NOT JUST ANY MAN – CHAPTER 23

The following material is an extract from NOT JUST ANY MAN, A Novel of Old New Mexico, Copyright © 2018 Loretta Miles Tollefson. Published by Palo Flechado Press, Santa Fe, NM

A Note about Spanish Terms: This novel is set in northern New Mexico and reflects as much as possible the local dialect at that time. Even today, Northern New Mexico Spanish is a unique combination of late 1500s Spanish, indigenous words from the First Peoples of the region and of Mexico, and terms that filtered in with the French and American trappers and traders. I’ve tried to represent the resulting mixture as faithfully as possible. My primary source of information was Rubén Cobos’ excellent work, A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish (University of New Mexico Press, 2003). Any errors in spelling, usage, or definition are solely my responsibility.

CHAPTER 23

The trappers march steadily up the Colorado, covering as much ground as possible, not stopping to trap. Each night, they raise a rough barricade around their fireless camp and post a two man, two hour watch. There’s plenty of beaver sign and Thomas Smith complains that they’re wasting good territory, but Young pushes everyone forward. Even the animals feel the impact of long days crossing unfamiliar ground. They stamp and nip impatiently as the camp keepers load them each morning.

To top it off, the rain starts up again: a steady drizzle more disheartening than any solid downpour with a defined beginning and end. Gerald feels as if he’s moving in a drearily endless nightmare of wet clothes, slippery mud, cranky mules, and anxious men.

On the fourth night, the rain stops and the mood lightens. Young seems to think the worst of the danger is past and allows the camp keepers three small fires for the evening meal. He details Thomas Smith for the first watch, and he and the others wrap themselves in their still-damp blankets and lay down beside the smoldering flames.

It’s full dark, and Gerald has been asleep perhaps two hours, rolled into his blankets just beyond Young and the campfires, when the arrows come pouring in. They thud heavily into the wet ground.

“What the hell?” Ewing Young exclaims. He rolls from his blankets, bumping up against Gerald’s legs as Gerald sits up and reaches for his gun. “Get down!” Young barks and Gerald drops, his hands clutching the rifle’s smooth stock. “Won’t do you any good!” Young says. He half rises, peering into the night. “Use your knife!”

Gerald fumbles at his waist and sits up. Crab-like, he moves toward Young and crouches beside him.

“Douse those fires!” Young barks. Blankets fling up and out, covering what’s left of the flames. But it’s too late. The damage has been done. As the light dies, the Indians disappear into the night.

The trappers rise cautiously and look around the clearing, trying to assess the damage by the dim light of a clouded moon.

“Get me outta here!” James Pattie gasps. He’s still in his blanket. Smith moves closer to examine him. He chuckles and shakes his head. Arrows project from the ground on either side of the younger man, pinning his wool trade blanket in place. Pattie looks back at Smith in terror. “I can’t move!” he says. “I’m paralyzed!”

“You ain’t hurt.” Smith reaches down and yanks on one shaft, then another. The fire-hardened wooden points pull smoothly out of the wool and Smith kicks the blanket aside. “Come on out of there,” he says. “You’re all right. Those arrows don’t even have a real point on ’em.” He turns and tosses them to the ground.

“Pointed enough to do damage if they hit you,” Maurice LeDuc says, looking down at the man who’d been lying next to Pattie. “This one is gone.”

“And this one,” George Yount says from the other side of the clearing.

“And I got hit,” Milton Sublette says, his voice coming from the darkness on Gerald’s right. Gerald turns to see Sublette holding the fleshy part of his upper left arm, blood oozing from his bicep.

“First the right leg, then the left arm,” Young says. “Next time, it’ll be your head if you’re not careful.”

Sublette scowls and looks at Smith. “Do you think you can fix this one up better’n you did my leg?”

Smith humphs, leans his rifle against a tree stump, and turns to find his pack. “Only thing wrong with your leg is your head. You should of let that Mexican woman medicine it.”

“I ain’t lettin’ no witch woman doctor me,” Sublette says sourly. “You gonna bind this up, or not?”

Maurice LeDuc appears at Smith’s elbow and mutters something in his ear. Smith drops his pack and turns on Young. “Dammit, they got my horse!” he shouts.

Young raises his hand. “Quiet now,” he says. “They may still be out there.”

Smith pays him no heed. “Damned thieving coyotes! Sneaking cowards!” He reaches for his rifle and starts across the clearing. “I’m goin’ after ’em.” He turns to glare at Young. “I don’t care what you say! Those Injuns need a lesson they won’t forget!”

Ewing Young looks at the two dead men, then the wounded Sublette. “Wait until morning,” he says. “Then we’ll cut out after them.”

Smith and a dozen of the others ride out at first light, Gerald among them, James Patty on his father’s sorrel mare. Gerald can’t say why he accompanies the posse. Some atavistic desire to see the thing through, he supposes. Blood’s been shed. Or perhaps it’s simply that, after four days of fighting and waiting, waiting and fighting, he’s tired of living in fear and wants to put an end to at least this particular threat.

He realizes guiltily that he wants the sense of relief that he felt after the fight with Jones. A release of the tension, no matter the cost. He grimaces. He’s no better than the men on either side of him, who are urging their mounts forward so eagerly. He’s just a man like any other man. In this case, he’s not sure that he likes the idea very much.

It’s just dusk when they find the Mojave camp. It seems that Thomas Smith has a nose for Indians. Or at least the smell of broiled horseflesh on the early evening breeze. Sweet but with an overlay of charcoaled bitterness. Smith reins in at the top of a small hill and nods grimly to the left and a cluster of cottonwoods beside a small stream that empties into the river beyond.

Smith reaches for his rifle and checks the primer as the other men draw up beside him. Gerald cranes his neck to peer past LeDuc’s shoulder. A group of bare-chested Mojave men cluster around a campfire beneath the gnarled cottonwoods. As the trappers watch, there’s a hoarse exclamation from the branches of one of the trees. The warriors turn in unison toward the hill, strung bows materializing in their hands.

“Arrows!” Smith says contemptuously. He heels his horse and charges down the slope, his rifle blasting as he goes. The young warrior in the cottonwood tumbles out of its branches and the other Indians break for cover as the rest of the trappers follow.

Gerald pauses long enough to check his powder, then urges his horse forward, weapon at the ready. But by the time he reaches the thicket of streamside willow where the Indians have turned to make their stand, his rifle is only a distraction. There’s no room here for arrows or gunfire. Knives and spears are the weapons of choice and both sides use them fiercely, the mounted trappers leaning forward and jabbing downward, the Mojaves sidestepping the blood-wild horses while maneuvering for a spear thrust that will silence them or their riders.

Gerald’s horse shies from a thrusting spear and Gerald leaps off, letting him run. Then a warrior rushes him. The Mojave’s tattooed face and the red strip of cloth binding his hair are spotted with blood and his eyes are mere slits of fury. He raises an arm, swinging a two-foot-long wooden club. Gerald ducks and swings his rifle.

The rifle butt hits the warrior broadside in the chest and the man falls into the dirt. Gerald straddles him, flips the gun into position, and fires. The bullet explodes into the man’s chest, but Gerald doesn’t stay to inspect the damage. He leaps away, every sense heightened, braced for the next onslaught.

But there is no onslaught. The fight is over and the other trappers are already celebrating. Pattie and two other men prance in a mock war dance between dead and dying Mojave warriors. The normally phlegmatic LeDuc has his trousers down, his urine spraying triumphantly. “Iiiiiiyee!” he yells.

Gerald winces and looks away only to see Thomas Smith looping a lariat around the neck of a Mojave who’s attempted to escape. A section of spear projects from the man’s back, apparently wrested from one of his fellow warriors and used against him. The three feathers on the end of the spear wave jauntily as Smith yanks the man toward one of the cottonwoods.

Smith tosses the loose end of his lariat over a thick branch and begins pulling the Mojave inexorably to his doom. The warrior closes his eyes for a brief moment, then his jaws lock stubbornly. Gerald feels a twinge of sympathy and respect.

Milton Sublette moves toward Smith, waving a long black scalp and dragging the body it came from by one leg. “Here’s another one!” he says.

Smith grins and nods. “That’ll show ’em what happens when they attack white men!” In his distraction, he pauses in his work. The Mojave man’s feet are still on the ground and he gives a sudden twist, trying to slip out of the rope. A rifle blasts, and the man crumples.

Smith nods at LeDuc. “Fast thinking!” he says. He kicks at the warrior, assuring that he’s truly dead, then turns and looks around for more. “Hey Pattie! Bring that one, too!”

Bile rises in Gerald’s throat. He moves away, toward the hill. The animals are clustered behind it, milling anxiously. He finds his horse and starts to lead it away, but finds himself drawn to the hilltop.

Six warriors dangle from the cottonwoods. Except for the man Sublette scalped, the warriors’ long lustrous black hair splays awkwardly over their shoulders, canted to one side by their broken necks. Under the trees, Smith slaps Maurice LeDuc on the shoulder, as if congratulating him on a job well done. Gerald’s throat fills with bile as he turns away and mounts his horse.

~ ~ ~ ~

While the fight with the Mojaves leaves Gerald feeling sick, the other trappers seem filled with a strange exhilaration. They move up the Colorado in a whirl of hunting, albeit mountain sheep and deer rather than beaver. In fact, they feel so powerful, they become magnanimous, leaving the few Indians they encounter at little risk of the indignities they inflicted on the Mojave.

Still, Gerald braces himself for trouble each time he sees a native hut and feels a surge of relief when the encounter is over. He wonders how long the magnanimity will last. Hardly any pelts have been added to the packs since the trappers’ first interactions with the Mojave, and beaver are thin along this part of the Colorado. There isn’t much overt grumbling, but there is a sense that things could be better.

Smith, of course, is more free with his opinions than the others. He blames first the Indians and then Ewing Young. From his perspective, Young wasn’t firm enough in the first place and, in the second place, the route Young has chosen is just plain stupid.

His comments are particularly strong on mornings when he’s found only one beaver in his six-trap set. He’s so disgusted that he’s started muttering that he’d just as soon give up trapping altogether and head on back to the settlements by way of the Zuni. They apparently have some good looking gals there that would ease at least some of his frustration.

Maurice LeDuc chuckles at Smith’s more colorful grumbling and adds comments of his own, but Young ignores them both. Young’s lack of response seems to goad Smith and, as the trappers move up river, he and LeDuc begin spending more time apart from the others, occasionally pulling in Pattie, Solomon Stone, and even Ignacio.

They make no effort to lower their voices. “East,” and “Zuni villages,” and “more beaver” drift to the others around the fires. Young remains aloof. After all, Smith and LeDuc are free trappers. They can do and say what they like. Only the camp keeper is under contract and Young seems confident that Ignacio will remain with him.

Gerald watches the friction uneasily. The larger the band, the more secure it is and the more likely to produce a favorable beaver harvest. And Ignacio’s contract with Young is as binding as his own. Will the boy break it and become known as a man who doesn’t keep his word?

But it’s none of Gerald’s business and he turns to his own work. He oils his traps, considers the kinds of crops that might grow in nuevomexico, and lets himself wonder what Suzanna Peabody might be doing at this particular moment.

In spite of his concern about Ignacio, Gerald feels a sense of relief the night Smith and LeDuc announce that they’re pulling out the next morning, along with Solomon Stone and Alexander Branch.

Young looks at Pattie. “You and that horse of your daddy’s goin’, too?”

Pattie hesitates, then shakes his head and runs his hand through his curly blond hair. “I’ll be staying along with you, if that’s all right,” he says meekly. Young nods brusquely, then turns toward Ignacio.

“I made a contract, señor,” Ignacio says stiffly. He looks away. “I will honor it.”

“I should hope so,” Young says. As the Captain turns back to Smith, Ignacio’s face darkens. He moves stiffly toward the food.

Gerald frowns. What is it about Young that the boy dislikes so thoroughly?

Copyright © 2018 Loretta Miles Tollefson

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