Dancing with the Golden Bear Read online

  Our stomachs were aching—we smiled and said “Please”

  Our tongues were surprised when they fed us on fleas.

  This wasn’t quite accurate. Those Indians, Paiutes, had offered the trappers bugs, but not specifically fleas. Nevertheless, the verse got a big laugh—everyone loved it. Evans said “fleas” was poetic license.

  Late that night came a scratch on the door flap of Sam and Meadowlark’s tipi. It was Jedediah. He didn’t want to come in, just wanted to give Sam the news. Robeseau and the Nipisang were leaving the outfit. They wanted to go east, seeking better beaver prospects. Being free trappers, not hired company men, they had the right. Their wives, children, and horses would go with them, and the brigade would be that much weaker.

  When Diah left, Sam looked at Meadowlark in the soft glow of the coals. “He doesn’t get discouraged,” he said, and sat back down next to her.

  She gave her husband a lopsided smile and said, “Sometimes I wish he did.” She snuggled her face into his neck, so he couldn’t see her eyes. He held her tight. His wife was plucky, plenty damn plucky. Not many Crow women would leave their families for any man, especially not a white man. Fewer yet would want to set out across unknown deserts to get a look at the ocean-everywhere.

  “You said you have dreams about the ocean,” said Sam. “Tell me about them.”

  “Better not to talk about it,” she answered. He could feel her stiffen up.

  He thought about what she’d said before. In her dreams she went into the water and descended deep, she’d said. There were strange and wondrous creatures down there.

  But she didn’t want to talk now. She’d been moody lately. Touchy and moody.

  The next morning matters were worse. The men woke up to find that Manuel Eustevan had run off. He took with him a good deal of company property—one Shoshone slave woman, the Umpqua slave, a horse, a rifle, and some ammunition. Manuel was claiming the slave woman for his own blankets.

  Sam wondered whether Manuel took some of the brigade’s confidence with him. Half the men talked about whether Manuel would survive, and all thought on whether they would.

  Sometimes, in the evenings of days like this, Evans and Gideon would play tunes, or the brigade would work together on another verse of “The Never-Ending Tale of Jedediah Smith.” Tonight they were moping.

  Sam, Gideon, and Flat Dog were at the seep getting what water they could. The water didn’t flow. You pressed your horn or kettle against the grass and mud, and water oozed into it. Mud too.

  Gideon raised his head and looked at the captain legging his way up the nearest hill. “Dreaming,” he said.

  “What?” asked Sam, though he’d heard clearly.

  “He’s dreaming, I think.” Gideon said it comfortably; not much upset him.

  “The Buenaventura,” said Flat Dog, drawing the word out slow, like a tease.

  “Or is it Californy?” The French-Canadian had his own way of talking. “It” came out “eet,” “this” came out “zis,” and so on.

  They all looked at Jedediah. He’d get to the top before sundown, but he’d have to find his way down in the dark. Coy yipped lightly, as though calling the captain back, or urging him on. Sam scratched the little coyote’s belly, and Coy rolled onto his back for more.

  Sam stood up and looked at Diah’s back again. He shook his head, then his shoulders. No sense to anything these days, but Diah was Diah, and Sam wouldn’t criticize him.

  When they had enough liquid, they walked downhill to their horses and watered them.

  Sam rubbed Paladin down with water too. He admired her looks again, white body with a black cap around the ears, a black blaze on the chest, and black mane and tail. The Crows called this kind of pony a medicine hat. She was getting gaunt from this desert travel, and Sam was worried.

  When the horses finished the water, the men walked back to camp. Sam could hardly watch Gideon peg along. Just three months ago Sam had taken his friend’s leg off, with a knife.

  The brigade spread itself along a dusty, cactus-spiked flat in three campfires set a little apart. Its men were grousing, no need to ask about what.

  “Diah don’t make sense,” said Gobel. The blacksmith laid down words like rings of a hammer, solid and sure. He was a practical, earthy man, not one to let himself become entranced by figments of imagination. “This ain’t no beaver country, and there ain’t no prospect on south.”

  He looked Sam, Gideon, and Flat Dog in the eye, including them in his challenge.

  They sat down with blank faces. Coy growled. He didn’t take to Gobel.

  “California,” said Robert Evans with the music of his Irish accent. Evans and Gobel, the smallest and largest, liked to brawl—they saw it as sport.

  “The Buenaventura,” said Sumner with a sly smile, making the word slide like a note on a fiddle.

  These two words had become a muse, a siren, a force.

  Oh, the Buenaventura. They knew one big fact: In the middle of California was a huge harbor where a big river flowed in. That knowledge gave rise to mists of speculation. The river was the connection between the west side of the Rocky Mountains and California. It would provide a basic route from the United States to the decks of ships that would trade in India, China, London, and Boston. It was what President Thomas Jefferson had dreamed of, but Captains Lewis and Clark had failed to find.

  The beaver men of the Rocky Mountains damn well thought they would find it. Any hand of them knew the Rockies far better than all the Lewis and Clark men put together. And they had marched every which direction looking for it. They had been clear to Flathead country in the north, Taos in the south, and the plains of the Snake River, where some had been reduced to eating grasshoppers, in the west. Now they were trekking to the southwest, thinking they might find the Siskadee, or Green River, and that might take them to California.

  If some of them were thinking the Buenaventura was a mirage, like the water they sometimes imagined in this miserable desert, they didn’t say so.

  California was also a mirage, a dream. Just as the Buenaventura was Jedediah’s big dream, California was the heart’s desire of his men. The sailors who had visited the ports of Alta California said the climate was spring and summer all year round, and a farmer might make two or three crops a season. They said the breezes were balmy, the snows never fell, the women were willing, the life easy, lazy, and good.

  But now that name was also a joke among the brigade’s men. California meant the country you walk toward forever and never find, a never-never land you sometimes glimpse shimmering in the desert, tantalizing, always just beyond reach.

  As one they looked toward the captain on the hill. He stood on the top, one dark vertical line tinged with the blue of twilight. Solitary, the way he likes to be, thought Sam. They could not see the single black horizontal line that would be his looking glass, which might also be called his instrument of dream-seeing. He would glass until he saw a couple of trees, some bushes, or a bit of grass that spoke of a chance of water.

  “He don’t look for water,” said Gobel. “He prays for it.”

  “Maybe,” said John with a smile, “he need one somep’n-somep’n stronger than God to pray to.”

  No one laughed. They didn’t live in some far past, or in the future either. Last night they’d camped dry. Tonight they had a little water, tomorrow they might not. It was that kind of country. It was where their captain had led them, maybe following his dreams. Their life was the captain’s dreams.

  Four

  To the River

  In the end it was the Siskadee that saved them. Or was it Jedediah’s dream?

  They knew the Siskadee from where it came out of the mountains far to the north, almost to Jackson’s Hole, all the way down to Flaming Gorge, where Ashley had boated it and got into trouble. The Colorado, Ashley called it, but the ordinary mountain man still called it the Siskadee, the Crow word for “sage hen.”

  First off, that hint Jedediah saw in his spyglass had i
n fact turned out to be a river—the Adams, he named it, in honor of the current president of the United States, John Quincy Adams. It was a dubious find, though. The men had exhausted their supply of dried buffalo, saw no game, and had nothing at all to eat the first night. Toward the end of the second day, though, came a hope—Indians peeking at the camp.

  Jedediah went out alone with iron arrowheads as gifts. Diah knew these Indians probably had never before seen white men, or even horses. After much coaxing, one brave fellow came forward, visibly quaking with fright. The Indian gave Jedediah a rabbit. Diah patted the man and spoke soothingly. Soon another ten or twelve came close, bearing ears of corn as gifts. Corn! When Diah gave them the metal arrowheads, they were so delighted they ran off to get more corn, and even some pumpkins.

  Farmers! In the red-rock desert! The trappers could hardly believe their luck. That night Jedediah wrote in his journal:

  Indifferent as this may seem to him who never made his pillow of the sand of the plain, or him who would consider it a hardship to go without his dinner, yet to us weary and hungry in the solitary desert, it was a feast, a treat that made my party in their sudden hilarity and glee present a lively contrast to the moody desponding silence of the night before.

  Three days of rest, the captain said—Sam could hardly believe it. He felt like a gopher trampled by a herd of horses, breaded with dust, and fried by the sun.

  Now, in the evenings, when dark protected them, he and Meadowlark played in the river together. This was a custom Sam taught Meadowlark, for Crow men and women didn’t bathe together, not even couples. Mostly these two sat in the water up to their chins and talked, or just looked at each other. They wiggled their toes against each other’s toes in the muddy bottom, and sometimes joined in love in the warm river. Sam taught her to splash water in each other’s faces, dunk each other, and clown around. She loved it.

  Each morning they woke to the light of dawn glowing through the hides of the tipi and made love. They took their time, touched each other in many ways, and afterward warmed up last night’s vegetable stew and ate it and talked for a long time.

  After breakfast each day Sam jumped in the river by himself, soaking up the water through every pore. Then he got Paladin and led her withers deep. He thought, dry as she’d been, even soaking the liquid through the skin would be good for her.

  Coy stood on the bank while the man and horse bathed. Wary of the water, unable to understand why his master played in it, Coy yipped and howled the whole time, raising a coyote complaint.

  Maybe it was Coy who called Sumner down to the river. “Why you do this every morning?” the black man asked.

  “I’m a Crow,” said Sam uneasily.

  “And I’m an Irishman.” Sumner laughed, slipped off his clothes, splashed into the water, and asked, “You serious about being a Crow?”

  “Yes.” Sam explained that Crow men bathed in the river every day, even in the mountain winter.

  “That don’t make you a Crow.”

  “I carry the sacred pipe.” Sumner would know more or less what that meant. “I gave a sun dance.” This was touchy but important. “I got a vision. I have a Crow name.”

  “Big doin’s, huh?”

  Sam nodded.

  “Ain’t for me.” Sumner snorted. “Guess if I was a Crow, I’d still be a slave.”

  “No man oughta be a slave.”

  Sumner shrugged. “With Cap’n Smith it ain’t bad.” Sam eyed Sumner sideways and guessed he was just saying what he thought he was supposed to say. True, his only duties were around camp, but that made it seem he was a boy instead of a man.

  “What do you want to be?” asked Sam, looking at him quizzically.

  “A thief.”

  “What?!”

  “Every tribe we meet, I filch something. It’s a little dangerous, but that’s the fun. For sure I put something in my pocket. What you think I trade to the women to get fun in the willows?” Sumner gave Sam a look. “Cap’n Smith don’t supply me nothing to get poontang. I get it with stuff I done stole.”

  Sam couldn’t help laughing.

  “White man looks at me, he sees an ignorant Nigger and a slave.” Sumner cocked his head saucily. “I ain’t gon’ say much, but don’t you think you know me. I reads and writes pretty good, and one day I will do it real good. I’m a damned sneak.” He gave Sam a shrewd look. “You read and write?”

  Sam shook his head no. That was a sore spot with Sam.

  For the first time Sumner gave Sam a wide-open smile. “Maybe you best turn into a sneak.”

  On the way back to the tipi, Sam thought about what he’d said to Sumner—“I am a Crow.” He knew that his wife thought so. To her Sam was a man whose proper name was Joins with Buffalo, a name given him properly by a medicine man. Always, when they were alone, they spoke the Crow language and she called him Joins with Buffalo. He hadn’t smoked his pipe in too long, though. The pipe was power. The way things were going, he and the brigade could use some power.

  This morning Flat Dog was sitting with Meadowlark and talking about this and that, as he did most mornings. Sometimes Sam worried about how much they expected. Flat Dog saw Sam Morgan as a Crow warrior, with a full list of duties attached. They had fought the enemy Sioux together. They had danced the sun dance together. They had suffered together. They belonged to the same warrior society, Kit Foxes.

  Yes, the three were on a great adventure—they all wanted to see the ocean to the far west, especially Meadowlark. Ultimately, though, being a Crow meant responsibilities to the village, to the people. They all knew where they belonged, in the end. Only Sam had to remind himself.

  He reminded himself every morning, I am a Crow. It was confusing. A white-skinned, towheaded Crow. A Welsh Crow. Confusing.

  “What are you thinking about this time?”

  Meadowlark liked to tease him that he spent too much time cogitating, instead of just being and doing.

  “Confused about what I am.”

  “I know that one. Let’s see, you’re a mountain man, have all those hunting and traveling skills.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a Crow. You have medicine.”

  “Yes.”

  “These are true, you know. You really are both. You’re something special.” She rubbed against him to hint at a woman’s response to his being special.

  “You also waste time thinking.” She smiled up at him and stroked his face. The breakfast fire was out, and today they didn’t have to travel. “Tell you what, I’ll teach you who you are. You want to know? Come inside with me.”

  And for the next hour he was in the right place on Mother Earth.

  Later, Meadowlark built another fire to reheat their vegetable stew. Sam watched her fondly. Strange—though they were almost never out of each other’s sight, he didn’t feel like they got enough time together. She said she didn’t either. Finding water, getting a few mouthfuls to eat, plodding across the desert in the parching sun, taking care of their animals, putting the tipi up and taking it down—these daily tasks were exhausting. When they lay down at night, they barely had the energy for love, and usually their coupling was silent and brief. Their words of affection were few, their cup of feeling no longer brimful, as in the first weeks, but just barely enough to slake thirst.

  Oh, those first six weeks, all of July, half of August. As they tramped slowly and painfully across the desert now, Sam put his mind back in those times at the rendezvous in Cache Valley and their honeymoon.

  There he woke up amazed every morning, amazed that she was next to him. He had stolen her away back in the spring, and they had several dazzling days together, a magical time there in Ruby Hawk Valley. They made love triumphantly, tenderly, playfully. He repented of his one terrible sin in front of her, getting her brother killed, Blue Medicine Horse, who was also Sam’s best friend. For this transgression, there in Ruby Hawk Valley, she forgave him. She even used his own Bible words—“I give unto you beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for
your mourning, the garment of praise for your spirit of heaviness.”

  Those short days felt like a time lived in the way people in stories lived, the Bible stories, or the King Arthur stories his father used to tell from the old country. To Sam this kind of life was why he left Pennsylvania, why he merely paused in St. Louis, why he came as a new man to the Rocky Mountains. In that act, that adventuring forth, he felt himself an Adam, abandoning the old world and searching a new, undiscovered world for a home. He wanted to live every day of his life like that, living what he felt inside himself.

  Then her relatives came with rifle, spear, and arrow and sundered him from Meadowlark by force.

  This brutal fact was as real as his dream, more real. They brought him back as a prisoner to a hostile camp. He was forbidden to speak to her, even to make eye contact with her. At last, at her urging, he left the camp to rejoin his brigade—he acted like a white man again.

  Then, like a miracle, she came to him. She ran away, abandoning all for the towheaded Welsh Crow.

  After their wedding ceremony, those six weeks at rendezvous …

  Now Sam had two new human beings in the galaxy of his life. Meadowlark was his love mate, housemate, playmate, partner in every way. He’d never realized, back at home, how much his mother and sister left his life incomplete. And Flat Dog was his brother. Plus Coy and Paladin. That summed it up.

  At first Sam was surprised. Now he couldn’t believe how much Flat Dog felt like a real brother. For instance, they could talk about anything.

  “I don’t get it,” Sam said as they rode along, dust spitting toward their faces with every plop of hoof. Coy trudged beside Sam, each step looking wearier than the last. He looked at his wife, two or three horse lengths ahead of them, leading her pony.

  “She was shy, demure, soft-spoken, a perfect lady. Now she’s …”

  Flat Dog’s face rearranged itself into a lopsided grin. It was a face that could only be described as skewed, put together crooked. The effect made everybody smile.

  Sam waited.

  “Because she turns out to be stubborn?”

  Flat Dog looked like he wanted to hoot. “Because she’s not shy anymore?”