Sam wondered what the white people back east, with their turbid feculent rivers and garbage dumps, would think of Caleb’s love for a squaw. or Loretto’s, or his, or Kit Carson’s for Maria Josefa Jaramillo. After telling Lotus about Caleb and Batchicka, Sam felt a bit choked up. Slipping down, he put his arms around his wife as she sat on her horse; and she looked down at him with strange and wonderful things in her eyes. He looked up to meet her gaze (this had become a habit with them) and they looked into the eyes of one another, without smiling or speaking.
If he went blind, Sam said, in words and signs, would she take him down the river?
"Yes," she said.
"Make pemmican?"
"Yes."
"Kill my enemies?”
"Yes."
"You love me'?" She knew the words but she didn’t know what love meant.
"Yes," she said.
Sam hugged her, his face pressed to her belly. "I love you," he said, and mounted his horse.
When they came to a beast that had been killer Sam examined it, with Lotus at his side. He said he could usually tell the kind of killer. The wolf nearly always attacked buffalo, elk, deer, and antelope in the flank or ham; the mountain lion seized the throat of larger beasts, and wrenching the head around, broke the neck; the grizzly left the marks of its terrible claws. Of them all, the wolf for its size had the strongest jaws and teeth. Whitemen, he told her, had a small dog called a terrier; it would attack a wolf or a whole pack of wolves. He had once seen wolves literally tear a terrier in two, as he had seen a grizzly tear a badger in two. Whitemen had a larger dog, part staghound, part bull, that could kill a wolf, or even two or three, in a fight. The wolf was such a powerful beast that it had been known to drag an eighteen-pound trap, attached to a forepaw, for twenty-five miles in a few hours—and at the end of that time had enough stamina left to outrun a man and disappear.
With boyish pride in all the things he had learned in seven years Sam halted to show her a scent post and the furrows in the earth left by claws. After voiding its urine against the tree the wolf had scratched the earth, in the foolish way of the dog family. There was its run, he said, pointing; it was always in fairly open country—the bottoms of canyons, dry ravines, the lowest saddles across divides. The only unfailing scent-lure for a wolf was the scrapings from a scent post, taken far from the wolf run where the trap was to be set. Unfamiliar wolf urine caused a male wolf to tremble with excitement and run round and round, sniffing and snapping, and stepping at last on the hidden plate of the trap. Sam told her that while he was gone from her this winter, wolves might bivouac her and try to bring down her horse. He would show her how to trap them. She would kill a rabbit and wet her hands in its blood; she would cut the rabbit in small pieces and scatter it over an area as large as her father’s village; and in the center of it she would set the trap just below the level of the snow and put a thin covering of snow over the plate.
Sam talked to her about these things after they had gone to bed, trying to foresee all the possible dangers. He would build a corral for her pony but if she did not watch out the wolves would sneak into it to chew the leather hobbles, or to hamstring the beast and bring it down. For an unknown reason the wolf had a great fondness for horseflesh. Folding one of her small hands into a big palm and sniffing the night air for scent of an enemy, he would talk to her until she fell asleep. His sense of kinship with all the wild things of nature was so strong in him that he wanted his wife to share it; to know the ways of the water ouzel, sandpiper, kildeer, and flicker; the songs of birds, such as the plover’s, the two notes of which were the two g’s on the flute stop of a pipe organ; or such as the meadow lark’s, for it seemed to him that in the lower of two keys it stated the theme and expressed it again in a higher key. With his mouth organ he tried to imitate the songs of birds, and at last, thinking of himself as a man with many blessings he would fall asleep.
He did not want Lotus ever to know about a whiteman’s cities and way of life. Even a trading post was so crowded, and so rank with human odors, that he was glad when his exchanges were made and he could get away, alone and free, into the vastness. The big trapping companies had so debauched the red people with rum that drunkenness, which Sam abhorred, was rife at the post; red warriors were sprawled everywhere, their black eyes out of focus and their rum-sotted minds busy with evil plots. Sam had heard that some of the company traders put narcotics in the rum and that the drugs filled the redmen with such wild lunacies that on one occasion they roasted a trader alive on his own fire, thrusting a sappling through his body and suspending it from two tripods, so that it could be turned over and over in the flames like a haunch of venison. Sam had seen stone-drunk braves dragged by their heels out of trading posts and scattered over a half acre of ground, until it was literally covered with them. He had seen haughty warriors sitting under sun shelters, which their old limping discarded wives had been forced to build for them—sitting, half drunk, with their young beauties, while the old crones hustled around, trying to steal more rum for their lords, or with their bodies buy more. In front of each arrogant red prince stood a tripod, on which were his shield, bow and quiver, medicine bag and pipe. The Indian male was so innocent and gullible that when giving him rum in exchange for pelts the white trader could let three or four fingers slip down into the cup, to displace that much liquor; or he would actually put melted suet in the cup to the depth of half an inch and let it harden before pouring rum in. As the redman got drunker the whiteman would dilute the rum, until at last it was one part rum and ten parts river water. Sam had watched drunken warriors gamble at the game of Which Hand, until one owned all the horses and clothing and weapons, and the other sat stark-naked, wondering what else they could find to wager.
To impress his wife with the way thousands of immigrants were pushing into the Western lands, to overrun the homes of the red people, Sam had wanted to show a few landmarks, such as Independence Rock in the lovely valley of the Sweetwater, a river that at first was not Eau Douce but Eau Sucrée, because a packload of sugar had been lost in it. The great granite table was two thousand feet long and almost two hundred feet high, and would eventually have, Sam supposed, at least a hundred thousand Mormon names chiseled on its top, eighty thousand of whom would be polygamous wives. But he had decided to go far west of the Rock, for he was on his way to Bridger’s post. He had wanted to show her Scotts Bluff, after telling her the story of another brave man.
A party of trappers coming down the Platte had capsized their canoe and lost practically all their supplies, including their powder. Defenseless in enemy land, they had given way to panic. One of them, a man named Scott, had become too ill to walk, and the others, retending they were only going over the hills to find food for him, abandoned him on the river bank. What had been his thoughts after he realized the cowards had deserted him? Even after the fleeing party had overtaken an armed group of whitemen they did not mention the sick man they had left to die, but said that Scott had died and they had buried him. The next year some of the men in that armed group came back up the river and found the skeleton. It was plain to them that Scott had crawled on his hands and knees for more than forty miles, in a pathetic and desperate effort to overtake the cowards who had left him. Hugh Glass had crawled farther than that, with maggots swarming in his wounds—digging in the earth for roots, chewing on old bones, all the way to Fort Kiowa on the Missouri, his soul burning on the one thought of vengeance. Would Sam Minard ever dedicate his life to vengeance? He could see no likelihood of that, but he was not looking very clearly into the future.