The Shirt On His Back

Chapter 25



January opened his mouth to make the obvious reply, then closed it again, recalling that sense of seeing some piece of a puzzle fall into place . . . 'Did you break his leg?' he asked.

Flecks of color came up under the mountaineer's heavy tan, and he looked away. 'He had pistols,' he said. 'I saw that fool lantern of his a mile away and thought it might have been you, or one of those numbskulls that were out all over the hills that night followin' Beauty and the Dutchman. Bodenschatz put a ball in my arm 'fore I ever saw him. He had a second pistol, and I knew I had to get it from him fast . . .' Some memory flickered for a moment like the reflection of that speck of lantern fire in his eyes.

'I was angry,' he added, more softly. 'At that pissant Blankenship. At you, as I thought, comin' after me. At all them damn cretins tramplin' all over the hills tryin' to find their way to the one best beaver stream in the mountains . . . Doesn't matter.' He shook his head, like a bull in fly season, goaded beyond enduring by a thousand biting demons that he could not see. 'Anger comes over me ... I hurt him . . . pretty bad, I think. His bones was like dry sticks.' For an instant his face convulsed: shame and pain and grief at what he had done. 'But I never took a knife to him. I splinted up his leg and tore up his shirt to bind his ribs with, for I'd broke a number of 'em. Then I made a shelter for him, under that big deadfall, and made a fire, and give him my own shirt, for I could smell it was comin' to rain again.'

From the blanket beside him Manitou picked up his second parfleche, half-emptied, and handed it to January, who had to force himself to stop eating the pemmican lest he devour everything and leave nothing for the others. Their companions still lay like the dead on the apishamores spread on the ground: Shaw's bare arms and hands criss-crossed with makeshift bandages from his torn-up shirt; Hannibal and Veinte-y-Cinco clung together in sleep like some tattered Hansel and Gretel, adrift in a forest that neither could hope to survive. January wondered who was taking care of Pia back at the camp.

'Did he wake?' he asked at length.

'Nah.' The big man sighed. 'I thought of wakin' him, to ask his forgiveness. But I was riled from the fight an' could still feel the thunder spirit scratchin' to get out. I knew the old man had to be with someone. He musta come into the camp that day, maybe seen me when I fought you. I had to get away from him, where I couldn't see him: with the fire burnin' before him, he'd be safe enough. I thought I'd move on, soon as it got light. Him an' Franz - I figured it'd be Franz with him - would be easy enough to lose in the mountains.'

He sat for a time, looking out into the still blue cold of the dawn woods. Then: 'I laid down, but the only thing in my mind - like a voice whisperin' stronger an' stronger - was that it'd be so easy to go back ... I got my horses an' went to where I knew Silent Wolf was camped. Silent Wolf is a medicine man, as well as the war chief.'

The trapper turned his arm, as if through the elk-hide war- shirt, the blanket capote, he could see the scars of a hundred slivers of fatwood, driven under the skin and lighted to bring his soul back from the frontiers of homicidal madness. 'I told him what I need to do, to keep that thunder spirit on its own side of the fence. He'd done it before. Blackfeet are good at it. The best.' His hand brushed his body, as if recalling every one of those shocking scars that covered him as if it were a blessing. 'Time we're movin',' he added and glanced at the gold sunlight as it washed across the rock escarpments behind them, the twilight below dissolving into color and brightness. 'You feel up to it?'

'As opposed to sitting here,' said January, rising, 'I could run all the way back.'

While January bridled the mules - stiffened muscles, knife cuts and bruises shrieking with every move - Manitou woke Shaw, Hannibal and Veinte-y-Cinco, who split the last of the pemmican among them. Day was growing bright and chill. Shaw looked out over the valley, toward the ford and the stumpy red-brown thumb of Grindstone Butte: 'What's our chance of makin' the camp by tonight?'

'God willin' an' the creek don't rise,' replied the medical student from Ingolstadt.

Manitou led them down off the high mesa eastward, and into the rougher country along the New Fork, watching the western skyline for the point at which they could swing west again and come down near the site of William Bonneville's old fort. From there they could follow the Green River to the rendezvous camps from the north. They moved with a kind of swift deliberateness, Shaw and Manitou calling frequent halts, to rest the tired animals or so that their tracks could be covered. On these occasions January, Hannibal and Veinte-y- Cinco took turns foraging and resting, for even riding the mule, January found it was difficult to keep going for more than an hour at a time. He didn't like the way Hannibal and the woman sometimes clung to the saddle, as if it was only with the greatest effort that they kept from slipping off unconscious. Rough stretches of open grassland alternated with thin lodgepole timber; in the stillness the drone of a bee, or the far-off popping cry of a grouse, seemed loud as gunshots. Again and again he turned to scan the horizons and the sky for the telltale dust of horses.

As Iron Heart, he was sure, was watching for the dust they might raise.

'But now the poison is gone,' said Veinte-y-Cinco, at one of these halts, 'and Boden is of no more use to Iron Heart, will Iron Heart pursue us still?'

'Iron Heart's a man of honor,' said Manitou. 'If he's made a vow to help Boden with his vengeance, he'll do it . . . An' there's no tellin' what Boden'll feel obligated to do to help him, in return.'

The dryness of the hills was worsened by the thin dryness of the air, and though small game - rabbits, ground squirrels and grouse - seemed everywhere in the sagebrush, firing a gun was out of the question. In answer to Shaw's question, Manitou confirmed that the winter before - 1835-36 - Iron Heart and his Omahas had indeed camped near Fort Ivy, which was close enough to Manitou's own winter hunting-grounds that he preferred to come down to trade there, rather than going on to Laramie and dealing with the AFC.

'I trapped in Company brigades for two years,' said Manitou. 'Hundred dollars a year, and when time came to pay out, you found most of that hundred dollars, you owed 'em for the cost of your traps an' the liquor you'd drunk at the last rendezvous. Hudson's Bay gave me a better price, and after one good year I started trappin' on my own. Preferred it, anyway. Longer I stay out here, seems like the shorter fuse I got, when 1 come amongst my own kind.'

He only shook his head over the machinations of the Hudson's Bay Company and the AFC, though he agreed that it was probably Titus who'd set the AFC Crows on to January, Shaw and Gil Wallach after the feast. 'Part of the game,' he said. 'Red Arm don't really care who they scalp, long as Titus pays 'em in good knives an' gunpowder. It's all White Men's Business. But if it comes to war,' he added somberly, 'the tribes'll fight for the British, like they did back in '12. The Brits keep their treaties. America'll back its settlers, an' there's more of them every year.'

His voice held an echo of sadness, as Sir William Stewart's had, back in the crowded banquet-tent, when he'd said wistfully: it'll all be gone . . .

The streets of Independence, January recalled, had been crowded not only with trappers and traders and bullwhackers and trail hands stocking up for the Santa Fe caravans, but also with farmers, farmers' wives and their children. Ordinary working-folk, who spoke with shining eyes of 'free land' in Oregon, as if the United States already held uncontested title to those untouched miles - and as if it were simply free for the taking.

'Will you go back to the rendezvous at all?' asked Hannibal, later in the afternoon as they sheltered among a few thin- trunked pines at the head of a draw.

'If you need me.' Manitou spoke without turning his head, scanning the jumble of gullies that fell away before them. 'Like I said, no tellin' what Boden'll get up to, to keep Iron Heart on his good side - an Iron Heart'11 sure want somethin' from him, to go off chasin' me through the mountains. I'd as soon go on, but if you need bait, I'll stay.'

'It's good of you.'

Manitou shrugged. 'Every book, every play I ever read 'bout vengeance, I never read one of 'em that ends well . . . Every man I talked to that's done it, they say the same. A god implants in mortal guilt whenever he wants utterly to confound a house . . . Was that Aeschylus as said that? When he spoke of turnin' vengeance over to justice an' lettin' justice have its way? I'll do as I can, to make an end.'

January glanced back up to the top of the rocks behind them, where Shaw crouched, a tattered, feral scarecrow, watching the sky to the south-west. Easy enough to speak of making an end, when one had something to go back to. Without family to return to - without a life beyond vengeance - he saw, suddenly, that the quest itself became life. That Frankenstein needed his monster to chase, because without the chase he, too, would be swallowed up in his own inner darkness.

And what do we do,' asked Hannibal, getting stiffly up - Veinte-y-Cinco had to help him - from the foot of the tree where he'd been sitting, 'if Iron Heart and his warriors have gone back to the rendezvous, to make sure Boden comes up with another plan of vengeance while we're out here?'

'Ain't much we can do.'

'An' it ain't a problem that's like to arise.' Shaw dropped lightly from the rocks, knocking bark and pine needles from his bandaged hands. 'Supposin' that's their dust we got, comin' up the draw from the east.'



'That wouldn't be Sir William's hunting party,' inquired Hannibal wistfully, even as he collected the last of the water- skins, 'heading back to the camp?'

'He'd be comin' due west.' Manitou shaded his eyes against the slant of the sun. 'Dust's in the south. Looks like, along our same route.'

'We split up?' Shaw checked the loads on Mary and Martha, his long Kentucky rifles. When they'd slipped away from the Omaha war camp, Veinte-y-Cinco had managed to retrieve three rifles, but the warriors who'd taken the captives' knives had kept them. Manitou was the only man who had powder and ball.

'Give 'em a horse trail to follow.' Manitou tossed one of his knives to Shaw; pulled a spare skinning-knife from his moccasin to hand to January. 'These poor beasts are so tired, I doubt they could outrun 'em.'

'I'll take 'em on north.' Shaw was already unwinding reins from trees. 'Those rocks we passed at the top of the ridge 'bout four miles back—'

'We should make it.'

'Once I turn the horses loose I'll head for the camp,' went on Shaw. 'Let 'em know we need help bad.' He held out one of his rifles to Manitou - January didn't even want to think about the Kentuckian's chances of making it the ten miles back to the Green River, after leading the Omahas several miles further along the ridge.

Hannibal - who had shown a surprisingly adept touch in such things - scratched the tracks from around their campsite with a branch.

Veinte-y-Cinco touched Shaw's arm as he started to move off: 'You make it back to camp, you tell Pia—'

She hesitated. Tell her what? thought January. That she's on her own, at age thirteen, in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, with no home to go back to, dependent utterly on the likes of Edwin Titus and Mick Seaholly?

A slave cabin shared with twenty other people, and a drunken lunatic master thrown in for lagniappe, seemed like a sanctuary in comparison.

Veinte-y-Cinco's voice was almost a whisper. 'Tell her that her mama loves her.'

Shaw put his hand briefly to the woman's dirty cheek, then turned away. With the horse and the mules he headed off up the ridge, clumsily dusting at the tracks to make it look as if an effort at concealment had been made. Manitou led the way downslope to where a deadfall made a sort of road toward stonier ground that would hold no tracks. From there they doubled on their trail and moved back south toward the nearest cover, a distant tangle of huckleberry in a dip of ground. They went as swiftly as they could, but both Hannibal and Veinte- y-Cinco lagged, despite themselves, and it felt to January as if the hoofbeats of the Indians - still some miles off - hammered in his head. As if the sun was nailed to the sky above the ridge, never to go down again. As soon as they could, they went to ground - the thicket indefensible if they were discovered, but enough, January prayed, to shield them from enemy eyes until the Indians had ridden past.

After what felt like over an hour he heard the hooves, dim with distance as they swung on to Shaw's trail. Manitou lay with his ear on the ground for a longer time yet, waiting until they were far off before he signaled them to move on. It was halfway to darkness by then, and Hannibal was falling further and further behind, the leg that he'd broken eighteen months before visibly weakening. They were in timber now, the rocks Shaw had spoken of still some distance off. January recalled they were a couple of boulders and a sort of granite elbow, close to twenty feet tall, thrusting up from the ground amid a tangle of sagebrush and laurel. He tried to picture where defenders could situate themselves to hold off a determined attack and failed.

And it didn't matter. Behind them he half-guessed, half- heard what might have been hooves, glanced back - Manitou grabbed Hannibal by the arm and dragged him along, though the rocks weren't even in sight in the slow-gathering twilight. Veinte-y-Cinco fell back beside January, hurrying her steps to his, looking back also . . .

Damn it, it's not my imagination, she hears it, too . . .

'I'll fire first,' Manitou said. 'You others, keep your rifles pointed but don't shoot 'til I say. Indians they mostly don't have enough powder or ball to waste it on a threat. You handle loading, Sun Mouse? Good. Winter Moon, you see anything big enough to get our backs against?'

Every tree - fallen or otherwise - in the dusky forest seemed uniformly less than a foot in diameter . . .

The hooves were definitely audible, and he could see movement behind them in the trees, on both sides, too . . .

Christ, did they get Shaw? He'd heard no shots—

'There!'

It didn't look like much of a bastion - a dip in the ground formed when a lightning-struck tree had fallen, the trunk itself small, but a tangle of branches still relatively fresh. In the gloaming, it might be enough to confuse attackers' aim. They ran for it, skidding and stumbling on the slope of the ground, January thinking, in spite of himself: Rose, I should never have left Rose by herself with a baby coming . . .

The thought that he'd never see her again was almost worse than the thought that he was going to die.

Two painted horses flashed past them as they neared the fallen tree, wheeled to cut them off from it. Manitou raised his rifle and fired, one of the riders toppling and two others swinging in from the other side. They were still twenty yards from the log, and January knew that this was as good as they were going to get. He raised his rifle, put his back to Manitou's, covering the horses that whirled close, then veered away, ghostly shapes in the lowering dark. He recognized Iron Heart, and Dark Antlers, and other men who'd taken them before. Recognized, too, Franz Bodenschatz, in his bright Mexican coat and with his big American horse, riding at the back of the war party. Two riders charged in from either side, January shifting aim to cover them both—

A rifle crashed from somewhere in the dimness of the woods behind them, and the Indian Manitou had called Left Hand fell somersaulting from his horse's bare back, struck the ground with the pinwheeling confusion of a man already dead.

Two more rifles spoke.

Shaw couldn't have gotten to camp that fast. Stewart?

And close to a hundred other Indians emerged howling from the twilight.