“I taken myself away from my own kind; I’d sickened on white folks. I seen a sign of them, seen bull teams, seen freight wagons, I hid. Only trail I followed was animal trail. I seen a hawk, I followed the hawk. Hawk passed me on to a deer, I followed the deer. Deer tipped his horns to the sun, I followed the sun. I rode forty miles some days, east, west, north, south, I wasn’t bound for any particular place. Watered my horse in the Frenchman, the Saskatchewan, the Oldman, the Bow, the Big Muddy. I covered some ground. Kept moving.”
My pencil is moving under cover of darkness, too, scratching out a story offered under cover of darkness. I turn the pages of the notebook quietly, marching my shorthand across the paper by feel. My eyes grow accustomed to the dark; I dimly make out the old man on his chair, head held upright, the reefer steady now, its bright point hung down the side of the chair.
“Lived that way for a month, went sick. Suffered the bone ache and fever, the bloody shits. One day I found myself squatting by a buffalo wallow, buck naked and white as peeled willow. Looked up and saw a four-o’clock sun, didn’t know how it got there. Didn’t know where my clothes was. Heard myself… singing. Next I knew, it was night. Standing out in the bare prairie in the middle of the most godawful storm you ever seen, but now my clothes had climbed back on me. Thunder booming and the sky cracking like a bad plaster wall, booming so hard your ears near bleed, yellow-green cracks of fire running ceiling to floorboards, whole world shaking and burning like a house falling down around your head, timbers snapping, floor giving way under your feet, roof buckling.
“Two balls of ground lightning come rolling towards me, skipping and flaring over the short grass, crackling, jumping like drops of water in a hot skillet. The hair on me jumps up straight all around my head, I lift my hands to cover my eyes to shut out what’s a-going to blast me to Kingdom Come… there’s a hovering blue light all around them hands… like sundogs circling round the sun. I feel myself lifting, boots dangling above the ground.
“Sky opens up. Rain drives me back down, knocks me side to side, pounds me so hard it’s going to tear the rags I’m wearing right off me, shred and peel them off my bones like wet newspaper. Can’t catch my breath the rain’s driving down so hard, I’m breathing rain. She’s like standing in a fast-running river, white water boiling over my head, and on the banks of this here stream, big old green tree trunks of lightning are waving in a white wind, forking their roots down into the ground to reach the very hubs of hell.
“Of a sudden I’m stinging all over, cold bees are at me. Hail. She’s making a sound like a scythe cutting grass, blood roaring through your head. There ain’t no cover but my horse. I throw my coat over his head and duck under his belly. The stones are drumming on him and he begins to squeal like a stuck pig, you never heard the like of it.
“God knows how long I listen to that squealing. I squat under him with my arms wrapped around my head to shut out the sound of it, just rocking back and forth. Then, all of a sudden like, she’s hushed, dead quiet. The scythe’s done cutting, the blood’s done roaring. No more lightning, no more thunder. I can feel the cold rising off the ground, see the pale ice steaming. I come out from under that horse on all fours. I crawl. Don’t know where I’m going, don’t care. Hail’s crunching like broken glass, biting into my knees. Everywhere’s white and frozen, mist smoking off the ground and me creeping through it, sweating fever and fear, bawling like a baby. I creep and crawl, looking for a hidey-hole to worm myself into, some place to curl. Then my limbs won’t carry me no more and down I drops on my face in the hail, me mumbling into the ice and the thunder muttering off in the distance.
“I wake round dawn, the sky apple-green and me nigh right in the head, but wet and chilled and shaky. I suspicion laying in the hail drew the fever out of me. Only now I ain’t laying in hail I’m laying in melt-water. Slathered in mud. I pick myself up out of the muck and look for my horse. No horse. He’s made tracks with my saddle and my rifle.
“There’s a blow of black despair for you. I sink back down into the mud, can’t pick myself out of that wallow. I’m whipped.
“The sun keeps climbing, the mud dries stiff on my face, my hands, my hair, my clothes. And I just sit, can’t rouse myself. Until I hear horses. Good Lord, maybe I been saved. I look up from studying the mud caked on my trouser legs and what do I see? Three Indian bucks making towards me on their ponies.
“I shake myself up then, by the Jesus, shake myself up and go for my pistol. But there ain’t no pistol to hand. All that capering the night before jogged it loose and it’d gone missing somewheres. I cast about every which way but all I see is puddles with sunshine slanting off them, hail-beat grass, and mud-holes. No Colt. The only weapon stands between me and those Indians is a knife.
“They’re on me now. Rein their ponies up in my face and investigate me Indian-fashion – poker-faced and solemn. I must’ve been a study. Raggedy-ass white man in clothes a beggar of a fort Indian wouldn’t wore. Hair all matted and twisted up in mud like a mop, rest of me crusted over with a acre’s worth of God’s good earth.
“They was right handsome boys, all done up for a party, paint and feathers. The one I figured for the leader of this expedition was straight as a gun barrel, a fall of that blue-black Indian hair hanging down to the small of his back, half his face painted yellow and the other half red, necklace of brass bells hung round his neck that went tinkle-tinkle every time his horse pawed the ground.
“He points to me, says something to his friends in Indian gab. The way they laugh ain’t encouraging. He shoulders his pony into me and taps my hair with his quirt. In a big, loud voice he puts what I take to be a question. I’m guessing something along the lines of, What you doing spoiling my air and my scenery?
“By the Christ, thinks I, by the Christ. These lads are Blackfoot. I’d heard plenty of how they done woodhawks and hunters along the Missouri. They didn’t leave no pretty corpses. Lot of dead men with their own dicks stuffed in their mouths.
“Red and Yellow Face gives me another flick with his quirt and makes some remark to his boys that sets them laughing fit to bust a gut. I suspicion what’s funny is me plastered in hog muck. Man’ll do most anything to save his precious skin and I did. Down I goes on hands and knees, sticks my rump in the air, lets loose a squeal to wake snakes, and starts rooting like a pig in his pen. Lord, the look on those Indians’ faces. They’d never seen the like. But when the surprise slid off them they howled with laughter. That was a favourable sign. Nobody likely to murder you when they’re laughing at you.
“Old Red and Yellow Face was pointing at me and saying the same word over and over. The other two kept nodding their heads yes, yes, every time he said it. I speculate Old Red and Yellow Face was a man of the world, been to the white man’s forts, seen his pigs. Every time he said the word, I nodded and grinned and grunted all the louder. I even pitched myself in a good-sized mud-hole and rolled for him, wriggled on my back, all four trotters up in the air. Your Indian’s got a natural contempt for the pig, but this was right up their alley, watching a white man do pork proud.
“What they didn’t know I was up to, rooting through the slop on my hands and knees, wiggling my hams, was I was looking for that revolver of mine. Playing pig got my snout close to the ground. And when I found that Colt, I aimed to knock Red and Yellow Face and his brethren off their ponies like they was turkeys setting on a rail fence.
“So I kept oinking, and praying, Please God let me lay hands on that gun. Once or twice I thought the boys might be losing interest so I sat up on my haunches like a fat old boar and made windy, wet farts with my lips, or flopped my hands up alongside my head like they was pig ears. When they was roaring with joy I’d get back on the hustle again, covering ground looking for the Colt, the Indians heeling their horses behind me, not wanting to miss nothing.
“My spell of sickness had weakened me considerable though. Wasn’t long before I was feeling mighty dogged out, but I says to myself, Keep moving, you got to keep moving until you get that gun. Over and over I said it. And that’s what I done, went on sinking my wrists in gumbo, the mud sucking the strength out of me, leaving my arms so wearisome heavy it was all I could do to pull them free. Keep moving, I said, you got no hope but that gun.
“Everything squeezing in, your eyes begging for a flash of shiny metal, and this noise in your head like a saw whining through wood. And that’s the sound of your own breath, but you got to keep moving, keep moving. Your eyes start to haze, like blood dripping into water, one drop at a time, each drop spreading, and the water going misty, then cloudy, then bright, until there ain’t nothing but bright blood, and then you get a new notion – that that noise is the sound of a saw chewing through your heart, the blood spurting deep down in you with every stroke, slowly inching up in you until you drown in it, drown in your own heart’s blood.
“And I did. I drowned. Keeled over. Sank. I had strength but for one thing, fumble for that knife in my boot top. Pick away, pick away went my fingers but they wouldn’t close on it. Then I knew it was all over. Just lay there panting, hog waiting to be butchered. Lay with my face in the mud and waited for them to come, do what they done to those woodhawks on the Missouri, cut me down to size one piece at a time.
“It was unholy still. A still kin to the still of an empty house, but bigger and stranger. Empty world, it said. I