The Yellowstone by Win Blevins Page A

over the mountains. But as Mac traveled that night, one foot after another automatically between his partners, he spun dreams. A substantial building, timber, not adobe, and not as big and gaudy as Fort Union. Comfortable, though not stocked with fancy wines, like some. He could float the furs to Fort Union, a real advantage, and ship them downstream on the paddlewheelers—that would cut the cost of getting his goods to market.
    Imagine, Skinhead would snort, paddlewheelers in the Rocky Mountains. But right here you were protected against the steamboats—forever, Mac thought. They’d never come past Wolf Rapid, at the mouth of the Tongue River, several days away. So you had the use without the nuisance. And Mac dreamed on.
    Just like a white man, Jim would have said, to be living high in his head when he was starving afoot, unarmed, and wore out.

Chapter 7
    Moon when the buffalo bulls are rutting
    Dogs were barking at the strangers. Some children disappeared. Others, recognizing the Frenchmen, ran away laughing and screaming. For a moment Mac thought the girl bringing water from the creek was Annemarie, but she was too slender. When children darted into the lodges, sometimes adult heads popped out to have a look at the odd spectacle.
    The three trappers had come onto the Cheyennes all together in one huge camp, all the people who lived between the Big Horn Mountains and the Black Hills, gathered together in their half-moon village for the ceremony of the sacred buffalo hat and then the sun dance.
    “Good time to be here,” said Skinhead. “Get religion.” But Mac was uneasy about Cheyenne religion and wanted to be off for St. Louis. Or he would want that if he could get beyond craving food and get a gun and a horse.
    A voice called out their Cheyenne names: Skinhead, Man Who Doesn’t Stir Air, and Dancer.
    Strikes Foot ducked his huge shoulders through the lodge door and gimped toward them fest, grinning. He shook hands white-man style all around, even with Jim, who didn’t like the custom. “Do you have hunger?” he said in Cheyenne.
    Mac was acutely embarrassed to be coming into camp this way—dirty, ragged, emaciated, broke, helpless, sore-footed, almost barefooted—hell, almost naked. A beggar in flour-sack rags, and with his face blistered and peeling. But not too embarrassed to use one of his Cheyenne words. “Eat and eat and eat,” he told Strikes Foot.
    “We come to you starving,” said Skinhead formally. Strikes Foot would have been too polite to mention it.
    “Calling Eagle is making food,” he said. They could see her at it in front of the lodge.
    Calling Eagle welcomed them chatteringly. She was a tall, husky woman, always cheerful and animated and bristling with talk, yet odd. She added water to the kettle and said she’d kill a young dog to celebrate. The kids were around somewhere. Annemarie, she added to Mac, had gone to see the Assiniboins.
    Mac masked his disappointment. It meant she and her mother were visiting the family Lame Deer was born to. He told himself it was just as well—now she wouldn’t actually see him in this humiliating state. But he also wouldn’t see her before going to St. Louis. Well, that might make it easier to ask Strikes Foot for her.
    A pretty girl came out of the lodge, and Calling Eagle introduced her—Strikes Foot’s new wife, Yellow Bird. She smiled shyly, eyes down, and set to work peeling cattail roots for the stew. Three wives now, thought Mac. And usually bunches of kids, all except Annemarie, visiting or adopted. A different sort of family.
    Strikes Foot was a huge man, six and a half feet, Mac guessed, extra broad, bull strong, full of life. Strange thing was, he had a clubfoot. It made him gimpy. Usually he kept a buffalo hoof strapped onto it—certainly for ceremonial occasions, or hunting or fighting. But he didn’t let his foot slow him down—he had a considerable reputation as a man of war and was a leader in the Shield society.
    Mac