After he had jerked all the beef and put the meat in buckskin bags, and put out the fires and looked after his horses, he sat again and smoked. Then he took his rifle and harp and went up the hill, and came in behind the hummock where he had lain and played. He began softly, with the Ave Maria; and then played back and forth, from one tender thing to another, trying to make the music sound as if it were in heaven or came from there; and he was overjoyed when suddenly he heard her singing. How beautiful it was! For his own sake and for the bones in the cairn he played a few things that he had played for Lotus, and sung for her; and he played old hymns and Corelli and Schubert, softly, so that the music reached her and faded, and reached her again, as though the Creator were closing windows and putting some of the musicians to bed. After two hours he figured that if the music faded away gradually she would feel all right about it.
At midnight she fell silent. At daylight Sam was awake and the first sound he heard was her footfalls on the path. He watched her go to the river and return. The heavy pail bent her over, and she looked very frail and thin and old. Carrying water to flowers that bloomed above graves was, he supposed, what people called ritual. It seemed to be symbolic. It seemed to be deeper than the conscious mind. When she came again Sam rolled out, and with his rifle, and a hundred pounds of jerked flesh over his shoulder, he went up the hill while she was at the river; and the first thing he looked for was the steak. It was there, with the appearance of something that had spilled from her lap when she stood up. He turned and watched her come up the hill, bent forward, her shoulders looking pulled out of joint. Her face seemed bloodless and drawn, as from famine, fatigue, and want to sleep.
He had set the meat inside her cabin by the bed, where she could not fail to find it. He remained in this area until October, when the first snow fell. He put fresh stakes under the white skulls with their fringe of hair; gathered more wild fruit; and brought deer from the hills. With deer flesh and berries he made pemmican for her. With her old shovel he put three inches of earth on the cabin’s roof, and banked earth all the way around it, to the top of the first log. He brought river mud and used it for mortar to fill the cracks. When he could think of nothing more to do he packed his horse and saddled the bay, but even then stood, undecided, looking up the hill. There she was, a bent old mother in ragged shoes and tatters, carrying water to flowers withered by frosts and needing no water now. Not sure that he would ever see her again, who had become a precious part of his life, he went up the hill, leading his beasts, for a good-bye look at these familiar things. Framing her sad face with his two big hands, he kissed her forehead and her gray hair.
"Good-bye," he said. "I’ll see you before long."
He was to see her again a lot sooner than he expected to.
22
AT THE BIG bend of the Musselshell he took from a cache the keg of rum, the kettle, and a few other things, and then sat on the bay and looked west and south, wondering if he should take the safer way over the Teton Pass or the more dangerous way by Three Forks. Storm determined it. It was snowing this morning, and all the signs said it would be an early and a long hard winter. If he went by the pass it would take twice as long and he might find himself snowbound up against the Tetons or the southern Bitterroots. By far the easier route was by Three Forks, where John Colter had made his incredible run to freedom; where the Indian girl who went west with Lewis and Clark had been captured as a child; and where beaver were thickest in all the Western land. It was there also that more than one trapper had fallen under the arrows or bullets of the Blackfeet.
It was a foolhardy decision but mountain men were foolhardy men.
For a hundred and fifty miles, with snow falling on him most of the way, he went up the river, and then followed a creek through a mountain pass. He was leaving a trail that a blind Indian could follow. Straight ahead now was the Missouri; on coming to it he went up it to the Three Forks, the junction of the Gallatin, Madison, and Jefferson rivers. He knew this area fairly well. Lewis and Clark had gone up the Jefferson River, which came down from the west, but Sam planned to go southwest and cut across to a group of hot springs in dense forest. The snow was almost a foot deep now and still falling, but he had seen no tracks of redmen, only of wild beasts, and he had no sense of danger. Just the same he hastened out of the Three Forks area, eager to lose his path in forested mountains. He might have made it if pity had not overthrown prudence. He had gone up the Beaverhead, past a mountainous mass on his left, and hot springs that would be known as the Potosi, and had then ridden straight west to a group of hot springs deep in magnificent forest, when suddenly he came in view of a
mountain tragedy that stopped him.
Two great bulls of the wapiti or elk family had been fighting and had got their horns locked, and a pack of wolves was circling them, while turkey buzzards sat in treetops, looking down. Sam saw at once that it had been a terrific fight; the earth was torn and the brush trampled over half an acre. The two bulls looked evenly matched, each with a handsome set of antlers, and beautifully muscled shoulders and neck. Sam had sometimes wondered why the Creator had put such an immense growth of bone on the head of elk and moose; their antlers were about all their necks could carry, much less handle on a run through heavy timber, or in a fight with another bull. It was not an uncommon thing to find bulls dead with horns entangled in dense underbrush, or interlocked, as now. These two had their rumps up in the air to the full length of their hind legs but both were on their knees and unable to move their heads at all. Any moment the wolves would have moved in to hamstring them and bring them down, and feast in their bellies while they still breathed. If Sam had found one bull dead and the other bugling over him he would have thought it all right, but to find two magnificent warriors unable to continue their fight, who deeply wanted to, was such an ironic miscarriage of the divine plan that he was outraged. He would set them free if he could, so they could resume their fight.
Sam looked round him and listened. Thinking that he was many miles from danger, he secured his horses to a tree, hung his rifle from the saddlehorn, and walked about a hundred feet to the bulls. He went close to them to study the interlocking of the antlers. The astonishing thing about it was that bulls were able to do it; Sam had heard men say that they had taken two antlered heads and tried for hours to get the horns inextricably locked. These two sets were so firmly and securely the prisoners of one another that it looked to Sam as if he would have to cut through two or three bones to set them free. He had no saw but he had a hatchet. While considering the matter he walked around the two beasts, studying them with the practiced eye of one who knew the good points of a fighter. Yes indeed, they were well matched; he thought there was not thirty pounds difference in their weight; their antlers had the same number of points and in clay banks had been honed to the same sharpness. They had been in a great battle, all right; their eyes were bloodshot, their chin whiskers were clotted with the stuff that fury had blown from their nostrils, and both had been savagely raked along ribs and flank. What a handsome pair they were! Sam patted them on their quivering hams and said, "Old fellers, I kallate I’ll have to chop some of your horns off. It’l1 hurt just enough to make you fight better." He again studied the antlers. So absorbed by the drama that he had been thinking only of the two warriors, he glanced over toward the horses where his hatchet was and turned rigid, his eyes opening wide with amazement.