Tucket's Travels Read online

  He eased up from the rifle, but only a little. They could still be up to no good, and it didn't hurt to be ready. He watched for some sign of their intentions—and got it when they were just a hundred yards from the house.

  One of them slipped his rifle from its buckskin case and laid the gun across his lap. The other then did the same, and Francis could feel the hair on his neck rise. Nobody dropping in for a friendly visit would make a point of coming armed and ready.

  His cheek went back to the stock of his rifle. He wanted to run out back and get the mountain man, but he didn't know how far he'd have to go. And if he left the pack mules and all their equipment alone, even for a minute, everything might be gone by the time they got back.

  No, he couldn't leave. There was nothing else to do—he would simply have to stay and try to bluff them out.

  Approximately thirty yards from the house, the two men stopped. They were about twenty feet apart, sitting their horses loosely, but both of their rifles were aimed in the general direction of the lean-to. Francis could make out their features easily. One of them was rather short and bearded. The other was lean, also bearded, fairly tall, and it was he who leaned forward in the saddle and called:

  “Yo, the house! Anybody home?”

  Francis said nothing. He watched.

  “Up there! The house!” the man called again. “Anybody home?”

  They were getting uneasy. Francis could tell by the way the lean one angled his rifle upward as he talked. Even at that range, the muzzle looked like a cave. Might as well say something, he thought, before they just fire away.

  “Who are you, and what do you want?” he called, trying to make his voice sound gruff and older.

  “Name's Bridger,” answered the lean one. “Jim —to people who come into the light. This here's my partner, Jake Barnes. And all we want is a little hospitality.”

  Sure, thought Francis—you're Jim Bridger and I'm Kit Carson. If you really are Jim Bridger, you sure wouldn't just amble blind into a trap like this. How do you know I'm not an Indian? You could have been following anybody's tracks.

  “You lost your tongue in there?” the lean one yelled again. “I said that the name's Bridger …”

  “I heard you,” Francis answered. The man was lying. He was sure of it. He brought up the front sight of his rifle. It made him feel funny, aiming at a man. But he'd been caught off guard once—by Braid—and it wasn't going to happen twice. “I'm not sure I believe it. Can you prove you're Jim Bridger?”

  “Prove? What's to prove? I'm just sitting here, ain't I? I said I was Bridger, didn't I? What more do you need?”

  There it was. He said he was Bridger, but Francis was positive he was lying, and so they were stalemated. There was nothing to do but wait for Mr. Grimes.

  “If you're really Jim Bridger,” Francis called, “you won't mind just sitting there for a while—”

  “What for?”

  “Until—until somebody comes who can tell me if that's the truth.”

  “And what if I decide to ride off? Or come plowing at you?”

  “I've got a gun on you.”

  “I figured that.”

  “I'll use it.”

  “Maybe. When's this man coming?”

  “Soon.”

  “What's his name?”

  “You don't need to know.”

  “All right. I'll wait for a spell. But if he doesn't come soon, and I mean soon, you better figure on using that gun.”

  The minutes dragged. The sun got hotter, and flies began buzzing around the horses.

  He had no idea how long Mr. Grimes would be gone, Francis realized. Somehow, half an hour crawled past. It was the longest half hour of his life. And Bridger—or the man who said he was Bridger —didn't help any. If he had gotten nervous, or started to move around, Francis would have felt better. But he didn't. He just sat his horse—cool, calm, waiting. And the smaller man did the same.

  Forty minutes passed, fifty, then an hour was gone. And that was enough.

  The lean one moved. He straightened in his saddle and called. “Time's up. I haven't got ten years to waste. Now I'm gonna turn around and ride out of here. My partner's coming with me. I don't think you'll touch anything off—but if you do, you'll get only one of us. And the other one will get you, just as sure as winter's coming.”

  This was it then; The test. Francis reset his sight. It would be suicide to let the man go. He and his partner might ride off a mile, turn around, and sneak back to kill them at night.

  Even as the lean one turned his horse, and the partner followed suit, Francis knew he couldn't do it. It was one thing to shoot somebody who was attacking you, but to just come out and shoot a man because you thought he might be lying—

  “Jim Bridger!” the voice was loud, cutting through Francis's thoughts. It came from the side of the clearing he couldn't see, but he knew that voice. It belonged to Jason Grimes. “You figuring on riding out of here without taking a cup of coffee with an old friend?”

  The two men stopped their horses. “I figured you was up here somewhere,” the lean one said. “And to be downright truthful about it all, I did stop for some coffee. I figured old Jason Grimes was as good as the next for a free spot of Java. But before you get all relaxed about us stopping for a while, maybe you ought to know there's a two-legged terror in that shack over there with a gun on us. Shouldn't we ask him about stopping?”

  “What … ?” Mr. Grimes turned to the building. “Oh … how long you been here?”

  “Seems like ten years,” Jake Barnes said. “Maybe an hour, really.”

  “And Mr. Tucket kept you at bay all that time?”

  “Who?” Jim Bridger asked.

  “Mr. Tucket.” Mr. Grimes turned again to the building. “Mr. Tucket, come on out here and meet the men you've been holding.”

  So it was Bridger. Francis felt like an idiot. Still, he couldn't stay out of sight forever. He stepped out of the doorway and walked toward the horses.

  “Why, it's ain't nothing but a cub.” Jim Bridger snorted. “Jake, we've been sitting here worried about a cub.”

  That broke the ice, and the two men dismounted, grinning at Francis.

  “Where'd you get him?” Bridger asked.

  While Francis made a fire, Mr. Grimes told the two mountain men about him. By the time the explanation was finished, the coffee was ready, and they all sipped it and chewed on venison. After that, the men smoked and Francis sat quietly thinking. There was something bothering him. Finally he could hold it no longer.

  “Mr. Bridger,” he asked, “how did you find us?”

  “Why, we just followed your trail, boy. Easy as following a herd of buffalo. But don't worry. We covered tracks coming in—ours and yours.”

  Francis looked at Mr. Grimes. He was smiling.

  “Ho!” he exclaimed. “You're feeding Mr. Tucket a nettle. Bad for his liver. The fact is, Mr. Tucket, there's another meadow like this up a ways that belongs to Mr. Bridger. I found this one last year about the same time he found his. We met coming out, so he knew I'd be here about now. Unless I miss my guess, he's on his way up there now.”

  Bridger nodded. “Caught, cold turkey. Boy, never lie in front of Jason Grimes. You'll lose every time. Say”—he turned to Mr. Grimes—“how are you and Braid getting on lately?”

  That triggered off another round of talk. They covered the Indian tribes—Pawnee, Sioux, and finally, while Francis made another pot of coffee, the Crow.

  “You might be extra careful when you go out,” Bridger told Mr. Grimes. “We saw some fresh Crow sign down at the mouth of the valley. Whole tribe—man, woman, child, and dog. Looking for a wintering ground, I reckon, so they probably won't bother you. But I don't think they'd pass up a chance at those rifles if they ran across you.”

  Mr. Grimes nodded. “The Crows and the weather—-you can't tell about either one. But I think I'd take a blizzard to a Crow any day …”

  Francis listened to them intently. His stomach
was full of warm coffee and jerky, evening was coming down, the fire felt good, and he was in the company of a living legend—Jim Bridger. What more could he ask? Why think about such unpleasant things as snowstorms or Indians at a time like this? Better just to listen, because someday he would want to tell his family everything about this meeting with the fabulous Jim Bridger.

  BRIDGERAND HIS PARTNER pulled out early the following morning. Before they were even out of sight, Mr. Grimes said, “Back to work. We lost a good part of a day, Mr. Tucket, and we couldn't afford it.”

  He walked out of camp to get more bait sticks, and Francis went back to work on the drying hoops.

  Actually, they were fairly simple to make. He took a slim piece of springy willow or aspen, eight feet long, and bent it into a circle about three feet across. Then he lashed the ends together with wet, green rawhide that seemed to shrink when it dried and made the two ends of the willow become one piece. After a beaver was skinned, the hide was put in this hoop and with lacing around the sides pulled toward the edges so that when it was dry it would be a hard plate of hide with fur on one side.

  Mr. Grimes wanted two hundred of these hoops. Francis ran out of rawhide that evening on the fiftieth hoop. He told Mr. Grimes about it.

  “Well, Mr. Tucket, the woods are full of deer and you've got a rifle. Seems like a fairly simple problem to me …”

  So the next morning Francis walked quietly through the pine glades, glad of a chance to get away from the lean-to. Not three hundred yards from the house, he stopped on the edge of a small clearing, just to enjoy the morning, and found himself facing a nice three-point buck.

  There was the deer, and there was Francis, with perhaps fifty feet between them. He raised his rifle, aimed at the buck's shoulder, and squeezed the trigger. The litde Lancaster cracked sharply—higher and faster sounding than Mr. Grimes's big bull gun —and the deer took two steps forward, sagging as he walked, and fell. Francis reloaded, as cool as though he were shooting buffalo chips, and aimed at the deer's head. He fired again and it was over.

  He started forward, then, remembering what he'd been taught, stopped and reloaded again.

  And he suddenly started shaking all over, as though he had a chill. He couldn't even walk right and had to sit down. It was silly, but he was nervous about the deer—nervous and rattled. He didn't know what it was—he just had to sit down for a minute.

  When he got up, it was as tliough it had never happened. He grabbed the deer by its rack and dragged it back to camp. There he skinned it and cut the wet hide into strips half an inch wide. By late afternoon, he was again making hoops, the incident all but forgotten.

  Mr. Grimes came in at about four o'clock, his arm full of sticks, and Francis told him about the deer.

  “Buck fever, Mr. Tucket—or, as some call it, gun jaw. Most people get it the first time they think about shooting anything bigger than a rabbit. Usually it only hits a man once or twice—and then only if he's had time to think about it. You're lucky.”

  “Why?”

  “ ‘Cause some get it before they shoot. They can't even pull the trigger. I watched one man—and this is pure gospel—stand up against a bear that didn't like him at all, and all he did was aim his rifle and say, ‘Bang.’ ”

  “You mean he didn't shoot?”

  “Nope. Didn't even draw his hammer. If I hadn't been there to kill the bear, that man would have been nothing in a second or two. Unless the bear could understand English. Hah!”

  But Francis couldn't laugh at the joke. He remembered shaking all over, and he hoped that when the time came—/fit came—for him to face something dangerous, he wouldn't do something dumb like saying “Bang.”

  By the end of the week the hoops were finished, and Mr. Grimes had gathered all the bait sticks. Next came the traps. There were fifty of them—big, double-springed traps with bait-pan trips. They all had to be smoked over a low fire of green aspen to take away the smell of man. So Francis was put in charge of the smoking fire, working ten traps at a time. They were hung over the fire with a long pole and taken off with a forked stick. Once smoked, they could not be touched by human hands.

  After the traps were smoked, they were hung three to a stick, so that Mr. Grimes could carry them to the individual ponds without touching them.

  About halfway through the second week of working, as if on demand, cold settled in and held for a few hours. The next morning, Mr. Grimes reported that they'd start trapping that day.

  “There'll be ice on the ponds,” he said. “That makes it easier. The beaver sort of give themselves away by cutting holes in the ice. All you have to do is drop a trap in the hole and wait. They come right into it. Even if the ice melts off—and it probably will before the day is out—they still use the same place. Sort of like you'd use a hallway in a house.”

  While he talked, he was working, lashing bait sticks and trap sticks to a long aspen pole. This pole, with twenty-one traps, he handed to Francis. Then he made another one, just like the first.

  They rode out toward the first pond well before noon. Francis was almost excited. All this labor, and now he would actually see what they'd been working toward. And, he thought, just maybe, the back-breaking labor would slack off a bit.

  They dismounted at the first pond, and sure enough, despite the fact that it was turning out to be a fairly warm day, the pond was covered by a thin layer of ice. At one point, near the dam of sticks and mud along the bank, there was a broken, jagged hole about two feet across. In this hole the mountain man placed one trap, set, on a pole that angled down into the water and stuck in the mud on the bottom. The trap was well under water and above the trap he tied several bait sticks to the pole with rawhide.

  “But won't the beaver see the trap?” Francis asked.

  “He'll see it, all right,” came the answer, gruff and short. “But he won't take notice, Mr. Tucket. At least not till he steps in the trap. Old Daddy Beaver goes more by his nose than his eyes, and if you smoked these traps right, he'll think that piece of iron is another hunk of wood.”

  So it went, pond by pond. It was nearly dark when they finished the fourteenth pond. Francis had done nothing but hand out traps and bait sticks, and yet he was exhausted—and more than ready to head back for the house and a warm fire.

  Mr. Grimes headed back to the first pond.

  “They're good enough to let us trap ‘em, Mr. Tucket,” he said. “The least we can do is keep up.”

  “You mean there'll be one trapped already?” Francis asked.

  “More than one, or I miss my guess.”

  And of course, he was right. The first pond yielded one, same with the second, nothing in the third, one in the fourth and so on. By midnight or so, with Francis all but falling off his mare, they had eleven prime beaver.

  Mr. Grimes had reset all the traps, and although he didn't say anything, Francis was living in a quiet horror that they might start all over again, and again, and just keep going until they had two hundred beaver.

  But the trapper headed his sorrel back to camp. Once there, after the fire was going and coffee started, he went to work skinning the beaver. And Francis, who could think of nothing but crawling into his big buffalo robe and forgetting everything, was told to stay up and stretch the hides on the hoops.

  By eight in the morning—with no sleep—they had finished the twenty-six beaver they had trapped.

  “We sleep till noon, Mr. Tucket,” the mountain man announced. “Then we start over. And we've got more work now, because after this haul, we'll have to move the traps.”

  Francis didn't hear The last words about more work. He was asleep.

  At noon he didn't want to get up. He wouldn't have wanted to rise with fifteen hours of sleep, but with just four, he almost couldn't get up. Mr. Grimes dumped cold water on his face and he did get up, sputtering, and after a little fresh venison, they started again.

  Francis lost all track of time. It didn't seem possible to him that human beings could live and work on
such an insane schedule. Work at midnight, go to bed at dawn. Get up in four hours and work some more. Ride out with traps and bait sticks, come back with dead, wet beaver. Skin and stretch. Sleep. Eat while you worked, while you rode. Set traps. Close your eyes for what seemed like a second, then open them and work again.

  Finally, Mr. Grimes stopped. Five days could have passed, or maybe five years—Francis didn't know. All he knew was that two hundred beaver pelts were hanging and drying inside the house. It was impossible not to know that, for their stench was overpowering.

  “We sleep now, Mr. Tucket, as long as we want,” the trapper said, grinning. Francis was standing in front of him, almost falling down. “The pelts have to dry for a week at least. I'll wake you at the end of the week.”

  Oh, no, you won't, Francis thought, grabbing his buffalo robe and heading upwind of the building. Not in a week. I won't even be started catching up in a week. Wake me in January sometime, or maybe next spring. Better yet, don't ever wake me.

  THE WEEK OF IDLE RESTING that Mr. Grimes had promised Francis never took place, but it wasn't the mountain man's fault.

  What happened to ruin the week was the sudden arrival of more “company.” But this time, the company didn't consist of friends of Jason Grimes. They arrived on the third day after all the pelts had been hung to dry.

  Contrary to what he had thought, Francis didn't sleep even for a day. After ten hours of solid snoring, he was up gathering wood. And by the second day, he was practically bored stiff.

  “Don't fret on so much, Mr. Tucket,” the trapper said when Francis began grumbling. “A man would think you wanted to go back to work. Rest up a mite. There'll be plenty to do.”

  Francis snorted. “I wouldn't even mind some more trapping. It's better than just sitting around, getting soft.”

  “Ah, Mr. Tucket, relax. Trap more beaver and you'd just have to sit around for another week. These things take time.”

  So Francis had dreamed up things to do. He made bullets—when he already had enough to stand off a small army. He took to riding around the meadow along the stream, not going anywhere in particular, just riding.