Fair Land Fair Land - A B Guthrie Read online

  Fair Land, Fair Land

  A B Guthrie

  1982

  To Robert F Cubbins

  my friend, promoter and goal

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  I have sworn more than once to write no more about the early-day West and just as often have broken the vow. I break it again for one reason among others. In my series of novels — mostly about the interior northwest — I left a time gap, roughly from 1845 to 1870. Here I have undertaken to fill it. Though the story is complete in itself, it belongs chronologically between The Way West and These Thousand Hills. No writer escapes debts. My thanks then to Ruth K. Hapgood, my helpful editor; to my wife, Carol, an acute and gentle critic, and to my stepson, Bill "Herb" Luthin, no poor critic himself, both of whom have encouraged me and waited on my work almost page by page; and to the Great Falls Public Library and the Center of Military History, Department of the Army, for ready and abundant assistance.

  PART ONE

  1

  DICK SUMMERS climbed the ridge from the channeled valley, glad enough to be leaving Oregon behind him. He hadn't said goodbye to any of the wagon-train people who had hired him for a guide. Goodbyes were something like gravestones. Yeah, rest in peace, you sod-busters. May the Lord bless you, good men and weak. Here's hoping your plows pay off in berries or melons or apples or whatever.

  "Hurrah for Oregon," they had called. Sure, plant a nail and reap tomatoes. Till the soil. Put up a house. Breed chickens, pigs, sheep, cattle or whatever. Live fat right there, today, tomorrow and tomorrow. The soil, for certain, was richer than that on the stingy acres he had farmed in Missouri, but farming was still farming. Let those do it who were farm-turned. For an instant he was back, a gray-back in Missouri, the slow sod turning to the share and the slow-poke mule farting in his face. The corn grew up spindly and the tobacco leached-looking. The hogs were growling in their pens, wanting slops.

  No more of that for him. Good for them as liked it. Boresome life if not. He ought to know. He had tried it while married to a good if sickly wife who got as tiresome as the chores. He could count as fun only the careful training of a good horse.

  Even high on the ridge the breath of the Pacific reached him, wet enough and salt enough to pickle pork in. Going east he was, going east to find the west, the west of wind and open skies and buffalo. Hurrah for that.

  He shifted his hold on his Hawken. It was all he carried, it and his old Green River knife, some ammunition and a small sack of possibles.

  He veered off to the edge of the Columbia's gorge, lay down and peered over. Far below him, almost straight below, the rushing river ran. Here was beaver country, too, though not much to his liking. Or it had been beaver country, the whole scoop of it, north, south and east, when there were plenty beaver and the price good enough to attract men and companies. Hudson's Bay men had trapped clear into California and east of there in territory claimed by Americans who weren't too careful themselves, both sides being plenty willing to poach.

  He ought to be getting on, he thought, but for a moment let his mind play with the great cargoes and pack-train harvests of furs that meant fame for Fort Vancouver and money for Hudson's Bay. What would the fort do now, with beaver scarce and worth next to nothing? What would old Here Before Christ do?

  He squirmed back from the cliff's edge and started walking again. Here had been beaver country all right, but give him the Popo Agie and the Wind and the Seeds-kee-dee and throw in the upper Missouri in spite of the Blackfeet. Give him a far reach of eye, the grasses rippling, the small streams talking, buttes swimming clear a hundred miles away. Give him not Mount Hood but the clean, ungodly upthrust of the Tetons. They were some.

  He was hankering for the young years, for the new land and the frolics he had been part of, and he shrugged to shake the hankering out of his head. Like a tomfool he had spent too much time remembering and, remembering, had rushed toward old age, at least in his mind. He was maybe sixteen when, with a scatter of education, enough to read, write and cipher up to a point, he had quit his no-account home in Missouri. Two years later he had gone up the Platte and learned to trap beaver. No sooner was he in the settlements again than he began to hark back, as if the best part of his life was behind him. That's the way it had been. Later he had gone up the Missouri and into the country of the Roche Jaune and then again up the Platte and over South Pass to the Seeds-kee-dee and had wintered in South Park and so become a hiveman or sure enough mountain man. Next, up the Missouri in a keelboat, and most of the party, all except three, rubbed out by the Blackfeet. And each trip was a remembered trip, too much remembered. Afterward, feeling old, he had gone back to his farm and stayed there until the party bound for Oregon had wanted him as a guide.

  He plodded on, feeling the ocean mist closing in. How the hell old was he, anyhow? Christ maybe knew. Couldn't be much more than forty-five, if that, but the western winds wrote time in a man's face, and the sun and wind bleached what hair hadn't turned white, and anyone who had spent more than one season in the mountains was likely to get "old" attached to his name.

  But that wasn't the point. The point was he kept looking back, like a grandpa returned in mind to his pup days.

  He halted at a trickle of spring water and drank, belly down. Time, he thought, getting up and going on. There was no such thing as time, then, now or ever. Time was always. It was the changes, the trappings along the way, that a man reckoned his life by. Rendezvous dead and gone, along with plenty of those who had enjoyed it. Beaver nigh gone. Fur companies and some sometime mountain men making out with coarse furs. Before a man knew it the buffalo might all be killed off. Another marking, another trapping to reckon by. That was the way of men and things. Find a good country and spoil it.

  Maybe only mountains lasted, like Mount Hood yonder, dimmed by the mist.

  He came to a stream he didn't know the name of and shucked off his clothes and waded across with his plunder. As long as he was at it, he might as well clean himself up where he didn't have to watch for womenfolk.

  Dressing, he thought he"d put on his old buckskins once he got to buffalo country. Homespun and peg boots were all right for now. He bet his feet would be tender in moccasins. Mountains lasted and what else? The sky. The stars. Maybe the high plains and the riffling grasses, though like as not men would find a use for the land and gouge it up so's to raise turnips and cabbages or some other truck not worth eating. Before that was done, he aimed to have a long, good look again.

  But even a turnip would sit all right now. He had been walking for eight hours or so by the look of the sun that was trying to show through the mist, and he hadn't brought even a bite to tide him over. No matter. A mountain man could make out. Make out then, he told himself. Look sharp. Must be some kind of game in this teary country, small game, anyhow, but the Hawken was too large for a rabbit or bird. It would make mush of the meat.

  To his right appeared a likely stand of evergreens, pines or spruces, he couldn't tell which. He walked to it, going soft, and after what seemed a long time heard little throat cluckings. In a small open space a few fool hens were pecking. He could kill one with a thrown rock, but the motion of his arm would probably flush the others, and he had best get two if he could. He withdrew and found a dead limb and from his possible sack took a short length of buckskin. He made a sliding loop of it and tied it to the small end of the branch. By itself it would collapse, so he bound it around with long stems of green grass. He went back to the clearing and sat down, moving slow. It was movement and not unmoving presence that spooked critters. The birds didn't scare. They looked at him with their little snake eyes and went back to feeding. He snared one and drew it to him, the others just watching it flutter. H
e broke its neck with his fingers. He didn't need the noose for the second one. It came close, and he reversed his pole and tapped it on the head with the butt end.

  At a ribbon of water he cleaned and plucked the birds and went on until he came to a low bank. It would shut off the wind if the wind blew and reflect heat from the fire if he needed it during the night. He gathered wood, built a small fire and let it go down mostly to coals. He speared one bird with a green · stick and positioned it over the heat.

  Watching it beginning to sizzle, he thought even a big fire would be safe in this country. There was no gumption much in the fish-eating Indians of the coast, no spizerinctum. But feed them on rich buffalo meat, and they might get ringy.

  When the hen was done, he ate it, wishing for salt and even bread. That showed how far he had strayed from his mountainman days. In time fur hunters lost their taste for both, as he had once. He wrapped the other bird in a piece of canvas and tied it in a tree.

  He smoothed out his possible sack so's to have something to rest his head on and lay down, the Hawken by his side. He would drowse off, he thought, by thinking of Chief White Hawk of the Shoshones and a squaw lying willing under a robe.

  2

  HE WAS DRIFTING into light sleep when a voice came of the darkness. "Hello, the fi."

  He sat up, his hand closing on his rifle. "Step ahead."

  A form took shape, a long and skinny form in old buckskin. "No cause for the shootin' iron, friend."

  "Come and set then." Summers tossed a couple of sticks on the dying fire.

  "Wanted to make sure what was what. I got a couple of horses. Wait till I tend to them."

  When the man returned, he carried a jug. He sat down by the fire. "Don't know about you,

  but I could do with a dram."

  "Sure thing."

  The man was probably thirty-odd years old. His clean-shaven face had known weather. He uncorked the jug, held it out and Summers drank.

  "Name's Birdwhistle. Birdy, they call me."

  "I've heerd the name in the settlements. Bound west?"

  "My mind goes back and forth, like a dog that keeps runnin' out to bark and keeps runnin'' back, scared of what he's barkin' at." Birdwhistle took time to drink. "I went west with a party and decided I didn't like it much, so I started back by myself. A couple or three days out, and I thought, what's the idee, goin' back to what you come from?"

  A couple of stars shone through the mist. The night was silent, without a bird or coyote sounding off. Birdwhistle asked,

  "Bound `back yourself?"

  "Partways, anyhow."

  "Well, there I was, with two minds, so to speak. I"m a fair hand with horses and machinery and good with a hammer and saw, and I figured latelike, though I knew it damn well, that there would be plenty of work in Oregon, not like in the settlements, and, hell, I could stand rain. So I turned ass-around."

  "Meet anybody?"

  "There was a party herdin' cows west."

  "How far away?"

  "Two days, maybe a little more, from here. Why?"

  "Friends of mine."

  "I take it you been a mountain man?"

  "How so?"

  "The Hawken and the looks of you. The mountains put a brand on a man."

  "Onct I was."

  "Me, too. I trapped beaver and went to one rendezvous, but I was never no great shakes. That rendezvous! I come out of it with a dose of the clap and a case of bottle fever that would have made God cry. That was toward the tail end of things."

  Summers said, "It all petered out."

  The man was full of talk, so let him talk.

  "Fun while it lasted, though. We wasn't pups, most of us, but it was like pups we played. All that crazy language. "This child" and ‘This nigger' for your own self and all those damn ‘waghs.' It kind of sticks to me yet."

  For the hell of it, Summers said, " 'Pears like it does to this child. That it does."

  Birdwhistle chuckled. "Like you said, it all petered out. Me and some others hung on for a while, takin' few furs and tradin' them for nothin'. Then we tried that new wrinkle, hide-huntin'."

  "Poor doin's."

  "And poorer because of the bunch I was with. There was one man, the ringleader, scared the shit out of me." Birdwhistle drank and shook his head. "The broodiest bastard I ever see. Turn on you for nothin'. He killed two men to my knowin'."

  Summers took his turn at the jug. "Some's like that."

  "A bragger, too. Taken a little drunk he would tell as how he killed his friend."

  "I heard tell of one case like that."

  "What did he kill him for?"

  "I never got the straight of it."

  "This broody bastard said his best friend was slippin' it to his squaw and even birthed a child by him. That was in Blackfoot country."

  Summers asked, "Blackfoot?"

  "So he said. I figure he was warnin' us to lay off whatever squaw he had taken up with. Then again he would be dead quiet and grumpy, like as if he couldn't get along with hisself. Better leave him plumb alone then. Broody was what they called him, not when he was around."

  "Just Broody, huh?"

  "To his face we called him Boone."

  Without knowing it until it was done, Summers sucked in a deep breath. "Last name Caudill?"

  "Come to think on it, maybe it was. Know him?"

  Know him! Know Boone Caudill? Know Jim Deakins, the friend Boone had killed. Over the few years there had been the three of them, all friends, so he had thought, partners in hardship and frolic, until he had felt too old for the life and left them before they set out for the north country. They mixed in his mind, they and what they had done, and he forgot to answer until the man asked again, "Did you?"

  "Yup. I knew him."

  "Beggin' your pardon, but can I ask the name that you go by?"

  "Dick Summers."

  The man whistled a low whistle. "Dick Summers!" He held out his hand for a shake. "Never expected to meet up with you."

  "Where were they when you last heard?"

  "Broody and that bunch? Tradin' at Bent's Fort, but that was a time ago. You aim to find them?"

  "Might run into them. Who knows?"

  "Watch out for that Broody."

  "Yeah."

  Birdwhistle sat silent. A little flare of the fire deepened his wrinkles. At last he said, "Someone's bound to kill him, but it won't be me."

  "Yeah."

  "Killin' his friend over a squaw for God's sake!"

  "And the friend never done him wrong."

  "How you know?"

  "I knew the friend."

  "Beggin' your pardon again, but you got a grudge?"

  "I don't know as killin' a man ever sets things right."

  The man took a long look at him and said at the end of it, "I wouldn't want to be Broody."

  3

  CURTIS MACK sat on a downed log and smoked his first pipe of the day. He was tired, as everyone else was, and ought to be up helping pitch camp, but for a moment damned if he wouldn't just sit and pull.

  It was raining again, if that was news, raining a mist with few real drops in it. Low in the west the sun was drowning, yet an hour or so of daylight remained. Tomorrow they'd take the day off, he and the single men who were trailing livestock overland from the Dalles to the Willamette where the Oregon party would claim them. A day off was justified, for here they were without the loss of a single animal and the hardest going was surely behind them. An insane thing, to volunteer to lead the crew, but by God he was doing it.

  Higgins was undoing the packs and taking out cooking utensils and food. The pack animals, rid of their burdens, had rolled and gone to drink and were mingling with the other stock, loosely herded by the men on horseback. The men had little to worry about. On this upland clearing was water, good feed and soft turf for sore feet. The riders called out now and then, more to relieve tedium than to discourage bunch-quitters. Their voices sounded tired and wet.

  By and by he and Higgins would
put up a fly so the men could sleep more or less dry, and there was the fire to make and the meal to be heated. Meal? Salmon and rice again and coffee that had lost its flavor. With what good nature they could summon, the men complained of this steady and indifferent fare. Tobacco was short-rationed, too. The wonder was that the crew wasn't really grumpy. Higgins stepped toward him and asked, "Hey, you hear a shot?"

  "Don't think so."

  "Maybe it was just in my mind. No game in this whole scoop of country, far as we've seen."

  "Nothing to be alarmed about at any rate."

  "Higgins shook his head, as if to rid it of imagined sound, but still said, "I swear it didn't sound much more'n a whoop and a holler away."

  "Anyhow, we'd better put the fly up and then start a fire."

  "Yeah."

  They strung a rope between two trees at the edge of the clearing, threw the canvas over it and spread and secured the sides, tying them to what growth was handy.

  Higgins said, "Now I'll gather the makin's of a fire, if so we can light this damn wet wood."

  "No big hurry. The stock hasn't bedded down yet."

  Higgins sat on the log beside him, saying, "I don't know about Oregon. It's so goddamn rainy. Here we are, all of us, smellin' like wet dogs."

  "Wait till we get there. It's too early for judgments."

  "Maybe so, but first acquaintance ain't promisin'."

  One of the riders called out, and Higgins got up and squinted.

  "There's a man afoot on the way."

  "I can see him."

  "Got a rifle. Walks like an Injun. Look! Botter and Moss wavin' him welcome. Damn my soul if it ain't Dick Summers!"

  "It can't be, but still —"

  It did turn out to be Summers. He came into camp smiling, asking, "How be ye?" He shook the offered hands.

  "You don't bring bad news`?" Mack asked, suddenly fearful.

  "Naw. Naw. All fat and sassy."

  "My wife?"

  "Same with her. I left the bunch on safe water, making for the Willamette. Could be they're stakin' claims by now, though it's a mite soon."

  The men on horseback had ridden close, casting their eyes back now and then to make sure the herd was safe. It was. Through the gathering dark Mack could make out that some of the animals were lying down.