Dancing with the Golden Bear Read online

  Yet they would follow him. He was the man, new to the mountains, who traveled alone three hundred miles past hostile Missouri River Indians to take a message to General Ashley. He was the man who got his head caught in a griz’s mouth, came away a mass of blood, and coolly gave instructions for sewing his own ear back on. Most of all, he was the man who, late every afternoon, when the day’s travel was done and the men felt beat to a pulp, rode or walked several more miles, to the top of the nearest big hill, to take a look at the country ahead. He was the toughest, most capable man any of them knew.

  The trappers didn’t know where Jedediah was heading. But they put adventure ahead of trapping and signed on.

  Which got them into this pickle.

  It was a mongrel brigade, and polyglot. As the couple of dozen traipsed along the desert far below the Great Salt Lake on a typical September day, they were strung out, plodding along on their mounts. Captain Smith rode in front with a distinctive expression, still as a waiting raptor.

  This was a ragtag string of rough-looking men dressed in hides, and three women. The men led packhorses, and the women led a horse or mule with a pony drag behind. The packhorses bore the belongings of the fur company, items to give or trade to Indians, pay for passage through the country, or information, or guide services, or horses, or whatever else the outfit might need. It wasn’t much. A better-outfitted brigade would have carried English blankets instead of American, kettles, wool cloth, cotton cloth, and all sorts of foofaraw for the squaws, from bells to vermilion. But this was a new company, and prosperity only a hope.

  Trappers packed, Indians dragged. The drags, two poles with hide strung between, carried the possessions of the squaw—a buffalo-hide tipi, covers for sleeping, gear for cooking and sewing, and so on. These were her belongings, and if you lost the woman, you lost your house, your blankets, and your cooking and eating utensils.

  Three of the men had wives, and slept in luxury in tipis.

  Aside from Diah there were the other white-man hunters, including a Virginian who could read and so was the clerk; Americans from Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, and even New York; two Scots, a Frenchman, a German, and an Irishman; two French-Canadians, meaning men of mixed blood, red and white; a Mexican; three Indian men, a Crow, a Nipisang, and an Umpqua who was a slave; and a black slave named John. Around the fires at night, if you were sharp-eared, you could hear a new language being born. Trapper talk was backwoods English spiced with French, Spanish, and the words of several tribes. It was natural to them, a jumble and a tickle to outsiders.

  None of these trappers thought much about the mixture of colors, languages, and nationalities. It was the way they did things.

  To Salt Lake and on to Utah Lake the going was easy, well-known country with plenty of water and plenty of game, even if it was elk and deer instead of buffalo. They dried seven hundred weight of buffalo meat to bring along, and didn’t touch it that first week.

  And then the Utes told them they were headed into disaster.

  The men talked about it that night around the cook fires. What was the captain’s plan? Some guessed he’d hunt out the Siskadee, a river they knew well, and follow it south and west. Some guessed he’d stick to mountain country, where beaver peltries could be taken, what the men called “plews.”

  At their own fire in front of their tipi, where Flat Dog and Gideon Poorboy shared supper, Sam murmured, “It’s a starving country ahead.” He mentioned those moccasin soles. Then he threw some flesh to Coy, wondering how long they’d be able to spare meat for his coyote.

  Two days later, after crossing a big divide, Jedediah turned the outfit southwest into as desolate a territory as any man of them had seen, dry, dust-colored country dotted by hills and mesas, the kind of land that makes you nod off in the noonday sun, and the horses hang their heads low.

  They plodded and plodded and crossed another divide into a kind of world they’d never seen. Here was red rock in every direction, a gigantic, all-encompassing circle of pink-orange-red sandstone, with patches of dust and cactus and sprigs of grass running like streams between the immense stone monuments. But water? No sign of it. They rode along the dirt trails through the red rock, past weird shapes arising like hoodoos, alongside the sandstone that, strangely, had whorls in it, as though it was once butter but now hardened into eerie forms that hinted of … They dared not think. They rode, and camped dry several nights. Soon they were leading their mounts, knowing that little grass and little water meant dying horses. Sam was very protective of his saddle mount, Paladin.

  On they walked. Only Gideon rode. He had one wooden leg from the knee down and couldn’t peg well enough to keep up.

  Conversation passed the time. “Armies march on full bellies,” said John. “What we marching on?”

  “Faith,” said Robert Evans, a wisp of an Irishman.

  Coy yipped, as though making a comment.

  White teeth made a show in John’s dark face. “What’s faith?”

  Evans looked sideways at John. The Irishman bore a face that told a tale, a love of a drink, a laugh, and a jaunty tune. Sam supposed that, despite his size, his nose had gotten crooked in bar-room brawls.

  “I leave faith to the priests,” Evans said, “and certain American captains.”

  John laughed, and Gideon joined him heartily.

  “Mystic prophets all,” said Gideon.

  Sam looked at Coy, thinking the captain often did come back from his scouting trips looking like he carried a secret, something hidden from ordinary men.

  “Way I heard it,” said John, “them prophets went out in the desert and thirsted and not all of them come back.”

  John turned to Sam. “Do you have faith?” Though he worked as willingly as any man, John talked a lot of sass.

  “I do,” said Sam.

  “You one of them as admires the cap’n so much you’d follow him into hell on a one-way trip?”

  “I guess I am.”

  “This beaver is the same,” said Gideon.

  “I like a bit of madness myself,” said Evans.

  Coy yodeled out a long call, or plaint. Sam loved his companion’s eloquent howls, but their meaning was a mystery.

  He stopped and poured a little water into his beaver hat for his pet.

  That night things changed. The brigade had been eating the flesh of horses and mules as they happened to give out. Now Diah gave the order to kill a horse, the weakest-looking one, for its flesh.

  “That one wasn’t gonna make it anyway,” said Sam.

  Coy whimpered at him, and Sam heard the forlornness in his own voice.

  The rest of the men were too tired to talk. They caught the horse’s blood in their hats and drank it.

  Only John the slave seemed to have energy for conversation. He sat with Sam, Meadowlark, Flat Dog, and Gideon, who gathered together every night, right in front of the tipi Meadowlark put up for herself and her husband.

  “What kind of name is Gideon?” asked John.

  “Biblical,” said Gideon. “Israelite. Means ‘mighty warrior.’” Gideon looked at his peg leg, and Sam knew what he was thinking. He took off the peg and started carving it. He was making an intricate pattern of leaves and tendrils, and showing a real talent for it.

  “I don’t like my name,” said the black man. “John. Every half ass be named John.”

  “Any man can earn a name,” said Flat Dog. “So it is among Crow people.”

  Sam thought, Or maybe a name chooses you. That’s the way he felt about his Crow name, Joins with Buffalo.

  “I wish I had yours,” John said. “Sam is a good-sounding name.”

  “We don’t need two Sams in camp,” put in Meadowlark.

  “We could call you Black Sam,” said Flat Dog.

  “I’m not black,” said John. “I’m purple.”

  Everyone looked at his face more closely. He was the color of an eggplant.

  “The name I’d choose would be the one my grandpa had,” sai
d John. “Sumner. I like that one. Don’t know what it means, but …”

  “Captain,” Sam called to Jedediah over at the next campfire. “The name Sumner—you know what it means?”

  “‘One who summons,’” said Jedediah.

  John got a merry look. “Does that mean like a butler,” asked John, “or like the angel who calls the roll at the Last Judgment?”

  “Whatever you want,” said Flat Dog.

  “I’m the angel,” said John, grinning.

  “All right, Sumner,” said Sam, “that’s you.”

  “Listen here,” said Gideon. “We’re your friends, and we expect you to get us through zem pearly gates.”

  Things sparked up. The outfit came to a handsome river, chest deep and sixty or seventy yards wide. It even had beaver sign. Diah called it Ashley’s River, in honor of his former business partner, the man who had boosted the mountain fur trade into something important.

  As they moved up the river, trapping on the way, they were struck by how shy the Indians were. Each family, when the strangers approached, lit a brush fire as a signal to neighbors, packed their belongings into baskets worn on their backs with a line around the forehead, and fled. Though Jedediah wanted to give them presents, he was unable to get close.

  They also found that game was very scarce. They saw nothing but a lot of black-tailed hares and a very few distant antelope. The last straw was that the beaver seemed fewer than the sign. They left the river in favor of a creek heading up in the west. One look from the divide above the creek told the story: a bigger, emptier, drier country.

  More dry camps. More horses killed or dying. The men had started with twenty-eight company animals, now were down to twenty. The free trappers, not bound to the company, had lost two of their eight. Now everyone missed the red-rock country. This piece of land was bland, the flats the color of a window unwashed for too long, the hills the color of cedars that rolled away endlessly, or of ocher outcroppings. Both dust-colored flats and cedar-green hills stretched away to infinity.

  Sam watched Paladin carefully. He checked her hoofs at the end of each day’s march and staked her on the thickest grass they could find. Some evenings, to keep her in training, he put her through her special maneuvers. Sam had taught her with the help of his Delaware friend Hannibal; he had once worked liberty horses in a circus. Liberty horses performed without riders, responding to hand and voice signals. Sam thought a demonstration like that would do a lot to impress Indians, and maybe save his life in a pinch.

  This evening Paladin obeyed Sam’s hand signals, prancing to the left or right, circling, curveting, or rearing. She came to his whistle. And Coy rode her. Sam was working on getting the pup to do somersaults on her back.

  Now came the part that always drew an audience. He himself stood on Paladin’s back, and the mare walked slowly in a circle. Sam was mastering keeping his balance for the walk.

  His friends gathered around and had some fun.

  “Get!” Gideon shouted.

  Paladin ignored him. Sam thought it was good training for her, making sure she responded only to his voice.

  “Run, you bugger,” Evans shouted.

  When Paladin passed close, Sumner gave the cluck that made most horses go to a faster gait.

  At first some of these tricks had worked, but now Paladin ignored them all.

  Flat Dog and Meadowlark watched in silence and admiration. Crows were great horsemen, but they had never seen any man, except Sam’s friend Hannibal, ride a horse standing up.

  After days of worry and suffering the brigade came on another river, this one headed south through a canyon. Either Jedediah was seeing something with that glass of his when he walked up every night to scout, or he was witching their way along. This stream they called Lost River, because it kept disappearing in its own sandy bed, and then seeping up farther down the canyon. It didn’t inspire faith, the Lost River, so they abandoned it for some rocky hills and then another valley running south, a parched valley.

  Now the whole country was red again, and it seemed to Sam they were descending into a netherworld, dangerous but lovely to the eye, a world of rocks in purple and yellow and a bouquet of reds variable, rich, and delightful. None of this, however, hinted of water. For the first time Sam could remember Coy lost his bounce, and poked along head down, discouraged.

  The question on everyone’s mind was whether they would starve to death or thirst to death.

  They were too exhausted to speak, except, occasionally, of beaver.

  “We’ll find beaver,” said Sam.

  “Don’t think so,” growled Gobel. The blacksmith stretched his enormous arms. He was the size of man you wanted on your side in a fight.

  They looked at each other around the fire, the young Sam, his Crow bride, her brother and his best friend, the slave, the blacksmith. The fears and the dreads in every pair of eyes were different. But none flickered with hope.

  A tune jinked up. Sam turned in delight and surprise.

  Gideon played a slow, dreamy ballad, “Scarborough Fair,” one that caressed every man’s melancholy.

  Then he gave Sam a look and jumped into another song. Cued, Sam sang the words:

  The water is wide, I cannot cross over

  And neither have I wings to fly

  Build me a boat that can carry two

  And both shall row my true love and I.

  Everyone laughed at the water joke. Now the men from the other two fires gathered around, and even the Indian women and the children.

  Meadowlark joined Sam in the part she liked.

  O waly waly up the bank

  And waly waly down the braes

  And waly waly by yon burn side

  Where me and my love were wont to gae.

  Now Evans got out his Irish tin whistle and was ready to go. Gideon grinned broad and slipped into what he knew everyone wanted, a tune to dance to. It was a hop jig. Sam didn’t remember the name of this one, but it was a three-beat jig instead of a two-beat, danced with a stiff upper body and feet very nimble and twice as quick. He and Meadowlark had learned it thoroughly back at rendezvous, and they led the way now. Others danced and fell all over themselves and had a grand time.

  Evans was as deft with the tune as Gideon, and led the way to a second time through at an even quicker pace. The high, spiky pipings inspired everyone’s feet. Evans had a way with the instrument, ornamenting here, bending a note there, to set the blood afire.

  Sam noticed that one of the Shoshone women, Spark, was dancing in front of Gideon, directly to Gideon, as if they were a couple. Gideon’s peg leg was bouncing up and down as fast as his bow, and his eyes locked with hers.

  A new “marriage” is coming into camp, thought Sam, happy for his friend. After the amputation, Gideon had drowned himself in grief. Though Gobel had smithed a socket onto Gideon’s stirrup, a place for the peg to fit, Gideon had trouble riding fast. “Injuns get on us,” he said, “I’m a gone beaver.” Only his music seemed to perk him up. Sometimes, in good spirits, he would carve on his peg.

  The tune ended. Gideon drew his bow for one more song, but at that moment Jedediah materialized out of the darkness and stood among them half real. He’d been up the nearest hill again, looking ahead with his spyglass.

  “Greetings, Cap’n,” said Gideon.

  “Greetings, dreamer,” someone said at the other fire. The name was mostly a joke.

  “I think I see a river,” he said. “Maybe twenty miles.”

  Eyes regarded him, but tongues were silent.

  Quickly, Gideon and Evans launched into a rousing version of “What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor,” an old stamp-and-go sea chanty that set the feet to moving.

  Then Evans made a proposition. “I have a new song I’ve been doodling on, a storytelling song about you, Captain Smith. Would you care to hear a bit of it?”

  “Damn right!” and “Aye” rang out around the fire. Evans said, “’Tis called ‘The Never-Ending Tale of Jedediah Smith.�
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  We set out from Salt Lake, not knowing the track

  Whites, Spanyards and Injuns, and even a black

  Our captain was Diah, a man of great vision

  Our dream Californy, and beaver our mission.

  “Now comes the chorus,” cried Evans.

  Captain Smith was a wayfarin’ man

  A wanderin’ man was he

  He led us ’cross the desert sands

  And on to the sweet blue sea.

  All the men chuckled at this, including Jedediah. Though he wouldn’t say openly they were headed for California, all believed it.

  We rode through the deserts, our throats were so dry

  If we didn’t find water, we surely would die

  The captain saw a river, our hearts came down thud

  The river was dry, and we got to drink mud.

  The men liked that.

  Now Evans played a bouncing version of the chorus on his pipe, with lots of florid ornamentation.

  “The way the song goes,” he explained, “you have a verse, a chorus, then another verse, and the pattern starts again—verse, chorus, verse, with an instrumental solo here and there. But this is as far as I’ve got.”

  “It shines!” called several men in the circle.

  “So here is my idea.” He looked merrily about. “Let’s all do it together. Come up with the next verse, I mean, and then later on another and another.”

  “Every verse more suffering than the last?” said someone.

  “Is this a tragedy?” queried another.

  Still, they all pitched in, and that very evening they came up with one more verse.

  We rode through a salt plain, not a creature could live

  The captain saw a village, said the Injuns might give