Into the Savage Country Read Online Free Page B

drainages and scrambling up rocky hillsides we established our encampment at some hidden spot beneath towering pines and spruce, and immediately started off toward some drainages with our traps clinking, making a racket like we were the only living creatures for miles. We were about a quarter of an hour from our encampment when a shadow detached itself from a pine tree and vanished into the gloom with the sound of fading hoof beats. It happened so fast that I hardlyunderstood what I’d seen but Bridger was already wheeling his pony, bolting after the native, brandishing his weapon. I understood I ought to follow, but in my surprise I managed to drop my pistol. By the time I’d retrieved it, Bridger had already vanished. I started out after him, following his tracks, which I lost.
    After a quarter mile, I’d stopped to listen for them when a wolf wearing a leather harness padded into the clearing. The wolf’s harness was painted with eagle and bear sketches and had feathers dangling and I understood I must be very close to a native encampment. I backed my horse into a shrub, trembling and panicked, though there was a very small voice in the back of my mind that was saying: Well, now you’ll have a story to tell back at the Rocky Mountain House. The vanity of my youthful ambitions for glory touched a corner of my mind even at that moment.
    Then I mounted and rode as quietly as possible back toward our encampment. I imagined Bridger bound and being roasted alive at that very moment, but I told myself correctly there was little I could do about it.
    I picketed my horse two hundred yards from our encampment and crept forward until I saw the meat hanging on the trees. I was just about to enter the clearing itself when a native stepped into view. He was less than twenty yards from me and was dressed almost identically to the veteran trappers in the brigade. He was wearing a trapper’s buckskin jacket and a buffalo robe and a beaver hat and leggins and fur-lined boots. He carried a Northwester musket and his horse was painted with the same buffalo and bear emblems as the dog’s harness. The native had a pistol in his belt and what looked like an I. Wilson blade. He stood in the middle of the campsite and looked at the lodge and the hanging meat and the smoldering fire. We had left a fleshing knife stuckin a log. The native pried the knife out and tested the blade then used it to cut a strip from the hanging meat. He licked his fingers, pocketed the knife, jumped on his horse, and rode off through the gloom while I crouched in the shrubbery, too frightened to move. I waited for several minutes, then stole forth and collected our lodge and robes, knowing he’d return. I packed everything as best as I could and dashed off.
    An hour later I arrived at a promontory that overlooked the juncture of the two rivers. From that spot I could see the snowcapped mountains and the two wide valleys with the rivers converging, and beyond that, the smoke from our fort rising into the late-afternoon light. I saw a rider with a pack horse moving toward the forks and I knew that was Bridger. So he was alive after all, I thought, and stood there grinning, feeling as if my heart had been clenched in a fist and suddenly beat freely again.
    By dusk I was galloping across the flats toward the half-completed palisades of Fort Ashley, having recovered my nerve by that point and trying to pretend the whole thing was just an afternoon stroll for me. All the men came out of the lodging to watch me arrive, including Bridger. I rode in and told carelessly of how we’d given chase to the natives and been split up when we’d almost ridden into the heart of their encampment.
    “Should have blasted the lot of ’em,” Blanchard said.
    A veteran named Pegleg gave a withering look. “He’d have had the whole hunting party testing his hump ribs with their blades. You did right keeping still.”
    The others began asking all manner of questions.
    “Were they