Skye brewed some tea. It was a habit that rose from his very bones, and many mornings he cared for nothing more. He let the leaves steep in his pot, and then let the pot cool so he could drink from it.
The day quickened, and the low sun prized the flanks of the dark mountains south and west, sometimes burnishing the ridges until they shone like new pennies. But the sunlight was a cheat and the day didn’t warm. Skye felt heavy air rolling out of Canada. He pulled his blanket about him to allay pain, and knew all over again why he needed a sheltering home.
The tea stirred his pulse, and he was ready to introduce himself to his land. He hiked slowly east until he came again to the ground that spoke to him in the night, and stood upon it. He felt some ancient stirring that could have no name, as if the earth beneath his moccasins were speaking. Maybe gravity was heavier here, making him feel heavier, connecting him to the soil below him. He saw a great meadow sloping toward the river bottoms. Behind him the land convulsed upward into grassy hills.
He ached for Victoria. She had medicine powers, and once in a while she warned him away from a campsite or some other place. He wanted her to stand beside him, and tell him what the spirits were whispering to her, and whether this would be a place of joy or danger or heartache. But she had begged off. Building a house was white man’s stuff, and she wanted no part of it.
So Barnaby Skye would settle for his own wisdom this time. He noticed a shallow draw and walked to it, finding chokecherries and willow brush, and in the bottom, a thin trickle, not a foot wide. He hiked upslope and discovered a spring rising from an outcrop. He cupped his hands and lifted the water to his lips, and found it cold and sweet. The spring flowed from a vertical fault in gray rock, a good sign that it was not seasonal and perfidious. Its water could be diverted into a home, and it could cool a springhouse as well, and water livestock in a pasture, and water gardens and apple trees.
Ample wood was at hand. The meadows here were more in the nature of parks, surrounded by mixed stands of aspen, cottonwood, fir, and pine. Wood for hearth and stove; wood for timbers and planks and window frames and lintels. Copses sprang up from the meadows, especially where there was a bit more moisture in the soil. And just beyond the valley, fir and pine blackened the slopes.
It was a good and bountiful land, maybe not for a plowman but for a man who needed pasture and garden. Still … it was a long way from this open and virgin world to a functioning home. He had with him one small camp axe. He could no longer count on the toil of his body, his own sweat and blood and muscle, to build a house. He drifted across the parks, wrapped tightly in his blanket against the metallic air,
wondering where houses came from and how he could conjure a good solid one here.
A bit closer to the river, he knew, would be good rounded cobbles just below the thin topsoil, cobbles to lift out of their ancient beds, placed on sledges and dragged to the building site. Cobbles to be mortared into foundations and walls. He studied the woodlands, looking for stands of lodgepole pine, the preferred tree for log buildings because the logs were arrow-true and easy to work. But there were no lodgepole pines anywhere near. Only a little crooked jackpine, good enough for firewood but an anguish to builders.
The nearest sawmill was in Bozeman City, over Jim Bridger’s pass, in the Gallatin Valley. He could buy sawn timbers and planks there if he had some money. He could have them hauled here, if he had some money. He could buy kegs of nails and window glass or even pre-made framed windows there, if he had some money.
He eyed the sod. He could build a sod house here. He still could dig each piece of sod with a spade without help, and set it into his walls without help. He could cut poles for a roof and put thick sod on the poles for a roof. That much he could do, even at his age and with his bounty of pain. Then he could live inside his dirt house, avoid the leaks when it rained, and chase away bugs and snakes and rodents and worms. He sighed, unhappily.
He saw flatiron clouds sliding along the northern horizon, and knew where the cold wind was coming from. Before the day was done there would be a spring storm here, and he ought to look to shelter. He turned his back to the heavy air and walked to his campsite, deep in the bottoms, where the trees subdued the wind a little and a man could find small comforts.
The temperature was plummeting even though it was midday. Rain slapped him. He peered upward and saw nothing but clear sky, and yet rain drove into him like ten-penny nails. The dark outliers still rode far north, deepening the mystery. There was no time to marvel at nature’s perversities, so he hurried for shelter. He had lived in nature half a century, and knew what to look for.
In this case it was an ancient cottonwood lording over a large grove. He collected his bedroll, dragged his packs to the top of the gravel bar where water would not pool under them, and then he hurried into the grove, while bullets of cold rain smacked his leather shirt and trickled down his neck. The mammoth tree spread naked branches over a wide patch of earth, but that wasn’t the shelter he wanted. He studied the massive roots and found a hollow between them on the lee side, just wide enough for him to sit in. He wrapped his blankets about him, and then the duck-cloth bag, and lowered himself into the hollow. The roots rose beside him like stout walls, scraping his duck cloth, and then he pulled the cloth over his head and the ice picks falling out of the sky stopped pricking him. He settled in, noting the sweep of white rain across the parks and brown meadows. The mountains across the river vanished in fog, which soon white-blinded him to the rest of the world.
He had endured all this many times, and he would endure it again. A thin heat collected in his blankets. Water sprayed off his canvas, and rarely caught his face. He could no longer see sky; fog obscured it. He could not read the weather, and he knew this could last ten minutes or ten hours or ten days. He discovered sleet mixed in the rain, and knew the temperature had dropped. There would come a time when he was so stiff he had to stand, a time when he might need to drain himself,
and when that time came, his haven would be violated, and he would return to water pooled where he sat.
The horse and mule stood with heads lowered, rumps to the wind. Their backs slick and black. A bit of slush frosted the packs on the gravel, and more was collecting here and there on dried grass.
In spite of his wraps, Skye felt cold. And worse, he was hurting again. He was breathing misty cold air, and his chest hurt too. He had weathered a thousand storms over half a century, but this was different because he hurt. As the minutes progressed to hours, his limbs ached, his back hurt, and his neck radiated so much pain that he found himself rotating his head this way and that, trying to ease the outrage of his body. A man of his years needed shelter, and he could never return to the outdoor life he had weathered for decades.
He thought he might build the foundation of river cobbles and mortar, and then add logs and a thick floor, and raise a hearth and fireplace and chimney of cobbles and mortar, and pile the logs up into walls, thick and airtight and sealed, and then raise a roof over all of that, a roof with shakes to drain the rain away and support the heavy loads of snow that would settle on them. He would add some store-bought windows, and a stout door, and a good iron stove to cook on and supplement the hearth fire. He would give Victoria and Mary rooms of their own, and partition off his own, but the rest of the house would be a great commons for them.
He would put a roofed porch along the front where a man might sit quietly and watch the future. He would build a massive outhouse in the back, where a man could sit without feeling the cold wind, and below the spring he would build a spring house to cool vegetables and preserve meat. In the bedrooms he would fashion sturdy beds wrought from poles
and leather, and add stuffed cotton mattresses that could blot up a man’s hurts and keep him warm and off the cold ground. Getting off the ground was the main thing. Even in a warm house, the cold of the ground in these northern places rose upward and numbed feet and made calves ache and stole warmth from each room. That was the trouble with lodges. The Crows had comfortable lodges that drew the smoke away and caught the fire-warmth, but the cold from the frozen earth stole upward, through layer upon layer of buffalo robes, and one never slept on warm ground in winter. Only on ground that made bones ache and old people draw deep into themselves.
After Skye had sat immobilized until he hurt all over, he stood, drew his covering about him, and walked through sleet and fog down to the river, where the silver waters flashed by. Slush worked through his moccasins and numbed his feet. He walked, feeling the cold muscle of his body begin to work, to drive away the pain that seemed to build up when his muscles weren’t working.
So Skye walked. It was better than sitting tight. It was an old person’s remedy. Old people drove away stiffness by walking. He could not see the heavens well enough to know when this storm might abate, but he would walk it out, walk until the cloud and fog lifted. He was not a good walker, his body compact and stout rather than lanky and lean, but walking would be his salvation now, and there was always this: walking took a person somewhere, and opened new prospects.
So Skye settled his soaked top hat on his locks and walked along the Yellowstone River, following game trails through brush. Walking felt better than sitting. He cold-footed his way through muck and slush, driven by some compulsion he didn’t understand, to walk or die. He walked awkwardly,
wrapped in his bedroll and duck cloth, but he never stopped walking. He had the sensation that walking meant life and stopping meant death, but he dismissed it. He might be old but he wasn’t sick. He didn’t know how far he was from his horse and mule and packs but that didn’t matter either.
A stirring in the brush gave him pause. There had been only the deep quiet of the wilds, but now something stirred, and it was large, snapping twigs and piercing through brush. A grizzly, perhaps. Skye regretted that he had left his Sharps with the packs, and carried nothing but a belt knife.
The ox saw Skye at the same instant that Skye limned the ox. The startled animal lowered its giant horns, threw his head to either side, those deadly horns arcing one way and another. Then it snorted and charged. Skye had never been assaulted by a wild ox, and saw no way to escape. Brush hemmed him. The murderous horns cut a wide swath. Then it was too late. The left horn, swinging like an axe handle, caught Skye’s leg and lifted him high into the fog and he felt himself tumbling back to earth, landing hard in slush and muck and brush, while the beast thumped by, its hooves missing Skye’s writhing form by inches. Pain lanced him, white-hot pain shooting up from his leg, pain such as old age never knew. Then Skye drifted in and out of the world.