The Big Sky (38 page)

When Jim came back from a trip he was full of talk about new forts along the river and new people moving out from the settlements and the farmers in Missouri palavering about Oregon and California, as if the mountains were a prime place for plows and pigs and corn. When Jim went on too long that way, Boone cut him off, not wanting to be bothered with fool talk that stirred a man up inside.

Jim always seemed glad to be back, even if he was always setting out again. His face would light up when he saw Boone, and his hand was warm and strong and his mouth smiling. When he looked at Teal Eye it was as if he wished her double was around somewhere. Boone would catch just a gleam in his blue eye sometimes, or a kind of long, slow look that would make a man flare up if he didn't know Teal Eye so well, that maybe would put blood in his eye if Jim wasn't his friend.

Teal Eye was the woman for Boone. He reckoned he never would take a second woman in his lodge, and never have to cut Teal Eye's nose off, either, the way a Piegan did when he found his woman had lain in secret with another man. It was a sight, the squaws you saw with no end to their noses. Cut-nose women, they were called. They went around like nigger slaves, not having a man any longer or any proper home.

Teal Eye suited him all right. There wasn't any sense in a man nosing around like a bull, or wanting to cover every new woman just from being curious. One woman was enough, if she was the right one. Teal Eye never whined or scolded or tried to make a man something else than what he was by nature, but just took him and did her work and was happy. She had got a little heavier lately but was still well-turned in her body, with sharp, full breasts and a flat stomach and legs slim and quick as a deer's. Most squaws aged early, looking pretty just when the first bloom was on them and then drying up or going all to flesh, but not Teal Eye, maybe because she never had caught herself a baby. Looking at her, Boone couldn't tell much difference from five seasons back when he had found her on the Teton with Red Horn. He couldn't tell much difference, even, from the
Mandan
time, except that she was a woman now and rounded out as a woman ought to be. Her face was still slim and delicate, and her eyes melting and her spirit quick and cheerful and her body graceful. What she cared about most was to please him. She watched while he ate the meat or tried a new pair of moccasins and showed pleasure in her face when he grunted an all right. And she was always ready for him when his body was hungry, not lying still and spraddled, either, like a shot doe, but joining in, unashamed, her legs smooth and warm and strong and her breath whispering in his ear.

Boone uncrossed one leg and stretched it out before him and studied the moccasin he wore. Teal Eye had put a decoration of colored porcupine quills on it, arranging them neat and in a nice pattern. She had tanned the leather for this foot white and for the right foot yellow, so that a person not knowing Piegan ways would think the moccasins didn't match. They were slick shoes, he thought, while his mind went to wishing that Jim would come back soon from St. Louis. He felt better with Jim around. There was more spirit in him, and he laughed oftener. There wasn't anyone could find fun like Jim, or set a man's head to working so. When he thought of it, it was as if Jim was a part of all the life he liked, as if he always had been ever since they had met up on the road between Frankfort and Louisville, and Jim uneasy with the dead body in his wagon. Take Jim away and Boone felt there was something wanting, though he still wouldn't trade his way of living for any he ever knew or heard tell of. When Jim came back, it was as if all was well again. A man went with the feeling inside him that everything was right and just about as he would order it if it was his to order. Jim ought to be back soon, Boone figured, from going down the river with a boat of furs. It could be he had made up his mind to stay the winter in the settlements and to come back in the spring when the flood water would float steamboats to Fort Union and farther. Boone reckoned not, though. Jim never stayed away for a long stretch. Likely he would come overland, maybe with a party of mountain men who had spent their beaver. For all his traipsing around, Jim was a true mountain man, with the life showing in his face and in the set of his shoulders and legs and the way of his walk.

The wind was moving out of the west, as it nearly always did, sometimes hard and sometimes easy but nearly always moving. A shadow fell on the land, and lightning flickered and thunder sounded, and a big splash of rain fell on the hand Boone held his pipe with. The Piegans spent a heap of time inside their lodges. He liked to sit outside where the sun could hit him and the breeze get at him. Sometimes he put himself in mind of the menfolk back in Kentucky, sitting around the door while the day turned by, only he didn't have a hickory chair and wouldn't sit in it if he had. A man got so he didn't feel right unless seated cross-legged. The rain wouldn't be but a drop or two. Already the cloud was sailing over him, passing on east.

Boone knocked out his pipe and sat still, letting time run by. Each part of time was good in itself, if a man knew to enjoy it and didn't press for it to pass so as to get ahead to something different. By and by Red Horn came along and sat down by him, not speaking until he got his pipe going. Red Horn's eyes seemed to get sharper with the years, and his nose higher and more hooked. The wrinkles were like cuts at the side of his mouth though he wasn't old yet. He made Boone think of an eagle, except he didn't bite or claw any more. The hand he held the pipe with lacked the joint of one finger. He had cut it off, along with his hair, when old Heavy Otter died of the smallpox.

"We have meat enough, and hides," said Red Horn, speaking the Blackfoot tongue that Boone knew almost as well as white men's talk.

"More hides than meat." Red Horn puffed on his pipe. "The buffalo die fast, Red Horn."

"They are plenty."

"They die fast, with hunters killing them for hides alone." Red Horn hunched his shoulders. "They are more now than before the big sickness. We need robes to trade."

"I hope we never want for meat."

The lines in Red Horn's face deepened. He spread his hands, as if there was no use in anything. "The buffalo will last while the Indian lasts. Then we do not care. The buffalo cannot die faster than the Indian."

"We do well enough."

"The white Piegan does not know. He did not see the Piegans when their lodges were many and their warriors strong. We are a few now, and we are weak and tired, and our men drink the strong water and will not go far from the white man's trading house. They quarrel with one another. The white man's sickness kills them. We are like Sheepeaters. We are poor and sick and afraid."

"The nation will grow strong. The white man will leave us. We shall be many and have buffalo and beaver and live as the old ones lived."

Red Horn grunted and took the pipe from his lips to speak. "Strong Arm is a paleface. He will go back to his brothers when the Piegans go to the spirit land."

"No!" Boone answered in English. "Damn if ever I go back -not for good, anyways!" He switched to Blackfoot. "Strong Arm is a Piegan though his face is white."

"Already," said Red Horn, "the white hunters make ready to trap our rivers again."

"They have no right. It is Piegan land."

"We are weak. We cannot fight the Long Knives. Red Horn will not fight. He tells his people to keep the arrow from the bow and their hands from the medicine iron."

It was no use arguing with Red Horn. The spirit was dead in him, except for a sadness and an old anger that fanned up sometimes like a coal touched by wind. He couldn't see ahead. Already the white hunter was getting scarce in the mountains, finding beaver too few and too cheap and the life too risky now that the big parties were gone and he had to travel small. It would be the same with the other white men, with the traders who crowded the river and with those who figured to settle and make crops where crops wouldn't grow. Things came and went and came again.

"Red hair should be back soon," Boone said, watching Teal Eye come toward the lodge with water from the stream and stoop and go in while the edge of her eye looked at him and her face told him he was her man. He heard her freshening the fire. The days were getting shorter. Already the sun was dipping behind the mountain rim, well to the south of its summer setting place. The breeze began to quiet, as if it couldn't blow without the sun shining on it.

"Red Hair waits at the trading house?" Red Horn asked.

"Maybe Jim is there."

"Two suns, and we go to trade."

"Good."

Red Horn got up and looked around the village, the lines cutting into his face, as if he could see how far the Piegan lodges would stand if the big sickness hadn't come along.

Boone smoked another pipe after Red Horn had gone. From inside there came the little noises that told him Teal Eye was readying the pot for him. The smell of wood smoke was in the air and of good meat cooking. A man's stomach answered to it. The water came into his mouth. High in the sky Boone could hear the whimper of nighthawks. Looking close, he spied one of them, diving crazy and crooked and whimpering as it dived. He knocked the ash from his pipe and got up, stretching, and ducked under his medicine bundle that hung over the entrance and went into his lodge, to his meat, to his woman.
 

The first snow had fallen before Jim came back. It was a wet and heavy snow that weighted the branches down and dropped from them onto a man's shoulders and down his neck as he poked through the brush along the Musselshell looking for beaver-setting. The first flight of ducks from the north came with it, their wings whistling in the gray dusk. The water in the beaver ponds stood dark and still against the whitened banks. Deep down, the trout lay slow as suckers. In a day the snow slushed off. The sun came again and the wind swung back to the west and the ground dried, but the country wasn't the same; it looked brown and tired, with no life in it, lying ready for winter, lying poor and quiet while the wind tore at it one day after another. A trapper making his lift heard the wind in the brush and the last stubborn leaves ticking dead against the limbs; he looked up and saw the sky deep and cold and a torn cloud in it, and when he sniffed he got the smell of winter in his nose -the sharp and lonesome smell of winter, of cured grass and fallen leaves and blown grit and cold a-coming on. His legs cramped in the water and his fingers stiffened with his traps, and he felt good inside that his meat was made and berries gathered against the time ahead. Now was a time to hunt, and to think forward to lodge fires and long, fat days and a full stomach and talk like Jim knew how to make.

One beaver from six settings. A poor lift, but a man couldn't expect better, not while he traveled with a parcel of other folks and trapped waters that trappers before him had worn paths along. A plew wouldn't buy much from Chardon, the new bourgeois at McKenzie. A man could put one beaver of whisky in his eye and never wink, and a beaver of red cotton for Teal Eye wouldn't much more than flag an antelope. It was good a man needed but a little of boughten things. The buffalo gave him meat and clothing and a bed and a roof over his head, and what the buffalo didn't give him the deer or sheep did, except for tobacco and powder and lead and whisky, and cloth and fixings for his squaw.

Boone picked up the beaver by a leg and went to his horse and mounted and rode back toward camp. Teal Eye would skin out the beaver and cook the tail. Her hands worked fast and sure for all they were so small. And she hardly needed to look what they were doing. She could watch him or laugh or talk, and they never missed a lick and never lagged. His lodge was kept as well as anybody's, no matter if they had half a dozen wives, and it didn't crawl with lice, either, like some did. Maybe that was because of the winter she had spent in St. Louis with the whites; more likely it was just because she was Teal Eye and neat by nature and knew how to keep a lodge right and how to fix herself pretty, using red beads in her black hair, where they looked good, and blue or white beads against her brown skia, where they looked good, too.

Near his tepee Boone saw two horses standing gaunt and hip-shot and heard voices coming from inside. He checked his own horse and listened and knew that Jim had come home. Teal Eye's laugh floated out to him. He jumped off and dropped the beaver by the door and stooped and went in.

Jim yelled, "How! How, Boone!" He scrambled to his feet, holding a joint of meat in one hand. He spoke through a mouthful of it. "Gimme your paw, Boone. I reckon I'm plumb glad to be back."

Boone looked at the red hair and the face wrinkling into a smile and the white teeth showing and felt Jim's hand hard and strong in his own. "Goddam you, Jim," he said. "What kep' you? Ought to hobble you or put you on a rope. And damn if you didn't get your hair cut! Like an egg with a fuzz on it, your head looks."

Jim ran a hand through the short crop on his skull. "Done it to keep people from askin' questions back in the States. Wisht I could grow it back as quick as I cut it off."

In Blackfoot Teal Eye said, "We thought Red Hair had taken a white squaw."

"Not me," said Jim. "Too fofaraw, them bourgeways are. I got things to do besides waitin' on a woman." He changed to Blackfoot talk. "The white men in their big villages do not have squaws like you. The women are weak and lazy. They do not dress skins and cut wood and pitch and break camp. They are not like Teal Eye."

Boone could see Teal Eye was pleased. He sat down by the fire and put out his wet feet and lighted his pipe. Teal Eye came and took off his wet moccasins and brought dry ones. Jim sat down and lit up, too.

It was good, this was, this having Jim here and winter edging close and a pot of meat fretting and the fire coming out and warming a man's feet and tobacco smoke sweet in his mouth. It made Boone feel snug inside and satisfied. He wished it could be that the Piegan men wouldn't come visiting until he and Jim had had their own visit out. "You didn't beat winter but by a hair, Jim."