The Shirt On His Back

Chapter 13



The trail swung south through the broken jumble of gullies and hills: five men, a woman - Shaw pointed out where she'd squatted to urinate - and twice that many beasts. As Morning Star had observed, one of the men was definitely wearing boots.

'That'll be the Beauty,' remarked Shaw after a mile or two. 'He gets Fingers Woman to rawhide his moccasin soles, like they do in Mexico. I ain't yet seen that track.'

'Staying off their horses until they get clear of the valley.' January shaded his eyes to squint east, where a long, dry draw led toward the distant river. 'Cute.' As much to keep their own dust down, as to better read the ground-sign, Shaw, January, and Morning Star were afoot as well.

'This far south of the camps, white company might not be all they're lookin' to fight shy of.'

Again and again the trail disappeared, eradicated by the dragging of blankets, the use of old stream beds or rocks: the Dutchman had been in the mountains a long time and knew all the tricks. 'I'm beginning to feel we're not wanted,' said January.

'They really got a secret valley, where beaver's plentiful?' Shaw asked Morning Star in his painful French, coming back down what had turned out to be a false trail back toward camp.

'If you had a lovely lady,' replied the young woman, 'and hid her away in a secret place, would you thank one who spoke of that place to a stranger? The whole of this land was once a secret,' she went on gravely. 'Every valley had a stream where the beaver were plentiful and big. Now those streams run silent. And the Beauty and the Dutchman don't want to keep their valley a secret out of respect for the beaver or care for the spirits of the valley: it is only that they do not wish to share their furs with another man. When the beaver are all gone - not a single one of them left - what will you do then? What next will you want?'

She broke away from them and walked on ahead, leading her spotted Nez Perce horse, and her short, slightly bowed legs outdistanced even the men's long stride in her anger. For a time January had nothing to say. They were far beyond sight of the camps here, alone in a world of larks, buffalo grass and yellow-brown sagebrush on the hill slopes above. The stillness was enormous. The world as it had been, thought January, before the Americans came . . . Americans wanting beaver skins to sell for hats so they could make money. Americans wanting slaves brought in from Africa so they could grow cotton to sell to make money. Americans wanting land that the Sioux and Shoshone and Cherokee had since time immemorial lived on as hunters and as farmers ... not so that they could farm themselves, but so they could sell it to other whites for farms, so that they - the sellers - could make money.

He'd been poor too long to have turned down a partnership in the American Fur Company had someone offered it to him ... or a hundred acres of Arkansas land baldly stolen from the Cherokee, for that matter. But last night Bridger - who had been all over these mountains - had said that it wasn't just one stream or one valley or one area that was trapped out: it was all of them. Stacks of pelts were piling up behind the AFC tents, and in the enclosure of the Hudson's Bay Company, by the thousands.

Hats for New York. Hats for London. Hats for the world . . . which might go out of fashion tomorrow. For each hat, a beaver struggling frantically against a steel trap underwater until it drowned.

What next will you want?

Here among the hills the windless heat was oppressive. Away to their left the crest of the ridge made a sharp yellow division against the sky. Closer and ahead, a startling, perfectly cone-shaped hill stood apart from the rougher terrain all around, like the ruined pyramids he had encountered in Mexico: 'Could we see them from up there?'

'Climbin' it'd just lose us time.' Shaw pushed his hat back, shaded his eyes. 'They's headed east, so they gotta be makin' for the ford where the river oxbows. That many horses, loaded for a year's trappin', they ain't gonna swim 'em.' Ahead, Morning Star had apparently come to this conclusion herself, and she mounted to ride down the draw to the ford: a dark, straight little figure against the immense prairie sky. Anger still radiated from the set of her back, the angle of her head, but as they came nearer, January saw sadness in her face as well.

Did she understand, January wondered, that as long as her people saw the white men as a tribe like themselves - a potential ally against their particular tribal enemies - they were doomed? Did the Crows understand that as long as they thought they could get the American Fur Company to side with them against the Flatheads, they were doomed? Do ANY of them understand that even the whites who are their friends don't see them as Crow or Blackfeet or Flathead or Sioux, but only as Indians? Savages to be brushed aside because their rights to their land are less important than the Americans' right to make money?

Morning Star delighted him - friendly, clever, bustling, efficient and without the slightest intention of remaining married to Hannibal past the rendezvous' end. Her aim was quite frankly to accumulate as much vermillion and gunpowder as she could with her services as housekeeper and tent-setter and animal-skinner and cook. Yet what would become of her in the long years ahead?

It was as absurd to follow his thoughts into that darkness, as it was to torment himself wondering about Rose: was she well? Was she alive? Would she die in childbed before he ever saw her again? There's nothing you can do about it here, now, today . . .

It marks you, he thought, watching Shaw's pale thin figure move slowly along the side of the draw. It changes you, to come home one evening and find the person you most love in the world dead - as his beautiful Ayasha in Paris had lain dead of the cholera, across the bed in the room they shared. It marks you forever. As if this had happened yesterday instead of five years ago, he still recalled that sickened shock: wait, no, there's been some mistake . . . She and I were going to be together for the rest of our lives . . .

Go back to our mama an' our wives, Shaw had said.

Had Ayasha not died he would not have returned to New Orleans. Would not have met his beautiful Rose . . .

Yet sometimes, waking in the hour before first light, even with Rose beside him whom he loved with the whole of his heart. . . with everything in him he wanted Ayasha back, and the life that they'd lost together. The life he sometimes still felt he was supposed to have had.

He turned his head, sweeping the landscape with his eyes, and there on the pyramid hill, behind them now, a man was standing, watching them from its top.



They rested among the cottonwoods by the river. 'What you want to do, Maestro?'

January broke off a chunk of pemmican from the parfleche his companion had tossed him and considered the sun, halfway from noon to the westward crags. 'How far is it back to camp?'

'If we go straight on up the river, 'bout six miles. If we cross over, we can catch our friend back there, see who he is.'

'You're the one who's paying me,' said January. 'I'm just here to follow orders. Madame -' he turned toward Morning Star - 'you wouldn't happen to know which side of the river the Blackfeet are on, would you?'

'I've not seen their tracks on this side today.' In addition to what she'd taken from Manitou's camp, she'd brought her own rawhide satchel of that mix of dried, shredded meat and rendered fat that seemed to be the standard trail rations of every hunter in the mountains. 'There are forty lodges of Blackfeet, my brothers tell me, led by Silent Wolf, a man of caution and good counsel who has little interest in this secret beaver valley ... I think this man you saw behind us on the butte must be one of the trappers, who held to the Beauty's trail through the night.'

'Makin' it either Boaz Frye or Manitou hisself.' Shaw licked pemmican grease from his fingers, then wiped his hands down the front of his shirt. 'They both bein' unaccounted for as of last night. Or one of the Dutchman's men. Or someone that's followed us from the camp—'

'Who might be working for Edwin Titus,' finished January. 'Or John McLeod. Or whoever it was who tried to lift our hair the other evening. I agree. We need to see who it is.'

Accordingly, after an hour's rest, the three hunters crossed the ford, January uneasily conscious that this course of action would put their return to the first of the rendezvous camps far after sunset. If there were something like three hundred Blackfeet on this side of the Green, it wasn't anywhere he wanted to be come nightfall.

The moment they were in the trees on the eastern bank, January dropped off his horse and shed his corduroy jacket and wide-brimmed slouch hat. With equal speed, Shaw cut saplings with his knife and made a sort of legless scarecrow, which he then lashed upright to the saddle of January's sturdy liver-bay gelding. It wouldn't have fooled a blind grandmother at a hundred paces . . . but the Green was considerably wider than a hundred paces broad at this point, and the man or men behind them would be either among the cottonwoods on the west bank - in which case all they'd be able to see was that there were riders on all three horses - or further back in the hills, in which case ditto. January stretched out under a clump of the huckleberry bushes, rifle at his side, as his companions - and his makeshift double - rode on.

And waited.

Sunlight flashed on the water like flakes of fire. Four deer emerged from the trees upstream, trotted hesitantly to the bank to drink. January wondered what he'd do if the tracker turned out to be Manitou. He guessed the big mountaineer had little concern about anybody's secret beaver valley, but if Manitou had indeed killed the old man in the woods, he'd be well aware that trackers had come investigating the clearing and his camp.

But if Wildman had killed the stranger - and taken a pistol ball in the process - why bother to hide? These mountains belonged jointly to the United States and Britain, and neither nation had anything resembling a lawman on-site (and in fact wouldn't have been permitted by the other to do so). Had Abishag Shaw walked up to Edwin Titus and shot him in the open, the only repercussion he would have had to face would have been from Titus's friends (if he had any), the Company (a serious consideration), or such champions of civilization as Sir William Stewart, who would probably have been distressed, but couldn't have legally done anything except shoot Shaw in return.

Wind brought the smell of dust and drying grass down the draw and across the water; the leaves of the cottonwood flickered and sighed. He'd described them for Rose in his notebook, examined the papery bark with the English magnifying lens she'd sent with him (accompanied by threats of murder in the night if anything happened to it).

Shadows lengthened, the stillness a balm on the heart. At this hour the streets of New Orleans would be clattering with carts, the air jagged with the voices of jostling drunks. Here, the silence was almost magical.

Then a man emerged from the cottonwoods on the far side of the water, leading a mule and a horse. Not Manitou. One less thing to worry about. A mountaineer - even at the distance, across the flashing water, January could see that. Dark beard, dark braids. Wiry build. A wool jacket of the kind sold by the AFC, the indigo dye new and glaring against the softer hues of sagebrush and cottonwood. He carried a rifle, but scabbarded it and led his animals quickly to the ford, bending now and then to study the ground.

The river was still fairly high, and in the cottonwoods on January's side of the water, the little party had again taken care to obliterate their tracks. The ford was rocky, treacherous underfoot. The mule balked, and the newcomer - after some truly choice epithets in the nasal yap of New England - led the animals across. January let them get breast deep, with the man's hands fully occupied with bridle reins and equine hysterics, then stood up and in two bounds reached a flat rock beside the river, his rifle aimed for business.

'I don't mean you harm,' said January immediately, as the man made a move to grab his own weapon and dodge behind the mule.

The man squinted across the glare of the water. 'You're holdin' that thing kinda strangely for a friend.'

January lowered the barrel, but kept his finger on the trigger. 'You're following us a little quietly for a man with good intentions.'

The trapper laughed. January recognized him from around the camp, very young behind his tangle of black beard, twenty or twenty-one at most. 'Like the preacher said when he came out of the widow's house at midnight,' said the young man, 'I realize this looks a little strange. Ben, ain't it? I had four pelts of Made Beaver on you against Manitou, day before yesterday. Wasn't that a sorry to-do? Bo Frye.'

'I thought you might be.' January signed for him to come on. Frye turned his attention back to coaxing the mule up out of the water.

'I'd offer you my hand,' added Frye genially as he reached the bank. 'But if you really doubt my good intentions, you'd be a fool to take it.'

January shifted the rifle to his left hand and held out his right.

'And here I thought I was the only one to hang on to the Beauty's trail,' lamented the young man. 'Tell you what, though, January. I'll go in with you and your friends - that's Shaw with you, ain't it? And the fiddler's squaw? Once the Beauty gets up into the mountains, he'll quit hiding his tracks, and then we can double back to camp, gear up good and follow 'em straight— What is it?' he added, seeing the direction of January's gaze. 'What you lookin' at?'

'Your fancy waistcoat.'

Frye's face colored above the dark beard, and he looked aside.

'Where'd you get something like that out here?' January went on. 'And whose throat did you cut to take it off him?' He extended a finger, to the remains of the crusted blood still visible on the puckered and water-ruined black silk.

The young man's flush deepened. 'Like that preacher said,' he repeated, opening his coat further so that January could see the garment, 'it's not how it looks.'

'I know it's not,' said January. 'We came on the same man, dead on the ridge by Horse Creek.'