Mountain Man

He guessed he had better be going. As he rode east it occurred to him that he and the mountain men had avenged not only his own humiliation but also the massacre of Kate’s family, if it could be said, in earth or heaven, that a wrong so monstrous could be avenged. If Lotus had lived would she have loved him with such holiness that she would have covered his shame with her hair, and have knelt by him and died in the bitter cold? All the mountain men had been impressed by the loyalty of red women to their husbands. They were wildcats in their jealous furies, and they often killed, when they could, the adulterous husband; but they would accept floggings and brutalities that would drive white wives from the door. Covering the unspeakable shame of a scalped head with their own hair, they would freeze to death by the man they loved.

After crossing the Musselshell, Sam observed that winter had been in no hurry to depart. It was June, but on the north flank of every hill was a snowbank, molded to the hill’s contours and dappled with wind dust. No river flowers were yet in bloom; he wondered if Kate’s would be. He had with him twenty different kinds of wild-flower seed—enough, he expected, to sow an acre of prairie. Kate might not use them but she would be happy to have them: when building a nest, a woman, like a bird, was happiest when she had more materials than she could use. Except for the willows and shrubs the plant life hadn’t put on its spring dress yet; and the river grasses were barely looking out of the earth. Everywhere were signs that the Canadian winds had been here. Cottonwood trees riven by frost now stood with their bellies open; and aspens had been snapped off by the winds or torn from the earth.

When he came to the hill where he had always paused to look at the shack and the garden he cried aloud, "My God!" and some part of him died. He saw it instantly and knew it all. He saw the second cairn of stones, standing close by the one he had built, and he knew that Kate was dead. The grief that choked and blinded him would have been no more intense if he had looked at the grave of his mother. The sky had darkened, the earth had taken on a deeper quiet. It was all desolation now: there were no flowers—there was only an old shack with a part of its roof fallen in, and two mounds of stones. Dismounting, he dropped the reins, and rifle in hand, approached on foot.

The sage plants still lived and for a few moments he looked at them. Then he looked at the second cairn, observing how the stones had been laid, for his first thought was that a mountain man had passed this way. He had found Kate frozen to death. But he knew it was not that. Something had caught his gaze and he now circled the two cairns and looked down at the sage, most of which had been trampled and broken, and went to the shack to peer in. The pile of filthy bedding was still by the door. By the north wall with earth from the roof spilled on it was the heap of utensils and food. Stepping across the bedding, he went over and knelt to examine it. He found an old knife but no axe. Under the bedding was the rifle.

Sam went out and looked south. Something had happened here that he did not understand. After walking twice around the cabin he knelt to examine footprints of man and horse. He went east from the cabin fifty yards. He swung north and doubled back to the south, and at the top of a hill found the incredible evidence that he had thought he might find. He knew now that a party of Indians had been here and that they were Crows. This seemed to him so utterly outside the plausible and the possible that he examined all the signs, over and over; stared again at the cairn, half expecting that it would not be there; and looked up and down the river and all around him. He knew it was true but he could not believe it, not all at once: a party of Crows had come here and found Kate in her bedding, dead, with a part of the roof fallen on her; and they had gathered stones and built a house to protect her; and they had taken none of her tools, bedding, food, not even her rifle! How could a man believe that?

To be completely sure he searched over the area where they had hitched their horses; examined footprints of man and beast; studied from top to bottom of the cairn the way the stones were laid; found their campsite and inspected the ashes of their fire; and then for two miles followed the path they had taken eastward over the hills. The implications so overwhelmed him that after two hours of searching and study he could only sit and look and wonder. It was this way: they had come in from the southeast, perhaps looking for Blackfeet; and on the first hill from which they had a view of the shack they had sat on their horses, looking and listening. They had tied three of either seven or eight horses to a cedar and in single file had approached the cabin. When a hundred yards from it they had been able to see that most of the roof had fallen in, and that there were no flowers, no woman, no life. They had then moved nearer, and two of them had approached the door by going around the north wall. They had found her in the bed. Old woman's man her children their ghosts, there, in the blackest nights they are, in the sagebrush they are crying ....

Sitting by the bedding, his left palm resting on it, Sam smoked three pipes. He was trying to believe that far yonder in the pale haze in a small tent filled with death smell a wife was bowed before her man, her hair hiding his shame; and that here another wife had lived for years, alone, by the graves of her children. Greater love hath no man, but greater love hath the mother. Where was her Bible? He would know someday that they had put it in the cairn with her. Where was her axe? He would never know. Why had the Crows done this thing? It was an act of such gracious mercy and pity—or, if not that, of atonement—that he sat humbled before it.

So this was why all the way up from the post he had seen no Crow!

After the third pipe Sam patted the bedding as though it were Kate, and closed his eyes on loneliness and grief. Then he went to the cairns. On a ledge of stones shoulder high he rested his face in his arms and tried to say a prayer for Kate, or a farewell, or something. Prayers had never been a part of him, and he did not know how to say farewell. The opening of light in the last movement of the Fifth, that was prayer maybe, his kind. No matter: the Crows long ago had said the only prayer for her that need ever be said:

Old woman’s man her children their ghosts, there, in the blackest nights they are,

in the sagebrush they are crying ....

But not crying now. Not any more.

From time to time, he told himself, head bowed and tears falling, he would pass this way, to bring flowers and touch a stone. His wife and child would be here, and Kate and her children. There would be no olive-green sage plants any more, no marigolds and bluebells and gilias; no little gray woman in rags carrying pails of water up a hill all day long. There would now be only memory of her and the story of her; and after a generation or two there would not even be that. But as long as any of the mountain men lived there would be the footfalls of friends passing this way, and eyes looking over to the spot where the crazy woman lived ....

Meanwhile he had a job to do. Leaving everything here as he had found it, for time and God to do with in their infinite patience, he mounted his horse, drew tight on the lead rein, and set his course into the southeast, straight for the Belle Fourche and the old chief of the Crows.

35

AFTER HE HAD crossed the Yellowstone he proceeded through Crow country without his usual vigilance. He shot game, and at night he made a fire and roasted steaks. He sat outlined by flame and smoked his pipe. Though he crossed fresh trails he saw no redmen.