Lotus went off again and returned with a quart of the blue-purple chokecherries. Sam made a face at them, for they puckered the hell out of a person’s mouth. Knowing how he prepared mushrooms. Lotus made incisions in their plump bellies, stuffed inside each a blob of marrow fat, and set the buttons on their backs in an inch of hot hump fat. When they were turned to a nice golden brown and the steaks were hot and dripping and the sliced lupine roots were sizzling in a platter of fat and the coffee was steaming Sam looked up at the sky, for this was his way of saying grace before a meal. Every time he feasted he thanked the Giver of the earth’s fantastic abundance.
"No taxes," he said. He had uttered these words so many times that Lotus now said, "No taxes."
"No jails."
"No jails."
'The steaks were as tender as young Canada goose. The mushrooms melted in his mouth. Even the lupine tasted fine.
"Good?" he asked.
"Good," she said, gravely nodding.
Sam chose a fat golden mushroom and offered it to her on the point of a green stick. She opened her mouth in a pucker, sucked the mushroom in, and closed her eyes. He fed her choice morsels of steak, knowing all the while that she was abashed by these little gallantries. Instead of feeding their wives delicious morsels the red husbands as likely as not kicked them away from the fire and left for them only the scraps of the feast. Still, most of the squaws were fat, and Lotus, it seemed to him, had gained ten pounds since her wedding day.
Sam had cooked the whole tenderloin and half the liver. Raw liver and rose hips, the older mountain men said, were enough to keep any man healthy, if he also had pure water and air and a hard bed. Some of them ate a lot of yarrow, including its white flowers when it was blooming; as well as the onion bulb, the thorn apple, pine nuts, watercress, and viscera besides liver. Sam had watched red women in the Snake River country shake chilled grasshoppers off sagebrush into baskets, in cold September mornings, and roast them in pits and pound them into cakes, as well as crickets, mice, snakes, wood ticks, and ants. He had seen them thicken soup with these things, and though Bill Williams said they were all fine Sam had refused to taste them. Just the same, Bill could outwalk any man in the country, and go for two or three days and nights without food, sleep, or rest.
After they had eaten and Sam had smoked a pipe they both set to work on the buffalo hide. Stretching it flat on the earth, fur side down, with knives and stone chisels they took off every last particle of the flesh and fat. While Lotus boiled this flesh and fat into a thick gelatinous soup, Sam opened the skull and tool; out the brains. He then turned the task over to his wife, for the reason that no man seemed to have a woman’s intuitive skills in making fine leathers and robes of the skins of beasts. Sam sat back, rifle across his arm, and smoked another pipe while drinking another cup of coffee.
What a beautiful evening, and what a wonderful life it was! He hoped he would live to be a hundred years old.
10
NEVER HAD SAM been so happy as on this long journey south; he would never be as ha py again. He so loved them that he found delight in telling her the name of every mountain range, peak, river, creek, valley, and landmark they passed, or could see in the distance—Yellowstone, Powder River, Meadowlark Lake, Sun River Creek, Tongue River, Rosebud Creek, Papoose Peak, Black Panther Creek, Absaroka Summit, Little Goose Pass, South Pass—he loved them all, for in his soul they were like the call of the French horn in a Mozart concerto.
Side by side when eating or sleeping or riding Sam told her about the men he had met since coming west—Three-Finger McNees, a tall slender man as straight as a lodgepole, with coarse black hair and beard, a grave mien, and one eye cocked off at an angle of forty-five degrees from the other. He was a tough critter in a fight—and so was Lost-Skelp Dan, a muscular scowling giant who kept putting a hand back over his hideless skull, as though to brush his hair. Lord, how he hated the redmen! It was Dan’s ambition to scalp a thousand—and he didn’t take off a mere topknot, but the hull thing, as Bill would say, clear down to the ears and halfway to the eyebrows. She would see Jim Bridger soon; except Kit Carson, he was about the most famous of them all, unless it was old Caleb Greenwood or Solomon Silver or Moses Harris or Jim Clyman. Not all of those were free trappers. The free trappers were a clan of their own, and man for man could lick any gang on earth or in all the
spaces beyond.
Jim Bridger was probably the biggest liar in the whole pack. Though it was said that he could neither read nor write, and talked as if he had found his English in an Indian tepee, he dearly loved to spill his chin music and spin his yarns, especially if greenhorns were listening. He loved to tell the lubbers from back east that he had once run for his life with three hundred tall Cheyennes after him; that he came to trees and clum, and fell down and clum other trees; crawled out on a limb and found it as full of redskins as a blooming chokecherry with honey bees; fell plum to the ground and clum other trees, till his hands were gummed over an inch deep with sticky pine sap. But he kept running and came at last to a canyon that narrered and narrered and closed down to a pinch that a spider couldn’t get through; and there he was, with three hundred red devils swarming over him, and arrers falling as thick as pine needles in a hurrycane. At that point Jim would stop. The bug-eyed greenhorns, mouths agape, cheeks twitching, would stare at him; and in a hoarse whisper one would ask, "What happened, Mr. Bridger?" In a weary old voice Bridger would say, "They kilt me."
Another of Jim’s favorite talks to novices was about a panther, which he called a painter. He was hunting elk on the flanks of Battle Mountain, when suddenly out of a thicket came a painter, to study him with cold green eyes, while the tail moved back and forth. Jim had felt awful oneasy; jist lookin at the critter made him shiver and shake, for he kallated that the painter was sizing up his dinner. "Nice ole feller," Jim said to him, and made like he was dying to stroke and pat him. But with a flip and a Hop and two somersaults the painter was right in front of him, his mouth open four feet wide. His teeth were as long as Bowie knives. There was nothing to do but reach into the mouth and down torst the tail and grab it, and quicker than a wink turn him inside out. He was then headed in another direction, and figgerun that Jim had jist took off, he sailed out of sight. "When one of the greenhorns said, 'Aw shucks,’ it kinda dawned on me that he thought Jim wasn’t exactly telling the truth."
He guessed maybe she had never heard of old Caleb Greenwood. Caleb said the bravest of all the red people were the Crows, but then he was prejudiced, for he had married one, named Batchicka. She was not a mere winter squaw, as so many red women were for whitemen, but a fine year-round work-plug. The truth was that Caleb had loved his wife and his five sons and two daughters.
One son and one daughter they would have, Sam said, patting his wife’s belly.
The Caleb-Batchicka relationship had touched Sam’s sentimental soul. In his late seventies Caleb became almost blind, and when all the Indian medicines failed him he asked his wife to take him to St. Louis. For weeks she had shot buffalo and jerked the flesh, dried fruits, gathered roots, and made leather clothing for all of them. Then, with her husband and all the children but the oldest son. she had climbed into a canoe and headed down the river. In Siouxland they were attacked by a horde of shrieking warriors. most of whom plunged into the river and swam toward them, bent on plunder; but when Batchicka laid open the skull of one with a canoe paddle the others went howling to the bank. Learning somehow that her man was blind and helpless, the braves so admired the woman’s i courage that they gave her safe passage down the river. In St. Louis, Caleb hah had growths removed from both eyes and had come with his family back up the river. Now somewhere in his eighties he was kicking as hard as ever.