G.T. was much put out by that command.
“But the Indians left,” he said. “You can hear them. They’re heading for the river.”
“Don’t be presuming to instruct your elders, G.T.,” Uncle Seth said. “Bothersome as the Pawnee is when you’ve got him in your camp, it’s once he’s left that you really have to worry. Go help Charlie with the mules.”
“The clouds are coming back,” Charlie said. “It won’t be moonlight much longer—once it’s dark they might try for a mule—I’m going to bring them in close to the wagon.”
“I have never liked to sleep with a mule breathing on me,” Ma said. “But I guess I can stand it if that’s the best way to secure them.”
The moon soon went behind a cloud, as Charlie had predicted; the only light was the faint white of the sleet and the flickers of our campfire. We hitched all six mules to the wagon, in a line—the two horses also. I stood between two mules, shivering, and G.T. did the same. Then I heard coyotes yipping. When I strained my eyes I thought I saw forms creeping around on the plain.
“Are those Pawnees?” I whispered to Charlie. I was sure we were about to be in a battle.
“No, those are coyotes,” Charlie said.
Ma sat by the campfire, keeping the baby warm. She fed cow chips into the flames, one or two at a time.
It was during that night on the sleety prairies—it seemed to last for a week—that I really learned what cold was. All that saved me—and G.T. too—was the fact of being between the two mules. The cold just got colder and colder—the temperature dropped and dropped. It wasn’t just my hands and feet that froze—it was my cheeks and eyelids, my forehead, my ears. It felt like the blood was freezing inside me. From time to time I stopped to rub my freezing cheeks against a warm mule.
G.T. had an even worse time than me. He forgot and grabbed his gun barrel with his bare hand: of course, he stuck to his gun and peeled a good strip of skin off two fingers when he tried to get loose. Ma rubbed a little antelope tallow on the skinned place. It was not until the first faint light came that Charlie told us we could go get warm.
The ends of Ma’s hair had frozen where baby Marcy had breathed on it during the night.
“The Pawnees must have lost their starch,” Uncle Seth observed. “Six fine mules and two horses and they didn’t even manage to steal one. It’s almost an insult.”
“It was because of Villy,” Charlie said. “They think he makes bad medicine.”
“Yes, they have a powerful fear of the rosary,” Father Villy said. “They associate it with funerals, mostly.”
“Why, they stole my cowbell—I can’t find it,” Ma said.
“With that many Pawnees milling around, if all we lost is a cowbell we got off light,” Uncle Seth said. “We don’t have a cow anyway.”
“No, but if we settle out here we might get a cow or two,” Ma said. “It would be nice to have a cowbell, to help locate our cows with, if we get some.”
That was the first any of us had heard about the prospect of settling out west. We had been on the move for a good while now, but none of us kids really knew what all this travel was leading to. Ma wanted to have a talk with Pa, we knew that—but what the talk was supposed to be about had us mystified. It was going to be an important talk, though—otherwise Ma would just have waited to have it next time Pa came home.
“It’s for reasons of my own, Sherman,” Ma said, the one time I got up the nerve to ask her about it. She wouldn’t say more than that.
The band of Pawnees led by old Nose Turns Down never bothered us again, but it was not long before we began to see more Indians, lots of them, mainly traveling in small groups. Five or six would race up to us, feathers fluttering on their lances—feathers or sometimes scalps. All of them were bold when it came to inspecting our goods, a habit that continued to annoy Ma, who quarreled with Uncle Seth about it.
“Why wouldn’t they ride right in?” he asked her. “There are no doors out here on the baldies—did you expect them to knock?”
“No, but I didn’t expect them to be so familiar, either,” Ma said.
“It’s their country, Mary—we’re the invaders, not them,” Uncle Seth said, speaking more sharply than he usually spoke to Ma.
“I don’t want their country—I just want to pass through,” Ma said, a little surprised by his tone.
“We are passing through,” Uncle Seth said. “Us and a lot more like us.”
It was certainly true that plenty of people were headed in the same direction we were. Several times we even saw men walking: no more equipment than a rifle, a spade, and a blanket or two. There was a wagon train behind us, nearly as long as the one in front of us, and lots of single wagons like our own.
“I confess I’m shocked by the lack of game,” Father Villy said. “It’s only been five years since I traveled the Platte—only five years ago there was plenty of game.”
“The same for me,” Uncle Seth said. “When Dick and I first hauled freight to Fort Laramie we were never out of sight of critters we could eat. Buffalo, elk, antelope—when supper time came we just grabbed a rifle and shot whatever looked tastiest. Now about the only meat we can count on is prairie dogs.”
Of course, we saw plenty of prairie dogs, but we hadn’t killed one yet—Uncle Seth wouldn’t let us shoot at them.
“I don’t favor wasting bullets on small varmints,” he said.
“The old days have always seemed better to people—I wonder why that is, Seth,” Ma asked.
For once Uncle Seth seemed to have no opinion. He took his rifle and rode off to look for the game that he had just said wasn’t there.
7
WHILE we were fixing our wagon for about the fourth time in a week, the thing that G.T. used to worry about finally happened: a bear sprang out and went for him. We had been struggling through what Father Villy called the malpais—he said it just meant “bad country,” and this country was certainly bad, a land of dips and dry creeks and sharp rocky gullies. Some of the gullies were so hard to pull out of that we had to hitch all the mules to the wagon. The mules were up to this rough travel, but our old wagon wasn’t. The dryness loosened the spokes, and they began to fall out of the wheels. Then one day, as we were easing up out of a steep gully, one of the rear wheels just suddenly came off and went rolling down the gully, in the direction of the Platte River.
When the wheel came off, the rear end of the wagon dropped and the wagon box shook loose and fell out, spilling most of my ma’s cooking stuff. Marcy had been napping—before anyone could catch her she slid out of the back of the wagon and had the bad luck to land right on a little cactus.
“Whoa! Whoa! We’re wrecked!” Uncle Seth said to Ma, who was driving. Ma stopped the mules, but I don’t think she quite took in what had happened until she noticed the wagon wheel rolling off down the gully.
“Dern the luck, where does that wheel think it’s going?” she said. “One of you boys go get it, quick.”
Father Villy had just picked up the baby when the bear sprang out—it had been down in the gully, trying to dig out a ground squirrel, when the wagon wheel came rolling along and startled Mr. Bruin.
G.T. had just started to go retrieve the wheel when a brown bear that looked as big as a hill came roaring up toward him. What saved G.T. was Charlie Seven Days’s little sorrel horse, which had the bad luck to be nibbling a little growth of bunchgrass on the side of the gully. Before the horse could move the bear whacked it like Ma might whack G.T. if her temper was up. The sorrel horse died on the spot, of a broken neck. G.T. was paralyzed: he couldn’t move. It was his good luck that Uncle Seth happened to have his rifle in his hand, and that he was a skilled sharpshooter, too. You wouldn’t think a little thing like a bullet could kill a bear that size, but Uncle Seth killed it with two shots. When the bear first sprang out it seemed to be right on us, but in fact it was a fair way down the gully. Uncle Seth’s second shot caused it to sit down and look thoughtful. It pawed at itself for a moment
and then flopped over, dead. Once killed, it didn’t look half as big as it had looked while it was alive, but it was still twice as big as any bear you’d find in Missouri.
G.T. was so shocked he didn’t realize he was alive. He couldn’t even talk, for several minutes.
“This solves the vittles problem but not the wagon problem,” Uncle Seth said. “If the wheel hadn’t come off I doubt that bear would even have noticed us.”
I guess Ma hadn’t been as impressed by the bear as the rest of us were, besides which she was impatient by nature. Ma hated delays, even delays caused by grizzly bears.
“That bear’s dead, G.T.—go on and get the wagon wheel,” she said.
G.T. didn’t even answer. I think he was still trying to convince himself he was alive.
“Leave him be, Mary Margaret,” Uncle Seth said. “He’s had a shock.”
He and Charlie Seven Days eased down the gully and took a closer look at the bear. They had their guns at the ready, in case the bear was just playing possum.
“It’s dead—I can see that much from here,” Ma said. “What’s everybody lolling around for? My wagon box is broken, my baby’s full of cactus, that wagon wheel’s probably still rolling, and you’re all standing around looking at a dead bear. We need to get this wagon fixed or we’ll still be in this gully tomorrow.”
Neva, who was fearless if she was anything, finally went and got the wagon wheel, rolling it back up the gully it had just rolled down. If we hadn’t had Father Villy, though, I doubt we could ever have got the wheel back on the wagon. He lifted the whole back end of the wagon and held it long enough for us to wedge the wheel back on.
The task of butchering the bear and the horse was left to Charlie, who was very quick and skillful with a skinning knife. He tried to show G.T. and I how to cut up a large animal—we were eager to try out our new knives—but we were so slow and did so many things wrong that Ma finally called off the lesson. Her lifelong habit of interfering with whatever happened to be going on irritated Uncle Seth sometimes, and this was one of the times.
“Don’t you even want these boys to know how to cut up a bear?” he asked her.
“Not particularly,” Ma said. “They might live the rest of their lives without needing to cut up another bear.”
G.T. and I talked about that grizzly bear for the rest of our lives, but it was plain that it had made little impression on Ma.
“Good Lord, it was just a bear,” she said. “It’s no more inconvenient than having a baby fall on a cactus.”
“It would have been if I hadn’t been around to shoot it,” Uncle Seth pointed out. “At the very least it would have laid waste to the mules.”
“Why make up notions about things that didn’t happen?” Ma asked. “You were along to shoot it, and that’s one reason you’re along on this trip: so you can shoot things that need to be shot.”
“I wish I was as practical as you are, Mary Margaret,” Uncle Seth said. It was plain that Ma’s bossy ways had put a strain on his temper, again.
“Well, you ain’t, and that’s that,” Ma said, as if that settled the matter.
Not only was Charlie Seven Days the best at cutting up dead bears and dead horses, he also turned out to be the best at getting cactus thorns out of babies. He soaked them loose in some warm water and then rubbed some bear grease on Marcy’s punctures, so she wouldn’t be so whiny.
I guess knowing how to cure cactus punctures was what Ma considered a practical skill. She was real friendly to Charlie after that.
8
AFTER that morning when the bear sprang out it seemed like some little thing went wrong with the wagon every day. The rocks and the creeks and the gullies—the malpais, as Father Villy called it—were destroying our wagon a little at a time.
Ma knew it but she did her best to ignore it, waiting impatiently while Uncle Seth and Father Villy repaired the spoke or the hitch or the shaft—whatever went wrong on a given day.
“How far till we’re done with this malpais?” she asked the priest. “I’ve had about enough of it.”
“Another week, ma’am,” Father Villy said.
Once again, though, it turned out that being a little distance back from a big wagon train was a piece of luck—our wagon wasn’t the only conveyance to suffer. Almost every day us kids, while out with our turd sacks, would spot some little piece of equipment that had been dropped by the big train. Once we even found a whole wagon that had been abandoned. The Indians had picked it over some, but there were still lots of valuable parts that we could scavenge—and we did. Uncle Seth even broke up the bottom and sides, to use to patch the holes in our wagon bed.
“There’s no reason for any part of the United States to be this big,” Ma said one morning. A rear wheel had just come loose again, which meant a slow day.
“It’s even bigger in some places,” Father Villy said.
“I don’t see how it could be bigger,” Ma said, a position I agreed with. Sometimes we’d come to the top of a hill or ridge only to have the sky swell out above us and the horizon retreat so far away that it was hard to believe we could ever get across to it.
“Montana’s bigger,” Father Villy assured Ma.
“I hope my husband’s had the good sense to stay out of Montana then,” Ma said. Though the breakdowns vexed her, it was clear that she had no intention of giving up.
Of course, there would have been no advantage to giving up. We were so far out in the middle of nowhere that we would have been lucky to make it home, even if we turned back.
“How much farther to a house?” Ma asked, looking around her at the empty plain. “I’ve about forgotten what a house looks like.”
It was a bright, clear day, but a chilly wind was howling out of the north.
“I guess you’d call Fort Laramie a house, of sorts,” Uncle Seth said. “It’s about a hundred miles away.
“I doubt you’ll approve it, though,” he added.
“Seth, nobody made you the judge of what I approve of,” Ma said. “Or what I don’t approve of, either.”
“Maybe not, but I have spent several months of my life at Fort Laramie and it’s a disorderly place, filled with cowards and drunkards and whores and coffee coolers, none of which you normally approve of,” he said.
“Don’t you talk of harlots around my boys,” Ma said. “What’s a coffee cooler?”
“It’s an Indian who’s too lazy to hunt,” Uncle Seth said. “By now I imagine those Pawnees have cooled that coffee we gave them.”
“Oh, you mean beggars,” Ma said.
Just then Charlie Seven Days touched Uncle Seth’s arm. Charlie had been afoot since the day the bear killed his horse, but he seemed just as happy to be walking. One day he killed a big porcupine—the meat tasted rank, but Charlie helped Neva pull out the quills, which he said could be used to ornament a shawl.
Charlie pointed to a ridge to the northwest—all I could see were some moving dots, but the dots soon turned out to be Indians, and they were moving our way fast. In fact they seemed to be charging right at us—Ma thought the same.
“Seth, they’re charging,” she said. “We better get ready to fight.”
“It’s the Bad Faces,” Charlie said. “I see that paint horse that Red Cloud likes.”
“You may be right,” Father Villy said. He was as cool as if Charlie had just quoted a verse of scripture or something.
“Seth, did you hear me?” Ma asked. The fact that the horses were racing toward us at breakneck speed made more of an impression on Ma than the grizzly bear had.
“They’re Sioux, Mary Margaret,” Uncle Seth said. “They ain’t attacking, they’re just showing off their horsemanship. The Sioux ain’t been cowed yet—they still think they have the right to run their horses, if they want to.”
I wasn’t as easy in my mind about the Indians as Uncle Seth was, but I had to admit it was a noble sight to see them come flashing over the prairies at reckless speed. I had never seen horses ridden so fast
—when they came to a creek or small gully they soared over it like birds, the horses kicking up dust on the other side.
“I’ve heard the Comanches can outride the Sioux but I don’t trust the report,” Father Villy said. “Look at them come!”
For a moment I felt a lump in my throat, just from the beauty of the race—but I was scared, too. What if they all pulled tomahawks at the last minute and knocked us all dead? They were riding so low on their mounts that even if we had shot I doubt we’d have hit more than one or two of them, which wouldn’t have been enough.
Then, when they were no more than fifteen or twenty wagon lengths from us, they stopped. A few of the horses were so caught up in the run that they pawed the air, anxious to keep going.
“Red Cloud is behind,” Charlie said. “So is Old Man Afraid.”
We saw that two of the Sioux riders hadn’t been quite so swift. They were a half mile back, coming at a slow, easy lope.
“These here’s just the youngsters,” Uncle Seth said. “They will race their nags.”
“Who’s going to palaver?” Father Villy asked.
We all looked at Charlie, but he declined the position. He just stood close to the wagon, watching the Sioux.
Then the two older men eased to the front of the crowd, waiting for someone from our bunch to go talk to them.
“Seth, go on—talk to them,” Ma said.
The two older Indians who were waiting to talk to us didn’t seem impatient. The one on the paint horse had a narrow face and carried a brand-new rifle—a repeater of some kind. The other Indian was older—his face was wrinkled, like a melon gets when the sun has dried it up.
Uncle Seth and Father Villy walked out together and began to sign to the Indians. The signing went on for a while, and then the thin-faced man on the paint horse began to talk—and did he talk! He sat right there on his horse and made a long speech—I didn’t get a word of it, and I doubt anyone else did, either, unless it was Father Villy.
The speech went on for so long that I expected Ma to get impatient—she didn’t enjoy listening to anyone for much of a length of time—but for once she behaved herself and waited for the discussion to be over.