In one of the coincidences of history, the beaver was largely exterminated in the mountains at the exact time when its pelts were no longer wanted in the cities.
“It’s not so easy to find pelts now,” McKeag reported to Bockweiss. He stayed in Saint Louis for several weeks, marveling at the changes that had overtaken it as an American city. Grand Rue was now Main Street. Rue de l’Eglise and Rue des Granges were now Second and Third streets, and wherever he went he heard that Bockweiss had bought this or sold that.
Lise Pasquinel, hearing that her old friend was in town, invited him to supper at her big brick house on Fourth Street, and after he had climbed to that height he saw what a splendid view she had. “The Mississippi runs for you,” he told her, but he became tongue-tied upon finding that Grete and her prosperous husband had been invited too. “I thought you’d like to meet old friends,” Lise explained, and the sisters were so gracious that they forced him to forget his shyness.
There was much talk of American military action along the frontier, as they now called it, and repeated questions about Indians. After supper Hermann Bockweiss stopped by, bringing the two Pasquinel children. Cyprian, a tall young man, aged twenty-four, appeared in a Parisian outfit: tight trousers, ornate vest, jacket, ruffled shirt, stock, pointed shoes and one of the new silk hats. He was a courteous young fellow and said he was helping his grandfather buy land. Lisette, aged thirteen, was a pert child, pretty in a French way, but firm-chinned like her German mother; she wore a princesse gown with the belt line of the bodice very high and the skirt flaring away in lovely patterns. McKeag could not help contrasting the civilized behavior and dress of these Pasquinel children with that of their half brothers on the prairie; they spoke English, French and German equally well. They were not deceitful enough to act as if they were interested in talking with McKeag; they scarcely knew who he was and were eager to be off.
“Fine children,” McKeag said impulsively as they left. “Pasquinel would be proud of them.”
This inappropriate observation produced a chill, but without obvious embarrassment Lise leaned forward and asked, “How is Pasquinel?”
“Hasn’t he been here?”
“We haven’t seen him for seven years,” she said evenly.
McKeag looked at her without speaking. How pitiful, he thought. No big fight, not even a difference of opinion. Just a fur trapper who got fed up with the city and left one day, a Daniel Boone asking the world to leave him alone. He felt deep compassion for Lise but could find no way to express it. Her brother-in-law broke the silence to ask, “What’s he up to now?”
McKeag reflected. What was Pasquinel up to? From the myriad answers he might have given he chose a strange one: “They cut that arrowhead out of his back.”
“Did they!” Lise cried.
“How’d they do it?” Grete asked. And McKeag went into such detail, explaining what the rendezvous was like and how the Englishman Haversham sold lapsang souchong, that any tenseness over Pasquinel was eased. Later he said with considerable infelicity, “I think it was after they cut out the flint ... Pasquinel was drunk, but he stood stock-still and allowed his son—well, both of his boys—to shoot a whiskey bottle off his head.”
There was another silence, which none of the listeners cared to break. Then Grete’s husband asked quietly, “His sons?”
“Bockweiss knows about the sons,” McKeag said, but as soon as the words were spoken he realized that the old German had sought to protect Lise’s feelings by not telling her of the Indian family. Now, having betrayed the secret, McKeag felt that he should complete it. “They are younger than Cyprian,” he told Lise. “Marcel has possibilities. Jacques, the oldest, is a terrible monster. What might happen with him, not even God knows.”
Lise listened to this information impassively and refused to comment.
As McKeag started to leave, he noticed again how luxurious the house was, filled with fine things shipped from the east. “My children will be marrying soon,” Lise said. “They’ll live here at first, I hope, and maybe one of them will want the house and allow me to stay on.” She was a composed, gracious woman, the finest lady McKeag had ever met.
“Thank you for supper,” he said, and the way he spoke was so formal that she reached out and grabbed his hands, pulling herself to him and kissing him on the cheek.
“Alexander! We’re old friends!” And she dragged him to a different corner of the house and showed him the room she had built for him. “This is your room, Alexander,” she cried, pressing her fingers against her tears. “As long as you live, when you come to Saint Louis you are to come here ... stay with us. There will be no more living along the river.”
She insisted that he move in that night, sent servants down to the shore to gather his belongings lest he go and not come back, and when his meager equipment was installed she sat on his bed, smoothed out her skirt and said, “Now tell me about Pasquinel.”
During that autumn of 1828 Pasquinel, Clay Basket, the two boys and their baby sister pitched their tipi among the red-stone monuments that lined the North Platte east of where the Laramie River joined. This was country occupied by the Oglala Sioux, a warlike tribe that Pasquinel liked, and while his sons rampaged with the young braves he held long talks with the chiefs, trying to ascertain whether they knew anything of Lame Beaver’s gold. They knew nothing.
He was irritated beyond endurance. He resumed the hard questioning of Clay Basket which he had conducted sporadically through the twenty-two years of their marriage, and one day, as she had reviewed once again her father’s life, he recalled something of importance.
“Didn’t I see in your father’s tipi a buffalo skin with paintings on it? His coups?”
“Yes, my mother painted it.”
“Where is it?”
She shrugged her shoulders and explained again that among her people, when a man died his goods were distributed.
“I know that,” he snapped. “But who got the picture skin?”
“No one.”
He could not accept this as an answer, and shook her. “What do you mean, no one?” he shouted, and she explained that at her father’s death the painted skin simply disappeared.
After a while he had to believe this, but then he had another clever idea. Let Clay Basket recall the incidents on the skin so that Pasquinel might reconstruct the places that her father had visited. It was a pleasure for her to visualize her mother’s beautiful paintings, and she ticked off the scenes.
There was the raid on the Comanche, but that wasn’t gold country. There was the victory over Never-Death, but Pasquinel already knew that land.
She went through the litany of courage, but could come up with only seven incidents, whereas even Pasquinel knew there had been eight. He badgered her, charging her with holding back the crucial information because she didn’t want him to find the gold ... wanted to save it for the Arapaho after he was dead.
She punished her brain, trying to reconstruct her father’s life, and then, as she was making pemmican, she recalled a small painting. in the corner, of her father cutting tent poles and fighting Ute warriors. “I know!” she called, and Pasquinel came running.
“It was when Lame Beaver went into the mountains to cut tipi poles. He had a fight with some Ute warriors, and I’m sure he took their pouches. And that’s where the bullets must have been.”
“Tipi poles, where?”
“Blue Valley.”
“We camped there,” Pasquinel shouted. “Damn it, we camped there.”
“That’s where it was. I remember the story now.”
It was much too late to shift camp to Blue Valley now, but all that winter among the bleak monuments rimming the Platte, Pasquinel visualized Blue Valley, and how the stream cut through the meadow, and where in the hills the gold might lie. Finding it became an obsession many times stronger than it had been when first he held the two gold bullets in his palm.
His life had not worked out well. Had he stayed with any one o
f his white wives he could have had a reasonably happy time of it; his many children were likable and he supposed they were doing well. But he had wanted to keep running; that’s what he was, a coureur de bois. The beaver had been plentiful and he had earned much money from them, but it was all gone now. What he needed was to find that gold—to climax his failures and his indifferent years with a grand exploration and so much wealth that men from Montreal to New Orleans would speak of him with enduring respect: “Pasquinel who found the gold mine.”
He would leave his Indian sons with the Oglala Sioux. They would be happier there; they were Indians now, and the Sioux would be glad to have two more braves. Yes, he and Clay Basket and the little girl would move south to Blue Valley as soon as the ice broke. The beaver? They could wait. It was getting more difficult to find them, and if he could locate the gold, there would be no more need for beaver.
McKeag, still operating alone, was not gathering many pelts either, certainly not enough to warrant another trip to Saint Louis. In the autumn of 1829 he had to decide where he would trap during the coming winter. He preferred to hole up at Rattlesnake Buttes for the cold months, then work the tributaries of the Platte when the thaw came, but even a cursory examination of those streams satisfied him that the animals were gone. Beaver Creek, which had been jammed with beaver when he first trapped it, had none at all, and the creeks farther west were little better.
He had no alternative but to abandon this congenial country and move into the foothills of the Rockies. With regret he said farewell to an area which had been kind to him and from which he had taken a modest fortune, now safely banked in Saint Louis.
Traveling on foot, he moved to the northwest toward a spot he had marked some years before, a chalk cliff which afforded protection from storms and had likely streams near at hand. There he found enough scraps of wood to erect the outlines of a hut and enough branches to keep a fire going.
It was a bad winter and he was soon snowed under. Drifts covered him and once more he lived at the bottom of a cave. Since he had survived such entombments before, this one did not cause apprehension, and there was one change which brought a measure of contentment. Each day at sunset, after be had crawled back into his tunnel, he brewed himself one small cup of lapsang souchong, and as its smoky aroma filled the cave, it brought visions of Scotland: he saw his mother at the peat fire, his father stomping in from tending sheep. Then, no matter how hard he tried to limit his thoughts, he saw himself in a yellow apron, dancing at the rendezvous, and Pasquinel stepping forward to dance with him—and he could no longer deny how much he loved this difficult man.
They had fought side by side and each had saved the. other’s life. In long winters they had sat by meager fires, hardly speaking for days at a time. They had been loved by the same woman, that remarkable Arapaho. Above all, they had explored an uncharted continent. They were closer than brothers. They were children of the buffalo, inheritors of the plains.
Pasquinel had taught McKeag the meaning of freedom, of man alone on the infinite prairie hemmed in only by the horizon, and it forever receding. How pitiful the horizons had been in Scotland: a tiny glen dominated by one rich man and all terrified of him and his power. West of the Missouri there were no rich men, only men of courage and capability, and if a man lacked either, he was soon dead.
And yet, as McKeag thought of Pasquinel now, thirty-two years later, he saw all his faults, and he wondered if the Frenchman had ever really known the meaning of freedom. He had cherished the companionship of women, but he had always fled at the first sense of encroachment. He had loved his numerous children, but he had left them for his wives to rear. He had always been a man running away from something, courageous in physical battle, a coward in moral values. He had called it freedom, but it was flight.
McKeag, the tentative one, actually felt compassion for Pasquinel, who had arrogantly directed their ventures. He was sorry that so gallant a man had come to so poor an end, but at the same time he recognized that they were still bound together by the indissoluble bonds of dangers shared and work done. Suddenly he no longer wished to live alone. He wanted to share a tipi with Pasquinel and Clay Basket on the open prairie and to seek with them such beaver as survived.
He spent a week pondering what overt action this decision entailed: At the next rendezvous I will become partners with him again. Fortified by this resolve, he began to look forward to summer, and his snow-bound cave became less oppressive.
So on a brilliant, storm-free day in March, as he climbed out to see whether spring was coming to the streams be intended trapping, he felt himself gripped by a force greater than any he had previously known. It was as if a great hand pulled him, and he heard himself cry, “Pasquinel needs me.” With irrational frenzy he packed what gear he could carry, lashed a pair of snowshoes to his feet and set forth on his difficult journey to Blue Valley.
The drifts were deep and the sun blinding. To invade mountains in such weather was preposterous, but he was convinced that Pasquinel had to be there, so he forged ahead.
Night fell, and he huddled in the lee of a rock, covering himself with snow to keep from freezing, but before dawn he resumed his trek and all that day clawed through drifts.
At last he found the branching stream that flowed down from Blue Valley, and now he was guided by the little stone beaver that climbed the cliff.
As he neared the plateau where the valley rested he had a hideous thought: Suppose Pasquinel is not here? Impossible. He would not think about that.
With a new surge of energy he clambered up the last rocks and looked down into the valley. With immense relief he saw that a lodge had been erected and that signs of life surrounded it, signs the uninitiated might miss: a branch missing from a tree, scuffled snow where an antelope had been shot.
Running as fast as his snowshoes would permit, he shouted, “Pasquinel! I’m here!”
He was close to the lodge before anyone responded. Then he saw that the door had been torn from its hinges, and Clay Basket stood on the threshold, holding a child in her arms. Clay Basket’s face was streaked with blood and she seemed to comprehend nothing.
“Pasquinel!” McKeag screamed into the unechoing snow. Kicking off his snowshoes, he dashed into the lodge. There on the floor, face down, lay Pasquinel, his body riddled with arrows and his scalp gone McKeag looked at him dumbly, then knelt to turn the body over, as if it might still contain life.
“Who did it?”
“Shoshone.”
“The boys. Didn’t they help?”
“Pasquinel left them with the Sioux.”
He took charge of everything, cutting the arrows from the dead body and preparing it for burial. He washed away the blood and brought in wood to keep the fire going. Before sunset he cleared away a patch of snow and hacked out a shallow grave in the frozen earth. There he buried Pasquinel, man of many wounds, many victories.
That night McKeag recalled that his partner had often predicted that some day the Indians would kill him, and they had. They had caught him kneeling to inspect the stream bed, turning over the gravel to see if perhaps this was where Lame Beaver had found his gold. They shot him full of arrows just as he was reaching for a glistening object. He staggered back to the lodge to protect his wife and child, as he had always protected the weaker in a fight, but they were away gathering wood, and he had died alone, as he always knew he must. In death he had two dollars and eighty cents and owed four thousand; the glistening nugget he had spotted was soon covered over with gravel.
For two uneasy days McKeag stayed in the valley, but then he was pulled by a sense of obligation back to his own traps, to his tunnel under the snow.
“Trap here,” Clay Basket said in a low voice.
“Your sons will care for you,” he said.
“They are gone,” she said. There was a silence, after which she said in a whisper, “I am alone.”
These words cut McKeag, for they were his words, thrown back at him. In confusion he tried t
o sort out ideas, but no order prevailed. All he was able to understand was that he no longer wanted to be alone. He acknowledged how wrong it was. He had climbed a mountain of frozen snow to regain a brotherhood he had once known, only to find that such brotherhood was no longer possible.
Could it be, he asked himself, that the mysterious summons he experienced might have involved not Pasquinel but Clay Basket? But he was afraid. He was deeply afraid that he was not meant to share his life with a woman, that he wouldn’t know what to do. He was especially afraid that she might laugh at him, as he had heard the Indian women laughing at other men.
For three days he wrestled with this ugly problem and almost convinced himself that he was destined to live alone, but as he looked up at the great mountain and saw the stone beaver forever climbing, he realized that men, like animals, must climb whatever cliff confronts them.