So Wild a Dream Page 23

  Sam decided he needed a cup to get started.

  Halfway through the cup he thought he noticed a nearby woman looking at him. As soon as he looked back, though, she cast her eyes down. Hmmm.

  He had noticed her around one of the lodge circles. She was short and round, but always full of fun. Tonight she was very well turned out. He found her appealing, and couldn’t help imagining certain activities.

  Though Sam saw the result, he didn’t know how much the woman had done to look her best. Her dress was sheepskin, tanned a light café au lait. The bottom of the skirt, just below her knees, had a fringe, and bells were tied to the thongs to make a happy sound when she danced. The waist was held in by a wide belt she’d beaded herself in her favorite colors, which were called in the Indian trade Crow blue, Cheyenne pink, and greasy green. The bodice showed off a featherburst of porcupine quillwork she’d done over many hours. She’d tied ermine tails to the fringe of the cape on her shoulders. Her hair was rubbed glossy with a blend of oils and herbs she made herself, and brushed with many, many strokes by her sisters. Vermilion shined in the center part of her hair. She’d also rouged her lips. She even wore a perfume, a mélange she learned from her mother and made with grasses, herbs, flower petals, and wild mint. Altogether she might have spent a good deal more time on her presentation than a young lady of the settlements who had a date for a country dance.

  When the cute young white man finally brought her a cup, she downed it quickly and gave him a big smile. Clumsily, he told her his name in the Crow language, a gesture she found endearing. She told him her name was Yellow Leaf and let him take her hand, an awkward, new custom she’d learned, and lead her out among the dancers.

  Even she, it turned out, had learned these dances as well as he, and they pranced their way through some turns almost nimbly, laughing when they made mistakes. He wasn’t a bad fellow, this white boy.

  Then he took her hand again, led her back to the whiskey jug, and offered more. She drank—she liked whiskey, or rather the whirly effect on her mind. Then with a quite unbelievable embarrassment, the young fellow offered a handsome piece of red strouding. She looked at him teasingly. It was a nice gift. She threw it over her shoulders as a shawl, and this time took his hand. She led him out of the dance circle and toward his own camp. She knew very well which lodge he lived in. In the darkness away from the fire, she turned, stroked his hair, and kissed him. “Your white hair is beautiful,” she said. She ducked through the low door ahead of him and immediately embraced him. She intended to have a very good time for an hour or so, and was glad to take him along for the ride.

  Much later that night Sam stood near Yellow Leaf listening to the music. Though she smiled at him from time to time, and acted like she sure liked him, she accepted other trappers’ cups when they were offered, and danced with quite a few men. He couldn’t help wondering if she would spend the whole night in the lodge of some one of them. He moved away quietly, because he didn’t want to see.

  A schottische ended, and it was Gideon’s turn to offer a song.

  He strolled around the fire head down, apparently thinking. Finally, he planted his feet wide and declared, “This song, it’s a wedding song belong … it is of the Jews of the old country and the old ways. Is a gasn-nign people use to march from one house to another—for the ceremony, it take seven days!” He looked around the circle of dancers merrily, “Dance who will, and parade where you will!”

  It was a slow, ceremonious tune in a minor mode, three-beat. It hinted of the mysteries of the Near East, and moved with the emphatic rhythms and yet the silkiness of a belly dancer, erotic and stately in the same breath. Sam had never heard such music, and was deeply affected.

  When the song ended, Gideon sat down by the fire with his fiddle, his head down, his mind and spirit perhaps lost in ancestral memories.

  Isaac didn’t strike up a new tune. It didn’t feel right, everyone sensed it.

  And then the mulatto Edward Rose stepped into the circle. “This is a song of my mother’s people,” he said simply, and no more. He began to sing an old, old plaint of the slaves.

  Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen

  Nobody knows my sorrow

  After these few bars he started dancing around the circle, a head-down shuffle, and yet in the bounce of his legs and the suppleness of his body, there was a hint of strut, and pulsating life.

  Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen

  Glory Hallelujah!

  He made them ring out bold against each other, the troubles and the glory.

  Sometimes I’m up, sometimes I’m down, O yes, Lord!

  Sometimes I’m almost to the ground, O yes Lord!

  There was joy in that down, joy on the ground, and vitality.

  He danced around the circle and sang it all again, more mournful.

  Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen

  Nobody knows my sorrow

  Now he howled it like a wolf.

  Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen

  Glory Hallelujah!

  He shouted the last hallelujah to the black heavens and the infinite stars.

  Then, suddenly, he stopped. He looked at the assembled crowd of mountain men and Crows, like he was realizing for the first time who they were. He began to chuckle. The chuckle came out like the rumble of a big river and grew loud like a waterfall and finally geysered out into a huge haw-haw-haw. He bent over and slapped his knees.

  He looked up at everyone. “Happy New Year!” he said gravely. “Happy New Year to every one of you. Though it ain’t no new year for the slaves, all the way across the American South. Nothing new about it.”

  Sam had never heard him mention the Negroes before.

  Rose dropped his head and shook it, but when he raised his face to all it was smiling broadly. “I didn’t mean to spoil the party. Here, I got another song, a party song.”

  I got a shoe, you got a shoe

  All God’s children got shoes

  It was a kind of stomp, and both fiddlers caught on right quick and bucked up the dancing rhythm.

  When I get to heaven gonna put on my shoes

  Gonna tromp all over God’s heaven

  Heaven, heaven

  The whole audience began to do the stomp.

  Everybody talkin’ ’bout heaven ain’t’ a-goin’ there

  Heaven, heaven

  Gonna tromp all over God’s heaven.

  Rose led the stomp like a pied piper.

  I got a shoe, you got a shoe

  All God’s children got shoes …

  Sam spent January courting Meadowlark. In the early darkness of the winter evening he went to the circle where her family’s lodge was and stood outside until she came. Then they would stand together with his blanket wrapped around their shoulders, their sides touching. The blanket was a handsome Witney Sam had signed for with the company, sky blue with a black stripe at each end. He chose it to match the leggings and beaded moccasins of Meadowlark. (Signing for things, he was getting a good bit of debt against the wages Ashley owed him.) Unfortunately, from Sam’s point of view, their sides were all that ever touched. Certainly her lips never raised to his, nor did her hand find his, even in the privacy of the blanket. And Sam felt obliged to respect her desire to walk at the head of that ceremony (whatever the hell it was for) as a virgin. Forbidden to touch, they watched the evening stars. Sometimes Meadowlark told him stories of the star people, and what they had done long, long ago, before the memories of the grandfathers of the oldest men. Sometimes she told him stories of the doings of her people, especially great fights they had with the Sioux or Snake or the Blackfeet. Though she was no storyteller, the stories had a ring of fairy tale, true stories in their way, but more than fact, and beyond true. Sam talked of his family, the father he loved, the mother he felt sorry for, the sisters he wanted to see again, the older brother he resented, the younger brother who died, Coy, and whose company Sam sometimes longed for. Sometimes he spoke of his dreams, and then his to
nes took on the gong and clamor of heraldry. It was these stories she loved best, and sometimes she pitched in and elaborated them further—“And maybe then raven sees bear run down the tree, and raven will tell….” He hoped she was falling in love with the hero he wanted to be. He was long since in love with her.

  Though brim full of romance, he also wanted sexual play. The dances seemed to come about once a week and he found it then. Meadowlark, maybe knowing, never appeared at any of the dances.

  Gideon, and another man or two, got what Sam wished he had, a kind of regular girlfriend. Gideon’s young woman, Sapling, made him a gage d’amour as a token of her love, a small, heart-shaped bag, ornamented with beads, made to wear around the neck and hold a clay pipe and a little tobacco. Sam was ripe with envy.

  He and Gideon developed other forms of play. The two of them and Micajah started a shooting game on the ice of the river. They’d throw a piece of log on the ice and shoot at it with their pistols, driving it farther away with each shot. When all but one man missed, he was the winner; if no one hit at a certain distance, they shot until someone did. None of them were as good with their pistols as their rifles, but Micajah was the best of the three.

  One day when they were walking back to camp from the river, Sam said to Micajah, “I’ll be damned if I don’t think you’ve turned into a friend.”

  Micajah gave him a merry look and said, “Let’s prove it by shooting the cup off each others’ heads.”

  “Nobody’s shooting at me if they’re boozing,” answered Sam.

  Micajah clapped him on the back and haw-hawed and allowed, “Don’t blame you.”

  Gideon showed Sam how to make snowshoes by lashing long, stiff pine boughs to his moccasins, and the two went elk hunting in the foothills with Blue Medicine Horse. Blue Horse’s mother acted very grateful for the fresh meat in the middle of winter, and so did Meadowlark.

  It seemed to Sam that Gideon was the good older brother he’d never had, and Blue Medicine Horse the good friend. He just wished Meadowlark would be the woman.

  Instead she stirred up feelings that bothered him. He went to Jedediah to talk it over.

  Captain Smith, Tom Fitzpatrick, and Bill Sublette were sharing a lean-to they’d built against a huge boulder. The log walls kept some of the wind out, and the boulder held some heat from their fires into the night.

  Since it was late, the fire down to embers, Diah, Bill, and Fitz sat deep in their blankets against the cold. They helloed Sam and told him to have a seat. Three pipes stuck out from blanket-shrouded heads.

  Sam sat, tried to act deliberate by taking time to get his pipe going, and blurted out, “I’m in love with Meadowlark, damn it.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” quipped Fitz.

  “What a pain in the ass,” said Bill with a wolfish grin.

  Diah just waited.

  “I want her to be my woman. You know what’s she waiting for.”

  “And maybe waiting for a young man she fancies as well,” said Fitz.

  “Someone handsome,” teased Bill.

  After a silence, Diah put in, “Do you have a woman back home?”

  “I’ve all-the-way forgot about her,” said Sam.

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “Well, she married my brother.”

  A stricken look Sam had never seen before flashed across the captain’s face.

  “An experience every man should have,” quipped Fitz.

  “What’ll I do?” Sam looked at Diah mournfully.

  “Well,” said Diah, “fornication is out of the question.”

  “Not out of any questions I’d ask,” put in Bill.

  “Nor Sam either,” said Fitz quietly.

  Diah ignored them. “Marriage? Are you ready to commit to spend the rest of your life with the Crow people? I don’t think so.”

  “Not when there’s so many good-looking Sioux women,” said Bill with a chuckle.

  Diah frowned at his friend, though he was used to this banter.

  “Do you want to raise your children without the blessings of a Christian church?”

  Sam couldn’t answer that one. Actually, though he thought of himself as a Christian, he’d never been in a church.

  “So far from a Christian community, I think your immortal soul would be in danger.”

  Fitz and Bill fell silent. Talk of souls apparently silenced even their scoffing.

  “Has she given you gage d’amour?” asked Diah.

  Sam put his hand to the empty spot at his collar bone and shook his head.

  “I didn’t think so,” said Diah.

  “I got to have her,” said Sam.

  “Her sister is probably available,” said Bill, a glint in his eye.

  Sam blushed.

  “Where will we be after the spring hunt?”

  “No way to know,” said Diah.

  “Hope we’ll be in Snake country,” said Fitz.

  “Beaver heaven, that’s what they say.” This was Bill.

  Sam pondered, but it didn’t seem to help. “Let’s talk on something else,” he said.

  “What about the horses?” asked Diah.

  Sam looked at him questioningly.

  “Her family would expect a gift of horses, especially since you’re a rich white man. Do you have four, five, or six horses to give?”

  “I guess not.”

  Everyone was quiet for a while, smoking.

  Sam got an idea. This summer, if he could do something heroic, he could get the horses. That perked him up.

  “Sam,” said Diah. “In a week or two, whenever the weather looks a little better, we’ll be leaving for Snake country.”

  That night, deep in his buffalo robes, Sam dreamed about raiding the Snakes for ponies.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The departure was a disappointment to Sam. He wanted something, he didn’t know what, maybe seeing all the trappers and Indians lined up on two sides and his brigade riding down the middle, waving; women would run out and give their sweethearts good-bye kisses, and children would cry.

  Instead the outfit heard light scoffing from the Weber boys, and the Keemle-Gordon brigade too. Early February was too early in the season to move, they said. Hardly any snow here, but plenty everywhere else. Haw-haw. Neither of the other brigades would push west. Tales of beaver heaven be damned! They were in beaver heaven right here. Weber would work his way down the Wind River until it turned into the Big Horn and down that river to Henry’s Fort, and would harvest plenty of plews. Keemle and Gordon would head down the Wind, across the Little Horn Mountains, across the Big Horns, across the Black Hills, and over the plains to Fort Kiowa—they had a good take from trading with these Crows. The other men wondered what burr Diah Smith had under his saddle, that he had to go casting about for a new place to trap. How did he know the Indians wouldn’t be hostile? Why didn’t he accept what was very, very good and be well satisfied?

  By watching and listening, Sam had mostly figured that out. Captain Jedediah Smith burned with something. He was itchy partly for dollars. The Ashley-Henry firm was off to a shaky start, maybe worse than shaky. They needed a good spring hunt so the general could show the men who backed him some return. Partly, Diah was determined to do well for General Ashley, who had put confidence in a very young leader. Partly he had the desire to see what was over the next hill—Diah harbored the traveler’s hunger, the lust to see what a piece of country looked like—he yearned to see the shape of the shoulder of a mountain, the way a creek wound through its valley, as much as other men yearned to see the flesh of woman. But with Jedediah Smith, Sam sensed, it was really something beyond all of that, something that turned and turned inside him and would always be churning, driving. That something, Sam was sure, would fill in the blank spaces on his map, maybe all the way from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean. Diah’s thirst was big and it would take that much country to slake it.

  From the Crows they couldn’t tell about the country ahead, the pass they wanted to
cross. Rose was gone on a war party, and had told the captain he didn’t want to work for Ashley anymore, instead would stay with the Crows. Now the outfit had no guide. Sam and Blue Medicine Horse translated between Diah and the men who knew the country. Sam thought they were hinting that it was too early for the pass, but didn’t want to be so impolite as to say so right out. Also, the captain seemed plain sure white men could do what Indians could not. The lure of adventure shone bright in Diah’s eyes, and they would go, regardless.

  They loaded up, this baker’s dozen of men, one packhorse to each rider. Sam and Gideon abandoned their lodgepoles as too cumbersome to carry, but took the cover. The brigade mounted and rode slowly upriver, first past the circles of the Crow camp. Though Sam said good-bye to Meadowlark the night before, pledging a return for summer, now his eyes searched her circle. No Meadowlark running out to wave good-bye. No Meadowlark at all. For sure, no brass band farewell.

  They rode northwest along the river toward a high pass, Union Pass, it was called. Captain Smith had a map he’d put together from the country he’d seen and what was known from the Lewis and Clark men and the Astorians and the few others who’d ventured this far. The pass was on the map, and the Crows confirmed it. Beyond that pass, they said, was Snake country, the Siskadee River, beaver heaven. Why, you didn’t have to trap them, you could kill them with a stick.

  The first day they made maybe fifteen miles, easy riding in snow no more than hoof deep. From the Crows and the maps Diah had figured it was thirty miles to the pass, and no telling how many miles of high country on the other side.

  The second day the snow was cannon-bone deep, and they had to take it slow with the horses. After five or six miles, it was hock deep, and they got off and led the horses. The men wondered what the animals would feed on. That night a majority in camp was for turning back. The captain, though, had his mind made up to go on.