“It looks like you have given up, Pa. I can’t say it no plainer than that. You got old real fast, and next your teeth are going to fall out and you’ll go blind staring at those empty places all the time. You got to get up off the robes and walk up the mountain with me, make the elk come to your call, the deer to your grunt. You got to hear the crack of your rifle again and see if the beaver have come back up on Lost Creek or over in the Bitterroots.”
“I probably should give up.”
“Pa, what’s a ‘squaw man’?”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“At the fort.”
“That what they call me?”
Zak dipped his head and nodded.
“Well, that’s from folks who just don’t understand about livin’ in the wilderness, son. They can call me a ‘squaw man’ all they like, but your ma was a special woman. And her ma, too. A white gal gets captured by an Injun and white folks don’t want nothin’ to do with ’em. Treat ’em like dirt. Worse than dirt, like cur dogs.”
“Did you feel sorry for Ma?”
“No. I saw who she was. Where she come from. Her ma was just a child when she was took. She didn’t know nothin’ of white ways after a time. So she became a Sioux woman. It takes a mite of courage to change like that, give up what you was and become somethin’ else.”
“I think I know what you mean, Pa. I remember Curly Jack told me once that he became a mountain man because it was a better life than he had back in Tennessee. Said a man had to become an Indian if he was going to live through a winter in the mountains.”
“Curly Jack said it right, Zak. We all came up here to trade with the red man. Once we tasted their life some, we got to lookin’ at things different. We saw white people for what they was, and red people for what they was. We never learned any of that in no school down on the flat.”
Zak thought about his schooling and realized that, while he had learned a lot about numbers and words and foreign countries, he had also learned that the white race hated the red men and didn’t think of them as being human at all. He began to realize that he and his father lived in two different worlds. It was a sobering thought and went deep with him and stayed there all this time. That was probably why he and Crook had gotten along so well. Crook was a man who could look into both worlds and see the worth in each, as well as the worst in each.
He fell asleep thinking of White Rain and how his father had begun to recover and get back to life after that talk they had. They hunted and fished together, traveled the Rockies as carefree as a couple of kids let out from school for the summer, and they had grown close. That’s when he found out that his father had been collecting gold in the Paha Sapa and saving it up, not for himself, but so that he could have a life of ease someday if he chose to live in the white world.
Neither of them had realized the path Zak would take, or that the country would take, going to war over slavery and states’ rights, brother killing brother, father killing son, son killing father. Neither of them could foresee the future, but both knew what they both had lost when the beaver played out and White Rain died.
Zak could look back and see that all the signs were there, like signposts on roads that wound through the Badlands. Changes. New paths. The old ones blown over by wind and weather, the new ones dangerous, treacherous, dark.
Neither had seen a man like Ben Trask come down the trail, driven by greed, bent on torture and murder. Trask had intruded on their world as surely as the white man had intruded on the world of the Plains Indians and all the tribes in the nation. Such thoughts tightened things inside Zak, turned him hard inside, like the granite peaks of the Tetons, like a fist made out of stone.
The war changed him, too.
He had seen men torn to pieces by grapeshot and shrapnel, heard their screams and cries, seen the surgeons saw off gangrenous limbs and battlefields strewn with the bodies of young men, some with peach fuzz still on their faces, taken from life long before their allotted time, and it was all horror to see young men march into clouds of smoke and die by the hundreds.
Yet he had escaped harm, somehow, with bullets and minie balls whistling past his ear, bombs bursting all around him, horses shot from under him, and stronger men falling, left crippled for life. He thought of his mother and father often during those years, appreciating them both more than he ever had, missing them in those dark hours when he heard only the moans of the dead and dying while crickets struck up their orchestras in the blood- soaked grasses of woodland havens.
Zak fell asleep thinking back through those years, and feeling just as alone now as he had when the rattle of muskets and the clank of caissons were like a horde of metal insects marching across the land, leaving destruction in their wake, those desolate and deserted burnt lands where corpses stiffened in the sun and wild animals fed on them at night.
And the first kill strong in his mind, that bleak moment when he had shot a gray-clad soldier in the eye, seen him fall and later gaze up at him with that one sightless eye, his stomach churning with a nameless grief for the life he had taken, and the hollow feeling afterward, knowing something had changed inside him, something that could not be spelled out or described or explained.
His dreams picked up strands of these thoughts and wove them into a mysterious tapestry hanging in a great empty hall where the coyotes sang songs of the dead and White Rain smiled at him, great tears in her eyes, and his father stood knee-deep in a beaver pond filled with blood, holding up a rusted trap from which dangled a water snake with a human head that bore a strong resemblance to Ben Trask.
Chapter 11
Sergeant Leon Curtis bellowed down from the driver’s seat.
“Who’s in charge here?”
Hiram stepped off the porch. Trask stood there, eyeing the three soldiers he saw in the lantern light. Two on the seat, one on horseback. Two horses were on lead ropes behind the coach, unsaddled.
