Mountain Man

Sam said she wouldn’t come; it would break her heart to take her away from the graves. Besides, he had thought he would do a little chirking up and get a papoose for his medicine bag. With mock gravity. Bill looked all around him, as though to see this Indian tribe and that one, and decide toward which Sam was taking his romantic interest. "I don’t see no Burnt-Thighs," he said, "ner any Broken-Arrers, no Yankataus, no Pian-Kashas, no  Cut-Throats." These were all names for members of the Sioux nation. "It wooden be a Digger, I doan expect. Ner a Snake. Jist which one air ye headin torst nohow'?"

"The Flatheads," Sam said, refilling his tin plate with boiled elk.

"Wall now," said Bill, "I think ye be actin real plum smart, I shorely do. The Flatheads, they ain’t no better varmints. They’s the only red people ain’t killed a whiteman yit. But one thing, Sam, I allus figgered, the furder a man is from his in-laws the longer his marriage will last. The hull doggone tribe will expect ya to feed them if ye live within five hundred miles."

"I had thought of that," Sam said.

The Flatheads were good honey, said Bill, filling his pipe. They were scairt to death of the Blackfeet, so would never come to visit him because they would never dare leave home. Did he have his sugar plum picked out?

"I saw her last spring."

"She might be some other man’s filly now."

"Might be," Sam said.

"Chief’s gal?"

"Tall Mountain."

"Waugh! A princess!" said Bill. He fixed his large, rather bulging pale-blue eyes on Sam’s face. He reckoned he had seen the critter a year or two ago when he was pulling leather for Pare’s Hole. He knocked his pipe out, filled it, listened to the night sounds, sniffed the breeze coming up the creek, put the glowing end of an ember to his pipe bowl, puffed a few times, his bearded cheeks caving in with each puff, and said, "Wall now, I wish ye luck, I shorely do. As fer me, twenty-six winters has snowed on me in these here mountains and even a nigger or a greaser would larn a few things in all that time. I otta could tell bull from cow. I know deer is deer and grizzly paws ain’t a woman’s soft belly and a cactus ain’t her lips but I never could find the tracks in a woman’s heart."

He was having trouble with his pipe. He put another ember to the bowl and puffed hard; and at last he said, "Sam, let me tell ye. Fer ten year I packed me a squaw, a Cheye

"I tell ye, Sam, if she be female, no matter if redskin, blackskin, or whiteskin, she will torment the life outta ye fer foofarraw. Day and night she wi1l. I know mountain men as has tried them all, even the Diggers, even the Snakes, even the niggers; and I been tole the nigger she is as sweet as Hank Cady’s honey. But I swear by the ole hoss that carried me safe twenty mile with fifty Blackfeet ru

Sam said he ought to. He wanted to see the woman before going south to the Uintahs to trap. Bill said he might amble up the river to see if she was all right: it made him powerful oneasy to think of a white woman only a wide river from Blackfeet country and not a friend in three hundred miles. What was her name?

"Don’t know," Sam said. "She wouldn’t talk."

"Then she ain’t a woman. What should I take her?"

Jerked buffalo or elk; a big warm robe, if he had an extra; sugar, salt, Hour, and wild flower seeds, if he found any ripe along the way. He would take her a hull pile of stuff, Bill said.

"What’s the name yore sugar plum?"

Sam stared at his pipe. He had decided that his woman’s unpronounceable Flathead name would never do but he had not settled on a new name. Some wild flower, maybe—Lily, Daisy, Rose—there weren’t many flower names given to women. He might call her Lotus.

Bill did nothing to hide his skepticism. After looking at Sam a long moment he said, "I didden like the names my squaws so I give them all the same name. Lucy, it was. There war a gal named Lucy I liked when I was a kid. Sam and Lotus. Wall now, ye expect ta have some little Sams and Lotuses?"

"Sure," Sam said with a genial grin. "Two mebbe, one of each."

"Jist right," said Bill. "Wood ticks on my joh

Sam turned to look at him.

"That’s what I heerd, Sam. The hull doggone pligamus shit-taree, Brigham Young and all. In a few years we’ll be pushed right outta our homes. The Injuns have knowed it all along. Twenty year, thirty, there won’t be a butfler left—nothin from hell to breakfast but damn fools plowin ground and plantin cabbages. I ar a trapper an a mountain man but there ain’t no future fer my kind. They’ll push us inta Canada and then inta the ocean." Bill knocked his pipe out. He looked around him. "Ten thousan, twenty thousan, the hull pligamus mess is headed fer this country and if I wuzzn’t a Christian I’d hope they all starve to death. It makes me sick in my boudins jist ta think about it."

"Me too," said Sam, looking round him and wondering where he could sleep. Most of the mountain men whom he knew flung themselves flat on their backs, arms outflung like a babe’s, and snored with a violence that put a quiet sleeper out of his mind. Bill began with low rumblings and whistlings and wheezings that climbed steadily to a crescendo of gulping and roaring, and then to a shattering fortissimo. After a few bars that a man could have heard a mile away the wild clamor of frog music in Bill’s throat seemed to collapse among his tonsils and adenoids, and he gasped and gurgled and seemed about to die. But like a bullfrog with a bad cold, working out sonata variations on a theme, he would then blow out a few tremendous snorts, strangle until his whole body quivered in the torment, and begin again with the rumblings and whistlings, in another key.

Knowing that he couldn’t sleep within fifty yards of Bill, Sam said. "Reckon I’ll take a little stroll."

Bill turned on him the knowing grin of a man who had had more than his share of women. "Ye act restless," he said. "Yer lotus gal will take that outta you.”

"I reckon," Sam said. With his rifle he moved away into the woods. When Bill was asleep he would slip back for his bedroll and go down the creek a hundred yards. He looked up at the stars. The constellations said the time was about midnight.

6

IT TURNED out to be less of an ordeal than Sam had expected. Tall Mountain pretended that fifteen or twenty other trappers would be along any day to make offers for his daughter, each with ten packhorses laden with gifts. Sam smiled at that. The chief feigned astonishment that his brother Sam Minard, Chief Long Talons, had been able to spend so many moons away from this girl, who was lovelier than wild flowers, the sky, the clouds, and trees in their spring dress; for did the bull elk eager to mate with the cow hide in a thicket and sulk in his bull-powers? Sam explained in sign language that he had had to catch a lot of beaver, to trade for a lot of gifts, including the fine copper kettle he had brought for Tall Mountain, bravest and noblest of all warriors, to cook his elk in. Would he have dared to come with empty packhorse to the greatest chief on earth and offer for his most beautiful daughter a handful of cloudberries and a broken knife? The chief conceded the reasonableness of all that, and probed another spot. He said, with words and signs and interpreters, that he had had more trouble than a rabbit in a wolf’s den keeping this girl virginal for so long, denying her to other palefaces, who came snorting like studs and with mountains of gifts; turning away immense fortunes that included the fastest horses from the Crow nation, enough rifles to exterminate the Blackfeet, enough kettles to cook all the buffalo on the prairies, all because he so deeply loved his brother Chief Long Talons. His grief had been inconsolable. He had become very ill. For such devotion, patience, forbearance, did he not deserve some special gifts? Brother Long Talons said he surely did, and from his luggage drew forth a two-gallon keg of rum. When Tall Mountain’s black eyes saw what it was there came into them the joy seen in the eyes of small children. His bronzed face smiled. He was ready to get drunk.