Mountain Man

After three miles Colter had glanced back and seen a gloating buck only a hundred yards behind him. Calling on what had seemed to Colter to be the last of his strength, he had tried to run faster, and soon began to hemorrhage, the blood bursting from his nostrils and spilling down over him. At the end of another mile a backward glance appalled him: now the red warrior was only forty or fifty feet behind him and was in the act of hurling his lance. In that instant Colter made his decision. He stopped short and turned. Possibly his body, red with blood, u

It made a mountain man proud just to think of him. It made him proud to think of Hugh Glass, who, torn open front and back by a grizzly and left to die, had crawled a hundred miles on his hands and knees, with maggots swarming in his wounds. There were so many to be proud of. There was Jedediah Smith, as intrepid an explorer as Meriwether Lewis; Jed, who carried a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other; who prayed in one moment and blew his foe’s head off in the next. In an encounter with a grizzly his head had been seized by the monster’s mouth and huge chisel-teeth had raked furrows in flesh and bone and torn one ear almost off. Jed had had the ear sewed to his skull with a crude needle and buckskin thread.

It was a riddle, Sam thought, listening to the night sounds and moving a hand caressingly back and forth over his wife’s thighs—it was a riddle how the grizzly managed to get so many heads in its mouth. There was Lewis Dawson on the Rio de las Animas Perdidas: in his fight with a bear his companion’s gun had missed fire three times; three times a bitchdog had attacked so furiously that the bear had turned to chase her; and three times the beast had returned to maul Dawson. Three separate times it had Dawson’s entire head in its mouth, and his wounds, like Jed’s were stitched together with leather thread. But one big tooth had gone through the skull, and after three days the brains began to leak out and Dawson died in

delirium.

How will I die? Sam wondered, and sniffed the night air for scent of Blackfeet. How would Lotus die? He was sure that neither of them would die in bed. Few whitemen in this land had sense enough, when eyes and trigger finger began to fail, to pack their possibles and get out. Tom Fitzpatrick might die in bed but how many times had he come within a hair of going under? He hadn’t turned gray overnight for no reason at all. Tall, grizzled, hard-muscled, Fitz had been one of the biggest and best of them, until that day in 1831 when his hair turned white; most of the flesh wasted from his bones and, too weak to stand, he had been found by two half-breeds crawling along a creek bottom. One day when alone on the Big Sandy he had come face to face with a band of Gros Ventres and had raced for his life until his horse fell dead under him. He had then crawled into a hole in a mountainside and filled the entrance with stones and leaves, and had remained there until almost dead of hunger and thirst. Crawling out, he had headed for Pierre’s Hole but while crossing swift waters on a raft had lost his rifle, pouch, and knife. Defenseless, he had had to climb a tree and sit in it all night, when attacked by a pack of wolves. There were no words, Sam supposed, to tell how much a man suffered, whose hair and beard turned from brown to white in a few days.

When they came to the big bend of the Musselshell, Sam and Lotus gathered a pile of dead cedar boughs and stripped off their clothing. Sam then fired the pile and they stood naked in the heavy smoke, holding their garments in their hands. It is possible that Sam overrated the redman’s sense of smell, because his own was so acute; but his years in Indian land had convinced him that often the redman could smell an enemy when he could not see or hear him. He had concluded that the whiteman had a strong body odor, of which he was unaware.  After all, was the mountain goat conscious of its odor? Or the cougar and the wolf? With the wind coming from the beasts, Sam could smell a pack of wolves five miles away. He had got to know the body odor of all the mankilling beasts, and of such birds as the horned owl and red-tailed hawk; but it was the odors of red people that had been his special study, until now, by odor alone, he could distinguish between Blackfeet and Crow, and between these and the Cheye

After he and Lotus had saturated their pores and garments with cedar incense they turned their moccasins inside out and smoked them, for there was no part of man with a stronger odor than his feet. If their path were found a score of Blackfeet warriors would go down on hands and knees to sniff at the footprints of horse and man.

8

WHEN ON A late September day they looked over at the woman’s shack there was no smoke or sign of living thing. After staring for a full minute Sam said, "I don’t see hide or hair of her but I feel she’s there." He went down to the river trail and followed it to the lean-to. Nobody had been there in a long while. On the path leading to the river he saw her tracks and took the path up the hill. She had been sitting just inside the hut, on her bed. He was never to forget how she looked, the moment she came in view, standing there by the shack, the rifle in her hand, her body bent forward, eyes staring and ears straining.

"It’s me," he said in a loud voice, for he was a hundred and fifty feet from her. "It’s Sam Minard, your friend." For two or three minutes they looked at one another and nothing more was said. He thought she had a very crazy way of staring at him. Putting a hand behind him, his lingers motioned to Lotus to go back down, for he suspected that the woman had seen her and recognized her as Indian. He then advanced, slowly, until he stood before her and looked down at her gray hair. He thought it had turned gray since he saw her last. Father in heaven, how she had suffered! "I’m your friend," he said, and looked over at the sage plants, and the wild flowers by the graves. The wetness of the earth around them showed that she had watered them within the past two or three hours. Nowhere was there any sign that she had made a fire.