17

HE RODE, by night, through Crow country, and four days later sat astride the bay on a hilltop, looking first at the cairn. Then he saw the woman sitting between the graves. God in heaven, would she spend all her life over the bones of her dead? Was this a typical mother? Before her tragedy imploded into his being he had never thought of the differences between the human male and female. While looking over at this lonely woman and thinking about her he recalled a dream about Lotus that he had dreamed many times. She had lain naked on his thighs and belly, as though on a big thick mattress of meat, her chignon of black hair snuggled against his throat, a slender bronzed hand reaching up to play with his beard. His beard had lain down over one side of her face like a covering of horse mane. She had liked to run lingers through his whiskers and yank gently at the hair over his chest, possibly, he had thought, because the redmen were so hairless. Then she had moved up through hair to his mouth and had kissed him.

Now, looking over at the woman, he felt a surge of tenderness; in memory emotion flowed in lightning heat all the way south over the path they had taken, and to the cabin, and to the pitiful armful of bones that was all that had been left of the vibrant thing he had loved. He was hungry for woman but he had no hunger for the woman with white hair sitting by the graves. If she was anything for him she was a mother image, or female-with-little-ones image, like the grouse with her lovely darlings, or the female mallard webfooting it across a lake, with seven or eight soft little balls of fluff and down in her wake. This was a large soft hour for Sam Minard, goose-downlined, geyser-warm, antelope-eye gentle, mountain-lily white and tender, as he looked at the woman. Sentimental softening of his will and senses had not moved in such a deep current since he last reached in to touch the immured bones, his soul enfolding all that remained of one who in his dream of her and his plans for her would have been wife and mate and straight-shooting warrior at his side.

Sam then rode off into the hills. Had this woman learned how to jerk flesh, catch fish from the river, dry wild fruits? Or did she sit there the whole time, except when bringing water to her small elysian garden? Suspecting that he knew little about the human female and her ways, he tried to summon a clear image of his mother and of other mothers he had known, in their pattern of living. His mother had worked hard for her children and work was about all she had had. This woman had time and that was about all she had. She would have years and years of time  and she would grow old there and die, and like his wife, be eaten to her bones by wolves and ravens.

He returned with two fine deer, gutted but with the hides still on, and went over to the shack. The woman had seen him coming, and now actually looked over at him as he drew near. Bill had learned her name and now all the mountain men knew her name; and so Sam said, cheerfully, "How are you, Mrs. Bowden? How have you been this long time?"

Dismounting, he untied the deer, and taking each by a hind and foreleg, laid them on their backs, open bellies up. Looking round for stones to prop them, he saw that the northwest skull was not the one he had put on the stake. He walked over to have a look at it. Some mountain man had killed and beheaded an Indian and had brought the skull here. "Looks like they’re watching over you," he said when he returned to the cabin. Because she had risen to her feet he went over to her. He simply stared at her and she stared at him; after a few moments his gaze moved over her face and he saw that it was starvation-thin; and down over her body, noting the details of her garb. On her feet she had the tatters of a pair of shoes; her ragged dress looked to him like the one she had worn the first day he saw her. Her hair hung in uncombed snarls; her face and hands looked as if they hadn’t been washed for years.

He went over to a pannier, saying, "The Crows don’t have feet as big as mine. Mebbe some of these will fit you." He offered them to her but she did not take them. Again he looked at her eyes. He had never seen such eyes. He had not known that in human eyes there could be such glittering and chilling lights. Something like. horror ran along his nerves as he looked into Kate’s eyes and saw that they had no memory of anything not fenced in by this river and its hills.

He went to the door of the shack and looked in. It was bleak with the first chill of autumn. He turned to look at her plants. She had quite a garden of sage and wild flowers, but the flowers were now withering in the freezing nights. Facing her again, he said he wished she would go with him to the region of bilings, where she could be warm in any kind of weather. He and Bill and some others could take up her loved ones and carry them down there and bury them by the hot waters of a pool; and she could have a much lovelier garden, almost the year round. But he knew after a few minutes that his words were not entering the small bleak world where she lived. He sensed that in strange ways that he would never understand it was a wonderful world, where a mother lived with her children, and the angels and God. He framed her thin tired face with his big hands and lightly kissed her forehead and her hair.

"I brought you some things," he said, speaking cheerfully, doubting that she would understand a word. From his packhorses he took sugar, flour, coffee, salt, raisins; a roll of buckskin inside of which were pepper, needles, thread, matches; a roll of cotton cloth, inside of which were pencils and a notebook; and a buffalo robe. Here were pencil and paper, he said, holding them in full view of her stare. He thought she might like to write letters back home. Every time a mountain man came by she could hand the letters to him, and he would give to her the mail that came in for her. Sam had had the notion that she could be won back to a sense of the realities if she were to write and receive letters; but he knew, good Lord, he knew that she was far below that, or above it.

He dressed out the meat, jerked most of it, roasted one tenderloin for himself and the other for her, and the next morning turned back up the river, He had not gone far when he stopped to think. Why would a woman, even a mad-woman, carry water all day long up a hill to water such a plant as the sage? Concluding that there must be a mystery in it, he decided to go back and spy on her. What did she think about all daylong, what did she dream about all night? The pile of wood he had laid by the south wall she had never touched; all around the cabin there was no sign that she had ever made a fire. She had never brought river mud to daub the hut—she must have almost frozen to death during the past winter, when temperatures dropped to thirty or forty below zero and winds colder than ice smote the walls. The more he thought about it the more incredible it seemed that she was still alive. On his way down the river he searched the bottoms but found no spot where she had dug for roots, no berry bush from which she had taken fruit.

Hiding his beasts in a thicket, he went up the hills and turned north. Approaching behind one juniper and another, he drew within sixty yards of her and sat to make himself comfortable, and to observe her and wait. Peering between cedar branches, he had a good view of her and her yard. She was sitting. It looked to him as if she was sitting between the graves, and she seemed to be talking but he could not be sure of that. The sun was sinking; it would be dusk soon, and then night, with a full moon two hours before midnight. How simple it would be for a Blackfoot from the west, a Big Belly from the east, or a Crow from the south to slip in here and take her scalp and everything she had! He knew that redskins must have been tempted to the verge of frenzy. He knew that only fear of mountain-man vengeance stayed their hands. It had become a law of this country that if the redmen of any tribe were contemptuous or brutal toward any mountain man, or any person whom mountain men were protecting, word of it would go forth all the way to the San Juans, the Big Blue, and to Oregon’s Blue Mountains and beyond; and a summons to a rendezvous and vengeance, The vengeance would be so dreadful that survivors would turn gray with fear and flee to the remotest hills. Sam thought it unlikely that any buck would ever be fool enough to take the scalp of this defenseless woman.