Rocky Mountain Company Read Free Page A

them all.
    “I reckon I’ll trade where the trading is,” said Brokenleg quietly, overriding Dust Devil. “That’s how it’s got to be.”
    They toasted the new company uneasily, knowing the risk even better than they knew the reward. The Cheyenne problem in the north. A problem with Mexican licensing in the south — a license they needed to put them close to the Kiowa and Comanche. And looming like a rumbling volcano over them all, the ruthless competition of two giant firms with deep experience in the fur and hide business, Chouteau in the north and Bent to the south.
    “I’ll tell Monsieur LaBarge we’ll be aboard at the fifth hour,” he said. “Have your engagés ready by the fourth, with their packs. He will wish to sail at dawn. Mrs. Straus and I will board this evening and say au revoir to all of you and our sons at Independence.
    Eighteen-year-old David would be Dance’s clerk, reading and figuring for the trader; sixteen-year-old Maxim would clerk for Fitzhugh. Guy had fought it fiercely, fearing he might never see his dear flesh and blood again, but acceded at the last: what papa could stand in the way of sons whose eyes gazed toward the shining mountains?

Two
     
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    A red ball of fire rolled across the broad Missouri valley ahead, so that the black waters of the river seemed to rise out of a cauldron of fire. Not a tree lined the banks to catch the gold of the setting sun, but only grass, glowing ochre in the last light. Already the sky above the bluffs had turned indigo.
    Before them, the river vibrated with life as an endless stream of black buffalo swam north like some giant snake out of the skies. Brokenleg’s senses demanded noise; demanded the thunder of a vast herd on the move; insisted at least upon the splash and froth and bawling of a thousand animals, a column a hundred yards wide, swimming a half a mile of water en route to summer grass. But he heard no noise. Countless buffalo, backlit against the dying sun, swam as patiently and silently as beaver, scarcely disturbing the powerful river. On occasion this vast black bridge bowed downstream, toward the idling Platte , which lay anchored in still waters away from the main channel because there was not a stick on shore to tie it to.
    He couldn’t fathom the silence. Not even when the water-blackened beasts clambered up the slippery bank gleaming orangely off to the right did they shake and bawl and thunder the earth. Instead, the great procession slid across grassy bottoms and up an apricot bluff and vanished into the dark sky, like a mirage. He could see no end to them in the south; no end to the humped beasts that dominated the short-grass prairies from Mexico far into the English possessions to the north. If the parade continued much longer, LaBarge would probably stay the night here, no doubt irritable because the nearest woodyard lay far ahead and he’d anchored too close to the current.
    It seemed an omen, all these buffalo, as common as ants, rippling the sunset light before him, making the river hump and shatter into silver splinters that seemed to bounce off a few high wisps of cloud above. He’d come to have the same instinct about the sacred animals as Dust Devil, seeing them as something much more than meat and hide, clothing and tools, glue and horns. The buffalo was more; it was holy; the gift of the One Above, Dust Devil would have said, for the use of the People. He waited, trying to fathom in himself whether the silence of tens of thousands of buffalo was a sign of welcome — or something else. He needed that welcome, though he would never admit it. He glanced covertly at Dust Devil, standing beside him up on the hurricane deck beside the texas where they could see, and sensed her fierce anger. A bad omen, then, all those sacred buffalo marching up into a great hole in the sky.
    They’d been stalled for two hours there in the land of the Santee and Yankton Sioux. These buffalo were the first they’d seen this