Rocky Mountain Company (29 page)

He busied himself cutting sedges with a sickle, and hauling armloads to the post. He knew intuitively they’d be too coarse to make a proper airtight thatch, and he suspected that the roofpoles lay the wrong way for thatching. There should be horizontal stringers to anchor the bundles of thatch to. Still, he thought, a layer of sedge over his poles, plastered with a thin layer of mud dredged up from the riverbottom before it froze, might give them something, anything, to contain warm air. A lot of decent dwellings were made of reed and daubed mud.

He stood watching while Maxim clambered up onto the roof and spread the sedges evenly over a small area, especially in the hollows between the poles. He liked what he saw. He toted a bucket back to the river, feeling the rockhard earth maul his bum leg, and painfully scooped up some heavy river mud, feeling his hands go numb. It took all his strength to carry the single heavy bucket back, and he wondered at it, wondered what had weakened him so terribly. Maxim trowelled it into a thin layer that covered scarcely a square yard, and then fled back to the fire. Within minutes the mud froze in place, anchoring the sedges, and Fitzhugh decided it looked hopeful.

He spent the rest of the afternoon waiting for the hunters, his stomach protesting. To deaden his belly-pain he cut sedges from a swampland that had frozen solid. By mid-afternoon long lavender shadows stretched across frozen ground. The hunters who’d worked up the riverbottoms returned emptyhanded and dour. The shadows lengthened when the sun slid behind the western bluffs. The two remaining parties descended the eastern bluffs together, bearing nothing.

Maxim handed them sugared coffee as they huddled silently around the roaring fire, their gaze averted.

“Maybe we should go to Fort Cass, yes? asked Trudeau, knowing well the implications. “Before we faint?”

“Hyar, now,” Fitzhugh said. “warm your butts at the fireplace a moment, and we’ll have us a regular rendezvous.”

They stared at him, anger and pain radiating from cold-savaged faces. From the small store of camp supplies hulking along a wall, he rolled one of the two barrels, the one marked lamp oil, toward the fireplace. Engagés watched, like rabbits watching a rattler, while he tapped it with an auger.

“This hyar’s pure spirits,” he said. “You may want to add a little Bighorn River to her — but not much, I’ll reckon.”

“Sacre blue!”
bellowed Samson Trudeau.

“If ye don’t want it, I won’t pour it.”

“I never tasted lamp oil before,” Trudeau added.

“Rendezvous!” cried Bercier.

He filled cups. Men sipped and yelped and spat, and added a cautionary dilution, and then settled down to bonewarming and the renovation of the soul. Within an hour they’d forgotten their hunger. They didn’t remember it all night. And by dawn, unknown by any of them except Maxim, a chinook had eddied in, and the temperature had risen into the fifties.

She felt the caustic black gaze of crow-bird upon her, but she did not see crow-bird. Then she knew those bright eyes gazed upon spirit, and their medicine-helper had come to her. She stretched, trying to drive away the stiffness of her body. Her capote and poncho did little to shield her from the bitter air. She stood up in a gray haze of dawn and knew where she would walk. Her people would be many sleeps away, but crow-bird would lead her.

She wondered whether to build a fire and boil one of her tule potatoes, and decided against it. Maybe later. She must use every moment of daylight during these short days. She gathered her small possessions, slid from her bower, and studied the riverbottoms. Dense fog lay in patches. She turned south and walked, feeling the protest of her cold muscles. But she knew the walking would warm her.

At noon that day, under a hazy and unfeeling sun, she bowed to her hunger and cooked a meal in the lee of a cutbank, safe from prying eyes and the wind. The little roots didn’t ease the torment of her stomach much. She walked southward, the unbleached canvas poncho over her scarlet capote to hide her from the wind and from eyes. Many miles, she thought. She wasn’t really sure how long a whiteman’s mile was, but she knew she’d set her moccasins over many of them, up the endless river that ran through broken plains.

That night darkness surprised her without a camping place, coming suddenly while she trudged across a vast, open flat, some distance from the coiling river. Enough clouds hid the sky so that she could steal no direction from the stars, and could see no place to stop, so she kept on walking, harried more by wind than anything else. She grew weary in the blackness, but her keen night vision told her she walked a long way from anything, across barren grassy basins, and so she pressed on through an endless tunnel. She felt more than ever that with every step the world grew, and her journey lengthened, and she was making no progress at all. Once she fell when her moccasin slid into a hole, and it hurt. The cold made a bruise more painful.

In the landscape of her mind, crow-bird led her forward, and she didn’t question it, but followed. She would trust in her medicine. Still, her body rebelled: she felt famished and her strength ebbed. She would need shelter, sleep and food soon. But she found none.

“Crow-bird helper, you must lead me to a safe place now,” she whispered into the blackness, and she saw her helper before her.

She sensed the river angling toward her, or perhaps she angled toward it, and soon she pressed through brush that whipped and clawed at her poncho. And then she stepped into nothing, tumbling down a sharp rocky grade into gravel. She skinned her palm in the landing. The rest of her hurt, too. She slowly realized she had fallen into the bed of the river itself, dry here because the waters ran low. A few steps away water murmured.

She made out a looming rock cutbank just ahead, and walked toward it, discerning a great hollow where the raging river had undercut a cliff. The hollow rose so tall she could stand in it, and the air lay so still she felt warmer. At its rear wall, she found soft dry sand, and her nostrils registered the faint smell of animals. She settled into the gentle sand gratefully, falling into a troubled, tormented sleep in moments.

She awakened in full daylight, numb again but rested. The low sunlight of
Hikomini,
Freezing Moon, struck sparks on the river, like the scrape of her oval-shaped steel across flint. She decided to recruit her strength, and gathered bonedry driftwood to build a fire. She dashed sparks into her charcloth until it glowed, and then her cottony tinder caught, and she had a fire. She boiled all of her tule potatoes, one by one, and ate them, and then made tea, mixing a bit of her precious sugar with it. The sun probed into her hollow and warmed her.

She felt comfortable at last, and even warm. But she was many sleeps from her people. She thought about her man, Fitzhugh, oddly missing him even though he lacked the strength and beauty of Tsistsista men, and never followed the warrior’s path. She needed him badly, and it angered her that she should. She didn’t need him! How could these things fight inside of her? When she got to her village she would lay a gift before the grandfathers, and listen closely while they explained the Way.

For days she trudged southward through deepening cold, bruising her moccasins, feeling hunger gaunt her even though she found a steady supply of nourishing food in the rootstock of frost-tanned cattails. Her people had always gathered these roots, pounded and dried them into a fine flour. Even when the ground froze as hard as a rock, she could find cattails in unfrozen sloughs along the river. In all these short days and long nights she saw no one. The creatures of the earth, including the peoples of the tribes, seemed to stay close to their dens, preparing for the winter. She came at last to the place where the Little Bighorn flowed into the great river, and she followed it south, along a place her people knew as the greasy grass. The smaller river would take her to her people, while the great one would soon plunge into a terrible canyon.

The soles of her winter moccasins wore out, and she stopped one afternoon in a hollow of a cutbank to sew on new ones from the bit of buffalo rawhide she carried in her bag for just such an emergency. She had to work close to her tiny hot fire to keep her numb fingers nimble while she poked holes with her small awl, and threaded them. Her mind turned often now to her parents, Antelope, her
nahkoa,
and One Leg Eagle, her
nehyo,
and their warm lodge, perhaps still home to one or two of her sisters or brothers. She wasn’t sure they’d welcome her gladly. They might find scandal in her flight from the whiteman. They and the
namshim,
the grandfathers, might send her back into the cold, and tell her to return to her whiteman. Her people divorced one another sometimes, but they might see her flight from such an important man differently. She’d tell them she wouldn’t marry again. She’d become a medicine woman, if her helper-spirits beckoned!

The moon waned to nothing but a cruel sliver, and then grew again like a pregnant woman, and she knew
Hikomini,
Freezing Moon, had passed, and
Makhikomini,
Big Freezing Moon, had begun. Her man called it December, the last moon of his year. And with it came more cold, this time cruel and murderous, freezing the banks of the Little Bighorn solid so she could gather no more roots of the cattail. It became important now to find a sheltered camping place well before night caught her; a place out of the wind, with ample dry wood, where she could build a fire that would truly warm her. The valley narrowed between pineclad bluffs, and more often than not she found a campsite halfway up them, and far from the dwindling creek.

She topped a low divide and continued southward, weakening each day from a lack of food. Once she found a vast thicket of buffaloberry, and patiently harvested the small red berries while her fingers numbed. These tiny fruits clung to the bushes long after other berries had fallen to earth, and made a winter food for birds. She gorged herself there, but knew the bitter fruit wouldn’t help much, or chase away the faintness that made each step harder, day by day. She resorted to prickly pear, cutting the new joints loose and roasting them directly on the fires to burn away the prickers. She downed the hot pulp, knowing it’d fill her but wouldn’t give her strength.

The Big Horn mountains loomed to her right, a vaulting wall that catapulted bluely into a white blur above, where heavy windwhipped snows shrouded the peaks. The days grew even shorter, and she spent large amounts of time gathering the few things that might keep her alive in a cold that burned like fire wherever it caught her flesh. She ceased to think about anything except food for her pinched stomach; and all visions of Fitzhugh, of her parents, of her village, faded before the reality of her misery. Still, she reminded herself, she was the daughter of the keeper of the medicine hat; she would trust her crow-bird medicine helper; she would live.

Springs froze; open water grew scarce, and sometimes she had to chip ice with her awl and melt it in her metal cup to quench a raging thirst. One night a skiff of snow fell, whitening the dawn, clinging crystalline on her poncho. She watched the skies anxiously, wanting not clouds but sun because a blizzard would trap and kill her. Cold she could deal with; waist-high drifts she could not.

The wind died, and the next four days brought her much closer to her destination. The air lay heavy and bitter, unmoving, scalding her lungs when she exerted herself, but at least it didn’t probe and slice and numb her with its fingers. Something drew her eastward, away from the Big Horns and out upon the broken plains, and she followed without questioning. Crow-bird hadn’t appeared in her mind’s eye for days, and yet he hopped ahead. She knew where she was going now: Crazy Woman Creek, where her people often wintered in wind-sheltered flats rich with cottonwoods, abounding in deer, and sometimes buffalo.

She worried her feet over the thin ice of Clear Creek, feeling it bend and snap under her soft footfall, but it didn’t collapse. On its south bank she found a half-eaten carcass of a mule deer yearling with its throat torn out, downed by a wolf. But something had driven off the wolf, and it had frozen. She sawed away at a flank patiently, and soon was devouring the good flesh — her first meat in over a moon. It did not cure her deepening weakness. She cut away as much as she could, sometimes having to chip it out, while a treeful of crows watched solemnly. The rest she wrapped in her doeskin bag: it would keep her two more sleeps.

She struck Crazy Woman Creek well above its confluence with the Powder. It had snowed there a little; enough to show her the passage of many hoofs and moccasins, cut in an angular pattern that lifted her spirits. Still, she didn’t know which way to go, upstream or down. She found a cutbank — this river had carved itself deep below the level of its scooped prairie valley — and built a fire there and ate the last of her meat, and waited. Overhead, corrugated streamers of cloud, infinitely higher than most, scrubbed the low sun from the world.

Brokenleg Fitzhugh awakened warm, wildly thirsty, ravenous, and with a sullen throb in his swollen head. He couldn’t fathom the warmth. But yes indeed, he could wave his palsied hand through air that didn’t bite him. Then he understood: strong drink had destroyed his carcass. He’d lost sensation. He always knew it’d happen some day; he’d sip too much and wake up a ruin. And now it’d happened. He threw his robe and blanket off and stood, and then toppled to earth over his bad leg, sledged back down by nausea and dizziness. This was serious: he felt warm in the middle of December, and he couldn’t stand up.

He discovered Maxim staring maliciously.

“You and Trudeau will have to take over,” Fitzhugh muttered. “I’m going under. Tell Jamie. Send an express.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“What’s the matter! Can’t you see? I’ve lost my senses!”

“Lost your senses?”

“I quit. Tell your father I failed. Bury me on a platform, Injun style, so the wolves don’t eat me.”