The army had in mind for us to brave out the winter in the fort and then come spring be seeing what else could be done for to pacify the country. Although I have given the impression that them Yuroks were small and ineffectual people nevertheless listening to the townspeople did put us in suspicion that the Indians were not always so tolerable. There were stories everywhere of rapes and robberies and sudden and vicious visits on out-of-the-way premises. Unless you were a witness how could you say what was true. Anyhows in due course a herd of some hundreds of cattle arrived, driven up from southern California on an army requisition docket. That was for our sustenance. On the saint’s day of St John I get a letter from Mr Noone just as he promised. All his news. There was good water under the thickening ice. All the stores would keep fresh in those low temperatures. There was a forest of wood to burn. We washed our shirts and trews and when we went out to get them off the bushes, they were as stiff as corpses in the cold. Some poor cows froze where they were standing like they had peered into the face of old Medusa. Men lost the wages of three years hence at cards. They bet their boots and then pled for the pity of the winner. The piss froze as it left our peckers and woe betide the man with an obstruction or hesitation to their shit, because soon they had a brown icicle on their arse. The whisky continued its work of eating our livers. It was as good a life as most of us had ever knowed. Watchorn and Pearl mingled with the rest, as if the major had forgotten their offence. The Missouri men sang their Missouri songs, rough Kansas men sang theirs, and those queer New England types sang no doubt the ancient songs of England, who could tell.
Then rain began to fall in an extravagant tantrum. High up in mountain country though we were, every little river became a huge muscled snake, and the water wanted to find out everything, the meaning of our sad roofs for instance, the meaning of our bunk beds beginning to take the character of little barks, the sure calculation that if it fell day and night no human man was going to get his uniform dry. We was wet to the ribs.
Crazy California weather, how come anyone ever come out here? said John Cole, with the voice of one who has not exactly chosen this destination.
We was lying out on the aforesaid bunks. Now the spring was supposed to be afoot was just as well as no one had dollars left to lose at cards, except the damn sergeant, who had won most of it. There were sharks in other segments of our unit too, Patterson and Wilks, both evil good card-players. Now they were likely struggling to keep their winnings dry. Those Yankee dollars were inclined to rust. The high snow melted and down that came too.
Next morning John Cole was shaking my arm to wake me. You need to do something other than lie there, he says. Sure enough the water was up over his bunk and just about to engulf mine. There was a smell of rats’ urine if you ever smelt that. Now that I think of it, we saw dozens of the critters swimming for their lives. We sloshed out onto the parade ground so called. Men were coming out of the sheds trying to hitch their braces. Well we had no high ground to go to. How come we got a flood here, we were saying? The way some genius built this place. True enough, now that we had the rain and meltwater to show us, the camp was kinda built in a odd way. If you can imagine a great scallop shape there, and the hills behind, and what was formerly the helpful little stream going past the boundary wall. Now blotted out. The night pickets were standing on the wall looking very doubtful. Some brave bugler bugled reveille but damn it we were all reveilled by then. The major was actually swimming up the way. Now the three hundred were looking to get up on the roofs, seemed the only way, and dozens of others shimmied up into the shade trees, if they were dizzy from heights they didn’t show it, up they went like monkeys in uniform. Myself and John Cole pushed over through the lead-heavy water and clumb a tree likewise.
We weren’t even all up there when something queer was stirring in the distance. No one had ever seen the like. It looked like someone had put the ocean on top of the forest, just thrun it down there, and now the ocean was doing the inevitable in the scientific way and was hammering and surging down towards us. We felt like three hundred very small and foolish creatures when we saw that, standing as we were on a bunch of low roofs. Major almost screams out his orders, and then the sergeants were echoing him, and then the men were trying to respond. But what had the major said? What had the sergeants called out? Where to go? We were already the citizens of a shallow sea. That coming wave looked like twenty feet of death. The flood came so quickly you couldn’t have laid a bet on it. You couldn’t a got the book open quick enough to mark the wager. Then the wild vicious thing reached our camp and spread itself over it carrying half of the forest with it. Trees and branches and bushes and bears and deer and God knows, birds and alligators, though I never saw alligators up there to be truthful. Wolves and mountain cats and snakes. Everything was gone then with the flood, that was able to be unmoored and move. Those fellas on the roofs had the shittiest cards in the deal, it was like nature’s hand just swept them off the table. I could feel our shade tree bending with the force and it was twelve feet round at the base. Man, it bent. Then unbent. Now we were nearly arrows being fired. Hold on there, John Cole! Hold on, Thomas! So we held, we gripped, we fastened ourselves, the great old tree whanged in the boiling waters, I doubt I will ever hear such a sound again, it was well nigh musical.
Dozens of troopers musta drowned. Maybe Watchorn and Pearl might have wished to be among them, but they survived. Me and John Cole. Thank God, John Cole. The major, and two hundred others. It was the men in the trees was mostly saved. Those roofs too low. We found bodies for the next weeks, lower down, as the flood waters fell. The townspeople came down and helped us with the burying. They hadn’t been so crazy as to build their town in a flood path anyhow. Guess we knew then what had scalloped out that ground. Goddamn engineers.
Then a queer fever went through the camp. Maybe it was yellow fever, something like that, something that liked a lot of wetness. Our cattle were gone of course and all our dry goods were wet goods. The townspeople gave us what they could but the major said we had to go back to Missouri even though the grass would only be coming small on the prairie.
This little tour is done, he said, drily. The major’s wit. It was the driest thing in the camp.
Now winter was tightening her noose on the world everywhere and we were headed back for Missouri. To say we were a bedraggled troop is not quite saying enough. Maybe we were being punished for our shabby acts. There was no game below the mountains this time and soon our bellies were gnawed by hunger. It was weeks of a journey and now we were a-feared of what hunger might do. A hunger knower like myself was a-feared more than most. I seen the cold deeds of hunger. The world got a lot of people in it, and when it comes to slaughter and famine, whether we’re to live or die, it don’t care much either way. The world got so many it don’t need to. We could have starved out there on the badlands, on that desert that wasn’t a desert, on that journey that wasn’t a journey so much as a fleeing eastward. Thousands die everywhere always. The world don’t care much, it just don’t mind much. That’s what I notice about it. There is that great wailing and distress and then the pacifying waters close over everything, old Father Time washes his hands. On he plods to the next place. It suits us well to know these things, that you may exert yourself to survive. Just surviving is the victory. Now that I can no longer exert myself in that way, I think back to that lonesome troop of soldiers, trying to make it back. Desolate, and decimated though we were, there was something good there. Something that couldn’t be extinguished by flood and hunger. That human will. You got to give homage to it. I seen it many times. It ain’t so rare. But it is the best of us.
Now we were praying like priests or virgin girls that we would meet some wagons plying west. Except, by the time they passed us, they might be lean on victuals also of course. But we just gotta see other human faces. Mile upon mile of the sere little bushes of America and the scraggy up-and-down terrain. In the far distance to the south sometimes we thought we could see piled-up squ
are hills, we knew we mustn’t go down there. That was Apache and Comanche country certainly. Boys would eat you for their supper quick as see you. The major knew the lean Apache boys, he had fought with them for fifteen years, he said. Just about the worst devils you will ever hear about or see, he said. He said they was going down regular into Mexico, chewing up farmers. Kill everyone they could find, take the cattle, horses, women and oftentimes children back to their countries. Be gone a month, riding like ghosts through the spectral lands. You could chase after them with men and guns but you would never find them. Never even see them. You’d wake in the morning and there wouldn’t be a horse tethered no more, fifty of them vanished in the night, and the pickets dead as stones where they had been sitting. He said they took you prisoner you would regret it. Take you back to their villages for sport, the women with their little sharp knives cutting you with a thousand cuts, the slowest death in the book. Bleed out on the warm prairie dust. Or bury you to the neck, let the ants eat your face, the dogs gnaw your ears and nose, if the women hadn’t cut them off already. Thing was, a warrior was never to cry out. Show how brave you were by not crying out, that’s what they thought was a decent exit. But white men, troopers, they’d be roaring just to see the women coming with the knives. Anyhow, you died either way. Thing was, if a warrior was missing something important, if the head was parted from the trunk for instance, there was an opinion among them that you wouldn’t be able to reach the happy hunting grounds then. So they were careful not to take too much. Just little bits. The ear and eye, say, or trim off the bollocks. So you could still reach heaven. But the trouble was, Mexican bandits, and rough riding white men of any description, evil outlaws, murderous rustlers, all those wild class of beings that were ubiquitous in that time, they thought they better cut up an Indian when they killed him. Took off the hair firstly, hair was a big thing for an Indian. Scalping. Long silky black hair down to the waist and the skin on top of the head with it. Chop off the head with a machete. Chop off the arms. That didn’t show no respect and no thought either for the warrior’s aftertime. That sort of thing inflamed the Apache, the Comanche, then he was out on a revenge spree. He was going to take your fingers off one by one. He was going to take your toes, and then your balls, and then your pecker. Slowly, slowly. You better not get in his way then.
White men doesn’t understand Indians and vice versa, said the major, shaking his head in his even-toned way. That’s what brings the trouble, he says.
Well, now we were fearing the Indians just as much as the hunger, though the hunger was winning too.
CHAPTER FIVE
IMAGINE OUR HORROR and distress then when we saw those Oglala boys sitting on their horses on the horizon. Two hundred, three, just sitting there. Our own horses were skeletons. They were getting water but little else. Horses need regular fodder, grass and such. My poor horse was showing his bones like they was metal levers sticking out. Watchorn had been a small plumpish man but he weren’t no more. You coulda used John Cole for a pencil if you coulda threaded some lead through him. We were a day out on the prairie and the horses only had the first bright green slivers of grass to graze on. Half an inch. It was too early in the year. We were yearning to see wagons, our crazy wish was to see a herd of them buffalo, we started to dream of buffalo, thousands upon thousands, stampeding through our dreams, and then we’d wake in the moonlight and see only that, piss yellow and thin in the chill darkness. Temperature dropping down the glass till it was hard to breathe it was so cold. The little streams smelling of iron. At night the troopers slept close together in their blankets, we looked like a mess of prairie dogs, sleeping close for life. Snoring through frosty nostrils. The horses stamping, stamping and steaming out frosted tendrils and flowers of breath in the darkness. Now in these different districts, the sun came up that bit earlier, more eagerly, more like the baker putting fire into his bread-oven, in the small hours, so the women in the town would have bread bright early. Lord, that sun rose regular and sere, he didn’t care who saw him, naked and round and white. Then the rains came walking over the land, exciting the new grasses, thundering down, hammering like fearsome little bullets, making the shards and dusts of the earth dance a violent jig. Making the grass seeds drunk with ambition. Then the sun pouring in after the rain, and the wide endless prairie steaming, a vast and endless vista of white steam rising, and the flocks of birds wheeling and turning, a million birds to one cloud, we’d a needed a blunderbuss to harvest them, small black fleet wondrous birds. We were riding on and all the while, ten fifteen miles, the Oglala moving with us, watching. Might have been wondering why we didn’t stop for eats. Didn’t have no eats to eat. It was Trooper Pearl knew they were Sioux. Said he recognised them. Don’t know how he did, seeing as they were so far off. The flood had took our Shawnee scouts who’d a known. With our diminished numbers we were two hundred now, maybe a little less. The major hadn’t done a roll call for days. Sergeant Wellington was the only one indifferent, it would seem. If he knew one song out of the mountains of Virginia he knew a hundred. If he knew one song about a poor dying mother lonesome and her children far away he knew a thousand. And the cruel creeping raw vicious scraping voice he had. Mile after mile. And the goddamned Oglala Sioux or whoever it was out there keeping pace with every painful step. I was beginning to think it would be a welcome release if they just charged up now and did for us. It would stop that miserable caterwauling anyhow.
Mid morning then of this drear day Sergeant perks up suddenly, his singing dying away. He points out on the plain a horseman detaching from the distant group. Had a high pole with a pennant on it, waving in the fluttering breeze. The major stopped our whole troop and got us to clump together. He was giving a sight of ten lines of men with twenty riders each ready with muskets to the approaching Indian. The Indian didn’t seem to think much of this, he came on, we could see him clearer now. Then he stops half way, just sits there, his horse stirring about a little like they do. Champing, backing off a step, being settled again by his rider. He was just beyond musket range. Sergeant was anxious to try a shot but the major stayed his hand. Then the major spurs his horse and goes forward out of position, heads off across the scutty grasses. The sergeant bites his lip, because he doesn’t like this, but can’t air an objection. Major thinks Indians gentlemen like hisself, he hisses.
So we’re paused there and of course the flies find us quickly and if we have nothing to gorge on, they do. Ears and faces and backs of hands get a going over. Damn little black devils. But we almost don’t heed them, you can see all the men sitting forward on their saddles, as if they could hear the parlay about to take place, but no chance of that. Off there now we see the major reach the rider and now he is stopped and now we can see the mouth of the Indian moving, and the head nodding, and the hands going in sign language. The air is so tense even the flies seem to stop biting. The prairie is as quiet as a library. Just the tremendous grasses folding, unfolding, showing their dark underbellies, hiding them, showing. The little shucking sound of that. But most of the business was sky. Huge endless sky all the way to heaven most likely. The major and the Indian talked for about twenty minutes, then the major suddenly wheels around, comes trotting back. The Indian watches him for a few moments, sergeant begins to draw a bead on him then, but there’s no emergency, the Indian pulls the head of his pony round, and goes back placidly to his friends. The major comes on daintily enough, that’s one fine horse he has, one of those pricy mounts, skinnied up now though.
What’s the news? says the sergeant.
He wanted to know what we’re doing out here, says the major. Looks like we’re north of where we thought. These ain’t treaty Indians.
Goddamn mongrel sonsabitches what they are, the sergeant says, and spits.
Well, he said they have meat and he would give it to us, says the major.
The sergeant didn’t seem to have an answer to that. The men were amazed, relieved. Could it be true? Sure enough we saw the Indians leaving the meat. Then
we went over to get it, by which time they had cleared off completely. Just vanished away like they do. The fire-makers and the cooks got going and then we had roasted buffalo. We were pulling it a bit raw from the fire but no matter.
It was such a wild crazy pleasure simply to eat. To champ on actual sustenance. It was like the first time we ever ate. Mother’s milk. Everything we were that had started to seep away because of the hunger was returning. Men were talking again and then the laughter was returning. The sergeant was affecting to be angry and perplexed. Said the meat was likely poisoned. But it weren’t poisoned. Sergeant said no one ever likely understood Indians. They’d had their damn chance to kill us and they hadn’t took it. Goddamn stupid Injuns, coyotes had more sense. The major must of decided to say nothing. He was quiet. The two hundred sets of teeth chewing away. Swallowing the big blackened lumps, bellies growling.