On the Wapiti Range

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  On the Wapiti Range

  Paul Lederer writing as Owen G. Irons

  ONE

  Calvin Manassas stepped out into the bright sunlight from his roughly built cabin. He had heard something approaching. The sound was unusual and so, respecting all of the instincts of caution, he carried his hard-used but meticulously maintained Winchester repeating rifle in his right hand.

  The morning was clear except for a few horsetail banners of thin cloud sketched against the high sky of Wyoming. The Rocky Mountains to the east were stark and clear, maintaining a burst of sunrise color in the gaps. The day was not old.

  The air was clean and cold in early fall. The breeze was light, but it toyed with the concept of oncoming winter. The high peaks, all of 14,000 feet high, were capped with eternal snow. Long, unfurled pennants of white ran down their dark slopes until they met the timber-line where the tall blue spruce and jack pines spread in endless depths.

  The sounds continued to approach. Now Cal could hear well enough to determine that there were wagons on the trail leading to his small homestead. One of them had an ungreased axle rasping and whining with each revolution. With his free hand Calvin shaded his eyes and peered southward. He was a narrow man, his gray-shot, home-cut hair sticking up in spikes. He had not shaved yet and the white of many winters showed in the whiskers along his narrow cheeks and jutting jawline.

  His yellow hound, Jack, had emerged yawning from his sleeping place under the house. He scratched his ear a few times and then began to bark enthusiastically as the train of wagons drew into view, emerging from the creek bottom pines.

  Calvin’s few cattle – he had thirty-four in all – scattered as the strangers interrupted their morning cud chewing. Calvin reached inside the cabin, removed his flop hat from its peg and planted it on his head. He at first believed that a lost group of settlers had missed the Green River ferry crossing. Then he had hopefully considered that it was his old friend, Frank D’Arcy, the whiskey peddler and drummer, arrived early this year. It was neither.

  It was the strangest entourage Calvin Manassas had ever encountered in his years on the Wyoming basin. He squinted into the early sunlight, making out: first, two men in black uniforms with brass buttons on their coats wearing shiny helmets, secondly a four-wagon train, each wagon driven by other men in uniform, thirdly a party of seven men, two of them in dude clothing of a cut he had never seen before. One of the two men who now took the lead sported a gray upturned, waxed mustache that seemed to cover half of his face. The other was American, but he sat his big horse in eastern fashion. Calvin removed his hat, scratched his head and stepped out to meet the arriving party.

  The wagons held back and two of the men, flanked by the guards in polished helmets, approached the cabin. No one swung down from his horse or smiled.

  ‘Howdy,’ was all Calvin could think to say.

  The two men sitting in front of the group walked their horses a little closer. The stallion the obviously Eastern man rode was black as obsidian, deeply muscled and heavy in the chest. The other man, the one with the vast mustache, a foreigner of some sort, sat a white horse with a twitchy attitude about it. The man on the black horse wore a buckskin jacket, but there was what seemed to be lace at the cuffs of his shirt. Calvin frowned.

  ‘My name is Darby Pierce,’ the American man said. He was thick in the chest, thick in the face. He waited as if that name was supposed to mean something to Calvin.

  ‘Happy to meet you, Mr Pierce. Would you and your friends care for some coffee? I was about to boil some up. The trough is that way,’ he said with a jerk of his head, ‘if your horses are thirsty.’

  ‘We are seeking information,’ Pierce said stiffly. His accent, Calvin thought, was Bostonian. At least from that part of the East.

  ‘Fine,’ Calvin said. ‘Be happy to help.’ Jack the hound had gone off to sniff at each horse in turn. The tall white stallion kicked at him and the man with the huge mustache was jostled in his saddle.

  ‘Jack, you be good. Get home!’ Calvin said and the dog obligingly slunk back toward the sagging front porch to lie down on his belly and soak in the morning sun rays.

  The American swung down and the portly European with the mustache followed after waiting for one of the helmeted guards to hold his horse’s bridle for him. These two tramped across the dusty stretch of yard to Calvin’s cabin. Neither of them smiled. Calvin thrust his hand out and the Easterner shook it briefly with a hand that, though uncallused, was strong in its grip. The European man only looked at Cal’s hand and refused to raise his own. Calvin smiled inwardly.

  ‘A man welcoming you into his own house expects some civility,’ he said. The puffy European stiffened. Darby Pierce intervened quickly.

  ‘The baron is not used to Western ways,’ he said. ‘Please, may we go inside?’

  ‘Certainly,’ Cal Manassas agreed, gesturing to the open door. He turned his head and spat. Jack, the yellow hound, he reflected had better manners than this stranger. In the far places, however, a man was remiss if he didn’t offer guests food or drink as they required, and after letting the two men enter his cabin before him, he followed, Jack at his heels.

  The baron stood looking around the one-room shack, his eyelids drooping. Darby Pierce sank onto a puncheon chair and smiled ineffectively at the Wyoming rancher. Calvin said, ‘I’ll start some coffee, men, and you can tell me what it is that brings you out all this way.’

  It was left to Darby Pierce to speak as Calvin prodded the wood in his iron stove to life, filled the gallon coffee pot with water and roughly measured fresh ground coffee.

  ‘As you may have gathered,’ Darby Pierce said, removing his hat and placing it on the table – crown down, another indication that he was not a Western man. Out in the wilds there was a custom, not really a superstition, of removing your hat so that it was open to prevent your luck from running out, ‘This is a hunting expedition.’

  The Easterner went on. ‘My brothers and I own a shipping company in Baltimore and the baron and his friends have expressed a desire to visit our wild West and get in some hunting while here. You may know Baron Stromberg by name.…’

  ‘No, sir,’ Calvin said, scratching at his disordered thicket of gray hair. ‘The only baron I ever did hear of was this man called Munchausen.’ The baron stiffened. Calvin couldn’t guess how much English the man understood, but he supposed he had somehow insulted the nobleman.

  ‘Baron Stromberg,’ Pierce said hastily, ‘is from Prussia, and I assure you, a member of a very successful family of traders.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ the old mountain man said, pouring the boiled coffee into three tin cups using a rag as a hot pad. He poured a tablespoon of cold water into each to cause the grounds to drop, then served the men. Stromberg had continued to stand; now with a tight-lipped glance at the roughly made wooden chair, he seated himself. ‘What can I do for you gents?’ Calvin asked.

  The baron continued to watch Calvin from beneath heavy eyelids as if he were bargaining with some untrustworthy barbarian prince. Pierce continued although Calvin Manassas seemed to pay more attention to Jack, the yellow hound, than to him. He petted the dog’s wide skull and scratched it under the chin, causing Jack’s leg to twitch in response.

  Pierce colored slightly, but he continued. ‘The baron and his friends have been hunting in the West for three months now. He has taken his share of buffalo, three mountain lions, one moose, more than twenty mule deer, five or six mountain sheep, a couple of badgers and hundred
s of grouse, one black bear, three grizzlies, at least twenty pronghorn antelope.…’

  ‘Sounds like he’s pretty well cleaned us out,’ Calvin said laconically. He tilted back in his chair and sipped at his strong gritty coffee. Outside the men loitered around the wagons or watered their horses. A few of them had broken out pipes and were smoking at their leisure. A cook had begun to cook something savory on a portable black iron stove.

  Pierce smiled and then went on with a glance at the baron. He looked to Calvin like a new employee trying to please his boss, which, he supposed Darby Pierce was in a way if he was trying to cement a deal between a major European import-export enterprise and his own Baltimore shipping line.

  ‘The wapiti,’ the Prussian said between clenched teeth. He had not even reached for his coffee cup.

  Pierce continued, ‘Before returning to Europe the baron wishes to collect one more trophy, a wapiti.’

  ‘Elk,’ the baron said in the same manner.

  ‘I’m sure Mr Manassas knows what a wapiti is,’ Pierce said, trying for friendliness. Still there was a glimmer of anxiety in the back of his eyes as if he feared offending the baron, a potentially powerful trading partner.

  ‘Ain’t no wapiti roaming this low just yet,’ Manassas said. He had found a corncob pipe and without fresh tobacco, he fired up the cold tarry dottle that remained in it. ‘By ‘low’, I mean in the basin. To you three, four thousand feet might not seem that low, but it is for the big elk herds. Soon as the first snow begins to fall in the high reaches, they’ll begin to drift down, but that’ll be a month at least.’

  ‘Is he saying he cannot help us?’ the baron demanded and now Calvin had an idea just how much English Stromberg did speak. Enough.

  ‘I didn’t say that, exactly,’ Calvin replied, holding up one hand as he strained to get his pipe going. ‘I said they don’t normally come this low this time of year. There’s a herd of maybe two hundred wapiti that range not far from here, but they’re on the Lee Trent parcel.’ Calvin shook his head, blowing out a stream of acrid smoke. ‘I can’t speak for Lee Trent. I don’t know if he’d want any truck with you.’

  ‘Truck!’ the Prussian sputtered.

  ‘I don’t know if he’d agree to have you on his parcel, that is,’ Calvin replied. The dog got up and went out onto the porch to watch the convoy of visitors.

  ‘There’s money in it for him,’ Pierce insisted.

  ‘For you as well,’ the baron persisted. ‘I wish to obtain the trophy.’

  ‘I can speak to Lee Trent,’ Calvin said. Shaking his head, he added, ‘But I don’t know how he’d feel about trophy hunting on his parcel.’

  ‘You keep calling it a parcel,’ the man from Baltimore said, sipping at his own coffee. ‘What do you mean by that? I understand the term loosely, of course, but what exactly does that mean out here? How much land does he own?’

  Calvin rubbed the back of his hand against his snowy whiskers. It took him a minute to respond. ‘Well, sir, it’s like this: Lee Trent don’t own any land out here. He has a “parcel” of about two hundred square miles.’

  ‘If he doesn’t own it …’ the baron said growing more deliberate. Calvin lifted a broken, callused hand.

  ‘Things are different out here, sir. Here is what Lee’s parcel means: a long time ago Lee did a great favor for the Green River Cheyenne band. What it was, even I don’t know. Lee don’t like to talk about it too much.

  ‘You have to understand, as few as five years ago there was still warfare between the Cheyenne and the whites. Well, even now it wouldn’t take much to set that tinderbox up in flames. Anyway,’ Calvin said, now content since his pipe had begun to draw well, ‘Lee did the Cheyenne this great favor. The Cheyenne are a generous people. When they asked Lee Trent what he wanted in return – a hundred ponies! Wives! Lee told them that he wanted to be free to live on the land where warfare would never come.’

  ‘And they gave him …’ Pierce began, now caught up in the story.

  ‘They gave him nothing, sir. Among the Cheyenne land is not something that can be owned, bought or traded. They gave Lee his “parcel”, meaning that no Cheyenne can come upon his land to hunt or trap without his permission, that the fur, the game, the timber is his and no man can encroach upon it.’

  ‘His own fiefdom,’ Pierce said. Calvin smiled.

  ‘No, sir – if I understand the word – Lee is free to live on it without interference, without fear of betrayal. That is the Cheyenne law. He has no fences, he has no lumber camps or mines. He lives as he wishes in complete peace.

  ‘So!’ Calvin told them, ‘I am not sure if he would allow anyone to hunt the land. Not for trophies,’ Calvin said with a small shake of his head.

  ‘Surely he hunts there!’ the baron said, rising an inch or two.

  ‘’Course,’ Calvin answered evenly, ‘but a man like Lee Trent uses what he kills as an Indian would. The hide of an elk or a buffalo makes for moccasins and a winter coat, blankets and such. The meat is quartered and smoked or left out in the winter to last frozen – unless the timber-wolves find it. He uses the elkhorn for the buttons on his jacket. The hoofs, boiled down, become mighty good glue … Lee doesn’t waste any more of the animal than an Indian does. Five or six a year can see him through for meat.’

  ‘Surely,’ Darby Pierce said, leaning forward intently, ‘he must need more.’ His hand waved toward the stove, ‘Coffee, flour, cornmeal, sugar, beans, lard, salt!’

  ‘I will give him five hundred dollars for the wapiti,’ the baron said. ‘A span of five to six feet on the antlers. Five hundred gold American dollars. Surely the man is not stupid! He must have needs he wishes to satisfy.’

  Calvin was silent, turning his cup on the table. ‘I couldn’t say. I can’t speak for another man.’

  ‘Will you talk to him!’ Pierce pleaded. ‘This is important to the baron. Fifty dollars just to speak to him! Fifty more if you convince the man,’ he said, without a glance at the baron. ‘Baron Stromberg must have his trophy collection complete. It is essential.’

  ‘I can’t see why it’s essential,’ Calvin said, speaking the word as if it were sour. He thought of the oncoming winter and the use he could have for fifty dollars. He shrugged, ‘I’ll talk to Lee Trent, though I can promise nothing.’

  After the meeting Calvin was left with many questions. He went out alone, his dog beside him, to think matters over. The hunting party had made itself at home in his yard. The cook’s fire continued to burn and the scent of venison was heavy in the air. That and onions and a variety of spices unfamiliar to Calvin. An assortment of men had exited the wagons, drawn up in a half circle near Calvin’s stone well. His few cattle had moved away in a loose bunch, made nervous by the gathering.

  Deciding that he wished to have a closer look at the hunting party, he walked unremarked among the guards, hunters and wagons. One of the wagons had its tailgate dropped and a man was working there. Calvin started that way and then halted abruptly as he got a look at what the wagon contained.

  Within the wagon where the man with a scraping tool worked was a pile of bones, antlers and whole skeletons. He saw bear paws hanging from hooks placed along the wagon’s side and a stack of furs pushed further into the corner. The taxidermist, for that was what he proved to be, glanced up at Calvin and then bent to his work again.

  ‘The baron has had some luck,’ Darby Pierce said, appearing at Calvin’s side. The man from Baltimore was taller than Calvin had first thought and his face was broad and hard, sheltering pale blue eyes. ‘Those specimens will raise some eyebrows in Europe.’

  ‘They’d raise some out here,’ Calvin said trying to keep his tone neutral. These men had no use for these animals. They had killed them without need and done it profligately.

  ‘Let me show you something that might interest you,’ Pierce said. He was trying to be affable, it seemed, but he must have read Calvin’s eyes for the smile in his eyes died away. Shrugging, Calvin followed the man to a second wagon. This one
was constructed entirely of wood with a hinged stairway leading to a heavy wooden door, something like a gypsy caravan’s wagon, Calvin thought. He followed Pierce up the stairs and into the wagon’s interior.

  Pierce slid a shutter wide and light streamed in to glint on the gleaming cargo the wagon held. Calvin whistled softly despite himself. Every inch of one wall was hung with magnificent hunting arms. Long barreled, short barreled, octagon and round. The receivers were embossed and inlaid with gold and silver depictions of game. The stocks were of gleaming black oak or bird’s eye maple, polished to furniture brightness.

  ‘Never seen nothing like these,’ Calvin said. Darby Pierce had removed a large-bore rifle from its hook and showed it Calvin. Pheasants in gold soared skyward from a silver meadow and stags, their heads held high, watched in surprise.

  ‘It’s Belgian-made of course,’ Pierce said. Why of course, Calvin Manassas didn’t understand, but it was a beautiful piece of workmanship, the kind of weapon that should have been displayed in a museum not trundled around the West in this wagon.

  ‘Remarkable,’ Calvin said, handing the rifle back. ‘What caliber?’

  ‘This is a .45-.90. Quite suitable for anything smaller than an elephant.’

  ‘I should guess. Where do you find the ammunition for such a piece?’ Calvin wondered.

  ‘Oh, that,’ Pierce said, replacing the rifle. ‘We have our own reloader with us. A man named Glass. He keeps a ready stock of powder and lead, bullet molds and casings available.’

  ‘The baron doesn’t want for much, it seems,’ Calvin said. He himself carried a Colt revolver and a Winchester .44-.40 rifle with a couple of chips in the stock from hard usage. Although there were still a few old Sharps .50 buffalo guns and even a .56 Spencer repeater or two, almost everyone carried the same combination of firearms that Calvin did. The reason was obvious – the shells fit both your handgun and your rifle, and since the cartridge was so popular, they could be had anywhere ammunition was sold.

  He followed Pierce back down the steps, the Easterner pausing to lock the door again.