The High Missouri (14 page)

Part Three

THE BELLY OF THE WHALE

Chapter Thirteen

It was the music, really, that made it so… alien.

His mind whirled a little, and he commanded it to stop. The music, yes, the infernal wailing-chanting, quavering high in the scale, sliding melismatically downward and softer, sailing high again, bursting up, then arcing down, like the howl of a wolf. But more grating, by far, than a wolf’s cry, because it was human. To Dylan’s ears it was not graced with the human.

Dylan kept telling himself that if not for the music, surely, this ritual, this whatever-it-was of the North Piegan Indians, would not seem so… He would be able to bear it. Which he wasn’t sure he could.

He looked sideways at the man who brought him here, Bleu, the fort interpreter, and got a stern look for his trouble. There would be times, Bleu had told him, when they could take a break from this ceremony, and Bleu would let him know. Obviously not now.

The dark and the bonfire didn’t help. The dancing figures, firelight flickering off their red bodies, looked like devils. Dylan looked at his other companion, the Balmat, for help. The Balmat was a lively young blacksmith. Dylan thought he might become a friend. He watched the dancing with an expression of pleasant curiosity.

The drums were almost worse than the singing. The violent metrical thump made Dylan flinch sometimes, but that wasn’t what drove him crazy, it was the relentlessness of the beat, the feeling of timelessness, the sense that it drove on forever, it never stopped. Even when the drums were silent, the beat would thump at you in your brain, in your blood.

It was tied somehow to the corporeal, the bodily, the carnal, the physical without soul.

He shuddered.

It was a scalp dance, Bleu had explained. Dylan had expected to feel repulsed by dancing over human scalps, but this was far worse than he expected, not something merely bloodthirsty and bestial, but a macabre celebration of … He didn’t know what.

He told himself that his job was to learn the language of these Piegans, and their customs. It was not only a task the factor at Fort Augustus assigned him, but also his pledge to Dru. He didn’t know if he could stand it.

Bleu explained the parts of the dance casually, sometimes wittily. Nobody knew what the fort interpreter’s real name was, if he even had a baptismal name, but his common name was Sacre Bleu, a joke of a name. His English approached gibberish, and even his French was larded with Indian words. He was plenty peculiar himself. He liked to brag that he had as many bloodlines as a stray bitch had studs—Piegan, Cree, Ojibway, Assiniboine, French, English, Scottish (he didn’t claim Welsh), spic, and nigger—as he called them—and the darkest strain of each. He was of indeterminate age, but Dylan was inclined to think he was close to sixty. Swarthy and thick, he had the gnarled physique of a troll. Sometimes he seemed simply hearty and vulgar, but sometimes his eye looked sinister. And certainly he knew the sins of the flesh, intimately.

The Balmat seemed tickled by Bleu.

Dylan cringed at the thought that this was what a lifetime in the
pays d’en haut
made you.

Bleu had explained the ceremony in his cryptic and sardonic way. The dance leader was a woman called a berdache, and there were five parts. First she danced around waving the scalps. Improbably, this was called the courtship dance. Then she paired off males and females of all ages, and they danced. In part three, the round dance, men chose female partners and they danced. In part four women did the choosing.

The screeching and the barbaric drumming reached a peak of intensity and stopped. There was quiet for a moment.

“What next?” whispered Dylan.

“The climax,” said Bleu in French, “the dance of the buffalo mating.”

Dylan couldn’t stand it. “Let’s go!” he snapped.

Dylan felt relieved the moment they got out of the circle. The night air was crisp and cold. The horses were staked beyond the cottonwoods. They would have a head-clearing ride for two or three miles to Fort Augustus. Dylan had the sense that Bleu and the Balmat were amused by him.

They were strange, these young Englishmen the company sent out, each more naive than the last. Bleu ran short of patience with them. They knew nothing of life, and you could tell them nothing. He was supposed to teach this one about the Piegans.
Bien sur
, he explained the dance, at least what of it the kid was willing to hear. The lad’s morals—or what the innocent thought were morals—plugged up his ears.

The man known as Bleu to the Englishmen and Frenchmen, and known to a dozen tribes by a dozen names, and to a dozen wives as much man, didn’t understand it. They asked to know but the information made their brains boil. How can you learn when your brain is boiling?

Bleu had thought of telling this Englishman, the young Monsieur Davies, a little of what berdache meant. After all, Rain-in-Her-Hair, the leader of the dance, was not a woman, not exactly, or not what Monsieur Davies thought was a woman. After all, Bleu thought wickedly, she had a cod and a pair of balls. Berdache, the French Canadians called such people,
ake’ skassi
, the Piegans called them, every tribe had its own name. Men-women, born men, living as women. People who had the medicine of man and woman in one body…. It was hard to explain.

The Englishman could see that a deer wasn’t an elk and a porcupine wasn’t a beaver, even if they looked a little alike. Why couldn’t he see that the English were one thing and the French another and the nigger and spic and Indun yet others? Why did he have to be horrified by the differences?

Because that’s the way your Englishman was.

No, Mr. Stewart, it is not the country that is godless. It is the natives.

Dylan was watching the women butcher their autumn buffalo kill. Like carrion birds they flew in among the carcasses with their knives and axes, hacking and pecking at the steaming flesh. The prairie itself became an abattoir, and in a few minutes its floor was so wet with blood the ground sucked at your moccasins.

The great bodies were ripped open, the skins huge, dripping red flags, the guts strewn on the ground, blood gouting everywhere. The women, their arms and legs and dresses and even their faces and hair soaked in crimson, cut pieces of raw liver and sucked them into their mouths. They drank the rank bile, even drank the stomach contents. From all this rose the steam and stench of corporeality, of blood and gut and kidney and heart and testicle and womb, spilled on the ground, laid open in its foulness. Dylan thought it showed what man would be without a soul.

Dylan thought the plains, seen right, had a certain stark beauty. Even the plants that grew upon them, the willows, the cottonwoods, the berry bushes, and the vast carpet of thick grass, had a dry-land loveliness. Even the buffalo was majestic, only partly undone by its stupidity. No, the godlessness showed in the human beings who thrived upon the buffalo, the Indians.

He could admire their ingenuity in making everything they needed from the great brute. Meat, of course, and every kind of clothing from the hide. Also the war shield, from the thick skin of the neck. The hides also made blankets. With the hair removed, a cover for the lodge. The sinew became string, the stomach a pot, and the bladder a watertight bag. The bones were used for scraping tools, the hoofs for glue, the horns for drinking cups. The long chin hairs were braided into rope. There was more. Even the dung was used—as fuel for fires in a woodless country.

And every part of the buffalo could become a totem, a medicine object, worn on the head, around the neck, tied to one arm, hidden in the medicine bag, a mad, barbaric emblem of what they mistook for divine.

The attitude of the Piegans toward this beast was bizarre and perverted, a combination of worship and blood lust. They followed the buffalo, they let the buffalo determine their movements and season, they danced to it, they dreamed of it, they made medicine of it and for it. In short, they worshiped it. Surely it said everything about a people that the object of their devotion was a dumb, dirty beast full of flies and maggots, of foul and grossly corporeal body, offering food for the body but none for the soul.

It was the buffalo the white men came for as well. The Piegans didn’t trap beaver. The trade here was essentially pemmican, made by cutting the meat into long strips, drying it on racks high above small fires, pounding it into powder and tiny fibers, mixing lots of fat and some dried berries with it, stuffing it into the sacks that kept it dry, so it would last all winter and longer.

Dylan might be able to trade for the pemmican. Having seen the butchering, he didn’t think he could eat it again.

Today they would appear on the plain in front of the fort to trade. Quite a show, it would be, said Mad Jack. “You must learn to barter with Indians, me boy. That’s your job, to learn to pamper them, humor them, indulge them, praise them, outwit them, and let them have some of what they want for lots of what you want.” Mad Jack cackled. Sometimes he seemed as bedlam as the Indians. They were children, he said, transparent, guileless, susceptible to flattery, impulsive in their desires. Yet they could be cunning, devious, vengeful, murderous. You had to go among them, trade, and come back with your scalp and a handsome profit for the NorthWest Company.

Mad Jack said, “Follow my lead and keep your mouth shut.”

Fine, thought Dylan.

Dylan had his questions about Mad Jack O’Malley. In a firm run by Scots, he was an Irishman who had risen high enough to command a post. Fort Augustus was important, the center of the trade of the North Piegans and the Cree and all the other Indians of the Saskatchewan River. Yet even in his high position he was intemperate, immoderate, and inclement. Quick to wrath, indignation, and vexation, full of rage and fury, and intermittently drunk, very drunk indeed. His very manner of speech told his disposition: He stood too close to a man, his body tensed for a fight, fists clenched, voice raised, and talked with animation, spittle flying. The Indians were said to be afraid of him. They dealt peaceably with Mad Jack because they feared he was truly crazy.

Bleu said maybe he was.

Though he claimed to speak more languages than he had fingers and toes, Bleu’s English and French were poor, except for words for the vulgar bodily functions. He didn’t answer certain questions, and Dylan could never tell why. Either he didn’t understand, or he thought the question was dumb, or… You couldn’t tell. He had a way of responding with stock words and phrases that made no sense:

Will Horn of the Bull compare our prices to what the HBC will give him? “Thank you,” Bleu would say.

Why don’t the Piegans do more trapping? “Just as you say.”

Are women just property to Indians, like horses? “Chin up, there’s a good fellow.”

Do the Indians believe in more than one god? “Tallyho.”

“Tallyho” was his favorite. Dylan had no idea where he’d gotten it. It was funny to think of anyone riding to hounds in this godforsaken place. What Bleu meant by it was mysterious as… Everything was obscure here.

First Mad Jack told Bleu and Dylan to check the security of the fort. This meant walking around and looking at the fortifications, arms, and guards. Mad Jack told Dylan privately that he asked Bleu to do this because he knew Bleu told the Indians the fort’s so-called secrets, and Mad Jack wanted them to know how high the cost of rushing the fort would be. This was in case the damned HBCers got the Piegans hot enough on rum and inflammatory talk to take a notion.

The exterior wall was a palisade as tall as three men, the logs squared where they butted up against each other and sunk four feet into the ground. Below the top ran a gallery, all the way around, to give the guards protection and an ideal angle for shooting. At the corners were blockhouses, and in these bastions sat three-pound cannons. In one room, stout and well-locked, were plenty of Nor’West rifles and muskets, plus a powder magazine. Altogether it was a fortification that made Dylan sleep easier, two thousand miles from civilization.

Since today was trading day, guards were posted. The Piegans had come in yesterday afternoon, pitched their lodges near the river on the side away from the HBC post, Edmonton House, which sat insolently within sight of the NWC fort. Last night Mad Jack and Dylan got the trading room ready.

“When will they come?” Dylan asked Bleu.

“Thank you,” said the scoundrel, eyes wandering off.

“How long will it take?”

Now Bleu favored him with a skeptical glance. “Tallyho,” he said.

They walked outside the fort to meet the chiefs. The farther they walked, said Mad Jack, the greater the compliment to the visitors. As soon as the guards reported the Indians on the way, Mad Jack, Bleu, and Dylan hurried out toward them. When the chiefs saw the traders coming, they stood contentedly and waited.

Clearly they were dressed for a great occasion. They wore their most ornately quilled or beaded shirts, breech-clouts, leggings, and moccasins. Several wore buffalo robes painted with huge sun signs, which Dylan admitted had a strong, primitive beauty. Their hair was elaborately combed into bizarre shapes and held in place with bear grease and feathers. Necklaces of tooth, claw, and shell abounded. Most faces were painted gaudily, and some men wore paint instead of shirts.

They stood in line, and the traders passed down the line to shake hands with each chief. Bleu told Dylan softly that they stood in the order of their coups, from most to least. You could tell the coups, he said, by looking at the feathers on the staffs they carried. When Dylan asked why some coups brought the greatest honor and others the least, Bleu answered, “Just as you say.”

Finished with handshaking, Mad Jack led them back to the head of the line, produced his medicine pipe, lit it, and offered it to the four directions and to the sun. When the grand chief had taken three puffs—it must be exactly three, whispered Bleu—he got out his own pipe, lit it, presented it ceremoniously to the powers, and invited Mad Jack to smoke. Then the pipe was passed to all the chiefs, and to Dylan and Bleu.

On orders, Dylan kept a scrupulously straight face while he puffed. He felt self-conscious as a choir boy with his first solo.