Cheyenne Winter (12 page)

They are not so different from men, he thought darkly.

Fitzhugh’s post did a desultory trade through high summer, mostly with Crows who slid away from Fort Cass to sample the wares and prices of the rival post. The village chiefs didn’t stop them from coming but neither did any headman bring his village to the post to trade. The threats, bribes, and cajolery issuing from Fort Cass kept the Crow trade from spreading. Even so, through the heat of August the post took in almost four hundred robes which were graded and baled, eleven prime robes and one summer robe to each bale. But the stock of trade goods on the shelves of the trading room scarcely diminished and the post was not paying for itself. It was slowly dying.

Maxim continued to sulk and avoid duty, and Fitzhugh decided simply to let the youth’s anger and guilt wear itself out. At least the lad didn’t vanish down the river on some reckless lone journey two thousand miles to civilization. Brokenleg knew he had no skills to cope with sulky boys, so he ignored him. He had better things to do. The training of the harness horses occupied every second he could spare. He and Abner and Zach worked the mustangs long hours, driving, harnessing and unharnessing them, deciding which ones were the most reliable. One hot afternoon they hooked a span to one of the wagons and let the pair drag the wagon around the flats. Then they hooked a second span to the empty wagon and let the horses grow accustomed to working in concert. The next day they tried three span, enough horsepower to yank the empty Pittsburgh around with ease, and drove them far up the Bighorn River. A few days later they pronounced the team ready for work. Seven of the nine horses became reliable drays; the other two made decent saddles although one tended to startle at every imagined danger. He preferred oxen for hauling trade goods but he had no choices. In the wilderness, one made do.

Dust Devil waited impatiently, never failing to remind Brokenleg that he had promises to keep. The thought of them made him faint. But at least part of her notions made a heap of sense: they weren’t getting much Crow trade and had better reach out to her Cheyenne or the post would perish.

“All right, all right!” he exclaimed, feeling testy. “Git yourself packed up, and tomorrah we’ll go.”

“You’ll see!” she cried. “Four wives are good. Make you a blanket chief! Big man! And lots of help here!”

“It ain’t my goal in life to be a blanket chief, dammit.”

“You got to be a blanket chief to be a big-man chief!”

“Who says?”

“I say. Tsistsista say.”

It puzzled him. The Cheyenne were the most puritanical of all tribes. Girls kept their maidenhood. Adultery was rare, though divorce was common enough. And yet  . . . no tribe was as puritan as white puritans.

“We can use the help,” he grumbled. “That’s all I want of it. Now what’s a proper gift for your pa?”

“A rifle, balls, powder, and blanket for each daughter. Plus lots of tobacco and a bolt of trade cloth for my mother.”

“It’ll bust the company,” he muttered. But he began toting the stuff out of the trading room, not telling Zach or Samson what he was up to. They’d laugh him clear to the Platte River if he confessed. In fact, he intended to tell them he hired some help when he returned with his harem.

He hoisted a load of trade goods into the big freighter, the only one of the three wagons equipped with a seat at the front. He took care to have a good sampling of all his wares, especially the trade rifles, powder, and ball. His men didn’t volunteer, and stood grinning at him until he wondered if they knew what sort of trip this would be.

“Git your lazy butts to work,” he growled, knowing there was no work. Hardly a dozen Crows showed up on any day and most often that was just before the traders closed the shutters.

They rolled out at dawn, Dust Devil beside him looking smug, a spare saddler tied to the rear of the wagon. He itched to lecture them about running the post, getting work done, getting next winter’s firewood cut, building a new shed, scything fields for hay, and all the rest. But he checked himself. Under Samson Trudeau’s hand the work would get done, even if slower than he liked. He wanted to sermonize about the trading; about luring tribesmen; about keeping a hawk’s eye on the opposition; about getting over to those villages camped at Fort Cass and talking with head men; about dealing with other tribes that might wander in, Shoshone, Flathead, Sioux  . . . 

But he clamped his upper molars to his lower and rode off, ashamed of the impulse. Nothing a free mountaineer hated more than a lecture from a boss. Instead, he fumed at Little Whirlwind, letting his sulfurous mood corrode her happiness.

He had a long way to go, at least two hundred miles to get to Little Whirlwind’s village, which probably was east of the Bighorn Mountains this time of year. Two hundred trackless miles where no wagon had ever been. He worried plenty about that; about the cutbanks of Crazy Woman Creek and the broken prairie off to the south, with all its dead-ends, low escarpments, and mud-bottomed crossings. And that was only part of it: one could never know what sort of trouble a lone trader and his wife could run into among unfriendly Indians. Or what temptations the wagonload of trade goods were, even to friendly ones. Or which of them would take a notion to steal his three span of horses and the saddler.

Still, the ones he had to watch out for were the Blackfeet, who’d kill and Dust Devil on sight. And they were rolling steadily away from Blackfeet country as he drove gradually up the bighorn River valley, between low arid hills. Traders were held in high esteem: traders were the source of the things they coveted most, especially rifles. And what’s more, rival traders stood together when it came to trouble. If they troubled Brokenleg, they’d find themselves unwelcome at Cass or Union, or even at Fort William down on the Platte. And they knew it. It was an odd contradiction of the fur business that an unprovoked attack on a trader would shut trading windows everywhere, but at the same time outfits used Indians to raid or harass their opponents.

They rattled through the sweet silence of the prairies, enjoying the soft breezes of morning and evening, while hunkering down during the midday heat. The grass had browned with the passage of the monsoon season, and the clay lay hard under the iron tires making travel easy. The horses settled into their new task, except for one troublemaker named Hail that spooked at everything and itched to run. Brokenleg moved him from leader to swing position so he wouldn’t take notions. At swing, he had steadier horses ahead and behind him and was locked in by their quieter conduct.

He showed her how to drive, how to hold six pairs of lines in her small brown hands; how to gauge the land far ahead, looking for flat, unobstructed passage; how to avoid boulders or soft ground or thickets of sagebrush. He wanted her to learn so he could climb aboard his saddler and scout ahead, choose a road, look out for trouble, and hunt. But she didn’t take to it, preferring to gawk, or yanking to hard on the lines until she shored the mouths of the drays. So he drove most of the time, and when he wanted to scout ahead he stopped the wagon and rode his saddler to the next ridge for a look.

She abandoned the driving altogether — that was white men’s stuff — and returned to being herself and reminding him of it. It was demeaning for a Shutai Tsistsista to do the work of slaves, she said. Capture a slave and let him do it.

They rolled through a summer idyll, following the Bighorn River until they reached the Little Bighorn, and then swinging up the tributary to avoid the huge canyon of the Bighorn ahead. They rolled through the country of the greasy grass, a place where verdant valley stayed green from moisture in the soil long after the nearby hills browned. They crossed a low divide and dropped into the drainage of the Tongue River, heading ever southward. The Bighorn Mountains closed in from the west, a blue wall with snow still capping the higher peaks some unfathomable distance upward.

Brokenleg calmed a bit though he was a worrier by nature, and worrying had kept him alive in a land where the most idyllic moment might harbor death. With each passing mile Dust Devil grew cheerier. She was going to see her people. She was going to see her family and acquire three sisters for companions! She deigned to smile at him now and then, and the smile lacked the usual mock in her face. He thought he might yet, someday, lie softly in the robes with her and talk about things he’d never said to her, the hopes and dreams and foolishness locked in his soul, the things that had met only her scorn whenever he’d edged toward them before in the tender moments.

Near the Tongue River they topped a long north-south ridge that ran parallel to the mountains like a wave radiating from a great splash, and spotted a small herd of buffalo half a mile off. They halted the wagon atop the windy bluff and peered into the mass of black animals — brown, actually, but they always appeared black against the sunlit grasses. His mouth watered. Tongue, boudins, humpmeat, boss rib! When he killed a buffalo he ate Indian-style, gorging five or six pounds of meat until he couldn’t swallow another bite.

“Ah!” hissed Little Whirlwind, breath escaping her as if from a steam pipe. “Ah!”

This would be easy, he thought, clambering off the wagon. The steady southwind put them downwind, and a brushy coulee would let him stalk to within a hundred yards of the somnolent cows. Tongue! Hump! Cow meat! Apparently the rutting season had passed, and this herd had settled into quietude.

“Ah!” she cried, pointing frantically. “Ah!”

He followed the vector of her small finger, and saw it — and felt his heart leap in his chest. He’d never seen a white buffler before, but there it was, a cow, creamy in the sun, visible now that it emerged from behind a distant bull. A white buffler! The source of a thousand legends! One in a hundred thousand, the buffler men claimed.

“You must kill it! You must!” she breathed, scarcely letting the words escape her.

“I reckon I oughter. You know what that’s worth? I can git sixty regular robes for it. Heard me a story once of some
Gros Ventre
comin’ into a post and itchin’ for a magic white hide the trader had, and offering that much. Heard another story about how some bunch or other traded fifteen ponyloads o’ blankets, guns, and whatnot, for one o’ them white hides.”

“No — never! You must not!” she cried. “It must be given to the spirits. You must! If you don’t its power won’t come. The Tsistsista tan it and then put it on the pole for the sky spirits. That is the biggest medicine! It give us everything. They smile at us!”

“Aw, that’s plumb — ” he checked himself. He wanted sixty robes. She wanted to follow her custom, and a fight was brewin’.

“The People know how to do this,” she whispered. “I wish they were here! A warrior who has slain another in battle must peel the hide. The skin of the head must be peeled by one who has scalped an enemy. The hide must be carried on a horse owned by one who has carried off a captive. It must be unloaded by one who pulled an enemy off a horse. It must be carried into the village by one who has slain an enemy in his own lodge!”

“I reckon I purty-near make it,” he said, grinning.

She glared, sensing disrespect in his tone. But he slid his old rust-pitted Hawken off the footboards and checked it, pressing a fresh cap over the nipple. Damned heathen, he thought. He’d shoot the cow, have him a cow roast and a cowhide worth sixty prime robes for the askin’.

“You hush now,” he whispered, knowing it was an all-purpose request to her to keep the horses under control. He had to limp his way down that steep coulee, make sure the sentry cows weren’t getting restless, and then wait for the albino to present a good broadside shot into that hat-sized spot just behind the shoulders where she’d go down without a struggle.

The hot air raised a sweat on him — or was it the burden that lay on him suddenly? — and he felt a wetness stain his shirt and gather at his neck and brow. The whole damned trip had bitten at him. He was still trying to figure out how he’d gotten himself into marrying her sisters, and now she was telling him he had to sacrifice the white hide to her sky spirits!

He came finally to a place where the coulee debouched onto a flat, and the brush vanished. That was it.

A sentry cow stared at him, and he knew that within seconds the whole herd might bolt. He stood stock-still until she lowered her massive head and snatched some bunchgrass. When she glanced at him again, he’d vanished, settling himself to earth. He pulled his shooting sticks from his kit and poked them into the clay for a benchrest, and dropped the Hawken into the vee. Then he swung the heavy barrel to the right and upslope until it lined up on the white — cream, he corrected himself — creamy cow, which had stopped grazing and stared westward. A beauty! Not a brown patch on her, except for a little on her crown! She stood almost broadside, and he decided not to wait, not even for an instant. He settled the blade sight on the heart-lung area, calmed his own fingers and arms, and then squeezed.

The white cow shuddered, sat down on her haunches, shook her head slowly back and forth, while the throaty boom of the Hawken echoed up the hills, and blue powder-smoke drifted back upon Brokenleg. He loaded quietly, measuring powder from his horn and pouring it down the hot barrel, patching a ball and driving it home with his stick. He found the nipple fouled, picked it clean, and snuggered a new cap over it.

The white buffalo sagged to her side, blood leaking from her mouth. None of the other animals had taken alarm. He knew he should shoot another for meat. If he ate the white cow, he’d never hear the end of it from Dust Devil. he settled on a young heifer that basked in the sun, and shot her. She dropped as if poleaxed. He loaded again and clambered to his feet, letting himself be seen. A sentry cow snorted, and the score or so of remaining animals broke into a sudden gallop.

He squinted up to the crest of the hill where Dust Devil waited with the wagon and waved her down, hoping she’d take the grade slowly. Then he checked the horizons. Where buffalo gathered so did Injuns. But nothing disturbed the breezy morning, and he walked slowly toward the white cow. They arrived at the same moment, Dust Devil hissing and muttering Cheyenne as she slid off the high seat, an excitement and fear upon her.