like a coyote’s yips. We stashed our personals and leaped onto our horses. A moment after that there was a second keening and in an instant, all of us, at least a thousand men, started up the white hills on our horses.

As we crested the highest of the hills we saw that the land to the north was as different from the alkali plains as Ireland is from the Sahara. Below us was a lush, grassy lowland, ringed by higher ridges, and in this lowland there were at least five hundred buffalo, unaware until that moment that they were surrounded by a thousand men on horseback in a giant, converging ring.

As soon as the buffalo came in sight the natives began bellowing and caterwauling and a few fired their weapons. The buffalo leaped up and in an instant dashed off with a deafening thunder that literally shook the earth.

At the far end of the valley, a few miles away, there was a second herd of buffalo almost as large as the one we were chasing, also trapped inside the ring. We could see this second herd, tiny wavering dots against green hills, moving silently toward us.

The two groups of buffalo, the north and south herds, converged slowly, and after five minutes the two herds arrived on the same grassy plain. When the group of buffalo tried to turn, a pistol was fired. The men shouted and jeered and waved their arms. The buffalo ran on, the two herds nearing each other. They were a hundred yards apart, then fifty, then thirty, and then … a shrieking and grunting and shaking of the earth as the huge creatures struck one another. Beasts were sent dashing in every direction, spinning out, swirling, in a living, dusty explosion. Pegleg,
Bridger, Branch, Ferris, and I, trying to keep ourselves equally spaced, charged toward the point of impact. A small herd of buffalo spun off in our direction. Thirty bulls. Gigantic, lumbering beasts, bearded, black-eyed, horned, the size of small elephants. The creatures tried to veer but were penned in by other beasts coming behind. Pegleg was at my side. He raised his weapon and, as he rode at full speed … Bang! He fired. One of the bulls in front of us fell and the charging beasts turned at the last moment and charged back in the direction they’d come.

Hundreds of arrows were flying and rifles were detonating and flickering all up and down the line. I raised my gun and entered a chaos of men and beasts and dust and smoke. I could hear voices in many different languages, yelling and cursing and crying out. Beasts swirled around us and among them men were shooting and spearing and hacking and stabbing and slashing. A desperate native with a broken arm, on foot, dashed about among the beasts. I made a grab for him but he was swept away.

A minute later I found myself on the crest of a low hill. I realized I had never discharged my weapon. Beneath me, in all directions, the bulls were rearing and snorting and charging off, pursued by natives and trappers alike. Men tagged the skins of dispatched buffalo with slashes from their blades, then aimed their weapons at the countless wolves that had slunk into the killing fields. In all directions women were gutting and skinning the great beasts. I saw Red Elk disputing with one of the Gros Ventre who apparently believed the bull Red Elk marked to be his kill. I saw Red Elk finish marking the beast then turn and very calmly smack the Gros Ventre across the skull with his cudgel. Afterward, the Gros Ventre lay alongside the beast, unmoving.

In another direction, near a shrub-lined drainage, a short,
squat trapper with a handlebar mustache paced about a buffalo that had so many arrows sticking from it that it resembled a porcupine. This was a free trapper named Max Grignon with his companion Bouchet. The two were trying to provoke the injured beast into chasing them. Bouchet grabbed its tail and Grignon was jabbing its side with a section of spear he’d found. When Grignon stuck the blade in, the poor creature writhed and finally, after repeated jabs, rose weakly and lumbered after Grignon, the many arrows rippling and sending streams of blood down its thick pelt. Bouchet was dragged behind in the dust by the tail, laughing in a high-pitched tone. The buffalo stopped after only a dozen yards and made a halfhearted effort to dislodge Bouchet, then collapsed, blood pouring from the innumerable arrow wounds. Grignon walked back to the beast, looked it in the eyes, placed his pistol against the creature’s head, and fired.

Ferris had taken refuge near me. I noticed he also had not joined in the hunt.

“Waste of meat,” he yelled out over the sound of shooting.

“But a glorious hunt,” I said.

He did not comment. I saw he did not agree. He did not think it was glorious. He thought it was a useless slaughter. A part of me agreed, but I was not indifferent to the hunt, either. I could not be so close to the men engaged in that sport and not want to join in. Everyone, it seemed, had gotten their bull. I had not. And a feeling of absolute misery quivered inside me.

Nearby, a young bull was flushed from a dense patch of foliage, and I was off in an instant, up the side of a nearly vertical hill, pursuing the bull.

As we neared the crest of the rise I let go of my reins and raised my rifle to fire. Just as I did the bull veered back toward me
and I thought it odd for the creature to turn back after fleeing so desperately, but understood after a moment that there was someone coming over the rise on the other side. I thought I ought to lower my weapon, and then I thought, No, I have chased this beast. This one is mine. Let them lower theirs.

I kept my weapon raised, and just as I was about to fire I saw that it was Bridger coming up over the rise. Either the jolting of the horse or my own ineptitude made me shoot low. At the same instant Bridger shot. The bull was at the same height as his gun. If he’d hit it, all would have been well. He missed. I was close enough to see the blanket wad come from Bridger’s muzzle. At the same instant I was thrown back and the world slowed and stopped. The smoke from my discharge hung overhead. A calmness and resignation flowed into me.

I am slain, I thought.

I felt my body hit and roll and wrench across the clayey soil.

The next thing I knew I was being dragged over grass by Pegleg who had a bloody piece of flesh stuck in the waist of his leggins.

“Gimme your paw, Wyeth, you ain’t a virgin no more. Help me, boys.”

Glass bent to one arm. Bridger, who was bleeding from the head, grabbed my legs, and was almost bawling.

“All you did was gutshot him,” Pegleg said. “Now if you’d hit him a little lower he’d have room to complain.”

They set me on a buffalo robe. My gut and my legs were wet with blood. I tried to sit up but could not. I was strangely chilled but felt little pain. Bridger knelt at my side, gape-mouthed, with a sad, dumb, cow-like expression.

“How are you, Wyeth?” he asked. But before I could answer,
Ferris arrived, jerking Bridger away and shoving him to the ground. I believe he would have stomped on him but Branch stood between them.

“Vanish,” Branch said to Bridger.

Ferris knelt next to me. “How do you feel?”

“Never been better,” I said faintly.

I felt cold water splash my gut and something squirming at my side—black tadpoles flapping. That was Pegleg, who’d brought a hatful of water.

“Wash without the fish,” Ferris said in a derisive tone that was not normal for him. A while later I felt the pressure of Ferris’s hand gently prodding my stomach, pushing something in. A sort of faintness welled as he did it. And then I did faint.

When I awoke there was a native staring down at me, holding a wooden cudgel with a little hair on the end. It was Chief Red Elk. He stood over me, feathers dangling off the braids of his hair, sweat streaks on his cheeks. I thought perhaps he’d come to watch a white man die, or to cudgel me. But he did neither. He just stood there looking down at me and after a moment he turned and wandered off without a word.

Ferris was returning with Pegleg waddling behind him holding a glowing iron ramrod from a military rifle. Ferris knelt next to me and pressed my hand.

“Turn away, Wyeth.”

“What?”

“Look somewhere else.”

I turned my head. I had a view of the grassy lowland where hundreds of dead buffalo were spread, some of them skinned. Thousands of vultures and magpies flapped about and pried at the innards, torn red nastiness in their beaks, leaving trails of
drippings across the grass. The unskinned beasts, huge red lumps of gore, attracted masses of skittering wolves that slunk about the fires and smoking racks.

Ferris wedged a doubled halter between my teeth, and then, without warning, Pegleg stuck the glowing iron into me.

I woke again to the sound of wood creaking and willow branches being bent near my head. I had been moved to the riverside.

“You’re still alive after Pegleg doctored you?” I heard Captain Smith say. “That’s a first.”

“It was the greenhorn Ferris that did it,” Branch said. He had the deepest voice in the brigade, so I knew it was him. “Plucked a two-inch strip of deerskin that had been blasted from his shirt into his gut. Sewed him up like a moccasin.”

Ferris hovered over me, bathing my wounds in salt water and wiping a salve of oil and castoreum over my gut and then covering it. By the way he did it I could tell he had done it many times before and I remembered he’d grown up assisting his father at medical procedures.

A gourd was pressed to my lips and I drank. Bridger stood nearby with a forlorn expression. He was a bighearted, sturdy fellow and I thought I ought to forgive him before I died, but then I was asleep and there were bizarre memories of early childhood with the looming shape of my father and a wavering prism light on a wall. I must have slept through a day or several days, for the next thing I knew it was daytime again but the sun was on the other side of the sky, and I was in a boat. With my head turned I could see a pack of pelts wrapped with deerskin with the word
GENTRY
written in charcoal on the outside and I thought it must have been prepared by Sam Gentry, a trapper from Ashley’s Hundred of 1823. I remember considering this. Sam Gentry. I
had heard he had a cache in the area we’d been trapping, and I thought they must have unearthed the cache while I slept and meant to transport it.

When I woke again I was on the shore of some wide, shallow, braided river. A gourd rested near my head with twine wrapped about the neck. I shook the gourd and heard water in it. I lay listening to the riffle of water two feet away but I could not sit to drink and could not pull out the stopper though I practically wept with the effort. When I woke again rounded river-bottom rocks slid across my back. Pemmican had been placed in my mouth and I was chewing. A gourd was pressed to my lips and I drank. The river had broadened and was swifter. I could feel it carrying us along. I heard water splashing. I gathered my forces and tried to sit. Ferris appeared overhead, holding a wet, roughly hewn oar.

“So you had a mind to pull your weight for once,” he said.

“You’re one to talk,” I said weakly, and that sent the men cackling.

“Is Bridger here?” I asked, and when I heard he was I tried to sit up to forgive him for shooting me but did not have the strength.

“He’s coming for you?” I heard Pegleg say, and that sent men all up and down the river guffawing again, happy as children because I was alive and talking.

I could hear swallows chittering and, momentarily, saw their dark, curved shapes as they cut and soared overhead in the patch of sky above me. There were hoots and calls all up and down the river, men wishing me well, telling me to take a paddle, and I understood that Smith had ended the spring season early and allowed the men to carry me back to safety. It must have been a blow to the business side of his arrangements to let them scatter like that, but no matter, that was the trapping life.

My father had predicted I would die a lonely death in a desolate spot with low companions, and he had almost been proved right, but it was these same “low companions” who were going seven hundred miles out of their way to save me. And as I lay there and listened to the swallows chittering and the cheerful men calling to one another from boat to boat and felt the smooth river-bottom rocks slide against my back, I knew I was in the most beautiful country on earth and in the care of the most lively and good-natured companions a man could ask for, and that I’d done the thing up to the hilt, like I’d vowed, and that despite my father’s predictions, I was alive.

BOOK TWO
   
The Settlement