Mountain Man

"Flies in the pemmican, skip to my Lotus

Flies in the pemmican, skip to my Lotus,

Flies in the pemmican, skip to my Lou!"

She gave him a marvelous smile for that: she knew the word "pemmican."

"You know, Mrs. Minard, I think I’ll send for a banjo."

"Ban—jo."

"Banjo." While pretending to strum an instrument he made banjo sounds with his lips. When he left home the only banjo he knew was the long-necked fretless instrument, used in black-faced minstrel shows, English ballads, and popular Irish and Scottish tunes of the day. A letter from his brother David said there was now a banjo with five strings and frets in the fingerboard, and that the playing style was changing from chording to a developed solo. That all sounded good.

"Hey, git along, git along Josey!

Hey, git along, Jim along Joe!"

She smiled at him. He brought her hands to his lips and kissed them, both backs and palms, and then the lingers. He thought they were getting along all right. When the moon rose above the trees he pointed and said, "Moon."

"Moon."

"A Mozart moon." When the moon was round and melonripe, like the one up there, he wanted to make his mouth organ sound like a French horn, so that he could play a horn solo; he wanted to express the music in winds, the murmuring lullabies in flowing water, the exquisite bird arias, the great lovers’ sighs made by trees—for the Almighty, his father had told him, had the finest orchestras and the most magnificent symphonies in the world. It was his father who had told him that Knecht’s "Musical Portrait of Nature" had fertilized the soil for Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. On the pianoforte his father had striven to paint tones—to evoke mental images with auditory impressions; on his mouthpiece Sam could do a fair imitation of the flute, cello, and oboe, but he failed completely when he tried to bring forth the round golden bell-tones of the horn.

"What fun we’ll have," he said, squeezing her. "No taxes, no policemen, no government, no neighbors, no preachers—only the four of us, eating and sleeping, playing and singing." He turned and lightly kissed her forehead, cheeks, lips, but she gave no response. He had thought that Eve was the same in all women. Did she know that some of the finest singers on earth were birds? On their long ride south they would hear them, the meadow lark, the hermit thrush, the wood thrush, the grosbeak, the oriole. He guessed he would have one more pipeful and they would roll in. Standing, he looked at the bluff above them and at the country roundabout, to be sure that the only approach an enemy could make was from the front. He then sat, and while he smoked and looked at his wife her gaze moved over his face, as though to fix it in memory, or as though marking the differences between red faces and white. He supposed she did not know what to make of Whiteman music, or of his kissing, for the redmen did not kiss their women. Perhaps she was wondering when he was going to take her, with the brutal and savage passion with which most of the males of the mammalia took their females. Poor little Lotus! She would have a few more days of peace.

Yes, it was a Mozart moon. September was almost here; at this season the nights in the high northern mountains seemed to have been lifted off the glaciers. But he had plenty of bedding. Putting his pipe away, he rolled her into a buffalo robe as though she were a doll. Raising the part on which her head lay, he dragged pine needles and twigs under the fur so that she would have a kind of pillow, though he was not sure that the red people used pillows; and he put the revolver and knife within a fold of the robe, within swift reach of her hand. If enemies came, he said to her, he would get four and she must get two. He now wrapped a robe around him and lay at her side, with the rifle between them. A thousand stars were out, and the moon among them looked like a round golden note from a French horn. Sam was not a religious man in the sense of creeds and churches but he felt a powerful affinity to the earth and to the heavens and to all the living things around him, except the professional killers. He looked at the moon and the stars and began to talk.

He told his silent and listening bride that the Almighty had created a beautiful world and that the Rocky Mountains, the cordilleras of the continental spine, or Stony or Snowy Mountains, as some men called them, were the marrow, heart, and soul of it. He had not seen them but common sense told him that by comparison the Andes were only foothills and the Alps were for children to climb. This conceit made him grin in the robe. Together they would explore the Gallatin and Madison and a hundred other valleys; the Tetons, the Bighorns, the Green River, Columbia, the Blue, the Big Belt; and a thousand peaks that any man alive and joyful wanted to reach the top of; and the rivers and lakes and the high white cascades against the snowlines. Why any man would willingly live in a city, with its infernal stinks and noises, he would never know. Why a man would live back there among the hummocks called mountains, east of the Mississippi, when he could come west to God’s finest sculpturings, both Greek and Gothic, and be his own lord and king and conscience, with no laws except that thc brave survived and the cowardly perished, and no asylums for crazy men who could no longer look at city life without shrieking—and no churches except this in which she lay, no priests except the larks and wrens and thrushes, no bible except this land’s language for those who could read it. This was the life he loved. This was where he would live until an arrow or a bullet found him, and when that hour came he would be content to let the wolves strip his bones clean and leave them upon this great map of the magnificent ....

The girl lying at his side understood only a few of his words but she understood the emotion, for in its essence his mood was her mood. She was thrilled by both felicity and fright when his hand moved over to touch her, to squeeze her arm, or (once) to spread out flat on the robe over her navel. Strong emotion she understood, for her own people, all the red people, were supercharged; but she did not understand a man, white or brown, who for hours would do no more to his woman than to her. She would never know that for the pure glory of it a romantic man was falling in love.

The next day her astonishment and wonder continued to grow.

He tarried in friendly land, turning aside from his straightest course to camp by a mountain lake. He looked at the cold high-mountain water and told himself that he needed a bath. In his sly but human way he wanted to see his wife with no garments on her. He sniffed at his arms but the only odor there was the smoke essences used to tan buckskin. Like all the free trappers, whose lives depended solely on their alertness and courage, he had many times saturated his leather clothing in the smoke of burning cedar, sage, and stinkbush to overcome the human scent. The odor of smoke, ta

After tying the horses and placing his weapons where he could swiftly seize them as he stripped off his clothing. He knew that his wife was watching him; he supposed she was wondering if he intended to strip her down. Poor frightened doe, did she think her hour had come for rape? He made a sign to her to take her garments off and in a few moments she stood naked; but he had already plunged into the cold waters and was swimming. Then he stood, treading water, looking over at her, with water ru