man.”
Chuckling, Zach replied, “My wife is white, and I sure don’t hate her. My father is white, and so is Shakespeare McNair, and they are two of the most decent men I know.” He sobered and said, “It is not whites I hate, it is white
“I will be forever in your debt. Anything you ever want of me, you have only to ask.”
“There is one thing.”
“Name it and I will do it,” I pledged.
“Whatever you do, don’t take it into your head to paint a griz. If a badger can do this to you, just think what a bear would do.”
I blinked and laughed and could not stop. Perhaps it was an emotional release. But I laughed as if his little joke was the funniest I ever heard. I laughed until my ribs ached, and just when my mirth subsided, he made another comment.
“Stick to chipmunks and squirrels and you should be safe.”
I convulsed anew.
“Or how about insects and birds? I think butterflies and wrens would be best. They are about as harmless as anything gets.”
“Please,” I begged between gasps. “I’m ready to split a gut.” But the laughter did me good in that it restored some of my vitality, to the point where I could sit up unaided. I suspect he made me laugh for that express purpose.
Strange to relate, but whatever barrier had existed between us was gone. I thought of him as a friend, and I flatter myself that he began to think the same of me. He was more talkative thereafter, and I detected none of the wariness that was so much a part of his nature. He had accepted me, and I accepted him.
I wanted to head out the next morning, but Zach wouldn’t hear of it. He claimed I needed a day to rest, and I did not object too strenuously.
That evening we were seated by the fire eating roasted venison when Zach remarked, “I’ve been thinking about that horse.”
There are moments when I wonder if I have a brain. This was one of them. “What horse?”
“The one with the blood. The one I have been leading around the past couple of days.”
“Oh.” The truth was, in my delirium I had forgotten about it. I glanced at where the animals were picketed.
“I’ve seen that sorrel before,” Zach said, and tore off a strip of venison with his teeth.
“You have? Where?”
“In a corral at Bent’s Fort.”
“You are certain? Who did it belong to?” As I recalled, the fort had two large inside corrals, one at the north end of the post and the other on the west side. Between them, they could hold over three hundred horses, mules and oxen.
“The Bent brothers,” Zach said. “They have stock for trade and sale, and sometimes they rent horses out for short spells.”
“So the Bents could have sold or traded it to practically anyone?”
“Well, we know it wasn’t an Indian,” Zach said with his mouth full, and lustily chewing.
“We do?”
“The saddle,” Zach said. “Indians don’t much like white saddles. They use their own or ride bareback.” He chewed some more. “No, I think it was a white man, but then that doesn’t explain the bedroll and the packs.”
“There weren’t any.”
“Exactly. And white men don’t go anywhere without their bedroll and supplies.”
I had not considered that. It added to the mystery.
Three days of travel went by. By then we were deep in the mountains. I came to appreciate why much of the Rockies were unexplored. Except for the intrepid trappers of a generation ago, few white men had ever penetrated this far in among the towering peaks.
Zach filled my head with facts about the land and the wildlife. I learned, for instance, that many of the streams only flowed during the winter and spring, that in the summer much that was green became parched and brown. And a lot of the water that did flow came from runoff from the snow high up. Rain was a relative rarity except in the summer when fierce thunderstorms broke out.
I was particularly interested in the habits of the animals, and in that Zach did not disappoint. He was a font of information. I surmised that he had been a keen student of nature while growing up. When I made a comment in that regard, he looked at me and said he had never thought of it that way. He had learned what he had to in order to survive. I added that in my opinion, he would make an excellent guide for others who might want to venture into the mountains.
Zach mentioned that whites were coming to the Rockies in greater numbers of late. It was the main reason his father had decided to move deeper in. He alluded to half a dozen homesteads scattered along the foothills.
I replied that it would not be long before whites did to the Rocky Mountains as they had done to the Appalachians in the East. “No barrier, not even the Rockies, can stop the tide of western expansion,” I said, parroting what I had read in many newspapers. “Our Manifest Destiny will not be denied.”
“Leave it to white men to think that multiplying like rabbits makes them special.”
He grinned as he said it, but I detected an undertone of bitterness. He did not want to see the mountains overrun, and I can’t say as I blame him. Man—and when I say that I mean humanity in general, men and women combined—insists on turning wilderness into farmland and filling it with towns and cities, wiping out the wild in favor of the tame and the safe.
That is what it was all about: living safe. People did not want to worry about being eaten by a grizzly whenever they stepped out their door.
This was impressed on me the very next day.
We stopped to rest the horses at noon. I spotted a woodpecker off in the woods, and taking my sketchbook, I hurried to catch it on paper before it flew off. It was the first of its kind I had seen, and I was so excited, I left my rifle behind. I lost sight of the woodpecker but continued toward where I had seen it last. I moved quietly, in order not to startle it into flight should I suddenly come upon it.
I was so intent on finding the woodpecker that I paid no attention to the woods around me, an oversight I regretted when the undergrowth abruptly crackled to the passage of an immense form, and into the open lumbered a flesh-and-blood behemoth.
Chapter Nine
Another interesting fact Zach King had taught me, a fact few whites were aware of, was that there were two kinds of buffalo, not just one. Most people were familiar with the vast herds that grazed the plains, but few had ever heard that prairie buffalo had shaggier cousins who preferred mountain forests to grassland.
And here I was, face-to-face with one.
When I say it was a behemoth I do not exaggerate. It stood six feet at the shoulder and was over ten feet in length. In color it was a dark brown bordering on black. Its coat was, as I noted, shaggy, the long hairs thick and matted. I would say this one weighed well over a thousand pounds. It had a short tail with a tuft at the end, which constantly twitched, and large, dark hooves. But what impressed me the most were its striking hump, its broad head, and especially the pair of black horns that curved like scythes.
I froze, transfixed with amazement and awe.
The buffalo stared a few moments, then snorted and pawed the ground as if about to charge.
My awe was replaced by fear. I had my pistols, but they were a puny defense. Should it attack, it would be on me before I could draw and shoot. I wanted to wilt into the earth.
Movement behind the buffalo warned me there were others. I had stumbled on a small herd. The bull confronting me was protecting the others.
