Mountain Man

Without the slightest trace of fear the Sioux had folded his arms across his naked chest and bowed his head. Without the slightest feeling of mercy or pity the Cheye

So he demanded that they meet again for another game of hands, after two moons. Feeling immeasurably superior, the Cheye

They met again in two moons, the Sioux’s skull as bright and smooth as sun-baked bone, the Cheye

It was a man’s country out here, and not for tall boys called men. Sam had never known an Indian and had never heard of one who had begged for mercy. Mercy was not a word in their language. A white captive who begged for mercy—and most of them did—aroused in their captors such contempt that they could not devise tortures fiendish enough to degrade him. Every mountain man knew that if he were luckless enough to be captured the only way to face the red people was to hawk phlegm up his throat and spit it in their faces. They might then torture you and they certainly would kill you but they would admire you and they would treasure your scalp.

Sam looked squarely at the fact that he might be captured someday. Few whitemen in Indian lands had lived to be as old as Caleb Greenwood and Bill Williams. Twice captured by the Blackfeet and twice escaping from them, Jeremiah Flagg had said, "I spect it’s time fer this ole coon to git back to his tree." He said there had been a time when he could smell a cussed redskin ten miles toward nowhere but now couldn’t smell him unless he could see him.

It was terribly beautiful country covered with violent life. The beaver was a gentle fellow who lived on bark; the milk-givers ate leaves and grass; but the flesh-eaters were all killers, and man was a flesh-eater. Sam had observed that most of the flesh-eaters were savage in their love-making. A favorite with some of the red people was the soup dance, in which the men and women in two lines faced one another across a distance of thirty or forty feet. A girl would coyly advance with a spoon (of buffalo or mountain sheep horn) filled with soup. This she would offer to the man of her choice and quickly withdraw, with the man pursuing her until she reached her line. He would then retreat, dancing to music, and she would come again; and still again; and from those watching there would be laughter or hoots of derision. When whitemen participated they substituted kissing for the spoonful of soup; but the Arapahoes, with whom, it was said, the dance had originated, rubbed noses, though now and then a couple would try kissing and seem to like it. The girls sometimes but not always wore a hair-rope chastity belt, with the ends tied around their waist.

A story was told of Kit Carson in one of these dances. A huge French bully had proclaimed himself the favorite and guardian of all the more attractive girls. Half drunk and with his lusts boiling, he had chased a girl into an adjacent woods, and after catching her had been so eager that he had slashed with his knife back and forth at the chastity belt, opening deep wounds in the girl’s thighs and belly. She had then drawn a hidden knife and stabbed him and run away. According to the tale Sam had heard, Kit then challenged the bully to a duel, killed him, and took the girl, Singing Grass, as his mate, changing her name to Alice.

Sam had learned that most of the flesh-eating males were brutal to the females. Possibly the cats, big and little, were the most ferocious of all, though no more cruel than some of the men, red or white, when filled with passion and rum. The way his Lotus trembled under his touch during the first days had told him things he had never read in books. The red lover was  sometimes worse than the male bobcat: at one of the posts during trading time Sam had watched drunken braves mating with their women—had seen a Cheye

Weariness with killing had turned Sam’s thoughts to love, and to John Colter’s hell. Why not spend a winter there? He could go deep into that steaming and exploding area and no Indian would dare follow him, for they thought that evil spirits were working their magic there. They thought a geyser spouting its boiling breath fifty or a hundred feet into the sky was an especially large devil showing off his powers. All the tiny hot—mouth poutings were, Sam supposed, the puckered lips of little devil-babies. It was a fearful land tucked away in the basins among densely forested mountains. No buffalo were there, but deer and elk were, rabbits and grouse, and ducks and geese on the lake. He could build a fire without having to feel anxious; soak himself in hot pools; eat hot food, play or sing, and think of his wife. He could study the loveliness of coruscant glitters and winkings of light in a coppice when a breeze was on it; and the empyreal elemental fires in the sunsets; and the fugues as choirs of birds sang around him. If tax collector or policeman or political boss ventured in he would chuck him headfirst into a big boiling mudpot.

Yes, he would go there, to recover his poise and nourish his powers; but first he would go up to the woman to see if she was all right. He wished he could persuade her to come with him, for it chilled his bones to think of her alone in another winter, under the howling megalomania of the Canadian winds and the wild subzero blizzards. The mountain men might even move the graves down there, where she would always have heat and hot water and shelter, and lifelong security from her enemies.