The geyser, to which he came now, was larger and angrier than the one by his camp. It exploded its furies only once in a while. He was lucky, for as he approached the geyser he heard the hissing and rumbling up its hot throat, and after a few minutes saw, first, a prelude of belchings, as of a throat being cleared, and then the immense quantities of boiling water vaulting upward, to spill downward like shattered water-falls. The geyser then seemed to pause, as if gathering the forces in the depths of its belly, and then vomited even more sensationally, with the steam devouring the storm over a wide area. Hot water fell downward in tumbling piles of vapor and flowed in steaming rivers toward him. This colossal eruption in the depths of a snowstorm was, Sam told himself, as beautiful as anything he had ever seen or heard. A man just about had to believe that Beethoven had seen it. Dropping to his knees, he swept the snow back and put an ear to the stone crust. He thought he could hear monstrous rumblings and heavings of subterranean waters, as though the whole earth might burst open in one self-consuming vomit. No wonder the redmen fled this spot. Sam backed away from it and into the storm, and watched, entranced, until the last furious pulls and snorts had been blown out of the throat and the underground angers had fallen back into the belly’s gurglings.
In cupped palms he gathered hot water and drank it. Two or three hundred miles south were the soda springs, by the Oregon Trail, from which he had drunk. He liked those waters and their catharsis but these in Colter’s bilins tasted of alkali and bitter salts.
After he had rubbed his horses down and eaten a big supper he spread his bed on earth that fire had warmed, and lay, snugly enfolded, and wondered about his future. He suspected, in these deeper moments of calm, that he had been a bit of a fool to fling a challenge into the beautiful white teeth of a whole nation; for as long as the vendetta endured he would have to be vigilant twenty-four hours a day, the whole year round. He had no wish to spend his life in a blood feud but he could think of no sensible and honorable way to withdraw. The red people loved feuds and warpaths and undying hates. They wouldn’t want him to ask for peace. And there were the Blackfeet and Cheyennes, possibly even the Sioux and Arapahoes, all determined to capture him. And every scalp he lifted would boost the ransom.
It was not that he was afraid; he was as much a stranger to fear as the human male can be. It was not that he would feel sorry for himself if he fell under the redman’s weapons. It was that he knew a simple truth, that men who loved life were not men who liked to kill, He would never be able to put out of memory the shocked and paralyzed youngster who had looked at him or the ungainly pathetic body hanging from the tree. Besides, he wanted to trap and hunt, cook and eat and sleep, without having to be watchful every minute. He’d not mind too much staying on the warpath another year, if the hot-blooded idiots would then wipe their knives and go home. They would never do that. He had begun to think that most men in the world wanted nothing more than any enemy whom they could hate and plot against. He did not pretend to know why this was so.
He hoped the next summer to ride over to visit his father-in-law. He might take a gift of four or five gallons of rum; like all the redmen, Tall Mountain had an enormous thirst for it. Living in an area meager with game and pelts, he did not have much to trade that white men wanted. He would be transported to a red heaven if Sam were to make a long journey to see him—a white son visits his red father, and rides two hundred miles right through Blackfeet country!
During this winter of reflection, with its many marvelous storms, there were tasks to keep him busy. He had garments to make. Because his hands were so large he was not nimble with needle and thread. Bear Paws Meek, fat and jolly and tobacco-stained, had large hands but he had a pianist’s mastery of them. There was nothing dainty or artistic in Sam’s sewing; he punched holes through the leather with a bone awl, thrust the needle through, and pulled the leather thread through one hole after another, to make his moccasins and leggins, trousers and jackets. While sewing he would wonder what kind of people they were back east and over in Europe who clamored to buy the scalps of the red people. Would they also be eager to buy testicles? He also made during this winter several pairs of moccasins for the bay; he expected next summer to be pursued not only by Crows but by war parties from the Blackfeet and Cheyennes. In certain dangerous situations two or three layers of leather over the stone hoofs of a horse were the difference between life and death. If he were to outwit the warriors the old chief sent against him he would need to be master of warcraft and woodcraft—equal to Kit Carson in the first and Jim Bridger in the second. He was pretty sure that he had got Wolf Teeth; two years earlier he had seen this brave showing off on his pony, and had marveled that a man could ride with such grace and skill. It was said that some of the Crow warriors could hit flying birds with a rifle; that some were so noiseless they could slip up to the sleeping wolf and take it by the tail; and that some could devise phenomenal deceptions in ambush. Sam was not at all sure that he would be alive when the next frosts came but he was a fatalist; a man, like the buffalo or elk bull, could only do his best, and when his time came let go his grip on life and slip under.
As spring approached he put his weapons in perfect condition. A knife got dull and needed a lot of fine honing. He had two Bowies, so that in a tight place he could lay enemies open with both hands. In a buckskin pouch he had pieces of obsidian and filing whetstone, which he had saturated with hot goose oil to make oilstones, and hard and soft leathers. One knife, his finest, he kept wrapped in soft oiled leather; the other was his hunting and kitchen knife. His rifle and revolvers he kept spotless. He was not the kind of shot with a revolver that Bill Hickok would be a few years later, or with a rifle, as a man named Carver would be; but he felt that he was a match for the Crows, for the reason that his nerve would be steadier. The redmen in a crisis were notoriously bad shots. Bridger said it was because for the redman a gun was big medicine and all medicine was magic. If you were using magic you didn’t have to pay much attention to sights or wind drift or buck ager. Buck ague or buck fever the mountain men called buck ager; they meant the trembles and willies, when a man suddenly faced a charging grizzly or bull moose. The redmen, as Sam had sized them up, were pretty good nghters when running, or riding hell-bent in a pack, because the heat of battle and the presence around them of their own kind brought their courage to the fusing point; but alone, man to man or man to grizzly, without war cries and wild commotion, few of them had the heart for it. Now and then one preferred to fight alone for the glory of it. It was these, Sam knew, who would be sent against him.
During this winter, when he lay snugly warm in the dark midnight of another dead day, he faced the possibility of capture and so thought of the squaws. Tom Fitzpatrick said they were red women, not squaws, but Sam knew that squaw was the word for female among the Massachusetts Indians. Most mountain men thought them too cruel and ferocious to be called women, much less ladies; for look at the way some of them beat their dogs. When the squaws of most tribes went for firewood they used dogs, with their travées or trabogans; the dogs of the Crows looked to Sam like a cross between wolves and rawboned shaggy mongrels. They looked mean and evil and they were lazy. When harnessed to the trabogans they were a sight to make the whitemen die laughing; they sank back on their haunches like balky mules, and with tongues lolling and crafty eyes half closed they simply sat. The squaws then would run shrieking at them, and the dogs would slink away toward the woods; but after the trabogans were loaded with wood the dogs sank not to their hams but to their bellies, and like the mother grouse protecting her young, pretended to be wounded. It had looked to Sam as if some of them had feigned sickness. Ungovernable furies then seized the squaws; screaming and wailing, they would grasp heavy cudgels, and running up to the dogs, almost knock their heads off. Sam had never seen his Lotus angry, or brutal with any creature.