Boone's Lick

After that speech Corporal Botchford was so out of breath that he sat down on an overturned bucket and glared at the old wild man in the cage.

"The Indians call him the Man of the Morning," he said, which caused Uncle Seth to perk up.

"Oh, that's him, by golly," he said. "He was way over at Fort Pierre the last time I saw him. Dick and I gave him a ride. He's aged a bunch since then."

"I guess he would, traveling all over the country, preaching his rant,"

Botchford said. "It's because of the likes of him that we've got sixteen chopped-up dead people scattered all over these plains."

109

The old man in the cage just went on chanting, as if we didn't exist. The few Indians lazing around the fort didn't seem to be paying him any mind at all.

"Do you feed him?" Ma asked. "He looks pretty starved down."

"Not starved down enough!" the corporal said. "I'd hang him right now if it was my choice, but it ain't my choice."

"Why hang a preacher for preaching?" Ma asked. "I've heard plenty of white preachers say the same thing: the good dead will all be raised up to a new day, and the others will burn."

G.T. was getting spooked by all this talk of shit floods and the dead rising up.

"That's why I don't like sermons," he said. "I think it would be a better world if all the dead people just stayed in their graves, where it's comfortable."

"Give that old man some tobacco, Seth," Ma said.

"Hell, if you've got tobacco to spare, give me some," Corporal Botchford said. "I'm the fellow who just sold you a fine mule too cheap."

Uncle Seth gave them both a little tobacco. He even slipped the old Indian a little antelope jerky. When we rolled out of Fort Reno we could hear the Man of the Morning, still singing.

"I can see where listening to that all day might make a man jumpy," Uncle Seth said.

"It's just preaching, Seth," Ma said. "I despise it that they've caged him like that."

7 THE farther north we went, the colder it got; in those days of bitter chill Uncle Seth's gimpy knee began to plague him. Some mornings Ma had to walk him around a little while, holding his arm, like you might do a lame horse, before he could get his knee to start working fairly well.

Once in a while we'd even hear him groan in his sleep. When he was awake he complained plenty, tracing the trouble all the way back to the day the Civil War started, although it had been the day after it ended when he accidentally shot himself.

"Seth, you can complain all the way back to Adam and it won't make you young again," Ma said. "You shot yourself in the knee, and that's that."

What a

the need to help Uncle Seth loosen up his knee every morning meant that we got off to a late start. Besides, we were in high country and it was already past the middle of December, which meant that we were traveling in the short days. It seemed as if the sun barely rose above the mountains before it started down again. Snow threatened nearly every day, and some days it did more than threaten. We saw no Indians, and no more buffalo, although Uncle Seth did kill a large cow elk, out of a herd we surprised one morning.

110

With the weather so sharp and the terrain unfamiliar, we didn't risk traveling after dark, so most days we couldn't make much more than ten miles. At that we were lucky, I thought, because we were traveling a fairly smooth plain, with not too many humps or bumps in it. The mountains to the west looked too high to even think about crossing. G.T.

didn't like the mountains, or the thick forests on them, either.

"There could be a thousand bears, in a forest that thick," he said.

As we got closer to the fort where we were expecting to find Pa, everybody's mood got tense, except Ma's. She didn't seem to think it was anything out of the ordinary to plod along in the deeps of winter, in a country full of violent Indians, to find a man she hadn't seen in nearly two years. She was a

"If it was June you could loiter, but it ain't June," she pointed out.

It was clear to all of us that Uncle Seth wasn't nearly as eager to come on Pa as Ma was, even though Pa was his brother and his business partner.

"Dick Cecil does not like to be criticized, by women or anyone else,"

Uncle Seth remarked one night, while we were making supper off some of the cow elk he had killed. The meat was a little stringy, but it still beat mush.

Ma just gave him a mild look. It was clear that Pa's preference on that point didn't mean beans to her.

"I haven't come all this way to kiss his feet, if that's what you suppose," Ma said. "I have a few likes and dislikes of my own, you know."

"I speculate that it's mainly that Indian family of his that you don't like," Uncle Seth said.

Ma just shrugged, as if she were a little disgusted by his line of reasoning.

"Don't speculate," she said. "Mind your own business and I'll mind mine and Dick's.

"In some ways you have less sense than anybody I know," she added, after a pause.

"Now, that's a wild opinion if I ever heard one," Uncle Seth said.

"I wish we'd get to a fort," Neva said. "I'd like to hear someone play a fiddle or something. There's no excitement in this travel."

"I guess you'd be excited enough if some scalping Indians got after you,"

G.T. said.

The next day we saw our second grizzly. It was about a mile away, across a snowy meadow, standing up on its hind legs, looking around.

"Get ready to shoot," G.T. urged Uncle Seth.

111

"Settle down," Uncle Seth said. "It's just a bear minding its own business. It hasn't given us any reason to shoot."

The bear never came any closer, or gave any reason to shoot, though we kept it in sight most of that day. It ambled along north, still about a mile away, as if it meant to keep us company at a comfortable distance.

"There would be nothing to keep it from sneaking in after dark and eating us all," G.T. said.

That night the moon shone unusually bright, so bright that it dimmed out the stars.

"It's getting toward the solstice," Uncle Seth observed. "Means winter's here. That bear we seen needs to be looking for itself a den."

The next morning was unusually cold. The mules' breath condensed in sizable clouds. Uncle Seth was a long time getting to his feet, even after Ma brought him three cups of coffee. In Fort Laramie we had all bought heavy gray coats, with hoods for our heads. I didn't wear mine often, because of the weight, but I wore it this morning and was glad to have it. Neva was the only one of us who seemed to like the cold.

"I'd like to go where it's colder than this," she said. "I'd like to go clean to the pole."

"You may get your wish, the way this weather feels," Uncle Seth said.

Although all of us knew, in our hpaHc tkaf T™

were traveling to a certain place, to look for a certain person, we had been rolling on for so long that it seemed that rolling on was just our life, now. The old life we had had in Boone's Lick seemed far away, not just across distance but across time too. I could hardly imagine going back there and having a stopped life again.

That wasn't the way Ma seen it, of course. For us it might be a new way of life, but for her it had a plain purpose.