He then left her by the graves and went to the dead Indians. With skill learned from older mountain men he scalped the four, and while tying the scalps together he wondered if the woman would go away with him, to rejoin her people, or if this spot would be her home. In any case he intended to consecrate the graves as well as he could with four outposts; so now he cut off the four heads, with no more emotion than he would have felt in cutting off the heads of four deer, and took them, and four strong chokecherry stakes, to the grave area. The woman was sitting by the graves, bowed almost to her knees. Studying the scene, Sam decided to set the four stakes equidistant from the graves, at a distance of about forty yards; but while digging a hole it occurred to him that the tough dwarf cedar would last a lot longer, as posts, than the chokecherry; and so with the axe he went up the hill. It was almost sunset when he had the four cedar posts set, and with both hands was bringing the heads down with terrific force, so that the stakes were rammed up the throats and against the skulls. These four heads would be a warning to the Blackfeet, the sons of bitches, and to the Crows, if they came skulking around. These would tell them to leave this woman alone. The ravens would come and pick the skulls clean—the shrikes and magpies and buzzards, the beetles and all the insects; and before long they would be four white grinning skulls, facing the four corners of the world.
John Bowden had set up a crude brush lean-to at his campsite. Looking in, Sam had seen bedding, utensils, a few tools, and some food. Nearby was the rickety wagon. Did she want him to take these things up to the graves tonight? He stood in night dusk, looking up the hill toward her; he supposed she would want to be alone with her grief and loss. Poor thing, poor thing! She was sitting between the two graves, her rifle across her lap, her right hand laid on the mound that covered her sons, her left hand on the mound above her daughter. Never had he seen woe as deep as this, or known man or woman who in one blow from heaven or hell had suffered such overwhelming loss.
Wondering if she would sit there all night, he took his horses to the river for water. Somewhere north of him the Blackfeet war party was still racing toward a village of lodges where—it was always this way—the whole hideous screaming pack of them, squaws, children, and dogs, would torture and mutilate this woman’s husband, killing him horribly and very slowly, with the fiendish skills in producing agony of which the Blackfeet were masters. Sam Minard hated the Blackfeet. There was no mountain man from the Rio to the Athabasca, from the Ohio to the Pacific Ocean, who did not detest this red people. The hatred in some of the men was such a fierce wild passion that it boiled in their emotions and flamed in their talk, and kept them busy whetting their hatchets and knives. The Bloods and Piegans of the Blackfeet nation were the most savage tribes in the West; but most of the mountain men hated all Indians, and placed high among their mountain-man laws the axiom that the only good Indian was a dead Indian—and not only dead but picked clean by the ravens and wolves.
Securing his horses for the night, Sam went to the woman’s camp to see what she had. A dark night had come. His ear detected a sound above the sound of tree toads. He listened. Yes, there was a sound, blood-chilling-a wild insane keening, up there by the graves. Again he felt goosetlesh, as he stood, facing her, listening: in his mind he saw her there, month after month, year after year, fighting off eagles and wolves and making her heartbroken jeremiads to God, until at last she withered and shrank and died, of cold and loss and loneliness. He was afraid she would forget her camp, her bedding and food, and sinking into stuporous woe, fold over on her lap and die.
He was to learn that he did not know her.
After going halfway up the hill to listen, and coming back down, he thought of supper. Ordinarily when journeying through enemy lands he made fireless camps, even in wintertime; he would eat a chunk of jerked buffalo and roll into his buffalo robes. But he had labored hard this day and was as famished as a winter wolf. He decided to make a fire but first he would wait for the moon to come up, for he thought he could slip out to the hills and get a mule deer. Two hours later he came in with a fat buck over his shoulder. Opening it from throat to rump, he cut away the choicer portions, including the liver, loin, kidney fat, and the upper parts of the hams. He built a fire and brought water from the river. All the while he was thinking that it would be son-like to take hot steaks or a fine roast to the mother.
After eating four pounds of venison, a pint of dried serviceberries, and a quart of black coffee he filled his cob pipe and sucked flame into it. It was a nice night. He could hear the wings of night birds and the river’s flowing waters. Above him he could see a thousand stars. Around him he could smell tobacco smoke, the fertile loam of river bottom, magpie and crow nests in the cottonwoods, mole runs, moss pads, hot lime hills cooling in the night, and the embers of aspen and willow in the fire. He wondered if he should have used two of his robes as burial shrouds. He was not a very sentimental man; he knew that in no time at all the dead person or the dead beast was only a few bones but he knew also that people liked to lay their loved ones down in the best they could aiford. He had two large robes and several small ones. He guessed he would give one of them to the woman. Tomorrow if she refused to go north with him and wait for a river boat, or south to the trail, he would give her more powder and ball and anything else he had that she could use. If she was determined to stay here he doubted that she could long survive in a land where the strongest went down one by one. She would be all alone with four skulls and two graves. She would never see a human being, never in God’s world, except a redman on a distant hill, or a mountain man going up or down the river.
North of her only twenty miles would be the wide Missouri. Steamboats would chug through its waters as far as the Great Falls but she would never see or hear them. South of her farther than she could see, even if she were to stand a thousand feet above the graves, was rolling hill land covered with scrub pine and cedar. East of her was the same lonely waste clear to the junction of the Missouri and the Yellowstone—and west of her to the Judith Mountains, and Wolf Creek, Arrow Creek, and Dog Creek. Unless she climbed a tall hill she would never see the Big Belt or Crazy Mountains, much less such magnificent massifs of divine sculpturing as the Tetons, the Bitterroots, the Big Horns, and the Blue. There would be plenty of wild game all around her—a few buffalo, many deer and antelope; fifty or more kinds of duck and goose; squirrels and prairie chickens and fish in the river; and fruits and roots of several kinds, but no such luscious wild orchards as she might have if she were in the Madison or Gallatin valley ....
Sam was turning these things over as he puffed his pipe and thought of her problems. He wished he could stop thinking about her; after all, the vast wonderful earth the Almighty had made was filled with the dying and the about-to-die. He tried to force his thoughts to his plan to take a wife, to trap in the Uintahs this coming winter, to send for a trumpet—to these, or to speculation on what other mountain men were doing at this moment—in what deep impenetrable thicket tall skinny Bill Williams had hidden from the red warriors, his high squeaky voice silenced for the night; by what fire with its cedar and coffee aroma Wind River Bill was spinning his yarns and saying, "I love the wimmins, I shorely do"; in what Spanish village short blond Kit Carson was dancing the soup dance with black-eyed senoritas; what tall tales Jim Bridger was telling to bug-eyed greenhorns from a wagon train that had stopped this day at his post to get horses shod and tires set—Jim, spitting tobacco juice and saying, "Waugh! This here critter is wore plum down to his quick—I reckon I’ll hafta put moccasins on him"; and in what quiet shelter Lost—Skelp Dan was moving a calloused palm over the hideless bone of his skull, as if hoping to find hair growing there. Then Sam’s mind turned to Dick Wooton, who in mountain-man talk was some for his inches: six feet six and as straight as the long barrel of his rifle, he had once stood shoulder to shoulder with Rube Herring, and "Thar warn’t a hair’s-breadth differns in tall or wide betwixt them." Even Marcelline, though a Mexican, could easily look down on the top hair of a man standing six feet—Marcelline, with a temper ranging from red-hot to white-hot, who despised his people and abjured his blood, and cast his lot with the white mountain men. Marcelline was a picture all right, with his mass of hair half as long as his arm and as black as wet coal, spilling out from his slouched beaver, to cover the shoulders of his buckskin hunting jacket like a wide mane ....