Rendezvous (29 page)

Skye marveled at its beauty. Never had he seen such a place.

“Up ahead a piece is Colter's Hell,” Bridger told him. “With biling springs, hot water that shoots out of the ground, and the smell of sulphur. It's the doorway to Hades. We all been there and peered in and saw the old horned rascal hi'self grinnin' up at us.”

Skye smiled. He was onto old Gabe.

“You don't believe me, eh? Well, we'll go have us a sample.” He turned to Beckwourth and Tom Fitzpatrick. “Old Barnaby hyar don't believe in Colter's Hell. I reckon we'd better go show him where a man can get a whiff of sulphur and brimstone.”

“Skye, you don't believe in hell? We found it and we'll show it to you,” Beckwourth said. “We'll show you where you can roast your pale white hide. This is where Old Bug himself lives.”

“It's Mister Skye, mate.”

“Well, you'd better tell that to old Satan,” said Fitzpatrick. “The devil should address a man proper.”

Skye smiled. This had been going on ever since he arrived. For days he had devoured good cow—the mountaineers made sure he knew good cow from poor bull—and sometimes elk or mule deer. For days he had slept warm under two thick blankets spun and carded in England. For days he had learned wilderness arts, fire tending, hide dressing, and how to shoot his heavy, octagonal-barreled rifle.

They had disabused him of various notions, such as that he should stand up to shoot. Instead, they told him to lie down or get behind a tree or log or rock, and make no target at all. He should steady the barrel on anything solid and squeeze the trigger sweet and true. They didn't have much powder or lead to spare, but a man who could shoot true could make the difference in a scrape, so they instructed him anyway. They taught him how to load fast, even how to load without measuring powder in an emergency; how to drive a patched ball home with the hickory rod clipped under the barrel, how to pour a little powder in the pan, how to scrape out damp powder after a rain because if he didn't he wouldn't be armed.

He progressed from clumsiness to some skill, occasionally hitting a distant target, and they pronounced themselves satisfied that he could make meat or send a few red devils to the spirit world. He wondered about that. He had fired cannon in war, and brawled in bloody mayhem, but coolly aiming at and killing a mortal bothered him.

Skye, Bridger, Fitzpatrick, and Beckwourth set off on horseback that golden October noon for the gates of hell, and told Sublette they'd be back the next day. Skye kept his counsel, expecting that all this was an elaborate prank on a pork-eater. But it would be fun, and he'd had little enough fun in his constricted life. They rode south along the Yellowstone, scaring up flocks of Canada geese and ducks and alarming a few snorty cow moose and calves.

Beckwourth was at his gaudiest—to impress the ladies certain to be dipping their toes in the boiling waters, he said—with elaborately quilled buckskins he had talked some Crow maidens—or matrons—into making for him. The fringes of both his tunic and leggins were extra long. He wore a great floppy felt hat that concealed his dusky face, and his untrammeled dark hair stretched far down his back, making him rakish. The man had style, Skye thought, and never more so than in his bawdy recollections of nearly the entire distaff side of the Crow Nation.

“Why,” Beckwourth was saying, “I was so smitten by Bad Bear's buxom virgin daughter Raccoon, the Teton Queen I called her in honor of her assets, that I went to the chief and made him a proposition. ‘Ol' Bear,' sez I, ‘I want Raccoon for my very own, and in return I'll be in your service, come war and come peace.' Well, Bear, he smiles, and sez he'd be honored, and he sent Raccoon over and I indoctrinated her in all the arts of amour for a fortnight, spending a pleasant January last winter. My reputation grew—deservedly of course—and next thing I knew, Bear's wife and three other daughters came into my lodge for their own initiation, and that's how I spent a pleasant February except that I was plumb exhausted and out of sorts by March.”

Well, they were all marvelous liars: Beckwourth, that son of a white man and slave woman, most of all, and if that was what wilderness did, Skye supposed he would turn into a gaudy liar himself.

Bridger was steering them toward a conical peak to the southeast, and then into its foothills. Skye couldn't imagine a less likely place for brimstone and sulphur, and waited patiently to see how this great prank would end.

“We're getting close now, Skye. You can smell the sulphur. Wherever Bug is, there's the smell of burning sulphur,” said Fitzpatrick. “This is just a sample, sort of an outlier. Hell's real front gate's another fifty miles south of here up on a steaming plateau where boiling water erupts and sulphur stinks up the air. I've seen old Bug hisself, and so has Bridger, but Beckwourth's so saintly Bug leaves him alone.”

They were progressing up a bleak gulch with a small creek in it. The creek steamed in the crisp October air, which puzzled Skye. His husky colt poked a nose into the water and jerked back. They finally arrived at a place where water boiled out of a steep hillside and into pools, one below the next. Steam billowed into the chill air, and Skye realized the water actually was hot.

“Well, ha'r we are. I'll go pay Bug the admission,” Bridger said, vanishing into brush. The rest were picketing their horses on the grassy slope and peeling off their duds. Skye watched, uncertain, wary of a prank. They'd get him down to the buff and then ride off. Yes, that was it. The whole elaborate business would teach him a lesson.

“Couldn't find the Divil,” said Bridger. “Guess we go in for free this time.” He began tugging on his moccasins. “I left him a message that ol' Skye was hyar, sampling the Divil's wares.”

Next thing Skye knew, his comrades were poking toes into the pools, sampling them for heat, and then lowering themselves into the water with many a happy sigh. Where was the prank?

“Well, Skye?” Fitzpatrick, in waist-high water, addressed him. “Are you a shy fellow?”

“It's Mister Skye, mate.”

“Well, this pool will boil off your cooties, and the next one up will boil you. Go down two pools and you can sit for an hour without getting lobstered.”

Skye needed no more invitation. He dropped his grimy duds, stepped into the pool, and found himself immersed in just-bearable heat, which swiftly opened every pore and swept away every ache. He celebrated. Rarely in his brief life had he experienced a hot bath. He marveled at the water and wondered where it came from and what subterranean fires heated it. The water exuded a certain mineral odor, and Skye sensed that it had leached chemicals out of the bowels of the earth somewhere under this hot-bellied mountain. This was probably volcanic country.

That evening, they feasted on cow elk after Skye had collected wood and built a small fire for them.

“Actually, Skye,” said Beckwourth, “we was elected to bring you hyar. The vote was unanimous.”

Skye waited.

“You got the smelliest feet in Creation, and we was commanded to bring you here to clean your toes so you didn't foul up the whole camp.”

Skye hardly knew what to say.

Bridger hiccuped and snickered.

Skye got the drift. “It's Mister Skye, gents. When you introduce me to the Devil, remember it.”

“Bug wouldn't let 'im into hell, not with them feet,” said Bridger.

They were making him one of them, but not without some initiation rites. Skye sensed how he stood with them. From their standpoint, he was an odd duck who talked with an accent and used sailor words and harbored a vision of going back to the civilized east. But he knew he had done something they admired, something that might have sunk even the most experienced of them. He had survived two encounters with the Blackfeet, picked up a horse and food and gear along the way, and somehow made it to the brigade through a wilderness he didn't know. They were going to put him through some more of this, but all the while they were teaching him everything they knew about staying alive in a land without roofs and constables and butchers and bakers. Skye glowed within. These were friends as well as mentors.

Leisurely they rode back to Sublette's encampment. The aspens had bloomed yellow and withered to nakedness, but the cottonwoods were just reaching a burnished gold radiance, somehow joyous and sad. The air had changed, and each breeze carried tiny knives in it. In camp, the pace quickened. Skye found himself jerking meat, packing “Indian butter,” which he learned was the soft tallow that accumulated along the back of the buffalo—a delicacy that mountaineers as well as the tribes cherished and ate raw. It preserved well, and Skye filled leather sacks with it.

They trapped a few beaver just to have a look at the pelts, and pronounced them not yet prime but getting there fast. Skye learned to roast beaver tail and to flesh each pelt and dry it on a willow hoop. Sublette kept him busy but he still found moments he could call his own, and these he used to master the arts of war as it was fought here.

They showed him an Indian-made bullhide shield so tough it could deflect arrows and even a rifle ball that hit it askance. They taught him to throw a knife and a hatchet, and he, in turn, showed them the sailor's weapon, the belaying pin with its flared cusp that protected the hand from lance and knife. He surprised them in several mock fights, deftly deflecting a wooden mock knife and a mock lance fashioned from a stick, and thumping his adversaries in the ribs, or neck, or knees, which set them to howling. He knew little about shooting arrows or bullets, but when it came to close quarters, he won their respect in a hurry.

“That Royal Navy's tougher'n I thought,” said Fitzpatrick. “It can fight with a damned stick.”

“It fights with cannon and mortar and sword mostly, mate. But the seamen brawl with a marlinspike or cutlass, and they're handy if we're about to be boarded. Mostly the lads just pound on each other. Those sticks are everywhere on deck; the rigging's wrapped around them. All those lines off the masts end up wrapped over belaying pins.”

They weren't grasping much of that, but they were learning fast how to fight with a hardwood stick that protected the hand that held it.

Then one day the wind shifted and blew a cold gale that kept them from cooking because they couldn't keep a fire under anything. That night the temperatures dropped and it snowed sleety wet flakes. Skye hadn't thought much about winter camping, but now he did. He shivered under his blankets through a brutal night, wondering how he would survive that sort of ferocity. By morning he was numb and discouraged, soaked with snow, and colder than he had ever been.

The mountaineers joked about it, but he knew he'd die of the catarrh if he was subjected to much of it. Then he listened closer. They weren't really joking. They had a way of making their misery light by ridiculing it.

“Two months of hard cold work,” said Beckwourth, “and after that, paradise.”

“He's talking about them lustful and willing Crow women,” Blanket Jim Bridger explained. “And them warm lodges with a hot little fire right in the middle, and thick buffler robes to lie in. Beats a dugout or tent or brush hut any time.”

Sublette gathered them around the breakfast fire. “We'll head for the Three Forks,” he said. “Beaver's prime now, and maybe Bug's Boys'll be in their lodges. But keep your powder dry. Pull those loads; I want fresh powder under every lock.”

The lark was over.

Chapter 38

Cold was the enemy. It numbed and shocked Skye. He had been cold many times at sea, in unheated seamen's quarters, fighting North Atlantic gales, soaked with icy seawater. But on a ship there was usually refuge. In the wilderness refuges were few and took a long time to build.

November had barely started and yet it snowed daily, sharp blizzards that drove ice down a man's spine and numbed his fingers. He wondered how the trappers functioned at all, standing in icy creeks while they set their traps, going out each day to toil in bone-chilling cold, their hands too numb to set a trap or hold a rifle or pull a trigger.

Skye's leather shirt didn't serve him in this weather, and he yearned for the pea jacket and woolen skull cap he had traded long before. A few trappers had buffalo coats to warm them. The Creoles had blanket capotes, practical hooded affairs sewn from a trade blanket Skye knew he would need such gear fast or go under, so he ransomed his future to buy an old blanket capote from Broussard, a giant Canadian, and good gloves from Adams, one of the free trappers. Not even that was enough, because his feet froze. Many of the men had woolen or fur leggins, and so Skye bargained for a pair of these as well, and then rabbit-fur liners for his moccasins. By the time he was properly outfitted, he owed seventy dollars on top of his two debts to the company—one for the equipment he drew at the rendezvous, and the other for the outfit provided him by Sublette. Next summer, when debts and wages were squared, he would still be in the hole.

If this was November in the northern mountains, he wondered what January would be like. But by then the brigade would be holed up in Crow lodges, awaiting the return of spring and the second bout of trapping. His days were filled with hard work, which never ceased, although some brief interludes of warm weather made life easier. Sublette had led them over the pass into the Three Forks basin, and had set up camp close to the pass—an avenue of escape if they ran into Bug's Boys. This was Gallatin River country, and beaver flourished on every tributary, offering Sublette an incredible harvest.

Sublette made Skye the camp tender for Bridger and Fitzpatrick, and thereafter Skye was responsible for the horses of both men as well as his own, plus cooking, shelter, fire, and fleshing and drying the pelts. Skye felt lucky to work for two of the wiliest veterans in the mountains. He cut deadwood and kept fires going, fleshed and dried the thick pelts on willow hoops. He tended the horses, keeping an eye on them night and day, keeping them picketed and hobbled and on good grass. Once, when the snow rose higher than they could paw through, Bridger showed him something: he cut green cottonwood limbs and let the horses gnaw on the soft bark.