Long Blows the North Wind

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  Long Blows the North Wind

  Paul Lederer writing as Owen G. Irons

  ONE

  We knew early that it was going to be a hard winter. Thousands of geese were winging their way southward in long, graceful ‘V’s, the leafy trees had begun dropping their foliage in a whirlwind of color, and the pelts we were taking were thick and heavy.

  Which was all a profitable sign for Sad Sam and me; that is, the prime fox and beaver we were trapping up along the Milk River would fetch a fine price in the East. Only thing was, neither of us was in a mood to linger through another long Montana winter.

  The year before, we had had snowdrifts ten feet high outside the only window of our log shanty and we had not only nearly frozen but driven each other half crazy, retelling old stories and old longings hunched over a low-glowing fire in the stone hearth.

  Not that Sad Sam and I weren’t the best of friends, but spend four winter months locked in a twelve-by-twelve cabin with your dearest of friends and you will understand what I mean.

  We were not of a mind to repeat the experience.

  ‘Brian,’ Sad Sam said as he sat on the bench before our hut, looking up at the cold Montana skies on this late September day, ‘we have done well enough for ourselves. Besides, the foxes are soon going to take to their dens, the beaver to their lodges. I’ve had about enough of the north country for a time, and – excuse me – enough of your company.’

  I couldn’t argue with the old man; he was right. We had been trapping along the river for eighteen months, sometimes half-frozen, always half-hungry. It was time we gave it up.

  ‘There’s flatboats going downriver along the Missouri now, all the way to Saint Jo,’ Sad Sam was saying kind of dolefully as he tried to strike fire to his curved-stem pipe. ‘Why don’t we take what furs we have and “beat feet”?’

  By which he meant arrange our fortunes so that we were somewhere in the southern climes before the first blizzard of winter hit.

  I agreed.

  Sad Sam was as close to me as a father, but the prospect of spending another long winter locked up together inside a smoky, airless cabin was beyond consideration. We agreed to depart from the Montana land on that September day in the year 1876.

  I have to take a moment to explain about Sam and myself.

  Sad Sam McCulloch had taken me under his wing when, as a youngster, our wagon train had been hit by Sioux Indians, leaving very few on either side alive. My parents were among the dead, I discovered, when I crawled out of the poor shelter where I had hidden at the first sound of a war whoop.

  I don’t suppose many of you would be interested in the details – it was so long ago, and I was too young to remember it all. The killing, that is. But Sam was there, an army scout in his greasy buckskins, and he took me from beneath a burning wagon and nurtured me. As I say, that is a different, long story; I just wanted to explain how Sad Sam and I came to be where we were and why I was so close to him.

  There we were, on this fine Montana morning, the sky high and impossibly long and there were magpies in the meadow, and a clump of crows in the pines, and far away a small herd of elk, and I wondered if I could bear to leave this country of enormous beauty and heartbreak, but I knew it was the thing to do.

  We piled the pelts onto the two-wheeled cart we had. Then we backed old ‘Ben’ our black mule into the traces, I threw a saddle on my feisty four-year-old sorrel gelding, Santana, and we started for the Missouri River, sorry to be leaving, but relieved at the same time, for the snows were not far behind us.

  If I have not already said this – I’m kind of new to this writing game – my name is Brian McCulloch. I’m twenty years old, at a rough guess, my parents being dead and unable to vouch for that. I have sort of coppery-brown hair and stand a notch under six feet tall.

  That’s about all there is to know about me, I guess, except what I have mentioned above. I am no stronger built than usual. That is, a man who spends his bringing-up years chopping timber and tramping the high north country is naturally going to be broader than some Philadelphia clerk. But that is only a matter of experience and of necessity. There are some bear-like men up here in Montana, but I am not a man with a build like an ox and the temper of a catamount.

  To get back to what I was telling you, we were proceeding toward the Upper Missouri hoping to catch ferry transport south. Our cart was piled high with prime furs and we hoped to reach St Joseph or St Louis before the ice floes clogged the big river. We had some concern about the Indians, but the Cheyenne had been quiet and from what we had heard at the trading posts, the Nez Perce had begun to emigrate to Canada.

  Besides, Sad Sam knew many of the local tribes. He had always treated them with respect, and in turn they had treated us well.

  What we didn’t expect was a band of white raiders wanting our wealth in furs.

  The pine forest we were passing though was tall and cool and blue. There were patches of thin snow reflecting the afternoon light which sprayed like sifting gold through the trees. There was no sound but the steady creaking of the cart’s wheels and the twisting of the wind through the lodgepole pines. Sam, who could hear a bird whisper at a hundred yards, did not hear them coming. I, whose thoughts were on a long-ago vision of a girl I never knew, did not see them on the pine-clad ridge.

  There were six of them,. And they knew what they wanted. Furs were going at a prime rate in those times; beaver, especially. Men from New York to London were crazy to have beaver hats. I don’t know why exactly; I just knew that trapping them was a way to keep bread in our mouths.

  When the bandits came down on us from out of the darkness of the pines, they shot Sam through the lungs.

  They were a fur-clad bunch of bearded men with evil intentions. Could I have resisted more? I don’t know. Their leader rode his big bay horse up to me before I could even draw my Colt or unsheathe my Henry ‘Yellow Boy’ rifle, and he clubbed me down. As I hit the pine-needle-strewn ground I wondered if I could fight back, but I didn’t see how with half a dozen mounted armed men around me.

  Still I wondered if I was a coward. I could see Sad Sam as he lay dying, his mouth filled with blood.

  ‘Do you wish to die or to live?’ a man asked me. A huge, dark-bearded bull-shouldered man with glittering black eyes.

  ‘Live …’ I managed to say and cursed myself for it. Sam no longer twitched or spoke, or breathed. But his eyes seemed to meet mine for one final moment and I was so ashamed that I wished I had chosen the alternative and said, ‘I wish to die.’

  That, my friends, is what began my odyssey. Shame and doubts about my own manhood.

  I am not proud of the surge of revenge that slowly grew within me. It is an unjustifiable emotion.

  But murder is more inexcusable. To those of you who have never lived in a world where a man is his own administrator of justice because there is no other law, where there is no authority to appeal to, what follows might seem cruel or brutal, but in those times, in Montana territory I was the only law and my only friend had been murdered by these thieves simply for profit.

  I could not let that pass unanswered.

  I knew the man commanding them, Jason Grier. He had come by once in the heart of winter and been welcomed to our table. Sam had no liking for the man, but in those old days, no one was turned away from the door hungry.

  As I have said, I carried a Colt revolver on my hip, but I had never fired it in anger. Once I had shot it into the air to frighten away a prowling and t
oo-familiar grizzly bear, but it was carried more as a matter of custom than as a defense. Maybe that is why I did not draw my gun when Jason Grier hovered over me, looking through me with those mean coyote eyes. I don’t know. I always hoped it was because I was not a coward, but I felt as if I was in the days that followed.

  I watched the cart with our furs be drawn away, I watched Jason’s last disparaging over-the-shoulder glance at me; watched Santana being led away. Then on elbows and knees I dragged myself to where Sad Sam lay dying.

  He lifted a bloody hand as if he wished to clasp my own, but he hadn’t the strength and his fingers fell away in a slow, futile gesture. I sat beside him; I closed his eyelids. The forest was thick and deeply shadowed, the blue of the spruce so deep a blue that they seemed black.

  I sat there. My arms hung loosely and the chirping of the forest birds seemed to pause and await resolution. I found none within me. I sat with the cold blue steel of my unfired revolver, itself accusing, on my lap.

  I had done nothing to protect my only friend.

  Now, it does not matter that nothing could really have prevented his death, but thoughts such as those linger in a man’s mind. Shamefaced, I began to carve a shallow grave out of the dark soil, praying that the beasts would not find Sad Sam.

  It was then, as I returned Sad Sam McCulloch to the earth and a raucous crow sounding high in the pines reminded me that I was kneeling alone in silent invocation, that I knew what must be done. I am not a vengeful man, but they had begun the war. With a weary sadness I rose from the earth as the first light snow began to fall. I knew what I had to do.

  I would track the men responsible for this, and if I had to, I would kill them. It was not honor, nor hot pride, nor a vengeance-lust swelling within me. It was a sense that only I, across those thousand miles of wild country, could bring any sort of justice to these killers.

  I rose unsteadily and sorrowfully from the gravesite and lifted my eyes to the cold skies of Montana. I feared that I was about to become a killer myself, like it or not, a role I was not suited to either by skill or temperament.

  Sad Sam was the only parent I had ever known. Together we hunted, fished, at times hid out from hostile Indians, built our ramshackle cabin along the Milk River, worked our small truck garden, trapped, ate and sometimes wrangled with each other as all close people do. I did not remember my father. I barely remember my mother. Sad Sam was all the family I had ever known. Old, grizzled, whiskey-and tobacco-smelling coot … well, I could tell you a lot more about the way Sam hand-raised me and tried to teach me right, but it would take more than a book. He became my father.

  And my friend.

  I dragged myself up from my knees before Sam’s cold grave, maybe feeling sorrier for myself than I did for Sam – I don’t know.

  Our year’s work was gone, our furs, but that didn’t seem important. I was afoot in the middle of Montana Territory at the onset of winter – and that did matter. I stood straight, hands on hips, took a deep breath, looked around me at the deep forest and started walking, following the ruts the cart had left in the dark earth.

  I thought I knew where Grier and his gang were headed. It had to be far-off St Joseph or even St Louis, because there was no place in the north country to sell such a quantity of furs. I considered tracking them as they proceeded southward, but afoot it was obviously hopeless. They would easily outdistance me. My second notion was to find the Missouri as we had planned all along and see if I couldn’t out-race them to the civilized lands by traveling downriver. How I was to do it was a different question. Nevertheless, I turned my boots eastward and slogged my way forward through the day and into the bitter cold of the Montana evening.

  I rose in the frosty morning as stiff as if I had slept in sin, stretched my bunched muscles and went on as the red sun hoisted itself above the eastern horizon. Rime crunched beneath my boots, steam issued from my lips as I tramped along my uncertain route. By noon I had reached a tributary of the Upper Missouri locally called the Yellow, though it was really an arm of the Milk River. I was weary, hungry and disheartened. My scheme seemed mad and futile.

  I rested in the shade of the river oaks, watching idly as a high-flying crow circled above me. I was lost. Not because I was alone in the vastness of the plains – for that was where I had been nurtured – but because I had no real plan for survival. That is, I had always had Sad Sam, our successful if unpredictable trapping business, some sort of home and stability. Now I had nothing, nothing at all.

  Dwelling on that was going to accomplish nothing. I rose from the ground and walked on through the blackthorn and willow brush, aware of the silver glint of the sun on the river, the whisper of the wind in the barren wide-spreading, oaks, the occasional splash of a rising fish.

  I came upon the canoe half an hour on.

  Birch-bark, Indian-made, it was tied to a riverside sycamore by means of a rawhide string. I glanced around warily, my hand on my holstered Colt. I crouched slightly and listened intently, but there seemed to be no one around. Unsheathing my bowie knife I cut the canoe’s tether. Feeling like a thief I dragged the canoe to the water’s edge. My conscience caught up with me as I shipped the canoe, and I returned to the cove where I had found it tethered. With an overhand thrust, I drove the blade of my bowie knife into the sycamore tree, and left it shimmering there in the early sunlight. Steel knives were still uncommon among the Indians, especially one of that quality. I hoped that whoever’s canoe I had taken would accept it as a fair trade.

  I shoved the canoe into the Yellow, took up the paddle and began making my slow way toward the wide Missouri.

  TWO

  The Milk River flows south and east until it meets the Upper Missouri a little north of Fort Peck. It runs gentle and wide most times, and now, as I drifted along its silver face, it was pleasant and peaceful. The river found its way through tall granite outcroppings split by freezing winters and spring thaws. Tall pines crowded the shore like interested spectators. There were only a few wisps of cloud high in the lonesome sky. The only sounds were the occasional splash of mallard ducks landing or departing, and the quiet dipping of my oar as I steered my way southward. There were deer along the shoreline, hundreds of them, and occasionally a moose. I spotted one grizzly bear carrying a silvery fish in its mouth. It glanced at me dismissively and shambled on its way.

  After a few miles, the canoe began to leak.

  A small trickle of water from a seam near the bow drew my attention. Frowning, I tried to plug the chink in the birch-bark with my neckerchief. Fingering the seam, I could feel that the pine resin used to seal the birch was old and brittle. Cursing my luck I steered nearer to the shore in case the leak grew worse.

  Almost immediately that did begin to happen, and worse turned to worst as the sections of birch bark began to separate themselves. I now paddled with all my strength, having no wish to go down in the frigid river. I barely made it to the gravel beach before the canoe virtually came apart at the seams. I stepped out onto the shore and sat on the ground, watching the canoe flood and sag into the water to die. There was a reason, then, that the canoe had been abandoned.

  The Indian had gotten the better of the bargain after all.

  I glanced up at the sun, wheeling over toward the western horizon, struggled to my feet and began walking on.

  It seemed suddenly to be a fool’s errand I was on. If Jason Grier and his cronies were indeed heading toward St Joseph or St Louis, they were themselves only a day or two away from the landing on the Missouri River. As early as tomorrow they could find themselves aboard a flatboat or even a paddle-wheeler drifting lazily along the eight hundred miles they would be traveling, in the comfort of a steamboat lounge, smoking cigars and calculating the profit they would be making from their one morning’s work.

  No matter that Sad Sam and I had spent six months working sunup to sundown for those furs.

  Anger kept me plodding on. If it was a fool’s errand I was on, I was nevertheless determined to see it
through to the bitter end.

  Darkness came early. The thick pines around me closed out every memory of the day. The pine needles were soft underfoot. With each step the scent of crushed pine rose. The needles did not so much cushion sounds as smother them. I was as silent in my passing as a drifting cloud.

  Which is why, early that evening, I was able to come up upon their camp before they had an inkling that I was nearby.

  The first one I saw seemed to be sleeping on the ground near a cold fire ring, but he had no blanket thrown over him even in the chill of night, and I frowned. The second man was sitting propped up against the rough trunk of a big pine tree. His face was so pale that it was nearly translucent. It was like I could see his skull through his flesh, he was that pale. He was holding a big Colt revolver loosely on his lap, and he tried to lift it as I entered the tiny camp, but either he changed his mind or simply hadn’t the strength left to do it.

  I strode toward him; it was obvious now that he was badly hurt. And now it was evident that the other man curled up on the cold ground was already dead. I crouched down beside him.

  ‘What happened here, friend?’

  His mouth opened, but he had trouble forming his words. When they finally did come, they trickled out like sand spilling from between his lips so that I had to bend nearer to hear him.

  ‘They wanted our horses … bunch of men with a cart loaded with furs.… Said their mule had broken down. Big men.… Harv there,’ he said nodding at the dead man, ‘was too quick to draw his gun … I was too slow.’

  Jason Grier and his thugs. It had to be. Their mule had broken down … poor old Bess, I thought. Doubtlessly they pushed her too hard trying to get away from the scene of the robbery. ‘Where were they heading?’ I asked.

  ‘I heard them talk about a ferry landing … I don’t know.’ The old man coughed and blood came from his mouth. I remained crouched down beside him, all the time knowing there was nothing I could do for him. A bony hand stretched out and gripped my forearm with amazing strength and the wounded man’s fevered eyes met mine.