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"You swim a lot better than your man," he said. "I hope you shoot that well."
Moving close to her and reaching into the water, he put his right arm under her knees and his left across her back and brought her up. He waded ashore and stood in full sun, holding her dripping body, looking at the beauty of her bronzed Indian skin; at her breasts, which he thought perfect; at her lovely throat and shoulders; and at last at her eyes. What he thought he saw in her eyes he had no words for. It was as if he had lived for twenty-seven years within the prison of self, without communicating a single time to another living soul, to find now, in the miracle of this moment, that he was not alone. He guessed that was what love meant. Still holding her with one arm under her knees and the other under her back, he raised her, so that his lips could touch her, from her knees to her lips. Kissing over her, he moved her back and forth with such ease that she seemed to be weightless. He tossed her with a turning motion and in mid-air caught her, with his fingers now spread against her thighs, and against her chest just below her breasts; and he put his lips to her thighs and up her back to her nape and her hair. He tossed her again and with spread hands caught her at her waist and set her on her feet. With a tentative timid forefinger she touched him gently on the upper muscle of his powerful right arm. She had not known that there were men with such strength. She now would have been only a little surprised if Mick Boone had told her that he had seen this man, to whom she had been sold for good or ill, take two Indians of average size by their necks and smash their heads together with such power that they both dropped dead; that Sam could put a palm with fingers spread against her belly and lift her to arm’s length above his head with the ease with which most men would have lifted an infant; and that he could go under the belly of any beast in her father’s herd and with hands grasping his legs below his knees could put all four feet of the horse off the earth. Her eyes said that she knew he was a mighty one. She was looking at his hands.
Taking the mouth organ from his medicine bag, he played here and there in a few things, trying to find what he wanted; and having found it, he began to dance, solo, back and forth across the lakeshore sands, and a bronzed girl, glistening with melting diamonds, her black mane covering her whole back, stood still and looked at him. He would never know whether the wonderful melody went like the hermit thrush’s song into her mood. For him it was like the scent of warm melting wild honey; like the spring song of the bluebird; like an armful of alpine lilies. He then put the harp away, sniffed the atmosphere and listened, and heard only the sweet low note of the water thrush. He then walked over to his bride.
What he did astonished and frightened her. Bending over and putting his left arm behind her knees, he lifted her; straightened; gave her an upward thrust with his left arm and right hand, so that in the next moment she sat on his left shoulder; and walked over to her clothes. There he let her slide down to his left arm, and as she sat, like a big golden bird, staring at him, he looked at her eyes and smiled. Adam and Eve were measuring the wonder of one another. He then uttered words which, once spoken, he would find ten times as hard to say again: "Lotus-Lilah, I reckon this white nigger loves you." She was his wife, his woman, his mate, his companion on the trail as long as there were trails for free men to ride on; through the valleys, until these were choked with cabbages and people; and up the mountains to the highest peaks, as long as men felt compelled to seek God.
He set her down and they began to dress. He thought she was surrendering to his maleness but he was not ready to take her, not yet. There was a huge emptiness in him to be filled, and so little of it that could be filled with sexual passion. When they were both dressed he turned to her, where she stood waiting and looking at him, and putting his arms across her shoulders under her hair, he held her close to him, murmuring down at her, "Mine, all mine." Then, putting hands under her arms at the shoulders, he held her straight out, at arm’s length, and looked at her. With her feet still off the earth, her wonderful black lustrous eyes looking at him, he fetched her close against him, from her toes to her face, and pressed his bearded mouth into her hair.
"Well," he said, releasing her, "I reckon we best be on our way. You won’t be eating bitterroots for a long time." The bitterroot, which her people called spetlem, and boiled until it was like a fondant, was far too bitter for the whiteman’s taste. Because she and her people had not lived sumptuously, in the way of the Crows, he was eager to cook feasts for her on the long journey south. He hoped to get grouse for supper.
"You like grouse?" he asked her. "Geese? `. . . Quai1?" He tried to imitate the calls of these birds. The song or talk of the prairie chicken was so startling and in ways human that it gave a man a queer feeling; and the quail and white-winged dove could lift the hair on his neck. He imitated the cries by pinching his nostrils and honking and whistling, and by fluffing his hair to make feathers and flapping his hands to make wings. He made her laugh for the first time. That for him meant that his marriage was getting along.
7
SAM HAD NEVER thought much about love. He had had good parents. He had never as a child felt unwanted and unloved. His father, a rather ineffectual giant whose chief passions were music and philosophy, and who was sometimes found reading Descartes and Locke and Tom Paine when he should have been tending his small general store, had far more interest in Descartes’ effort "to attain to the knowledge of all things" than he had in the family larder. Sam took his love of music from his father; his practical sense in a world where a man had to adapt or perish, and his love of adventure and freedom, he took from his English mother. His father was French and Scotch with generous measures of still other peoples: he had, Sam had concluded, so many strains in him that they were constantly at war with one another. But he loved learning while his mother loved life. Daniel Minard had a library, small but excellent, and a hankering to write a book someday. Sam thought he might write a book, if he ever left the West and went back home. Some of the mountain men were about as illiterate as a man could be—such as Kit Carson and Jim Bridger, neither of whom, it was said, could read or write. Some were educated. Some had written books about their adventures in the West.
At nineteen Sam had told his parents that he guessed he would go out beyond the Mississippi and take a look around. He had intended to stay only a year or so but in the frontier town of Independence he had been fascinated by tales of Kit Carson and other mountain men. Then one day he threw a bully over his shoulders with such force that he broke both the man’s arms, and fled from the law, as many young men had before him. Long before his first vision of the Tetons he knew that the free trappers were his people and that these mountains would be his home.
On his way out he had gathered all the tales he could of the men who had gone before him. There was Edward Rose, who, if still alive, was an old cuss now. Negro, Cherokee, and white, Rose had worn (said those who knew him) the most fiendish expression this side of hell, his face scarred with old knife wounds, a crooked lip pulled into a perpetual snarl, and eyes as cruel and cold as the falcon’s. Most of his nose had been chewed off; he had an ugly brand on his forehead that some enemy had put there with a red-hot iron; he had buckshot and bullets in both legs; and like Jim Bridger, he had for a time carried an arrowhead embedded in the flesh of his back. About thirty-five years ago he had come west and joined the Crows and had become a powerful chief, and because of his reckless courage in battle against the Crows’ red enemies his name had been changed from Cut-Nose to Five-Scalps. Jim Beckwourth, who had also become a Crow chief, said Rose was killed about the time Hugh Glass had his dreadful fight with the grizzly. But there were those who said that Beckwourth was the biggest liar in the West next to Bridger.