Mountain Man

But he had before him, he hoped, twenty or thirty years of full living and millions of square miles to live them in; hot steaks and bird throats singing to him and mornings as fresh as the first alpine lily, and evenings as deep with peace as the earth under them. Turning on a hilltop, he looked back at the thousand Sparrowhawks watching him, and made a sign which said that he would come again someday; and then he galloped off into the southwest and a brilliant Rubens sunset. Maybe he would go down to see Jim Bridger, who was having trouble with Brigham Young and his Mormons.

When a few days later he came close to the Oregon Trail he paused, as in former times, and looked at the scene before him. There they were, hundreds or thousands of them, as far back as he could see in clouds of dust, and as far ahead—a long gray line of bawling beasts and squealing axles and creaking wagon beds that hadn’t a drop of moisture left in them. There they were, pushing on and on like the armies of red ants; and behind them were other thousands, on their way or getting ready; and in the future their children’s children would swarm over this magnificent land, chasing to their death the last elk and deer, shooting the last songbirds, trampling the last berry bush; there and everywhere with their houses and hotels and saloons and gutters, their towns looking like gigantic magpie and crow nests; there and everywhere, proliferating, crowding, and making untidiness and stench of everything, a people bumping and stumbling to get out of one another’s way. Every Indian tribe was becoming more restless as the hordes poured in, and before long there would shorely be bloody war between the red and the white. During the hour that he watched the slow dust-saturated serpentine crawl of a wagon trail four miles long there filled him the realization that his way of life would someday be no more. For a little while there would be patches of it left up in Canada but here it would all be what Jim Bridger said it would be, swarming human masses, with the effluvium of their body smells and city smells and machine smells rising to the heavens and wash away the blue. Sam didn’t know if the Creator had pla

ed it this way or if it was only the blind way of the blind. He remembered what a musician had written after hearing the Dan Giova

i overture: that he had been seized by terror as there unrolled the ascending and descending scales, as answerless as fate and as inexorable as death. Sam guessed he wouldn’t go on to Jim’s post now but would turn back to the bird wings and giddy roadru

ers and bluebirds, spilling lyrics out of the clean blue loveliness of their souls. He would go back to the Breughel mornings and Rubens evenings, and see what Bill was doing and what Hank was doing; and he would find a bushel of wild flowers and lay them gently over the bones of two mothers and one child. And so after a last long look at the immigrants he turned and headed straight north, back into the valleys and the mountains.