Читать книгу Fur Brigade - Hal G. Evarts - Страница 6

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Breckenridge, when hunting and following the trap-line through the forests of the Lower Missouri in his youth, had acquired certain precautionary habits from which he never deviated. When in hostile country he would not stand before a fire after nightfall. A man's eyes adjusted themselves to the blaze and prevented his seeing into the outer darkness.

"It makes me uneasy to outline myself against a light and a target for arrow or musket ball, when I can't see to shoot back," he informed Brady, when the old trapper rallied him upon that point and also for the custom of taking himself off to sleep alone. "I build my cook fire early and then sleep somewheres else. An Injun can see a fire many a mile across the prairie. It holds out a promise of a few scalps that maybe will be easy to collect. Every marauding band will investigate any camp fire they set eyes on."

Brady also, in common with most voyageurs, scorned the cumbersome pistols of the period. Few mountain men carried them, deeming them futile and ineffective weapons. Hunter, however, had perfected himself in the use of the short gun. Wherever he rode, the buckskin holster that suspended his long-barreled pistol from the cantle of his saddle went with him. When hunting ahead of the brigade, he kept his hand in by shooting game from the saddle with the pistol instead of resorting to his rifle. At ranges up to fifty yards he dropped deer and turkeys with unfailing regularity. Brady, observing this amazing proficiency, nevertheless continued to make slighting reference to all pistols. He relished his joke and Hunter did not mind.

The brigade had been on the march for more than a month out of Ely's Fort when the four hunters made camp one evening on a high prairie headland that overlooked the river. A small quantity of wood had been brought from the last patch of timber. This, supplemented by a great pile of buffalo chips, was sufficient for their needs.

"A fire will show up for twenty miles from this headland after nightfall," Hunter said. "Better douse it before sundown."

"This here's in Mandan country and the Mandans is friendly," Brady demurred. "Old fellows like me and Dubois need a fire to warm our bones. Anyhow, with you and Little Bull sleeping on the outskirts like coyoties, no Injun could creep up on us without tackling you all first."

It was such callous disregard of danger by men who had faced it hourly throughout their lives, their lack of caution and their calm confidence in their own ability to cope with any situation as it came up, that cost the lives of many a fearless voyageur of the West. Hunter picked up his equipment and moved away from the fire when night shut down.

"Thar he goes again—off to bed down by hisself like an old dog wolf," Brady chided, as was his nightly custom.

"I figure to have need for my hair for a long time yet," the tall Kentuckian replied.

Hunter selected a buffalo wallow seventy-five yards from camp. It was dry, there having been no recent rain. He propped his saddle against one edge of the wallow to serve as a breastwork to protect his head from arrow or musket ball. The pistol was propped muzzle-up against the saddle, its butt resting upon the ground while a piece of buckskin was spread across the lock to protect the priming against dew or frost. The rifle was taken to bed with him, sheltered by the edge of the buffalo robes. This arrangement never varied. On any night of his life his hand could close instinctively on rifle lock or pistol butt at the instant of waking. There was additional reason for this habit of isolating himself. Savages crawling upon a camp focussed their attention upon it so exclusively that they almost invariably overlooked an isolated slumberer some distance away, unless they chanced to stumble square upon him.

Brady and Dubois piled a great stack of buffalo chips upon the blaze and rolled up in their robes near the fire. The horses, equipped with hobbles of buffalo hide, cropped the succulent prairie grass close at hand. Listening to them, Hunter fell asleep.

It was the sound of the horses, also, that waked him some two hours later. The animals had started suddenly into the lumbering, awkward gallop that is acquired by ponies long broken to the hobble. They had halted after that first tumultuous start and now stood huddled together on the prairie. One animal snorted. Another stamped nervously. Hunter surveyed the surface of the prairie beyond him. Nothing stirred in the darkness. Had a wolf startled the horses?

Soundlessly, he turned in his robes and looked toward camp. Were his eyes dancing, or did he actually behold a number of low mounds on the prairie? One of the mounds moved slightly, hitching forward toward the tiny remaining glow of the dying camp fire. Savages, a score or more of them, creeping upon the camp! The nearest was a scant ten yards from Hunter.

He planned his campaign as coolly as he would have mapped out a campaign against a flock of turkeys. His rifle was trained, not upon the nearest savage but upon the one that was third removed from him. At the roar of his rifle the object of his aim collapsed with a wild shriek. Crouching figures leaped erect. As if propelled by springs, Brady and Dubois, dim flitting shadows in the night, shed their robes and leaped for the shelter of the river's bank. The startled savages discharged muskets and arrows in the general direction of the camp. Before the foremost stalkers could determine whether or not that first shot had been fired prematurely by one of their own number in the rear, another crumpled to the prairie as Hunter brought his pistol into play. With a mighty spring, he left the sheltering wallow and crushed the skull of the nearest Indian with a blow from the heavy barrel of his rifle. Then, with the high-pitched war cry of his kind—a cry that was to become known in border warfare almost a half century later as the "Missouri yell"—he charged down upon the rear of the savages.

Coincident with Hunter's second shot, a rifle crashed from sixty yards across the prairie, as Little Bull went into action from his own buffalo wallow. Then, mingling with the triumphant notes of the Missouri yell, the night resounded with the dread war whoop of the Loup Pawnees, as Little Bull charged the far flank of the attacking party.

Taken thus in flank and rear, the bewildered savages fled across the prairie and after them, wielding a mighty battle-ax as if it were a straw, leaped Little Bull, who split another brace of skulls before the Indians made good their escape.

A towering savage loomed in Hunter's path and swung a war ax at his head. He warded the blow with the barrel of his rifle but the force of it knocked the weapon from his hand. He grappled with the Indian, clamping his left hand upon the wrist that wielded the war ax while with his right he sought to drive his long knife home in his adversary's body. The Indian was powerful and endeavored to seize Hunter's knife-arm. His fingers caught and held. The Kentuckian twisted, forcing the bent arm back until the point of the knife touched his foeman's breast. The Indian, suddenly releasing his hold, sprang back, but Hunter's grip on his antagonist's right wrist held, and he jerked the Indian toward him, driving powerfully with his knife at the same instant. Three times he sent the long blade home.

Then the affray was over, having lasted less than two minutes after Hunter's opening shot.

"You boys hurt any?" Brady called from the river bank. From out on the prairie the voices of Breckenridge and Little Bull gave assurance of their safety.

"I'll bring in the horses and we'll drift," Hunter presently called. "Likely they're only a small detachment from a big war party and the whole passel may swoop down on us."

He and Little Bull came driving the horses to the fire. Hunter carried four fresh scalps, Little Bull three. They were burdened with the spoils stripped from their fallen foes—three muskets, seven war axes and as many knives, in addition to other trinkets that would prove valuable as trade goods.

"You two warriors counted plenty coos," Brady said, eyeing the seven scalps. "Counting coos" was a custom and a term prevalent among all Western tribes, the expression no doubt having been derived from the French word "coup" of the early French voyageurs. "I didn't think the Mandans was up to that sort of thing right in the heart of their own country. Should think they'd be afraid the brigade would wipe out a village for them."

"They weren't Mandans. They're Brule Sioux—Burnt-thighs," Hunter said, indicating certain insignia on the captured equipment. "They were on a raiding foray in the Mandan nation and figured if they collected our hair the brigade would lay it on the Mandans. That's what made me think they was maybe merely a small detachment of a big war party. We'll move upriver. They'll figure us to fall back toward the brigade and will be looking to cut us off downstream." They packed swiftly and headed up the river. After covering perhaps five miles, they halted in a depression in the river bank, a little basin graced by a cluster of stunted trees. The night passed without incident and in the morning they decided to wait until overtaken by the brigade with which they had last established contact some ten days before.

Dubois shot an antelope for breakfast. Thousands of those animals were moving north across the prairie, flanking the course of the Missouri. Great bands of them took to the river and swam across. Fleet as the wind on their native prairies, the pronghorns proved to be but indifferent swimmers, their slender legs and tiny hoofs being ill-adapted to serve as propellers in the water. Nevertheless, they plunged in valiantly by the hundred and gamely tackled the crossing of the river. Some were swept down two or three miles by the current before effecting a landing on the opposite shore. The buffalo, too, were moving north and hundreds of these animals also swam the river.

A small hunting party of Mandans appeared on the far shore of the river to intercept the migrating game. Squaws followed with ponies that dragged travoises loaded with household effects, also with the houses themselves, as subsequent events soon proved. Travois poles served also as teepee poles on occasion and the squaws erected several teepees, covering the poles with dressed buffalo skins. The red hunters shot down antelope and buffalo as they emerged from the water. Others came darting down the current of the Missouri in tiny skin canoes, each fashioned from the hide of a single buffalo. They shot the swimming animals with arrows or pierced them with lances. So engrossed were they with the chase that for some time they failed to observe the four white hunters in the depressed basin on the opposite shore. More Mandans were arriving at frequent intervals.

Then a half-grown boy, cruising midway of the stream in his canoe, noticed the hunters. He put in toward them but refused to land, holding his tiny craft steady in the current abreast of their camp and some thirty yards out in the stream. Presently he gathered sufficient confidence to land. Hunter presented him with a long knife that he had taken from one of the dead Brule Sioux. He related the details of the fight on the prairie during the night. The boy eyed the scalps with manifest eagerness, then put off in his little craft in high excitement. Presently there was a general cessation of the slaughter on the opposite shore. Teepees were hastily struck. Effects were lashed on ponies or stowed in the tiny canoes. One and all, the Mandans took to the river, a churning throng of swimming ponies. They surrounded the four hunters with vast evidence of admiration and extravagant expressions of friendship.

The Mandans were a harassed people. Once a great nation, it was now going into swift decline. The Assiniboines swept down from the Canadian prairies to slaughter and rob among the Mandans. The Brule Sioux—known as Burnt-thighs from the fact that, being horse Indians, they rode with bare thighs which were darkened to a deeper tint than the rest of their bodies by the action of the sun—harried the Mandans from the east.

The Indians hailed the four hunters as deliverers, declaring that the Brules undoubtedly had been planning a raid on a Mandan village and that their defeat at the hands of the hunters had saved many a Mandan scalp. A sizeable village sprang up around the camp of the whites, the Indians very much excited at the prospect of meeting the brigade.