But he did not understand her. He might reasonably have asked, What man could? He would never know of her frenzied assaults on the killers that invaded her small world, or that she had totally forgotten her people. If he had known about her visions in the sage garden and her reading and talking aloud to her dead ones he would have thought only what Bill was to say, that she was as crazy as a loon with three eagle babies in its nest. Kate on her side would have found it hard to understand the redmen and the mountain men, who month after month shot thousands of healthy beautiful animals and took only a few pounds of flesh, leaving the remainder to the wolves and vultures; who found delight in waging savage war against one another; who caught and killed lovely creatures, such as beaver and otter, for no more than their skins. She could hardly have understood Sam Minard—for on a high mountain spine he would beat his chest in a raging storm and call on the Almighty to look down on the world he had made.
The next day Sam and Lotus brought three deer from the hills and built fires and jerked nearly all the flesh; and this Sam put in skin pouches and took to Kate’s door. He wanted to touch her hair a moment, with palm or lips, before going so far away from her, but her attitude told him that she wanted him to get out of sight. And so without saying another word to her he took his wife and headed up the river. The cottonwood and aspen were putting on their yellow cloaks, the chokecherry its scarlet; the river, done with its goaded spring torments, was a broad flowing of clear waters, borne down from the highest mountains. It was a beautiful day. A meadow lark was singing exquisitely in two octaves; mourning doves and owls foretold the coming of rain. When, having passed the big bend. Sam saw the far blue mists of mountains south of the Yellowstone, he told his wife that yonder were the Wolf and the Rosebud summits, and the northern most summits of the Bighorns.
The ebullience of his emotions, spilling all day long into spontaneous enthusiasms, or into song, was new to her. Her people were emotional but they didn’t exclaim with delight over such things as flowers, the swift sudden dive of a dabchick, the strange dusk-sounds of the snipe’s tail feathers, the juicy ripe flavor of a wild plum, the wing markings on what he said was a swallow-tailed butterfly, a badger’s footprints. After they swam the Yellowstone they were out of Blackfeet country, and she thought her man seemed to feel that he had no enemies. He would burst into song. He would shout at her—to draw her attention to the things around her. "There!" he said, pointing to the blue and purple belt of peaks lying east and north of the Bighorns. She looked, and saw only mountains and mist and distance. A map of the whole vast sweep of it was in Sam’s mind—the Yellowstone, Bighorn, Wind, Powder, Green, Snake and a dozen other rivers, and all their valleys; and the Little Snake, the Yampah, the Uintahs, and a hundred more. He had decided to stop long enough to say hello to Bill Williams, if he could find the sly lean old codger, holed up in some thicket between Medicine and Bald mountains. From the Bighorn River, which he had been following upstream from its junction with the Little Bighorn, he turned east; and pointing to two peaks, he said to Lotus, "Somewhere between them, if he isn’t dead yet." Bill was not dead and he was not asleep. Early in the morning two days later Sam was walking and leading his beasts, as he pushed his way through tangles and thickets, when suddenly a high shrill voice cried, "Do ye hear now? I wuz nigh to givin ye hell, I was. If I didden think ye wuz a Blackfoot after my topknot I’m a lyun nigger, I shorely be."
A moment later there he came, tall, cadaverous, gangling, a rifle across his arms and his right hand on the trigger guard, his bright almost glittering gray eyes peering out under shaggy brows. The face Lotus saw had a long thin nose, lean bearded cheeks, and a narrow forehead with veins standing out in the temples. He had a high-pitched, almost whining voice that made some men think he was crying. Around his waist hung a lot of contraptions, including a queer-looking bullet mold, an awl with a deerhorn handle in a sheath of cherrywood, hand-carved by him, and a vial made from the tip of an antelope horn in which, in season, he carried his castor bait. Bill had begun life as a Methodist preacher in Missouri, but (according to his story) every time he appeared at the church door the roosters shouted, "Hyar comes Parson Williams! One of us goes inter the kittle today." One morning when preaching at his fervent best a girl in a front seat got his mind so mixed up that he kallated he wasn’t born for preaching. He took his gun and l headed west.
"Wall, tie up my boudins!" he said, ambling over. "If it ain’t Sam Minard. And who is this here red filly?"
"My wife, Bill. Mrs. Samson John Minard, the most beautiful woman in the world."
"Wall now," said Bill, squinting his small keen eyes at the girl. "If this nigger sees good she doan look bad a-tall. Where fer be ye headin?"
"Uintahs. I need four or five packs, for I have a wife to support now."
"They cost, I’ve heard. Ye best spend a night with me, I reckon. I have some of Hank Cady’s huckleberry preserves and the best buffler hump ye ever tasted."
They spent the night with Bill. After supper the men and the girl sat by a small fire and Lotus looked at Bill most of the time, for he was spinning tall yarns and his facial mannerisms fascinated her. If Sam asked a question that touched Bill’s emotions the sunken face would turn grave, the eyes would narrow to slits of light, and Bill would knock the pipe out and fill and light it before uttering another word.
"Ivar Carlsson, ye say? That be a sad tale, Sam. We wuz huntin lass spring, it was over on Shields River. Wall now, I dotta knowed better, I’ll be dogged if I shooden. That time a year the Blackfeet is all over the place. I tell ye, Sam, Ivar wuz as full of arrows as a porkypine, with one stickin plum through both cheeks, another stuck deep in his meat bag, and six or seven in his hump ribs. I tuk them out but it was like butcherin him almost; but he war a mountain man—waugh!—and he never give off more than one little grunt; and I’ll be dogged that wuz when I cut the arrow outta his boudins. That one was so deep I could feel the pint against his backbone. Of course the one stuck through his cheeks I jist whacked the head offen it and pulled it back out; but the one in his meat bag it was plum buried too, and that doggoned one in his boudins. I had to slice him open so I could git inside .... "
Listening to Bill’s high-pitched words, Sam’s mind went back to a blizzard three years ago, when he had spent a night with Bill on the headwaters of Bear River, near Sublette Mountain. About forty feet from their fire had stood Bill’s old grayed-over and grizzled pack mule. Its guts filled with Western bunch grass and cottonwood bark, it stood, half dead with cold and age, and sound asleep over its picket pin, its limbs drawn a little under it, its rump in the blizzard, the stark bone of its back arched in the driven sleet, the whole weathered skinny carcass wavering a little from side to side, as, disturbed in its slumber, it opened its eyes a narrow slit to survey the storm. Now and then Bill had looked round him with piercing intentness at the driven white winds but always in the end his gaze came back to his faithful mule; and at last he had risen to his creaking legs and said, "I’ll be dogged iffen I doan think I’d best put a robe over Balaam. It ain’t as warm here as it wuz in Moab and he do seem to be shiverun powerful hard."
"Ivar live?" Sam asked at last.
"I’l1 be dogged if he didden. But didden ole Hugh Glass live? It takes a lot, me boy, ta kill a mountain man."