When at last Sam slipped away into the night he wondered if his playing had been a kindness: if there was no music tomorrow night, the next night, and for weeks or months, how would she feel about it? Well, doggone it, he would return as often as he could, to play what she surely must think was heavenly music. She would hear it and she would sing to her children: deeper happiness than that there was none, for mothers anywhere.
18
BECAUSE IT WAS impossible to enter the geyser basins on horseback up the Yellowstone or over the Yellowstone Mountains Sam had to go south and up the South Fork and past Hawks Rest and down the Yellowstone to the lake. Across timbered mountains, black and beautiful with health, he followed the east side of the lake, going north, and then the north side, until he came to steaming springs. It was a marvel to all who had seen this coastline, for out in the cold lake were hot springs, some of them a hundred yards out; and there the hot and cold waters mingled, and steam rose from the surface. At the lake’s edge a man could find water of any temperature, between icy cold and almost boiling. Before going to the area on the west side of pouting and hissing paint and mud pots Sam stripped off and plunged in. He had known no experience more exhilarating than swimming back and forth through extremes of hot and cold. It was such a delightful and thrilling surrender of his senses to the caresses that, floating on his back and looking up at the blue, he said to the Creator, in Bill’s language, "No man alive ever made a bath pool like thissen!" What was it the woman had read from the holy book? "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them." How glad he was to be here, solitary, alone, and safe in the wilderness!
This evening he was entertained by the mudpots, which he thought of as mud mouths: they took him back to the blond neighbor girl, named Nancy, who had puffed her cheeks at him and then slapped them with both palms, pretending that her face had exploded. Another of her impish tricks had been to puff her cheeks as far out as she could and then insert a small reed between her lips. It was, she gravely told him, a puncture; as she forced air out through the reed her cheeks slowly collapsed, her blue eyes all the while soberly watching him. The hot mud mouths puffed their lips out and up; and sometimes the lips parted and a burst of hot steam-breath shot up; and sometimes the lips were expanded to astonishing fullness, without parting, like thin gray rubber or a toad’s throat. Now and then they sucked back and forth, as Nancy had sucked her lips in and pushed them out.
Sitting on warm earth among the mudpots, he tried to write a letter to his parents. Unlike the great explorers Lewis and Clark, who had come through the rocky mountain land before Sam was born, or famous scouts like Bridger and Carson and Greenwood, Sam had had twelve years in good schools. With note pad on his knees and brows perplexed, he wrote the salutation; and then for ten minutes wondered what to say and what not to say. Should he tell them that he had taken up arms against an entire Indian nation and next spring would be on the warpath again? No, he would not worry them with that. Should he tell them that he had married a lovely and loving Indian girl, who only a few months later had been struck down by a pack of killers? Should he tell them that he stood chance of being dead within a year? No, he would tell them only pleasant things. He recalled how one morning his mother had looked out at a wide-spreading apple tree with five bushels of ripe apples on it and said, "This is the first time I ever thought of an apple tree as a mother." His mouth watered as he remembered the sound fragrance and the juices bursting past his lips as he sank strong teeth in those apples. Waugh, if only he had one now!
Well, he would tell them that the more he looked round the world the plainer became the glorious truth that the Creator was a great artist in all fields. His paintings, which included sunsets and mornings, mountain lakes in pure jeweled radiance, and the firmament with two rainbows across it after a rain, were Rubens and Rembrandt on canvas as big as worlds. What sculptor would dare set his puny and trifling creations beside the Tetons or the Black Hills or the Wind River range, or the vast acres of ruga in the lava flows over by the Snake? The Creator had more bird musicians, playing their arias with flute, piccolo, harp, and tiny horn, than any man could guess at—in any moment of the twenty-four hours there were millions of bird throats singing. In His stupendous orchestrations the Creator could overwhelm a man with His mastery of counterpoint in rivers and winds and thunders, or with the variations in His cosmic sonatas. Sam would tell his father he ought to be out here, for he remembered the man’s deep emotion when he listened to the conclusion of the second movement of Beethoven’s Third or the F-minor sonata. If only he could hear the music in this wild land—the horn calls of the loon, coot, crane, helldiver grebe, or the incredible music of the snipe’s tail feathers at dusk!
He would tell them that snow was falling in winter blankets on the forests now but that he was sitting on hot earth, with hot water boiling out all around him. If they were here they might be looking at small puffs of steam above a stone basin and a few moments later see a million gallons of boiling water hurled a hundred feet into the air, to fall downward in streamers and mists as still other millions of gallons exploded from the world’s hot insides. Deep warm fog in subzero weather would envelop them. He would try to make them understand what a divine loveliness it was when, in heavy snowstorm, the millions of flakes, many as large as oak leaves, descended into the atmosphere above one of the steam vents; how, looking up, they would see the millions of them coming down; how they would see them vanish by millions, as in the winking of an eye they melted and fell in big fat raindrops; how they would marvel at this enormous chamber of heat within a circumference of pure white snow. In a hundred or two hundred steps from hot earth they would find snow six or eight feet deep. In only a few seconds they could walk from thirty-degrees-below-zero cold into such warmth that they could stand in comfort with all their clothes off. They could lie in a hot natural pool and see trees so cold that they were bursting open.
He would spend the winter here, alone, thinking of his wife and son, without having to keep his eyes skinned, as Windy Bill would say, day and night. The snow all around him except in the hot places might be eight or ten feet deep; but the grass was tall and his horses would paw the snow away to find it. He would get two or three elk before the heaviest snows came, he would jerk some meat and hang up some hindquarters; and he might go south to the Big Snake where he would find whole mountainsides of berry bushes bent under their fruit. Like the red people, he might gather some acorns, pine nuts, chestnuts, hazelnuts; and of berries the service, elder, choke, thimble, as well as big juicy yellow currants and rich wild plums. Away down south beyond the San Juans was a tall sage plant, the seeds of which Indians pounded into flour. Jim Bridger called it chia; he said bread made of it was so strong that when washing his hands a man had to be careful or he would pull his fingers off. The Creator had put an abundance of food in the land and there was no tax on it. Had they ever heard of wild broom corn and balsam root? If they would come out for a visit their son would set before them such feasts as they had never known; and they could take home a bag of pemmican made of buffalo tenderloin, hump fat, huckleberries, and arrowroot jelly.
Tongue in cheek, he would tell them that they might wish to sample red-ant cakes, made of the terrible big red ant, mixed with camas roots and onion bulbs. Or for breakfast with their pancakes they might like a hash of grasshoppers, or rattlesnake broiled on cedar embers, or a paste of castoreum. That was the orange-brown stuff from the beaver, with the strong wild odor, which trappers used as a lure.