Sam had dug a bath hole in the earth, into which and out of which hot water flowed; and in the hole he soaked himself every day. What a land it was! All over its broad breast there were hot springs; Bridger said it was possible to travel a thousand miles and have a hot spring at every campsite. Since Sam had learned, with the Indians, to bathe in cold water, winter and summer, it was a delightful luxury to lie half asleep in a hot pool; and this, with the sumptuous meals, the magnificent mountain-winter all around him, the crisp purity of the air, and the wild things in the silence and aloneness, made him unwilling to leave the basin. With Lotus and his son he would have been content to live here forever. It seemed to him that in wintertime most people suffered a wintering of their emotions. And one other thing he had learned: that the folk in cities never got a chance to know themselves and one another: in this land, where enemies honed a man’s wits and the forces of nature kept him trimmed of physical and emotional fat, a person had to learn what he was and what he was not.

It was late April before Sam reluctantly, saddled and packed his beasts, hung a revolver and knife from his waist, mounted the bay, and sat for ten minutes looking around him. He then went over to the lake and down the west side to the headwaters of Snake River, and followed the river to the broad valley of the Tetons. On one of the streams flowing past those  magnificent sculpturings he expected to find Wind River Bill.

19

"WALL NOW, I’ll be cussed fer a porkypine!" Bill cried as Sam rode up to his cabin door. "If it ain’t the Crow-killer hisself I’ll be hog-tied and earmarked. Sam, whar in hell have ye bin?"

"Out and around," Sam said.

"Dog my hide," said Bill, staring. "We had it figgered you wuz dead and tuk. We bin awful oneasy. Have ye heerd they are callin ye The Terrer?"

"Hadn’t heard that," Sam said, dismounting. He was looking round him when back in a recess he saw Zeke Campbell squinting at him. Zeke, Sam had no doubt, was the most taciturn man in the world; he had seen him a dozen times and had never heard him utter a dozen words. His usual affirmative was an almost inaudible grunt; his negative was a cold stare through the smoke from his pipe. In size and strength and agility he was only average. The most unusual thing in his appearance, for Sam anyway, was his hair; his beard so completely covered his face that only the forehead and the small green eyes were visible. Zeke even had hair all the way down the bridge of his nose. His hair was of a bronze color; when it was full of sunlight the man’s face looked hidden behind a thicket of golden wires.

"How are you, Zeke?" Sam said. Zeke grunted.

Bill said, "I smell selfer." He came up to Sam and breathed iu. "I spect ye’ve bin in the bilins," he said.

"How’s trapping?" Sam said.

At once Bill looked downcast. Soon a man would starve to death, without he dug his fingernails off, and even then he would get ganter and ganter. Between him and Zeke they had only about five packs, though they had worked like two coons climbing greased poles.

Any extra tobacco?

Wall now, they did have plenty of that. Bill went to a hidden cache and returned with a few inches of twist. "Fill yer pipe, Sam, and rest yer hinder. Tell us what ye have been up to in the

bilins."

This evening Bill cooked a supper of lean elk roast, beaver tail, muskrat broth, and coffee; and after the men had eaten and filled their pipes they sat by a loud-talking fir-and-cedar fire and wondered aloud about this and that.

"I wunner," Bill said, "about ole George." He meant Bear Paws Meek. George had gone into the Bear Paws Mountains, all alone, smack dab into the middle of Blackfeet country. Was George tired of life?

George was a smart coon, Sam said.

"Many’s the smart coon ended up in the pot," Bill said. "He might as well a-set down at Three Forks and blowed his bull whistle, I figger George is gone under, I shorely do."

He doubted that, Sam said. George had been up that way twice before and had come back.

Bill scratched through his thick hair to his unwashed skull. He and Zeke, he said, had had a close shave last fall. In fact, two. One was the Cheyennes. Zeke was up Bull Elk Creek on a trapline and Bill had just brought in a fine buck and was skinning it when suddenly four red devils appeared out of nowheres, with so much grease and coal dust smeared over their faces that at first Bill had thought they were niggers; but his second glance saw their headdress, his third, the scalps. Wall, doggone it, if there was one thing the whiteman knew he must not do in such a situation it was to reach for his gun. Bill said he was bent over, with skinning knife, and he just remained bent over and let the knife fall, his mind wondering how he could warn Zeke. As sure as varmints Zeke at any moment would come back and walk right into his own funeral. Bill broke off in the story, filled his lungs with strong tobacco fumes, and exploded smoke from two hairy nostrils. His mind, he said, was thinking like a horse loping but there was nothing in it. He had never had such an empty mind in all his born life. He knew, of course, that the red killers were asking theirselves if he was alone or it mebbe two or three men were back in the brush looking torstthem. "I tell ye I was plum scairt, I shorely wuz."

He figgered, Bill said, that his hump fat was as good as gone.His rifle was six feet from him; his revolvers were hanging over  a limb not far from his rifle; and his knife lay at his feet. He was trying to remember some prayer to say when suddenly there was an explosion that sounded like the bursting of twenty rifle barrels. The redman closest to Bill fell almost on top of him but Bill didn’t wait around to see if the varmint was down for good. In the instant he heard the shot he knew that Zeke had let daylight into the soul of one of them; in the next instant he had plunged his knife into the belly of another; and in the third instant the other two took to their heels like antelope in a high wind. They kallated that a hull war party had descended on them. Zeke had had time to reload and he dropped the third. The fourth then took to wings and when they last saw him he was ten miles above the Tetons. Their other close shave was with two Crows, Bill guessed that these two had it figgered that he was The Terrer, for at the moment when they came in sight of him he was standing on the humped back of a log in a beaver pond and looked a foot taller than he was. He guessed that one or both of them belonged to the twenty the old chief had chosen to bring in Sam’s topknot and ears. They had him dead to rights, for like the fool he had been ever since he left his mother’s knee, he had stood his rifle against a tree and had gone toad-hopping from log to log, looking for a floater stick that would show where a beaver trap was hiding in the deep water below. It was Zeke who again saved his life.

Through a cloud of smoke Sam looked over at Zeke. Though safer in pairs, the mountain men usually trapped alone. A lone trapper never for a moment put his rifle more than a few inches from his grasp. But no matter how wary they were they died violent deaths, one by one, year after year: there was never a rendezvous, at Pierre’s Hole, or Brown’s, or Laramie or Union or Bent, that they did not look round them to see which faces were missing. Bill was now looking at Sam. He guessed Sam knew that he had killed five, mebbe, six, of the twenty sent out to take him, and that the others were waiting for him to come out of Colter’s bilins. He had heard from Charley that these braves had met in a secret powwow and had cast lots to see which of them would have the first chance at the Terrer’s scalp. The lot had fallen to Eagle Beak.