Into the Savage Country Read Online Free

Ferris, and I even moved to help him in his labor, but the sanctimonious way Ferris futilely tucked up the corners of the covering made me think he secretly set himself above us. Ferris’s father, we’d all heard, was a physician and a man of wealth, and Ferris had paid a lump sum to be taken on, as they’d not thought he’d make it halfway up the Missouri. The knowledge of this pampered upbringing along with his self-satisfied manner damned him in my mind.
    The three of us rode back to our encampment that afternoon and reported what we’d seen. Smith put up double sentries for the night, and the next morning the wind shifted and we went back to hauling on the cordelle. The memory of that massacre faded, but the feeling of heaviness and solitude from the prairie had lodged inside me and expanded and spread and became entangled with a sort of hesitation or uncertainty. I felt as if the enormity of the land were squeezing me and that I was dissolving into the utter silence and implacability of that immense, monochromatic, edgeless place. This oppressive heaviness and strangeness washed over me bit by bit until I understood what I was feeling: I was afraid. Afraid that I would not measure up to the others, and that I would fail in the tests that inevitably lay ahead. Afraid, too, that I would be slain in some lonely place with no one to mourn me, as my father had predicted. I was sure the others around me werereal outdoorsmen, mountain men, all of them. Gruff, talented, and indifferent to hardship. All that late summer and into the fall these fears simmered inside me and mingled with the feeling of solitude and isolation and utter vastness of that great burned country.
    By early November we arrived at the juncture of the Missouri with a large river that flowed to the south called the Yellow Stone. It was here that the hauling ceased and we unloaded the keelboat and prepared to encamp until the spring season.
    Fort Ashley, which was positioned just downriver from the juncture of the two rivers, was three low sheds half sunk in the dirt and surrounded by incomplete palisades of sharpened cottonwood trunks. Ashley, Smith, and a few others slept in what we called the commissary. The rest of the men slept outside the palisades in a wooded area to the south of the fort in lodges of deerskin and sailcloth pilfered from the keelboat.
    One morning in November, a week after we’d arrived at the forks, we were woken in our encampment by the call, “Absaroka! Absaroka!”
    Ashley stumbled from the commissary, bareheaded, and motioned to the south where forty Crow on horseback approached, black dots on a snow-covered hillside.
    “Fingers off the triggers,” Ashley called. “They come to barter powder for sustenance. We’ll eat well tonight as long as you corncrackers don’t blast ’em.”
    The Crow trading party rode down the snowy slope and pulled up at four hundred yards and saluted us. We saluted back, though in a paltry way, as we were conserving powder. Thenatives continued down, and when they arrived we saw their pack animals were stacked with smoked buffalo and deer meat.
    The natives, curious about everything, were soon wandering among us, fingering all our personals, and at times looking to pilfer. It was the first time I’d seen the western natives up close. They wore sheepskin pants and ankle-high moccasins with fringes and fur hats and buffalo robes held at the neck with bear-claw clasps. They exuded an air of foreignness and savagery and most of the greenhorns kept their distance, but Ferris, I noted, mingled with the natives, putting on an air of affected and annoying friendliness, all the while scratching in a vellum notebook much like my own. I thought he took notes for his own memoirs, which I resented immediately, but when I drew close I saw he was not taking notes but making very quick and accurate sketches of the natives. He’d already done half a dozen. I even recognize myself in one, much to my