Mountain Man

It was Caleb Greenwood, squawman, mountain man, and scout who had changed Beckwourth’s life and made him the Devil’s own brother. As the story came to Sam, Caleb and a few companions had unwittingly killed a couple of Crows, and still had the two wet scalps when half the Crow nation surrounded them. To save the lives of his men Caleb had convinced a Crow chief that Beckwourth was a Crow—that when a band of Crows had been captured by the Shians Jim was a Crow boy among those captured. Years later when Beckwourth and Bridger were fleeing for their lives Beckwourth was captured and taken to a Crow village. Having seen him with Greenwood several Crows recognized him as a brother; and so all the older women were summoned and told to examine this man, to see if they could identify a lost son. An old crone who had inspected almost every part of him said at last that if he had a mole over his left eyelid he was her son; when the lids were pulled down like two small rubber awnings, as pure as gumption there was the mole. During the next hours Beckwourth almost died under the welcome; the enraptured hugging and squeezing of him by scores of shrieking sisters and aunts and cousins had made him feel, Jim said, as if he had been rolled over and over in a ton of fresh bois de vache. But he survived it to become a famous Crow chief, and for years had his choice of both women and horses, their only recognized form of wealth. It was said that he became enamored of a girl warrior, who had sworn never to roll under for a man, but to give her life to the extermination of her people’s enemies. Jim boasted that he had won her but no one believed his story, for even Jim Bridger said that as a liar he had no peer. It was a sad day for him when, growing weary of women and horses, he wandered away; on his return to the Crows he was promptly poisoned, so that they could keep his brave heart, the house of his phenomenal daring.

Sam hadn’t even seen Rose or Beckwourth, or a dozen other free trappers haloed by legends; but he had met Kit Carson, the most famous man of them all. Kit had served as scout for an explorer, and so many pages had been written about him back east that the greenhoms had made him a national idol. Sam had seen this Scot and Kentuckian twice and had looked hard at him. In an average group of mountain men Kit looked more like a boy; he stood in his moccasins only about five feet eight inches in height, and weighed, Sam guessed, no more than a hundred and fifty pounds. He had sandy hair, bowed legs, freckles, and steady steely-blue eyes. It was said that he had killed a lot of men and lain with a lot of women and been in a lot of fights. When only a lad his family had taken the trail of Daniel Boone, and when only nine Kit had seen his father killed by a falling tree. At sixteen he headed west. When in an accident a man’s arm was crushed, all the men with him said they didn’t have the nerve to saw it off. Kit, only a youngster, said he would saw it off if they would hold him, and with a dull old saw he went through the bone of the upper arm, cauterized the wound with a red-hot kingbolt, and said he guessed the man would be all right.

Such tales about him had made Sam look at him hard. It was also said that Kit was a romantic cuss who didn’t think that woman, white or red, was something to embrace and then kick into the nearest river. Kit’s taste ran to the blackeyed Spanish and Mexican lasses, in the Taos area, for whom kissing a man or stabbing him was all the same thing. Sam had seen some of the senoritas and had thought them bundles of vanity and violence. He preferred his Lotus, and by the end of a week it would have taken a lot of big spacious words to express the full scope of his feeling for her. She was mother, wife, daughter, trail mate, and angel, and the soul of his medicine bag. He had been teaching her to handle both rifle and revolver and to throw the knife. She was an apt pupil with all weapons, and English. In the vacuum where for seven years he had known only eating and killing and dodging his enemies he now enthroned her and she began to fill him; and his emotions enfolded her as she enfolded him, until on awaking she would be the first thing he would think of, and the last before falling asleep. Heaven help the man, white or red, who ever dared touch her.

Possibly he was afraid that man would, for during these blissful golden autumn weeks with her he never let her out of his sight for more than a few minutes. He found to his astonishment and delight that the sexual embrace had endeared him to her. Before that, she had stood off, as though to measure the depths of his villainy; after that she would come up to him, shyly, and look up at his eyes. At night he would lie, naked, on his robe and hold her, naked against him. He would let her lie on her back down his chest, belly, and thighs, the top of her head just under his chin, her toes barely reaching his ankles. Sometimes they would fall asleep that way, with a robe over them. He called her his golden bottom, his twin apples, the house of his son, and a score of other foolish endearments, while his big hands moved tenderly over her. Sometimes he would sit with Lotus on his lap and look for a full minute into her wonderful eyes, and she would look into his blue-gray eyes, her gaze moving from one to the other, back and forth. Sam would look and never say a word, as a man might try to look through an opaque pane into heaven. Sometimes she would tickle him in his beard or over his chest; and though her face was sober he could see laughter in her eyes.

"Love me?" she would say.

"You doggone right I love you."

"Supper?"

"Loin steaks and strawberries.”

Looking into her eyes, he would think of Loretto, who had come west a few years before Sam—a hot impetuous Spaniard who had ransomed from her enemies and captors, the Crows, and taken as his wife, a beautiful Blackfeet girl. A year later he and his wife and their baby were with Jim Bridger and his men when they came on a band of Blackfeet; and the girl, recognizing a brother, handed the babe to Loretto and fled to his arms. Then the Indians moved swiftly away, taking the protesting and weeping girl with them; and Loretto, the babe in his arms, went crying after them, begging his wife to come back. A Blackfeet chief then advanced to meet him and said his life would be spared if he would shut up and go away. That was the price of his life but not of his love. He lived and waited for the moment when he would see her again; and the truth of his abiding love for her became a lovely legend all over the West. Most whitemen found it strange that a whiteman could love an Indian girl, and made the matter agreeable to their prejudice by saying that a Spaniard, after all, was not white, but a cousin of the red people. Did Loretto ever see her again? The legend said he did not. Sam hadn’t thought much about the story before he held his Lotus close to him and felt the living wonder of her; after that he thought about it every time he looked into the lights and the melting liquid—black of her eyes.

In a high mountain meadow they found ripe wild strawberries, and on a hillside a young fat barren elk cow. The supper tonight would be a feast. There wouldn’t be cream for the berries or sourdough bread and wild honey or hump fat for butter but it would be a feast just the same. Taking her in his arms, he said, "Drink to me only with thine eyes and I will pledge with mine." Yes, she said, and then did something that surprised him. From the berries she chose one of the largest and ripest, and this she crushed across his lips. She then crushed a berry over her lips, and standing tiptoe, looked up at him and said, "You drink?"

"I’l1 be doggone," he said, and looked across her hair at the sky. Then he kissed her.

"Mmmm!" he said, loving the scent of the berries and the taste of the kiss. He kissed her again. He had tried to teach her the meaning of the word "what" by taking an object, saying, "What?" and naming it. She now looked up at him after the second kiss and said, "Lotus. What?"