Rendezvous (10 page)

“That's it exactly, sir. I'm not a subject.”

“They're scum, like you.”

“I take that as a recommendation.”

“Deserter. Thief. Come along. I'll give you some of it back. I'm charging you for your stay. You'll not get a free feed on the company.”

He walked to the store with an oil lamp in hand, Skye following. The redolence of fabric and good leather struck Skye, and he eyed those precious goods on the shelves with yearning while the factor opened the storeroom door with the iron key and pulled out Skye's kit.

“I'll keep that buckskin pelt. That's the price of the meal.”

“How much is a good tanned deerskin worth, and how much is a meal worth?”

“What difference does it make? That's what ye'll pay because I say so. Don't tempt me.”

“How much is the skin worth, and what's my meal worth?”

“By God, I'll not bargain with a deserter and degenerate.”

“What do you pay the Indians for such a skin?”

“As little as I can, ye scoundrel.”

“How much was a bowl of gruel worth?”

“To a starving man, plenty.”

“What do you charge trappers for a bowl?”

“As many pence as I can milk out of 'em, Skye.”

“It's Mister—”

“Get out before I shoot you. I've a loaded piece at hand.”

Skye smiled. “Thanks for the hospitality. I'll remember Hudson's Bay. You have beautiful women.”

McTavish snarled, but Skye took up his kit and checking it, threw the seine over his shoulder, hefted his belaying pin, and then remembered.

“Where are my boots, McTavish?”

“Where you can't get them, Skye.”

“Then I'll take what's at hand to replace them.”

“I'll kill you cold.”

“Do that.”

Skye set down his burdens and headed for the shelves, looking for something for his feet. He found no readymade boots, and knew that he would not find any, half a world away from English cobblers. But there were hard-soled moccasins, perhaps made by French-Canadians. He reached for a likely pair.

“I'll kill you, thief.” McTavish held his dragoon pistol in hand.

Skye paused, smiling. “Odd how I had just the same thought.” He picked up the knee-high moccasins and found they were fur-lined.

The deafening shot grazed his hair and made his ears ring. Skye sprang forward, his belaying pin in hand, and knocked the empty pistol out of McTavish's grip. They circled each other.

“Try me,” said Skye.

McTavish seemed to deflate. “I'll get your boots, and then get out.”

He went after Skye's boots while Skye tried the moccasins, found them small, tried another pair that fit, and bound them tight. They had thick soles, maybe buffalo-hide.

McTavish returned with Skye's ancient boots.

“I think we'll trade, McTavish.”

The Scot turned cunning. “Trade, will ye? Boots for moccasins?” He examined Skye's footwear and smiled suddenly. “You get the worst of it. Good navy boots. Ye be a fool.”

“I came here to ask directions. How do I get to the rendezvous of the Americans?”

“It'll be good riddance putting you out of Crown lands, Skye. Go up the Walla Walla, cross the Blue Mountains at any pass you find, go down any drainage to the Snake, find the Shoshones before they go to the rendezvous, and let them take ye. And may the devil or some wild tribe destroy ye on the way.”

“Thank you.”

The factor walked Skye to the front gates and opened them. The night yawned ahead. “If I had my way, you'd be bound in irons and on the river to Fort Vancouver. Don't ever set foot in Crown lands or I'll come after ye. I'll tell you something: it isn't over. If you linger around the mountains, we'll catch you and ship ye back to London. HBC sits like a spider in the web, the sovereign over an empire. John McLoughlin's a great patriot, and he'd like na' better'n to put a deserter in irons. Some time, when you least expect it, we'll catch ye, Skye. So go to the Yanks to save your miserable life.”

“I plan to, Mr. McTavish. I'm going to Boston and start college.”

“You fooled Ogden, but you don't fool me,” McTavish snapped.

Chapter 13

Skye found himself in a bountiful land as he hiked up the Walla Walla River, and his spirits matched the country. He had passed through fire and brimstone and had emerged from it alive and free. For the first time in memory, he lived each hour with sheer joy. This well-watered and mild country cried out to him.

The land! In his flight and hunger he had scarcely noticed the land. A childhood in London and a life in the prison of the sea had blinded him. But now, as he passed through a verdant and sweet country bursting with new life, the land bewitched him. Everything he beheld was a sweet mystery. He paused frequently, enchanted by the world about him. He marveled that he could name most of the plants and the creatures, and wondered where the knowledge came from. Poetry, perhaps. English poets had never ignored the land, and he had read them all.

Everything caught his eye and ear. The trill of a red-winged blackbird delighted him, and the whirring flight of a meadowlark. He paused to examine the fronds of weeping willows, and bent to inhale the acrid smell of a juniper. He lay for an hour on the grassy bank of the river, watching minnows dart, tadpoles swim, and a great humped turtle sun himself. He plucked the silvery sagebrush and rubbed its aromatic leaves upon his flesh. He watched squirrels, robins, raccoons, ants, red foxes, with eyes that had never beheld such wonders. He discovered that each creature had its own habits, and he could ferret them out. One dawn he discovered a doe with a newborn fawn at the river. The little creature wore white spots and stood on wobbly legs so thin he wondered how it could support itself. The doe picked up his scent and hurried her baby into red willow brush. Barnaby Skye smiled.

He absorbed this new world and loved it. Again and again he stopped to examine some new wonder, things as ordinary as a bee or a bright butterfly or a dragonfly. This was the good earth, and it awakened a new awareness in him. He wanted to walk this entire land, know it, possess it, nurture it even as it nurtured him. It dawned on him that he had been stunted and shriveled and warped by his sea-prison. The mortal soul needed the good earth and all upon it, just as much as any plant needed the good earth. He might have loved the ever-changing sea if he had not been a prisoner, and if it had not been a monstrous barrier against his liberty. But he could not put down roots into the sea. Here on this vast continent he could—and would.

Ever mindful that he needed to find the Americans in July, he continued eastward, but not in a rush, and always taking time to learn how to live upon the breast of the world. Bit by bit, he was becoming the master of his fate.

He experimented with various types of tinder for his fire steel, finding merit in the fibrous inner bark of dead cottonwoods. He learned to make his beds more comfortable by plucking away the smallest sticks and stones, and even to make a hollow for his hip bone. He practiced with his bow and arrows as he walked, knowing his skills were barely adequate. But one day he bagged a wild turkey, and several times he shot mallards, much to his astonishment. And he didn't neglect the sparkling Walla Walla River and its salmon.

If this was a paradise, it was also a land of unknown tribes, some of which might be dangerous. He found ample evidence of them: hoof and moccasin prints, and campsites. His Creole moccasins blended with these signs of passage and concealed his journey from knowing eyes. One day he found a discarded moccasin and put it in his kit as a pattern. He learned what he could of the ways the Indians fed themselves, noting what roots and bulbs they dug up, what trees and bushes showed signs of being disturbed, and what firewoods they used. Just by being observant, he learned the lore of the natives. The Indians had collected a tall herb with a cluster of half-inch-thick roots that he found edible. And they had dug up a low plant with bright white blossoms. This plant had a root that tasted bitter raw, but when he sliced and boiled the root in his tin cup, the white root tasted better. He discovered wild onions, and a small lily with purplish white blossoms that offered up a valuable root.

But the plant obviously prized by the local Indians grew everywhere and had blue blossoms on foot-high stalks. Its bulbous root, the size of a small onion, proved to be without taste but filling and edible raw as well as cooked. Skye collected the bulbs and stuffed them in his kit. Nature was providing a bounty as the warm season progressed, and he stopped worrying about feeding himself. He didn't know the name of any of these foodstuffs, and vowed he would find out when he reached the Yanks. Names were important. He wanted to know the name of everything around him.

An occasional cold, rainy day taught him to study the land for shelter as he passed through, and to thatch brush huts from boughs cut with his hatchet. He learned to build a fire near a rock escarpment that caught the heat and radiated it back upon him. Windy days he had simply to endure, because there was little refuge in nature from the blasts of air that plucked at his flesh.

He experimented with his trap, chaining it down, baiting it with meat, and setting it two or three hundred yards from his campsites. He caught nothing, and wondered why. Perhaps it was his scent. He scrubbed the trap in the river, using a root that yielded a frothy substance like soap. The next morning a foul odor permeated the entire area, and he found a dead skunk in the jaws. He wondered if he could endure its flesh, decided he could not, washed the trap in the river, and fled the area.

He walked up the broad valley through golden days, seeing not a soul and glad of it. He wanted to be alone. His ordeal at Fort Nez Perces had scarred his soul, left a rancid memory of a fur company's arrogance, and deepened his hunger to reach the Americans. The river swung south through mounting slopes and east again, into foothill canyons. He was nearing the Blue Mountains.

He followed the diminished river ever upward through private canyons and hidden glens. The river turned into a tumbling torrent, icy with snowmelt, sometimes hidden from the surrounding slopes by its log-choked canyons. He came upon large swampy plateaus chocked with wildlife, moose and elk as well as deer. One day a huge brown bear with a cub scared him witless, and he backed away from the creek while she stood on her hind legs and snorted. After that, he habitually noted trees he could climb and lines of retreat. He had not won his liberty only to let himself be butchered by a wild animal.

He arrived at the headwaters of the Walla Walla, a mass of springs and soggy turf. From now on he would travel without a reliable source of water, and it worried him. He would need to keep his eye peeled for springs and seeps. He hiked the rest of that day through chill mountain air, finding no sign of a spring, and feared he might have to retreat to the headwaters. Some unknown distance ahead he would reach a summit and enter the Snake River drainage.

The pungence of pines intoxicated his senses; he had never smelled anything like it. But his quest for water preoccupied him, and he feared he would make a dry camp that night and hope his body would endure the drought. Then, as he wound his way around a steep north slope, he found the rotted remains of a snowbank, mottled with dirt and bark on its glistening surface. Meltwater leaked from its lowest point and he drank it, gasping at its cold. After that he hacked out several pounds of the dripping snow and packed it into his poncho.

He camped that night high in the Blue Mountains, warding off an icy breeze with a crackling fire of knotty pine, and satisfying his thirst with the decaying snow. That night he slept cold even though it was the end of May, and finally built up his dying fire and sat in the pine-scented night, waiting for the sun.

The next dawn he swallowed some of his hoarded jerky and boiled some of his carefully husbanded bulbs in his little cup, using the last of his snow, and then set out again. He topped a saddle midmorning and descended a dry watercourse, wondering whether he had reached the Snake drainage. That day he hiked across a broad alpine meadow berserk with flowers. That evening he set up camp beside a foot-wide rill, and swiftly drove an arrow into a small deer, which ran, shuddered, stopped, and sagged to the ground a hundred yards away. He had never killed a creature that large, and felt a certain sadness he could not explain. It was odd, he thought, that a man who had fought the bloody Kaffirs would feel despondent about taking the life of a deer. It was as if the deer were innocent and undeserving of its fate, while the two-footed demons deserved what they got.

He dragged the limp yearling buck toward his camp, then thought better of it. He would leave it well away from his campsite. He attacked the carcass clumsily, eventually gutting it, up to his elbows in blood and gore. After two hours of sawing with his dull knives, he quit. He took ten or fifteen pounds of venison back to his camp, built a fire, spitted some of the meat on green twigs, and roasted it. It had taken an amazing amount of bloody work to make meat. Thinking back, he realized he had used too light a hand: next time, he would take his hatchet to a carcass and make quicker work of it. But that experience, like so many others these sweet days, had taught him much.

That night an unearthly howling awakened him, and he knew at once he was hearing wolves. He crawled uneasily to the fire and found a few live coals, which he soon fed into a hot yellow flame. Out in the blackness orange eyes stared back at him, one pair, two, then five pair in all, some holding steady, others bobbing, catching and losing the firelight. The sight raised the hair on the nape of his neck. He had no idea whether wolves would attack a man—no doubt the scent of meat had drawn them—but he took no chances. He put on his moccasins, grabbed his hatchet in one hand and his belaying pin in the other, and ran toward one of those pairs of orange eyes, roaring like a mad bull. The eyes vanished.