Or if when reading to her darlings and answering their smiling angel-faces she heard the sound of an enemy—the snarling challenge of a wolf almost at her door or the shriek of a descending hawk—she was instantly transformed into a tigress; and seizing the axe, she would rush blind and screaming against the challenge. No beast was ever to withstand her charge.
It was this sort of thing that spread in legends. In a moonlit night, a year or two after the massacre, Windy Bill was passing by when he heard wild screams and on a hill against the sky saw a woman rushing round and round, the blade of her axe flashing. "I took plum off fer the tall timber," he said. "My hair it stood up like buffler grass and my blood was like the Yallerstun bilins John Colter saw." He improved, or in any case embellished, his tale with each retelling, until what he saw was la witch riding a broom in the sky and shrieking into the winds. Other men were to see Kate, when passing her way, and to tell tales about her, and the legend of her would grow in an area of more than a million square miles; but while it was still in its innocent beginnings, other legends, to be still more awesome and incredible, were being born, and one of them would enfold the huge figure of Samson John Minard.
It had its origin in his decision to take a wife.
5
THE FREE TRAPPERS were the most rugged and uncompromising individualists on earth. Only now and then did one think of an Indian mate as a wife, even after accepting her in the marriage ceremony of the red people; but Sam Minard had a sentimental attachment to his mother and to an older sister, and under his bluff and reticent surface were emotional channels in which feeling ran heavy and warm. His closest friends were never to know it. Hank Cady, Windy Bill, Jim Bridger, George Meek, Mick Boone, and others who knew him and were to know him best thought that a red woman was for Sam what she was for them, a member of a subhuman species that a man might wish one day to take to bed and the next day to tomahawk. Dadburn his possibles, one of them said; there warn’t no human critters except the white. The red ones and the black ones were what the Almighty had in leftovers after making the twelve tribes. Most of the white trappers thought nothing at all of the redman’s habit of kicking his old wife-squaws into the hills, to die of disease, starvation, old age, or to fall prey to the wolves.
Sam had a different view of it but he kept it to himself. Last spring he had seen an Indian lass who took his fancy. Since then he had dreamed about her, and using some thrush and meadow-lark phrases, had tried to compose lyrics to her. The logical part of his mind saw objections to taking a wife. He wondered, for instance, if the physical mating of a girl weighing a hundred and fifteen pounds with a man of his size was the kind an all-wise Father would smile on. Sam was sensitive about his size. His mother had told him that at birth he was so huge that his father, after one appalled look, had said he guessed they’d have to name him Samson. It was no fun being so big and it was a lot of bother. A second objection was her age; she was only about fourteen or fifteen (he thought), and though he was only twenty-seven he seemed to himself middle-aged compared to her. A third objection, he had decided after much thought, was really no objection at all: he suspected that she was not all Indian; the Lewis and Clark men had left white blood running in Indian nations all the way from St. Louis to the ocean.
Sam had been surprised to learn the origin of the Flathead name. Formerly (they had now abandoned the custom) they had hollowed out a chunk of cedar or cottonwood and spent hours dressing it, carving it, and making it buckskin fancy. This cradle or pig’s trough or anoe or canim they then lined with cattail down, the fluffy inner bark of old cedar trees, the wool of bighorn sheep; and when it was nicely lined and looked cozy they slapped it on the poor baby’s skull almost the instant it was born, and swaddled its head over with tanned deerskins as soft as the underflank of a baby antelope. Laid out on its back, its black eyes staring at the red wise men, the babe then had a feather or wool shawl drawn across its forehead and around. Finally a long flat board, attached at one end to the canim, was forced down on the shawl and the forehead and bound with leather strings, thus putting considerable pressure on the soft bone of the foreskull. The luckless babe was then so securely wrapped and bound that it was unable to move a hand or foot, and did well to wiggle a linger and blink its eyes. In such horrible confinement it remained a year or more, except in those moments when it was unbound and washed clean of its filth and bounced up and down for exercise. The steady pressure on the skull caused the head to expand and flatten, like a big toad stepped on by a grizzly paw, so that the aspect of the upper face became abnormally broad and the skull flat.
The girl of whom Sam was enamored had not had her skull flattened; she was, he thought, the loveliest human female he had ever seen; she was lovelier, even, than the gorgeous alpine lilies, or the columbine with its five white petals in a cup framed by five deep-blue sepals. She was a golden brown all over, but for her hair, eyes, and lips. Her hair and eyes were raven-black, and her inner lips were of a luscious dark pink that he wanted to bite. Whether she was full-grown he had not been able to tell, but she had already had, at her early age, the womanly form, with the kind of full breasts, firm and sitting high; that a man saw on Indian girls only now and then. The quality of her that had most entranced him was what he might have called, had he found words for it, a vivacious surfacing of her emotions, like tossing water spindrift flashing with the jewels of sunlight; and she had a way of looking at a man as though she wished to tease and excite and bewitch him. It had been mighty good to look at and he was now on his way over to buy her.
That would be the most unpleasant part. An Indian chief, whether Flathead, Crow or Sioux, or even the lowly Digger, began to itch all over with avarice the moment he sensed that a paleface coveted one of his females. If it were not for the redman’s fantastic love of trinkets and trifles which the Whiteman could buy for a song, the cost of a red wife would have been too much for the trapper’s purse. Sam had learned that those who said the redman was not a canny bargainer simply did not know him. This girl’s father, Chief Tall Mountain, had put her up for sale outside her tribe; this proclaimed to every person who knew Indian ways that the greedy rascal thought she was worth a hundred times an ordinary red lilly. The chief would expect handsome gifts for himself. Then there would be her mother, stepmothers, aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters, step-aunts and step-uncles, step-brothers and step-sisters, and so many cousins that she would appear to be related to every person in the tribe, all hoping for nothing less than a fast horse, a Hawken rifle with a hundred rounds, a brace of Colts, a Bowie, a barrel of rum, a keg of sugar and another of Hour, a bushel of beads, and a small mountain of tobacco. The dickering would take weeks if you could put up with it. You’d have to let it drag out for several days, for the reason that a part of the redman’s joy in life came from prolonging anticipation of what he knew he could never get.
It would be fine if a man could read the price tag and pay it, and swoop. his golden-brown doll to his chest and ride away. But the redman, whose life was dull but for warpath and occasional feast, squeezed the last emotion out of everything that came his way. Sam well knew that after he had given presents and renewed the pledge of brotherhood he might have to indulge the old fraud in hours of mysterious silence, while the chief conferred with the more rapacious souls among his ancestors; or Sam might have to sit for so many hours smoking the spittle-saturated pipe of friendship that his stomach would turn, or for days he might have to wait, while the solemn-faced humbug pretended that a few thousand aunts and cousins were coming in from the distant hills.